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.
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Hey! Good Evening!
This evening's music features Texas singer Angela Strehli. Enjoy!
Angela Strehli - Two Bit Texas Town
“In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements.”
-- George Orwell
News and Opinion
Barack Obama: no cold war over Crimea
Barack Obama declared there were no easy answers nor military solutions to the Crimea crisis, but cast Vladimir Putin's Russia as a lonely villain shredding the international rulebook to bully a smaller neighbour.
Russia's seizure of Ukraine's Black sea peninsula did not herald a new cold war, Obama told 2,000 people gathered in an arts centre in central Brussels in the big speech of his four-day trip to Europe.
But it was also clear that the Kremlin's actions in recent weeks had triggered a deep shift in western perceptions of Putin that would see Russia increasingly isolated internationally and exposed to a spiralling trade war with the west, depending on his next moves.
Putin's decision to redraw his region's borders had caused "a moment of testing", Obama said in a 40-minute speech on his first visit in office to Brussels."Bigger nations can bully smaller ones to get their way," he said. ...
Obama dismissed Russian arguments on Crimea, countering Moscow's claims that ethnic Russians in Ukraine had to be protected, saying there could be no parallels between Kosovo and Crimea, and also offering a qualified defence of US policy in Iraq. "There is no evidence, never has been, of systematic violence against ethnic Russians," he said. "Our approach stands in stark contrast to the arguments coming out of Russia these days."
Putin and Ukraine dominated the bulk of the 40-minute speech. Obama painted Putin as a menace to a law-based international system that had taken decades to establish after the second world war.
Anger, Disbelief as Obama Defends US Invasion of Iraq
'In order to not appear hypocritical, Obama rewrites history around Iraq War while denouncing Russia'
President Obama is on the receiving end of scorn for remarks made during a high-profile speech in Brussels on Wednesday in which he defended the U.S. invasion of Iraq in an attempt to chastise Russia for recent developments in Crimea and Ukraine.
Speaking to the international community about the ongoing crisis in Ukraine and fending off repeated accusations that the U.S. has lost its moral authority given the invasion of Iraq and other breaches of international law in recent years, Obama said:
Russia has pointed to America’s decision to go into Iraq as an example of Western hypocrisy. Now, it is true that the Iraq war was a subject of vigorous debate, not just around the world but in the United States, as well. I participated in that debate, and I opposed our military intervention there.
But even in Iraq, America sought to work within the international system. We did not claim or annex Iraq’s territory. We did not grab its resources for our own gain. Instead, we ended our war and left Iraq to its people in a fully sovereign Iraqi state that can make decisions about its own future.
But instead of tamping down accusations of hypocrisy, Obama inflamed it.
Responding to the speech on FireDogLake, DSWright shot back: "Worked within the international system? So if Russia had gone to the UN to get a resolution, failed, then annexed Crimea it would have been OK?"
Russia has a laughing fit over Obama's remarks about Iraq:
Say what? Obama claims 'Iraq invasion not as bad as Crimea'
Obama Defends Iraq Invasion: At Least America 'Sought' To Get UN Backing
Obama struggled ... in his attempt to defend the legality of the invasion. The war was unsanctioned by the United Nations, and many experts assert it violated any standard reading of international law. But, argued Obama, at least the U.S. tried to make it legal. "America sought to work within the international system," Obama said, referencing an attempt to gain U.N. approval for the invasion -- an effort that later proved to be founded on flawed, misleading and cherry-picked intelligence. The man who delivered the presentation to the U.N., then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, has repeatedly called it a "blot" on his record.
Obama, in his speech, noted his own opposition to the war, but went on to defend its mission.
"We did not claim or annex Iraq's territory. We did not grab its resources for our own gain," Obama argued. In fact, the U.S. forced Iraq to privatize its oil industry, which had previously been under the control of the state, and further required that it accept foreign ownership of the industry.
Obama's assertion also hinges on how broadly one construes the word "our." Taxpayers on the one hand are worse off, as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have added $2 trillion to the national debt, according to one study. But contractors reaped tremendous gains, and Halliburton -- a company often associated with the invasion, of which former Vice President Dick Cheney served as CEO -- saw its stock price surge from under $10 a share to over $50, before falling along with the rest of the market in 2008. (It has since recovered.)
The Right to Heal: 11 Years After Iraq Invasion, U.S. Urged on Reparations for War's Enduring Wounds
You don't get credit for seeking approval and then doing what you want anyway when it's denied
The president's speech today was very strange. Ryan Grim reports:
... Obama struggled, however, in his attempt to defend the legality of the invasion. The war was unsanctioned by the United Nations, and many experts assert it violated any standard reading of international law. But, argued Obama, at least the U.S. tried to make it legal. "America sought to work within the international system," Obama said, referencing an attempt to gain U.N. approval for the invasion -- an effort that later proved to be founded on flawed, misleading and cherry-picked intelligence. The man who delivered the presentation to the U.N., then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, has repeatedly called it a "blot" on his record.
I can't imagine anyone on those planet who would buy the president's rubbish on that topic. You don't get extra credit for "seeking" UN approval and going ahead when it's denied, fergawdsakes. If anything that makes it worse! It proved to anyone with eyes that it doesn't matter what the UN thinks --- if the US wants to invade a country it's damned well going to do it. "Asking" the UN is a mere formality. I think most of the nations of the world got that "message" loud and clear. ...
Yes, we invaded a sovereign nation and killed many thousands of its people for their own good. Pay no attention to the litany of lies our government told to justify it.
I heard the speech this morning and nearly choked when I heard President Obama --- the man whose rationale for running for president in the first place was based upon his superior judgement compared to anyone who voted for that misbegotten war --- now standing before the international community and defending that travesty and drawing a fatuous moral distinction between what we did just a decade ago and what is happening in Russia today. I am embarrassed for him. And for the United States.
The Unknown Known: Errol Morris’ New Doc Tackles Unrepentant Iraq War Architect Donald Rumsfeld
Obama: Putin-Baiter and Preventive Detainer
Although Russian President Vladimir Putin has drawn a line against further NATO incursions and coups at his southern border – a move that most of Earth’s inhabitants undoubtedly applaud, given that polls have long confirmed that the U.S. is seen as the number one threat to peace in the world – U.S. public opinion reverts effortlessly to Cold War mode. Obama will have no problem gaining near-unanimous congressional support for the widest range of escalations against Moscow – from sanctions to natural gas wars to preparations for the shooting kind – while the ridiculous U.S. pseudo-Left, personified by Jon Stewart, of the Daily Show, snarks an historically-reversed narrative of post-1991 history in which Russia is constantly moving westward towards the English Channel.
The president lowered himself to Stewart’s level (or was it the other way around?), baiting the Russians as less than manly. “Russia is a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors, not out of strength but out of weakness,” said the fracking PR-man-in-chief. Obama issued his juvenile insults against the world’s other paramount nuclear power at, of all places, a summit on nuclear security in The Hague, Netherlands. Tens of millions of eyes must have rolled among the U.S.’s southern neighbors when Obama said, “we generally don't need to invade them in order to have a strong cooperative relationship with them."
Tell that to Haiti (1994, 2004), Cuba (1961), Grenada (1983), Panama (1989), Dominican Republic (1965) – neighborly nations directly invaded by U.S. troops; and to the people of Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and Colombia, who lost tens or hundreds of thousands at the hands of U.S. surrogates; and to the citizens of Chile and the rest of South America, virtually every country of which was taken over by militaries backed by the United States. And, we are only talking about the post-World War Two era! As we write, Obama pursues George Bush’s policy of regime change in Venezuela, while the people still suffer under the heirs to the military coup he backed in Honduras, in 2009.
The list gets much, much longer if one includes the rest of the world as “neighbors” of the U.S. Certainly, the Americans behave as if everyone else’s internal affairs are subject to Washington’s approval – a negation of international law and the real meaning of Obama’s humanitarian military intervention doctrine, or R2P, Responsibility to Protect. Under the First Black President, U.S. non-recognition of international law has effectively achieved bipartisan acceptance. Indeed, much of what pretended to be an anti-war movement under Obama’s Republican predecessor is now in thrall of “humanitarian” warfare.
[For a more in-depth discovery of the depths of hypocrisy Obama's statement reaches, here's an historical thumbnail sketch of America's engagements that were "not as bad as Crimea:" A brief history of U.S. imperialism -js]
Merkel not ready to back economic sanctions against Russia
The West has not yet reached a stage where it will be ready to impose economic sanctions on Russia, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said, stressing that she hopes for a political solution to the stalemate over Ukraine crisis.
The chancellor said she is “not interested in escalation” of tensions with Russia, speaking after Wednesday meeting with the South Korean president in Berlin.
“On the contrary, I am working on de-escalation of the situation,” she added, as cited by Itar-Tass.
Merkel believes that the West “has not reached a stage that implies the imposition of economic sanctions” against Russia, advocated by US President Barack Obama. “And I hope we will be able to avoid it,” she said.
Berlin is very much dependent on economic ties with Russia with bilateral trade volume equaling to some 76 billion euros in 2013. Further around 6,000 German firms and over 300,000 jobs are dependent on Russian partners with the overall investment volume of 20 billion euros.
IMF agrees bailout for Ukraine
The International Monetary Fund has agreed a $14bn to $18bn bailout for Ukraine, a deal that will unlock further credits to reach a total of $27bn over the next two years. ...
"The financial support from the broader international community that the programme will unlock amounts to $27bn over the next two years. Of this, assistance from the IMF will range between $14-18bn, with the precise amount to be determined once all bilateral and multilateral support is accounted for."
The agreement is subject to approval by the IMF's management and executive board, which will consider it in April. ...
Ukraine's new leaders announced a radical 50% increase in the price of domestic gas on Wednesday with effect from 1 May, meeting an unpopular IMF condition that Yanukovych had refused.
Ukraine wants closer military ties with U.S. and NATO after Crimea annexation
Ukraine’s acting president asked parliamentary approval on Wednesday for a set of military exercises with NATO partners that would put US troops in direct proximity with Russia’s forces in the annexed Crimea peninsula.
Acting President Oleksandr Turchynov’s request came as the chief of Russia’s general staff announced in Moscow that his forces were now in full control of all 193 military bases Ukraine had in the Black Sea region prior to its seizure by Kremlin forces at the start of the month.
Turchynov said Ukraine would like to conduct two sets of military exercises with the United Sates this summer — Rapid Trident and Sea Breeze — that have prompted disquiet in Russia in previous years.
Ukraine is planning two additional manuevers with NATO member Poland as well joint ground operations with Moldova and Romania. ...
The Sea Breeze exercises have especially irritated Moscow because they had on occasion been staged in Crimea — the base of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.
Those manuevers have in more recent years been moved to the Black Sea port of Odessa where Ukraine also has a naval base.
Lysistrata with a racist twist...
Ukrainian womens’ campaign for sex embargo against Russian men becomes online hit
Political and economic sanctions may not have dissuaded Russia from annexing Crimea, but a group of Ukrainian women have called for a different kind of embargo: no sex for Russian men.
“Don’t give it to a Russian,” is the name of the campaign, which aims to throw cold water on Moscow’s appetite for Ukrainian territory and draw attention to its actions in Crimea.
The campaign was launched on Facebook after Russia officially added the Black Sea peninsula to its map, brushing off international fury and fanning fears of further intervention in Russian-speaking parts of the former Soviet country.
“You need to fight the enemy in every way you can,” organisers urge fellow patriotic women on their website.
The New York Times propaganda machine at work:
Venezuela: When Some of the Most Important News Comes in the Form of Corrections
It says something about overall media coverage of a subject when some of the most important news appears in the form of corrections. On February 26, the New York Times corrected a false statement in a news report that had incorrectly referred to Globovision as “[t]he only television station that regularly broadcast voices critical of the government.” This was false, and it was easy to show that other major television stations regularly broadcast opposition views.
Today the Times corrected an even more important false statement that appeared in an op-ed by jailed Venezuelan opposition leader Leopoldo López. López had written that “more than 30” protesters had been killed in Venezuela in the recent protests. In fact the “more than 30” number cited by López includes all protest-related deaths, a fraction of whom appear to be protesters. Although it has not been mentioned in major media coverage, a compilation of press reports indicates that the protesters themselves – not security forces – are responsible for about half of the deaths. These include six national guardsmen who were shot, five additional people apparently shot while trying to remove barriers erected by protesters, and seven people who were killed apparently from crashing into protesters’ barriers (including two motorcyclists beheaded by wire strung across the road).
This correction is extremely important because most people who see the daily death toll from protests in Venezuela understandably assume that these are people killed by state agents. Although the reporters are not intending to mislead, we can see the effect of this reporting in that López himself, and whoever edited, placed, or provided other assistance with the op-ed for him also were very much mistaken. The net result of this widespread false impression is to greatly strengthen the opposition strategy, supported by many politicians and pundits in the U.S., to portray Venezuela as a violent, repressive, and illegitimate government.
Venezuelan opposition leader dares Maduro’s government to arrest her
Opposition politician Maria Corina Machado dared Venezuela’s leftist government to arrest her Wednesday, as President Nicolas Maduro’s administration carried out a widening crackdown on protesters.
Machado was a lawmaker until Monday, when National Assembly head Diosdado Cabello kicked her out, stripped her of parliamentary immunity, and threatened to arrest her for going before the Organization of American States as a guest of Panama to try to talk about her country’s crisis. Fiery with defiance, Machado — who flew in from Peru Wednesday — said that she was still a legislator “because that’s what the Venezuelan people want, and I will continue doing it as long as Venezuela wants it.”
“If the price that I have to pay so that our voice is heard around the world is this persecution and these threats … I’ll pay it once and a thousand times,” Machado said at a Caracas rally. ...
Machado, a 46-year-old engineer first elected in 2010, advocates an opposition strategy that seeks to generate pressure with street protests to force Maduro from power. Former opposition mayor Leopoldo Lopez — in a military jail for more than a month accused of instigating anti-government violence — also supports the strategy, nicknamed “the way out.”
Maduro says the protests are part of a coup plot led by the opposition in alliance with Washington and conservative Colombians. The protests however have been losing steam in the last weeks.
Abdel Fatah al-Sisi resigns from Egypt military to run for presidency
Egypt's army chief Abdel Fatah al-Sisi resigned from the military on Wednesday night, paving the way for a long-awaited presidential campaign and a return to strongman leadership for Egypt.
"I am here before you humbly stating my intention to run for the presidency of the Arab Republic of Egypt," Sisi said in a televised statement, still dressed in military fatigues. "Only your support will grant me this great honour."
Sisi had been spoken of as a potential head of state after he removed ex-president Mohamed Morsi last July, following days of mass protests against Morsi's Islamist-slanted government. But while his candidacy has been an open secret for months, Sisi himself had given few definitive signals of his intentions.
That finally changed on Wednesday night – three years and two months after the fall of Egypt's last ex-military strongman, Hosni Mubarak – as Egypt's military council, known as Scaf, convened to allow Sisi to resign. Minutes afterwards, shortly before 9:30pm local time, state television broadcast a 13-minute statement recorded earlier in the afternoon. ...
In speech that contained few surprises, the outgoing field marshal warned Egyptians that the country faced a host of economic and political challenges, and asked them for their patience and help in rebuilding the state. He focused on strengthening state institutions and increasing stability – mentioning democracy just once, and with no mention of human rights.
Turkish telecoms authority moves against YouTube after Twitter ban
The Turkish telecoms authority TIB said on Thursday it had taken an "administrative measure" against YouTube, a week after it blocked access to microblogging site Twitter.
The sausage is being made. Obama proposes
what sounds like far-reaching reform on the surface. Watch as what sounds like reform turns into an expansion and codification of NSA's snooping powers. Lot's more details in the article worth paying attention to.
NSA critics express 'deep concern' over route change for House reform bill
Bill will go through intelligence committee rather than judiciary committee, in a move described by insiders as 'highly unusual'
The House parliamentarian, who oversees procedural matters, has determined that a new bill that substantially modifies the seminal 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act will go through the intelligence committee rather than the judiciary committee, a move that two congressional aides consider “highly unusual.”
Seemingly an arcane parliamentary issue, the jurisdiction question reveals a subterranean and intense fight within the House about the future course of US surveillance in the post-Edward Snowden era. The fight does not align with partisan divides, with both sides claiming both Republican and Democratic support.
The bill, authored by Republican Mike Rogers of Michigan and Democrat Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland, would largely get the NSA out of the business of collecting US phone data in bulk. Rogers and Ruppersberger, both staunch advocates of the NSA and until now just as staunch defenders of bulk collection, are the leaders of the intelligence committee. ...
The suspicion amongst some Hill staffers is that the next step for Rogers and Ruppersberger, after securing approval from the full intelligence committee, will be to attempt to get their bill to the House floor without putting it before the judiciary committee at all.
While on the surface the bill has similarities with the USA Freedom Act [a rival bill, two of whose principal sponsors are Judiciary's top Democrat and a former GOP chairman], the intelligence leaders’ proposal would not require a judge’s approval before the government compels telecoms or internet providers to turn over customer data, which an aide called a “fatal flaw” of the bill for the judiciary panel.
Obama formally proposes end to NSA's bulk collection of telephone data
The Obama administration on Thursday formally proposed ending the National Security Agency's bulk collection of all US phone data. ...
The administration has yet to decide on a specific time limitation for querying the data, but “there would be some limited time period,” the official told reporters on Thursday. “That’s something we’re going to have to talk with Congress about.”
The Obama administration is seeking legislation to enact the changes, but it has not settled between competing proposals currently before Congress. ...
A senior administration official indicated that the legal standard by which the court could order phone companies to turn over customer data would be a "reasonable articulable suspicion" of a phone number’s connection to terrorism or espionage. That is a lower threshold than relevance to an ongoing terror investigation, the language of Section 215 of the Patriot Act, the current authorisation the administration claims for bulk domestic phone data collection. ...
The Obama administration left several aspects of its desired surveillance policy unaddressed on Thursday.
Although officials explaining the policy on a conference call with reporters said they wanted the government to no longer “hold” the data, they did not unveil any changes to the NSA’s so-called “corporate store” of analysed phone records. That store, according to the government’s official privacy and civil liberties watchdog, contains tens of millions of phone numbers, and analysts do not face any restrictions on searching through it.
Nor did the administration outline any changes to its consideration of privacy rights for non-Americans abroad, something Obama said in his January speech the NSA needed to consider.
Snowden supporters want his passport returned and right to asylum
Advocates for Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor-turned-whistleblower pressed for the return of his U.S. passport and his freedom to seek political asylum.
Snowden, whose revelations about a National Security Agency program to collect Americans’ phone data rocked the intelligence community, is currently in Russia.
Supporters, including Coleen Rowley, a former FBI special agent who became a whistleblower herself about the agency’s pre-9/11 knowledge, and former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, attempted to deliver thousands of public petitions to the Departments of State and Justice Wednesday.
Rowley and McGovern were among the first Americans to visit Snowden in Moscow. They were joined at the petition effort by Norman Solomon, co-founder of RootsAction.org, an online civil liberties group whose website hosted the petition drive.
The petitions “urge” Secretary of State John Kerry to “immediately reinstate” his passport and call on Attorney General Eric Holder to respect Snowden’s right to political asylum.
This is a must read article, one of Matt Stoller's best.
The Surveillance State is About Power
Every few years, someone prominent makes a claim that we could fall into a dystopia. From Orwell’s 1984 to Snowden’s “turnkey totalitarianism,” they always say we are on the verge of becoming a different kind of society, one in which your every move is logged and tracked by powerful entities. But we’ve been living in it in one form or another for at least forty years.
At some point, we stopped being on the verge, and got there. And now we’re here. We are in a surveillance state, as per the various warnings we’ve received. But what we’ve found is that totalitarianism is not necessarily related to technological capacity. The most totalitarian state in the world today, that of North Korea, is the least advanced state when it comes to digital technology. And the Nazi regime, while it used a quite advanced information technology infrastructure for the time to track down, categorize, and kill Jews, was a totalitarian regime before it was a technologically sophisticated one.
Still, much of what we do is tracked and digitally archived, and it is being used to make decisions about our lives. In one way or another, this has been the case since at least 1973, when Visa computerized its operation, which was shortly followed by credit reporting agencies. So we should move beyond the question of whether we are building the tools for an authoritarian political state, and start talking about what kind of surveillance state we want. It’s a creepy question, but it’s one we’ve avoided talking about, until now.
A Tortured Twist on Ethics
The question of whether American health professionals previously involved in military torture programs should be allowed to quietly and freely continue their careers came to a head recently when it was revealed that the American Psychological Association (APA) refused to pursue ethics charges against psychologist John Leso.
According to official and authoritative documents, Dr. Leso developed and helped carry out “enhanced interrogation” techniques at Guantánamo Bay in 2002. Importantly, the APA hasn’t disputed Leso’s role in the interrogation of detainee Mohammed al-Qahtani, an interrogation that included being hooded, leashed, and treated like a dog; sleep deprivation; sexual humiliation; prolonged exposure to cold; forced nudity; and sustained isolation.
In a subsequent investigation, Susan Crawford, a judge appointed by then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, characterized this treatment of al-Qahtani as “life-threatening” and meeting the legal definition of “torture.”
Over almost seven years, the APA — whose leadership has nurtured strong connections with the military and intelligence establishment — never brought the case to its full Ethics Committee for review and resolution. In defending this decision a few weeks ago, the APA board released a statement explaining that a handful of top people with classified military access had determined that there was nothing unethical about Dr. Leso’s actions and that the case should be immediately closed. ...
Ethical imperatives to “do no harm” and sanctions for psychologists who break the rules — from sleeping with patients to insurance fraud to not informing research subjects of their rights — exist not only to protect the public but also to provide clear guidance to professionals faced with moral dilemmas. Yet when considering ethical complaints, the APA apparently takes involvement in torture less seriously than these other transgressions.
Swift U.S. jury verdict gives lie to Gitmo
The government’s charges against Osama bin Laden’s son-in-law looked pretty thin. Washington was basically claiming that the Kuwaiti imam had made a few inflammatory speeches — one praising the September 11 attacks and another warning that more attacks on tall buildings were soon to come. It didn’t sound like much, given that the charges were providing “material support” for terrorism and conspiring to kill Americans.
But less than a year later, 48 year-old Suleiman Abu Ghaith stands convicted on all counts, following a jury trial in a U.S. federal court. ... It’s an odd quirk of U.S. conspiracy law. If someone joins a conspiracy, though it may be years after it started, he’s still liable for all the murder and mayhem his co-conspirators caused, even if it was long before he came along. ...
The funny thing is that at Guantanamo Bay, 12 years later, the five alleged (and self-described) masterminds of the September 11 terrorist attacks still haven’t been convicted of any crimes. Though seized by U.S. forces within a few years of the attacks, they’re still nowhere near being brought to justice. ...
There are still 154 detainees at the prison camp in Cuba. What’s now clear from the Abu Ghaith case is that none of them belong there.
Fed: "Too-big-to-fail" banks do get all the breaks
Bigger is better, at least when you're a bank looking to borrow money in the bond markets.
It turns out that the five largest banks -- JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs -- have on average paid almost a third of a percentage point less on top-rated debt than smaller rivals, according to a new study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
That may not seem like a huge difference in price, but researchers at the New York Fed say it adds up to $3 million for the average bond deal done by a megabank. And the only reason these banks are getting this break is because bond investors believe they will be rescued by the government in the face of disaster.
Remember all that talk about "too-big-to-fail" banks having an implicit government subsidy? Well, this study confirms the existence of the subsidy and gives a whole lot of credence to lawmakers who have been fighting to end the perk.
David Graeber posts an interesting commentary on class, austerity and solidarity
Caring too much. That's the curse of the working classes
"What I can't understand is, why aren't people rioting in the streets?" I hear this, now and then, from people of wealthy and powerful backgrounds. There is a kind of incredulity. "After all," the subtext seems to read, "we scream bloody murder when anyone so much as threatens our tax shelters; if someone were to go after my access to food or shelter, I'd sure as hell be burning banks and storming parliament. What's wrong with these people?"
It's a good question. One would think a government that has inflicted such suffering on those with the least resources to resist, without even turning the economy around, would have been at risk of political suicide. Instead, the basic logic of austerity has been accepted by almost everyone. Why? Why do politicians promising continued suffering win any working-class acquiescence, let alone support, at all? ...
To some degree this seems to reflect a universal sociological law. Feminists have long since pointed out that those on the bottom of any unequal social arrangement tend to think about, and therefore care about, those on top more than those on top think about, or care about, them. Women everywhere tend to think and know more about men's lives than men do about women, just as black people know more about white people's, employees about employers', and the poor about the rich. ...
As the child of a working-class family, I can attest this is what we were actually proud of. We were constantly being told that work is a virtue in itself – it shapes character or somesuch – but nobody believed that. Most of us felt work was best avoided, that is, unless it benefited others. But of work that did, whether it meant building bridges or emptying bedpans, you could be rightly proud. And there was something else we were definitely proud of: that we were the kind of people who took care of each other. That's what set us apart from the rich who, as far as most of us could make out, could half the time barely bring themselves to care about their own children.
Today we are seeing the effects of a relentless war against the very idea of working-class politics or working-class community. That has left most working people with little way to express that care except to direct it towards some manufactured abstraction: "our grandchildren"; "the nation"; whether through jingoist patriotism or appeals to collective sacrifice.
As a result everything is thrown into reverse. Generations of political manipulation have finally turned that sense of solidarity into a scourge. Our caring has been weaponised against us.
The Evening Greens
BP Spill at Tar Sands Refinery Has 'Crapped Up Lake Michigan'
Oil giant BP has caused yet another oil spill in a crucial water way this week, following an increase in tar sands refining at its Indiana plant on the shores of Lake Michigan.
BP notified the federal government’s National Response Center around 5 p.m. Monday that its Whiting Refinery was leaking oil into the lake, which is the source of drinking water for 7 million people in nearby Chicago, due to a malfunction in the refinery's cooling water system. ...
"The malfunction occurred at the refinery’s largest crude distillation unit, the centerpiece of a nearly $4 billion overhaul that allowed BP to process more heavy Canadian oil from the tar sands region of Alberta," reports the Chicago Tribune. "The unit ... performs one of the first steps in the refining of crude oil into gasoline and other fuels."
It was still uncertain Wednesday as to exactly how much of the oil spilled. BP said it had managed to stop the discharge by Tuesday and cleanup efforts continued throughout the day on Wednesday.
Oil Spill Threatens Wildlife and Local Economy
Canada's Harper Seizes Crimean Crisis to Sell Tar Sands and Fracked Gas to Europe
Western leaders meeting in The Hague this week for a nuclear summit considered new measures, including new sanctions, against Russia in response to Putin’s annexation of the Crimean region of Ukraine. According to the Globe and Mail, Prime Minister Harper “has singled out the prospect of sanctions against Russia’s energy industry, which would likely entail curtailing the ability of Canadians – and those in other G7 countries – from doing petroleum-related business with Russians.”
Harper told media it was “conceivable” that such a move would benefit Canadian energy exports but that his government’s policy has always been to promote oil and gas sector interests when travelling anywhere and, we should add, especially in Europe. For example, Canadian government lobbying has helped stall a European fuel quality policy that would have restricted or blocked imports of tar sands-derived transport fuels because of their higher carbon content.
Now Canada, political voices in the United States, and the European Commission for that matter, are trying to leverage the political crisis in Ukraine to make a case for more (not less) North American imports of the dirty stuff: tar sands from Alberta and fracked gas from North America’s “boom” in unconventional shale production. The first puts pressure on Obama to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, which would bring bitumen from Canada to refineries on the Gulf Coast before shipping the final product to Europe and Asia. (The Energy East pipeline would do the same in Canada.)
The second (fracked gas) would require the U.S. to approve new LNG plants and remove energy export restrictions, which the EU is trying to do through trade and investment negotiations with the United States. David Cameron’s government in the UK is also using the crisis to justify a European shale gas boom that environmental groups and the general public strongly opposes.
A Canadian family's 'Plan B' to pump tar sands oil
Keystone XL, a pipeline proposal to pump Canadian oil sands through the heart of America, has alarmed environmentalists and become one of the most contentious issues of the Obama presidency. But there is a "Plan B" to cut the United States out of the picture, and it is championed by one of Canada's wealthiest business dynasties.
Since 2012, the billionaire Irving family has been advocating a proposal called Energy East. The 2,858-mile (4,600-km) pipeline would link trillions of dollars worth of oil in land-locked fields in the western province of Alberta to an Atlantic port in the Irvings' eastern home province of New Brunswick, north of Maine, creating a gateway to new foreign markets for Canadian oil.
The C$12 billion ($10.8 billion) line, which would pump 1.1 million barrels per day, would include about 1,865 miles of existing natural gas pipeline converted to carry oil. The rest would be new construction, most of it along the banks of the Saint Lawrence River and into New Brunswick.
The industry is keen. Pipeline company TransCanada Corp, which is also backing Keystone, unveiled plans in August to build and operate Energy East by 2018. Customers as far away as India are lined up to take the oil, according to New Brunswick provincial officials. Canadian oil companies, frustrated by Washington's dithering on Keystone, say they have seized on it as a viable alternative to the route through the United States.
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin' Is On Hiatus
Maryland becomes 18th state to pass transgender protections
A Little Night Music
Angela Strehli & Friends - Big Town Playboy
Angela Strehli, Marcia Ball, Sarah Brown - I'm Ready
Angela Strehli, Marcia Ball, Sarah Brown - Mean Mistreater
Angela Strehli - Can't Stop These Teardrops
Angela Strehli, SRV, Kim Wilson - Don't fall for me baby
Angela Strehli - It Hurts me too
Angela Strehli - I'm just your fool
Angela Strehli, Mighty Mike & Paul Lamb - Boogie Like You Wanna
Angela Strehli - COD
Angela Strehli - Stand By Your Woman
Angela Strehli - Cut You Loose
Angela Strehli, Lou Ann Barton, Marcia Ball - Something's Got A Hold On Me
It's National Pie Day!
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