the nameless uncarved blog

after Lisa Samuels

2012-01-31T10:47:00.000-08:00

afterLisa Samuels

brakesthat undo where he
makescover a deep country
bottomgaze decorates inner chamber seats
wayway up as inner lens when
soldiershe lets him go?

shecame placid-dredge came
exposingcurves a gladdening wheat
uponits casters
courage she curves over
affection'srhyme he fears

afat sparrow-brake why
sheopens decorative feet-end only I
exposedus

for Lisa Samuels

2012-01-31T10:19:00.001-08:00

...

for Lisa Samuels

bluehis skin when

shecomes-breaks, the top stills

out-of-space

peripheryhungered kernel hid
whom?

estrangementnegligent roses beneath

mirrormirror mirror
when

themuddy week renamed
closedlicks

angel

fear

...

from FOCUS.

2012-01-31T09:50:00.001-08:00

...

Readingher cover

whereit leaves

makesthe bottom

changeplaces

Thecore freed

fromits shell –

showinghow

collisionmatters

Bread

Upon

the

Waters

Ona clear day

onerecalled

circuitssoldered

inthe Philippines

...

Big Oil’s Puppets Love Keystone XL

2012-01-30T14:15:00.001-08:00

Antonio Negri - A Revolt That Never Ends (1 of 5)

2012-01-30T14:13:00.001-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04LtQu1prF8

Important People

2012-01-30T14:12:00.001-08:00

http://imppeople.blogspot.com/

Will Progressives and Libertarians Abandon Major Parties?

2012-01-30T14:07:00.001-08:00

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=7856

A Family's Cat Is Murdered In the Name of Politics and Conservatism

2012-01-27T07:03:00.001-08:00

http://legalschnauzer.blogspot.com/2012/01/familys-cat-is-murdered-in-name-of.html

In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad

2012-01-27T06:50:00.001-08:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/business/ieconomy-apples-ipad-and-the-human-costs-for-workers-in-china.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

A staggering manufacturing system in China has made it possible for Apple and other companies to make devices almost as quickly as they can be dreamed up, but for workers, it can be dangerous.

RIP Theo Angelopoulos

2012-01-27T06:24:00.001-08:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/jan/25/theo-angelopoulos

Build a Pocket Theremin on the Cheap | Popular Science

2011-12-30T09:40:00.000-08:00

Build a Pocket Theremin on the Cheap | Popular Science

Archaic Torso of Apollo

2011-12-30T09:20:00.000-08:00

Archaic Torso of Apollo
by Rainer Maria Rilke translated by Stephen Mitchell

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could 
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

"We are Farmers, We Grow Food for the People"

2011-12-29T17:14:00.000-08:00

Pixies - winterlong (live) HQ

2011-12-29T12:19:00.000-08:00

http://dietsoap.podomatic.com/entry/2011-11-16T01_03_25-08_00

2011-12-21T11:10:00.000-08:00

http://dietsoap.podomatic.com/entry/2011-11-16T01_03_25-08_00

The Chorus and Cassandra, by Christopher Hitchens

2011-12-20T14:07:00.000-08:00

The Chorus and Cassandra, by Christopher Hitchens

What US universities are doing when they open campuses in rich police states: exporting our brains

2011-12-20T12:13:00.001-08:00

Exporting Our BrainsGray Brechin

The Chancellor was absent as University of California police kitted out in battle gear vigorously beat and arrested students and professors at on the Berkeley campus (http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/%7Ebarsky/occupy.Cal.html). Called to account by the Academic Senate two weeks later, Robert Birgeneau declared himself extremely disturbed that these events happened. Claiming to take full responsibility for a terrible miscommunication, he explained that he had been on a trip through Asia at the time. (http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2011/11/29/faculty-senate-criticizes-response-to-occupy-cal-protest/ ). The trip, he said, concluded with a phenomenally successful, though unspecified, mission to Shanghai, so he did not hear how badly things went at home until the following day. The two events on opposite sides of the Pacific coupled with a subsequent crisis in Berkeley provide a freeze frame for the self-inflicted decline of the West.

Chancellor Birgeneau and the dean of Berkeleys College of Engineering, signed an agreement to open a 50,000 square foot building in Shanghais Zhangjiang High-Tech Park two days after clubs fell on Cal students agitated by what they perceive as the progressive privatization and commercialization of their university. According to the New York Times(http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/17/world/asia/cal-berkeley-reveals-plan-for-engineering-center-in-china.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Zhangjiang&st=cse), the new branch will give U.C. an Asian beachhead by opening a large research and teaching facility as part of a broader plan to bolster its presence in China. Other premier American universities such as Duke, NYU, and Stanford are, for a price, establishing similar partnerships that China hope[s] will form the base of a modern high-tech economy. As U.S. funding dries up, college administrators hope that such collaborations will support fundraising efforts that target wealthy Chinese alumni not to mention attracting their children more able to pay ever-rising tuition than American students.

Californias business elite until recently oversaw the establishment and growth of a prestigious twelve-campus system if you count U.C.s twin nuclear weapons laboratories meant to do for the Golden State what the university now will do for China. Codified in the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education, the promise of a virtually free and high quality education for Californians worked well to that end until 1978 when voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 13 to cut their taxes. In doing so they fired the opening gun of a tax revolt that spread quickly to the rest of the nation.

Starved of funding, Californias public schools plummeted from the best to near worst, but many believed that the University of Californias crucial role in the states and the nations economy would immunize it from the rot consuming the rest of the Golden States educational apparatus. Banker Russell S. Gould, chair of U.C. Board of Regents, called the university an essential incubator of the California dream, (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/08/12/EDIP196JU1.DTL, but as California piled up multi-billion dollar deficits, U.C inevitably joined the rest of the public sector on the dream factorys cutting room floor. Campus-building in the states three-tiered higher education system ceased, but after the 2008 stock market crash, the entire system began dramatically contracting even as student tuition and debt skyrocketed.

As with any organism fighting for its life, available money has moved like blood from regions the university administration considers expendable to those regarded as vital profit centers such as business, biotechnology, sports, and online learning initiatives as well as lavish executive pay packages meant to retain, those executives say, the very best talent. Last year, for example, the universitys flagship campus at Berkeley quietly divested itself of its outstanding Water Resource Center Archives to save the cost of four clerical positions and thus free space for the expanding College of Engineering (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_Resources_Center_Archives). The University library closed on Saturdays, but at UC San Diego, three specialty libraries closed altogether while a fourth the largest oceanographic library in the world will close in 2012 (http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/home/892450-264/as_library_footprint_shrinks_university.html.csp).

Two weeks after the Shanghai agreement, and on the eve of final exams and a proposed faculty vote of no confidence in Chancellor Birgeneau, the campus email system crashed. For the following week, an institution that its overseers still boast as the worlds greatest public university struggled to function in the 21^st century with only periodic and guttering communication. Earlier cost-cutting that removed phones from professors offices only aggravated miscommunication. Shelton Waggener, the campus associate vice chancellor for information technology, explained to the student newspaper that by failing to upgrade to increased demand he was trying to be prudent given the budget situation, (but) now in retrospective it would have been good to have invested money in the storage so we would have avoided this crisis.

Advanced communications and information technology will be among the first areas of research undertaken by the College of Engineerings new partnership with Chinese industries seeking to overtake Californias fabled Silicon Valley.

For centuries, city states and nations jealously guarded their home industries to the point of sending assassins to dispatch those trading secrets with rivals. Decades of neoliberalism have encouraged todays elites to do the opposite. Availing themselves of the deregulation and lowered trade barriers for which they paid and the communications technology they developed, they exported their industries and jobs to wherever labor costs are lowest and environmental constraints absent. Derelict factories, ruined towns, failing infrastructure, and prisons now pock those countries still imagining themselves members of the First World. The natives back home grow ever more restless and noisy.

The screams of students belabored for asking where their university is going and for whom (http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/tag/urban-shield-2011/) raises the question whether intelligence will be our last export, or whether it was among our first.

Gray Brechin is a three-time U.C. Berkeley alumnus and visiting scholar in the UBC Department of Geography. He is the author of Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin.

New park rules: No lying down | Cincinnati.com | cincinnati.com

2011-12-20T11:25:00.000-08:00

New park rules: No lying down | Cincinnati.com | cincinnati.com

Hitchens on Terror

2011-12-20T10:47:00.000-08:00

www.gis.net/~debfar/Terror HarpersMagazine-1986-09-0016283.pdf

It's Clichéd to be Cynical at Christmas

2011-12-20T10:23:00.000-08:00

Half Man Half Biscuit - All I Want For Xmas Is A Dukla Prague Away Kit

2011-12-20T10:22:00.000-08:00

Occupy Ninjas Take Manhattan

2011-12-17T11:25:00.000-08:00

The Arts of Occupation | The Nation

2011-12-17T11:21:00.000-08:00

The Arts of Occupation | The Nation

Occupy the Safety Net | The Nation

2011-12-17T11:08:00.000-08:00

Occupy the Safety Net | The Nation

www.law.upenn.edu/journals/jlasc/articles/volume5/issue1/Hardt5U.Pa.J.L.&Soc.Change21(2000).pdf

2011-12-17T10:46:00.000-08:00

www.law.upenn.edu/journals/jlasc/articles/volume5/issue1/Hardt5U.Pa.J.L.&Soc.Change21(2000).pdf

Occupy Economics Departments | Common Dreams

2011-12-17T10:25:00.000-08:00

Occupy Economics Departments | Common Dreams

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/12/14-0

Published on Wednesday, December 14, 2011 by On the Commons
Occupy Economics Departments

Conventional economists have a lot to answer for but will they listen?

by David Morris
On November 2nd nearly 70 students walked out of an introductory economics class at Harvard in solidarity with the Occupy movement. The mainstream media largely ignored the protest. That’s regrettable since the economics profession has provided the intellectual framework and justification for the inequality and centralization of corporate power the Occupiers are challenging.

“You can’t get into so disastrous a situation as we are in now without extraordinarily bad thinking and the economics departments were the source of that bad thinking,” observes Steven Keen, Professor of Economics at the University of Western Sydney and author of Debunking Economics.

The Harvard students were protesting EC 10. The course is taught by Professor N. Gregory Mankiw, author of the world’s best selling economics textbook, Principles of Economics, former Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under George W. Bush and regular New York Times columnist. A prerequisite for social studies and economics majors, the class may be taken by nearly half of all Harvard students before they graduate.

“Today we are walking out of your class, Economics 10, in order to express our discontent with the bias inherent in this introductory economics class,” the protestors explained in a letter to Mankiw. The course “espouses a specific—and limited—view of economics that we believe perpetuates problematic and inefficient systems of economic inequality in our society today.”

On December 3rd Mankiw responded in the Times. He expressed “sadness at how poorly informed the Harvard protesters seemed to be”. “If my profession is slanted toward any particular world view, I am as guilty as anyone for perpetuating the problem. Yet, like most economists, I don’t view the study of economics as laden with ideology.”

Quoting Keynes, Mankiw maintained he teaches “a method rather than a doctrine, an apparatus of the mind, a technique for thinking, which helps the possessor to draw correct conclusions.”

Regarding Mankiw’s insistence that his textbook and course simply instruct students in “a method rather than a doctrine” Moshe Adler, Professor of Economics at Columbia University and author of Economics for the Rest of Us notes the singularly consistent conclusions that result from the application of that “technique of thinking”. “(W)henever it is necessary to choose sides between the rich and the poor, between the powerful and the powerless, or between workers and corporations, economists are all too often of one mind…”

The Consistent Conclusions of Conventional Economics

Consider the issue of inequality. “We economists can try to estimate the cost of redistribution—that is, the negative impact on efficiency that comes with attempts to achieve more equality,” writes Mankiw. “But in the end, picking the best point on the tradeoff between efficiency and equality comes from policy preferences about which we, as economist must be agnostic.”

Translation. The economist’s role is to help us understand that we will all be poorer if we reduce inequality but to abstain from advocating specific polices. Of course, no economist worth his or her salt, including Professor Mankiw would refrain from advocating specific policies.

“Reasonable people can disagree about whether and how much government should redistribute income,” Mankiw’s observes. “But don’t let anyone fool you into thinking that when the government taxes the rich, only the rich bear the burden.” We can tax the rich but the result will be a smaller overall economic pie.

In 2001 Mankiw wrote a blistering Op Ed in the Boston Globe decrying a student sit-in aimed at gaining a living wage for janitorial staff. “The living wage campaign wants to repeal the law of supply and demand”, Mankiw insisted, as if the “law” of supply and demand were actually a law and thus more incontrovertible than, say the theories of evolution or gravity. If Harvard were to pay its janitors more, Mankiw predicted, the result would be lost jobs, more teenagers dropping out of school and fewer adults making the transition from welfare to work.

In his Presidential Address to the American Economics Association (AEA) Mankiw used economics-speak to explain why janitors don’t deserve a living wage while Wall Street executives deserve billions. “Under a standard set of assumptions, a competitive economy leads to an efficient allocation of resources…it is also a standard result that in a competitive equilibrium, the factors of production are paid the value of their marginal product. That is, each person’s income reflects the value of what he contributed to society’s production of goods and services. One might easily conclude that, under these idealized conditions, each person receives his just deserts.” Oh.

Before Mankiw, EC 10 was taught by Martin Feldstein former Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under Ronald Reagan. Feldstein used Mankiw’s book as his text. In 2004 Feldstein’s Presidential Address to the AEA focused on health insurance. He informed his colleagues that the principal problem facing the health system isn’t its lack of universal coverage but low deductibles and copayments that encourage people to visit the doctor too often. In economics jargon, “They (low payments)…lead to an increased demand for care that is worth less than its cost of production.”

Professors Mankiw and Feldstein, of course, would not consider any of these conclusions biased or ideologically driven. That they always favor the rich and powerful and disfavor the poor and weak must be chalked up to simple coincidence.

The Conclusions From Unconventional Economics

Those who rely on a different “way of thinking” often arrive at diametrically opposite and far more equitable conclusions.

Consider Feldstein’s thesis. Americans actually visit doctors less often than their counterparts in countries with universal health coverage. Yet the level of medical spending in those countries is 30-50 percent less than ours and achieves better outcomes. Might one conclude that enabling Americans to visit their doctors more rather than less could improve the efficiency of the overall system? If people don’t see a doctor they can end up in vastly more expensive hospital beds. Sometimes common sense trumps complex models.

In his 2001 column, Mankiw dismissed the widely disseminated finding by economists David Card and Alan Krueger in Myth and Measurement that raising the minimum wage does not reduce employment. Mankiw considered them outliers and noted that many economists had “attacked their data, methods and results”. Indeed they did, often and aggressively. For as John Cassidy pointed out, “Card and Krueger didn’t just question the conventional wisdom; they attacked it in a novel and powerful way. Instead of concocting a mathematical model and `testing’ it with advanced statistical techniques, which is what most economists call research, they decided to test the theory in the real world.”

Recently Arindrajit Dube, Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and an expert in studies of the effects of minimum wage policies reviewed the impact of Card and Krueger’s work. Their methodology as well as their empirical results have stood the test of time, he concludes. Indeed “today, writing a paper arguing that moderate increases in minimum wage do not have any appreciable effect on jobs because the labor market exhibits search friction is not a conversation stopper or a career ender.” Perhaps raising the minimum wage reduces turnover and hiring and training costs? Just a theory. Not a law.

Mankiw insists that workers are paid based on how productive they are. “Our real wages are ultimately determined by our productivity.” Yet the evidence argues that the proportion of the wealth generated by increased productivity that accrues to labor is highly dependent on the percentage of the work force that belong to unions. As union membership has dwindled and workers are forced to negotiate as individuals with ever-more-powerful and mobile corporations that proportion has plummeted while corporate profits are at an all time high.

Mankiw and other conventional economists argue that increasing taxes on the rich reduces economic growth and dismiss the idea that lowering taxes on the wealthy has played a significant role in increasing inequality. Recently two Professors of Economics, Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez examined data from 18 OECD countries and came to the opposite conclusions. They found little evidence that low taxes on the rich raise productivity and economic growth. And they found “a strong correlation between the reductions in top tax rates and the increases in top 1% pre-tax income shares from 1975–79 to 2004–08”. For example, the U.S. slashed the top income tax rate by 35 percent and witnessed a large ten percent increase in its top 1% pre-tax income share. “By contrast, France or Germany saw very little change in their top tax rates and their top 1% income shares during the same period.”

And in what can only be considered a direct repudiation of virtually all conventional economic theory, the researchers’ rigorous analysis estimated the top tax rate could be as high as 83% without slowing economic growth.

The Economic Crisis And Conventional Economics

How has the economic crisis changed what Mankiw offers in his freshman course? “…not as much as you might think,” he answers. “Despite the enormity of recent events, the principles of economics are largely unchanged.”

Mankiw does admit that the precipitous collapse of most western economies has convinced him to entertain some “subtle” changes. For example, he might introduce a few overlooked factors into his course such as the role of FINANCE or the importance of LEVERAGE.

Many economists who are not slaves to conventional economic models with their “standard assumptions” and “idealized conditions” recognized the importance of these issues long before the crisis. In 1994, for example, Marxist economist Paul Sweezy told Harvard economic graduate students. “In the old days finance was treated as a modest helper of production. By the end of the decade (1980s) the old structure of the economy, consisting of a production system serving a modest financial adjunct, had given way to a new structure in which a greatly expanded financial sector had achieved a high degree of independence and sat on top of the underlying production system.”

In 2001, economist Steven Keen bluntly challenged conventional economics. “An economic theory that ignores the role of money and debt in a market economy cannot possibly make sense of the complex, monetary, credit based economy in which we live.”

What about the failure of the economics profession to forecast the economic collapse? Mankiw concedes, “It is fair to say that this crisis caught most economists flat-footed.” But he insists; “Yet this is no reason for embarrassment….Some things are just hard to predict.”

Mankiw is certainly correct that most conventional economists were caught flat-footed. Indeed, many boasted that their “method not a doctrine” had led to policies that had achieved enduring prosperity and stability. The “central problem of depression-prevention has been solved,” declared Nobel Prize winner Robert Lucas in his 2003 Presidential Address to the AEA.

Before 2008, conventional economic theory championed the deregulation and expansion of the financial sector as a strategy to enhance economic efficiency and lower risk. It taught us that speculation is not a problem because all of the actors have all the information necessary to make the right decision.

It ignored the tsunami of increasing private debt while concentrating its attention and disapproval on a much slower growing public debt.

“The problem is that economists (and those who listen to them) became over-confident in their preferred models of the moment: markets are efficient, financial innovation transfers risks to those best able to bear it, self-regulation works best and government intervention is ineffective and harmful,” Dani Rodrik, Professor of Economics at Harvard comments.

Again Keen is more blunt. “Neoclassical economists were effectively trained to not see this crisis coming, by theoretical fallacies that led them to ignore crucial real-world phenomena like the ballooning levels of private debt, and rampant speculation and fraud in the private sector.”

In 2003, when Feldstein taught EC 10, students first rose up against its perceived bias. Some 700 students and alumni signed a petition asking Harvard to offer an alternative economics course. After much deliberation, Harvard agreed, but refused to allow economics majors to receive credit for taking the alternative course.

Economics Professor Stephen Marglin teaches the alternative class. The author of The Dismal Science he believes the methods of economists do embody a doctrine. Their assumptions embody certain values and predetermine outcomes.

In an interview Marglin points out several potentially fatal flaws in conventional models.

It is highly misleading about how society actually works. Not only do you have to leave out all the ﬁne print about monopoly and oligopoly, externalities, public goods, asymmetric information…you have to separate individuals, focus on the individual, and leave out of the analysis the connections between individuals. You have to leave aside the limits of rational calculation. You have to assume that it is human nature always to want more, never to be satisﬁed with ‘enough.’ … you have to assume these rational, isolated individuals are completely self-interested. Because as soon as they are not self-interested anymore-even if that non-self-interest takes the benign form of altruism-then the theorems about Pareto optimality, the efﬁciency of markets, break down.

Marglin addresses an issue ignored by most economists: the effect of their models and the policies derived from them on our sense of community. How Thinking Like An Economist Undermines Community is the subtitle of his book.

“Community is important to a meaningful life,” he maintains. “Community is about human connections; we need community to foster and maintain these connections. And we are diminished as our human connections are diminished.” “The economics we have constructed makes it virtually inevitable that we will leave community out of consideration when we ask questions about economic policy.”

He offers students advice that would be considered heretical in a conventional economics course. “Choose very carefully which markets you will allow and which you will not in terms of what they do to communities.”

Remember. It’s the Bank of Sweden Economics Prize not the Nobel Prize

A few weeks ago the Nobel Prize for Economics was announced. The press dutifully noted that it wasn’t one of the official Nobel Prizes inaugurated in 1901. Yet the media continue to call it the Nobel Prize rather than by its actual name: The Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.

Knowing that the prize is issued by a bank might help people understand why, since its inception in 1969, 70 percent of these economics prizes have been awarded to Americans compared to only 39 percent of the real Nobel Prizes in chemistry, physics, literature and medicine. And why ten have been won by University of Chicago faculty.

The study of economics may indeed help us understand the world and design appropriate policies. But we need to drop the pretense that economics is a science based on laws and objective models and accept that it is a normative discipline. We need to own up to the bias inherent in conventional economic models and the social damage policies based on those models has wrought.

David Morris is Vice President and director of the New Rules Project at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, which is based in Minneapolis and Washington, D.C. focusing on local economic and social development.

Capitalism Is the Enemy of Democracy | Truthout

2011-12-17T10:17:00.001-08:00

Capitalism Is the Enemy of Democracy | Truthout

Occupy Your Education: A Note to Students About Changing the World | Truthout

2011-12-17T10:17:00.000-08:00

Occupy Your Education: A Note to Students About Changing the World | Truthout

Netanyahu's vengeance sends a message to Israeli journalists - Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News

2011-12-17T10:06:00.000-08:00

Netanyahu's vengeance sends a message to Israeli journalists - Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News

http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/netanyahu-s-vengeance-sends-a-message-to-israeli-journalists-1.401079

Netanyahu's vengeance sends a message to Israeli journalists
Coalition members bring down the ax on the channel, sending its workers to the unemployment line because of a minor technicality.

By Yossi Verter
Tags: Knesset Benjamin Netanyahu

A typical 40 minutes late, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a group of his advisers entered the Likud faction's room in the Knesset on Monday, smiles of victory on their faces. In the nearby Knesset Economic Affairs Committee room lay the metaphorical body of Channel 10.

A short while earlier, coalition members had brought down the ax on the channel, sending its workers to the unemployment line because of a minor technicality, refusing to postpone a debt of some NIS 45 million.
Benjamin Netanyahu - Olivier Fitoussi - 05122011

This is social justice in the Netanyahu era: There will always be work for 38 ministers and deputy ministers, but for a news company that dared to annoy some of those ministers - particularly the prime minister and his wife, who, as we know, are beyond reproach - there is no future and no hope.

After the routine photo-op at the start of the faction meeting, someone asked Netanyahu for his response to the closing of Channel 10. The prime minister wrung his hands, looked coolly at some distant point, and said nothing.

Less than 24 hours earlier Netanyahu and his minions were working their tails off to tie and tighten the noose around the crushed channel. On Monday it didn't seem to interest him. (The Prime Minister's Office response: The office was not involved with issues connected to the channel. )

The plan to shut down Channel 10 was drawn up in the Prime Minister's Bureau several months ago. If anyone doubts that, note there was an order to impose coalition discipline during both Economic Affairs Committee votes.

But the process actually started more than a year ago, when there was meant to be a rotation of chairman between the economics committee and the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee - the former was to be given to the opposition, as had always been the case in the past, and the latter was to revert to coalition control, as had historically been the case. Netanyahu, however, wouldn't hear of it. There are 12 statutory Knesset committees but only one of them deals with the media. Netanyahu preferred to entrust the sensitive and prestigious Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee to a political rival, Shaul Mofaz of Kadima, who drives him crazy, than to relinquish the very committee that gave him power over the commercial channels. He knew exactly what he was doing. Monday was the day he had been waiting for.

The move to shut down Channel 10 was executed without mercy or restraint. The coalition members of the committee - Likud, Yisrael Beiteinu and Shas MKs - were happy to obey the order from on high.

The official grounds for the decision were that the channel had to pay its debts, which had been deferred time after time. This is an ostensibly reasonable argument. But when the sum at issue is so small - NIS 45 million, not 450 million; and when the Second Television and Radio Authority itself admitted Monday that it didn't need the money right now; and given the media's difficult economic straits, making it unlikely that other outlets will hire almost any of Channel 10's workers, the decision was not inevitable, it was an act of vengeance - simple, transparent and horrifying.

Even if by some miracle the channel is saved and continues to operate, the message has been conveyed: There is a sword hanging over any media outlet whose oxygen supply is in government hands - the commercial channels, Channel 1 and Educational Television. Anyone who dares cross the line, publicly criticize, or broadcast a lethal investigative report will meet a bitter fate.

There aren't only judges in Jerusalem. There are also hangmen.

Occupy the Food System - OtherWords

2011-12-17T09:51:00.000-08:00

Occupy the Food System - OtherWords

Occupy the Food System

The world can feed itself,
without corporate America's science-experiment crops
and expensive chemicals.

By Jim Goodman

http://www.otherwords.org/articles/occupy_the_food_system

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/12/12-0

Farmers have been through this before — our lives and
livelihoods falling under corporate control. It has
been an ongoing process: consolidation of markets;
consolidation of seed companies; an ever-widening gap
between our costs of production and the prices we
receive. Some of us are catching on, getting the
picture of the real enemy.

The "99 percent" are awakening to the realization that
their lives have fallen under corporate control as
well. Add up the jobs lost, the health benefits
whittled away, and the unions busted, and the bill for
Wall Street's self-centered greed is taking a toll.

It's not the immigrants, the homeless, the unions, or
the farmers that have looted the economy and driven us
to the brink of another Great Depression. The public is
catching on.

When Occupy Wall Street (OWS) welcomed the Farmers
March to Zuccotti Park in New York on December 4, a
natural rural-urban alliance — the Food Justice
Movement, gardeners, farmers, seed growers, health care
workers, and union members — was formed at Wall
Street's back door.

Change can come only when you confront your oppressors
directly on their turf. That makes them uncomfortable,
it gets attention, and it wakes up the distracted
public.

The Occupy movement is doing exactly what the prominent
student activist Mario Savio spoke of in 1964, when he
declared: "There comes a time when the operation of the
machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart,
that you can't take part, you can't even passively take
part and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears
and upon the wheels, upon the apparatus and you've got
to make it stop — and you've got to indicate to the
people who run it, the people who own it, that unless
you're free, the machine will be prevented from running
at all."

The people who are now forming a movement to occupy the
food system agree with this sentiment too.

The food system isn't working. People eat too many
calories, or too few. There's too much processed food
on our plates. Too many Americans lack access to food
that is fresh, nutritious, and locally grown. This is
the food system that corporate America has given us.
It's the food system it's selling to the rest of the
world.

Clearly, this system doesn't have the best interests of
the public at heart. Nor does it consider the interests
of farmers or farm workers or animals or the
environment. It has one interest: profit.

We all have to wake up.

Farmers need access to farm credit, a fair mortgage on
their land, fair prices for the food they produce, and
seeds that aren't patented by Monsanto or other big
corporations. Consumers need to be able to purchase
healthy and local food, and to earn a living wage.

The parallels are pointedly exact. It may be the Wall
Street banks that are controlling our lives, or it may
be Monsanto, Cargill, DuPont, Kraft, or Tyson's. The
system isn't working.

Why do agribusiness profits continue to grow while
farmers struggle to pay their costs of production and
more Americans go hungry? We can't feed our people if
we are forced to feed the bank accounts of the 1
percent.

Agribusinesses insist that we have the responsibility
of feeding the world. Growing more genetically
engineered corn and soy isn't going to feed the world,
nor will it correct the flaws in our food system;
clearly it has created many of them.

The world can feed itself, without corporate America's
science-experiment crops and expensive chemicals. The
world's people can feed themselves if we let them — if
we stop the corporate land grabs and let them develop
their own economies for their own benefit.

The message from the Occupy movement needn't and
shouldn't be a specific set of demands. It should be
about asking the right questions.

Wall Street, the government, and corporate America need
to answer one basic question: Why did you sell us down
the river?

Jim Goodman is a dairy farmer from Wisconsin and a
member of Family Farm Defenders and the National Family
Farm Coalition. Distributed via OtherWords
(OtherWords.org)

Lawrence Weschler: Time to Start Preoccupying Wall Street - Truthdig

2011-12-17T09:26:00.000-08:00

Lawrence Weschler: Time to Start Preoccupying Wall Street - Truthdig

Feinstein: Senate Panel's Probe of CIA Torture Program Concludes It Was "Far More Widespread and Systematic Than We Thought" | Truthout

2011-12-17T09:15:00.000-08:00

Feinstein: Senate Panel's Probe of CIA Torture Program Concludes It Was "Far More Widespread and Systematic Than We Thought" | Truthout

Occupy Ourselves | Truthout

2011-12-17T08:36:00.001-08:00

Occupy Ourselves | Truthout

2011-12-17T08:36:00.000-08:00

Occupy Ourselves | Truthout

Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri | Adbusters Culturejammer Headquarters

2011-12-17T07:57:00.000-08:00

Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri | Adbusters Culturejammer Headquarters

The Big Ideas of 2012

Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri

What to expect in 2012.
14 comments Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri , 08 Dec 2011

Audio version read by George Atherton – Right-click to download
Some of the most inspiring social struggles of 2011 have placed democracy at the top of the agenda.
Although they emerge from very different conditions, these movements – from the insurrections of the Arab Spring to the union battles in Wisconsin, from the student protests in Chile to those in the US and Europe, from the UK riots to the occupations of the Spanish indignados and the Greeks in Syntagma Square, and from Occupy Wall Street to the innumerable local forms of refusal across the world – share, first of all, a negative demand: Enough with the structures of neoliberalism! This common cry is not only an economic protest but also immediately a political one, against the false claims of representation. Neither Mubarak and Ben Ali nor Wall Street bankers, neither media elites nor even presidents, governors, members of parliament, and other elected officials – none of them represent us. The extraordinary force of refusal is very important, of course, but we should be careful not to lose track in the din of the demonstrations and conflicts of a central element that goes beyond protest and resistance. These movements also share the aspiration for a new kind of democracy, expressed in tentative and uncertain voices in some cases but explicitly and forcefully in others. The development of this aspiration is one of the threads we are most anxious to follow in 2012.
One source of antagonism that all of these movements will have to confront, even those that have just toppled dictators, is the insufficiency of modern democratic constitutions, particularly their regimes of labor, property, and representation. In these constitutions, first of all, waged labor is key to having access to income and the basic rights of citizenship, a relationship that has long functioned poorly for those outside the regular labor market, including the poor, the unemployed, unwaged female workers, immigrants, and others, but today all forms of labor are ever more precarious and insecure. Labor continues to be the source of wealth in capitalist society, of course, but increasingly outside the relationship with capital and often outside the stable wage relation. As a result, our social constitution continues to require waged labor for full rights and access in a society where such labor is less and less available.
Private property is a second fundamental pillar of the democratic constitutions, and social movements today contest not only national and global regimes of neoliberal governance but also the rule of property more generally. Property not only maintains social divisions and hierarchies but also generates some of the most powerful bonds (often perverse connections) that we share with each other and our societies. And yet contemporary social and economic production has an increasingly common character, which defies and exceeds the bounds of property. Capital's ability to generate profit is declining since it is losing its entrepreneurial capacity and its power to administer social discipline and cooperation. Instead capital increasingly accumulates wealth primarily via forms of rent, most often organized through financial instruments, through which it captures value that is produced socially and relatively independent of its power. But every instance of private accumulation reduces the power and productivity of the common. Private property is thus becoming ever more not only a parasite but also an obstacle to social production and social welfare.
Finally, a third pillar of democratic constitutions, and object of increasing antagonism, as we said earlier, rests on the systems of representation and their false claims to establish democratic governance. Putting an end to the power of professional political representatives is one of the few slogans from the socialist tradition that we can affirm wholeheartedly in our contemporary condition. Professional politicians, along with corporate leaders and the media elite, operate only the weakest sort of representative function. The problem is not so much that politicians are corrupt (although in many cases this is also true) but rather that the constitutional structure isolates the mechanisms of political decision-making from the powers and desires of the multitude. Any real process of democratization in our societies has to attack the lack of representation and the false pretenses of representation at the core of the constitution.
Recognizing the rationality and necessity of revolt along these three axes and many others, which animate many struggles today, is, however, really only the first step, the point of departure. The heat of indignation and the spontaneity of revolt have to be organized in order to last over time and to construct new forms of life, alternative social formations.
The secrets to this next step are as rare as they are precious.
On the economic terrain we need to discover new social technologies for freely producing in common and for equitably distributing shared wealth. How can our productive energies and desires be engaged and increased in an economy not founded on private property? How can welfare and basic social resources be provided to all in a social structure not regulated and dominated by state property? We must construct the relations of production and exchange as well as the structures of social welfare that are composed of and adequate to the common.
The challenges on the political terrain are equally thorny. Some of the most inspiring and innovative events and revolts in the last decade have radicalized democratic thinking and practice by occupying and organizing a space, such as a public square, with open, participatory structures or assemblies, maintaining these new democratic forms for weeks or months. Indeed the internal organization of the movements themselves has been constantly subjected to processes of democratization, striving to create horizontal participatory network structures. The revolts against the dominant political system, its professional politicians, and its illegitimate structures of representation are thus not aimed at restoring some imagined legitimate representational system of the past but rather at experimenting with new democratic forms of expression: democracia real ya. How can we transform indignation and rebellion into a lasting constituent process? How can experiments in democracy become a constituent power, not only democratizing a public square or a neighborhood but also inventing an alternative society that is really democratic?
To confront these issues, we, along with many others, have proposed possible initial steps, such as establishing a guaranteed income, the right to global citizenship, and a process of the democratic reappropriation of the common. But we are under no illusion that we have all the answers. Instead we are encouraged by the fact that we are not alone asking the questions. We are confident, in fact, that those who are dissatisfied with the life offered by our contemporary neoliberal society, indignant about its injustices, rebellious against its powers of command and exploitation, and yearning for an alternative democratic form of life based on the common wealth we share – they, by posing these questions and pursuing their desires, will invent new solutions we cannot yet even imagine. Those are some of our best wishes for 2012.

Michael Hardt is an American political philosopher and literary theorist. Antonio Negri is an Italian Marxist philosopher. In the late 1970s Negri was accused of being the mastermind behind the left-wing terrorist group the Red Brigades. Negri emigrated to France where he taught in Paris along with Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. Hardt and Negri have published four important critiques of late capitalism and globalization: Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State-Form (1994), Empire (2000), Multitude (2004) and Commonwealth (2009). These four works have been highly praised by contemporary activists. Empire, for example, has been hailed as “nothing less than a rewriting of The Communist Manifesto for our time” by the Lacanian philosopher Slavoj Žižek.

http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/99/under-no-illusions.html

_______________________________________________

Robert Fisk: Bankers are the dictators of the West - Robert Fisk - Commentators - The Independent

2011-12-17T07:54:00.000-08:00

Robert Fisk: Bankers are the dictators of the West - Robert Fisk - Commentators - The Independent

Bankers are the Dictators of the West

By Robert Fisk
The Independent (UK)
December 10, 2011

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-bankers-are-the-dictators-of-the-west-6275084.html

Writing from the very region that produces more clichés
per square foot than any other "story" - the Middle
East - I should perhaps pause before I say I have never
read so much garbage, so much utter drivel, as I have
about the world financial crisis.

But I will not hold my fire. It seems to me that the
reporting of the collapse of capitalism has reached a
new low which even the Middle East cannot surpass for
sheer unadulterated obedience to the very institutions
and Harvard "experts" who have helped to bring about
the whole criminal disaster.

Let's kick off with the "Arab Spring" - in itself a
grotesque verbal distortion of the great Arab/Muslim
awakening which is shaking the Middle East - and the
trashy parallels with the social protests in Western
capitals. We've been deluged with reports of how the
poor or the disadvantaged in the West have "taken a
leaf" out of the "Arab spring" book, how demonstrators
in America, Canada, Britain, Spain and Greece have been
"inspired" by the huge demonstrations that brought down
the regimes in Egypt, Tunisia and - up to a point -
Libya. But this is nonsense.

The real comparison, needless to say, has been dodged
by Western reporters, so keen to extol the anti-
dictator rebellions of the Arabs, so anxious to ignore
protests against "democratic" Western governments, so
desperate to disparage these demonstrations, to suggest
that they are merely picking up on the latest fad in
the Arab world. The truth is somewhat different. What
drove the Arabs in their tens of thousands and then
their millions on to the streets of Middle East
capitals was a demand for dignity and a refusal to
accept that the local family-ruled dictators actually
owned their countries. The Mubaraks and the Ben Alis
and the Gaddafis and the kings and emirs of the Gulf
(and Jordan) and the Assads all believed that they had
property rights to their entire nations. Egypt belonged
to Mubarak Inc, Tunisia to Ben Ali Inc (and the
Traboulsi family), Libya to Gaddafi Inc. And so on. The
Arab martyrs against dictatorship died to prove that
their countries belonged to their own people.

And that is the true parallel in the West. The protest
movements are indeed against Big Business - a perfectly
justified cause - and against "governments". What they
have really divined, however, albeit a bit late in the
day, is that they have for decades bought into a
fraudulent democracy: they dutifully vote for political
parties - which then hand their democratic mandate and
people's power to the banks and the derivative traders
and the rating agencies, all three backed up by the
slovenly and dishonest coterie of "experts" from
America's top universities and "think tanks", who
maintain the fiction that this is a crisis of
globalisation rather than a massive financial con trick
foisted on the voters.

The banks and the rating agencies have become the
dictators of the West. Like the Mubaraks and Ben Alis,
the banks believed - and still believe - they are
owners of their countries. The elections which give
them power have - through the gutlessness and collusion
of governments - become as false as the polls to which
the Arabs were forced to troop decade after decade to
anoint their own national property owners. Goldman
Sachs and the Royal Bank of Scotland became the
Mubaraks and Ben Alis of the US and the UK, each
gobbling up the people's wealth in bogus rewards and
bonuses for their vicious bosses on a scale infinitely
more rapacious than their greedy Arab dictator-brothers
could imagine.

I didn't need Charles Ferguson's Inside Job on BBC2
this week - though it helped - to teach me that the
ratings agencies and the US banks are interchangeable,
that their personnel move seamlessly between agency,
bank and US government. The ratings lads (almost always
lads, of course) who AAA-rated sub-prime loans and
derivatives in America are now - via their poisonous
influence on the markets - clawing down the people of
Europe by threatening to lower or withdraw the very
same ratings from European nations which they lavished
upon criminals before the financial crash in the US. I
believe that understatement tends to win arguments.
But, forgive me, who are these creatures whose ratings
agencies now put more fear into the French than Rommel
did in 1940?

Why don't my journalist mates in Wall Street tell me?
How come the BBC and CNN and - oh, dear, even al-
Jazeera - treat these criminal communities as
unquestionable institutions of power? Why no
investigations - Inside Job started along the path -
into these scandalous double-dealers? It reminds me so
much of the equally craven way that so many American
reporters cover the Middle East, eerily avoiding any
direct criticism of Israel, abetted by an army of pro-
Likud lobbyists to explain to viewers why American
"peacemaking" in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can
be trusted, why the good guys are "moderates", the bad
guys "terrorists".

The Arabs have at least begun to shrug off this
nonsense. But when the Wall Street protesters do the
same, they become "anarchists", the social "terrorists"
of American streets who dare to demand that the
Bernankes and Geithners should face the same kind of
trial as Hosni Mubarak. We in the West - our
governments - have created our dictators. But, unlike
the Arabs, we can't touch them.

The Irish Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, solemnly informed his
people this week that they were not responsible for the
crisis in which they found themselves. They already
knew that, of course. What he did not tell them was who
was to blame. Isn't it time he and his fellow EU prime
ministers did tell us? And our reporters, too?

___________________________________________

OR Books — Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action that Changed America

2011-12-17T07:33:00.000-08:00

OR Books — Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action that Changed America

OAPEN Library - Anticapitalism and Culture : Radical Theory and Popular Politics

2011-12-17T07:25:00.000-08:00

OAPEN Library - Anticapitalism and Culture : Radical Theory and Popular Politics

OAPEN Library - Knowledge Goes Pop : From Conspiracy Theory to Gossip

2011-12-17T07:24:00.000-08:00

OAPEN Library - Knowledge Goes Pop : From Conspiracy Theory to Gossip

Kiki of Montparnasse

2011-12-17T07:03:00.000-08:00

Polwechsel & John Tilbury — Place Replace Represent

2011-12-16T13:20:00.000-08:00

some background (from 2009) on Honduras - Inside Story Americas - Al Jazeera English

2011-12-16T13:14:00.000-08:00

Honduras turns deadly - Inside Story Americas - Al Jazeera English

Gritos en el Cielo - Shouts in the Sky

2011-12-16T12:59:00.000-08:00

Gritos en el Cielo - Shouts in the Sky

Life of Brian

2011-12-16T12:35:00.000-08:00

The consensus model of some Occupation GAs have had me thinking both of this profound deconstructive criticism of the notion of difference as zero which blocks the necessary ethical thinking of sameness, and my past experiences with anarchist groups.

Book Launch for Gar Alperovitz's America Beyond Capitalism at Busboys an...

2011-12-16T12:16:00.000-08:00

Gar Alperovitz "America Beyond Capitalism": Video 1 of 3

2011-12-16T11:20:00.000-08:00

The End of Capitalism? - David Harvey (Penn Humanities Forum, 30 Nov 2011)

2011-12-16T11:07:00.000-08:00

10 greediest Americans of 2011

2011-12-13T13:49:00.001-08:00

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

"The 10 Greediest Americans of 2011"

SAM PIZZIGATI, editor@toomuchonline.org,http://www.toomuchonline.org
Pizzigati edits "Too Much," the weekly Institute for Policy Studies
newsletter on excess and inequality. He just wrote the piece "The 10
Greediest Americans of 2011,' which lists the following:

10. Michael T. Duke, Wal-Mart CEO: Duke takes home his millions -- $18.7
million in the company's latest fiscal year -- by squeezing workers. He
ended "premium pay" for the hours Wal-Mart workers have to put in on
Sundays, eliminated profit-sharing, sheared health care benefits, and
cut staffing levels so low, Retailing Today reports, that customers
sometimes can't find shopping carts because the store where they're
shopping has no employees available to collect carts from the parking lot.

9. Paul Hoolahan, Sugar Bowl CEO: The Sugar Bowl, one of college
football's top four postseason games, enjoys tax-exempt status and
regularly touts its contributions to good causes. But Hoolahan's
favorite cause may be his own. He took home just under $600,000 in 2009,
almost quadruple his $160,500 paycheck for the same job 13 years
earlier. Meanwhile, the Sugar Bowl and its three "Bowl Championship
Series" partners are contributing to charity only 20 cents from every
$10 in revenue, the Arizona Republic reports.

8. Robert Iger, Disney CEO: His annual compensation topped $28 million
last year, a neat 35-percent increase. In October, Iger picked up a new
pay deal that extends his CEO contract into 2015 and then adds on a
cushy final year as Disney's "executive chairman" -- at $2.5 million --
to help him make the transition into retirement.

7. Doug Oberhelman, Caterpillar CEO: In 2009, a year that saw only three
U.S. corporations lay off more workers than Caterpillar, its CEO took
home just under $3 million. His 2010 paycheck soared to $10.4 million.
Caterpillar workers, meanwhile, have a new six-year contract that
excludes wage increases and raises health care premiums.

6. William Weldon, Johnson & Johnson CEO: Weldon "restructured" this
health care giant in 2007, slashing its quality-control program. For the
next two years, a hiring freeze made replacing vacant quality positions
almost impossible. In 2009, a flood of recalls began for company
products from contact lenses to hip implants, but Weldon took home $25.6
million anyway. After those recalls and assorted other scandals, the
company did finally trim his annual pay -- to $23.2 million.

5. Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman Sachs CEO: In 2007, on the eve of the
meltdown banks like Goldman did so much to hasten, Blankfein collected a
$68-million bonus, the largest in Wall Street history. In 2011,
Blankfein had a chance to hit the restart button. He didn't. In April,
Goldman Sachs revealed that Blankfein, after going two years without a
cash bonus, had gobbled up $5.4 million in bonus cash for the bank's
latest fiscal year. And plenty more in stock and salary. His total pay:
$19 million, about double his pay the year before.

4. Alan Mulally, Ford Motor CEO: After losing $30 billion over three
years, Ford has gained back $9.3 billion. In reward, Ford handed Mulally
$56.5 million in stock and then, a month later, announced that he pulled
down an additional $26.5 million last year. That amounted to 910 times
the pay of entry-level Ford workers.

3. Larry Ellison, Oracle CEO: The top exec at business software giant
Oracle collected $77.6 million for the fiscal year that ended this past
May 31.That piece of change added less than two-tenths of 1 percent to
Ellison's $39.5 billion personal fortune, the world's fifth largest.

2. Don Blankenship, Former Massey Energy CEO: West Virginia
investigators found Massey management directly to blame for the 2010
blast that left 29 miners dead at the company's Upper Big Branch coal
mine. Massey, the report charged, had nurtured a "culture bent on
production at the expense of safety." That culture paid off handsomely
for Blankenship. He pocketed $38.2 million from 2007 through 2009, after
raking in $34 million in 2005, and retired with a $5.7-million pension
and $12 million in severance.

1. Mark Pincus, Zynga CEO: High-tech start-ups like the online social
gaming empire Zynga typically attract talent by offering shares of
stock. But Pincus had apparently concluded, with a multi-billion-dollar
IPO pending, that he had given away too many shares. Pincus demanded
that various employees "give back not-yet-vested stock or face
termination," The Wall Street Journal reported.

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy: Sam
Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167
_______________________________________________

Ohio Redistricting Transparency Report - Draw the Line Midwest

2011-12-13T13:13:00.001-08:00

Ohio Redistricting Transparency Report - Draw the Line Midwest

2011-12-13T13:13:00.000-08:00

Ohio Redistricting Transparency Report - Draw the Line Midwest

Capitalism and the Accumulation of Catastrophe on Vimeo

2011-12-13T13:07:00.000-08:00

Capitalism and the Accumulation of Catastrophe on Vimeo

Lorenz von Stein, in 1842

2011-12-13T11:11:00.000-08:00

There is no longer any doubt that for the most important part
of Europe political reform and revolution are at an end;
social revolution has taken their place and towers over all
movements of the peoples with its terrible power and serious
doubts. Only a few years ago, what now confronts us seemed
but an empty shadow. Now it faces all Law as an enemy, and
all efforts to compress it into its former nothingness are
vain. – Lorenz von Stein, 1842

When you ain't got nobody by tom waits

2011-12-12T14:32:00.000-08:00

Occupy the American Historical Association: Demand a WPA Federal Writers' Project | History News Network

2011-12-12T13:44:00.000-08:00

Occupy the American Historical Association: Demand a WPA Federal Writers' Project | History News Network

Joan Baez - The Ballad of Sacco and Vanzetti

2011-12-12T13:30:00.000-08:00

Rep. Jane Harman: Finally, Some Progress in Combating Rape and Assault in the Military

2011-12-12T13:27:00.000-08:00

Rep. Jane Harman: Finally, Some Progress in Combating Rape and Assault in the Military

Gilbert Adair obituary | Film | The Guardian

2011-12-12T13:25:00.000-08:00

Gilbert Adair obituary | Film | The Guardian

link to Negri's Time for Revolution

2011-12-09T10:15:00.001-08:00

http://books.google.com/books/about/Time_for_revolution.html?id=H5mdulfXDJQC

Alex Mendoza 2012

2011-12-09T09:22:00.001-08:00

From FIREDAYS, Book II, after Mandelstam (first draft)

2011-12-09T08:15:00.000-08:00

From FIREDAYS, Book II

after Mandelstam

Only a parasite trembles

On the threshold of new days

The age sees all that it can see,

Wears the egg like chocolate:

A gift divided by the au pair

Who knows the cost of living?

Only apparatus assembles

A parachute trembles

On the transport of exit signs

The hips of modular days

Must be found by vocoder.

The beast (not mine) rocks the waves

With humanitarian Splenda.

And in the grass a viper seethes

The measure of detachment.

And with a name you can trust

You look upward, rewarded points;

Like Stretch Armstrong, under the X-ray,

At the streaks of your tears.

...

Emory Student Arrested for Trying to Help a Homeless Woman

2011-12-09T07:25:00.000-08:00

Rats have been wrongly maligned and are actually kind hearted, generous creatures | Mail Online

2011-12-09T07:12:00.000-08:00

Rats have been wrongly maligned and are actually kind hearted, generous creatures | Mail Online

Workers Challenge Big Food | Labor Notes

2011-12-08T15:20:00.000-08:00

Workers Challenge Big Food | Labor Notes

Workers Challenge Big Food

By Jenny Brown
Labor Notes
November 23, 2011

http://labornotes.org/2011/11/workers-challenge-big-food

"Farm to fork" may sound like a doctrine for foodies,
but for workers in food production struggling for
decent jobs, it's an organizing goal.

Workers along the food chain-on farms, in warehouses
and supermarkets, in restaurants and cafeterias-are
seeking to make common cause with each other and
against the corporations that run the food industry.

Big food purveyors like Walmart and Sodexo indirectly
set the pay of the farm workers who pick fresh
vegetables in the sun and the warehouse workers who
move the frozen variety in and out of windowless
buildings.

They do so by setting low prices and squeezing their
suppliers, pushing contractors to underpay workers all
along the chain. They goad farms and food processors to
cut corners in a production system that values quantity
over quality and appearance over nutritional content.

Corporate consolidation in the food system has become
so extreme that the Department of Justice held
investigative hearings last year. Firms seek to control
food "from gene to supermarket shelf," said a report
for the National Farmers Union, with five companies now
controlling 50 percent of the retail food market and
four firms controlling 85 percent of beef production.

Joann Lo of the Food Chain Workers Alliance says this
means "workers need to be united across the food supply
chain." Her organization brings together farmworker
groups, worker centers, and unions.

Supermarket workers in Food and Commercial Workers
(UFCW) locals in the New York and Los Angeles areas are
part of the alliance, as is the hotel and culinary
union UNITE HERE, Restaurant Opportunities Center,
Warehouse Workers for Justice, the Coalition of
Immokalee Workers in Florida, and the Farmworker
Support Committee (CATA) in New Jersey and
Pennsylvania.

FAIR FOOD

The alliance is connecting workers with
consumers-leveraging fresh interest in locally grown,
healthy, and sustainable food into backing for
sustainable jobs.

"You care about the food you're eating?" asks Diana
Robinson of UFCW Local 1500 in New York. "Well, let me
tell you about the person behind your food."

Campus food workers had a median wage of $17,176 in
2010, according to UNITE HERE, and 28 percent of cooks
live in "food-insecure" households, where nutritionally
adequate food is limited or uncertain. Many Florida
pickers still make 45 cents per 30-pound bucket of
tomatoes, the same rate they did decades ago.

Connections between food workers and consumers can make
managers nervous. At Pomona College in Claremont,
California, the administration has banned students from
talking to dining hall workers, even during their
breaks. The gag rule came down a week after workers
cooked and shared a meal with students as part of a
union-supported "Food Day" event in October.

But people who are concerned about getting healthy
local food to low-income communities often aren't
making the connection to the workers involved in food
production, Lo said.

That connection came into sharp focus in January when
Michelle Obama, whose signature issue is healthy food,
praised Walmart for its promise to reduce hydrogenated
fats and salt in its brands, and to locate stores in
underserved neighborhoods.

Unions shot back that Walmart is a prime cause of
poverty, as it drives out unionized stores that pay
better, squeezes its food suppliers, and pays its own
workers so little they need food stamps to survive.

FOOD WORKERS ON BOTTOM

Low pay and harsh working conditions face nearly every
worker in the long food production chain, from
farmworkers, meatpackers, and warehouse workers to
grocery clerks, cooks, and servers.

"They're stealing our wages, they're treating us
poorly, and they're stealing our dignity, like it's
nothing," said Deathrice Jimerson, a former warehouse
worker who's now a volunteer organizer with Warehouse
Workers for Justice south of Chicago.

Farmworkers are still organizing for basic labor
protections, while at the other end of the chain,
kitchen staff working for food service companies like
Sodexo and Aramark have been struggling over a decade
to win union recognition.

Because of their low pay, food workers are
disproportionately affected by nutrition-related
illnesses-diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart
disease, said Jessica Choy, a California UNITE HERE
organizer. "Workers are affected not only where they
work by this broken food system," she said.

The union organized "Food Day" events at dozens of
campuses in October, where students and kitchen staff
cooked, ate, and talked together. UNITE HERE connects
its union drives to students' growing desire for
cafeteria food that isn't processed slop-favored by
institutions to cut costs.

"Bringing in packaged food, to a lot of people that are
passionate about feeding people, it's sort of like an
insult," said LaShanda Bell, a cook at Northwestern
University. "We want to mix sauces and make our own
stocks and actually produce food with our hands versus
unthawing, heating, and serving."

RE-SKILLING THE KITCHEN

Union food workers at Yale successfully fought back
against a de-skilling of their kitchen and the closing
of their bakery.

After Yale contracted with Sysco, the food distribution
company, "we went right to canned sauce, processed
cheese, pizza dough out of a box," chef Stu Comen told
the student paper. "Here we are, with our chef coats
with our names on them, and we're opening up cans of
sauce."

The workers, members of UNITE HERE Local 35, made
common cause with students, holding taste tests and
posting ingredient lists so students could compare the
processed baked goods provided by Sysco to those
produced in Yale's bakeshop.

Now the college aims to get 40 percent of its food from
sustainable sources in the next two years.

Harvard dining hall workers, members of UNITE HERE
Local 26, ratified a contract in September that sets up
a union-management committee to implement
"environmentally responsible" food practices.

Dining hall workers say these initiatives lead to more
work as well as better, healthier food. At Harvard,
workers were getting hours cut. They hope to see those
hours return as real cooking increases.

PITFALLS AT POMONA

At Pomona College, it's been easier to get the school
to switch to unprocessed food than to win union
recognition.

On Food Day kitchen staff reported that the
sustainable-food initiative won by students and workers
has led to speed-up in the kitchen rather than to more
hours or more jobs.

"They're putting skill back in the work, adding to the
workload, and not taking into account how it may be
affecting the workers," said Choy.

More than 90 percent of kitchen staffers signed a
petition for a union in March 2010, but the college
doesn't recognize their organization, despite many
meetings in which management promised neutrality, a
promise workers say has been broken.

In powerful videos the group has posted online, workers
say they were fired for being sick, had vital medical
care delayed due to management shenanigans, and were
unable to afford health coverage, which runs up to $600
a month. Some workers were still making less than $12
an hour after 20 years of service.

ALL ALONG THE FOOD CHAIN

The Food Chain Workers Alliance is using worker-to-
worker, worker-to-farmer, and worker-to-consumer
connections to plan a larger campaign, expected to
launch next year, focused on one corporate target that
can impact work from farms to tables, Lo said.

Each group of workers will figure out specific demands,
she said. They're compiling their knowledge of the
industry and studying winning models employed by
members of their coalition:

> Warehouse Workers for Justice has successfully used
community outrage to win back jobs for 10 workers fired
in warehouses southwest of Chicago. An ethnic food
distributor charged with discriminating against Latino
workers got an earful from community leaders who
threatened to boycott.

> In a 10-year campaign, Florida farmworkers and
students joined forces to pressure highly advertised
brands like Taco Bell to sign on to fair wages for
tomato pickers. They have nipped other brands into line
with marches, campus actions, and boycotts, and are now
focused on specialty grocer Trader Joe's and the
Florida-based Publix supermarket chain.

But farmworkers are able to employ boycotts partly
because they are excluded from U.S. labor law. Workers
covered by the National Labor Relations Act are hog-
tied by legal restrictions on "secondary boycotts,"
which target a company that is not their direct
employer.

On campuses, kitchen workers usually labor for
contractors like Aramark, rather than the university
itself. In warehouses, workers are often temps, way
down the chain from companies with a recognizable name.
When confronted, the corporate behemoths point to their
contractors as the culprits.

Successes have been won by cutting through the layers
of subcontractors, finding where the real power lies,
and then finding leverage to shift that target
directly. By creating connections and a deeper
understanding of what is at stake, food chain workers
hope to scale up and "build a campaign that will fight
for all of us on the supply line to America's tables,"
said Jimerson.

[Eduardo Soriano-Castillo contributed to this story.]

Washington Post Helps Senator Corker Spread the Big Lie on Fannie and Freddie | Beat the Press

2011-12-08T15:18:00.000-08:00

Washington Post Helps Senator Corker Spread the Big Lie on Fannie and Freddie | Beat the Press

Washington Post Helps Senator Corker Spread the Big Lie
on Fannie and Freddie
Dean Baker
CEPR
November 25, 2011
www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/washington-post-helps-senator-corker-spread-the-big-lie-on-fannie-and-freddie

When a newspaper abandons journalistic standards in its
news pages one hardly expects to find much commitment to
truth on its opinion pages. Therefore it is not
surprising that the Washington Post opened its pages
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/moving-beyond-freddie-and-fannie/2011/11/22/gIQAUyPhtN_story.html]
to Tennessee Senator Bob Corker to spread the story that
government support for homeownership through Fannie Mae
and Freddie Mac was the cause of the housing bubble.

Corker tells readers:

"During the boom years, the GSEs' affordable
housing goals were coupled with a Congress and
an administration that saw only the bright side
of rapidly increasing homeownership rates. That
meant that as housing prices began to spike, it
was impossible to make credit slightly more
expensive. Without countercyclical market
mechanisms able to operate naturally, as housing
prices went higher, the GSEs simply raced each
other to lower guarantee fees, out of fear that
they might lose business from mortgage
originators such as Countrywide and Washington
Mutual. The result, we now know, was a
government-induced bubble followed by a painful
collapse."

Okay, maybe Senator Corker really never heard of
Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Bears
Stearns, and the other Wall Street investment banks. He
may not know that they were making tens of billions of
dollars during these years securitizing the worst of the
sub-prime mortgages, without any government guarantees
except their implicit too-big-to-fail insurance. News
may take a long time to reach Tennessee.

But surely the Post knows about privately issued
mortgage-backed securities and their role in the bubble.
It even published a very good column
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/what-caused-the-financial-crisis-the-big-lie-goes-viral/2011/10/31/gIQAXlSOqM_story.html?tid=pm_pop]
by Barry Ritholz a couple of weeks back outlining the
story. So why does it allow Corker to publish something
that it knows is not true? Would it print an opinion
column blaming President Bush for actually doing the
World Trade Center bombing?

There is a ton of data showing that the blame-Fannie-
and-Freddie story is nonsense, but my favorite entry in
this debate is a contemporaneous assessment from that
well-known promulgator of left-wing propaganda, Moody's:

"Freddie Mac has long played a central role
(shared with Fannie Mae) in the secondary
mortgage market. In recent years, both housing
GSEs [Government Sponsored Enterprises] have
been losing share within the overall market due
to the shifting nature of consumer preferences
towards adjustable-rate loans and other hybrid
products. For the first half of 2006, Fannie Mae
and Freddie Mac captured about 44 percent of
total origination volume - up from a 41 percent
share in 2005, but down from a 59 percent share
in 2003. Moody's would be concerned if Freddie
Mac's market share (i.e., mortgage portfolio
plus securities as a percentage of conforming
and non-conforming origination), which ranged
between 18 and 23 percent between 1999 and the
first half of 2006, declined below 15 percent.
To buttress its market share, Freddie Mac has
increased its purchases of private label
securities. Moody's notes that these purchases
contribute to profitability, affordable housing
goals, and market share in the short-term, but
offer minimal benefit from a franchise building
perspective." (Moody's, "Federal Home Loan
Mortgage Corporation, Analysis
[http://www.freddiemac.com/investors/pdffiles/fm2006_moodys.pdf]
" December 2006, p.8)

So here we have Moody's expressing concern about the
ongoing viability of Freddie Mac because they are losing
out in the subprime and Alt-A market to the investment
bank. This is its assessment at the time, before it was
apparent (to them) that this market was a disaster in
the works.

When someone claims that the bubble was the fault of
Fannie and Freddie, they are either ignorant or lying.
And, I am saying this as someone who was harshly
critical of both at the time and would happy to see the
euthanasia of these mortgage giants-at least if the
alternative is to see them returned to some sort of
public-private hybrid.

Both companies deserve tons of blame, they could have
possibly stopped the bubble cold if either of them had
done something radical like announcing that they would
require appraisals of rental values and only buy
mortgages with a purchase price below some prce to rent
ratio (e.g. 18 to 1). However, their failure to be heros
does not make them the prime villians. That would be the
Wall Street boys, end of story.

Btw, if anyone is interested in knowing what happens to
a public agency committed to homeownership in the middle
of a housing bubble, that is not run for profit, then
they should look to the Federal Housing Authority (FHA).
While far from perfect, the FHA did not get caught up in
the irrational exuberance of the bubble years. Its
market share fell from around 10 percent in the late
1990s to 2 percent in 2005.

Democrats: all of a sudden a new breed of non-Democratic "moderates" and "centrists" are popping up like mushrooms. Here's an ironclad way to smoke out the phony crypto-Republican shills and double-talking sanctimonious hypocrites hiding among them. | Democratic Strategist

2011-12-08T15:11:00.000-08:00

Democrats: all of a sudden a new breed of non-Democratic "moderates" and "centrists" are popping up like mushrooms. Here's an ironclad way to smoke out the phony crypto-Republican shills and double-talking sanctimonious hypocrites hiding among them. | Democratic Strategist

Shocking News Cast

2011-12-08T15:08:00.000-08:00

Behind Closed Doors: Congress Trying to Force Indefinite Detention Bill on Americans » Blog of Rights: Official Blog of the American Civil Liberties Union

2011-12-08T14:48:00.000-08:00

Behind Closed Doors: Congress Trying to Force Indefinite Detention Bill on Americans » Blog of Rights: Official Blog of the American Civil Liberties Union

Lessons From V.I. Lenin and Father Roderick | Inside Higher Ed

2011-12-08T14:16:00.000-08:00

Lessons From V.I. Lenin and Father Roderick | Inside Higher Ed

Publications | New Economics Institute

2011-12-08T14:12:00.000-08:00

Publications | New Economics Institute

Nearly $2 Trillion Purloined from U.S. Workers in 2009 | Dollars & Sense

2011-12-08T13:56:00.000-08:00

Nearly $2 Trillion Purloined from U.S. Workers in 2009 | Dollars & Sense

Taxing the 1%: Why the top tax rate could be over 80% | vox - Research-based policy analysis and commentary from leading economists

2011-12-08T13:47:00.000-08:00

Taxing the 1%: Why the top tax rate could be over 80% | vox - Research-based policy analysis and commentary from leading economists

California prison hunger strikers propose ‘10 core demands’ for the national Occupy Wall Street Movement

2011-12-08T13:39:00.000-08:00

California prison hunger strikers propose ‘10 core demands’ for the national Occupy Wall Street Movement

The 10 demands:

1) *We want full employment with a living wage for all people who will
work, and for employment to be enforced as the right which it is.
2) **We want an end to institutional racism and race- and class-based
disparities in access to, and quality of, labor, education, health care,
criminal defense, political empowerment, technology and healthy food.
3) **We want decent and affordable housing for all people and for it to be
enforced as the right which it is.
4) **We want affordable and equal access to higher education for all and
access to education that teaches the true history of colonialism, chattel
slavery, repression of organized labor, the use of police repression and
imprisonment as tools of capitalist exploitation, and the perpetuation of
imperialism in the development and maintenance of modern U.S. power systems
and corporate financial markets.
5) **We want an immediate end to police brutality and the murder of
oppressed people in the U.S., particularly in the New Afrikan (Black),
Latino, immigrant and underclass communities and among those protesting in
this nation.
6) **We want an end to the expansion of the prison industrial complex, as a
profit base – from our tax dollars – for the disposal of surplus labor and
the poor.
7) **We want an end to all corporate and financial influences in the
political process in the U.S.
8) **We want an end to imperialist wars of aggression and sending our youth
off to kill and die to enforce the economic interests of big oil and other
corporate concerns seeking new resources to exploit, new markets to open
for sale of their goods and services and as an impetus to keep from
addressing domestic ills.*
9) *We want a bottoms-up approach to economic development and labor-capital
relations in the U.S.
10) **We want a more equitable distribution of wealth, justice and
opportunity at every level of society, reflecting the objective reality
that it’s the socio-economic, political, intellectual and cultural
contributions of the 99 percent upon which this society stands.

Global Justice School 2011 - Lecture Seven

2011-12-08T13:33:00.000-08:00

Global Justice School 2011 - Lecture Seven

Paul Mason; Meltdown - The End Of The Age Of Greed (RSA)

2011-12-08T12:50:00.000-08:00

BBC iPlayer - The Documentary: Radical Economics: Episode 1

2011-12-08T12:49:00.000-08:00

BBC iPlayer - The Documentary: Radical Economics: Episode 1

BBC iPlayer - The Documentary: Radical Economics: Episode 2

2011-12-08T09:26:00.000-08:00

BBC iPlayer - The Documentary: Radical Economics: Episode 2

GRITOS EN EL CIELO - SHOUTS IN THE SKY is an observational documentary film about a civil movement that was born in May 2011 in Barcelona.

2011-12-08T09:25:00.001-08:00

Glimpses of Isadora Duncan

2011-12-08T09:20:00.000-08:00

Workerism, Autonomia and Lessons from the Italian Left: Novara - 5th July 2011

2011-12-05T14:52:00.000-08:00

Novara - 5th July 2011

Novara - a weekly show discussing political theory, practice and aesthetics. Discussions and interventions will be with workers, theorists, students and activists. Hosted by Aaron Peters.

This week, Workerism, Autonomia and Lessons from the Italian Left; What can 2011 learn from Italy in the 1970s - with Federico Campagna from Zed Books.

Poor Kids Should Clean Bathrooms - Newt Gingrich

2011-12-05T13:20:00.000-08:00

Who's making a killing off student loans? - AlterNet - Salon.com

2011-12-05T12:19:00.000-08:00

Who's making a killing off student loans? - AlterNet - Salon.com

http://www.salon.com/2011/11/30/whos_making_a_killing_off_student_loans/?source=newsletter

Wednesday, Nov 30, 2011 8:00 AM 08:37:52 EST

Who’s making a killing off student loans?

We look at five lenders that are raking in serious cash from America's debt-ridden graduates

VIDEO

By Sarah Jaffe, Alternet

(Credit: Jagz Mario / CC BY 3.0)

Underneath the now-iconic red sculpture at Liberty Plaza, now cleared of tents and ringed by barricades plastic-cuffed together, several “students” stood draped in fake chains over their caps and gowns, brandishing debt bills instead of diplomas.

They might have been performing, as part of a press conference unveiling a national student debt refusal pledge, but the dramatization of what happens upon graduation to many of America’s students was spot-on. Despite a few moves by the Obama administration in past years and even recent months to lessen the burden of student loans, many graduates are still saddled with more debt than they can conceivably pay back and have little hope of finding a good job in the current economy.

Monday saw protests against tuition hikes on either end of the country; at New York’s Baruch College of the City University of New York, the Board of Trustees voted for another tuition hike and according to reports, a student kicked off the day’s actions byburning his Sallie Mae student loan bill. University of Californis, Davis, responding to the brutal pepper-spraying of students last week, also kept its focus on economic issues, chanting, “No cuts, no fees, education must be free,” and reportedly shutting down the financial aid building.

The talk of debt refusal or debt strikes, as I reported just recently, has ratcheted up along with the momentum of the Occupy Wall Street movement, as the occupiers made the connection between Wall Street bankers and student debt — right down to the bailouts, as student lenders received a bailout of their own from the federal government, which handed over billions in taxpayer dollars to the banks and lenders in exchange for loans that could no longer be sold on the secondary market.

Recent grads with mountains of debt know that without their tax dollars, these big lenders wouldn’t continue to exist. They want their loans forgiven or at least written down, and they think the lenders should pay. The principles laid out on theOccupyStudentDebtCampaign site call for free tuition at public universities, an end to interest on student loans, and for private and for-profit institutions to open their books so that students know how their money is being spent.

As of 2010, the government directly lends up to $31,000 to students for their undergraduate years. Yet that total isn’t even a year’s tuition at many schools, let alone enough to cover living expenses and textbooks for four full years. As the economic crisis continues to stifle the economy and strangle state budgets, even public universities are seeing tuition hikes — the students pepper-sprayed at U.C. Davis were protesting a proposed hike in their tuition a full 81 percent in four years. So many students turn to private lenders to fill the gap between what the government will provide and what they realistically need to pay for school. Though those private lenders no longer get direct government subsidies, many of them still have billions on the books in federally subsidized debt, and even the private loans (often at variable interest rates, vulnerable to hikes when borrowers can least afford them) still have protections unlike almost any other type of debt, as student loans cannot be discharged in bankruptcy.

Jon Walker at FireDogLake described the now-defunct federally subsidized private lending system thus:

“The Federal Family Education Loan Program (FFEL) was a classic lemon socialism program. It provided a nearly total government guarantee for ’private’ student loans. If the loans did well, the large financial companies got the profit, if they didn’t preform, the government socialized the loses. These broken incentives spurred risky behavior from the companies.”

“Student loans are among the most lucrative you can make because the borrower has no protections and the creditor is afforded extraordinary powers,” noted Andrew Ross, New York University professor and labor expert, at the student debt press conference. Ross spoke, too, of the need for professors to work in solidarity with the students on this issue since their salaries are paid through the debt of their students.

“Our public universities, once the democratic gold standard worldwide, are increasingly and ruinously dependent on debt financing from the people they are supposed to serve,” he said.

So just who are the lenders profiting from the massive student debt load?

You already know some of the names: JPMorgan Chase, U.S Bank, Citi, Bank of America. Others are non-bank student lenders. What all of them have in common, though, is that their practices are shrouded in secrecy. A recent release from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the brainchild of now-Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren, called for an investigation into the industry:

“It has been operating in the shadows for too long,” Raj Date, the Treasury Department adviser who is running the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, said in a release. “Shedding light on this industry will benefit students, lenders, and the market as a whole.”

Here, we take a look at five of the lenders raking in the cash off the backs of the U.S.’s students.

1. Sallie Mae

The SLM Corp., better known as Sallie Mae (and originally called the Student Loan Marketing Association), is the largest student lender in the United States. It was created in 1972 as a government-sponsored enterprise, but fully privatized in 2004. It also services loans provided by the federal government, and holds, services and collects loans made under the now-discontinued Federal Family Education Loan Program (FFELP), the federally subsidized private lending program that was recently replaced with direct federal loans. These loans were, up until the end of the program, Sallie Mae’s main source of income.

And just like in the mortgage market, Sallie Mae has been accused of making “subprime” loans to borrowers who will be attending for-profit or trade schools that have low graduation rates, making the loans a bad risk. Stephen Burd at the New America Foundation’s Higher Ed Watch wrote in 2008, “Still, Sallie Mae won’t overtly admit fault and poor management. Instead, the company and its promoters on Wall Street have been testing another explanation for its difficulties. An analyst with CreditSights Inc., in New York, recently tried it out when he told Bloomberg.com that the loan giant had been ‘blind-sided’ by the rising default and delinquency rates on the subprime private loans it had made to low-income and working-class students attending trade school of dubious quality.”

The last year that the FFELP existed, Sallie Mae held a frightening $154.1 billion in FFELP loans.

Like all of the student lenders, in 2008, Sallie Mae got what amounted to a sizable government bailout from the Ensuring Continued Access to Student Loans Act (ECASLA), which the Campaign for America’s Future described in a report as one that “allowed lenders like Sallie Mae to sell loans back to the Department of Education through a number of loan-purchase programs.” On the strength of that government bailout, the company’s profits surged to $324 million.

The CEO of Sallie Mae, Albert Lord, according to CAP “has reaped more than $225 million from the student loan business over the course of his career. In 2008, even as profits declined, Lord received $4.7 million in total compensation. He has used a portion of the proceeds to build himself a private golf course.”

Sallie Mae has spent millions lobbying against student loan reform, including lobbying the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which made recommendations on the cost savings of the government’s switch to direct lending. Over the last three campaign cycles (2012, 2010 and 2008) Sallie Mae’s PAC has spent $1,583,557, favoring Democrats in ’08 and ’10 but so far this year favoring the GOP.

In 2010, when Citigroup decided to get out of the student loan business, Sallie Mae paid $1.2 billion for the rights to collect payments and service $28 billion in federally backed loans.

2. Wells Fargo

Wachovia and Wells Fargo were the third- and fourth-largest originators of federally subsidized private loans under FFELP in 2009, with $5.54 billion and $5.14 billion, respectively. After their merger, the resultant behemoth is the country’s second-largest private student lender.

As we reported recently at AlterNet, Wells Fargo reported profits of $12.36 billion in 2010, and is No. 23 on the Fortune 500, just above Procter & Gamble. Headquartered in California, the bank has $1.26 trillion in assets and $93 billion in revenues. And, of course, it got $25 billion in TARP funds from the government and borrowed another $300 billion through the Federal Reserve during the financial crisis, which it helped create — Wells Fargo is the country’s largest consumer lender and is the only one of the nation’s big banks that offers payday advance loans, which it calls “Direct Deposit Advance” and has direct financial connections to six of the top seven payday lenders.

The company has faced allegations of racial bias in its mortgage lending processes, though there’s no information about similar allegations of its student lending. Salon reported:

“Wells Fargo has a history of targeting vulnerable communities for risky financial products. At the height of the subprime lending mania in 2006, the bank was more likely to loan subprime mortgages to Latinos and African-Americans than whites, according to a September 2009 report by the Center for American Progress, a process known as “reverse red-lining.” For financially stable borrowers, the targeting was even starker: Middle-class blacks were four times more likely than middle-class whites to get a dangerous mortgage. Middle-class Latinos were nearly three times more likely.”

Wells Fargo is now offering a new fixed-rate private student loan, which would allow borrowers to lock in one rate for the life of their loan; however, the rates can be high — up to 14 percent for those attending community colleges or trade schools, or in other words, for lower-income borrowers.

In Minnesota recently, a group of Occupy-affiliated activists “mic-checked” Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf, calling him out for his bank’s foreclosure and student debt policies.

3. Discover

After buying the remains of Citi’s Student Loan Corp., Discover Financial Services became the third-largest provider of private student loans. Best known for the Discover Card, of course, the company’s website proclaims:

“The company operates the Discover card, America’s cash rewards pioneer, and offers personal and student loans, online savings products, certificates of deposit and money market accounts through its Discover Bank subsidiary.”

According to Canadian Business magazine, of Discover’s $52.51 billion in total loans (as of May 31, 2011) $4.57 billion was student loans, up from $820 million the previous year — which reflects the buyout of Citi’s loans.

Harit Talwar, the company’s vice president for US Cards, said of student lending at a conference in May, “We really like this business. In the U.S., as you know, education costs are increasing much faster than income. And therefore, students need funding for tuition fees.”

Discover’s PAC has spent $2,221,136 over the last three election cycles on candidates, mostly to Republicans.

4. NelNet

Based in Lincoln, Neb., NelNet was founded in 1978 as the UNIPAC Loan Service Corp. and renamed NelNet in 1996. It reported net income of $165.5 million for three quarters of 2011, and has net student loan assets of $24.6 billion. Its press release states:

“In September 2009, Nelnet began servicing student loans for the Department of Education (Department) under a contract that will increase the company’s fee-based revenue as the servicing volume increases. At September 30, 2011, the company was servicing $44.6 billion of loans for 3 million borrowers on behalf of the Department, compared with $21.8 billion of loans for 2.5 million borrowers on September 30, 2010. Revenue from this contract increased to $12.8 million for the third quarter of 2011, up from $8.7 million for the same period a year ago.”

That’s $12.8 million in a quarter for servicing federal loans.

The lender has been riddled with controversy; in 2006, Inside Higher Ed reported that NelNet had overcharged the government about a billion dollars. (They settled in 2010 for $55 million to resolve a whistle-blower lawsuit — which also targeted Sallie Mae.) And Higher Ed Watch reported in 2007, in a piece called “NelNet’s Friend with Benefits”:

“Amidst revelations this spring of industry wide kickbacks, improper inducements, and gifts from student loan providers to colleges and universities, Nelnet quickly shut down a Nebraska investigation into its activities by agreeing to provide $1 million to the state in support of a national financial aid awareness campaign.
….
As we reported two weeks ago, seeking higher office in Nebraska with Nelnet’s support can be a lucrative endeavor. Democratic Sen. Ben Nelson received almost $65,000 in the 2005-2006 election cycle alone from Nelnet and Union Bank executives and officials. This June, Nelson co-sponsored an amendment that would have sent $4 billion in financial aid earmarked for students instead to for-profit student loan companies like Nelnet. Nelson’s amendment lost 61-36.”

NelNet’s PAC has spent $398,731 on campaign donations since 2008, and it’s spent $2,780,000 on lobbying since 2007; its lobbyists have included Clark Lytle Gelduldig & Cranford, the firm recently outed byChris Hayes on MSNBC as doing opposition research on the Occupy Wall Street movement.

JPMorgan Chase

JPMorgan this year became the country’s largest bank by asset size, surpassing the troubled Bank of America, and its private student loan division came into shape when it purchased Collegiate Funding Services in 2006, creating Chase Student Loans.

In 2009, Chase held $11.1 billion in FFELP loans, not a huge amount when you consider its $2.29 trillion in current assets. Still, the giant has been accused of some shady lending practices.

Back in 2007, NPR reported:

“The House Education and Labor Committee says it has evidence that JPMorgan Chase paid five student aid officials to do work for the bank while they were still on their school’s payroll. JPMorgan Chase confirmed it did pay school officials to do work related to student loans, but the bank says it doesn’t do that kind of thing anymore.
The company says it has also stopped throwing lavish parties for university officials, like the $70,000 cruise in New York Harbor that student aid officers enjoyed in 2005.”

JPMorgan Chase spends lavishly on campaigns and lobbying as well, dropping $5.8 million in just the last year on lobbyists and having given $109,750 to Mitt Romney, $79,150 to Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, $55,750 to Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker, and $37,439 to Barack Obama.

And just recently, the bank was pushed to reinstate a deferment program for active duty military servicepeople, after NBC News reported on a family that “received a letter alerting them the bank decided to end the program and would no longer allow active-duty troops to delay paying their student loans, even if they were away at war.”

Donna Lynn – 'I'd much rather be with the girls'

2011-12-05T11:40:00.001-08:00

Find more artists like Donna Lynn at Myspace Music

Former Broadway actress (whose 'My Boyfriend Got a Beatle Haricut' was her only top100 track) does a great job on this Keith Richards-penned number (originally 'i'd much rather hang out with the boys' and deemed “too poppy” for a Stones record and then passed along to The Toggery Five who released it as a single in Feb. 1965).

Funerali di Pier Paolo Pasolini

2011-12-05T11:13:00.000-08:00

“Death is not the inability to communicate but rather the inability to be understood.” (P.P.P, Una disperata vitalità, 1964).

In the hands of Saint-Pasolini, the montage transforms time, telling history in necessary narratives, piecing events logically together, making history tell us something about the construction of death and the eternal in life through particular images. He understood that editing allowed a self to differentiate, operating on the time and the history of his own destiny as the crucified who chooses his own death by humiliation: a “purely intellectual thriller”. He shares with Hegel the passionate attempt to submit life to negativity, where language – for me, P.P.P most surely makes the cut of the figure of writer-director – is most telling inscription of the movement of blocs of consciousness. Every artist must discover that language is a heterogeneous assemblage in perpetual disequilibrium, made up of diverse languages ad infinitum. Hence P.P.P could see his art of protest as against the society that could produce Italian language and say, courageously, as in all his acts,“it's not that I changed literary technique. I actually changed the language!”

Alice Cooper The Awakening

2011-12-02T13:01:00.000-08:00

a lil' polemic note on concrete poetry

2011-12-02T12:14:00.000-08:00

Alberto Toscano should have read Rosmarie Waldrop's very fine early book Against Language? and become familiar with a host of international verbo-visual innovations before he declared – in his otherwise groovy translator's introduction to Badiou's The Century – that concrete poetry has been “seldom compelling”.

That sounds like a banal echo of the prejudice adjudicated by late aesthetic modernism's liberal-bourgeois critics who refused to identify the concrete as thought (or poetics)....

from CATVILLE

2011-12-02T12:10:00.000-08:00

for m.m

Economy-sized thought

unfolds within a horrible secret.

You go dominate that tableau

kissed by a Prince, at half the price.

And what pride is revealed in

the power of the man-y man!

How many people reading that

Mandelstam poem is too many?

You mean to say you would

condemn your doppelganger?

Ballrooms and windows steeped in

the wisdom of mediocrity.

Tomorrow I will receive an invitation

to a seminar on “teaching peace”.

Super-adhesive Heddas, traitors spouting

sentimentalism and bragging,

demanding the Masonic –

closed in this indecent circle.

footnote on Deleuze

2011-11-30T13:04:00.000-08:00

Deleuze's “lost” book on Marx is one thing (a work he COULD have written, whereas De Man's thought simply COULD NOT complete his own Marx-project), but just imagine the book he did not write on music! By his own admission, his favourite plateaus were those on the ritornello, and the short essay on Boulez, Proust and time is breathtaking. “Even in repetition, the fixed not defined by the identity of a repeated element but by a quality common to elements that would not be repeated without it (for example, the famous taste common to two moments, or in music a common pitch...). [. . .] That is why the fixed imply no permanence but make instantaneous the variation or dissemination they force one to perceive.” “There is a lost time, which is not a negation but a full function of time. For Boulez, the pulverization of sound or its extinguishing is an affair of timbre, the extinguishing of timbre, in the sense that timbre is like love and repeats its end rather than its origin.....” Love: a timbre of the lost multiple aspects of implicated time.... wow wow wow.

Who Wants Cake

2011-11-30T12:50:00.000-08:00

Tang Dynasty - Internationale

2011-11-30T12:36:00.000-08:00

DARRELL BANKS - Open the door to your heart - REVILOT

2011-11-28T10:40:00.000-08:00

Pas de C4 pour Daniel Daniel.VOB

2011-11-28T10:39:00.000-08:00

Banks of the Ohio - Bill Monroe & Doc Watson

2011-11-26T06:00:00.000-08:00

Captain Beefheart in Cincinnati - Woe-Is-Uh-Me-Bop

2011-11-25T05:32:00.000-08:00

We’re ninety-nine per cent (song)

2011-11-22T10:24:00.001-08:00

Perth WobbliesThe 99%
Tune: The Farmer in the Dell

We’re ninety-nine per cent
We’re living in a tent
And what we really want to know
Is where our money went!

My uncle lost his store
Tho’ jobs have gone offshore
There always seems to be enough
To finance one more war.

We worked for thirty years
Through hopes and dreams and fears
They siphoned off our pension funds
To bail out profiteers.

The media’s got it wrong
The people are too strong
It takes more than the filthy rich
To stop this little song.

They took our homes away
Because we couldn’t pay
But even if we paid on time
We can’t trust B. of A.

They can beat us and put us in jail
But they can’t get us off their tail
We are the ninety-nine per cent
And WE’RE TOO BIG TO FAIL!

courtesy of
Mike B)
***********************************************************************
Wobbly Times
http://wobblytimes.blogspot.com/

The Mothers of Invention - Mother People

2011-11-22T10:15:00.000-08:00

Jean Ritchie - Careless Love

2011-11-22T07:52:00.000-08:00

www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/feds/2011/201151/201151pap.pdf

2011-11-21T11:20:00.000-08:00

www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/feds/2011/201151/201151pap.pdf

Desperate Bicycles - Advice On Arrest

2011-11-21T11:03:00.001-08:00

Desperate Bicycles - Advice On Arrest

2011-11-21T11:03:00.000-08:00

PhDs Becoming Worthless in America

2011-11-21T09:30:00.000-08:00