Welcome! "The Evening Blues" is a casual community diary (published Monday - Friday, 8:00 PM Eastern) where we hang out, share and talk about news, music, photography and other things of interest to the community.
Just about anything goes, but attacks and pie fights are not welcome here. This is a community diary and a friendly, peaceful, supportive place for people to interact.
Everyone who wants to join in peaceful interaction is very welcome here.
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Hey! Good Evening!
This evening's music features Delta bluesman Roosevelt "Booba" Barnes. Enjoy!
Roosevelt "Booba" Barnes - Heart Broken Man
“It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem.”
-- G.K. Chesterton
News and Opinion
Mark this date on your calendars, the NYT Editorial Board has called for a pardon of Edward Snowden:
Edward Snowden, Whistle-Blower
Considering the enormous value of the information he has revealed, and the abuses he has exposed, Mr. Snowden deserves better than a life of permanent exile, fear and flight. He may have committed a crime to do so, but he has done his country a great service. It is time for the United States to offer Mr. Snowden a plea bargain or some form of clemency that would allow him to return home, face at least substantially reduced punishment in light of his role as a whistle-blower, and have the hope of a life advocating for greater privacy and far stronger oversight of the runaway intelligence community. ...
In retrospect, Mr. Snowden was clearly justified in believing that the only way to blow the whistle on this kind of intelligence-gathering was to expose it to the public and let the resulting furor do the work his superiors would not. ...
The shrill brigade of his critics say Mr. Snowden has done profound damage to intelligence operations of the United States, but none has presented the slightest proof that his disclosures really hurt the nation’s security. Many of the mass-collection programs Mr. Snowden exposed would work just as well if they were reduced in scope and brought under strict outside oversight, as the presidential panel recommended.
Assange likens surveillance to reformation-era Catholic Church on BBC ‘religion’ show
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has used the unlikely platform of the religious slot on the BBC’s Today program to condemn attempts by US and UK governments to acquire a “god-like” knowledge of citizens through mass surveillance. ...
He said disclosures by the security contractor Edward Snowden about the scale of mass surveillance by the US and UK security services had exposed how governments and corporations seek to “know more and more about us” while “we know less and less about them”. ...
“Knowledge has always flowed upwards, to bishops and kings not down to serfs and slaves. The principle remains the same in the present era. Documents disclosed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden show that governments dare to aspire, through their intelligence agencies, to a god-like knowledge of each and every one of us.”
Bill de Blasio officially sworn in as New York City mayor
New York’s new Democrat Mayor Bill de Blasio was sworn in Wednesday promising to restore progressive ideals and end growing economic inequality in America’s biggest city.
De Blasio, 52, who in November won a landslide election to become New York’s first Democratic mayor in 20 years, took the oath of office one minute after midnight during a ceremony in front of his Brooklyn home, flanked by his wife, Chirlane, and their two teenaged children. ...
The modest oath swearing ceremony was in stark contrast with the inauguration for his predecessor, Michael Bloomberg, who in 2002 was sworn in in Times Square just after midnight amid confetti and a massive swarm of revelers. ...
The New York mayor’s nighttime oath traditionally is followed by a midday affair on the steps of City Hall.
De Blasio’s second oath took place at midday Wednesday, with former US president Bill Clinton presiding.
Newly Elected Mayor Bill de Blasio: NYC Cannot Become the "Exclusive Domain of the One Percent"
De Blasio vows action on inequality to tackle New York's 'Tale of Two Cities'
The change of direction from the business-friendly stewardship of billionaire Michael Bloomberg to the unashamed emphasis on equality and social justice of the incoming mayor marks a new era for the city. The shift could have profound nationwide repercussions, as it propels De Blasio into the spotlight as one of the country’s most prominent liberal politicians in charge of a city of 8.4 million people, the largest public schools system in the US and a workforce of 350,000. ...
Flanked by his wife, Chirlane McCray, and teenage children Chiara and Dante, De Blasio, 52, struck an uncompromisingly progressive note in his speech, promising to implement his campaign promise to reunite a city torn apart by a Dickensian gap between rich and poor. “When I said we would take dead aim at the Tale of Two Cities, I meant it,” De Blasio said. “And we will do it. We will succeed as one city.”
De Blasio equated what he called an “inequality crisis” in modern New York with the city’s historic struggles from financial collapse to the crime epidemic, the terrorist attacks on 9/11 and the devastation of Hurricane Sandy. He said the inequality crisis was “not the stuff of banner headlines in our daily newspapers. It’s a quiet crisis, but one no less pernicious than those that have come before.”
On a day when blankets were provided for the guests to help them cope with sub-zero temperatures, there was only one aspect of the proceedings chillier than the environment: the expression on the face of outgoing mayor Bloomberg as his policies were lambasted by successive speakers. De Blasio personally lashed out at the “broken stop-and-frisk policy” and promised to implement changes so that “New Yorkers see our city not as the exclusive domain of the One Percent, but a place where everyday people can afford to live, work and raise a family.”
Public Advocate Letitia James: Time to Tackle "Gilded Age of Inequality" in New York City
This appears to be the time for primary campaigns...
Most Americans say this Congress is worst in their lifetime, CNN poll says
The current Congress is not only unproductive, but most Americans see it as the worst they've ever known, according to a new CNN/ORC International poll released Thursday.
Two-thirds said the 113th Congress, which left for the year last week, is the worst in their lifetime. Twenty-eight percent disagreed.
Nearly three in four said this Congress has done nothing to deal with the nation's problems.
This disdain for Congress "exists among all demographic and political subgroups. Men, women, rich, poor, young, old - all think this year's Congress has been the worst they can remember," CNN Polling Director Keating Holland told the network.
How the New Hampshire Rebellion will make corruption the #1 issue of 2016
Why Is the IRS Fighting Efforts to Unmask Karl Rove and U.S. Chamber Political Money Laundering
The IRS is fighting the whistleblower instead of pursuing the alleged criminals.
An IRS whistleblower lawsuit that attempts to finger an overseas non-profit affiliated with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as a dark money conduit that put tens of millions into Karl Rove’s hands during the 2010 elections may soon die in an obscure federal court—unless the judge allows evidence-gathering over the IRS’s objections.
Robert Jacobson, a Tuscon, Arizona physician who brought the lawsuit, believes that a nonprofit created by the State Department in conjunction with the U.S. Chamber to build a much-ridiculed exhibition at the 2010 Shanghai Expo in China had another purpose—diverting large slices of the $70-plus million in donations to Rove for campaigns to retake the House. The idea was that money from GOP-friendly corporations and even the Chinese government would evade oversight by flowing through barely regulated nonprofits. ...
Jacobson, who is a physician working with pro-bono lawyers and a filmmaker, Mina Chow, has been filing motions to keep the whistleblower lawsuit alive and let his team do its own investigation under Tax Court supervision. He knows that the IRS is more than reluctant to assess and label nonprofits as political front groups. But that is exactly why the Chamber and Rove’s team chose this political money laundering route, he said.
“I’m arguing that these crimes were so egregious that to ignore them is to become complicit in them,” Jacobson said. “The IRS had an obligation as a law enforcement agency to investigate the claims—felonies that they had abetted in some way.”
Here's an under-reported story from 2013 that ought to get some attention in 2014:
Washington, DC: Family of woman slain by police calls for investigation
Last month, family members of Miriam Carey, the 34-year-old Connecticut woman slain in early October by police in front of the US Capitol building, requested that federal officials launch an investigation into the events that resulted in the single mother’s death. The document released by family attorney Eric Sanders, a former New York City Police Department officer, states that officials “completely mishandled” the situation, and that “one or more of them should be criminally prosecuted for violating Miriam I. Carey’s civil rights.”
Carey was killed in Washington, DC, on October 3 when, after refusing to stop at a police checkpoint near the White House, she allegedly “made a U-turn and began to flee.” An officer attempting to block Carey’s retreat was knocked down, thus initiating a high-speed pursuit through the downtown area, which ended when officers fired a hail of bullets into her car, killing her as she attempted to exit the vehicle (see “ Washington DC chase ends in shooting death of driver ”).
Dismissing the claim that the aggressive response was necessary due to the need to fight terror, the Sanders family’s document asserts that “such car stops are handled professionally by law enforcement officials all over the world every day without incident including in other cities with so-called high value targets.”
The document goes on to comment that “using the term high value target is nothing other than an emotionally charged red herring to distract the public from demanding relevant answers from government officials who obviously violated Miriam I. Carey’s civil rights under the guise of protecting society from Terrorism.
Another tale of law enforcement gone wild:
Customs officials destroy virtuoso flautist’s 11 instruments because they were ‘agricultural products’
A flute virtuoso was returning to New York via John F. Kennedy Airport when Customs officials confiscated and destroyed the instruments he was carrying with him.
According to Boujemaa Razgui, the officials told him that his 11 flutes — each of which he had constructed, by hand, himself — “were agricultural products and had to be destroyed.”
Razgui, who is a Canadian citizen, frequently travels with a variety of flutes, each of which is designed to be played with a specific ancient or modern genre in mind.
Israel put Palestinian children in outdoor cages during winter storm
During the visit by two of its lawyers “which coincided with the fierce storm that struck the country, the attorneys met prisoners who described a shocking picture: in the middle of the night, dozens of prisoners were transferred to iron cages built outside the IPS [Israel Prison Service] facility in Ramle,” according to a 17 December statement from the public defender.
“In these cages, which were exposed to the weather, they spent several hours in the freezing cold and rain, until the transport arrived to take them to court around 6am,” the statement adds.
The statement said that the practice had been going on for months, a fact “verified during other official visits and not denied by IPS.” ...
The Jerusalem Post reported on 31 December that Tzipi Livni, Israel’s justice minister “immediately telephoned Public Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch, telling him to end the practice.”
The matter was also discussed Tuesday in the Israeli parliament’s public petitions committee where, according to the Post, “the Knesset committee said that the manner of arrest and detention conditions of Palestinian children was violating Israeli law for dealing with children.”
2013 in Review: Aiming Higher, Labor Tries New Angles and Alliances
Lean meanness stalked workplaces. The political and economic outlook continued dismal. But the year was marked by workers trying new things and setting higher standards, for their employers, their unions, and—in the case of low-wage workers—their pay.
Unemployment ticked down slightly, but the jobs created paid worse than ever. Mainstream media reported with amazement that jobs that once paid the bills, from bank teller to university instructor, now require food stamps and Medicaid to supplement the wages of those who work every day. ...
When long-awaited provisions of Obamacare kicked in, the promise of covering the uninsured was blighted by perverse incentives for employers to cut hours. Businesses that didn’t want to give insurance cried crocodile tears, so Obama delayed their fines by a year. But when unions objected that the new law unfairly undermined their multi-employer funds, the administration stonewalled.
[There's much more good information at the link.]
Public Sector Unions Win When They Preach 'Tax the Rich'
Most public sector unions have failed to counter the conservative message that public workers’ pensions and pay are to blame for yawning budget gaps. Too many have offered preemptive concessions, hoping to fend off more severe cuts. Too few have been willing to defend their job standards or the services they provide, much less tackle the third rail of U.S. politics—raising taxes.
But unions and allies who have called for raising taxes—on the rich, not on their fellow workers—have won public support. More often than not, they’ve succeeded at raising revenue. ...
When it comes to taxes, public sector unions should take a page from the recent fast food strikes. With their twin demands for $15 and a union, fast food workers leapfrogged nearly two decades of patient organizing intended to raise the minimum wage in steady increments.
Instead of taking the traditional approach of calculating a politically feasible goal, the fast food workers aimed high. With direct action and a lot of publicity, they shattered the parameters imposed by simple legislative maneuvering—and shifted what’s possible.
The great story
In the run-up to the Great Recession, accountability journalism saw the story that access journalism missed
The watchdog didn’t bark. What happened? How could an entire journalism subculture, understood to be sophisticated and plugged in, miss the central story occurring on its beat? And why was it that some journalists, mostly outside the mainstream, were able to produce work that in fact did reflect the radical changes overtaking the financial system while the vast majority in the mainstream did not? ...
Was the brewing crisis really such a secret? Was it all so complex as to be beyond the capacity of conventional journalism and, through it, the public, to understand? Was it all so hidden? In fact, the answer to all those questions is “no.” The problem—distorted incentives corrupting the financial industry—was plain, but not to Wall Street executives, traders, rating agencies, analysts, quants, or other financial insiders. It was plain to the outsiders: state regulators, plaintiffs’ lawyers, community groups, defrauded mortgage borrowers, and, mostly, to former employees of financial institutions, the whistleblowers, who were, in fact, blowing the whistle. A few reporters actually talked to them, understood the metastasizing problem, and wrote about it. Unfortunately, they didn’t work for the mainstream business press. ...
The record shows that the press published its hardest-hitting investigations of lenders and Wall Street between 2000 and 2003, even if there were only a few of them. Then ... it lapsed into useful but not sufficient consumer- and investor-oriented stories during the critical years of 2004 through 2006. Missing are investigative stories that directly confront powerful institutions about basic business practices while those institutions were still powerful. The watchdog didn’t bark.
Hidden Disaster in New Budget: Demonic Plot to Raid Pensions w/David Dayen
Will Boeing Workers Nix Givebacks in Forced Re-Vote?
In November 31,000 Machinists at Boeing rejected an 11-year contract extension packed with big concessions, in a 2-1 vote. Highly profitable Boeing wanted to eliminate pensions, under the threat of moving work on its forthcoming 777X plane out of Washington state.
Unhappy that members rejected the concessions it had negotiated, the IAM International has now scheduled a second vote for January 3. This time around, local union leaders in District Lodge 751 are 100 percent opposed and are doing their utmost to ensure a second rejection.
The vote by this large industrial workforce could be a last stand for private-sector pensions for new hires.
The Student DebtCropper System: Even the Destitute Hounded by Debt Collectors
As most people who have passing familiarity with student debt in the US know, it’s a millstone that is brutally difficult to remove. But it turns out that even the limited ways out are often not available in practice thanks to the hyper-aggressive conduct of a critical government contractor.
Unlike every other type of obligation save child support and criminal penalties, it can’t be discharged in bankruptcy. The lone type of exception is “undue hardship”: when a borrower is so clearly incapable of ever paying that it’s ridiculous to keep pressing them for the money.
The undue hardship standard is very difficult to meet, so one would think given how stringent it is, and therefore the comparatively small number of cases that are involved, that the student debt collectors would accept this minuscule level of losses and focus their resources on people with means.
But it instead seems that the debt police are unable to contain themselves. A New York Times story discusses bankruptcy court abuses by the organization that is the main contractor to the Department of Education on these cases, the Educational Credit Management Corporation:
A review of hundreds of pages of court documents as well as interviews with consumer advocates, experts and bankruptcy lawyers suggest that Educational Credit’s pursuit of student borrowers has veered more than occasionally into dubious terrain. A law professor and critic of Educational Credit, Rafael Pardo of Emory University, estimates that the agency oversteps in dozens of cases per year.
Others have also been highly critical.
A panel of bankruptcy appeal judges in 2012 denounced what it called Educational Credit’s “waste of judicial resources,” and said that the agency’s collection activities “constituted an abuse of the bankruptcy process and defiance of the court’s authority.”
The Evening Greens
Hat tip Keith930:
China Says Land the Size of Belgium Too Polluted for Farming
More than 2 percent of China’s arable land, or an area the size of Belgium, is too polluted to grow crops, the government said, offering new evidence of the environmental cost associated with 30 years of breakneck growth.
About 50 million mu (3.3 million hectares) of farmland is too spoiled for planting, Vice Minister of Land and Resources Wang Shiyuan said at a press conference in Beijing yesterday, according to a transcript on the government’s website. The country has 135 million hectares of arable land, he said, citing a nationwide survey.
Concerns that toxic soil is spoiling crops and making people sick join those about China’s polluted skies and water as issues that have highlighted the cost of economic expansion, which has averaged about 10 percent annually over three decades. Leaders including Xu Shaoshi, head of the country’s top economic planning agency, have said environmental degradation is challenging China’s traditional growth pattern. ...
In May, Guangdong province, the nation’s most-populous region, said it found excessive levels of toxic cadmium in more than 40 percent of rice sold in capital city Guangzhou.
Crude Oil Impurities Are Probed in Train Explosions
After three fiery accidents involving trains carrying crude oil out of North Dakota's Bakken Shale, regulators and industry officials are trying to figure out why the oil is exploding.
Crude is flammable, but before being refined into products such as gasoline it is rarely implicated in explosions.
Yet earlier this week, when a BNSF Railway Co. train hauling 104 tank cars filled with Bakken crude struck another train, some of the cars exploded one after the other, releasing fireballs that blazed several stories above the frozen prairie.
"Crude oil doesn't explode like that," said Matthew Goitia, chief executive of Peaker Energy Group LLC, a Houston company that is developing crude-by-rail terminals.
The blast in Casselton, N.D., 25 miles west of Fargo, is just the latest explosion involving crude pumped out of the Bakken. Federal investigators and railroad and energy-company officials are probing whether additives to the oil or mislabeling of the liquid contributed to the series of explosions.
The Day a Federal Panel Overruled B.C. — And Nobody Noticed
On the afternoon of Dec. 19th, as the National Energy Board’s recommendations on Enbridge’s oil tanker and pipeline proposal for B.C. were released, I tuned into CBC Newsworld and CTV News Network to see the coverage unfold live.
Over and over again, the opposition to the project was described as "First Nations and environmentalists.”
Wait a second. Just six months ago, the province of British Columbia submitted its final argument to the National Energy Board’s joint review panel, requesting the panel reject the project. “Trust us” isn’t good enough, the report read with regard to Enbridge’s promises about oil spill response. ...
The report was covered by all major media. And, as far as the panel was concerned, that was B.C.’s final word on the project. Why then, when the panel recommended approval of the project last week, did most reporters fail to reference the fact the decision directly overruled the will of the province?
In 2013, Climate 'Resiliency' Officially Entered the Lexicon
The debate about tackling climate change has long revolved around the twin challenges of mitigating global warming and adapting to its more predictable long-term impacts—rising seas, higher peak temperatures, relentless drought.
Now a new concept has risen: "climate resiliency," or preparing cities for climate change's unforeseen and destructive disasters and disruptions. Resiliency includes adaptation measures—such as rebuilding wetlands or moving homes onto higher foundations as a way to fight floods—but it's also about armoring entire populations so they can absorb and quickly recover from sudden calamity. ...
Although scientists and academics have long fretted about the resiliency of the word's cities amid increasing bursts of deadly weather, 2013 saw the concept enter the American lexicon after Superstorm Sandy brought the issue of to the fore. The devastation left by the climate-fueled hurricane—the pummeled houses, stranded families, electricity outages and damage to critical shipping ports—showed just how ill-prepared many cities are for a rapidly changing climate. Leaders began raising the issue publicly for the first time in media interviews, during urban policy panels and at national conferences. ...
Sandy wasn't the only wake-up call. In 2012, America faced 11 weather disasters that topped $1 billion in losses each, including a persistent drought that covered 60 percent of the country at one point. This year has seen destructive wildfires, heavy flooding and record-breaking heat waves.
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin' Is On Hiatus
The ‘secret Capitalist cabal’ behind austerity
The Real Reason the Middle Class Is Dead
NYT Editorial, Foreign Policy Mag Column Concur: Snowden’s Actions Justified, He Deserves Clemency
Why trains matter
Connecticut prohibits health insurance discrimination against transgender people
A Little Night Music
Roosevelt "Booba" Barnes - Scratch My Back
Roosevelt "Booba" Barnes & The Playboys How Long This Must Go On
Roosevelt Booba Barnes - Love Like I Wanna
Roosevelt Booba Barnes - I'm going back home" & "Bluebird
Roosevelt Barnes - Ain't Goin' To Worry, About Tomorrow
Roosevelt 'Booba' Barnes - Blind Man + I pity the fool
Roosevelt Booba Barnes - Rocking Daddy
It's National Pie Day!
The election is over, it's a new year and it's time to work on real change in new ways... and it's National Pie Day. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to tell you a little more about our new site and to start getting people signed up.
Come on over and sign up so that we can send you announcements about the site, the launch, and information about participating in our public beta testing.
Why is National Pie Day the perfect opportunity to tell you more about us? Well you'll see why very soon. So what are you waiting for?! Head on over now and be one of the first!
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