June 16, 2013 archive

A-C Meetup: From Detroit to Honduras and Back: Capitalists Immigrate To Usurp Rights by Justina

From This in Michigan…

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To This in Honduras….

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In Michigan, Republican Governor Rick Snyder has appointed an “emergency manager” to  take over the city of Detroit,  with the powers to over-ride the votes of local citizens and the decisions and contracts made by their locally elected mayor and city council. The manager has the power to abrogate previously signed union contracts with city workers and sell city assets to pay off the city’s creditors.  The new emergency manager has ordered the appraisal of the Detroit Art Institute’s world class art collection with a view to its sale.  

In Honduras, its post-coup president and legislature has signed a law allowing the government to sell or lease vast tracks of lands in habited by Honduran’s indigenous tribes, to private owners to establish “charter cities”, feudal-like city states which are to establish their own laws and form of government, free of pre-existing state laws and regulations.  

As a part of Honduras’s “public-private partnership”, law, capitalist business have been invited to create new business cities in the wilderness, profit paradises to be totally controlled by the businesses which own them. Thus the ese corporate vandals are pillaging the world, its land, art and culture by liquidating previously sovereign states in their favor.

Honduras will now allow consortia of private corporations to set up their own city-states, free of virtually all pre-existing law and regulation by the country’s government.  The “public”  component of this “public-private partnership”, the putatively democratically elected Honduran government (post the 2009 Zelaya-coup) have voted to sell (or long term lease) large tracks of their country to private corporations and their agents.  Hondurans living in these feudal city-states will have no democratic control of their environment.  

The rules will be set by private charters, written by the corporate agents who shall decide who shall live in their states and who shall be excluded and where they  will live and work if they allowed in.  (Never mind that the likely territories involved long have belonged to indigenous tribes, who have not been consulted in this massive give-away of their land, but actively oppose it.)

It’s really not much different in Michigan.  

Cartnoon

On This Day In History June 16

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

June 16 is the 167th day of the year (168th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 198 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1933, The National Industrial Recovery Act is passed.

The National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), officially known as the Act of June 16, 1933 (Ch. 90, 48 Stat. 195, formerly codified at 15 U.S.C. sec. 703), was an American statute which authorized the President of the United States to regulate industry and permit cartels and monopolies in an attempt to stimulate economic recovery, and established a national public works program. The legislation was enacted in June 1933 during the Great Depression as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal legislative program. Section 7(a) of the bill, which protected collective bargaining rights for unions, proved contentious (especially in the Senate), but both chambers eventually passed the legislation and President Roosevelt signed the bill into law on June 16, 1933. The Act had two main sections (or “titles”). Title I was devoted to industrial recovery, and authorized the promulgation of industrial codes of fair competition, guaranteed trade union rights, permitted the regulation of working standards, and regulated the price of certain refined petroleum products and their transportation. Title II established the Public Works Administration, outlined the projects and funding opportunities it could engage in, and funded the Act.

The Act was implemented by the National Recovery Administration (NRA) and the Public Works Administration (PWA). Very large numbers of regulations were generated under the authority granted to the NRA by the Act, which led to a significant loss of political support for Roosevelt and the New Deal. The NIRA was set to expire in June 1935, but in a major constitutional ruling the U.S. Supreme Court held Title I of the Act unconstitutional on May 27, 1935, in Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, 295 U.S. 495 (1935). The National Industrial Recovery Act is widely considered a policy failure, both in the 1930s and by historians today. Disputes over the reasons for this failure continue, however. Among the suggested causes are that the Act promoted economically harmful monopolies, that the Act lacked critical support from the business community, and that the Act was poorly administered. The Act encouraged union organizing, which led to significant labor unrest. The Act had no mechanisms for handling these problems, which led Congress to pass the National Labor Relations Act in 1935.

Six In The Morning

On Sunday

World exclusive: Iran will send 4,000 troops to aid Bashar al-Assad’s forces in Syria

US urges Britain and France to join in supplying arms to Syrian rebels as MPs fear that UK will be drawn into growing Sunni-Shia conflict

ROBERT FISK    SUNDAY 16 JUNE 2013

Washington’s decision to arm Syria’s Sunni Muslim rebels has plunged America into the great Sunni-Shia conflict of the Islamic Middle East, entering a struggle that now dwarfs the Arab revolutions which overthrew dictatorships across the region.

For the first time, all of America’s ‘friends’ in the region are Sunni Muslims and all of its enemies are Shiites. Breaking all President Barack Obama’s rules of disengagement, the US is now fully engaged on the side of armed groups which include the most extreme Sunni Islamist movements in the Middle East.




Sunday’s Headlines:

State news: North Korea proposes high-level talks with U.S.

Nicaragua canal approved by Nicaragua’s president, Chinese businessman

SADC leaders urge Mugabe to delay vote

Why the US locks up prisoners for life

Vienna embraces the romance and culture of the bicycle

Late Night Karaoke

What We Now Know

On this week’s segment of “What We Know Now,” Up host Steve Kornacki talks about former Rep. Anthony Weiner who is running for mayor in New York City and his first campaign for the House. His guests, discussing with what they learned this week, are Ana Marie Cox, The Guardian; political strategist L. Joy Williams; Charmaine Yost, Americans United for Life; and Democratic pollster Celinda Lake.

One Nation Invisible

One Size Cloaks All

Nov. 23, 2012 – A metamaterial invisibility cloak that can adapt to hide different sized objects is demonstrated by in Nature Communications this week. The findings represent a useful advance for more practical applications of metamaterial cloaking…

Metamaterials have already been shown to hide objects from electromagnetic waves by manipulating the light so that it appears to have not interacted with anything. However, these cloaks need to be redesigned and rebuilt if the shape of the object changes. Kyoungsik Kim and colleagues now present a smart metamaterial that is able to adapt to changes in the object shape, so that a range of objects may be hidden by one cloak.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/re…

Take that, Superman, with your stinking x-ray vision that sees under clothes at airports.

Just tripping the light fantastic as we used to say but never got around to.

But there is even better news for people as opposed to snoops.



‘Temporal Cloaking’ Could Bring More Secure Optical Communications

June 5, 2013 – Researchers have demonstrated a method for “temporal cloaking” of optical communications, representing a potential tool to thwart would-be eavesdroppers and improve security for telecommunications.

“More work has to be done before this approach finds practical application, but it does use technology that could integrate smoothly into the existing telecommunications infrastructure,” said Purdue University graduate student Joseph Lukens, working with Andrew Weiner, the Scifres Family Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/re…

Hey, what’s with that electrical and computer engineering?  Is that some way of hiding from the snoops at the CIA who always work in the dark?

You have to talk optonics for this stuff rather than the old-fashioned electronics.

See?

No wonder the Republicans (and the Obama Democrats, if the full truth be told) want to gut research for the [chuckle] balanced budget.

Best,  Terry