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.
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Hey! Good Evening!
This evening's music features singer and guitarist John Hammond, Jr.. Enjoy!
John Hammond - Drop Down Mama + Come On In My Kitchen
“If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but the one who causes the darkness.”
-- Victor Hugo
News and Opinion
More like, "Obama battles to avoid culpability..."
Obama battles to contain CIA-Senate feud in wake of Feinstein accusations
The Obama administration was battling to contain a collapse in trust between the US intelligence services and Congress on Tuesday after a senator it counted as one of its most loyal supporters accused the CIA of a catalogue of cover-ups, intimidation and smears to hide its role in the torture of terrorism suspects.
The bombshell allegations by Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee, were batted away by CIA director John Brennan, who said they went “beyond the scope of reason”. But they revealed growing strains at the heart of Washington’s intelligence establishment about the agency’s power and accountability. ...
The White House sought to avoid taking sides in the dispute, saying Barack Obama was aware of the Senate claims but refused to comment on the substance of the allegations or say whether the president was concerned.
“This is a matter involving protocols established for the interaction between committee staff and the CIA,” said spokesman Jay Carney. “There are periodic disputes about this process and it is under two separate investigations, so I am not going to provide an analysis of it.”
But senior Senate Democrats continued to back Feinstein’s unprecedented public attack, calling on the president to allow swift publication of an unclassified version of her committee’s report into the CIA’s interrogation activities. “I support Senator Feinstein unequivocally, and I am disappointed that the CIA is apparently unrepentant for what I understand they did,” Senate majority leader Harry Reid told reporters.
Senator Ron Wyden, a long-time critic of intelligence overreach, told CNN: “The bottom line is: I am becoming convinced the CIA is simply fearful of the interrogation report being made public, and I think it’s time for the American people to get that information.”
The CIA is refusing to back down, raising the prospect of Obama being forced to choose whether to support his party or the intelligence community.
CIA steals the limelight from the NSA – and finds itself in full-blown crisis
After a year in which the National Security Agency faced global condemnation, the Central Intelligence Agency has now taken over as the US intelligence body most firmly in the midst of a full-blown crisis. The CIA has dug itself into a morass the NSA has firmly avoided: antagonizing its congressional overseers.
It is a crisis redolent with ironies. A White House that labored intently to move past the CIA’s post-9/11 torture legacy, disappointing many supporters, must now resolve a row stemming directly from it.
A CIA director who first missed out on his job over fears he was soft on agency torture is now in the crosshairs of what his Senate overseers considers a cover-up.
A Senate committee chairwoman who has fiercely defended the NSA’s abilities to collect data on every American phone call is furious that the CIA monitored the network usage of her staff, calling the alleged infraction a potential subversion of the Senate’s constitutionally mandated oversight responsibilities.
A Justice Department that limited and ultimately dropped a criminal inquiry into CIA torture without bringing charges now has to consider potential criminal liability against Senate staff conducting their own inquiry; and for CIA officials who allegedly attempted to thwart it.
"Giving Hypocrisy a Bad Name": NSA-Backing Senate Intel Chair Blasts CIA for Spying on Torture Probe
Snowden accuses Senate intelligence chair of hypocrisy over CIA disclosures
The whistleblower Edward Snowden accused the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee of double standards on Tuesday, pointing out that her outrage at evidence her staff were spied on by the CIA was not matched by concern about widespread surveillance of ordinary citizens.
Snowden, the former contractor whose disclosures to journalists revealed widespread surveillance by the National Security Agency, was responding to an explosive statement by Senator Dianne Feinstein about the CIA’s attempts to undermine a congressional investigation into interrogation and detention. ...
In a statement to NBC News, Snowden said: “It’s clear the CIA was trying to play ‘keep away’ with documents relevant to an investigation by their overseers in Congress, and that’s a serious constitutional concern.”
Snowden, who is in Russia on temporary asylum, added: “But it’s equally if not more concerning that we’re seeing another ‘Merkel effect,’ where an elected official does not care at all that the rights of millions of ordinary citizens are violated by our spies, but suddenly it’s a scandal when a politician finds out the same thing happens to them.”
Reid disappointed CIA 'apparently unrepentant' for what he understands they did
Senate leaders Tuesday were concerned but careful about their next steps after Sen. Dianne Feinstein told the Senate the CIA may have violated constitutional principles by monitoring her committee’s computers.
“I believe in separation of powers. I support Senator Feinstein unequivocally, and I am disappointed that the CIA is apparently unrepentant for what I understand they did,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, told reporters.
Reid rejected, at least for now, the suggestion by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., that an independent investigation might be needed.
The chorus rises. Mike Rogers, the idiot Republican who never met an unconstitutional, intrusive spying program that he didn't like, thinks the CIA might have overstepped a line, too.
CIA ties to Congress at risk over spying charges: House intelligence chief
The CIA's relationship with Congress would be ruined if it is proven that the agency illegally spied on the Senate Intelligence Committee, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee said on Wednesday. ...
"It's troubling to see this, but I do have immense respect for Senator Feinstein, so if she's going down to the floor, she clearly believes something untoward happened," Representative Mike Rogers, who heads the intelligence panel in the House of Representatives, said in an interview with CNN.
Rogers, a Republican, said that Feinstein's charges needed to be investigated to ensure the CIA did not break any laws.
"That would be a pretty horrific situation and would destroy that legislative-CIA relationship," he said.
Binney: Sen. Feinstein "Hypocritical" For Blasting CIA For Spying
The Feinstein Syndrome: “The Fourth Amendment for Me, But Not for Thee”
This week, Feinstein stepped forward to tweak her tap dance—insisting that intrusive surveillance, so vile when directed at her and colleagues with august stature, must only be directed at others.
A huge problem is that for the USA’s top movers and shakers in media and politics, nothing rises to the level of constitutional crisis unless their noble oxen start to get gored. It doesn’t seem to dawn on the likes of Senator Feinstein that Fourth Amendment protections for the few are not Fourth Amendment protections at all.
More than 40 years ago, under the Nixon administration—when the U.S. government was breaking into the offices of the Socialist Workers Party, busting into the homes of members of the Black Panther Party in the middle of night with guns firing, and widely shredding the civil liberties of anti-war activists—few among ruling elites seemed to give a damn. But when news emerged that one of the two big political parties had severely transgressed against the other with a break-in at the Watergate office of the Democratic National Committee on June 17, 1972, the Republican White House had gone too far. ...
History tells us that we’d be deluded to depend on entrenched elites to opt for principle rather than continuity of the status quo. With few exceptions, what bonds those at peaks of power routinely trumps what divides them. It takes a massive and sustained uproar to really fracture the perversity of elite cohesion.
Consider the fact that the CIA, under the current Democratic administration, has gone to extraordinary lengths to transgress against a CIA-friendly Democratic-controlled Senate intelligence committee, in an effort to prevent anyone from being held accountable for crimes of torture committed under and by the Republican Bush administration.
While Dianne Feinstein has a long and putrid record as an enemy of civil liberties, transparency and accountability, it’s also true that thieves sometimes fall out—and so do violators of the most basic democratic safeguards in the Bill of Rights. Some powerful “intelligence” scoundrels are now at each other’s throats, even while continuing to brandish daggers at the heart of democracy with their contempt for such ideals as a free press, privacy and due process. The responsibility for all this goes to the very top: President Obama.
How the NSA Plans to Infect “Millions” of Computers with Malware
Top-secret documents reveal that the National Security Agency is dramatically expanding its ability to covertly hack into computers on a mass scale by using automated systems that reduce the level of human oversight in the process.
The classified files – provided previously by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden – contain new details about groundbreaking surveillance technology the agency has developed to infect potentially millions of computers worldwide with malware “implants.” The clandestine initiative enables the NSA to break into targeted computers and to siphon out data from foreign Internet and phone networks.
The covert infrastructure that supports the hacking efforts operates from the agency’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, and from eavesdropping bases in the United Kingdom and Japan. GCHQ, the British intelligence agency, appears to have played an integral role in helping to develop the implants tactic.
In some cases the NSA has masqueraded as a fake Facebook server, using the social media site as a launching pad to infect a target’s computer and exfiltrate files from a hard drive. In others, it has sent out spam emails laced with the malware, which can be tailored to covertly record audio from a computer’s microphone and take snapshots with its webcam. The hacking systems have also enabled the NSA to launch cyberattacks by corrupting and disrupting file downloads or denying access to websites.
The implants being deployed were once reserved for a few hundred hard-to-reach targets, whose communications could not be monitored through traditional wiretaps. But the documents analyzed by The Intercept show how the NSA has aggressively accelerated its hacking initiatives in the past decade by computerizing some processes previously handled by humans. The automated system – codenamed TURBINE – is designed to “allow the current implant network to scale to large size (millions of implants) by creating a system that does automated control implants by groups instead of individually.” ...
[T]he secret files indicate, the NSA’s plans for TURBINE came to fruition. The system has been operational in some capacity since at least July 2010, and its role has become increasingly central to NSA hacking operations. ... The intelligence community’s top-secret “Black Budget” for 2013, obtained by Snowden, lists TURBINE as part of a broader NSA surveillance initiative named “Owning the Net.”
Snowden Leak: NSA Sees Erosion of Privacy Laws as Progress
Since the attacks on September 11, 2001, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) has been at the center of government efforts surrounding the expansion of inter-agency information sharing when it comes to data collected by the National Security Agency.
(Photo credit: François Proulx) Despite what is know about the rules and manner by which that information is regulated—specifically personal data belonging to U.S. citizens not under direct investigation or targeted for surveillance by court order—new reporting in Wednesday's New York Times by Charlie Savage and Laura Poitras, based on documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, reveal previously undisclosed decisions by the FISA court that dramatically altered the NSA's ability to share that information.
The existence of key orders by the FISC—with monikers like "Raw Take Order" and "Large Content FISA"—say civil liberty advocates, prove important privacy protections are being undermined and betray claims by the NSA and other agencies that safeguards to protect such data are being retained. ...
Responding to the latest revelations, the ACLU's Jameel Jaffer said the NSA's internal documents tell a different story than the one the agency has told publicly about its approach to the minimization rules that were once designed to closely monitor and restrict the way surveillance data of Americans is shared by various government agencies.
How a Court Secretly Evolved, Extending U.S. Spies’ Reach
Ten months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the nation’s surveillance court delivered a ruling that intelligence officials consider a milestone in the secret history of American spying and privacy law. Called the “Raw Take” order — classified docket No. 02-431 — it weakened restrictions on sharing private information about Americans, according to documents and interviews. ...
Previously, with narrow exceptions, an intelligence agency was permitted to disseminate information gathered from court-approved wiretaps only after deleting irrelevant private details and masking the names of innocent Americans who came into contact with a terrorism suspect. The Raw Take order significantly changed that system, documents show, allowing counterterrorism analysts at the N.S.A., the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. to share unfiltered personal information.
The leaked documents that refer to the rulings, including one called the “Large Content FISA” order and several more recent expansions of powers on sharing information, add new details to the emerging public understanding of a secret body of law that the court has developed since 2001. The files help explain how the court evolved from its original task — approving wiretap requests — to engaging in complex analysis of the law to justify activities like the bulk collection of data about Americans’ emails and phone calls. ...
Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, argued that the easing of privacy protections mandated by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 increased the risk of abuse and should not be a secret.
“The framers of FISA intended to narrowly restrict the ability of the government to disseminate this information because it has a very low standard enabling access to communications,” he said. “If the FISA court removed those safeguards, it obviously raises questions about compliance with the intent of the act.” ...
The new disclosures come amid a debate over whether the surveillance court, which hears arguments only from the Justice Department, should be restructured for its evolving role. Proposals include overhauling how judges are selected to serve on it and creating a public advocate to provide adversarial arguments when the government offers complex legal analysis for expanding its powers.
An online Magna Carta: Berners-Lee calls for bill of rights for web
The inventor of the world wide web believes an online "Magna Carta" is needed to protect and enshrine the independence of the medium he created and the rights of its users worldwide.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee told the Guardian the web had come under increasing attack from governments and corporate influence and that new rules were needed to protect the "open, neutral" system.
Speaking exactly 25 years after he wrote the first draft of the first proposal for what would become the world wide web, the computer scientist said: "We need a global constitution – a bill of rights."
Berners-Lee's Magna Carta plan is to be taken up as part of an initiative called "the web we want", which calls on people to generate a digital bill of rights in each country – a statement of principles he hopes will be supported by public institutions, government officials and corporations.
"Unless we have an open, neutral internet we can rely on without worrying about what's happening at the back door, we can't have open government, good democracy, good healthcare, connected communities and diversity of culture. It's not naive to think we can have that, but it is naive to think we can just sit back and get it."
This is an article worth reading in full, for those of us who have been around a while, there will be not-so-amusing memories and ironic comparisons:
How Reagan Enforced US Hypocrisy
Official Washington’s hearty disdain for anyone who cites U.S. hypocrisy toward the Ukraine crisis can be traced back to a propaganda strategy hatched by the Reagan administration in 1984, dismissing any comparisons between U.S. and Soviet behavior as unacceptable expressions of “moral equivalence.” ...
Reagan administration officials developed a propaganda “theme” that, in effect, asserted that the U.S. government should not be held to the same human rights standards as the Soviet government because the United States was morally superior to the Soviet Union. ... The “theme” was most famously expressed by U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick at the Republican National Convention in 1984 when she decried anyone who would “blame America first.” ...
Over the past three decades, the argument against “moral equivalence” has changed little, though it has morphed into what is now more commonly described as American “exceptionalism,” the new trump card against anyone who suggests that the U.S. government should abide by international law and be held to common human rights standards.
Today, if you make the case that universal rules should apply to the United States, you are accused of not embracing America as an “exceptional” country. As a result, very few mainstream observers in Official Washington even blink now at the U.S. government taking contradictory positions on issues such as intervening in other countries.
Invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan are “justified” as are drone strikes and aerial bombardments of countries from Pakistan to Yemen to Somalia to Libya. It’s also okay to threaten to bomb Syria and Iran.
Supporting the overthrow of sovereign governments is also fine – for the United States but not for anyone else. Just during the Obama administration, the U.S. government has backed coups in Honduras, Libya and now Ukraine. U.S.-endorsed secessions are okay, too, as with oil-rich South Sudan from Sudan.
Yet, when the geopolitical shoe is on the other foot – when Russia objects to the violent overthrow of Ukraine’s duly-elected President Viktor Yanukovych and, as a result, supports a secession referendum by Crimea on whether its citizens want to join the Russian Federation – Official Washington cries out in moral outrage.
Suddenly, we see mainstream American journalists searching for some clause in Ukraine’s constitution that prohibits secession, though these journalists had no problem with the violation of the same constitution’s procedures for impeaching a president, rules ignored by the coup regime with barely a peep from U.S. news outlets.
Kiev will not use army to stop Crimea secession
Ukraine's acting president has said the country will not use its army to stop Crimea from seceding, in the latest indication that a Russian annexation of the peninsula may be imminent.
The interim leader said intervening on the south-eastern Black Sea peninsula, where Kremlin-backed forces have seized control, would leave Ukraine exposed on its eastern border, where he said Russia has massed "significant tank units".
"We cannot launch a military operation in Crimea, as we would expose the eastern border and Ukraine would not be protected," Oleksandr Turchynov told Agence France-Presse.
"They're provoking us to have a pretext to intervene on the Ukrainian mainland … [but] we cannot follow the scenario written by the Kremlin." ...
On Wednesday, a Russian court issued an arrest warrant for Ukrainian far-right leader Dmytro Yarosh in absentia on charges of inciting terrorism – a symbolic move in support of Moscow's argument that "extremists" stole power in neighbouring Ukraine.
Russian news agencies said Moscow's Basmanny district court ruled that Yarosh – one of the most influential leaders of the protest movement which ousted former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich – should be arrested for making "public calls for terrorist and extremist activities via the media".
Yats goes to Washington
Russian stance firm in reply to U.S. proposals
Russian President Vladimir Putin's government responded overnight to Secretary of State John Kerry's proposal for a contact group that would facilitate direct Ukrainian-Russian talks and work to disarm irregular forces - steps the Obama administration says will help deescalate the crisis in Crimea.
Moscow's answer, apparently, is: No, thanks. ...
In other words, there was no sign from Putin that he's willing to consider the U.S. "off ramp" proposal and planned to go ahead as scheduled with a controversial referendum Sunday that's likely to lead to the annexation of the Crimea region of neighboring Ukraine. The United States and several of its allies have called the vote illegitimate and won't recognize the results.
Thousands flock to Turkish boy's funeral after night of protest
Tens of thousands of mourners chanting anti-government slogans marched through central Istanbul on Wednesday for the funeral of a teenager wounded in street protests last summer whose death has sparked renewed unrest across Turkey.
Riot police fired water cannon and tear gas at protests in several cities after Berkin Elvan's death on Tuesday, adding to pre-election woes for Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan as he battles a corruption scandal that has become one of the biggest challenges of his decade in power.
Crowds chanting "Tayyip! Killer!" and "Everywhere is Berkin, everywhere is resistance" held up photos of Elvan outside a "cemevi", an Alevi place of worship, in Istanbul's working class Okmeydani district, from where his coffin, draped in red and covered in flowers, was carried through the streets for burial.
Alevis are a religious minority in mainly Sunni Muslim Turkey who espouse a liberal version of Islam and have often been at odds with Erdogan's Islamist-rooted government. ...
The funeral ceremony was broadcast live on major television news channels, some of which were criticized for their scant coverage of last June's unrest.
Elvan, then aged 14, got caught up in street battles in Istanbul between police and protesters on June 16 while going to buy bread for his family. He became a rallying point for government opponents, who held vigils at the Istanbul hospital where he lay in intensive care from a head trauma believed to have been caused by a police tear gas canister.
Guantánamo hunger-strikers endure 'water cure' torture, federal court hears
Hunger-striking Guantánamo detainees are being subjected to a form of torture known as the “water cure” that was widely used in the Spanish Inquisition, lawyers are claiming, in the first legal challenge to force-feeding at the military base brought before a US federal court.
The case was lodged on Tuesday in the US district court for the DC circuit that has jurisdiction over Guantánamo. It was brought on behalf of Emad Abdullah Hassan, a Yemeni who has been on hunger strike in the detention camp intermittently since 2005 and continuously since 2007.
By his lawyers’ reckoning, Hassan has been force-fed more than 5,000 times during that period, in conditions they allege are abusive, illegal under international law, and a form of torture. The motion calls for a preliminary injunction that would put an immediate halt on the practice pending full review.
The legal move is the first of its kind to be brought before the civilian courts following last month’s decision by a federal appeals court to allow such a challenge to go ahead. It paves the way for the first comprehensive hearing in the US judicial system over the legality and propriety of the military’s controversial use of force-feeding at Guantánamo.
Hassan, now 34, was picked up by Pakistani security forces in February 2002, having travelled from his native Yemen to Faisalbad to attend university. He has been held without charge for almost 12 years in Guantánamo, despite the fact that he was cleared for release in 2009.
US now calls Guantanamo hunger strike 'long term non-religious fasting'
The Defense Department has released its 3-month-old Guantanamo forced-feeding protocol, a 24-page how-to document that rhetorically recasts the yearlong hunger strike in the remote prison camps as "long term non-religious fasting."
The release blacks out the portions of the document that define how much weight loss and how many missed meals qualifies a hunger-striking captive for the prison's twice-daily tube feedings.
Some prison spokesmen had argued that the captives were manipulating their weight loss to qualify as hunger strikers - and to focus attention on their indefinite detention at the prison, where about half of the 155 prisoners are approved for release if the Obama administration reaches resettlement or repatriation agreements for them. ...
At the U.S. Southern Command in Doral, Fla., the Pentagon outpost with oversight of the prison, Marine Gen. John Kelly had derided the protest as "hunger strike lite," and openly differed with President Barack Obama's description of his troops as "force-feeding" prisoners.
The new terminology more closely aligns with the general's language of choice on the long-running protest by an undisclosed number of captives receiving prison-mandated tube feedings.
Gitmo Inmate: 'All I Want Is What President Obama Promised'
In what is being hailed as a "historic legal challenge" to the United States government, a U.S. court will hear for the first time from a Guantánamo detainee who claims that force-feeding at the U.S. military prison amounts to torture.
Emad Hassan, who is severely ill and suffers from serious internal injuries — which his lawyers at the human rights group Reprieve say are the direct result of force-feeding— has been held without charge since 2002 despite having been cleared for release since 2009.
Hassan has been force-fed 5000 times since 2007 "as part of the military’s efforts to break his hunger strike," said Reprieve.
"All I want is what President Obama promised – my liberty, and fair treatment for others," stated Hassan. "I have been cleared for five years, and I have been force-fed for seven years. This is not a life worth living, it is a life of constant pain and suffering."
"While I do not want to die," he continued, "it is surely my right to protest peacefully without being degraded and abused every day."
If you still care why Obama does the stuff he does, this is an excellent analysis, worth a read:
The Voice: How Obama Became a Publicist for His Presidency (Rather Than the President)
In discussions about Obama, one occasionally hears it said -- in a mood between bewilderment and forbearance -- that we have not yet known the man. After all, he has been up against the enormous obstacle of racism, an insensate Republican party, and a legacy of bad wars. It is true that he has faced enormous obstacles. It is no less true that by postponement and indecision, by silence and by speaking on both sides, he has allowed the obstacles to grow larger. Consider his “all of the above” energy policy, which impartially embraces deep-sea drilling, wind farms, solar panels, Arctic drilling, nuclear plants, fracking for natural gas, and “clean coal.”
Obama’s practice of recessive management to the point of neglect has also thrown up obstacles entirely of his devising. He chose to entrust the execution and “rollout” of his health-care policy to the Department of Health and Human Services. That was an elective plan which he himself picked from all the alternatives. The extreme paucity of his meetings with his secretary of health and human services, Kathleen Sebelius, in the three years that elapsed between his signing of the law and the rollout of the policy makes a fair epitome of negligence. Indeed, the revelation of his lack of contact with Sebelius left an impression -- which the recent provocative actions of the State Department in Ukraine have reinforced -- that the president is not much interested in what the officials in his departments and agencies are up to. ...
Perhaps the thin connection between Obama’s words and his actions does not support the use of the word “conviction” at all. Let us say instead that he mistook his preferences for convictions -- and he can still be trusted to tell us what he would prefer to do. Review the record and it will show that his first statement on a given issue generally lays out what he would prefer. Later on, he resigns himself to supporting a lesser evil, which he tells us is temporary and necessary. The creation of a category of permanent prisoners in “this war we’re in” (which he declines to call “the war on terror”) was an early and characteristic instance. Such is Obama’s belief in the power and significance of his own words that, as he judges his own case, saying the right thing is a decent second-best to doing the right thing. ...
As an adapter to the thinking of men of power, Obama was a quick study. It took him less than half a year as president to subscribe to Dick Cheney’s view on the need for the constant surveillance of all Americans. This had to be done for the sake of our own safety in a war without a visible end. The leading consideration here is that Obama, quite as much as George W. Bush, wants to be seen as having done everything possible to avoid the “next 9/11.” He cares far less about doing everything possible to uphold the Constitution (a word that seldom occurs in his speeches or writings). Nevertheless, if you ask him, he will be happy to declare his preference for a return to the state of civil liberties we enjoyed in the pre-2001 era. In the same way, he will order drone killings in secret and then give a speech in which he informs us that eventually this kind of killing must stop.
Obama attacks Union jobs, wants to sell off legacy of New Deal
Labor unions are going on the attack against a proposal buried deep in President Obama’s budget that they charge is a move to privatize the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA).
Established in 1933 and still owned by the federal government, the TVA is one of the lasting legacies of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “New Deal,” providing electricity to more than 9 million people in seven Southern states.
But while the utility is now self-financing, the government could pocket a hefty profit by selling its stake.
Obama proposed studying that option in his last two budgets, angering a trio of major labor unions that have thousands of members at TVA facilities.
“Right now, the Tennessee Valley Authority now provides the most reliable, low-cost source of energy across the South,” said Greg Junemann, president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE). “There’s no reason to do this, unless it’s forming some sort of political partnership that no one can quite figure out.”
Junemann said 2,500 IFPTE members work for the TVA, and said he worries privatizing the company could see them tossed out of work. ...
In this year’s budget, the administration said it “continues to believe that reducing or eliminating the federal government’s role in programs such as the TVA, which have achieved their original objectives, can help mitigate risk to taxpayers.”
That language was included over the strenuous objections of labor unions, which approved a resolution at the AFL-CIO convention in September urging Washington to reject all efforts to privatize the TVA.
Only the New York Times would have to ask if a financial market is rigged...
$5.3 Trillion a Day: Is the Foreign Exchange Market Rigged?
Average Wall Street cash bonus highest since crash: NYS Comptroller
Wall Street's average cash bonus swelled last year to its highest since the financial crisis and the third largest on record, New York State's budget watchdog said on Wednesday.
The cash bonus pool jumped 15 percent to $26.7 billion in 2013, pushing the average cash bonus was $164,530, according to the New York state comptroller's annual estimate based on personal income tax trends.
The increased bonuses came as Wall Street posted a fifth consecutive year of profits after record losses during the 2008 financial crisis. Profits for broker-dealer operations of New York Stock Exchange member firms, however, fell 30 percent to $16.7 billion in 2013, the report said.
"Wall Street navigated through some rough patches last year and had a profitable year in 2013. Securities industry employees took home significantly higher bonuses on average," Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli said in a statement.
"Although profits were lower than the prior year, the industry still had a good year in 2013 despite costly legal settlements and higher interest rates," he added.
Wall Street Bonuses vs the Minimum Wage
Purveyors of Ferraris and high-end Swiss watches keep their fingers crossed toward the end of each calendar year, hoping that the big Wall Street banks will be generous with their annual cash bonuses. ...
That money will no doubt boost sales of luxury goods. Just imagine how much greater the economic benefit would be if that same amount of money had gone into the pockets of minimum-wage workers.
The $26.7 billion Wall Streeters pocketed in bonuses would cover the cost of more than doubling the paychecks for all of the 1,085,000 Americans who work full-time at the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour.
And boosting their pay in that way would give our economy much more bang for the buck. That’s because low-wage workers tend to spend nearly every dollar they make to meet their basic needs. The wealthy can afford to squirrel away a much greater share of their earnings.
When low-wage workers spend their money at the grocery store or on utility bills, this cash ripples through the economy. According to my new report, every extra dollar going into the pockets of low-wage workers adds about $1.21 to the national economy. Every extra dollar a high-income American makes, by contrast, only adds about 39 cents to the gross domestic product (GDP).
The Evening Greens
NAFTA's Deadly Legacy: Corporate Profits Over People and Planet
The legacy of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), twenty years after implementation, is one of environmental degradation and corporate dominance, according to a report published Tuesday.
Governments on the verge of signing similar agreements—both the Transpacific (TTP) and Transatlantic (TTIP) trade deals— ought to take a "page out of the history books and stop negotiating trade pacts that gut protections for our air, water, land, workers and communities," said Ilana Solomon, director of the Sierra Club’s Responsible Trade Program, ahead of the report's release.
The report, NAFTA: 20 Years of Costs to Communities and the Environment (pdf), summarizes more than 100 nonprofit, government and scholarly studies of the trade pact. ... According to the study, the environmental legacy of the trade pact is both widespread and varied. From fueling the proliferation of Genetically Modified (GM) agriculture in Mexico to encouraging the development of Alberta tar sands, the results have been a disaster for people and the environment.
NAFTA Report Warns Of Trade Deal Environmental Disasters
A report due to be released Tuesday aims to offer an object lesson to President Barack Obama: Free trade deals have high costs in unintended consequences for the environment, people's way of life, and local sovereignty. ...
The report estimates that a significant jump in pollution can be linked to NAFTA, with greenhouse gas emissions in the region increasing from 7 billion metric tons in 1990 to about 8.3 billion in 2005. ...
“Nearly 20 years into NAFTA and the evidence is in," Ilana Solomon, director of the Sierra Club’s Responsible Trade Program, said in a statement. "NAFTA led to an expansion of deforestation and unsustainable water use in order to support export-oriented agriculture. It gave massive rights to corporations to challenge environmental and climate safeguards in private trade tribunals. It expanded exports in dirty fossil fuels in a time when we should be moving beyond these outdated fuels and investing in clean energy. Governments must take a page out of the history books and stop negotiating trade pacts that gut protections for our air, water, land, workers, and communities.”
Nader on Senate’s Climate Stance, "Insanity" of U.S. Nukes
Ukraine Crisis Spurs Fracking-Friendly Measure in Poland
As the crisis in Ukraine continues to put a spotlight on Russia's stranglehold over European gas supplies, Poland has offered a frack-friendly proposal of making shale gas extraction tax-free in the country.
"We adopted measures that should encourage shale gas exploration," Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said Tuesday.
According to the new measures, fracking will be tax-free until 2020, and after that point taxes "shouldn't exceed 40 percent of extraction income," Tusk said.
The first commercial shale well in the country is expected this year, and as many as 30 fracking wells could be drilled this year.
Debate: Is the Democrats' Talkathon on Climate Change Just Talk?
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin' Is On Hiatus
DCIA Brennan's message to the workforce
With Ukraine powerless to help, Tatars face certain Russian victory in Crimea
Ukraine, the United States and international law
Bill Black Slams New York Times for Wink and Nod Endorsement of Criminal Conduct
David Mizner published in The Nation (woohoo!):
Starving for Justice
Trio of transwomen selected as Women of the Year by California legislators
NYT (Breaking) Snowden Docs: "Raw Take," Rampant Sharing of Domestic, "Unminimized" Wiretap Content
A Little Night Music
John Hammond Trio - Jitterbug Swing
John Hammond, Jr. - Up The Line
John Hammond, Jr. - Love Changing Blues
John Hammond - Preaching Blues
John Hammond Jr. - I Can Tell
John Hammond - I wish you would
John Hammond - Get Behind The Mule
John Hammond - Jockey Full of Bourbon
John Hammond - Baby How Long
John Hammond speaks about Jimi Hendrix
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