Headlines of the day: More patterns that connect

First, atop a tale of an ex-bureaucrat’s lament in the London Telegraph:

Financial crisis caused by too many bankers taking cocaine, says former drugs tsar

David Nutt, the former Government drugs tsar sacked after claiming that horse riding was as safe as taking ecstasy, has said that the banking crisis was caused by too many workers taking cocaine

From World Socialist Web Site:

Sharp decline in employer-sponsored health coverage in US

From Ekathemerini:

Study finds spike in heart attacks since start of Greek debt crisis

From The Guardian:

Portugal’s fed-up youth pack and go as their nation slides into reverse

Job prospects are grim, health and education are in crisis and, with more austerity to come, emigration is increasingly the only solution

From MercoPress:

Madrid’s city council to vote naming a street after Margaret Thatcher

‘I’m an old Kansas man myself,’ said the Wizard

The first time we heard the line from The Wizard of Oz, we laughed, being of that same peculiar species.

Kansas, once the home of abolitionist John Brown [a fact seemingly forgotten by Barack Obama and the mainstream media when Barry O launched his re-election campaign in Brown's former home base of Osawotamie], has a mixed history when it comes to people with higher melanin content in their skins.

We grew up in Abilene, the great-grandson of abolitionists who abandoned their pacifist Mennonite faith to wear the Union blue in the Civil War. Though nearby Wichita’s school system was segregated, leading to the Supreme Court’s  landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling, Abilene’s schools were integrated, largely because there were too few darker-skinned people to build separate schools. The swimming pool, however, was white only, a fact never advertised by nonetheless well known except to young children like esnl, who were told only that “Negroes don’t like to swim.”

But the language of bigotry was universal. We were perhaps nine years old before we learned that what folks called “Nigger Toes” in Abilene were called Brazil Nuts in more genteel society. And when choosing up sides, every kid used the old formula, “Eenie, meenie, minie, moe, catch a nigger by the toe. . .”

The nearest town to Abilene of any size was Salina, less than 25 miles away, and the source of frequent visits because our maternal grandmother lived there. It was also the home of the nearest movie palace, where “usherettes” clad in microskirts and tights escorted you to your seats with flashlights equipped with long translucent tubes that emitted a soft, warm orange glow. They also brought your drinks, popcorn, and candy to your seats, carried in trays suspended by straps from their necks.

The usherettes are long gone, but a story in the Salina Journal reveals that some of the attitudes we recall from childhood still remain.

Consider the case of Saline County Commissioner Jim Gile, who’s in hot water for accusing fellow commissioner John Price of “nigger-rigging” plans to repair the county’s Road and Bridge Department building:

In a recording made by County Clerk Don Merriman of the study session, Gile, who is white, can be heard to say the county needed to hire an architect to design the improvements rather than “nigger-rigging it.”

His comment brought laughter from others in the room. Salinan Ray Hruska, who attends most commission meetings and study sessions, asked Gile what he said.

“Afro-Americanized,” Gile replied.

When pressed about his comment later, the Journal reports, Giles responded, “I am not a prejudiced person. I have built Habitat homes for colored people.”

Well, that certainly clears things up, doesn’t it?

Headlines of the day: With a song in our heart?

From The Independent:

‘Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead’ closer to number one spot as it reaches midweek top ten following Margaret Thatcher’s death

From RT America:

‘Irreparable’ safety issues: All US nuclear reactors should be replaced, ‘Band-Aids’ won’t help

From ENENews:

TV: Gas release from U.S. nuclear site covered up? — Continued for several days — “Spontaneous, not controlled”

From McClatchy Newspapers:

Obama’s drone war kills ‘others,’ not just al Qaida leaders

From CNN:

Syria rebel group’s dangerous tie to al Qaeda

From Greek Reporter:

Labor Cost in Greece Drops Dramatically

From Spiegel:

Brain Drain: 120,000 Professionals Leave Greece Amid Crisis

Fox Follies: Boob apologizing for boobs

First, the story. From Daniela Altimari of the Hartford Courant:

FOX CT apologized Wednesday for airing what it called “inappropriate file footage” of women during a Morning News report on Women’s Day at the state Capitol.

“The video should never have aired,” the company said in a statement. “FOX CT will publicly apologize on today’s newscasts, as well as through our social media platforms. We are also implementing procedures to keep this from happening in the future.”

The footage, of fully clothed women, focused on their breasts and drew immediate criticism on Facebook, Twitter and other online news sites.

Read the rest.

And the reason for the tempest in a tube:

H/T to Jim Romensko.

Headline of the day: The other kind of drones

From Think Progress:

Caltech Physicist: If All Science Were Run Like Marijuana Research, Creationists Would Control Paleontology

There will always be an England. Or not.

From The Guardian, the reason for our equivocation:

The Oxford Student newspaper reported that a member of the Bullingdon Club was fined for setting off a firework at a nightclub earlier this month. According to the paper, the student was accepted into the club after an initiation ceremony which included burning a £50 note in front of a tramp.

Ah, now that’s a real class act, no?

Keiser Report: Horror Bankers Attack!

In one of his best episodes yet, Max exposes the confidence game that is quantitative easing after a delightful little excursion into the surrealism of modern banking praxis with co-host and inamorata Stacy Herbert.

The program notes:

In this episode of the Keiser Report, Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss Ben ‘Horror Frog’ Bernanke ripping the legs off the global reserve currency in order to defend itself from deflation, while in Europe, the Magritte and Dali of policymakers worry not about bankruptcy as long as the fraud flow fees keep flowing, or F-cubed. In the second half of the show, Max Keiser talks to Simon Rose of SaveOurSavers.co.uk about his recent experience giving evidence to the Treasury Select Committee and about the moochers living on the dole of quantitative easing while the Bank of England sits on one third of the stock of gilts with a ‘cunning’ plan to sell them one day and theoretically make a profit.

Headline of the day III: Paging Mr. Orwell

From the London Telegraph:

Leveson: EU wants power to sack journalists

A European Union report has urged tight press regulation and demanded that Brussels officials are given control of national media supervisors with new powers to enforce fines or the sacking of journalists

What the hell is it with the Catholic church?

Now we’re not the religious sort, and we think the notion that eating round crackers is an act sacred cannibalism is a bit daft, but we’re also sure that some of the things we believe, seen from the perspective of the future or by a visitor from Alpha Centauri would seem equally loopy.

So let’s forget things theological and look only at things criminal, like using the power of the priestly office as a handy dandy lever for exploiting the orifices of small children, all whilst professing to practice sacred celibacy — something which seems to happen a lot.

In a sane world, priests who do such things should be defrocked and handed over to secular authorities, but the reality has been something quite different.

Rather than strip the fucking Fathers of their office, the church often plays a shell game, shifting them from parish to parish, archdiocese to archdiocese, apparently to give them the opportunity to sample as many prepubescent bodies as possible. What other reason could there be? If the bishops and cardinals really wanted to scupper their ruts, then they could banish them to isolated, nearly empty monasteries, of which the church owns plenty.

Consider the latest nasty revelations from Los Angeles, where the central player in a vicious little coverup was a hugely popular cardinal.

From Victoria Kim, Ashley Powers, and Harriet Ryan of the Los Angeles Times:

Fifteen years before the clergy sex abuse scandal came to light, Archbishop Roger M. Mahony and a top advisor discussed ways to conceal the molestation of children from law enforcement, according to internal Catholic church records released Monday.

The archdiocese’s failure to purge pedophile clergy and reluctance to cooperate with law enforcement has previously been known. But the memos written in 1986 and 1987 by Mahony and Msgr. Thomas J. Curry, then the archdiocese’s chief advisor on sex abuse cases, offer the strongest evidence yet of a concerted effort by officials in the nation’s largest Catholic diocese to shield abusers from police. The newly released records, which the archdiocese fought for years to keep secret, reveal in church leaders’ own words a desire to keep authorities from discovering that children were being abused.

In the confidential letters, filed this month as evidence in a civil court case, Curry proposed strategies to prevent police from investigating three priests who had admitted to church officials that they abused young boys. Curry suggested to Mahony that they prevent them from seeing therapists who might alert authorities and that they give the priests out-of-state assignments to avoid criminal investigators.

Read the rest.

We suggest that the proper place for such scofflaws as Mahony is the general population of one of the state’s prisons, where inmates provide a special form of ministration to folks who sexually abuse small children.

Cardinal sins indeed.

UPDATE: It’s happened in Germany, too. And this year.

Headline of the day II: Die, already, effin’ geezers

From The Guardian:

Let elderly people ‘hurry up and die’, says Japanese minister

Quote of the day: To the barricades, anyone?

From a stunning new Oxfam report [PDF], “The cost of inequality: how wealth and income extremes hurt us all.” Emphasis added:

Over the last thirty years inequality has grown dramatically in many countries. In the US the share of national income going to the top 1% has doubled since 1980 from 10 to 20%. For the top 0.01% it has quadrupled to levels never seen before. At a global level, the top 1% (60 million people), and particularly the even more select few in the top 0.01% (600,000 individuals – there are around 1200 billionaires in the world), the last thirty years has been an incredible feeding frenzy. This is not confined to the US, or indeed to rich countries. In the UK inequality is rapidly returning to levels not seen since the time of Charles Dickens. In China the top 10% now take home nearly 60% of the income. Chinese inequality levels are now similar to those in South Africa, which are now the most unequal country on earth and significantly more unequal than at the end of apartheid. Even in many of the poorest countries, inequality has rapidly grown.

Globally the incomes of the top 1% have increased 60% in twenty years. The growth in income for the 0.01% has been even greater.

Following the financial crisis, the process has accelerated, with the top 1% further increasing their share of income. The luxury goods market has registered double digit growth every year since the crisis hit. Whether it is a sports car or a super-yacht, caviar or champagne, there has never been a bigger demand for the most expensive luxuries.

>snip<

The top 100 billionaires added $240 billion to their wealth in 2012 — enough to end world poverty four times over.

Headline of the day: Bureaucrats run amok

From ABC News:

Kindergartner Suspended Over Bubble Gun Threat

Quote of the day: Fiscal cliffs and sunny days

James Howard Kunstler at his acerbic best, writing on the meaninglessness of the “fiscal cliff” crisis at his blog, Clusterfuck Nation:

Do people like Barack Obama and John Boehner think we’re going to re-start another round of suburban expansion (a.k.a. the housing market)? That’s largely what the old economy was based on, and what Wall Street fed off of parasitically the past twenty years. That is so over. Do they believe that when absolutely every task in America is computerized there will be any gainful work outside of a sort of janitorial IT to tend all the computers. We’ve already seen what happens with the telephone system: after 30 years of techno-innovation in “communications,” it’s now impossible to get a live human being on the phone and robots call you incessantly during the dinner hour. Anyway, we don’t really have the energy resources to supply the electricity for all this crap indefinitely, or probably even another twenty years.

All the tendencies and trends in contemporary life are reaching their limits at the same time, and as they do things will crack up and fall apart, whether it involves the despotic reach of a government, or a tyrannical corporation, or a hedge fund server farm stuffed with algo-crunching computers sucking the life out of every honest market transaction until the markets are zombies. The euphoria that greeted the end of the fiscal cliff ritual has settled back into the feckless collective state-of-mind that we call “bullish.” It’s all noise and the madness of crowds now. And black swans shitting on your head some sunny day.

And for those who don’t get his final “some sunny day” reference, here’s the closing scene from Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb:

Headline of the day: Conspiracy movie plotline?

It’s certainly got that high concept ring to it.

From LA Observed:

How does Hollywood manage to keep a $430 million tax break?

Newspeak and the semantic antics of spin

RT’s Marina Portnaya tackles one of our favorite bugbears, the surrender of the American news media to the neologisms of political spinmeisters:

And don’t you just love “low information voters”? As opposed to, say, ignorant voters? But then that latter term would rightly direct some of the blame towards the news media, which do so much to insure that very ignorance. . .

Quote of the day: Oarless boating up fecal creek

From James Howard Kunstler, writing at his delightfully named blog, Clusterfuck Nation:

We’re now entering the seventh year of a smoke-and-mirrors, extend-and-pretend, can-kicking phase of history in which everything possible is being done to conceal the true condition of the economy, with the vain hope of somehow holding things together until a miracle rescue remedy — some new kind of cheap or even free energy — comes on the scene to save all our complex arrangements from implosion. The chief device to delay the reckoning has been accounting fraud in banking and government, essentially misreporting everything on all balance sheets and in statistical reports to give the appearance of well-being where there is actually grave illness, like the cosmetics and prosthetics Michael Jackson used in his final years to pretend he still had a face on the front of his head.

The secondary tactic has been intervention in markets wherever possible and the intemperate manipulation of interest rates, all of which has the effect of defeating the principle purpose of markets: price discovery — the process by which the true value of things is established based on what people will freely pay. For instance the price of money-on-loan. The functionally less-than-zero percent interest rates on money loaned between giant institutions like central banks and their client “primary dealers” (the Too Big To Fails) essentially pays these outfits for borrowing, which is obviously a distortion in the natural order of things (because it violates the second law of thermodynamics: entropy) as well as an arrant racket. The campaign of intervention and manipulation also deeply impairs the other purpose of markets, capital formation, by the resultant mismanagement and misallocation of whatever real surplus wealth remains in this society. What’s more, it allows these TBTF banks to become ever-bigger monsters which hold everybody else hostage by threatening to crash the system if they are molested or interfered with.

Which brings us to the third tactic for pretending everything is all right: complete lack of enforcement and regulation by all the authorities charged with making sure that rules are followed in money matters. This includes the alphabet soup of agencies from the Securities and Exchange Commission to the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, to the Federal Housing Authority, and so on (the list of responsible parties is very long) not to mention the Big Kahunas: the US Department of Justice, and the federal and state courts. Aside from Bernie Madoff and a few Hedge Fund mavericks nipped for insider trading and arrant fraud, absolutely nobody in the TBTF banking community has been prosecuted or even charged for the monumental swindles of our time, while the regulators have behaved in ways that would be considered criminally negligent at best, and sheer racketeering at less-than-best, in any self-respecting polity. The crime runs so deep and thick through all the levels of money management and regulation that one can say the whole system has gone rogue, up to the President of the US himself, the chief enforcement officer of the land, who has not lifted a finger to discipline any of the parties involved. The  fact that Jon Corzine, late of MF Global, is still at large says it all.

Fourth-and-finally, the news media in league with the public relations industry have undertaken a campaign of happy talk to persuade the public that everything is okay and all the machinations cited above are kosher so that there is absolutely no political agitation over these crimes against their own interest, which is to say, the public interest. The PR/media happy talk racket is also aimed at maintaining various subsidiary  fictions about the economy, such as the fibs that the housing market is bouncing back, that “recovery” is ongoing, and that the channel-stuffing monkeyshines of the car industry amount to booming sales of new vehicles. Perhaps the most pernicious big lie is the bundle of fairy tales surrounding shale oil and shale gas, including the idea that America will shortly become “energy independent” or that we have “a hundred years of shale gas” as President Obama was mis-advised to tell the nation. It is pernicious because it gives us collectively an excuse to do nothing about changing our behavior or preparing for the new arrangements in daily life that the future will require of us.

Images from an endangered, precious legacy

Barack Obama seems intent on reversing the legacy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, refusing to take the stands that endeared FDR to the American people [can you imagine Barry O saying to the forces of what he called organized money “I welcome their hatred”?].

One of FDR’s legacies, the great public art explosion of the New Deal, is coming under intense fire as the government — pushed by California Senator Diane Feinstein and to the profit of her developer spouse Richard Blum — sells off many of America’s post offices, including the Berkeley central post office in the city center.

Just by coincidence [snicker] the listing agent for the post office properties is Coldwell Banker Richard Ellis [CBRE] — owned by none other than Richard Blum.

And they say Greece is corrupt!

But, heck, that’s the way the game is played in Washington.

It’s not the first time Blum has benefitted from federal legislation to sell off properties.

On 21 April 2009, Washington Times reporter Chuck Neubauer wrote this:

On the day the new Congress convened this year, Sen. Dianne Feinstein introduced legislation to route $25 billion in taxpayer money to a government agency that had just awarded her husband’s real estate firm a lucrative contract to sell foreclosed properties at compensation rates higher than the industry norms.

Mrs. Feinstein’s intervention on behalf of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. was unusual: the California Democrat isn’t a member of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs with jurisdiction over FDIC; and the agency is supposed to operate from money it raises from bank-paid insurance payments – not direct federal dollars.

Documents reviewed by The Washington Times show Mrs. Feinstein first offered Oct. 30 to help the FDIC secure money for its effort to stem the rise of home foreclosures. Her letter was sent just days before the agency determined that CB Richard Ellis Group (CBRE) – the commercial real estate firm that her husband Richard Blum heads as board chairman – had won the competitive bidding for a contract to sell foreclosed properties that FDIC had inherited from failed banks.

Read the rest.

Blum is, in other words, the embodiment of FDR’s “organized money.”

Somehow, it reminds us of this.

Blum’s axe and a Berkeley legacy

The main Berkeley facility is both a notable piece of architecture [listed on the National Register of Historic Places (PDF)] and the repository of two notable New Deal artworks created under the Treasury Department’s Treasury Relief Art Project [TRAP], a remarkable historical mural by Suzanne Scheuer surrounding the door to the postmaster’s office and a bas relief plaque on the eastern side of the building’s loggia by David Slivka, the subject of today’s post.

It’s on the list of Blum’s plums, ripe for the plucking, along with that wonderful art, paid for by the public.

First the sculpture:

31 December 2012, Nikon D300, ISO 640, 44 mm, 1/640 sec, f4.5

And here is a closeup of the upper package:

31 December 2012, Nikon D300, ISO 640, 200 mm, 1/400 sec, f5.6

And the lower package, the artist’s signature:

31 December 2012, Nikon D300, ISO 640, 200 mm, 1/400 sec, f5.6

Here’s some background on Slivka from the website of New York gallery Vincent Vallarino Fine Art:

A passion for art came at a young age for the Chicago-born David Slivka, son of Russian immigrants. At the age of thirteen he was awarded a scholarship to attend classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. Slivka’s family moved around the country for the next three years until finally settling in San Francisco where he won a scholarship to The California School of Fine Arts and spent the next one and a half years studying under the guidance of Ralph Stackpole.

Stackpole recommended Slivka for a commission on the Public Works of Art Project (a precursor to the Works Progress Administration). In 1937, Slivka completed a bas-relief of postal workers on the Berkeley Post Office, commissioned by the Treasury Department. Like many artists during the time, Slivka’s career was placed on hold as the US entered World War II. In 1941, Slivka became a Ship Fitter on Naval vessels before joining the Merchant Marine in 1942.

After the War, Slivka moved to Manhattan where he studied painting under Stanley William Hayter. It was through Hayter that Slivka was introduced to other contemporary artists like Joan Miro, Jacques Lipchitz, and Romar Bearden. An early member of The Artists’ Club, Slivka also began to exhibit with many artists from the New York School like Jackson Pollack, Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, and Franz Kline.

During this time Slivka also changed his artistic style from the figural, evident from his earlier PWA commissions, to the abstract. The artist began to work in carved marble but eventually turned to lost-wax bronze casting. In 1951, after the death of his friend, the Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, Slivka was asked to make a death mask

Headline of the day: Worse than Bunga Bunga

From The Guardian:

Benito Mussolini: a dictator for all seasons in Italy?

Reverence for Il Duce, who adorns calendars and T-shirts, is spreading from neo-fascist youths to the Italian mainstream

Headline of the day: Uh, read your history books

Deportations of the marginal? Hasn’t Germany done that before?

From The Guardian:

Germany ‘exporting’ old and sick to foreign care homes

Pensioners are being sent to care homes in eastern Europe and Asia in an austerity move dismissed as ‘inhumane deportation’

Headline of the day: Something Yule regret

From the London Telegraph:

Adulterers beware: Christmas Day the peak time for ‘text message bustings’

It is meant to be a time of peace and love. But Christmas Day has become the day of the year when unfaithful husbands are most likely to be caught out, according to one of Britain’s top divorce lawyers