Headlines of the day: From hither and yon

From EconoMonitor:

Latest US GDP Data Show Economy Weak at Year’s End but Corporate Profits Near Record High

From RT:

Obama signs ‘Monsanto Protection Act’ written by Monsanto-sponsored senator

From World Socialist Web Site:

US food stamp use swells to a record 47.8 million

From Cornell University:

You Don’t “Own” Your Own Genes

Ethos: A documentary on money and power

Hosted by actor Woody Harrelson and written and directed by Pete Gain, Ethos is a 2011 documentary that explores the relationship between banking, power, politics, personal freedom, and environmental destruction. Among those featured are Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and Chalmers Johnson.

It’s well worth 68 minutes of your time.

Student debt & financialization of academia

Paul Jay of The Real News Network interviews economist Michael Hudson on the lethal collusion of politics, banks, and academia that has inflicted a blanket of debt servitude on generations of American students.

Hudson devotes special attention to New York University, which he describes as a real estate company that wins tax exemptions by offering classes.

A transcript of the interview is posted here.

Frankie the First: The austerian pope

Pay close attention to this Oscar Leon report from The Real News Network on Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the Argentinian Cardinal transformed into Pope Francis I — signifying his homage to St. Francis of Assisi, that most austere-living of saints.

Indeed, watch the headlines displayed in the video, and their invocation of papal austerity as sign of the new pope’s conspicuous frugality.

Watching the video, we had a perverse thought.

Frankie’s no liberation theologian, out to redistribute wealth. No, he’s here to preach the religious benefits accruing from the embrace of austerity. The poor accrue virtue by acceptance of their status, nay, by embracing their status.

Looking back at the recent history of the Catholic church, we see an easy acceptance of fascism in preference to communism, the provision of escape lines for Nazi war criminals in the wake of Nazi defeat, and the ongoing cooperation and funding of radical right underground groups during the Soviet era.

Who better to sell the austerian message to the peoples of, say, Spain, Portugal, and Italy, that a Latin American pope who names himself after a hippie saint?

And he’s proven himself quite accommodating to oligarchical imposers of austerian measures, and now runs a city state with its own bank-with-a-troubled history, laundering both mafia and spook money.

Anyway, just a thought.

Pope Francis accused by family and friends of tortured priests

A full transcript of the segment is posted here.

UPDATE: Donning our Madison Avenue thinking caps, we came up with a slogan for the Vatican to use to sell folks on latter-day indentured servitude:

Poverty: Not just a necessity,
It’s a divine virtue!

Jorge and Jorge: Why are these men smiling?

One, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, nominally a fisher of men, and the other, Argentina military junta jefe Jorge Rafael Videla, a baby-stealing, “Dirty War-making, feeder of men to the fishes, snapped back when Jorge II ruled the political roost and Jorge I, now reincarnated as Pope Frankie the First, was the country’s top Catholic.

Photo from Indignados Lisboa  via (Notes on) Politics, Theory & Photography:

‘How Your Tax Dollars Are Actually Spent’

Via Orwellwasright, a dramatic Al Jazeera visualization of the real budget battle’s driving engine, that military/industrial/academic complex Ike warned us about 52 years ago.

We suspect the real number’s larger. Nor were real impacts on, for example, academia made clear. Berkeley, with it’s bandolier of National Laboratories spawned by the search for The Bomb and expanded into engines of imperialism, as in the genetically engineered cops designed to conquer land rights and demolish peasant sovereignty on behalf of private profit and the interests of the U.S. military and their CIA drone-firing gunslingers now busily setting up shop in Africa, along with AFRICOM, the new military command launched by an Air Force general who lead the air war of Afghanistan.

And it was that same general who devixsed the strategy for converting the air force in agrofueled fleet.

Africa was also the first destination of crews from Berkeley’s BP-funded, national lab participating $500 million Energy Biosciences Institute, who launched searches for suitable crops to be turned into fuels using genetically engineered microbial refineries. If all those oil countries rebelled, at least there’d be fuel plantations, operating under the watchful missile-armed eyes droning overhead.

And that’s just one on many avenues in which the single largest burner of money shapes the landscape of possibilities. . .

‘James Steele: America’s mystery man in Iraq’

A stunning documentary from The Guardian about the secret presence behind reigns of violence in Latin America and Iraq:

The program notes:

A 15-month investigation by the Guardian and BBC Arabic reveals how retired US colonel James Steele, a veteran of American proxy wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua, played a key role in training and overseeing US-funded special police commandos who ran a network of torture centres in Iraq. Another special forces veteran, Colonel James Coffman, worked with Steele and reported directly to General David Petraeus, who had been sent into Iraq to organise the Iraqi security services.

Banking on a case of he said/she said

Attorney General Eric Holder, responding to Sen. Charles Grassley:

I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy.  And I think that is a function of the fact that some of these institutions have become too large.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, putting it all in proper perspective:

You know, if you’re caught with an ounce of cocaine, the chances are good you’re going to go to jail. If it happens repeatedly, you may go to jail for the rest of your life. But evidently, if you launder nearly a billion dollars for drug cartels and violate our international sanctions, your company pays a fine and you go home and sleep in your own bed at night, every single individual associated with this. I think that’s fundamentally wrong.

Headlines of the day: Signs of the times

From UC Berkeley’s Daily Californian:

Berkeley Student Cooperative pushes for cuts to employee benefits

From Bloomberg:

Rising Student-Loan Delinquencies Hurt Young Homebuyers

And to close on a positive note, from Science 2.o:

Pessimists Live Longer And Healthier

Quote of the day: Seeing the future in urban form

From a stunning and very perceptive 1999 report by Robert Fishman for Fannie Mae Housing Facts & Findings on the trends shaping of American cities, past and future.

The number one trend he saw for the first half of the 21st Century is proving right on the money:

The past 30 years have seen increasing concentrations of income and wealth at the top of the income scale, relative stagnation in the middle, and worsening poverty at the bottom. Our respondents expect this trend to continue in the next 50 years, with possible dire consequences for American cities and regions. For growing disparities in income and wealth lead inevitably to an increasingly divided metropolis. If, as our respondents believe, these growing disparities of wealth will become the most important single influence on the American metropolis in the next 50 years, some of the negative consequences are detailed in the rest of the top 10 list: a perpetual “underclass” in central cities and inner-ring suburbs and the deterioration of the “first-ring” post-1945 suburb, as the struggling portions of the middle and working classes find themselves trapped in deteriorating older suburbs. On the wealthier side of the great metropolitan divide, we are likely to see the winners in our “winner-take-all society” isolate themselves in gated communities or other exclusive preserves at the edge of the region.

Other likely trends include a home-building industry increasingly focused on high-end “trophy houses” or “tract mansions;” a similar concentration in retailing on upscale malls; office parks located near the enclaves where the top executives live-locations that often leave the bulk of the employees with long, difficult commutes; and increasing disparities between the quality of the school systems and other services in elite suburbs versus less-favored suburbs and inner cities. We are also likely to see new building focused not just on the outer edge of a region but in certain “quadrants” favored by the affluent: for example, in Washington, DC, the Northwest; in Minneapolis-St. Paul, the Southwest; in Atlanta and Chicago, the North. For the affluent who choose to live in gentrified neighborhoods in central cities, the rule of isolation will also obtain, as the wealthy use the techniques of privatization, ranging from private schools to special tax-and-service districts, to insulate themselves from the urban crisis around them.

‘The Cleaners: The True Face of Golden Dawn’

From Britain’s Channel 4, a short, disturbing portrait of the neo-Nazi party that has gained in popularity in Greece as the economic crisis deepens:

The program notes:

Greece’s neo-Nazi Golden Dawn is increasingly influential among members of the country’s political mainstream. Student Konstantinos Georgousis filmed party members on the streets of Athens.ational Film and Television School student Konstantinos Georgousis spent a month with the organisation last summer, as Greece hovered on the abyss, for his documentary film The Cleaners.Writing about his experience of making the film, Mr Georgousis says: “I walked through every nook and cranny in the centre of Athens to find these Golden Dawn members.

Keep Talking Greece reports today on what happened next:

The tolerance towards the incredible racism expressed by members of extreme-right party Golden Dawn was of very short duration. Hours after the video started to flood Greek media and internet sites, police intervened and sent the excerpts from the documentary broadcast on UK Channel 4 News to the prosecutor.

The Department against Racial Violence of Greek Police sent some excerpts from the documentary to the prosecutor in Athens.

“In the excerpts sent to prosecutor, an MP candidate for the parliament elections on the list of Golden Dawn speaks about migrants with threatening expressions such as “We are ready to open the ovens. Because soaps are nice… “Soaps to wash the cars, soaps to clean the sidewalks…, “some table lamps out of their skin…”, “take some teeth…” (o Vima )

According to SKAI TV, authorities are seeking the MP-candidate, while the prosecutor asked to watch the whole documentary. The politician in spe could face felony charges for violating the racism law.

Greek student Konstantinos Georgousis filmed “The Cleaners -the true face of Golden Dawn” during summer 2012. He spent a month going through the streets of Athens.

80 years ago today: The launch of the New Deal

A report from The Real News Network featuring John Weeks, professor emeritus at the University of London School of Oriental and African Studies, and Jennifer Taub, associate professor of law at Vermont Law School.

A full transcript is posted here.

Chart of the day: Call it agrofuelishness

From The Oil Drum, a devastating look at the per gallon price the Defense Department pays for agrofuels, drawn from an Air Force report:

The Truthseeker: US worst place to live?

Talk about getting kicked while you’re down. . .

From The Truthseeker, a new feature from Russia’s RT, a distinctly downbeat and flagrantly factual account of America’s sad transformation into the basket case of the industrial West:

From RT:

The greatest nation on earth (© US politicians & media) exposed as among the worst in the West… on all life indicators, why China steams ahead, plans for Land of the Tax Free + the proud record the States share with Lesotho, Liberia, Papua New Guinea and Swaziland. Seek truth from facts with Belle Isle: Detroit’s Game Changer author Rod Lockwood, Chair of Chinese Intl. Affairs Barry Naughton, The Personality and Well-Being Lab Director Dr. Ryan Howell, Political Science Professor Joseph Cheng, and Fox host Bill O’Reilly.

Video report: The Financialization of Food

From The Real News Network, a Paul Jay interview with Sasha Breger Bush, lecturer at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies. She describes her specialty as “International political economy, development studies, global financial markets, food and farming, and political theory.

A transcript of the discussion is posted here.

Quote of the day: Why Christopher Dorner?

While police and government officials are relieved the apparent fiery death of fired Los Angeles Police Officer Christopher Dorner, California historian and UC Riverside Professor of Creative Writing Mike Davis offers some qualifications, writing at the London Review of Books Blog:

Perhaps his brain synapses have been misfiring for a long time, but the core of Dorner’s Manifesto is a coherent account of how a police Explorer Scout realised his life’s dream as a LAPD rookie and then had his reputation and career destroyed for being an honest cop. He debunks the myth – propagated by the LA Times, Mayor Villaraigosa, and most of the liberal establishment – that thanks to Saint Bratton a kinder, gentler and more diverse LAPD now protects and serves Los Angeles.

Indeed Dorner’s eye-witness account of routine sadism, racism and conspiracy in the department is totally in line with its historical institutional culture and was inadvertently fact-checked by the LAPD’s wild shooting of two innocent women and Chief Beck’s kneejerk exculpation of the officers involved. (Those who think that there are no more Rodney Kings should look carefully at the case of the LAPD patrol woman who killed a mentally ill woman last summer by stomping on her genitals.)

Breaking the Set: Indefinite detention challenged

Another solid Breaking the Set episode from RT’s Abby Martin:

From RT:

EPISODE BREAKDOWN: On this episode of Breaking the Set, Abby Martin takes an in depth look at the lawsuit against the National Defense Authorization Act’s indefinite detention clause, starting with a short look at just how many people actually know about it. Abby then talks to one of the plaintiffs spearheading the lawsuit, Tangerine Bolen, about how the suit came to be, and why the corporate media has not picked up the story, Abby also talks to former whistleblower, Jesselyn Radack, about the extent and reach of the NDAA as it applies to journalists, activists and whistleblowers. BTS wraps up the show with an interview with journalist, author and lead plaintiff in the case against indefinite detention, Chris Hedges, about the historical precedent the NDAA lawsuit sets, and why every American should care.

Quote of the day: Barry O, imperial president

Philadelphia Daily News scribe Will Bunch, writing at his blog, Attytood:

Obama’s expanded, top-secret drone war has allowed the U.S. to kill high-level members of al-Qaeda without the risks that ground troops have faced in Iraq or Afghanistan, where U.S. troops have been fighting more than 11 years.

But in doing so, a president who promised “the most open and transparent administration in history” has gone to Nixonian lengths to hide its actions from the American people and from Congress. He’s ordered missile attacks on countries such as Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia with which the nation is not at war – drone strikes that in addition to its targets have killed as many as 1,000 innocent civilians, including women and children.

And according to a White House white paper obtained by NBC News, Obama has claimed a power never even envisioned during the waterboarding-drenched years of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney – the ability to order the assassination of an American citizen believed to be engaged with al-Qaeda at a high level, even if that citizen is not currently plotting against the U.S.

Chart of the day: Is there a pattern here?

From Michael Greenwell:

San Onofre: Southern California nuclear roulette

We’ll begin with a Tuesday RT report on the plant:

The program notes:

Nuclear energy is responsible for powering nearly 20 percent of the US, and in Southern California the San Onofre nuclear power plant has created much debate in the surrounding community. The station has been closed for about a year due to a leak that was detected in the steam generator tubes, but despite the wishes of the people living the area to keep the plant closed, the utility company is pushing to bring the reactor back online. Arnie Gundersen, chief engineer for Fairewinds Energy Education, analyzes the situation.

Plant with a history

We’ve been interested in Southern California’s San Onofre nuclear power station since first arrived in California back in 1967.

We worked as a reporter and then as city editor for the late Oceanside Blade-Tribune, and the plant was a few miles to the north, a sight we passed often on trips to Los Angeles and Orange County. The plant’s second domed containment structure was rising at the time, and we occasionally mused about the potential impacts of an earthquake and/or tsunami [since the plant is right on the shoreline].

The 2011 earthquake-spawned Fukushima disaster increased our concerns, since we had family living a few miles from the reactor site.

Then came word last year that new steam pipes designed to last 40 years were failing after 22 months, forcing a shutdown of one of the plant’s two reactor units.

And the latest, stunning twist

Now comes word that plant owners Southern California Edison knew of the potential problems before the system was installed, but opted to go ahead anyway.

Abby Sewell of the Los Angeles Times reports:

[Sen. Barbara] Boxer’s office cited a leaked report from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries — the manufacturer of the steam generators — obtained by her office. It is the first indication from government officials that Edison and Mitsubishi knew the now-shuttered system had problems before it was installed.

Boxer and U.S. Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) wrote to Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairwoman Allison Macfarlane on Wednesday and said the Mitsubishi report “indicates that Southern California Edison (SCE) and MHI were aware of serious problems with the design of San Onofre nuclear power plant’s replacement steam generators before they were installed” and “rejected enhanced safety modifications and avoided triggering a more rigorous license amendment and safety review process.”

Read the rest.

More from the letter via Don Bauder of the San Diego Reader:

“This newly-obtained information concerns us greatly, and we urge the NRC to immediately conduct a thorough investigation” into whether SCE and Mitsubishi failed to make necessary safety enhancements, say the legislator. States the letter, “All people in our nation, including the 8.7 million people who live within 50 miles of the San Onofre plant, must have confidence in the NRC’s commitment to put safety before any other concern.”

Michael R. Blood of the Associated Press reports on corporate and government responses to the letter:

In a statement, the NRC said it received the letter and “will review all available information in making a judgment as to whether the plant would meet our safety standards if restart were permitted.”

Edison said in a statement the company “takes very seriously all allegations raised by the letter” and would comply with all requests for information and documents.

“SCE is strongly committed to the transparent review of its operations at San Onofre and the safety of the public and its employees,” the company said.

Mitsubishi spokesman Patrick Boyle did not immediately respond to an email and phone message seeking comment.

Read the rest.