October 24, 2015

Lucy and Linus (cartoon)

http://www.truthdig.com/cartoon/item/political_peanuts_20151023

October 24, 2015

This Is Why It’s Going to Get Even Tougher

This Is Why It’s Going to Get Even Tougher
by Wolf Richter • October 23, 2015


The third quarter was tough for US corporations. Worse than the prior two quarters. They got waylaid by weak global demand and lack of pricing power. The easiest way to increase revenues and profits is to raise prices, so via inflation, but that strategy isn’t working when consumers don’t have the additional income to pay for higher prices.

Then there’s the “strong dollar.” On Thursday, Draghi evoked more QE and even more negative deposit rates, which eviscerated the euro and made the dollar a heck of a lot stronger. And so many US corporations are now reporting declining revenues.

It isn’t just the energy sector. For the 142 non-energy companies that have reported Q3 earnings so far, revenues dropped 3.0% year-over-year, according to Moody’s Credit Markets Review and Outlook. Operating income of these non-energy companies fell 2.7%. In this environment, companies try to maintain their bottom line by cutting costs.

“Results such as these weigh against expecting much of a pick-up by either hiring activity or capital expenditures,” Moody’s warns gloomily. Both have been dreary recently.

Cheap money is no longer readily available to riskier borrowers. In the third quarter, bond issuance by junk-rated companies plunged 38% from a year ago. Yields rose as the spread between high-yield bonds and Treasuries soared. And in October, according to S&P Capital IQ’s LCD, it has been even worse: just seven junk-bond deals through Thursday, for a measly total of $3.7 billion. ........................(more)

http://wolfstreet.com/2015/10/23/this-is-why-its-going-to-get-even-tougher/

October 24, 2015

San Francisco's motley Market Street Tamed, So Far, by Car Restrictions

CA: S.F.'s motley Market Street Tamed, So Far, by Car Restrictions

MICHAEL CABANATUAN ON OCT 23, 2015
SOURCE: MCCLATCHY


Oct. 23--If San Francisco's catch-all main drag of Market Street seems less hectic lately, it's not the end of the summer tourist crush or the surge in transit ridership. The 2-month-old program to steer most private cars off the busiest -- and most dangerous -- stretches of Market seems to be working.

The number of cars cruising the boulevard has declined noticeably. During the morning and evening commutes, swarms of bicyclists roll along Market, easily outnumbering the cars, buses and taxis. At times, the street even seems quiet.

The program known as Safer Market Street aims to elbow away most private vehicles between Third and Eighth streets by prohibiting turns at most intersections and forcing eastbound vehicles to make right-hand turns off Market. Transit and commercial vehicles as well as taxis are exempted from the rules, but ride services like Uber and Lyft are not.

"The biggest thing we're hearing is how much more calm it is and how much more pleasant it is, at least to walk and bike," said Nicole Ferrara, who directs the Walk San Francisco advocacy group for pedestrians. "From our perspective, we're seeing it work in the ways we want." .................(more)

http://www.masstransitmag.com/news/12130017/sfs-motley-market-street-tamed-so-far-by-car-restrictions

October 24, 2015

Oklahoma Earthquakes Are a National Security Threat

(Bloomberg) In the months after Sept. 11, 2001, as U.S. security officials assessed the top targets for potential terrorist attacks, the small town of Cushing, Okla., received special attention. Even though it is home to fewer than 10,000 people, Cushing is the largest commercial oil storage hub in North America, second only in size to the U.S. government's Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The small town's giant tanks, some big enough to fit a Boeing 747 jet inside, were filled with around 10 million barrels of crude at the time, an obvious target for someone looking to disrupt America's economy and energy supply.

The FBI, state and local law enforcement and emergency officials, and the energy companies that own the tanks formed a group called the Safety Alliance of Cushing. Soon, guards took up posts along the perimeter of storage facilities and newly installed cameras kept constant surveillance. References to the giant tanks and pipelines were removed from the Cushing Chamber of Commerce website. In 2004, the Safety Alliance simulated a series of emergencies: an explosion, a fire, a hostage situation.

After the shale boom added millions of additional barrels to Cushing, its tanks swelled to a peak hoard of more than 60 million barrels this spring. That's about as much petroleum as the U.S. uses in three days, and it's more than six times the quantity that triggered security concerns after Sept. 11. The Safety Alliance has remained vigilant, even staging tornado simulations after a few close calls.

Now the massive oil stockpile faces an emerging threat: earthquakes. In the past month, a flurry of quakes have hit within a few miles of Cushing, rattling the town and its massive tanks. According to the Oklahoma Geological Survey, more than a dozen quakes have registered 3.0 or higher on the Richter scale within a few miles of Cushing since mid-September. The biggest, registering at 4.5, hit about three miles away on Oct. 10.

This is all part of the disturbing rise in earthquakes in Oklahoma, which has corresponded to increased fracking activity and oil production in the state. Since 2008, Oklahoma has gone from averaging fewer than two earthquakes per year that measure at least 3.0 in magnitude to surpassing California as the most seismically active state in the continental U.S. This year, Oklahoma is on pace to endure close to 1,000 earthquakes. Scientists at the National Earthquake Information Center in Colorado recently published a paper (PDF) raising concerns that the welter of moderate-sized earthquakes around Cushing could increase the risk of larger quakes in the future. ..................(more)

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-23/oklahoma-earthquakes-are-a-national-security-threat

October 23, 2015

Drones, IBM and the Big Data of Death

(The Intercept) Oct. 23 2015, 8:47 a.m. LAST WEEK The Intercept published a package of stories on the U.S. drone program, drawing on a cache of secret government documents leaked by an intelligence community whistleblower. The available evidence suggests that one of the documents, a study titled “ISR Support to Small Footprint CT Operations — Somalia/Yemen,” was produced for the Defense Department in 2013 by consultants from IBM. If you look at just one classified PowerPoint presentation this year, I recommend you make it this one.

Like a good poem, the ISR study has multiple meanings, and rewards careful attention and repeated reading. On its surface, it’s simply an analysis by the Defense Department’s Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) Task Force of the “performance and requirements” of the U.S. military’s counterterrorism kill/capture operations, including drone strikes, in Somalia and Yemen. However, it’s also what a former senior special operations officer characterized as a “bitch brief” — that is, a study designed to be a weapon in a bureaucratic turf war with the CIA to win the Pentagon more money and a bigger mandate. The study was also presumably an opportunity for IBM to demonstrate that it can produce snappy “analysis” tailored to the desires of its Defense Department clients, as well as for current Defense employees to network with a potential future employer.

But the presentation’s most compelling meaning is much deeper: It’s a rare, peculiar cultural artifact that opens a window into the deep guts of the military-industrial complex, where the technologies of assassination and corporate sales converge, all described in language as dead as the target of an ISR platform kinetic engagement.

[font size="4"]Edge Methods[/font]

In 2010, IBM employees delivered a talk at IBM’s Analytics Solution Center in Washington, D.C., titled “An Introduction to Edge Methods: Business Analytics and Optimization for Intelligence.” The audience was “the Defense and Intelligence communities,” and IBM’s goal was to explain to them how the company could help them with “managing large volumes of data” to derive “invaluable” insights. Among its already-existing governmental customers, IBM explained, was the ISR Task Force. .................(more)

https://theintercept.com/2015/10/23/drones-ibm-and-the-big-data-of-death/

October 23, 2015

‘The Drone Papers’ Offer Even More Reasons to End Remote-Controlled Wars

(Truthdig) The recent publication by The Intercept of the “The Drone Papers” should have made an explosive splash both in the media and Washington, D.C. But the leak of classified documents has so far generated only modest media coverage (as of this writing, The New York Times has yet to cover it), and there has been no acknowledgment of it by elected officials.

The documents were provided by an anonymous source to an outlet with a strong reputation for muckraking journalism. They reveal how the CIA—an agency with no mandate to fight wars—and the Joint Special Operations Command vie for control of the remote-controlled battles fought in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. They also make clear that the U.S. is well aware of the vast civilian carnage from drones. In Afghanistan, “[d]uring one five-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets,” wrote Jeremy Scahill, who led the reporting. Scahill further determined that “the military designated people it killed in targeted strikes as EKIA—‘enemy killed in action’—even if they were not the intended targets of the strike.” The intrepid journalist has spent years tracing the inner workings of U.S. drone programs, revealing the results in his 2013 book “Dirty Wars” and a documentary film of the same name.

In Afghanistan, where the U.S. military has years of familiarity with the terrain and ostensibly has cultivated reliable intelligence sources, the drone program should have been working most efficiently. The Pentagon’s plan to root out Taliban and al-Qaida rebels in the Hindu Kush is called Operation Haymaker. In the words of The Intercept’s Ryan Devereaux, “the military’s own analysis demonstrates that the Haymaker campaign was in many respects a failure. The vast majority of those killed in airstrikes were not the direct targets. Nor did the campaign succeed in significantly degrading al-Qaida’s operations in the region.” If the Afghanistan program has been a failure by the military’s own standards, the drone program is likely a bust in countries like Yemen and Somalia, too.

Even a drone operator who defended this type of war in an article on Politico.com admitted that things have gotten worse on the ground: “The military has quadrupled drone strikes over the past seven years; and now instead of hiding in Waziristan, al-Qaida is flourishing throughout the world.” ....................(more)

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_drone_papers_offer_even_more_reasons_to_end_remote-controlled_20151022

October 23, 2015

New Yorkers Complain: 'The Rats Are Taking Over'

NEW YORK - When New Yorkers see something scurrying, they say something and that has brought rat complaints to the city's 311 hotline to a recent high of more than 24,000 so far this year, officials said on Thursday.

"The rats are taking over," New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer told Reuters. "I'm a lifelong New Yorker and I've never seen it this bad... I see them on my way home, they're standing upright, they say, 'Good morning, Mr. Comptroller.'"

With more than two months of grumbling still left in 2015, rodent-related grievances were already at 24,375 as of Wednesday, said Mayor Bill de Blasio spokeswoman Natalie Grybauskas. That's up from 20,545 in 2014 and 19,321 in 2013.

And that's just above-ground rats - complaints about vermin in the subway are routed to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and not recorded by the 311 line, Grybauskas said. .................(more)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/new-york-rat-problem_5629452fe4b0aac0b8fc3c24?utm_hp_ref=weird-news

October 23, 2015

Police Agencies Fold in St. Louis Area as Ticket Blitzes Stop

(Bloomberg) The aftermath of racial turmoil in Ferguson, Missouri, is exacting a toll on St. Louis-area communities that built their finances around speeding tickets, thanks to a state law limiting the income they can draw from traffic fines.

The city council of Charlack last week decided the community of 1,400 can’t afford an eight-officer police force under the new law, which says traffic citations in St. Louis County municipalities can’t exceed 12.5 percent of annual operating revenue, down from 30 percent. Policing in Charlack and in nearby Wellston, which dissolved its 23-officer force in May, is now handled by a recently created cooperative of local departments.

The 2014 police shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson forced a national re-examination of what critics call “taxation by citation,” a situation exacerbated by the sheer number of departments, 18,000 throughout the U.S. A bill is pending in Congress to restrict the amount of revenue local governments can collect from traffic citations. In St. Louis County, which has 90 municipalities and 59 individual police departments, more communities are expected to follow the lead of Charlack and Wellston.

“This will have lawmakers around the country taking a second look at their agencies and making certain that the sole purpose of their existence is not for revenue, but to serve the public interest,” said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington nonprofit. “Police departments should not exist if their sole purpose is to generate revenue. That’s what we have tax collectors for.” ...................(more)

http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-10-22/police-agencies-fold-in-st-louis-area-as-ticket-blitzes-stop

October 22, 2015

This is right-wing terrorism: The frightening new rise of church and clinic arson — and ............

from Salon:


[font size="4"]This is right-wing terrorism: The frightening new rise of church and clinic arson — and why you won’t hear about it on Fox News[/font]
Right-wing extremists are setting churches and clinics ablaze. It's a scary -- and vastly undercovered -- story

AMANDA MARCOTTE


While Donald Trump is bragging about closing mosques to fight Islamic terrorism, there has been an under-reported surge of right-wing terrorism recently in the U.S.

Since July, when anti-choice crusaders released hoax videos that falsely claimed that Planned Parenthood sells fetal body parts, there has been a rash of arsons at clinics, at least one of which doesn’t perform abortions. Just this week, police in New Hampshire arrested a teenager threatening a Planned Parenthood with a hatchet. After the racist church shooting in Charleston in June, itself an ugly act of domestic terrorism, there were a series of fires at black churches across the South.

And now St. Louis law enforcement fears that there’s an arsonist on the loose in the city, setting fire to churches with predominantly black or racially mixed congregations. This is on top of what the Southern Poverty Law Center was already calling a resurgence in domestic terrorism across the United States.

That we are living in an era of major conservative backlash is not news. From the wholesale assault on reproductive rights to the dramatic increase in restrictions on voting to the bizarrely enduring Donald Trump campaign, the evidence everywhere suggests that right-wing America is freaking out and lashing out. They can feel their control over the country, which has a black president and legal gay marriage now, slipping out of their fingers.

The temper tantrum has grown so massive it’s threatening even the Republican party, which is being torn apart by purity tests and fury over even the slightest hint of cooperation with liberals, who are seen as a subversive threat to be stomped out instead of fellow citizens to work through your issues with. ................(more)

http://www.salon.com/2015/10/22/this_is_right_wing_terrorism_the_frightening_new_rise_of_church_and_clinic_arson_and_why_you_wont_hear_about_it_on_fox_news/

October 22, 2015

Canadian election (cartoon)

http://www.truthdig.com/cartoon/item/canadian_liberals_sweep_election_20151021