Consider the life of a Michigan prisoner. They get three square meals a day. Access to free health care. Internet. Cable television. Access to a library. A weight room. Computer lab. They can earn a degree. A roof over their heads. Clothing. Everything we just listed we DO NOT provide to our school children. This is why I’m proposing to make my school a prison. The State of Michigan spends annually somewhere between $30,000 and $40,000 per prisoner, yet we are struggling to provide schools with $7,000 per student. I guess we need to treat our students like they are prisoners, with equal funding.
Tax Time!
Just in case you forgot it's tax time here. Also, if you are GE or Google you don't really pay shit. But you know, if you are a teacher in Wisconsin you a clearly rich and need a pay cut. Let me just link a few lovely things.
The top corporate income tax level in the United States is 35 percent. In the United Kingdom, it's 28 percent. But in Ireland, it's only 12.5 percent, and in Bermuda there's no corporate income tax at all. That means multinational companies that shift their earnings through Ireland or Bermuda can save billions of dollars in taxes each year.On today's Fresh Air, Bloomberg News reporter Jesse Drucker, who has written extensively about corporate tax-dodging, explains how companies like Google, Pfizer, Lilly, Oracle, Facebook and Microsoft have managed to reduce their tax rates by hundreds of millions — and in some cases, billions — of dollars by taking advantage of offshore tax havens.
And from The Daily Show, I Give Up. It's funny in a sad panda make me wanna chew on a gun kinda way.
Meanwhile on the internet
Wikileaks gets suspended and Anon takes up the ball as a free speech issue. Visa and Mastercard taken down and Pay Pal releases all funds. Facebook and Twitter delete Anon's accounts. Get some popcorn.
I want to believe?
U.S. Nuclear Weapons Have Been Compromised by Unidentified Aerial Objects | Reuters
Ex-military men say unknown intruders have monitored and even tampered with American nuclear missilesGroup to call on U.S. Government to reveal the facts
WASHINGTON, Sept. 15 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Witness testimony from more than 120 former or retired military personnel points to an ongoing and alarming intervention by unidentified aerial objects at nuclear weapons sites, as recently as 2003. In some cases, several nuclear missiles simultaneously and inexplicably malfunctioned while a disc-shaped object silently hovered nearby. Six former U.S. Air Force officers and one former enlisted man will break their silence about these events at the National Press Club and urge the government to publicly confirm their reality.
One of them, ICBM launch officer Captain Robert Salas, was on duty during one missile disruption incident at Malmstrom Air Force Base and was ordered to never discuss it. Another participant, retired Col. Charles Halt, observed a disc-shaped object directing beams of light down into the RAF Bentwaters airbase in England and heard on the radio that they landed in the nuclear weapons storage area. Both men will provide stunning details about these events, and reveal how the U.S. military responded.
Heck of a job BP.
The Picture Of Inaccuracy: The Evolving Estimates Of BP's Oil Leak
On May 5, BP CEO Tony Hayward told Congress in a closed-door briefing that, in the worst-case scenario, the oil well in the Gulf Coast would leak 60,000 barrels of oil per day.
Back then, official government estimates said the well was leaking 5,000 barrels of oil every day. Those estimates have since been repeatedly revised, most recently to reflect an estimated leakage of 35,000-60,000 barrels of oil per day.
Here's a look at how the estimates evolved over time:
Got them BP Oil Spill Blues VIA Neil Young in 1974.
Neil Young : Vampire BluesOn the Beach, 1974.
I'm a vampire, babe, suckin' blood from the earth. I'm a vampire, baby, suckin' blood from the earth. Well, I'm a vampire, babe, sell you twenty barrels worth.
I'm a black bat, babe, bangin' on your window pane I'm a black bat, baby, bangin' on your window pane. Well, I'm a black bat, babe, I need my high octane.
Good times are comin', I hear it everywhere I go. Good times are comin', I hear it everywhere I go. Good times are comin', but they sure comin' slow.
I'm a vampire, babe, suckin' blood from the earth. I'm a vampire, baby, suckin' blood from the earth. Well, I'm a vampire, babe, sell you twenty barrels worth.
This got me mad....
Seeing this just really got to me today. Really, no shit. None of that apathy bullshit. This is a massive train wreck that is ruining our biggest fishery. And BP will walk away from it all and people will keep drilling away. Keep chanting "drill baby drill" you god damn twits.
For more outrage if your blood pressure allows see this link at Metafilter with many links. Unctuous Gunk in the Bayous.
Oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill hits the Louisiana wetlands.More photos here. Meanwhile, the state department confirms US officials have begun talks with Cuba about how to help the small island nation deal with the environmental impacts of the disaster. And as McClatchy and other news agencies are now reporting, the latest independent scientific estimates appear to confirm a rate of flow much higher than BP has previously been willing to acknowledge, in the likely range of 95,000 barrels a day, amounting to roughly an Exxon Valdez size spill every three days. Meanwhile, ProPublica reports that the industry seems intent on keeping the lid on just how bad things really are in the Gulf, and quotes company spokesmen as saying that the actual rate and amount of flow is “not relevant to the response effort.”
Amen.
This makes me a sad panda
Supreme Court rolls back campaign cash limits - Supreme Court- msnbc.com
WASHINGTON - A major ruling Thursday by the U.S. Supreme Court could change how presidential and congressional elections are funded, possibly opening the floodgates of money from corporations, unions and other groups.The ruling is a blow to activists who have tried to limit the role of special interests in American politics.
By a 5-4 vote, the court overturned a 20-year-old ruling that said corporations can be prohibited from using money from their general treasuries to pay for campaign ads. The decision, which almost certainly will also allow labor unions to participate more freely in campaigns, threatens similar limits imposed by 24 states.
Just in case you thought this country was not bought and sold already, this should clear this up for you. Now it's sign, stamped and approved.
Scary stuff
Giving corporations an outsized voice in elections - latimes.com
Corporations are pitching a bizarre product -- a radical vision of the 1st Amendment. It would give corporations rather than voters a central role in our electoral process by treating corporate political spending as protected speech. If this vision becomes reality, businesses and other big-money players will spend billions either hyping their preferred candidates or running attack ads against elected officials who don't support their preferred agenda. Voters will be forced into a couch-potato role, mere viewers of the electoral spectacle bought and paid for by wealthy companies.
The failure of Obama
To be honest, I don't know what the president believes on anything, and I'm not alone among American voters. He introduced his recent job summit by saying that even in these times, the role of government should be limited. Really? That was a nicely nuanced reinforcement of the ideology of limited, ineffective government promulgated by Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Unfortunately, it runs against all the available data and everything Democrats have stood for since FDR.Abortion? Who knows. Gays? I suspect intellectually he believes in equal rights but deep down he thinks they're icky. Something is sure holding him back from doing the obvious. Immigrants? He probably has an opinion, but he's not going to waste political capital on them; he sold them out in 15 seconds on health care. Foreclosures? Nice speeches, and I'm sure it really concerns him when he hears the stories of families firsthand. But not enough to divert the cash from the lenders to the borrowers. And the problem is, the average American knows it. Job creation? Would be nice, and I presume he believes that people who want to work ought to be able to work. But when 700,000 people were losing their jobs a month in his first few months of office and over millions have lost their jobs on his watch (a process, of course, initiated by his predecessor, whose name, to my knowledge, he has not uttered since entering office), three letters should have come to mind: W - P - A. President Roosevelt had no legs to stand on, but he sure had spine.
And an entire generation disillusioned, will never vote again...
Don't think about it too hard.
A large number of the tea party protesters relied on DC’s transit system to get around the city. The Washington Metropolitan Transit Authority (WMATA) reported that on Sept. 12, metrorail ridership was double compared to an average Saturday. The Washington metro, of course, is public transit — in other words, it’s run by big government. Nevertheless, Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX) has written a letter to WMATA complaining that the service wasn’t good enough for the tea baggers:
The return of Redlining?
Bank Accused of Pushing Mortgage Deals on Blacks - NYTimes.com
Wells Fargo, Ms. Jacobson said in an interview, saw the black community as fertile ground for subprime mortgages, as working-class blacks were hungry to be a part of the nation’s home-owning mania. Loan officers, she said, pushed customers who could have qualified for prime loans into subprime mortgages. Another loan officer stated in an affidavit filed last week that employees had referred to blacks as “mud people” and to subprime lending as “ghetto loans.”“We just went right after them,” said Ms. Jacobson, who is white and said she was once the bank’s top-producing subprime loan officer nationally. “Wells Fargo mortgage had an emerging-markets unit that specifically targeted black churches, because it figured church leaders had a lot of influence and could convince congregants to take out subprime loans.”
Wow, looks like Redlining is still alive and strong.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Obama proposes Indefinite Preventive Detention without trial - Behind Blue Eyes - Open Salon
Obama is proposing we keep people locked up not for the crimes they have committed and we prove they committed in a court of law, but on the chance that they might commit crimes in the future. There will be no trial, for no crime exists to be charged. There is only the nebulous threat of "future acts" to justify depriving people of their liberty potentially indefinitely.
So far, Obama have proved that he is mostly made of shit on many topics. Bankers salary caps, Gitmo, spying, Iraq... Sigh....
Whoo hoo!
Don't Mess With Texas ... Get Rid Of It : NPR
Texas asking Blue America for a divorce is like a woman asking her boyfriend if he'd like to sit around all day drinking Miller and watching football, or like the Patriots offering Tom Brady to the Redskins for a 19th-round draft pick. Befuddled liberals can only shake their heads in gratified amazement while they pop the cap on their first beer, settle into the sofa and watch Brady pilot the 'Skins to the Super Bowl.
LET IT DIE: Rushkoff on the economy | ARTHUR MAGAZINE - WE FOUND THE OTHERS
Speculators aren’t buying homes in which to live—they are buying houses to flip. Speculators aren’t buying corn to eat or oil to burn, but bushels to hoard and tankers to park off shore until prices rise. The fact that the speculative economy for cash and commodities accounts for over 95% of economic transactions, while people actually using money and consuming commodities constitute less than 5% tells us something important. Real supply and demand have almost nothing to do with prices. We do not live in an economy, we live in a Ponzi scheme.
California's Inland Empire - Los Angeles Times
We drove through streets of boarded-up bungalows, the neighborhoods of old California now turning back to wild oats and silvery foxtails so high the windows were obscured. Men wandered the potholed streets looking like something out of a current-day Steinbeck novel.To say we might lose "community" is too simple. We are already more isolated and urbanized than in the past. But to lose the community on my street, the street I've lived on for 22 years, breaks my heart.
Yikes....
Project MKULTRA - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Efforts to "recruit" subjects were often illegal, even discounting the fact that drugs were being administered (though actual use of LSD, for example, was legal in the United States until October 6, 1966). In Operation Midnight Climax, the CIA set up several brothels to obtain a selection of men who would be too embarrassed to talk about the events. The men were dosed with LSD, and the brothels were equipped with one-way mirrors and the "sessions" were filmed for later viewing and study.[21]
MK-Ultra fun and good times.
Portland Real Estate Outsider: Portland Existing Home Prices Drop 13.1% in December - Case Shiller
The December Case Shiller data was released this morning and November's median price for an existing home in Portland was down 13.1% year over year. (click on any chart to expand it to readable size)The monthly change was even worse, down 2.5% from November, the largest drop we've seen to date. Or ever.
Portland is now down 15% from the peak in July 2007.
FRONTLINE: inside the meltdown: watch the full program | PBS
On Thursday, Sept. 18, 2008, the astonished leadership of the U.S. Congress was told in a private session by the chairman of the Federal Reserve that the American economy was in grave danger of a complete meltdown within a matter of days. "There was literally a pause in that room where the oxygen left," says Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.).