July 8, 2013

Howard Zinn: Questioning the total goodness of 'The Good War'

Howard Zinn: You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train
Uploaded on Jan 29, 2007


IN THIS SCENE: Dr. Howard Zinn discusses his experience as an Air Force bombadier in WWII. Near the end of the war Zinn is asked to bomb a small town in France that has a lasting impression on him. . .

ABOUT THE FILM: In these turbulent times, Howard Zinn is inspiring a new generation. This acclaimed film looks at the amazing life of the renowned historian, activist and author. Following his early days as a shipyard labor organizer and bombardier in World War II, Zinn became an academic rebel and leader of civil disobedience in a time of institutionalized racism and war. His influential writings shine light on and bring voice to factory workers, immigrant laborers, African Americans, Native Americans and the working poor.

Featuring rare archival materials and interviews with Zinn and colleagues such as Noam Chomsky, You Can't Be Neutral captures the essence of this extraordinary man who has been a catalyst for progressive change for more than 60 years.

Narrated by Matt Damon. Featuring music by Pearl Jam, Woody Guthrie & Billy Bragg!

July 8, 2013

Pennsylvania Father Believes Lawn Was Vandalized With Swastika Because Daughter Is Gay

A Pennsylvania man says he believes his home is being targeted by vandals because his daughter is openly gay.

As WPXI Channel 11 reports, John Namey woke up on the morning of July 5 to find a large swastika burned onto the front lawn of his Sarver, Penn. home

"It's a hateful thing," Namey, who isn't Jewish, told the news channel. Though he said he was not entirely sue why his family was targeted, Namey said that his 16-year-old lesbian daughter had been previously threatened with violence.

"She's a little more open with her sexuality -- of course that sheds a spotlight on her," Namey told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. In regard to the swastika incident, he added, "She's not going to let that change who she is." .................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/07/pennsylvania-swastika-front-lawn-_n_3557923.html?ir=Politics&ncid=edlinkusaolp00000009

July 8, 2013

EPA’s Abandoned Wyoming Fracking Study One Retreat of Many

EPA’s Abandoned Wyoming Fracking Study One Retreat of Many

by Abrahm Lustgarten
ProPublica, July 3, 2013, 11:58 a.m.


When the Environmental Protection Agency abruptly retreated on its multimillion-dollar investigation into water contamination in a central Wyoming natural gas field last month, it shocked environmentalists and energy industry supporters alike.

In 2011, the agency had issued a blockbuster draft report saying that the controversial practice of fracking was to blame for the pollution of an aquifer deep below the town of Pavillion, Wy. – the first time such a claim had been based on a scientific analysis.

The study drew heated criticism over its methodology and awaited a peer review that promised to settle the dispute. Now the EPA will instead hand the study over to the state of Wyoming, whose research will be funded by EnCana, the very drilling company whose wells may have caused the contamination.

Industry advocates say the EPA’s turnabout reflects an overdue recognition that it had over-reached on fracking and that its science was critically flawed. .......................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.propublica.org/article/epas-abandoned-wyoming-fracking-study-one-retreat-of-many

July 8, 2013

Chris Hedges: We Are All Aboard the Pequod

from truthdig:



We Are All Aboard the Pequod

Posted on Jul 7, 2013
By Chris Hedges


The most prescient portrait of the American character and our ultimate fate as a species is found in Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick.” Melville makes our murderous obsessions, our hubris, violent impulses, moral weakness and inevitable self-destruction visible in his chronicle of a whaling voyage. He is our foremost oracle. He is to us what William Shakespeare was to Elizabethan England or Fyodor Dostoyevsky to czarist Russia.

Our country is given shape in the form of the ship, the Pequod, named after the Indian tribe exterminated in 1638 by the Puritans and their Native American allies. The ship’s 30-man crew—there were 30 states in the Union when Melville wrote the novel—is a mixture of races and creeds. The object of the hunt is a massive white whale, Moby Dick, which, in a previous encounter, maimed the ship’s captain, Ahab, by biting off one of his legs. The self-destructive fury of the quest, much like that of the one we are on, assures the Pequod’s destruction. And those on the ship, on some level, know they are doomed—just as many of us know that a consumer culture based on corporate profit, limitless exploitation and the continued extraction of fossil fuels is doomed.

“If I had been downright honest with myself,” Ishmael admits, “I would have seen very plainly in my heart that I did but half fancy being committed this way to so long a voyage, without once laying my eyes on the man who was to be the absolute dictator of it, so soon as the ship sailed out upon the open sea. But when a man suspects any wrong, it sometimes happens that if he be already involved in the matter, he insensibly strives to cover up his suspicions even from himself. And much this way it was with me. I said nothing, and tried to think nothing.”

We, like Ahab and his crew, rationalize madness. All calls for prudence, for halting the march toward environmental catastrophe, for sane limits on carbon emissions, are ignored or ridiculed. Even with the flashing red lights before us, the increased droughts, rapid melting of glaciers and Arctic ice, monster tornadoes, vast hurricanes, crop failures, floods, raging wildfires and soaring temperatures, we bow slavishly before hedonism and greed and the enticing illusion of limitless power, intelligence and prowess. We believe in the eternal wellspring of material progress. We are our own idols. Nothing will halt our voyage; it seems to us to have been decreed by natural law. “The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run,” Ahab declares. We have surrendered our lives to corporate forces that ultimately serve systems of death. Microbes will inherit the earth. ........................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/we_are_all_aboard_the_pequod_20130707/

July 8, 2013

Toronto: Metrolinx price tag for Scarborough subway leaves councillors fuming

from the Toronto Star:



Metrolinx price tag for Scarborough subway leaves councillors fuming
Toronto councillors want to see a breakdown for the stated $1 billion extra it will cost to put subway rather than light rail on the old SRT route.

By: Paul Moloney City Hall Bureau reporter, Published on Tue Jul 02 2013


[font size="1"]Carlos Osorio / Toronto Star
The obsolete Scarborough Rapid Transit system needs to be replaced, but city council has dithered for years about what should replace it. Last November's master agreement with Metrolinx was supposed to have settled it.[/font]


Estimates that it would cost almost $1 billion more to convert the aging Scarborough RT to a subway rather than light rail have Scarborough councillors shaking their heads.

“Unbelievable,” said Councillor Michael Thompson, who, along with other Scarborough councillors, has been pushing for a subway alternative to LRT from Kennedy station to Scarborough Town Centre.

Officials met Tuesday to go over the numbers and the issue is expected to be discussed at Wednesday’s meeting of the executive committee, chaired by Mayor Rob Ford.

Ford has long championed subways but has never unveiled a concrete plan to fund them. ..................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thestar.com/news/city_hall/2013/07/02/metrolinx_price_tag_for_scarborough_subway_leaves_councillors_fuming.html

July 8, 2013

Ever run across quotes that just seem so timely and profound.......

[font size="4"]If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. -- George Orwell

It is perfectly possible for a man to be out of prison, and yet not free - to be under no physical constraint and yet to be a psychological captive, compelled to think, feel and act as the representatives of the national state, or of some private interest within the nation, wants him to think, feel and act. The nature of psychological compulsion is such that those who act under constraint remain under the impression that they are acting on their own initiative. The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a victim. To him the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to be free. That he is not free is apparent only to other people. His servitude is strictly objective. -- Aldous Huxley

There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; The other is to refuse to accept what is true. -- Soren Kierkegaard[/font]

July 7, 2013

Noam Chomsky: Who Owns the Earth?

Noam Chomsky: Who Owns the Earth?

Friday, 05 July 2013 11:41
By Noam Chomsky, Truthout | Op-Ed

(This article is adapted from a commencement speech by Noam Chomsky on June 14, 2013, at the American University of Beirut. )

With wrenching tragedies only a few miles away, and still worse catastrophes perhaps not far removed, it may seem wrong, perhaps even cruel, to shift attention to other prospects that, although abstract and uncertain, might offer a path to a better world - and not in the remote future.

I’ve visited Lebanon several times and witnessed moments of great hope, and of despair, that were tinged with the Lebanese people’s remarkable determination to overcome and to move forward.

The first time I visited - if that’s the right word - was exactly 60 years ago, almost to the day. My wife and I were hiking in Israel’s northern Galilee one evening, when a jeep drove by on a road near us and someone called out that we should turn back: We were in the wrong country. We had inadvertently crossed the border, then unmarked - now, I suppose, bristling with armaments.

A minor event, but it forcefully brought home a lesson: The legitimacy of borders - of states, for that matter - is at best conditional and temporary. .....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/17402-who-owns-the-earth

July 7, 2013

Can We Afford to Wait for Redistribution?

from Too Much: A Commentary on Excess and Inequality:


Can We Afford to Wait for Redistribution?
July 6, 2013

The ‘market’ isn’t working for working people. The rich have rigged the rules. We ought to keep trying, of course, to reduce the resulting inequality. But why not, unions are asking, end the rule rigging?

By Sam Pizzigati


Sometimes we need new words to get a grasp on new ideas. Frances O’Grady, Britain’s highest-ranking labor leader, has a new word for us. Predistribution.

Why does O’Grady, the general secretary of the UK’s Trades Union Congress, want us talking “predistribution”? In our staggeringly unequal modern times, her union federation argues in a new paper released last week, redistribution no longer gets us particularly far.

The rich — on both sides of the Atlantic — have seen to that. Over recent years, they’ve systematically dismantled progressive tax systems, the historic heart to public policies that aim to redistribute top-heavy concentrations of wealth.

Even worse, the rich and their cheerleaders have turned redistribution into a political four-letter word. They’ve branded anything that smacks of redistribution a dangerous assault on the “natural” wisdom of our market economy. ...................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://toomuchonline.org/can-we-afford-to-wait-for-redistribution/#sthash.jSy2aU0u.dpuf

July 7, 2013

Keiser Report: Art of Debt Juggling

Published on Jul 6, 2013

In this episode of the Keiser Report, Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss tipping points on the way to the Bondpocalypse, a time when flipping houses to greater fools will no longer be a viable retirement plan and incarcerating your fellow slightly annoying citizens for eternity will be far too much decadence to afford. In the second half, Max talks to Karl Denninger about bonds, QE tapering and Wimpy from Popeye paying for a hamburger next Tuesday. Karl says that as any investor under 50 will only know a world of ever declining interest rates, they will have to adjust their thinking for this new period of ever rising or flat rates.

July 7, 2013

Booz Allen et al donate campaign cash. Politicians praise surveillance. What does Occam’s Razor say?

from In These Times:


How Cash Secretly Rules Surveillance Policy
Booz Allen et al donate campaign cash. Politicians praise surveillance. What does Occam’s Razor say?

BY David Sirota


Have you noticed anything missing in the political discourse about the National Security Administration’s unprecedented mass surveillance? There’s certainly been a robust discussion about the balance between security and liberty, and there’s at least been some conversation about the intelligence community’s potential criminality and constitutional violations. But there have only been veiled, indirect references to how cash undoubtedly tilts the debate against those who challenge the national security state.

Those indirect references have come in stories about Booz Allen Hamilton, the security contractor that employed Edward Snowden. CNN Money notes that 99 percent of the firm’s multibillion-dollar annual revenues now come from the federal government. Those revenues are part of a larger and growing economic sector within the military-industrial complex—a sector that, according to author Tim Shorrock, is “a $56 billion-a-year industry.”

For the most part, this is where the political discourse about money stops. We are told that there are high-minded, principled debates about security. We are also told of this massively profitable private industry making billions a year from the policy decisions that emerge from such a debate. Yet, few in the Washington press corps are willing to mention that politicians’ attacks on surveillance critics may have nothing to do with principle and everything to do with shilling for campaign donors.

For a taste of what that kind of institutionalized corruption looks like, peruse InfluenceExplorer.com to see how much Booz Allen Hamilton and its parent company The Carlyle Group spend. As you’ll see, from Barack Obama to John McCain, many of the politicians now publicly defending the surveillance state have taken huge sums of money from the firms. .....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://inthesetimes.com/article/15250/how_cash_secretly_rules_surveillance_policy/