June 18, 2014

Bill Moyers Essay: Wall Street’s Secret Weapon: Congress

http://billmoyers.com/2014/06/16/bill-moyers-essay-wall-street%E2%80%99s-secret-weapon-congress/

Bill Moyers Essay: Wall Street’s Secret Weapon: Congress
June 16, 2014

Why haven’t any big bankers been prosecuted for their role in the housing crisis that led to the Great Recession?

These finance executives took part in “scandals that violate the most basic ethical norms,” as the head of the IMF Christine Lagarde put it last month, including illegal foreclosures, money laundering and the fixing of interest rate benchmarks. In fact, banking CEOs not only avoided prosecution but got average pay rises of 10 percent last year, taking home, on average, $13 million in compensation.

These “gentlemen” are among the leaders of the industry’s efforts to repeal, or water down, some of the tougher rules and regulations enacted in the Dodd-Frank legislation that was passed to prevent another crash. As usual, they’re swelling their ranks with the very people who helped to write that bill. More than two dozen federal officials have pushed through the revolving door to the private sector they once sought to regulate.

And then there are the lapdogs in Congress willfully collaborating with the financial industry. As the Center for Public Integrity put it recently, they are “Wall Street’s secret weapon,” a handful of representatives at the beck and call of the banks, eager to do their bidding. Jeb Hensarling is their head honcho. The Republican from Texas chairs the House Financial Services Committee, which functions for Wall Street like one of those no-tell motels with the neon sign. Hensarling makes no bones as to where his loyalties lie. “Occasionally we have been accused of trying to undermine aspects of Dodd-Frank,” he said recently, adding, with a chuckle, “I hope we’re guilty of it.” Guilty as charged, Congressman. And it tells us all we need to know about our bought and paid for government that you think it’s funny.

June 18, 2014

The homeless people’s handwritten signs that are being turned into fonts

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/06/17/the-homeless-peoples-handwritten-signs-that-are-being-turned-into-fonts/



A new charity project in Barcelona takes signs made by the city’s rough sleepers and turns their handwriting into a downloadable font

The homeless people’s handwritten signs that are being turned into fonts
By Jon Henley, The Guardian
Tuesday, June 17, 2014 18:33 EDT

Writing the cardboard sign you use to beg, says Guillermo, one of Barcelona’s estimated 3,000 homeless people, is just “really shitty. You’re hardly going to convey love. You can’t convey anything nice. What you’re conveying through the cardboard, through your writing, is something that’s really … screwing you.”

But the handwriting of some of the Catalan capital’s rough sleepers is now being put to a wider use than helping its individual authors survive: scanned and converted into downloadable fonts, it is being sold online to raise funds for a foundation that supports homeless people in their effort to leave the street behind.

Homelessfonts.org, a joint venture between the Arrels Foundation, which works with nearly half of Barcelona’s homeless population, and advertising agency The Cyranos McCann, hopes individuals and companies will buy the fonts and use them to communicate on social media or as part of their corporate identity on stationery and packaging.

Using the typefaces homeless people themselves use to call attention to themselves in the street – from rough, energetic and sometimes barely legible scrawls to sometimes beautifully executed near-calligraphy – is “a creative way to raise awareness and transform the popular view of the homelessness issue,” says Ferran Busquets, the foundation’s director.

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http://www.homelessfonts.org/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/124737378@N03/

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Great idea!

June 17, 2014

Senator Tim Scott Attempts to Build Support for Offshore Oil Drilling Legislation With Pictures of W

http://www.republicreport.org/2014/tim-scott-windmills/



Senator Tim Scott Attempts to Build Support for Offshore Oil Drilling Legislation With Pictures of Windmills
Posted at 8:29 pm by Lee Fang

How do you sell offshore oil drilling to a public that has grown skeptical after years of spills and deadly disasters?

U.S. Senator Tim Scott (R-SC) has a website promoting the four pillars of his policy agenda. On energy, the Scott site features the Southern Energy Access Jobs Act (SEA Jobs Act), which would reverse “the Obama administration’s moratorium on offshore Atlantic energy production and create one single ‘South Atlantic’ offshore energy planning area, comprised of South Carolina, North Carolina Georgia, and Virginia.” Offshore drilling lobbyists, including National Ocean Industries Association president Randall B. Luthi, have called Scott’s effort to open up more of the Outer Continental Shelf for oil and gas drilling a “giant leap” in the right direction.

To build public support, Scott has a less than straight forward way of depicting his fossil fuel-friendly bill.

The senator’s website shows the following image of windmills for the SEA Jobs Act. See a screenshot below:

June 17, 2014

Fading Solid Fuel Engine Biz Threatens Navy’s Trident Missile

http://breakingdefense.com/2014/06/fading-solid-fuel-engine-biz-threatens-navys-trident-missile/



Fading Solid Fuel Engine Biz Threatens Navy’s Trident Missile
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. on June 16, 2014 at 10:07 AM

CAPITOL HILL: “Failure to launch” isn’t a metaphorical concern when you work on nuclear weapons. That’s why the director of the Navy’s euphemistically named Strategic Systems Program (SSP) is a worried man. What has Vice Adm. Terry Benedict worried is something neither he, nor the Navy nor the entire Defense Department directly control. It’s the viability of what Benedict called “an already fragile industry” that produces the solid-fuel rocket boosters for the Navy’s Trident submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM). The worst part is that the solid fuel rocket engine business is an industry that will live or die not on the military’s own decisions, but on NASA’s.

“NASA is the large procurer in this whole equation, so what NASA does affects everyone,” from the Navy to the custodian of the nation’s spy satellites, the National Reconnaissance Organization, Benedict told me after the Peter Huessy Congressional Breakfast here. The retirement of the Space Shuttle already hit US rocket-motor manufacturers hard and raised prices for the industry’s remaining customers, including the Trident program. Yes, in theory you could import rocket boosters from abroad, but in practice the big seller is Russia, which is a problematic partner on rocket programs (and other things) right now. “I don’t think we’d ever procure Trident motors outside the United States,” Benedict said bluntly when I raised the prospect.

Next, in 2016, NASA will decide whether its new boosters will use liquid fuel, solid propellant, or a mix. If they go all or mostly liquid, that’s a potential death blow for domestic solid fuel manufacturing, and the Trident’s a solid-fuel missile. Even if the Navy could afford to design a replacement, it would still have to use solid propellant, because liquid rocket fuel is simply unsafe in the tight confines of a submarine.

That’s a unique Navy dilemma. In the Air Force ICBM program, for instance, “they do use liquids today in their upper stage,” Benedict told me. “Liquid (fuels) are a prohibited item on submarines.”

June 17, 2014

Debating Iraq in 2014: Wrong All Over Again

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/06/16-9



Debating Iraq in 2014: Wrong All Over Again
by Peter Hart
Published on Monday, June 16, 2014 by Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting

The crisis in Iraq has brought war back to the US airwaves. But if you were expecting a more robust discussion about US military action this time around, think again. The rule seems to be that if you were wrong in 2003, you're still an expert in 2014.

Take the Sunday chat shows. On ABC's This Week (6/15/14), viewers heard first from former military: ex-fighter pilot Steve Ganyard and retired Gen. Peter Chiarelli.

Up next was Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), a hawkish lawmaker who called Iraq "the greatest threat, national security threat, since 9/11."

The show's roundtable closed with a brief discussion of Iraq, featuring hard-right war advocates Laura Ingraham and Bill Kristol alongside Democratic strategist Donna Brazile and Rep. Luis Gutierrez, who voted against the Iraq War resolution in 2002. Kristol, one of the most visible media proponents of the Iraq invasion, has never suffered any consequences as a pundit. He told ABC viewers–perhaps even with a straight face–that the current crisis in Iraq is "a disaster unfortunately made possible, or certainly made more likely, by our ridiculous and total withdrawal from Iraq in 2011."

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At least Wolfowitz wasn't licking his comb. Pssst! The Iraq war cost more than $50 billion dollars, asshole.

I can't believe these douchebags are back on TV again. Nor that anyone listens to them.

June 17, 2014

The New Ground-Based Defense Missiles Cost $40 Billion That We Could Use For A Lot of Other Things.

http://www.commondreams.org/further/2014/06/16-1



The New Ground-Based Defense Missiles Cost $40 Billion That We Could Use For A Lot of Other Things. And They Don't Work.
by Abby Zimet
06.16.14 - 10:10 PM

A decade after it was declared operational for bogus political reasons - "you just needed to build them" - the $40 billion Ground-based Midcourse Defense System, or GMD, "cannot be relied on," says a blistering report from the L.A. Times. It has an "abysmal" record: It has failed more tests than it has passed, has "performed less well than people had hoped," has been hyped by U.S. officials who claimed it was more reliable than it was, has failed tests far less stringent than real-life scenarios would be, and over time has continued to perform worse, not better, despite years of tinkering, failing five of its last eight tests. It was also designed for a threat that likely doesn't exist, or in the immortal words of Charles Pierce, "not to defend ourselves against missiles but, rather, as a platform for international dick-waving." Oh yes, and members of Congress - the guys who battled over how much to cut food stamps - want a bunch more.



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June 17, 2014

GM safety crisis grows with recall of 3 million more cars for ignition issues

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/06/17/us-generalmotors-idUSKBN0ER2Q220140617

GM safety crisis grows with recall of 3 million more cars for ignition issues
By Peter Henderson and Paul Lienert
SAN FRANCISCO/DETROIT Mon Jun 16, 2014 11:14pm EDT

(Reuters) - General Motors Co GM.N recalled three million more cars for ignition switch issues on Monday, roughly doubling the number of GM vehicles with known switch problems in a crisis that has defined the automaker and new Chief Executive Mary Barra this year.

GM on Monday recalled 3.36 million midsize and fullsize cars globally with ignition switches that can be jarred out of the "run" position, potentially affecting power steering, power brakes and air bags.

The switch issue is similar to the defect linked to at least 13 deaths in an earlier, 2.6-million vehicle recall of Chevrolet Cobalts and other small cars.

GM engineers first noted the Cobalt problem more than a decade ago, and GM's slow response to the switch issue triggered investigations within the company and by Congress and federal agencies.

June 17, 2014

America wants the impossible

http://atimes.com/atimes/World/WOR-01-160614.html



America wants the impossible
By Spengler
Jun 16, '14

The United States has misunderstood everyone in the world outside its borders and mismanaged everything. It has done so with a bipartisan consensus so broad and deep that it has no opposition except simple-minded isolationism. America gets unwanted results — most recently in Iraq - because it wants the wrong things in the first place. And there seems to be no way to persuade Americans otherwise. The crumbling of the Iraqi state will provide yet another pretext for mutual recriminations among political parties. The trouble is that both parties wanted the wrong thing to begin with.

It is impossible to recruit clever young people out of American universities to the dour, depressing mission of managing the decline of other civilizations. Americans are missionaries, not imperial mandarins. America cannot ignore the Middle East because it has critical interests in the region, including the free flow of hydrocarbons, but it cannot fix it.

It tried to fix Libya, and traded the nasty regime of Muammar Gaddafi for a Petrie Dish of jihadist militias; it tried to fix Egypt, and traded the miserable regime of Hosni Mubarak for the Muslim Brotherhood, and the inevitable return of military rule in the face of the twin threats of terror and starvation; it did not even try to fix Syria, which has collapsed into sectarian division. It spent US$1 trillion, 5,000 dead, 50,000 wounded, and several million disrupted American lives trying to fix Iraq and Afghanistan.

From the Pillars of Hercules to the Hindu Kush, America confronts a belt of countries unable to feed themselves, let alone to invest their capital in profitable businesses or educate their young people. Without hydrocarbons their economies would resemble the worst of sub-Saharan Africa. The only four that have conquered illiteracy - Iran, Turkey, Tunisia and Algeria - have suffered a sudden collapse in fertility, from pre-modern to post-modern levels, in a single generation.

June 17, 2014

Iraqi quagmire calls the US back

http://atimes.com/atimes/World/WOR-01-170614.html



Iraqi quagmire calls the US back
By Ehsan M Ahrari
Jun 17, '14

When George W Bush invaded Iraq in 2003, he purportedly had big plans to reshape the entire Middle East into a region that would kowtow to the strategic priorities of America and Israel. The highly touted "shock and awe" tactic of the superior US forces that initially crushed the rag-tag army of Saddam Hussein, later on met the Iraqi version of shock and awe - a quagmire created by Iraqi insurgents from which Washington almost did not escape with its dignity intact.

Thanks to the Sahwa movement of the Iraqi Sunnis and General David Petraeus' adroit implementation of the counterinsurgency doctrine in 2007, the United States was indeed spared from experiencing another Vietnam-like defeat, something that Saddam Hussein always wanted to inflict on the American military. In 2011, President Barack Obama presided over the redeployment of American troops from Iraq.

However, in the wake of the steadily victorious campaigns of the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS), which is currently heading toward capturing Baghdad, calls are rising from the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki for the United States to come to Iraq's rescue. To put it differently, another Iraqi quagmire is calling Obama.

~snip~

As Obama is pondering intervention in Iraq, it is fairly certain that the horrible experience of his predecessor is very much on his mind. He knows that the American people will not stand for another war in Iraq, no matter how melodramatic the phraseology he eventually coins to rationalize US military involvement there.

June 16, 2014

Dead Americans and the Gadsen Flag

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/jaime-oneill/56398/dead-americans-and-the-gadsen-flag

Dead Americans and the Gadsen Flag
by Jaime O'Neill | June 14, 2014 - 10:02am

There are three houses in my immediate neighborhood that fly the Gadsen flag, that yellow banner with the rattlesnake and the slogan that reads "Don't Tread on Me." Since we elected a black president in 2008, that flag has become popular with people incensed by things that went unquestioned when a thoroughly entitled white guy occupied the White House. It's remarkable how many acts of presidential malfeasance, ineptitude, or usurpations of power were approved of by the very people who are now crying out how tyrannized they are, and how much worse their taxes seem now that the black guy is in office.

Though the Gadsen flag originated as the 13 colonies were moving toward insurrection against British tyranny, it has since been expropriated by the Tea Party, and by other people who are flirting with sedition, spreading fear and hatred against the duly elected leader of the country, and imposing a distorted Fox "News" view of the world on nearly any action the government takes, from expanding health care coverage to the most modest attempts to address our crazy immigration laws, and our even crazier gun laws.

These people are tyrannizing the majority of Americans. That flag has become an alternative flag to the stars and stripes. The yellow flag so many people are now willing to hoist on flag poles has become the symbol for people willing to aim high-powered rifles at men and women who are enforcing the duly enacted laws of the federal government. That snake flag now symbolizes the kind of people willing to shoot cops who are eating pizza, or Wal-Mart shoppers they see as standing in the way of their "revolution" to "take our country back." That flag is a rallying banner for some of the more paranoid people in our heavily armed nation.

So, once again we've seen people dying on our streets, our schools, and in our places of business, their lives sacrificed to the idea of a "well-regulated militia." So those policemen and that good Samaritan in Las Vegas and the two young dead kids up at that Oregon school were brought down by "militia men," I guess, though who was regulating them remains a mystery.


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Images from google, search: tea+bagger