Welcome! "The Evening Blues" is a casual community diary (published Monday - Friday, 8:00 PM Eastern) where we hang out, share and talk about news, music, photography and other things of interest to the community.
Just about anything goes, but attacks and pie fights are not welcome here. This is a community diary and a friendly, peaceful, supportive place for people to interact.
Everyone who wants to join in peaceful interaction is very welcome here.
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Hey! Good Evening!
Tonight's music features two harmonica players with somewhat different styles, Sonny Terry's nephew and sometimes recording partner, J.C. Burris and lateblooming r&b star Buster Brown. Enjoy!
J.c. Burris - Hand Jive
"What you saw, I think, anyway, was the end product of the president’s consuming naivete as regards the American political process, as well as the end product of thirty years of a Democratic Party that has slid so far to the center-right that a Democratic president found himself arguing with a “severely conservative” Republican candidate over the issues of how much the Democratic president had cut out of the budget, how many regulations he’d trimmed, how much more devoted to the middle-class-kick-in-the-balls Simpson-Bowles “plan” he is, and how he would “reform” Social Security and Medicare — and, frankly, a Democratic president losing some of those arguments to his left. A Democratic president got through an entire debate and didn’t mention unions at all, even though the fact that our teachers are unionized here in Massachusetts is a big part of the reason why Romney got to brag on how good our education system is [...] somewhere, Al From, that greasy corporatist lackey, was smiling. He’s got the political process of his dreams. "
-- Charlie Pierce
News and Opinion
U.S. military’s secret experiment sprayed radiation on low-income housing
A college professor from St. Louis, Missouri has released research claiming that the U.S. Army conducted secret Cold War tests by spraying toxic radioactive chemicals on cities like St. Louis and Corpus Christi.
St. Louis Community College-Meramec sociology professor Lisa Martino-Taylor told The Associated Press that her research showed that the Army may have sprayed radioactive particles with zinc cadmium sulfide while claiming that it was testing a smoke screen that could prevent Russians from observing St. Louis from the air.
Those tests were concentrated in predominately-black areas of the city, which Army documents called “a densely populated slum district.”
In 1994, the Army confirmed to Congress that St. Louis was chosen because it resembled Russian cities that the U.S. might have to attack with biological weapons.
Syria Formally Apologizes for Cross-Border Shelling into Turkey
Turkey’s deputy prime minister on Thursday said Syria has admitted it was responsible for the shelling that killed five civilians in Turkey on Wednesday and has formally apologized for the deaths.
The regime of Bashar al-Assad not only issued a formal apology, says Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Besir Atalay, but it reassured the United Nations that “such an incident will not occur again.”
Concerns that Syria’s internal conflict might be spilling over into neighboring countries and might prompt an outbreak of war were heightened sharply on Wednesday when the Turkish military launched artillery attacks against Syria in response to cross-border shelling which killed five civilians in southeastern Turkey.
Although the US has been meddling in Syria’s conflict – by sending aid to the rebel fighters and fueling the violence – many in the US still don’t see an outbreak of war in Syria as workable.
The Debate: What They Didn't Talk About
This is a hint of what last night's debates might have looked like if candidates representing the electorate's more diverse set of ideas were not blocked out of the debates by the political duopoly's collusion to silence competing opinions and ideas:
Live Debate: How to Create Jobs? Obama, Mitt Romney, Jill Stein and Rocky Anderson Respond
Jill Stein and Rocky Anderson Offer Ideas on Social Security, Entitlements
For more follow this link:
Expanding the Debate Exclusive: Third Party Candidates Break the Sound Barrier As Obama-Romney Spar
One in seven US seniors live in poverty
Canada’s Housing Bubble Set to Burst
Canada’s housing bubble is about to burst, and when it does, hundreds of billions of dollars in equity will be wiped out, unemployment will spike, and the economy will sink into a protracted slump. We know this will happen, because the same scenario unfolded in the US, Japan, Ireland and Spain. Housing bubbles always end badly.
Housing prices in Canada have more than doubled in the last 10 years while wages have remained relatively flat. That tells us that the soaring prices are not based on fundamentals, but on low interest rates, lax lending standards and speculation.
In relative terms, the situation in Canada is more extreme than it was in the US because Canadians have taken on more personal debt. Here are the details from an article in Friday’s The Globe and Mail:
“Over the past 10 years, household debt in Canada has risen by 135 per cent, while disposable income and nominal GDP have risen by 54 per cent. Household debt growth over the past decade has risen nearly three times as fast as income growth, a trend that is clearly unsustainable. The average Canadian now has a record-high debt load equal to 154 per cent of their disposable income.” (“Is household debt threatening Canada’s economy”, The Globe and Mail)
At the peak, US household debt-to-disposable income was just 125%, far lower than Canada’s.
How Wall Street Profits from Kicking Black People Off Their Land
President Barack Obama gave an important speech this past Tuesday on the "modern day slavery" of human trafficking. On the very next day, The New York Times ran an article on the injustice looming over direct descendants of slaves here in the United States. Those descendants-the Geechee of Sapelo Island, Georgia-stand to lose their once "invaluable" land for the same reason that most traditional black and brown cultures have: someone else has noticed that a profit can be made by taking it.
The Sapelo Island dispossession is the latest example of the way in which our economy creates and thrives off of inequity. ... As the Times details, most of the private property on Sapelo Island is Geechee owned. Sitting on scarce property, their coastal land has attracted the attention of investors, who have been slowly buying it.
These below-the-radar purchases have suddenly led to a massive tax reassessment by the local government of Geechee property. In just one year taxes have leapt for many cash-strapped residents by a whopping 500 percent. The sky-high tax bills could accomplish what others have been unable to do so far: clear the island of the Geechee through the legal dispossession of their property.
Oxfam: Land snapped up by corporations could have fed nearly 1 billion
In a report, published on Thursday, Oxfam says the global land rush is out of control and urges the World Bank to freeze its investments in large-scale land acquisitions to send a strong signal to global investors to stop “land grabs”.
“More than 60% of investments in agricultural land by foreign investors between 2000 and 2010 were in developing countries with serious hunger problems. But two-thirds of those investors plan to export everything they produce on the land. Nearly 60% of the deals have been to grow crops that can be used for biofuels,” says the report.
Very few, if any, of these land investments benefit local people or help to fight hunger, says Oxfam. “Instead, the land is either being left idle, as speculators wait for its value to increase … or it is predominantly used to grow crops for export, often for use as biofuels.”
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin'
The Machine to Cut the Safety Net Gets Started
Scarce Jobs, Slashed Salaries, and Schools Without Books: The Ugly Consequences of Austerity in Athens
Drone-Court Advantage
The President Agreed With Mitt Romney on Social Security in the Debate
A Little Night Music
J.C. Burris - Black President
J C Burris - Highway Blues
J C Burris - Smoke Filled Room
Sticks McGhee W/Sonny Terry + JC Burris
Sonny & JC - You keep on doggin' me
Buster Brown - Fannie Mae
Buster Brown - Sugar Babe
Buster Brown - Is You Is or Is You Ain't My Baby
Buster Brown - Don't Dog Your Woman
Buster Brown - Two Women
Buster Brown - The Madison Shuffle
Buster Brown - Raise A Ruckus Tonight
We believe in fighting with another purpose -- waging peace.
While we will write and debate about many topics on our new site, one that will always be in sharp focus is the issue of war and peace.
"Like any other people, like fathers, mothers, sons and daughters in every land, when the issue of peace or war has been put squarely to the American people, they have registered for peace."
~ Paul Robeson
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