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.
|
Hey! Good Evening!
This evening's music features R&B singer and piano player Screamin Jay Hawkins. Enjoy!
Screamin Jay Hawkins - I Put A Spell On You
"Do you know what the difference is between the United States and Hell? At least the road to Hell is paved."
-- Rip Spindragon
News and Opinion
Memo to Washington: The Occupy Movement Lives
Today, September 17, marks the second anniversary of the Occupy movement. When that movement is mentioned at all in Washington, which is rarely, the tone is dismissive. It didn’t have coherent goals, someone may say. The movement needed an electoral strategy, someone else will add. No wonder it didn’t last.
Today, September 17, marks the second anniversary of the Occupy movement. When that movement is mentioned at all in Washington, which is rarely, the tone is dismissive. It didn’t have coherent goals, someone may say. The movement needed an electoral strategy, someone else will add. No wonder it didn’t last.
Occupy was the product of a deep-seated yearning for economic justice, equality of opportunity, and a return to the kind of economy that lifted people out of poverty and spawned a large and prosperous middle class. It was the fruit of widespread and intense anger at Wall Street and corporate America, and against those in the political class who helped them hijack the economy.
If you don’t believe that last part, just ask Larry Summers.
This week the administration is reacting to another anniversary. It’s been five years since the economic crisis began. Unfortunately, the White House hasn’t gotten the message yet. Its report on the government response to the 2008 crisis, issued this week, consists almost entirely of triumphal pronouncements that will ring false to millions of suffering Americans. There is only one small paragraph in the entire 49-page document devoted to the theme of “there is still work to do.” ...
The White House hasn’t learned the lesson of the Occupy movement: The American people want an economy that works for everyone. The public understands that the “1 percent” have been diverting our nation’s wealth from the “99 percent” – both terms that Occupy placed in the national lexicon. And people know that too little has been done to redress the imbalance.
Obama Admits: The 99% Are Getting Screwed On His Watch
Appearing on the Sunday morning show of ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos," Obama was pressed by the host to respond to a recent study by University of California researchers that shows the rich have gotten richer while the poor continue to languish.
"95 percent of the gains to the top one percent. That is so striking," declared Stephanopoulos.
Obama responded, "It is. And the folks at—in the middle and at the bottom haven't seen wage or income growth, not just over the last three, four years, but over the last 15 years."
Obama went on to defend his record, claiming that his push for the Affordable Care Act, "fair" taxes, and a "strengthened" banking system will somehow shift the trend.
A New Raw Deal: Corporations to Profit While Workers, Planet Pay the Price
Trade representatives of nearly 50 countries, led by the United States and the members of the European Union, have since last year been engaged in initial discussions on a framework for what is being called the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA). This week, officials meeting in Geneva are marking the beginning of the substantive next phase of talks, with governments now offering their views on individual aspects of any eventual agreement.
“The TISA negotiations largely follow the corporate agenda of using ‘trade’ agreements to bind countries to an agenda of extreme liberalisation and deregulation in order to ensure greater corporate profits at the expense of workers, farmers, consumers and the environment,” an open letter from the groups, addressed to trade ministers both involved in the TISA negotiations and those not participating, states. ...
Sources within some of the negotiating countries say this could mean 90 percent of all services, according to Public Services International (PSI), a trade-union federation in over 140 countries. That means nearly all aspects of a society’s economy could suddenly be required to be deregulated and opened to foreign competition.
“We believe this deal is about transferring public services into the hands of private and foreign corporations motivated only by profit,” PSI General Secretary Rosa Pavanelli said Monday.
“This will undermine people’s rights and affordable access to vital public services such as healthcare, water and sanitation, energy, education, social services and pensions, and exploit common goods and natural resources.”
House bill would cut $4B a year from food stamps
The House is expected to consider a bill this week that would cut food stamps by an estimated $4 billion annually and allow states to put broad new work requirements in place for recipients.
The legislation also would end government waivers that have allowed able-bodied adults who don't have dependents to receive food stamps indefinitely. ...
One in seven Americans use food stamps, now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and the cost of the program has more than doubled in the past five years.
It is unclear whether the Republican leaders have enough votes for passage. Democrats have lined up solidly in opposition, and some moderate Republicans have indicated they may not be able to stomach the cuts.
Anniversary present for Wall Street banks: A financial speculation tax
As we mark the fifth anniversary of the Wall Street bailouts, it is clear that little has changed in the way they do business. They are still engaging in the same sorts of market manipulation and tax gaming as they did before the crisis.
The weak conditions on the bailout money had no lasting effect in areas like executive compensation. The industry itself is more concentrated than ever as the big banks used the crisis to merge with other banks, making them even bigger. And the Dodd-Frank reforms have been watered down to the extent that many are now pointless. ...
This brings us back to the problem of dealing with an out-of-control financial sector. The efforts to do finely-focused fixes in Dodd-Frank largely went nowhere. This calls for a different approach: regulating the industry with a sledge hammer known as a financial speculation tax.
The idea is simple and old. We can place a small tax on financial transactions to discourage rapid turnover. Eleven countries in the European Union are planning to impose a tax of 0.1 percent on stock trades and 0.01 percent on most derivative transactions. Senator Tom Harkin and Representative Peter DeFazio have proposed a tax of 0.03 percent on both types of transactions. Representative Keith Ellison has proposed a somewhat higher tax.
Greek Workers Rise for Week of Anti-Austerity Strikes
Greek government to enforce more public sector cuts in exchange for Troika 'rescue loan'
A week of public sector strikes in Greece began with a bang on Monday morning as thousands of public school teachers, university professors, and other public sector employees walked off the job in protest of the latest set of austerity measures in the poverty stricken country.
"No to extended leave, redundancies and mandatory transfers," read a sign outside a high school in Athens. At the heart of the strikes this week is the Greek government's "redeployment plan," in which civil servants will be moved involuntarily into other jobs, face salary cuts, or lose employment altogether—a measure designed to shrink the state sector. More than 40,000 workers will be affected over the next two years.
In exchange for the next installment of EU-IMF so-called rescue loans, Greek leaders will "redeploy" 12,500 civil servants by the end of September.
Thousands of workers, including school guards, teachers and public hospital doctors marched through the streets of Athens to parliament, chanting "Let's kick the government, the EU and the IMF out!" Reuters reports.
10 Arrests in 87 Minutes: The Anatomy of the NYPD’s Protest Dispersal Process
On the eve of the second anniversary of the Occupy movement, two video activists, have released a 10 minute short film providing perhaps the most detailed civilian account to date of the NYPD’s process of crowd dispersion during mass mobilizations. The video, shot on September 17th, 2012, during Occupy Wall Street’s first anniversary celebration action, details 10 arrests that took place over the span of 87 minutes. While at first glance many of the individual arrests appear to be arbitrary, careful analysis from the videographers illustrates a larger picture wherein the NYPD’s actions are calculated and designed to derail the protestors ability to effectively assemble.
“On the eve of the second anniversary of OWS it bears remembering that the occupations didn’t simply fizzle and dissipate,” says Paul Sullivan, who videotaped the police response, “this video, shot last year on the morning of the first anniversary, not only reminds us of how difficult it is to protest when the NYPD is determined to shut you down, but also how the NYPD continues to supress civil liberties in order to stamp out the movement.”
The Origins of Our Police State
Under a series of Supreme Court rulings we have lost the rights to protect ourselves from random searches, home invasions, warrantless wiretapping and eavesdropping and physical abuse. Police units in poor neighborhoods function as armed gangs. The pressure to meet departmental arrest quotas—the prerequisite for lavish federal aid in the “war on drugs”—results in police routinely seizing people at will and charging them with a laundry list of crimes, often without just cause. Because many of these crimes carry long mandatory sentences it is easy to intimidate defendants into “pleading out” on lesser offenses. The police and the defendants know that the collapsed court system, in which the poor get only a few minutes with a public attorney, means there is little chance the abused can challenge the system. And there is also a large pool of willing informants who, to reduce their own sentences, will tell a court anything demanded of them by the police.
The tyranny of law enforcement in poor communities is a window into our emerging police state. These thuggish tactics are now being used against activists and dissidents. And as the nation unravels, as social unrest spreads, the naked face of police repression will become commonplace. Totalitarian systems always seek license to engage in this kind of behavior by first targeting a demonized minority. Such systems demand that the police, to combat the “lawlessness” of the demonized minority, be, in essence, emancipated from the constraints of the law. The unrestricted and arbitrary subjugation of one despised group, stripped of equality before the law, conditions the police to employ these tactics against the wider society. ...
Our failure to defend the rights of the poor in the name of law and order, our demonization of young black men, our acceptance that they can be stripped of the power to protect themselves from police abuse or find equality before the law, mean that their fate will soon become ours.
From Mosques to Soccer Leagues: Inside the NYPD’s Secret Spy Unit Targeting Muslims, Activists
Wyden, Udall Statement on Intelligence Officials Lack of Understanding of Bulk Collection Program
Documents declassified last week clearly show that court orders authorizing the NSA’s bulk collection of phone records were consistently violated by the NSA. These documents also show that the government repeatedly made serious misrepresentations to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court when seeking authorization to conduct this bulk collection. The intelligence community’s defense was that these violations were occurring because no one had a full grasp of how the bulk collection program actually worked.
"If the assertion that ineptitude and not malice was the cause of these ongoing violations is taken at face value, it is perfectly reasonable for Congress and the American people to question whether a program that no one fully understood was an effective defense of American security at all. The fact that this program was allowed to operate this way raises serious concerns about the potential for blind spots in the NSA’s surveillance programs. It also supports our position that bulk collection ought to be ended.
"The government’s misrepresentations inevitably led to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court being consistently misinformed as it made binding rulings on the meaning of U.S. surveillance law. This underscores our concern that intelligence agencies’ assessments and descriptions about particular collection programs — even significant ones — are not always accurate. It is up to Congress, the courts and the public to ask the tough questions and require intelligence officials to back their assertions up with actual evidence. It is not enough to simply defer to these officials’ conclusions without challenging them.
NYT Editor Calls Out Own Paper for Ignoring NSA, Israel Revelations
New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan on Monday publicly challenged her paper's decision to ignore last week's revelations that the National Security Agency shares unfiltered raw data intelligence files with the Israeli government.
The story, which was based on classified documents revealed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and reported by Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Ewen MacAskill in the Guardian, was completely omitted from the globally-influential New York Times, despite being covered by the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and The Washington Post. ...
Sullivan openly declares that, in her view, the findings of a secret intelligence sharing agreement with Israel is in fact newsworthy, and the New York Times had an obligation to report it. ...
The New York Times has been widely criticized for biased pro-Israel coverage that ignores human rights abuses, war crimes, and civil liberties violations by this close U.S. ally.
CIA won't disclose lobbying reports
The Central Intelligence Agency won't make public lobbying disclosures by its contractors, claiming that release could compromise classified information or intelligence sources and methods.
In a response to a POLITICO Freedom of Information Act request, the CIA could "neither confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence of records" related to federal government contractors and their lobbying activities.
The grounds? "The fact of the existence or nonexistence of requested records is currently and properly classified and is intelligence sources and methods information that is protected from disclosure," the agency wrote.
Any company or entity that receives money from the federal government is required to file an additional, supplemental lobbying disclosure form. ...
Those additional disclosures — called OMB form LLLs — plainly state that they should be made available to public inspection.
Barrett Brown Can't Talk About Why the Government Wants to Jail Him for a Century
In the US government's campaign against journalists, Barrett Brown is one of the lesser-known victims. And now even less will be forthcoming about his story, as the Texas-based writer, satirist and Internet activist is under a federal court gag order, forbidden to talk about his case or the charges that could land him in prison for more than 100 years. ...
In his September 4 ruling for a gag-order, U.S. District Judge Sam Lindsay sided with a prosecution motion arguing that a gag should be imposed because Brown was trying to use the media to…defend himself:
Assistant U.S. Attorney Candina S. Heath told Lindsay that Brown has tried to manipulate the media from behind bars for his benefit.
She called as a witness an FBI agent who had listened to jail recordings of Brown's conversations with journalists and others about the publicity he sought.
In her motion, Heath said the government believes Brown's attorney "coordinates and/or approves of his use of the media." She also said most of the publicity about Brown has contained false information and "gross fabrications," according to the motion.
If trying to get a hearing in the media for one side or the other in a trial is grounds for a gag, it's a wonder that any case escapes silencing. Moreover, it's passing strange that a federal judge would gag a journalist, effectively declaring the court a First Amendment-free zone– particularly in a case where the nature and practice of journalism is the core issue. No doubt many other government institutions–whether it's the IRS, the CIA or the EPA–think that many discussions of their operations contain "gross fabrications," but it's absurd to think they should therefore have the right to prevent citizens from talking about them. Why, then, should the courts–supposed to be the guardians of the Bill of Rights–be given that power?
Edward Snowden Goes Unrecognized In Russia While Awaiting Family Visit
National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden is expecting a visit from his parents and potentially his grandparents, his lawyer told Kremlin news channel RT. ...
Snowden is living in a secret location under private guard but is free to move around the country since receiving temporary asylum in August, Kucherena added. “He takes walks, he can travel. He travels,” Kucherena said. “No one has recognized him so far.”
Brazil's President Rousseff Cancels US Visit Over NSA Spying
Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff has canceled her trip to the U.S. over spying by the National Security Agency. ...
Rousseff had a 20-minute phone conversation with President Obama on Monday to discuss the revelations that the NSA had spied on Latin American citizens including the presidents of Brazil and Mexico, but Rousseff was unsatisfied with Obama's explanations for the surveillance, the Brazilian newspaper reported.
The official statement called the "illegal practices" of the NSA an "assault on national sovereignty and individuals' rights." ...
In a further sign of spying backlash, Rousseff is pushing legislative measures for her country to "divorce itself from the U.S.-centric Internet" by storing Internet data from Facebook and Google locally to keep it out of the reach of the NSA's prying eyes.
UN Syria Report Confirms Chemical Weapons Used, Culprit Still Not Known
Israel Prefers That Al-Qaeda Rules Syria
Even Assad's defeat by al Qaeda-aligned rebels would be preferable to Damascus's current alliance with Israel's arch-foe Iran, Ambassador Michael Oren said in an interview with the Jerusalem Post. ...
Though old enemies, a stable stand-off has endured between the two countries during Assad's rule and at times Israel had pursued peace talks with him in hope of divorcing Syria from Tehran and Iranian-sponsored Hezbollah guerrillas in neighboring Lebanon.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had long avoided openly calling for the Syrian president's fall. Some Israeli officials now worry that radical Sunni Islamist insurgents fighting Assad will eventually turn their guns on the Jewish state.
But with Assad under U.S.-led condemnation for his forces' alleged chemical attack on a rebel district of Damascus on August 21, Oren said Israel's message was that he must go.
"We always wanted Bashar Assad to go, we always preferred the bad guys who weren't backed by Iran to the bad guys who were backed by Iran," Oren said in the interview, excerpted on Tuesday before its full publication on Friday.
War Dividend: US arms firms ready to cash in if Syria attacked
The Evening Greens
Oil and fracking chemicals spill into Colorado’s floodwaters
Heavy rains returned to Colorado on Sunday and hampered rescue efforts after last week’s flash floods. The confirmed death toll has risen to seven, and hundreds are still unaccounted for. An estimated 1,500 homes are destroyed. Some 1,000 people in Larimer County, north of Boulder, were awaiting airlifts that never came on Sunday — they were called off because of the foul weather.
The floods have also triggered other problems that have gotten a lot less media attention: Fracking infrastructure has been inundated and its toxic contents have spilled out. Pipelines that transport fossil fuels are sagging and snapping under pressure. Tanks that store chemicals and polluted water are being overwhelmed and toppling over. Oil and gas wells are flooding. ...
East Boulder County United, a group that fights fracking, has been < a href="https://www.facebook.com/EastBoulderCountyUnited">posting photographs on its Facebook page of fracking tanks and other equipment toppled over or submerged by floodwaters. Blogger TXsharon has also been posting updates and photographs.
Meanwhile, experts are beginning to discuss the links between climate change and the floods. The flooding was worsened by drought and wildfires, both of which have been linked to global warming and which left the ground dry and hard. That reduced the amount of water that the soil could absorb from the unusual late-summer inundation.
Soybean farming blamed for increased deforestation in Brazilian Amazon
Fighting deforestation of the Amazon for cattle raising and farming is one of the great rallying cries of the world’s conservationists.
And, while soybean growing’s impact on the vast jungle has eased since a moratorium imposed in 2006, Brazil’s huge soybean industry is still indirectly responsible for the felling of trees.
The mechanism goes like this: soybean growers take over land that has already been deforested, worked and worn out by cattle ranchers. The ranchers then move on to burn down fresh areas of Amazon. ...
Back in 2006, amid pressure from conservationists, the country’s main soybean exporters stopped buying crops grown on deforested land. ...
Persistent deforestation of the Amazon to grow soybean stems from the fact that some buyers, mainly Chinese, have not signed the moratorium.
1,000 tonnes of polluted Fukushima water dumped in sea after Typhoon Man-yi
The operator of the leaking Fukushima nuclear plant said Tuesday that it dumped more than 1,000 tons of polluted water into the sea after a typhoon raked the facility.
Typhoon Man-yi smashed into Japan on Monday, bringing with it heavy rain that caused flooding in some parts of the country, including the ancient city of Kyoto.
The rain also lashed near the broken plant run by Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO), swamping enclosure walls around clusters of water tanks containing toxic water that was used to cool broken reactors. ...
The utility said about 1,130 tonnes of water with low levels of radiation — below the 30 becquerels of strontium per litre safety limit imposed by Japanese authorities — were released into the ground.
But the company also said at one site where water was found contaminated beyond the safety limit workers could not start the water pump quick enough in the torrential rain, and toxic water had leaked from the enclosure for several minutes.
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin'
No One Reads Kafka in Gitmo
Boulder County activists concerned about flooded oil, gas wells
The Banality of Systemic Evil
Occupy Wall Street, two years on: we're still the 99%
The shame of interacting with trans women
“FBI will soon have equivalent of 20 pcs of intel on every American–and they share this broadly"
A Little Night Music
Screamin' Jay Hawkins - Frenzy
Screamin' Jay Hawkins -Whistling Past The Graveyard
Screamin' Jay Hawkins - Constipation Blues
Screamin' Jay Hawkins - Little Demon
Screamin' Jay Hawkins - Alligator Wine
Screamin´ Jay Hawkins - Voodoo
Screamin' Jay Hawkins - Yellow Coat
Screamin´ Jay Hawkins - I Hear Voices
Screamin' Jay Hawkins - The Whammy
Screamin` Jay Hawkins - You Put The Spell On Me
Screamin` Jay Hawkins - Heart Attack & Vine
Screamin Jay Hawkins - I Am The Cool
Screamin' Jay Hawkins - Shut Your Mouth When You Sneeze
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!
|