April 15, 2009 archive

Given what we are seeing with the little Teabaggers the Dog thought that today would be a good day to talk about effective protest and persuasion. There are many tools which we as activist can use. The critical thing is recognizing what works, when it works, why it works and choosing the ones which will achieve our goals most effectively. Today we have seen a failure of epic proportions which will do more damage to the Teabaggers causes (whatever the hell they are) than it will to advance them.

Cross Posted at Square State

1. The Washington Post reports Arms-control advocacy groups urge U.S. to update nuclear weapons policy. Instead of just counting warheads and destructive power, a new study examined what nuclear weapons are targeted to destroy.

   “From Counterforce to Minimal Deterrence,” a 57-page report released last week by two arms-control advocacy groups, takes a close look at “strike options,” giving their view of the role nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles and strategic bombs play in today’s post-Cold War world.

   Instead of just comparing numbers among the nuclear powers, the authors representing the Federation of American Scientists and Natural Resources Defense Council focus on what the United States is targeting and whether this approach should change.

   The study points out the obvious — that “nuclear weapons are horrific things and nuclear war would be an unimaginable disaster.” But it says current Pentagon plans for using strategic nuclear weapons include “individual strike options that probably range from using just a few weapons to using more than 1,000.”

   The studies advocate keeping the same number of nuclear weapons, but lowering their yields just enough to “remain devastating enough to deter any nation from striking the United States or any of its allies.” Lower yields would result in fewer people killed with “today’s targeting choices”.

   The study’s main purpose is to propose a new nuclear doctrine for the United States, one it defines as “minimal deterrence.” Under that doctrine, the nation would retain enough nuclear weaponry “to deter nuclear use in the first place.” The study creates a new category called “infrastructure targeting,” under which attacks would focus on “electrical, oil and energy nodes” that support war industries. “A minimal nuclear deterrence policy with infrastructure targeting does not require nuclear forces to be on alert or even to react quickly,” according to the study.

   This seriously looks like a utilitarian, ‘first strike’ path to nuclear weapons use.

2. The Guardian reports Iran offers new package to break nuclear weapons deadlock. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Iran is “preparing a new package. Once it becomes ready, we will present that package. It is a package that constitutes peace and justice throughout the globe and also respects other nations’ rights.”

   Ahmadinejad remarks seem to come in response to suggestions that the Obama administration may drop a Bush-era precondition from the nuclear talks, which had been a sticking point.

Four at Four continues with deflation, banking, and piracy.

 

Not too long ago, the United States used to invade nationalize nations banks for a lot less.

Bloomberg News reports that thefailed Wall Street bank, Lehman Brothers, has a stockpile of as much as 500,000 pounds of uranium “yellowcake” that could theoretically is just about enough material needed to make one nuclear bomb.

The difference between this uranium-oxide and Iraq’s “yellowcake” is, of course, that Lehman’s stockpile is real. It is one of the bankrupt bank’s many assets that liquidators have been trying to offload since September.

A supply of 500,000 pounds of yellowcake is just “slightly” less than the amount needed to make one bomb, or fuel one nuclear power reactor for a year, if the latest enrichment technologies are used, said Gennady Pshakin, an Obninsk, Russia-based nonproliferation expert.

The uranium “might fetch $20 million at today’s prices of about $40.50 per pound”. Once worth $55 a pound, the commodity price of uranium has dropped for five straight months. “More than 43 million pounds of uranium-oxide concentrate, or yellowcake equivalent sold on the spot market last year, more than doubling the 2007 trading volume”.

Lehman’s “yellowcake” is being stored, in part, in oil-rich Canada. Looking back, which was a bigger threat to the United States in 2003? A neutered Iraq or a “yellowcake” stockpiling Wall Street bank?

( – promoted by buhdydharma )

Yesterday was the anniversary of some mammoth multi-state dust storms.  Robert Geiger (AP) wrote on 4/15/35:

Three little words achingly familiar on a Western farmer’s tongue, rule life in the dust bowl of the continent – if it rains.

The name “Dust Bowl” stuck, first coined on today’s date 74 years ago.  The rains didn’t return until four years later.  When the dust settled in April 1935, scenes like this were repeated throughout the high plains region.

Crops were ruined.  Farms produced nothing.  Livestock died en masse.  There was no one to sell to.  People abandoned them in droves, with little more than the clothes on their back to show for many years of hard work building their homesteads.

The 1930s Dust Bowl is often referred to as a natural disaster.  But that’s not quite right.  Human activities, en masse, had everything to do with it.

The Masters of the Universe at Goldman Sachs are now so confident of their domination of America that they are publicly mocking the press, the government, and the people. They are doing this through shameless displays of market manipulation and disinformation. Any sane observer of the financial world would recoil in disgust at the following pranks.

1. Goldman drops out of their financial reporting the month of December 2008, in which they had significant losses, in order to conveniently shift to a different reporting calendar.

2. Goldman rushes through a $5 billion public offering based on cooked numbers and government subsides. The market responds with a vote of “confidence” by cutting 10% off Goldman’s stock price.

3. Goldman makes a show of intending to “return” $10 billion in taxpayer TARP money, while remaining silent about their continued issuance of huge amounts of debt GUARANTEED BY THE FDIC.

4. Goldman claims that the $12 billion of (taxpayer provided) CDO payments it received from AIG had no material affect on its financial performance. Uh-huh.

The long knives are out for Goldman Sachs. Government regulators, angry investors, consumer activists, blogosphere progressives, and most intelligent observers will long remember how one company used its legally corrupt operatives in the Obama administration to grab taxpayer funds to pay million-dollar bonuses to lying executives whose only ethos is greed. This firm deserves capital punishment. It may duck and twist and dodge for a few more years, but it is going to go down, and it will go down hard.

Goldman Sachs will be remembered like Enron: a textbook case of the pernicious and self-destructive conduct of an uncontrolled corporation.