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 blues rocker Larry McCray. Enjoy!
Larry McCray - Soulshine
“To say you have no choice is to relieve yourself of responsibility.”
-- Patrick Ness
News and Opinion
Obama Vows to Seek Guantánamo Closure, But Immediate Action Could Prevent Hunger Strikers’ Deaths
'Torture Reinforcements' Not 'Medical Personnel' Arrive to Combat Gitmo Hunger Strike
The US military has confirmed that at least 40 "medical personnel" have arrived at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility in order to expand a force-feeding operation designed to counter an ongoing hunger strike by more than 100 prisoners protesting their indefinite detention and ill treatment. ...
Military authorities repeatedly claim that force-feedings are somehow necessary, but experts are unequivocal when they declare that the procedure is torture.
The United Nations Human Rights Commission considers the practice of force-feeding—in which detainees are strapped to a restraining chair, have tubes pushed up their nostrils and liquids pumped down their throats—a clear form of torture. In addition, the World Medical Association prohibits its physicians from participating in force-feeding and the American Medical Association has just sent a letter to the Pentagon calling the practice an affront to accepted medical ethics.
Rights Groups Call Out Obama's Political Cowardice on Guantanamo
U.S. President Barack Obama stated at a press conference on Tuesday that he would like to shut down the Guantanamo Bay prison but said that Congress was to blame for blockading any such action.
However, rights groups are calling Obama's bluff, saying he actually does have the power to transfer detainees and put an end to the indefinite detention, solitary confinement, and torture inherent within the military prison—without the approval of Congress—and that he simply lacks the political courage to do so.
CCR Demands Obama Take Action Available to Him to Close Gitmo: Use Waiver, Transfer 86 Cleared Men, Lift Yemen Repatriations Ban
The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) released the following statement in response to the president’s comments.
After representing men at Guantanamo whose hopes for justice have been raised and dashed so many times over the last eleven years, we praise the president for re-affirming his commitment to closing the base but take issue with the impression he strives to give that it is largely up to Congress. Here is a prescription for what he himself can begin to do today if he is really serious about closing the prison.
Congress is certainly responsible for imposing unprecedented restrictions on detainee transfers, but President Obama still has the power to transfer men right now. He should use the certification/waiver process created by Congress to transfer detainees, starting with the 86 men who have been cleared for release, including our client Djamel Ameziane.
Congress may have tied one hand behind his back, but he has tied the other: he should lift his self-imposed moratorium on transfers to Yemen regardless of a detainee's status. It's collective punishment based on citizenship, and needs to be reevaluated now.
President Obama should appoint a senior government official to shepherd the process of closure, and should give that person sufficient authority to resolve inter-agency disputes.
The President must demonstrate immediate, tangible progress toward the closure of Guantanamo or the men who are on hunger strike will die, and he will be ultimately responsible for their deaths.
As Bangladesh Toll Hits 400, Calls Grow to Grant Workers the Same Protections as Labels They Make
We found dogs and cats were being killed in China for fur collars in the Burlington Coat Factory company. They were putting nice fur collars on their jackets, and the fur came from dogs—killing dogs and cats in China. The U.S. Congress went berserk and passed a bill that nobody is going to kill dogs and cats on our watch. You can’t import dog fur or cat fur to the U.S. You can’t export it. You can’t sell it. So, there’s a precedent there. Our Congress had a backbone to protect dogs and cats. We need the same backbone to protect the rights of workers.
We have—there’s no reason in the world why the American people and the people in the United—Europe and U.K. and Australia or in Canada—there’s no reason that we can’t stand up and say, "If we can protect dogs and cats, we sure as heck can protect the rights of human beings," and we give these workers the rights—not setting wages, wages set in Bangladesh or they’re set in Cambodia or Vietnam or anywhere, but workers will have their internationally recognized worker rights so that they can organize a union and protect themselves. And Barack Obama, or then-Senator Barack Obama, endorsed this. So did Hillary Clinton. So did Joe Biden. We had about 27 members in the Senate. We had up to 170 members in the House—until the corporations found out what we were doing with the Decent Working Conditions and Fair Competition Act. Nothing is going to change until there’s laws. The codes of conduct are so ridiculous. And it’s—people should be embarrassed talking about these codes of conduct. We need laws.
The more things change...
Bangladesh 1971
Budget Cuts Devastate Meals On Wheels: Enrollment Slashed, Services Cancelled
Congress recently passed a bill to undo furloughs at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) caused by sequestration, but it left cuts to many other programs intact, including Meals on Wheels. The program brings hot meals to homebound seniors and adults with disabilities, thus providing them with nutrition and helping many of them live independently.
Directors of Meals on Wheels programs across the country spoke with ThinkProgress about how they are coping with decreased funding. Some, like Meals on Wheels of Western Broome in New York, are private nonprofits that don’t rely on government funding and will therefore be shielded. But by and large, the heads of these programs described facing deep cuts after having already slimmed down in response to lean times over the past few years.
2 More Grad Students Claim To Find Another Flaw In Reinhart-Rogoff Research
First, University of Massachusetts-Amherst grad student Thomas Herndon shot holes in their influential research paper, "Growth In A Time Of Debt," by pointing out several mistakes and omissions the Harvard economists had made. Now, two PhD students at the University of Missouri-Kansas City have a new paper that they say finds another flaw in that same research.
The students argue that Reinhart and Rogoff's paper leaned too heavily on data from one country, Japan, leading to all sorts of bad conclusions about the relationship between government debt and economic growth.
"The argument that high ratios of government debt-to-GDP cause low growth remains plagued by misconceptions, at least for nations which issue their own currency," wrote the UMKC students, Matthew Berg and Brian Hartley. They used the same data that Herndon used, correcting for Reinhart and Rogoff's earlier errors and omissions.
Berg and Hartley argued that, once you adjust for the outsize influence of Japan on the data, there is no evidence that high debt causes slow growth, as Reinhart and Rogoff strongly suggested in their original paper and in subsequent influential op-ed pieces. In fact, there is some evidence that the chain of events may work in the other direction, with slow growth leading to higher debt, Berg and Hartley wrote.
Euro Scrapheap: Many of 26 mn jobless hit road to earn living
The Austerity Delusion
Unable to take constructive action toward any common end, the U.S. Congress has recently been reduced to playing an ongoing game of chicken with the American economy. The debt-ceiling debacle gave way to the “fiscal cliff,” which morphed into the across-the-board cuts in military and discretionary spending known as “sequestration.” Whatever happens next on the tax front, further cuts in spending seem likely. And so a modified form of the austerity that has characterized policymaking in Europe since 2010 is coming to the United States as well; the only questions are how big the hit will end up being and who will bear the brunt. What makes all this so absurd is that the European experience has shown yet again why joining the austerity club is exactly the wrong thing for a struggling economy to do. ...
Austerity is a seductive idea because of the simplicity of its core claim -- that you can’t cure debt with more debt. This is true as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough. Three less obvious factors undermine the simple argument that countries in the red need to stop spending. The first factor is distributional, since the effects of austerity are felt differently across different levels of society. Those at the bottom of the income distribution lose proportionately more than those at the top, because they rely far more on government services and have little wealth with which to cushion the blows. The 400 richest Americans own more assets than the poorest 150 million; the bottom 15 percent, some 46 million people, live in households earning less than $22,050 per year. Trying to get the lower end of the income distribution to pay the price of austerity through cuts in public spending is both cruel and mathematically difficult. Those who can pay won’t, while those who can’t pay are being asked to do so.
The second factor is compositional; everybody cannot cut their way to growth at the same time. To put this in the European context, although it makes sense for any one state to reduce its debt, if all states in the currency union, which are one another’s major trading partners, cut their spending simultaneously, the result can only be a contraction of the regional economy as a whole. Proponents of austerity are blind to this danger because they get the relationship between saving and spending backward. They think that public frugality will eventually promote private spending. But someone has to spend for someone else to save, or else the saver will have no income to hold on to. Similarly, for a country to benefit from a reduction in its domestic wages, thus becoming more competitive on costs, there must be another country willing to spend its money on what the first country produces. If all states try to cut or save at once, as is the case in the eurozone today, then no one is left to do the necessary spending to drive growth.
The third factor is logical; the notion that slashing government spending boosts investor confidence does not stand up to scrutiny. As the economist Paul Krugman and others have argued, this claim assumes that consumers anticipate and incorporate all government policy changes into their lifetime budget calculations. When the government signals that it plans to cut its expenditures dramatically, the argument goes, consumers realize that their future tax burdens will decrease. This leads them to spend more today than they would have done without the cuts, thereby ending the recession despite the collapse of the economy going on all around them. The assumption that this behavior will actually be exhibited by financially illiterate, real-world consumers who are terrified of losing their jobs in the midst of a policy-induced recession is heroic at best and foolish at worst.
Why Are People with Health Insurance Going Bankrupt?
'The Gilded Age' Statistics Corporations Don't Want Workers, or Anyone, to See
If there's one thing about what many are calling the "The New Gilded Age," it's that well-known corporations—not to mention less well-known, but extremely powerful ones—will fight extremely hard to keep secret just how lopsided the economic disparities have become in recent decades between low-paid workers in the society and the executive and ruling class that have reaped the words of a globalized, top-heavy economy.
In but one example, the CEO of JC Penny in 2011 made 1,795 times the amount of money as the average paid worker at the retail chain. Overall, the CEO-to-worker gap is up nearly 20 percent since 2009. What the numbers show, once again, is that in the US economy, some workers are more equal than others.
And as Bloomberg news reports, new disclosure laws designed to reveal the income gap between top executives and regular workers within their companies has been stonewalled by an aggressive lobbying effort at the Security and Exchange Commission. Among the corporations waging war against requirements imposed by the Dodd-Frank financial law are McDonald's, General Electric, and AT&T—all led, according to Bloomberg, by "a Washington-based non-profit called the HR Policy Association, which represents top human resources executives at about 335 large corporations."
Obama Picks One of Telecom's Most Powerful Industry Lobbyists to Head FCC
Reports that President Obama will soon nominate a former venture capitalist and head of powerful tech industry lobbying groups as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission was met with dismay by groups pushing for a more progressive choice to fill the vacant seat at the powerful regulatory agency.
The president's pick, Tom Wheeler, has served as both an informal adviser and key fundraiser for Obama and was for many years the head of two powerful industry associations. ...
Craig Aaron, president of the media reform group Free Press, was quick to question the troublesome choice of someone with such deep ties to the telecom industry, big finance, and the elite political machine of the Democratic Party.
"The Federal Communications Commission needs a strong leader — someone who will use this powerful position to stand up to industry giants and protect the public interest," said Aaron. "On paper, Tom Wheeler does not appear to be that person."
Judge Sentenced to 28 Years in Prison for "Selling" Kids to Private Prisons
Accused of perpetrating a “profound evil,” former Pennsylvania judge Mark Ciavarella Jr. has been sentenced to 28 years in prison for illegally accepting money from a juvenile-prison developer while he spent years incarcerating thousands of young people.
Prosecutors said Ciavarella sent juveniles to jail as part of a “kids for cash” scheme involving Robert Mericle, builder of the PA and Western PA Child Care juvenile detention centers. The ex-judge was convicted in February of 12 counts that included racketeering, money laundering, mail fraud and tax evasion. ...
Once the case against Ciavarella surfaced, special investigative panels began reviewing cases he handled from 2003 to 2008. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court concluded that he denied about 5,000 juveniles, some as young as ten, their constitutional rights, leading to the vacating of their convictions.
Nestlé is Trying to Patent the Fennel Flower
Nigella sativa — more commonly known as fennel flower — has been used as a cure-all remedy for over a thousand years. It treats everything from vomiting to fevers to skin diseases, and has been widely available in impoverished communities across the Middle East and Asia.
But now Nestlé is claiming to own it, and filing patent claims around the world to try and take control over the natural cure of the fennel flower and turn it into a costly private drug.
The Dirty Truth About Keystone XL
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin'
Lean Socialist
Meet the retailers that won't help victims of Bangladesh factory collapse
MayDay: Thousands of Workers gather in NYC/Wingnuts stage sad counter rally
A Little Night Music
Larry McCray - Don't Need No Woman
Larry McCray - Run
Larry McCray - Gone For Good
Larry McCray Band - Blues Is My Business
Larry McCray - Smooth Sailing
Larry McCray - All Along the Watchtower
Larry McCray - Midnight Rambler
Larry McCray - Buck Naked
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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