During the Deep Water Horizon spill, Obama put BP in charge of hiding the huge extent of the destruction, they poured in this toxic corexit stuff, and that made the spill much much worse.

This year alone 10% of the manatees in the Gulf have died.

People in the area are having skin lesions and other problems.

Other parts of his body, however, seem to be in perpetual disrepair. Dizziness, nausea, diarrhea, bloody stools and cognitive issues surface intermittently, painful reminders of the toxic assault he and untold others endured following the April 2010 explosion on the BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig.

From Huffpo

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…

Several government agencies and BP together hired a public relations firm together to tell lies about the spill to the public, and that same firm – then call Pier System, now  called Witt O’Brians, has been put in charge of lying about the Arkansas tar sands spill.

The criminals are firmly in charge.  

LONDON – WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said Monday that financial problems may lead to the closure of the notorious secret-spilling site at the end of this year.

“If WikiLeaks does not find a way to remove this blockade we will simply not be able to continue by the turn of the new year,” he said. “If we don’t knock down the blockade we simply will not be able to continue.”

The banksters have succeeded in starving 95% of wikileaks’ funds, and they have stopped posting new leaks, in order to concentrate on fund-raising.

The statement says that in order to ensure survival, WikiLeaks must “aggressively fundraise in order to fight back against this blockade and its proponents.

”

from here:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…

WikiLeaks is under attack by the big financial services companies , but there are still ways you can beat them.

Censorship, like everything else in the West, has been privatized.

As a result of exposing U.S. embassies from around the world, five major US financial institutions, VISA, MasterCard, PayPal, Western Union and the Bank of America, have tried to economically strangle WikiLeaks The attack has blocked over 95% of our donations, costing tens of millions of dollars in lost revenue. The attack is entirely political. In fact, in the only formal review to occur, the US Treasury found that there were no lawful grounds to add WikiLeaks to financial blockade .

From the wikileaks donation page, here:

http://shop.wikileaks.org/donate

The Northeast Passage Is Open

http://www.nytimes.com/interac…

I thought this news would still be a year or two away, but here it is.

I can’t even begin to summarize this, as every word is so important, and so very scary, but:

But environmental scientists say there is now no doubt that global warming is shrinking the Arctic ice pack, opening new sea lanes and making the few previously navigable routes near shore accessible more months of the year. And whatever the grim environmental repercussions of greenhouse gas, companies in Russia and other countries around the Arctic Ocean are mining that dark cloud’s silver lining by finding new opportunities for commerce and trade.

Read the whole thing:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10…

I will add only this: once you have added new industries, new jobs, new human settlements, all dependent on a warming planet, you’ll have to fight them and their multi-national lobbies tooth and nail in addition to all the powerful forces we have to fight right now, making an impossible task all the worst.    

Counterpunch has an excellent piece up on the New York City police and wall street’s  cozy relationship / revolving door.

Especially regarding ‘white shirts’.

And, especially something called the “PDU” – the Paid Detail Unit.

The corporations pay an average of $37 an hour (no medical, no pension benefit, no overtime pay) for a member of the NYPD, with gun, handcuffs and the ability to arrest.  The officer is indemnified by the taxpayer, not the corporation.

New York City gets a 10 percent administrative fee on top of the $37 per hour paid to the police.  The City’s 2011 budget called for $1,184,000 in Paid Detail fees, meaning private corporations were paying  wages of $11.8 million to police participating in the Paid Detail Unit.  The program has more than doubled in revenue to the city since 2002.

Read the whole thing here:

http://www.counterpunch.org/20…

It’s an amazing piece.  Note also the bio of the author: she worked on wall street for more than 2 decades.  

Still developing, but basically as part of OWS protesters went to a West Village Citibank (I think I used to bank at that branch, long long ago) and attempted to close account en mass.

Video here of a woman outside being dragged in to be arrested:

http://www.twitvid.com/ZUYXO

(ek hornbeck- Here are some embeds courtesy of lambert @ Corrente)

Bank of America, St. Louis 10/4

Bank of America, Santa Cruz 10/7

Citibank, NYC 10/15

Below, I have details on the legality of the arrest.

I can’t get it to embed … as usual here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?f…

(ek hornbeck- Only TheMomCat has the magic <iframe> touch.  Set your YouTubes to ‘Use old embed code’ and strip out everything that’s not between the <embed></embed>.  It’s hard for me to even get iframe to print!)

UN Report On Government Torture In Afghanistan:

KABUL, Afghanistan – Suspects are hung by their hands, beaten with cables, and in some cases their genitals are twisted until they lose consciousness in detention facilities run by the Afghan intelligence service and the Afghan national police, according to a study released Monday by the United Nations here.

At War

The report provides a devastating picture of the abuses committed by arms of the Afghanistan government as the American-led foreign forces here are moving to wind down their presence after a decade of war. The abuses were uncovered even as American and other Western trainers and mentors had been working closely with the ministries overseeing the detention facilities and funded their operations.

Read the rest here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10…

Thank you Mr Bush! Thank you too, Mr Obama. And a big shout out to freedom lovers the world over.  

Some rich guys new toy:

A 225 foot yacht ship.

Over the past 4 decades, and accelerating since 2008, the top 1% has gained an ever larger share of the wealth.

Saez and French economist Thomas Piketty have been generating steady academic, governmental and public attention after reporting (in 2008) that from 2002 to 2007, the top 1 percent of American households accounted for about two-thirds of all income gains.

In a 2010 paper titled “Striking it Richer: The Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States,” Saez provided 2007 to 2008 updates on the above-mentioned figures. The winner of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant in 2010, Saez found that the average real income for the top percentile fell 19.7 percent (resulting in a drop in the top percentile income share from 23.5 to 20.9 percent), average real income for the bottom 99 percent also fell sharply, by 6.9 percent. For that 99 percent, the drop was, by far, the greatest year-to-year decline since the Great Depression.

And:

Q: What are the key causes for the substantial income gaps in the United States today? What role does the size of the federal deficit play, if any?

A: New technologies and globalization cannot explain the dramatic increase in the U.S. income gaps because countries in continental Europe (such as France or Germany) and Japan are going through the same technological and globalization forces, yet are not experiencing such a dramatic increase in income gaps.

This implies that institutions, government policies and regulations, and social norms play a central role in shaping income gaps. To put things simply, the U.S. income gaps shrunk significantly after the Great Depression with the New Deal policies of stringent regulations and progressive taxation and widened significantly after the Reagan revolution that undid those regulations and progressive taxation.

http://newscenter.berkeley.edu…

According to DK:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/…

Video of baton beatings at the link.

And according to Charles Grapsi, 100 arrests so far.

update: now on huffpo:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…

“allegedly”

update 2:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…

The NYT has a good article for once:

VOLOS, Greece – The first time he bought eggs, milk and jam at an outdoor market using not euros but an informal barter currency, Theodoros Mavridis, an unemployed electrician, was thrilled.

“I felt liberated, I felt free for the first time,” Mr. Mavridis said in a recent interview at a cafe in this port city in central Greece. “I instinctively reached into my pocket, but there was no need to.”

Mr. Mavridis is a co-founder of a growing network here in Volos that uses a so-called Local Alternative Unit, or TEM in Greek, to exchange goods and services – language classes, baby-sitting, computer support, home-cooked meals – and to receive discounts at some local businesses.

Part alternative currency, part barter system, part open-air market, the Volos network has grown exponentially in the past year, from 50 to 400 members. It is one of several such groups cropping up around the country, as Greeks squeezed by large wage cuts, tax increases and growing fears about whether they will continue to use the euro have looked for creative ways to cope with a radically changing economic landscape.

read the rest:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10…

Anti capitalist protesters maced, beaten, arrested in NYC

Short Video Here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…

“I was on the ground sobbing and couldn’t breathe,” she said. The continuing protests, against a financial system that participants say favors the rich and powerful over ordinary citizens, started last Saturday and were coordinated by a New York group called the General Assembly.

Many of those taking part have slept in Zuccotti Park, which is private, using it as a base. In the early afternoon hundreds of people left the park and moved north toward Union Square. Witnesses said that for much of the route, protesters spilled from sidewalks onto streets and added that the police used long orange nets at Fifth Avenue and 14th Street in an apparent attempt to block the march from proceeding.

more here:

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes….