Some serious stories this week about big problems facing us all, but make sure you read #8......
1/ A major story from Matt Taibbi is an event, and this time he focuses on the last four years of our financial history, meaning the bailout of Wall Street. The facts are that our government has lied about every step of this process, and continues to lie to protect the financial oligarchs. These giant banks own the government, and the duty of the politicians and regulators is to protect the banks and make sure they make billions of profits, so they can pay their bonuses.
This is one part of our government that is deeply corrupt, top to bottom.......cret and Lies of the Bailout
The federal rescue of Wall Street didn’t fix the economy – it created a permanent bailout state based on a Ponzi-like confidence scheme. And the worst may be yet to come
January 4, 2013 4:25 PM ET
It has been four long winters since the federal government, in the hulking, shaven-skulled, Alien Nation-esque form of then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, committed $700 billion in taxpayer money to rescue Wall Street from its own chicanery and greed. To listen to the bankers and their allies in Washington tell it, you'd think the bailout was the best thing to hit the American economy since the invention of the assembly line. Not only did it prevent another Great Depression, we've been told, but the money has all been paid back, and the government even made a profit. No harm, no foul – right?
Wrong.
It was all a lie – one of the biggest and most elaborate falsehoods ever sold to the American people. We were told that the taxpayer was stepping in – only temporarily, mind you – to prop up the economy and save the world from financial catastrophe. What we actually ended up doing was the exact opposite: committing American taxpayers to permanent, blind support of an ungovernable, unregulatable, hyperconcentrated new financial system that exacerbates the greed and inequality that caused the crash, and forces Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup to increase risk rather than reduce it. The result is one of those deals where one wrong decision early on blossoms into a lush nightmare of unintended consequences. We thought we were just letting a friend crash at the house for a few days; we ended up with a family of hillbillies who moved in forever, sleeping nine to a bed and building a meth lab on the front lawn.
But the most appalling part is the lying. The public has been lied to so shamelessly and so often in the course of the past four years that the failure to tell the truth to the general populace has become a kind of baked-in, official feature of the financial rescue. Money wasn't the only thing the government gave Wall Street – it also conferred the right to hide the truth from the rest of us. And it was all done in the name of helping regular people and creating jobs.
2/ Interesting 6 minute behind the scenes tour of the GM car concept museum - the public is not allowed in this building, and this is a video tour of the GM range of classic vehicles......
Are you a car buff? This is for you.........
3/ We don't currently think of a "Western" country like Greece as a fully fledged oligarchy, but as this article from the Times says for decades an elite has run the country as a fiefdom, controlling all media and corrupting every institution. No wonder the Germans don't want to bail them out......
DEMOCRACY is like a bicycle: if you don’t keep pedaling, you fall. Unfortunately, the bicycle of Greek democracy has long been broken. After the military junta collapsed in 1974, Greece created only a hybrid, diluted form of democracy. You can vote, belong to a party and protest. In essence, however, a small clique exercises all meaningful political power.
For all that has been said about the Greek crisis, much has been left unsaid. The crisis has become a battleground of interests and ideologies. At stake is the role of the public sector and the welfare state. Yes, in Greece we have a dysfunctional public sector; for the past 40 years the ruling parties handed out government jobs to their supporters, regardless of their qualifications.
But the real problem with the public sector is the tiny elite of business people who live off the Greek state while passing themselves off as “entrepreneurs.” They bribe politicians to get fat government contracts, usually at inflated prices. They also own many of the country’s media outlets, and thus manage to ensure that their actions are clothed in silence. Sometimes they’ll even buy a soccer team in order to drum up popular support and shield their crimes behind popular protection, as the drug lord Pablo Escobar did in Colombia, and as the paramilitary leader Arkan did in Serbia.
In 2011, Evangelos Venizelos, who was then the finance minister and is now the leader of the socialist party, Pasok, instituted a new property-tax law. But for properties larger than 2,000 square meters — about 21,000 square feet — the tax was reduced by 60 percent. Mr. Venizelos thus carved out a big exemption for the only people who could afford to pay the tax: the rich. (Mr. Venizelos is also the man responsible for a law granting broad immunity to government ministers.)
Such shenanigans have gone on for decades. The public is deprived of real information, as television stations, newspapers and online news sites are controlled by the economic and political elite.
4/ He's baaaaack.......great to have a new Jon Stewart after their three week break.......and he's feisty! He shreds the Republicans that voted against relief for Hurricane Sandy in a delicious way......yummy......a great four minutes.....
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
5/ The single federal spending issue that is driving the national debt is military expense, but no politician wants to touch it......there's no discussion, no debate, it's even ignored by the deficit crazies in the Tea Party.......
it's because the defense lobbyists and contractors own Washington, lock stock and barrel, and our corporate media has defense spending off limits for discussion.......
Deeply corrupt......and see the next story......
I was asked earlier this week by an reporter for PressTV, the state television network in Iran, if I could explain why the US political system seemed to be so dysfunctional, with Congress and the President having created an artificial budget crisis 17 months ago, not “solving” it until the last hour before a Congressional deadline would have created financial chaos, and even then not solving the problem and instead just pushing it off for two months until the next crisis moment.
I thought for a moment, trying to come up with a simple way to explain the peculiar politics of a fake democracy where two equally pro-capitalist, pro-imperialist parties vie with genuine bitterness for patronage spoils and legal bribes, all the while ignoring the real wishes and needs of the public, and then it hit me: it is really all about US militarism and the unwillingness of the either of the two political parties to admit honestly to to American people how much they are being gouged to allow the US government and its corporate owners to continue in their attempt to control the world.
It really is that simple.
The US currently spends almost as much on its military and on paying for current and past wars in terms of interest on war debt and care for wounded and aging soldiers as the entire rest of the world spends on arms and war. Approximately $1.3 trillion gets spent each year in taxpayer’s dollars and in more borrowed funds (50 cents of every federal tax dollar goes to pay for the US military, the intelligence apparatus, veterans’ benefits and other related military costs). It is simply ludicrous, given this situation, to imagine that the US can significantly reduce its budget deficit either by raising taxes or by cutting social spending.
6/ One of the techniques of control is to make sure there is an enemy we need to be on constant alert for, and make sure the people are constantly in a state of fear.....this has been the "War on Terror" for the last 12 years, and it has justified the spending of hundreds of billions of resourses and has generated it's own industry, with lobbyists and contractors making sure it stays in place. The Obama administration is complicit in this......
The polices adopted by the Obama administration just over the last couple of years leave no doubt that they are accelerating, not winding down, the war apparatus that has been relentlessly strengthened over the last decade. In the name of the War on Terror, the current president has diluted decades-old Miranda warnings; codified a new scheme of indefinite detention on US soil; plotted to relocate Guantanamo to Illinois; increased secrecy, repression
Does that sound to you like a government anticipating the end of the War on Terror any time soon? Or does it sound like one working feverishly to make their terrorism-justified powers of detention, surveillance, killing and secrecy permanent? About all of this, the ACLU's Executive Director, Anthony Romero, provided the answer on Thursday: "President Obama has utterly failed the first test of his second term, even before inauguration day. His signature means indefinite detention without charge or trial, as well as the illegal military commissions, will be extended."
There's a good reason US officials are assuming the "War on Terror" will persist indefinitely: namely, their actions ensure that this occurs. The New York Times' Matthew Rosenberg this morning examines what the US government seems to regard as the strange phenomenon of Afghan soldiers attacking US troops with increasing frequency, and in doing so, discovers a shocking reality: people end up disliking those who occupy and bomb their country:
7/ Remember the Exorcist? This excellent little video will remind you of that truly scary movie......1 minute......
8/ "Big stuff" is difficult for the American public, and change comes very slowly because of the entrenched special interests resisting change at all costs. For climate change this glacial pace won't work, because as Bill McKibben says it's all about physics - physics has no political agenda, it just is......
Read this excellent, excellent article - it explains clearly and simply why we are screwed.....
Even if we take all possible measures today the temperature will go up 2.2 degrees C in 20 years and the extremes will be much worse than now.......remember all of the weather weirdness in the last few years are because the temperature has risen 0.8 degrees C.
If, as is likely, we do nothing much in the next decade we are on line to have a temperature rise of 6 degrees C, which will end life on earth as we know it in 100 years or so.....
But....."nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care".......and this includes the President........
Change usually happens very slowly, even once all the serious people have decided there's a problem. That's because, in a country as big as the United States, public opinion moves in slow currents. Since change by definition requires going up against powerful established interests, it can take decades for those currents to erode the foundations of our special-interest fortresses.
Take, for instance, "the problem of our schools". Don't worry about whether there actually was a problem, or whether making every student devote her school years to filling out standardized tests would solve it. Just think about the timeline. In 1983, after some years of pundit throat clearing, the Carnegie Commission published "A Nation at Risk", insisting that a "rising tide of mediocrity" threatened our schools. The nation's biggest foundations and richest people slowly roused themselves to action, and for three decades we haltingly applied a series of fixes and reforms. We've had Race to the Top, and Teach for America, and charters, and vouchers, and … we're still in the midst of "fixing" education, many generations of students later.
Even facing undeniably real problems – say, discrimination against gay people – one can make the case that gradual change has actually been the best option. Had some mythical liberal supreme court declared, in 1990, that gay marriage was now the law of the land, the backlash might have been swift and severe. There's certainly an argument to be made that moving state by state (starting in nimbler, smaller states like Vermont) ultimately made the happy outcome more solid as the culture changed and new generations came of age.
Which is not to say that there weren't millions of people who suffered as a result. There were. But our societies are built to move slowly. Human institutions tend to work better when they have years or even decades to make gradual course corrections, when time smooths out the conflicts between people.
And that's always been the difficulty with climate change – the greatest problem we've ever faced. It's not a fight, like education reform or abortion or gay marriage, between conflicting groups with conflicting opinions. It couldn't be more different at a fundamental level.
We're talking about a fight between human beings and physics. And physics is entirely uninterested in human timetables. Physics couldn't care less if precipitous action raises gas prices, or damages the coal industry in swing states. It could care less whether putting a price on carbon slowed the pace of development in China, or made agribusiness less profitable.
Physics doesn't understand that rapid action on climate change threatens the most lucrative business on Earth, the fossil fuel industry. It's implacable. It takes the carbon dioxide we produce and translates it into heat, which means into melting ice and rising oceans and gathering storms. And unlike other problems, the less you do, the worse it gets. Do nothing and you soon have a nightmare on your hands.
We could postpone healthcare reform a decade, and the cost would be terrible – all the suffering not responded to over those 10 years. But when we returned to it, the problem would be about the same size. With climate change, unless we act fairly soon in response to the timetable set by physics, there's not much reason to act at all.
Unless you understand these distinctions you don't understand climate change – and it's not at all clear that President Obama understands them.
That's why his administration is sometimes peeved when they don't get the credit they think they deserve for tackling the issue in his first term in office. The measure they point to most often is the increase in average mileage for automobiles, which will slowly go into effect over the next decade.
It's precisely the kind of gradual transformation that people – and politicians – like.
9/ So many climate change stories, but here is one I can't believe - Chicago is about to shatter a 72 year record - there's no snow.......
Chicago? No snow? Yeeeech......
It's already been a mild winter of record-shattering proportions in Chicago -- and the weather records keep falling in the city.
Unless at least an inch of snow falls yet Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday, AccuWeather reports that the city will beat a record, dating back to 1940, for the longest stretch of consecutive days without an inch of the white staff falling to the ground: 319. Such snowfall is not in the forecast amid nearly spring-like temperatures arriving in the area.
Adding further insult to injury, at least for those Chicagoans who enjoy snow, the city has still only logged a grand total of just 1.3 inches of snowfall through the entire winter to this point, 0.4 of which fell Saturday, pushing the city past one inch of snowfall for the season on nearly the latest date on record since 1866.
As the RedEye points out, some unlikely cities have surpassed Chicago's paltry snowfall total this year, including El Paso, Texas (3.1 inches), Amarillo, Texas (2.1 inches) and Oklahoma City, Okla. (1.4 inches).
10/ TwisterNederland has compiled the Best Fails of 2012......assorted drunks, youthful idiots, daredevils and just plain unlucky ones......most new......some nasty as well.....12 minutes of mayhem......
Lads - for you........
11/ No rational person can justify the sale of multi shot magazines, armour piercing bullets and other military grade weapons to individuals, but as this article says the gun"debate" is all about emotion......
It's part of the polarization of our society.......gun control becomes a complex topic when you factor politics, emotion and identity into it.....
Lots of statistics are being thrown around in the debate about whether guns make society safer or more dangerous. But the gun control argument is intensely emotional because it is about so much more than public safety. Guns have become symbols in our polarized society, figurative weapons in a war of conflicting cultural values that is compelled by deep and ancient instincts.
Humans are social animals. We have evolved to depend on our group, our tribe, for our health and safety. So we adopt views and positions that align with those of our group, in order to be accepted and supported — and protected — as a member in good standing. Agreeing with the group also helps protect us because social unity helps our tribe prevail in the competition with other tribes for control of society in general. So we see and interpret the facts about guns, or any issue, through these deep lenses.
This fight isn’t about guns or safety. It is a much more profound and ancient conflict over how society should work, and who decides.
This adaptive sort of reasoning is known as cultural cognition. (Research in this field has specifically investigated the roots of our powerful emotions about gun control. See “More Statistics, Less Persuasion: A Cultural Theory of Gun-Risk Perceptions.”) It turns out that some of us are “hierarchists,” a tribe that prefers a society operating under a fixed and unchanging hierarchy of social and economic class. Politically, hierarchists tend to be conservative. They bristle whenever government imposes rules and regulations that change the status quo in the name of broad social equity and protection, as with gun control.
Some of us are “individualists,” politically libertarian, who prefer a society that maximizes personal independence and individual choice. Charlton Heston’s rallying cry to the N.R.A. in 2000 (“from my cold, dead hands”) perfectly captures how the prospect of gun control threatens an individualist’s preferred society: “When loss of liberty is looming, as it is now, the siren sounds first in the hearts of freedom’s vanguard” — meaning the individualists.
12/ Even though Big Ag defeated the California ballot on labelling GMO foods in November, this issue isn't going away.....consumer groups in other states are working on this so there is still hope this will happen.......
Prop 37, a citizens’ ballot initiative that would have required the mandatory labeling of billions of dollars of genetically engineered (GE) foods and put an end to the routine industry practice of fraudulently marketing GE-tainted foods as “natural” or “all natural,” lost by a narrow margin of 48.6% to 51.4%. Opponents couldn’t claim anything close to a landslide, even though they outspent the pro-labeling campaign almost six to one.
The Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) immediately put a happy face on the narrow victory, repeating its tired old propaganda in a public statement: “Proposition 37 was a deeply flawed measure that would have resulted in higher food costs, frivolous lawsuits and increased state bureaucracies. This is a big win for California consumers, taxpayers, business and farmers.”
But Jennifer Hatcher, senior vice president of government and public affairs for the Food Marketing Institute, came closer to expressing the real sentiments of the big guns who opposed Prop 37, a measure she had previously said “scared us to death,” in her official statement:
“This gives us hope that you can, with a well-funded, well-organized, well-executed campaign, defeat a ballot initiative and go directly to the voters. We hope we don’t have too many of them, because you can’t keep doing that over and over again . . .”.
13/ Katy Perry's new video "Wide Awake" is worth another look.....
1/ It's a really good song.......
2/ She really is stunningly beautiful, but seems nice as well.......definitely the most beautiful witch you'll ever see....
3/ In HD this is a surreal, vibrant, subversive and ultimately triumphant video......
4/ Filmed on a huge budget, this is what money and CGI can do........if you have the connection watch it in 1080p......
Most impressive.......
14/ Another story that just nails our most important economic problem in this country - the broken and dysfunctional health care system........but noone is talking about the why, and the real solution.......
The "why" is because every component of the health process, health insurance, hospitals, medical equipment and of course Big Pharma is driven by corporate profits, not medicine or patient care...
The "how" is a single payer system, how about "Medicare For All"?
Excellent story, again about the deep corruption of our systems.......
Imagine a nation with a terrible problem – one its leaders refuse to discuss. The problem will needlessly drain trillions of dollars from its economy in the next ten years.
Now imagine that this problem also robs that nation’s citizens of life itself, draining years from their lifespans while depriving them of large sums of money. Imagine that it sickens and disables countless others, drives many people into bankrupcty, and kills more than two newborn infants out of every thousand born.
Imagine that fixing this problem would make result in a dramatic decline in publicly-held debt. It wouldn’t just “help” the debt problem, mind you – it would cause that debt to plunge.
And now imagine a national “deficit debate” which completely ignores this problem.
Imagine a news media which pretends the problem doesn’t exist. Imagine a corporate-funded “Fix the Debt” movement that refuses to mention it, and yet is treated as an objective source of information. Imagine a political consensus in which the debate isn’t around how to fix this problem, but how to cut service programs that help people cope with it.
Welcome to the United States of America, Jan. 2013. It’s a land where the population is broke, sick, gypped, and mistreated. But the problem’s fixable – if we can find the political will.
Broke
The problem, of course, is our health care system – although “system” seems like a flattering word for this greed-driven, anarchic three-ring circus. Our health care system – guess we’ll need to call it that for lack of an alternativer – is the worst in the developed world. It costs far more, provides much less, and has worse outcomes than any system that’s even remotely comparable.
How bad is it?
15/ Good article from the UK on how betting shops with high speed internet slots are sucking billions out of the poorest areas in Britain......at least they recognise the problem and that corporations exploiting the poor is a problem.....
Contrast this to Florida, where internet gaming parlours are everywhere in poorer areas.....in Mount Dora the big one is in the Triangle shopping center, and it's constantly full......don't expect any action, because the politicians are already paid off......
The report reveals that in the 50 parliamentary constituencies with the highest numbers of unemployed people, punters visited 1,251 betting shops and put £5.6bn into 4,454 so-called fixed odds betting terminals (FOBTs). By comparison, the 50 constituencies with the lowest levels of unemployment had only 287 betting shops and 1,045 terminals, and saw £1.4bn gambled last year.
The figures, produced for Fairer Gambling – a non-profit organisation which campaigns against problem betting, run by a gambling expert who helped bring the casino-style fixed odds machines to the UK high street – appear to show that bookmakers have deliberately targeted the poorest areas with the highest unemployment and poverty. It is a charge the industry vigorously rejects.
In east London's Bethnal Green and Bow, the 45 betting shops saw £243m placed in bets on machines, dubbed the "crack cocaine of gambling", which offer quickfire casino games allowing players to stake up to £100 on a 20-second spin of the wheel. Punters can play with cash, or pay with credit or debit cards at the counter. By comparison, in Oxfordshire's Henley not a single licence had been issued for a betting shop.
Todays video - some say the funniest skit ever shown on TV - Tim Conway and Harvey Korman on the Carol Burnett show with "The Dentist".......
Todays senior jokes for guys......
This asshole looked at my beer belly last night and sarcastically said, "Is that Corona or Bud?"
I said, "There's a tap underneath; taste it and find out."
***********
I said, "There's a tap underneath; taste it and find out."
***********
I was talking to a girl in the bar last night.
She said, "If you lost a few
pounds, had a shave and got your hair
cut, you'd look all right."
I said, "If I did that, I'd be talking to your friends over there instead of you."
She said, "If you lost a few
pounds, had a shave and got your hair
cut, you'd look all right."
I said, "If I did that, I'd be talking to your friends over there instead of you."
***********
I was telling a girl in the pub about my ability to guess what day a woman was born just by feeling her boobs.
"Really" she said, "Go on then...try."
After about thirty seconds of fondling she began to lose patience and said.
"Come on, what day was I born"?
I said, “Yesterday."
***********
I got caught taking a pee in the local swimming pool today.
The lifeguard shouted at me so loud, I nearly fell in.
***********
I went to the pub last night and saw a fat chick dancing on a table. I said, "Nice legs."
The girl giggled and said with a smile, "Do you really think so."
I said "Definitely! Most tables would have collapsed by now. "
I was telling a girl in the pub about my ability to guess what day a woman was born just by feeling her boobs.
"Really" she said, "Go on then...try."
After about thirty seconds of fondling she began to lose patience and said.
"Come on, what day was I born"?
I said, “Yesterday."
***********
I got caught taking a pee in the local swimming pool today.
The lifeguard shouted at me so loud, I nearly fell in.
***********
I went to the pub last night and saw a fat chick dancing on a table. I said, "Nice legs."
The girl giggled and said with a smile, "Do you really think so."
I said "Definitely! Most tables would have collapsed by now. "
***********
Another senior joke
There was a bit of confusion at Gander Mountain this morning.
When I was ready to pay for my purchases of gun powder and bullets
the cashier said, "Strip down, facing me."
I did just as she had instructed.
When the hysterical shrieking and alarms finally subsided, I found
out that she was referring to my credit card.
I have been asked to shop elsewhere in the future.
They need to make their instructions to us seniors a little clearer!
When I was ready to pay for my purchases of gun powder and bullets
the cashier said, "Strip down, facing me."
I did just as she had instructed.
When the hysterical shrieking and alarms finally subsided, I found
out that she was referring to my credit card.
I have been asked to shop elsewhere in the future.
They need to make their instructions to us seniors a little clearer!
Todays riddles
The 5 Riddles...
THESE ARE THE BEST RIDDLES I HAVE SEEN...
IT SHARPENS THE GENES IN YOUR BRAIN
AND STALLS ALZHEIMER'S FOR YEARS
1. A murderer is condemned to death. He has to choose between three rooms. The first is full of raging fires,
the second is full of assassins with loaded guns, and the third is full of lions that haven't eaten in 3 years.
Which room is safest for him?
- / -
2. A woman shoots her husband. Then she holds him under water for over 5 minutes. Finally, she hangs him.
But 5 minutes later they both go out together and enjoy a wonderful dinner together. How can this be?
- / -
3. What is black when you buy it, red when you use it, and gray when you throw it away ?
- / -
4. Can you name three consecutive days without using the words Wednesday, Friday, or Sunday?
- / -
5. This is an unusual paragraph. I'm curious as to just how quickly you can find out what is so unusual
about it. It looks so ordinary and plain that you would think nothing was wrong with it. In fact, nothing is
wrong with it! It is highly unusual though. Study it and think about it, but you still may not find anything odd.
But if you work at it a bit, you might find out.
THE ANSWERS TO ALL FIVE RIDDLES ARE BELOW:
Answers:
1. The third room. Lions that haven't eaten in three years are dead.
That one was easy, right?
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2. The woman was a photographer. She shot a picture of her husband, developed it, and hung
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3. Charcoal, as it is used in barbecuing.
4. Sure you can name three consecutive days - yesterday, today, and tomorrow!
5. The letter "e" which is the most common letter used in the English language, does not
appear even once in the paragraph.
I'll be getting Alzheimer's any time now.
How did you do?
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