August 2009 archive

1. The Guardian reports the Oil lobby is to fund phoney campaign against U.S. climate change strategy. The American Petroleum Institute (API), the U.S. oil and gas lobby, is funding 20 fake ‘energy citizen’ rallies to “give the false appearance of a groundswell of public opinion against legislation that is key to President Obama’s climate change strategy”. The events will be “seeded with industry employees.”

   Jack Gerard, the president of the API, outlined in an email to put a “human face” on their lobbying efforts to thwart climate legislation before the Senate votes on it in September. “We must move aggressively,” he wrote.

   Elsewhere, the LA Times reports ExxonMobil pleads guilty to killing protected birds. The company will pay a mere $600,000 in fines and fees for killing 85 protected birds — including hawks, owls and waterfowl. “Most of the birds died after exposure to hydrocarbons in uncovered natural gas pits, oil tanks and waste water facilities at ExxonMobil drilling and production plants in Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas”.

2. The LA Times reports Loophole in government program to buy toxic securities will cost taxpayers. “A controversial $40-billion government program to buy toxic securities from ailing banks has a flaw that law enforcement and financial experts say could allow traders to illegally profit from inside information.”

   “The Treasury Department, which is in charge of the program, says it intends to closely monitor trading activity to prevent illegal insider trading and profiteering at the expense of the public interest.” But, Neal Barofsky, the special inspector general for the banking rescue program, said:

   “The Treasury cannot possibly match wits with the innovation and aggressiveness of Wall Street… If you give them a set of rules and there are technicalities and legal loopholes and things we haven’t thought of, they are going to find that out, not because they are bad, but because that is what they are supposed to do. They are supposed to seek out profits at all costs.”

   Meanwhile, Bloomberg reports Over 150 U.S. banks may be at the point of no return. “More than 150 publicly traded U.S. lenders own nonperforming loans that equal 5 percent or more of their holdings, a level that former regulators say can wipe out a bank’s equity and threaten its survival.”

   Already 72 banks failed this year; the most since 1992.

3. The Guardian reports Afghanistan passes ‘barbaric’ law diminishing women’s rights. “Afghanistan has quietly passed a law permitting Shia men to deny their wives food and sustenance if they refuse to obey their husbands’ sexual demands, despite international outrage over an earlier version of the legislation which President Hamid Karzai had promised to review.”

   Meanwhile, the LA Times reports the upcoming Afghanistan report won’t include U.S. troop request. Defense War Secretary Robert Gates said the “upcoming assessment of Afghanistan by the top U.S. commander there will not include a request for additional U.S. troop”, however Gates noted it was possible that Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, “will be considered separately and subsequent to his assessment”.

   “McChrystal is expected to call for an increasing focus on protecting the population and less on mounting individual attacks on suspected extremists.”

4. The Army Times reports the Army is on track to surpass 2008 suicide numbers.

   As many as 12 soldiers killed themselves in July, the Army announced today, and the service remains on course to setting a record for suicides in a single year.

   Of the 12 deaths, eight were active-duty soldiers and four were National Guard or Army Reserve soldiers who were not on active duty at the time of their deaths…

   Between Jan. 1 and July 31, there have been 96 reported active-duty suicides. Of those, 62 have been confirmed as suicides and 34 are still under investigation.

Burning the Midnight Oil for the Arc of the Sun, xposted to Agent Orange, 7pm EDT

I guess its natural, as an advocate for transport cycling and for transport systems like High Speed Rail, light rail, and Quality Buses that support cycle transport, that among the enemies of our long term national interest, I tend to focus on the Oil Patch and their allies.

But, what would our economy be like if we didn’t study war no more?

Consider just official Federal Defense Spending, in 2005 dollars and as a Percent of GDP (to closest 0.1%) (BEA):

• 1995: $476.8b, 5.2%
• 2000: $453.5b, 4.0%
• 2005: $589.0b, 4.7%
• 2008: $659.4b, 5.0%

You can see right there why it was necessary to have Bush rather than Gore elected as President in 2000, and why the two candidates on the Democratic side in favor of expanding the size of the army were the two finalists in the Democratic primary contest to clean up for the mess that Bush made of things.

Direct Federal spending on “Defense” goods and services was heading south of 4%, and that could not be tolerated.

Crossposted at Daily Kos

Dr. Dean on Keith Olbermann video at bottom of diary

   The GOP is hoping that all the old people in America will freak out over whatever they can say to scare Grampa, but it isn’t working on anybody else.

It’s easier to scare older people than it is younger ones.

    What is interesting here, other than the majority support after all the GOP scare tactics and the media hysteria, is that even though people like what they have, they understand that what they have is quickly vanishing, 14,000 people a day, and that what they have now will cost more each coming year if the GOP and the status quo has their way.

drudge.com

   And though it may work on the wingnuts and the low information McCain voters, it simply isn’t working on anyone else.

   Well, when I look at some polls based on age, something really glaring comes out.

Has anybody in our idiot media noticed that there are ZERO young or minority Americans at these astroturf heavy town halls? (not counting children dragged along by their wingnut parents)

    This seems to be the response the GOP wishes to receive from our nation’s elderly.

    The good thing is, it isn’t working to move the entire 60-65+ demographic towards the GOP. Rather, it is turning off anyone who isn’t a rabid wingnut to begin with.

   The GOP is NOT WINNING THIS FIGHT!

More below the fold

The Dog is at the Netroots Nation and it is fabulous! For those playing our home game this week the Dog is going to try to post as many posts about being here as possible! This post is about the first panel of the day. It was titled Prop 8 and beyond. Marriage Equality for all 50 States.  

There are Two Americas, the wealth and the rest of us:

Income inequality in the United States is at an all-time high, surpassing even levels seen during the Great Depression, according to a recently updated paper by University of California, Berkeley Professor Emmanuel Saez. The paper, which covers data through 2007, points to a staggering, unprecedented disparity in American incomes.

snip

Saez calculates that in 2007 the top .001 percent of American earners took home 6 percent of total U.S. wages, a figure that has nearly doubled since 2000.

As of 2007, the top decile of American earners, Saez writes, pulled in 49.7 percent of total wages, a level that’s “higher than any other year since 1917 and even surpasses 1928, the peak of stock market bubble in the ‘roaring” 1920s.'”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…

The entire paper is available here:

http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez…

From Saez’s paper:

[W]hile the bottom 99 percent of incomes grew at a solid pace of 2.7 percent per year from 1993-2000, these incomes grew only 1.3 percent per year from 2002-2007. As a result, in the economic expansion of 2002-2007, the top 1 percent captured two thirds of income growth.”

Paul Krugman comments that it was “Even more gilded” than we thought.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.c…

The charts from Saez at Krugman and HuffPo say it all.

During a staged press conference, the GOP finally rolled out their health care reform plan…  

White House deal with drug firms draws flak  

An $80-billion pact with the pharmaceutical industry intended to advance the administration’s healthcare reform goals has instead created confusion and discord.

 By Tom Hamburger

August 14, 2009



Reporting from Washington – An $80-billion deal with the drug industry that the White House thought would add momentum to its campaign for national healthcare reform has instead provoked a political tempest, frustrating and bewildering some of the president’s most important allies.

As complaints rolled in, the administration offered varying, sometimes contradictory explanations of the deal.

“I’ve heard a lot of confusion about what was agreed to,” said Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Beverly Hills), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, who wrote healthcare legislation that would impose more cost on the industry than that contained in the White House agreement.

North Korea frees South Korean worker after Hyundai official’s visit

The chairwoman of Hyundai Group went to Pyongyang to seek the man’s release after President Clinton’s successful trip gained the freedom of two American TV reporters.

By Ju-min Park and John M. Glionna

August 14, 2009



Reporting from Seoul – A 44-year-old South Korean worker held in North Korea since March was released Thursday during a visit to Pyongyang by a prominent South Korean corporate leader, authorities said.

The release came a week after former President Clinton traveled to the North Korean capital and secured pardons for two American television reporters who had been sentenced to 12 years of hard labor for illegally entering the country.

Chairwoman Hyun Jung-eun of Hyundai Group flew to Pyongyang on Monday to negotiate the release of her employee, a technician at a northern industrial complex jointly run by North and South Korea.