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!
This evening's music features two giants of the Chicago blues Etta James and Elmore James (no relation). Enjoy!
Etta James - Something's Got A Hold On Me
"The Government should create, issue, and circulate all the currency and credits needed to satisfy the spending power of the Government and the buying power of consumers. By the adoption of these principles, the taxpayers will be saved immense sums of interest. Money will cease to be master and become the servant of humanity."
-- Abraham Lincoln
News and Opinion
Matt Taibbi on Big Banks’ Lack of Accountability
Al Gore: Democracy has been ‘hacked’ by big business
US democracy has been “hacked” by big business and needs to be reclaimed using the power of the internet to hold politicians to account, according to former US vice-president Al Gore.
He gave a blunt assessment of the extent to which private companies influence decision making in the US. “American politics has fallen into a state of disrepair,” Gore told the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show in an interview to mark the publication of his new book The Future.
He added: “It can be fixed, but we need to recognise that our democracy has been hacked … It has been taken over … and is being operated for purposes other than those for which it was intended.”
In the interview, Gore alluded to a 2010 US supreme court decision that banned restrictions on political donations by corporations in the name of free speech.
He agreed that US politics has become more divisive. “Certainly the level of partisanship and vitriol has been growing,” Gore said. “And I think it is directly connected to the influence of big money – anonymous contributors, corporations pretending to be people and pursuing their business plans in the guise of politics and encouraging many politicians to say things and do things that would not have been seen in the best interests of the public in years past.”
Creative Finance: Leaving Felons in Charge of the Banks
Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer on Whistleblowers and Prosecuting Bankers for Fraud
UK prepares new law to break up errant banks
British banks that fail to shield their day-to-day banking from risky investment activities could be broken up, finance minister George Osborne said on Monday, bowing to political pressure to come down harder on reckless lenders.
With Britain's banks buffeted by scandal and part-nationalized Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS.L) (RBS) set to be fined up to 500 million pounds this week for interest rate rigging, Osborne decided to "electrify" the ring-fence around banks' core retail activities with the threat of break-up.
"Our country has paid a higher price than any other major economy for what went so badly wrong in our banking system. The anger people feel is very real," Osborne said in a speech ahead of the publication of the banking reform legislation. ...
London's structural reforms go further than France and Germany, which, like the United States, are only demanding that banks separate out their proprietary trading, where they invest the banks' own funds, from the rest of their businesses.
Germany is however considering a new law that would see executives jailed for up to five years if found guilty of reckless behavior that jeopardizes their bank, a move described by a senior government source in Berlin as a signal to Europe, which is seen as not moving fast enough on the issue.
Osborne said Britain could ban directors of failed banks from working in the industry.
‘Fundamentally Unfair’: How States Tax The Richest 1 Percent At Half The Rate Of The Poor
The poorest Americans are subject to a tax rate at the state and local level that is twice as high as the tax rate paid by the wealthiest earners thanks to “fundamentally unfair” state tax laws, according to a new report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP). Middle-class taxpayers also pay higher effective rates than the wealthy.
When state, local, property, and sales taxes are taken into account, the poorest 20 percent of Americans pay an average effective tax rate of 11.1 percent, the report found. The middle 20 percent pays a 9.4 percent rate, while the rate for the top 1 percent is just 5.6 percent. The lack of progressive income taxes and an over-reliance on consumption taxes are the primary culprit, the report says.
In the 10 most regressive states, the poorest 20 percent pay a rate as much as six times as high as the rate for the richest 1 percent. Four of those states — Washington, Texas, Florida, and South Dakota — have no income tax; one, Tennessee, has a limited income tax that only applies to dividends and interest. In these five states, half to two-thirds of revenue comes from sales and excise taxes, well above the national average of one-third.
Zero Dark Thirty, Manhunt and Obama Admin. Justify Use of Torture
Obama Granted Sweeping Power in 'Secret' Cyber-Wars
Obama now 'proverbial judge, jury and executioner’ of cyber-strikes
U.S. President Barack Obama has been granted sweeping powers to order preemptive cyber-strikes on any given country, anonymous officials involved in a "secret legal review" of U.S. cyber warfare rules, told the New York Times Monday.
Speaking to the Times, the unnamed officials said quickly advancing tactics of cyber-warfare can be unleashed exclusively via the direct orders of the President—should the administration suspect signs of a major digital attack. If the president approves a strike, the government will be able to “attack adversaries by injecting them with destructive code—even if there is no declared war,” the Times reports. ...
"What we know about the legal questions Obama has grappled with is all secret. The development of 'cyber-security' policy or cyber warfare policies indicate a further expansion of the body of secret law under Obama," Kevin Gosztola writes at FireDogLake.
What we do know, as the anonymous officials told the Times, is that under the new cyber-warfare rules, which utilize an increasingly loose interpretation of preemptive war, President Obama can initiative cyber-warfare on countries that we are not officially at war with—much like the highly controversial drones strikes, or targeted assassinations, that Obama has approved in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia in recent years.
"The rules will be highly classified, just as those governing drone strikes have been closely held," the Times reports. "John O. Brennan, Mr. Obama’s chief counter-terrorism adviser and his nominee to run the Central Intelligence Agency, played a central role in developing the administration’s policies regarding both drones and cyber-warfare."
Are Drones Destroying our Democracy?
Defense Secretary Panetta, Gen. Dempsey: 'We're Not Leaving Afghanistan in 2014'
Dismissing zero troops option, the pair says US can expect to see "enduring presense"
As outgoing U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and General Martin Dempsey made media rounds on Sunday, they brought a joint message: the U.S. is not leaving Afghanistan in 2014.
Speaking to CNN's Candy Crowley on Sunday, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Dempsey dismissed the idea of a total withdrawal, saying, "no one has suggested zero [troops] to me." ...
On NBC's Meet the Press, Panetta also dismissed a White House option of zero troops past 2014, saying he felt the President would remain committed to agreements made in Chicago, referring to the summit that outlined plans for a "NATO-Afghanistan partnership" that would continue past 2014 and provide "an enduring presence" there.
Empire : Syria and the US: The complicity of silence
Rosa Parks' Stamp on American History
Today, to honor the Feb. 4 centennial of the birth of Rosa Parks, the United States Postal Service has issued a Rosa Parks stamp. Last year, a stone carving of Parks was added to the National Cathedral. In 2005, she became the first woman and second African American to lie in honor in the nation's Capitol and, through a special act of Congress, a statue of her was ordered placed in the Capitol.
Yet these tributes to Rosa Parks rest on a narrow and distorted vision of her legacy. As the story goes, a quiet Montgomery, Ala., seamstress with a single act challenged Southern segregation, catapulted a young Martin Luther King Jr. into national leadership and ushered in the modern civil rights movement. ... One of the greatest distortions of the Parks fable is the way it portrays her as meek, missing the resolute political sensibility that identified Malcolm X as her personal hero. Arriving in Detroit in 1957, she spent more than half her life fighting racial injustice in the Jim Crow North. Describing the city as the "promised land that wasn't," the Parks family lived in the "heart of the ghetto" and found racism in Detroit "almost as widespread as Montgomery." Having volunteered on his upstart political campaign, Parks was hired by the newly elected Rep. John Conyers in 1965 to be part of his Detroit staff, where she worked on issues such as police brutality, open housing, welfare and job discrimination -- the plagues of Northern racism.
Her long-standing political commitments to self-defense, black history, economic justice, police accountability and black political empowerment intersected with key aspects of the Black Power movement, and she took part in numerous mobilizations in the late 1960s and 1970s. An internationalist, she opposed U.S. involvement in Vietnam, demonstrated at the South African embassy to condemn apartheid and contested U.S. policy in Central America. Eight days after 9/11, she joined other activists in a letter calling for justice, not vengeance, insisting the U.S. must work with the international community and warning against retaliation or war.
On Rosa Parks’ 100th Birthday, Recalling Her Rebellious Life Before and After the Montgomery Bus
NYPD accused of violating civil rights agreement in new lawsuit
The New York Police Department’s surveillance of the local Muslim community constitutes a violation of rules governing the department’s monitoring of political activity, according to a lawsuit filed Monday in U.S. District Court.
The Associated Press reported that the suit, filed by a group of civil rights lawyers, accuses the department of breaking from the Handschu guidelines (PDF), established in 1985. The agreement sets rules for how long the department can conduct an investigation, as well as for the types of records it can keep.
The suit seeks an injunction stopping the NYPD from conducting further surveillance without evidence of wrongdoing, as well as the appointment of a court auditor to oversee department activities, saying the actions of the department’s Zone Assessment Unit constituted “substantial persuasive evidence that [the department is] conducting investigations into organizations and individuals associated with the Muslim faith and the Muslim community in New York, and have been doing so for years, using intrusive methods, without a reasonable indication of unlawful activity, or a criminal predicate of any sort.”
The Keystone XL Tar Sands Climate Threat
NY Governor Proposes Post-Sandy Conservation Over Reconstruction
In a rare move for coastal preservation, New York Governor Andrew M. Cuomo is rebuking the trend of knee-jerk rebuilding and rampant coastline development by proposing a buyout of flood-prone properties damaged by Superstorm Sandy to restore as wetlands and other "natural buffers."
On Friday, the Governor's aides presented their hurricane response plan, including the proposed buyout program, to federal officials. The state is proposing to spend as much as $400 million of the $51 billion disaster relief package, which Congress approved last week, on the purchase of the "10,000 or so homes built on the 100-year flood plain."
As NBC Meteorologist John Morales wrote on Twitter, "Finally! Someone proposes a better idea than 'we shall rebuild!'"
A 'carbon bomb' at the top of Keystone XL Pipeline
Check out Agathena's diary at the link above that features this excellent video!
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin'
Banks, at Least, Had a Friend in Geithner
Barack Obama, Drone Ranger
Breaking the Chains of Debt Peonage
A 'carbon bomb' at the top of Keystone XL Pipeline
A Little Night Music
Etta James - I'd Rather Go Blind
Etta James - I Just Want To Make Love To You
Etta James- seven day fool
Etta James - Tell Mama
Chuck Berry & Etta James - Rock and Roll Music
Etta James - Dance With Me Henry
Etta James, Keith Richards, Robert Cray - Hoochie Coochie Gal
Etta James - In The Basement
Etta James - Rock Me baby
Elmore James - Sunnyland
Elmore James - Standing At The Crossroads
Elmore James - Every Day I Have The Blues
Dust My Broom - Elmore James
Elmore James - Done Somebody Wrong
Elmore James - Shake Your Money Maker
It's National Pie Day!
The election is over, it's a new year and it's time to work on real change in new ways... and it's National Pie Day. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to tell you a little more about our new site and to start getting people signed up.
Come on over and sign up so that we can send you announcements about the site, the launch, and information about participating in our public beta testing.
Why is National Pie Day the perfect opportunity to tell you more about us? Well you'll see why very soon. So what are you waiting for?! Head on over now and be one of the first!
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