End America’s Wars: Bring the Troops Home

12 Aug

ComeHomeAmerica.us has a petition going. Please go over there and sign it. As Brother James used to sing, Please, Please, Please.

From the letter/petition:

It is time to end all of these wars. It is time to initiate a fundamental shift in U.S. foreign policy away from domination of others through military strength and damaging sanctions. As a first step we urge a major withdrawal of soldiers from Afghanistan–as candidate Obama promised in 2008. This withdrawal should be at least as large as the 63,000 troop escalation the President put in place early in his presidency. This withdrawal should be defined as a clear first step to a complete withdrawal of all soldiers and private contractors from Afghanistan by the end of 2011. It is time to return to our Founders’ declared conception of the United States as a democratic Republic and not an Empire.

New Rules and Old Plants May Strain Summer Energy Supplies – NYTimes.com

12 Aug

The E.P.A. estimates that a rule on air toxins and mercury that it expects to complete in November will result in a loss of 10,000 megawatts — or almost 1 percent of the generating capacity in the United States. Electricity experts, however, say that rule, combined with forthcoming ones on coal ash and cooling water, will have a much greater effect — from 48,000 megawatts to 80,000 megawatts, or 3.5 to 7 percent.

… The most likely replacement for the coal plants is new natural gas-powered generators. But PJM and others are complaining that if the E.P.A. follows its intended schedule, utilities will not have much time to decide whether to close or upgrade their old plants, and no one will have time to build new ones.

… The new peaks will shape the planning of the grid. In the eastern United States, electricity is mostly generated near where it is consumed, and if some producers disappear, someone will have to build new generation or new transmission to supply the area from a distant source.

“You always manage toward the peak, and have a reserve margin based on your latest peak,” said Tom Williams, a spokesman for Duke Energy, which does business in areas that experienced a new peak.

Peak supply is also becoming a vexing problem because so much of the generating capacity added around the country lately is wind power, which is almost useless on the hot, still days when air-conditioning drives up demand.

via New Rules and Old Plants May Strain Summer Energy Supplies – NYTimes.com.

Stop Using Chimps as Guinea Pigs – NYTimes.com

11 Aug

But in the years since, our understanding of its effect on primates, as well as alternatives to it, have made great strides, to the point where I no longer believe such experiments make sense — scientifically, financially or ethically. That’s why I have introduced bipartisan legislation to phase out invasive research on great apes in the United States.

Today is the start of a two-day public hearing convened by the Institute of Medicine, which is examining whether there is still a need for invasive chimpanzee research. Meanwhile, nine countries, as well as the European Union, already forbid or restrict invasive research on great apes. Americans have to decide if the benefits to humans of research using chimpanzees outweigh the ethical, financial and scientific costs.

via Stop Using Chimps as Guinea Pigs – NYTimes.com.

Can the Middle Class Be Saved? – Magazine – The Atlantic

11 Aug

Don Peck, in the Atlantic.

Plutonomy, an economy in which the economy activity of the top 1% of the income stream.

In a plutonomy, Kapur and his co-authors wrote, “economic growth is powered by and largely consumed by the wealthy few.” America had been in this state twice before, they noted—during the Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties. In each case, the concentration of wealth was the result of rapid technological change, global integration, laissez-faire government policy, and “creative financial innovation.” In 2005, the rich were nearing the heights they’d reached in those previous eras, and Citigroup saw no good reason to think that, this time around, they wouldn’t keep on climbing.

The Great Recession has been a Great Sorter, shifting people out of the middle class:

It’s hard to miss just how unevenly the Great Recession has affected different classes of people in different places. From 2009 to 2010, wages were essentially flat nationwide—but they grew by 11.9 percent in Manhattan and 8.7 percent in Silicon Valley. In the Washington, D.C., and San Jose (Silicon Valley) metro areas—both primary habitats for America’s meritocratic winners—job postings in February of this year were almost as numerous as job candidates. In Miami and Detroit, by contrast, for every job posting, six people were unemployed. In March, the national unemployment rate was 12 percent for people with only a high-school diploma, 4.5 percent for college grads, and 2 percent for those with a professional degree.

Housing crashed hardest in the exurbs and in more-affordable, once fast-growing areas like Phoenix, Las Vegas, and much of Florida—all meccas for aspiring middle-class families with limited savings and education. The professional class, clustered most densely in the closer suburbs of expensive but resilient cities like San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, and Chicago, has lost little in comparison.

More excerpts below the fold. Continue reading →

Ninja Light Don’t Lie

11 Aug

speckled leaves.jpg

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.

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