Archive | August, 2011

Open Letter to a Mutant Ninja Senator

11 Aug

From Charlie Keil:

"In his January 2010 State of the Union address, President Obama also called for
 building a new generous of safe, clean nuclear power plants as a vital component
 of his national clean energy program."
             from Sen. Joe Lieberman's letter to me of April 29th, 2011

wonder how 'generous' came to replace 'generation'
at the center of this lie-packed satanic sentence
what "Union" could we possibly be talking about
what "safe" when any one person
           can mortar a nukeplant into powdered poison
           can put a garden hose siphon into the fuel pool
           can fall asleep at the switch or twist x instead of y
           can have sex with a bored co-worker          
                       while the core melts down          
                       or the aging pipes leak more and more
            count the human errors that could occur
            much more probable than earthquakes
 what "clean"
            list the half-lives that cut our lives in half
            the daily eco-devastation of overheated waters
            again the dirty list is long
 what "vital" when death dealing radiation          
                       lasts for thousands upon thousands of years
            "energy" in this form is pure ENTROPY
            destroying the speciation before our eyes
 only the complete failure of the US schools
            can account for this letter
                                  this death sentence

Cornel West & Tavis Smiley on Obama: “Many of Us Are Exploring Other Possibilities in Coming Election”

10 Aug

Lookin” for Mr. TnT!

AMY GOODMAN: What are you exploring exactly? Are you talking about another candidate running for president?

CORNEL WEST: It would be a Bernie Sanders-like figure who is fundamentally committed to the legacy of Martin King and Fannie Lou Hamer and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and Dorothy Day, putting poor and working people at the center.

AMY GOODMAN: When you say Bernie Sanders-type, is Bernie Sanders considering running for president?

CORNEL WEST: Unfortunately, I don’t think so.

TAVIS SMILEY: He said he’s not.

CORNEL WEST: I wish he was, because he’s my kind of brother. But someone like that who’s got backbone and courage.

via Cornel West & Tavis Smiley on Obama: “Many of Us Are Exploring Other Possibilities in Coming Election”.

New Exposé Tracks ALEC-Private Prison Industry Effort to Replace Unionized Workers with Prison Labor

10 Aug

Follow the link below  transcript and video.

Many of the toughest sentencing laws responsible for the explosion of the U.S. prison population were drafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council, which helps corporations write model legislation. Now a new exposé reveals ALEC has paved the way for states and corporations to replace unionized workers with prison labor. We speak with Mike Elk, contributing labor reporter at The Nation magazine. He says ALEC and private prison companies “put a mass amount of people in jail, and then they created a situation where they could exploit that.” Elk notes that in 2005 more than 14 million pounds of beef infected with rat feces processed by inmates were not recalled, in order to avoid drawing attention to how many products are made by prison labor.

via New Exposé Tracks ALEC-Private Prison Industry Effort to Replace Unionized Workers with Prison Labor.

Will North America Be the New Middle East? | The Nation

10 Aug

There’s an even bigger reason to oppose the pipeline, one that should be on the minds of even those of us who live thousands of miles away: Alberta’s tar sands are the continent’s biggest carbon bomb. Indeed, they’re the second largest pool of carbon on planet Earth, following only Saudi Arabia’s slowly dwindling oilfields.

If you could burn all the oil in those tar sands, you’d run the atmosphere’s concentration of carbon dioxide from its current 390 parts per million (enough to cause the climate havoc we’re currently seeing) to nearly 600 parts per million, which would mean if not hell, then at least a world with a similar temperature.

via Will North America Be the New Middle East? | The Nation.

Another Bailout Joins the Goofball Economy

10 Aug

How dare a credit rating agency that got it so wrong, and should itself be investigated for malfeasance in the creation of the banking meltdown, dictate public policy? For S&P to insist on massive government cuts that would only increase joblessness is like a burglar shifting blame for his crimes to the poor quality of locks.

This from a credit rating agency that, as NYT columnist Joe Nocera points out, “has consistently fallen short.” S&P judged Enron to be an exemplary company until shortly before the corporation imploded, and it gave its triple-A seal of approval to the toxic securitized mortgage debt that caused the great recession. There are serious problems with the US economy, but they are not the ones that Standard & Poor’s outlined when it sent the stock market into a tizzy.

via Another Bailout Joins the Goofball Economy | The Nation.

Guerilla SK8 Park in Jersey City, Part 2

9 Aug

Part 1 here

Where were we? Ah, the SK8park has been destroyed as preparation for construction that never happened, presumably because of the 2008 financial melt down that’s still just oozing along and seems like it’s going to raise the cost of crossing the Hudson, but . . . back to the story.

The park’s patrons were not happy:

shoot-me

“Someone shoot me,” it says, “used to be the fucking coolest place.” Then, a few days later, another sign appeared:

city hall meeting.jpg

Could’a knocked me over with an aerosol blast. Who in City Hall, I asked myself, gives a crap about these kids and their illegal but hard-won park? I was curious, and went to the meeting. Four skaters, one councilman, Steve Fulop, and me, that was the meeting. Fulop asked the skaters if they could get more skaters to come to a rescheduled meeting. They said they could. Fulop scheduled another meeting for Monday 19 November. I told the councilman that I would donate photos of the site Jersey City’s library so that there would be a permanent record of the park, which I did a week or so later. Continue reading →

Anger in Japan Over Withheld Radiation Forecasts – NYTimes.com

9 Aug

Such is the way of governments, no? A protective lie here, another there, and pretty soon even the bureaucrats and politicians forget they are insulating themselves from the world through  lies.

“From the 12th to the 15th we were in a location with one of the highest levels of radiation,” said Tamotsu Baba, the mayor of Namie, which is about five miles from the nuclear plant. He and thousands from Namie now live in temporary housing in another town, Nihonmatsu. “We are extremely worried about internal exposure to radiation.”

The withholding of information, he said, was akin to “murder.”

In interviews and public statements, some current and former government officials have admitted that Japanese authorities engaged in a pattern of withholding damaging information and denying facts of the nuclear disaster — in order, some of them said, to limit the size of costly and disruptive evacuations in land-scarce Japan and to avoid public questioning of the politically powerful nuclear industry.

via Anger in Japan Over Withheld Radiation Forecasts – NYTimes.com.

Credibility, Chutzpah and Debt – NYTimes.com

9 Aug

And in those rare cases where rating agencies have downgraded countries that, like America now, still had the confidence of investors, they have consistently been wrong. Consider, in particular, the case of Japan, which S.& P. downgraded back in 2002. Well, nine years later Japan is still able to borrow freely and cheaply. As of Friday, in fact, the interest rate on Japanese 10-year bonds was just 1 percent.

So there is no reason to take Friday’s downgrade of America seriously. These are the last people whose judgment we should trust.

And yet America does have big problems. …

No, what makes America look unreliable isn’t budget math, it’s politics. And please, let’s not have the usual declarations that both sides are at fault. Our problems are almost entirely one-sided — specifically, they’re caused by the rise of an extremist right that is prepared to create repeated crises rather than give an inch on its demands.

via Credibility, Chutzpah and Debt – NYTimes.com.

Guerilla SK8 Park in Jersey City, Part 1

8 Aug

Sometimes people just go ahead and create what they need without waiting for the government to act. That’s what a bunch of kids and young adults did in Jersey City a few years ago. At least, that’s what I surmise after the fact. I don’t actually know what they decided, when, and why. I just know what they did. I know, because I walked into it by chance. Here’s that story.

It was in November of 2006, about a month or so after I’d become interested in photographing local graffiti. I was walking in the neighborhood, or perhaps I was in the car on the way back from my Sunday AM grocery run. One of the other, it doesn’t much matter. Anyhow, I spotted some color:

sk8 park.jpg

That’s the stuff, says I, that’s the stuff. When I got closer, I noticed a ramp against a wall:

one old ramp now gone.jpg

And then this:

10 80.jpg

Someone was obviously using this site—the floor slab of an abandoned industrial building of some sort—as a park for skateboarding and BMX bike riding. See:

bikez3

I took this in July of 2007. Notice that the art on the walls has changed. It seems that some local, and not so local, graffiti writers used this site as something of an experimental gallery even as the skateboarders and BMXers used it to hone their athletic skills. Continue reading →

Under a Mound in Hiroshima: A City of Ashes the Size of Santa Fe

8 Aug

Behind twin curtains on either side of an altar, several dozen pine boxes, the size of caskets, were stacked, unceremoniously, from floor to ceiling. They hold the ashes of about 70,000 unidentified victims of the bomb. If, in an instant, all of the residents of Wilmington, Delaware, or Santa Fe, New Mexico, were reduced to ashes, and those ashes carried away to one repository, this is all the room the remains would require.

via Under a Mound in Hiroshima: A City of Ashes the Size of Santa Fe | The Nation.

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