Iraq's Workers Unite as U.S. workers welllllllll……..
By jimstaro
Look around you, what can one say, except possibly going further into lower wages, at least they wouldn't be stagnant as they have been for most for these past years.
And workers having a Voice, C'mon!!!
Iraqi unions announce new confederation
And where did this take place, wellll…. in Iraq, of all places:
American Labor Unions, Democracy, Democracy for the Worker, Erbil Iraq, Iraq Labor Conference, Iraq Labor Unions, Iraq Union Labor Confederation, US Labor against the War, USLAW
Liberal "Hero" Jon Stewart Cozies Up to War Criminal Myers
By Valtin
As even a commenter at The Daily Show's website put it, Jon Stewart's interview tonight with former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under George W. Bush, General Richard Myers, was "one of the most fawning, sycophantic interviews I have ever seen Jon Stewart do."
There is no transcript or link to the interview yet. It's too fresh. From my memory, the interview began with Stewart lauding the sacrifice of U.S. troops, and it also ended the same way. A few days after electrifying much of the blogosphere with a critical interview with CNBC financial host Jim Cramer, Stewart showed how he can cower when faced with someone with real power, and not a small-time media crony like Cramer.
General Myers was promoted to the chairmanship of the Joint Chiefs only two weeks before 9/11, after having served as vice chair under President Clinton. As a loyal military man under the evil Bush/Cheney regime, he helped organize the "shock and awe" invasion of Iraq that produced hundreds of thousands of deaths and a million or more refugees, all under the guise of a bogus search for supposed weapons of mass destruction.
Donald Rumsfeld, Jon Stewart, Richard Myers, Senate Armed Services Committee, Torture
Four at Four
By Magnifico
Well I bet nobody could have predicted this. According to the Washington Post, Anger over AIG depletes Obama's political capital.
"The populist anger at the executives who ran their firms into the ground is increasingly blowing back on Obama, whom aides yesterday described as having little recourse in the face of legal contracts that guaranteed those bonuses… The Obama administration was already facing a skeptical public and members of Congress critical of the huge sums of money the government has allocated to shoring up the devastated financial system."
WaPo also reports Senate Democrats look at new taxes seek to recoup $165 million in AIG bonuses.
Over at the NY Times, they report on some other tax news — the Internal Revenue Service plans a deduction for Madoff victims.
IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman told the Senate Finance Committee that the agency will allow victims of Bernard "Madoff's investment fraud to claim a tax deduction related to the bulk of their losses… The plan would ease existing rules governing what are known as theft-loss deductions, which are losses claimed by investors who are cheated by their investment advisers and others in Ponzi schemes and other frauds."
So much for the people who were defrauded out of their retirement savings in IRA and 401(k) plans.
Four at Four continues with China wants consumers to pay for CO2 reduction, Rudman advising CIA on how to beat torture rap, and scientists use lasers to shoot mosquitoes.
Turning Good Bank / Bad Bank on its head (UPDATE)
By BruceMcF
Burning the Midnight Oil for the Beauty Platform and Economic Populism
The problem with the "Good Bank / Bad Bank" (see also Dr. Seuss version) plan is, of course, … {drum roll}
… in order to "rescue" banks that distributed a massive amount of contingency reserves as if it was income … by pretending that massive downsides did not exist …
… we "have to" reward the people who proved to be grossly incompetent in the core competency for senior executive management of a bank.
Except, as Joe Stiglitz points out, we don't have to at all.
In other words, there is good and bad in the Good Bank / Bad Bank plan. And if we reverse who ends up with the Good Assets and who ends up with the Bad Assets, we can have all of the Good, and avoid most of the Bad.
Keith Olbermann cites "my" plan on the Tonight show … posted at the Big Orange
Beauty Platform, Panic of 2008
It's In the P-I (In Memoriam)
By jessical in Personal
We've been watching this for a week, and today it happened: the Seattle Post Intelligencer, after 146 years of publication, has silenced its presses. There will be some sort of online effort; Hearst is a big company, and MBAs will no doubt be called in to poke at the corpse and apply the art of marketing galvanics to the still limbs; but the PI, the paper I grew up with, is gone.
How Does One, erm, Revolt, Exactly?
There is, as we all know, a huge and growing anger in the land. The Ruling Class…The Elite….The (alleged) Smart Guys…have screwed just about everything up. The only exception, being…um….um…ok, they have screwed EVERYTHING up.
Led by, among their many and various other faults, THE most incompetent eight year Presidential Administration in modern, if not all of, history. And their frantic efforts too dumb every one down, reduce everything to the simplest possible level….so that they might have a chance to look smart, or at least pass for knowing WTF they are doing.
Health care, energy, foreign policy (TWO screwed up wars and the animosity of the entire civilized world) energy policy, infrastructure, education (heh) and of course finance and the economy. Not to mention the media that reports, or should I say DOESN'T report it all to us, because they too were too busy being Elite to actually, you know, DO anything. Other than type out what the other Elites were telling them. Which was that everything was just going swimmingly, darlings, don't you worry your little heads, we have everything under control. And we are not just saying that to keep our jbs and make ourselves look smart, either.
Learn From My Mistakes My Sorrow
By breathingstill
It's been nearly a year since I have been blogging here regularly. For those of you that know me, and those just meeting me, last summer my husband and I decided to sent me off to Italy to find a country house we could live in during the summer months. We were advised to do this because I have Acute PTSD from a highly traumatic near fatal car accident 3 years ago and my doctors have all prescribed a less stress filled life as the best medicine to recovery (along with therapy).
I went. Found us a home. Came back. And while showing pictures of what I found was handed a formal agreement to dissolve our marriage. The trip to Italy was a sham, a way to get me out of town so that he could reorganize his life with me not a part of it. But it gets much worse.
By breathingstill in Personal
It's been nearly a year since I have been blogging here regularly. For those of you that know me, and those just meeting me, last summer my husband and I decided to sent me off to Italy to find a country house we could live in during the summer months. We were advised to do this because I have Acute PTSD from a highly traumatic near fatal car accident 3 years ago and my doctors have all prescribed a less stress filled life as the best medicine to recovery (along with therapy). I went. Found us a home. Came back. And while showing pictures of what I found was handed a formal agreement to dissolve our marriage. The trip to Italy was a sham, a way to get me out of town so that he could reorganize his life with me not a part of it. But it gets much worse.
deception, divorce, love, ptsd
The public humiliation of President Obama
By ANKOSS
A sad thing is happening to Barak Obama. As it has during past periods of crisis, the American electorate sought the "necessary man," a highly qualified leader to assume the powers of the Presidency. Obama has the personal qualities of intellect and character to address the great difficulties facing the nation. But as daily events are beginning to reveal, Obama's presidency has been betrayed from within. All of the bold measures he promised during his campaign and in recent speeches are being steadily undermined by his own advisers and deputies. How can this be?
Over the last thirty years, the moneyed interests in the United States developed a sophisticated system of recruiting and co-opting large numbers of politically prominent or promising individuals. By means of selective promotions, institutional subsidies, book contracts, and many other forms of professional favoritism, the owner's of our nation's wealth, corporations and private fortunes, have effectively bought off the entire set of candidates for national leadership. As Boss Tweed of Tammany Hall said "I don't care who does the electing as long as I do the nominating."
The American plutocracy controls the mass media. It controls talk radio. It controls popular entertainment. But, most importantly, it controls the pool of individuals from whom Barak Obama chooses the officers of his administration. The otherwise inexplicable actions of Geithner and Summers are no mystery once one understands that they were recruited to be agents of wealth decades ago. The persistence of the Military Industrial Complex and the likelihood of fresh attempts to raid Social Security are not puzzling once one understands that anyone "qualified" to lead these agencies and survive confirmation hearings is an agent of the plutocracy.
The consequences of this situation are unfortunate for our new President. Having promised vigorous action, his growing impotence in the face of concerted resistance to his policies BY HIS OWN APPOINTEES will result in his public humiliation. The only way out of this trap is to replace the plutocratic hand-puppets in his administration with outsiders who would immediately be labelled as "dangerous," "radical," or "fringe" figures, the standard code words used to denounce leaders whose first loyalty is to our republic and not to America's wealthiest.
Every time one of Obama's promises to the American people is betrayed by a member of his own administration, our President is humiliated. His popularity will not survive such humiliation, and unless he makes abrupt changes in his inner circle, the hope he promised our nation will prove false.
lobbyists, Obama, permanent government, systemic failure
Docudharma Times Tuesday March 17
AIG Should Be Given To
Fox News, Jim Cramer Of CNBC Or
Tuesday's Headlines:
Louisiana shooting puzzles witnesses
Hardliner Avigdor Lieberman set to become Israel's foreign minister
Mohammed Khatami to withdraw from Iranian presidential race
Just mix red and white and you'll be in the pink: Brussels enrages Provence rosé winemakers
Russia's richest woman begs for a state handout
Pakistan military 'forced rethink on judge'
Hybrid price wars as Toyota and Honda go head to head
Downturn 'risks Africa conflict'
Camps in Darfur struggle with aid groups' exit
In strategic shift, Colombia's FARC targets cities
Anger Over Firm Depletes Obama's Political Capital
AN IMPERILED AGENDA
By Michael D. Shear and Paul Kane
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, March 17, 2009; Page A01
President Obama's apparent inability to block executive bonuses at insurance giant AIG has dealt a sharp blow to his young administration and is threatening to derail both public and congressional support for his ambitious political agenda.
Politicians in both parties flocked to express outrage over $165 million in bonuses paid out to executives at the company, demanding answers from the president and swamping yesterday's rollout of his efforts to spark lending to small businesses.
The populist anger at the executives who ran their firms into the ground is increasingly blowing back on Obama, whom aides yesterday described as having little recourse in the face of legal contracts that guaranteed those bonuses.
Sent back by Britain. Executed in Darfur
A failed asylum-seeker who returned to Darfur under a government repatriation scheme has been murdered by Sudanese security officers after they followed him home from the airport in Khartoum, The Independent has learnt.
Failed asylum-seeker followed home from airport and shot by Sudan security officials
By Robert Verkaik, Law Editor
Adam Osman Mohammed, 32, was gunned down in his home in front of his wife and four-year-old son just days after arriving in his village in south Darfur.
The case is to be used by asylum campaigners to counter Home Office attempts to lift the ban on the removal and deportation to Sudan of failed asylum-seekers. Next month, government lawyers are expected to go to court to argue that it is safe to return as many as 3,000 people to Khartoum.
But lawyers for the campaigners will tell the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal that people who are returned to Sudan face imprisonment, torture and death. Mr Mohammed, a non-Arab Darfuri, came to Britain in 2005 seeking sanctuary from persecution in Sudan, where he said his life was in danger. The village where he was a farmer had been raided twice by the Janjaweed, the ethnic Arab militia, forcing him and his wife and child to flee their home.
His family in Britain told The Independent that Mr Mohammed witnessed many villagers being killed and became separated from his wife during a second attack on the village a few weeks later. He escaped to Chad before making his way to the UK in 2005.
But last year his appeal for asylum was finally turned down and he was told that he faced deportation. In August last year he was flown to Khartoum under the Home Office's assisted voluntary return programme, in which refugees are paid to go back to their country of origin. He stayed in Khartoum for a few months and then, when he believed it was safe, he travelled to Darfur to be reunited with his family
In Seattle, the World Still Turns, a Beacon in Memory of a Lost Newspaper
By DAN BARRY
SEATTLE – A visitor passing through Seattle last week made an impertinent request. He called someone at The Post-Intelligencer to ask whether he could, if at all possible, visit the 30-foot neon globe that sits atop the newspaper's waterfront building. He couldn't really explain the need.
The request might have seemed especially rude, given that those employed by The Post-Intelligencer were living hour to hour, waiting for a call from the Hearst Corporation, its owner in New York, about what day would be its last as a printed entity. That call came Monday: A daily Seattle tradition that began in 1863 will end Tuesday, March 17, 2009.
But back last week, back when the newspaper could at least revel in another day passed, another edition published, the good people at The Post-Intelligencer understood the well-intentioned desire behind the request.
Muse in the Morning
By Robyn in Art, Community, Poetry
Dream Catcher #5
Fractured Hope
replicating
inexactly
of existence
until it shatters
Shards compress
in an optimistic
but perhaps
for a stable
–Robyn Elaine Serven
Meditation on Succetus
By CrustyPolemicist
I propose we rename March 17th "Saint Baldrick's Day". Instead of getting
hammered on "Saint Patrick's Day" (and waking up disheveled, disoriented, and obscurely ashamed for reasons you pray you will never remember), do something nice instead and contribute a few pence at www.stbaldricks.org . Then go get hammered.
That is the only warm-fuzzy sentiment you will find in this piece, so enjoy it. On to the meditation …
Christianity, Ireland, paganism, Saint Patrick