Undernews For 21 January 2009

UNDERNEWS
The news while there's still time to do something about it

THE PROGRESSIVE REVIEW
Editor: Sam Smith

EMAIL US

REVIEW E-MAIL UPDATES
REVIEW INDEX
UNDERNEWS
XML FEED

20 January 2009
WORD

I know I know you. I'm just not sure from which movement. - - Guy to a woman at the inaugural Peace Ball

PROBLEMS AT THE STARTING GATE

Sam Smith

Afghanistan

Obama has called for more US troops in Afghanistan without any clear explanation of what they will do there, how or why. The mission has not only been not accomplished in Afghanistan, it hasn't even been defined. Obama's plan is to increase the force two and a half times; some military officials want twice that many. If Obama adds 30,000 troops, the US force will be approximately one third the size of the Soviet force that failed in its Afghan effort. And unknown to most Americans is that while the number of U.S. casualties there is far lower, the casualty rate in Afghanistan is actually higher than in Iraq. The whole operation has the unpleasant odor of the early stages of Vietnam.

Iraq

Obama has given the public a misleading impression about how soon and how many soldiers he plans to remove from Iraq. By using the term "combat troops," he slides over the fact that 100,000 mercenaries and up to 60,000 troops who could be easily used for combat purposes will remain. At some point the rhetoric and the reality have to confront each other, but Obama seems in no hurry for that to happen.

The Bailout

Both the Republicans and the Democrats - with the approval of Bush and Obama - have badly botched the bailout approving unspecified amounts for unspecified purposes with unspecified oversight. In practice, the bailout has grossly favored the large Wall Street interests, has been insultingly indifferent to the needs of homeowners and auto workers, among others, and ranks as the most outrageous congressional earmark in American history. As just one example, the House bill provides $90 billion for infrastructure of various varieties, which sounds like a lot until you realize that in the last election voters cross the land approved $75 billion for mass transit alone. Meanwhile the really big bucks continue to flow to Wall Street and the fact that Obama has among his key advisors, Robert Rubin, one of those responsible for the disaster, doesn't help at all.

Social Security and Medicare

Obama has adopted rightwing misleading rhetoric to describe Social Security and Medicare that falsely predicts when the former's funding will give out and blames the latter for costs that are really the result of the health industry and not the government program. He has also hired a budget director who favors cutting Social Security for those under 60. If Obama proceeds on this course, the resulting damage to Social Security and Medicare could easily represent the biggest assault ever on historic Democratic social democracy policies, surpassing even Bill Clinton's dismantling of social welfare.

Civil liberties

Obama's attorney general has indicated the administration will support the continued immunity granted telecoms for illegal wiretapping. Eric Holder also favors a continuation of secret searches of library and bookstore data files. In the past Obama has made it clear that he supports the unconstitutional war on drugs, Real ID, the Patriot Act and the death penalty. It is likely we will continue to live in a post-constitutional America under Obama.

Education

Obama has named a secretary of education who has been deeply involved in the corporate takeover of public school policy, which has left schools in poorer areas the target of urban developers, encouraged mindless emphasis on test taking designed to create obedient drones rather than critical thinkers, and which has even, in Secretary Duncan's case, resulted in several military academies antithetical to decent public education in a democracy.

PAGE ONE MUST

INAUGURAL DOWN TIME IN THE PURPLE TUNNEL OF DOOM

Channel Four, Washington - While most people were enjoying themselves on the National Mall while watching Barack Obama make history, there were others stuck in the Third Street Tunnel making every attempt possible just to get to their seats for the inaugural ceremony. A lot of them never made it, thanks to a potential security snafu of massive proportions.

At least 1,000 people who had tickets to get into the inaugural event missed out. A lot of those had tickets in the purple or silver sections. Most of those people used mass transportation and arrived early -- i.e., did what they were supposed to do. But instead of seeing Obama's historic day, they spent most of their time walking or standing in the Third Street Tunnel. Why? That's where police told them to go.

Some 1500 people have joined a Facebook page, the Purple Tunnel of Doom, complete with scores of photos and over 500 comments

THE WORLD'S TEMPERATURE

NASA - Calendar year 2008 was the coolest year since 2000, according to a NASA analysis of worldwide temperature measurements, but it was still in the top ten warmest years since the start of record-keeping in 1880. The 10 warmest years have all occurred within the 12-year period from 1997-2008. The map above shows global temperature anomalies in 2008 compared to the 1950-1980 baseline period. Most of the world was either near normal or warmer than normal. Eastern Europe, Russia, the Arctic, and the Antarctic Peninsula were exceptionally warm (1.5 to 3.5 degrees Celsius above average). The NASA scientists attribute the relative coolness of 2008 to the persistent La Nina.

BOOKSHELF: CULINARY TREND MAPPING REPORT: HOW GEN Y EATS

67 Pages
Online Download: $3000

Packaged Facts - Hear that rumble? It's the sound of a generation finding its voice. Generation Y - those born between 1980 and 2000, also known as Millennials - is the lion just now trying out its roar. With total membership as high as 78 million (our study focuses on the approximately 40 million consumers between the ages of 18 and 28), Millennials represent an irresistible customer pool - and not just because of their numbers. Call them Generation Me, Echo Boomers, whatever: more than any demographic in history, Millennials go beyond mere spending power. Weaned in a culture that's urged them to define themselves as PC or Mac, Abercrombie & Fitch or H&M, In-N-Out or McDonald's, Gen Y is the ultimate savvy, brand-sensitive consumer cluster. Any manufacturer, retailer, or foodservice operator without a laser focus on this generation needs to play catch-up. Fast.

As the most multicultural group in U.S. history, growing up in an amazing world of technological marvels and almost infinite choice, Millennials are the ultimate megaconsumers.

Instead of highlighting trends, we focus on essential traits of Millennials that shape their food and beverage choices - now and for decades to come. Our comments paint a comprehensive portrait of the Millennial eater:

Happy in The Third Place: how Gen Y eats and socializes in communal spaces, real or virtual

Gen Wired: the tech component of Millennial eating, from text ordering to the cybertainment restaurant

Thrill Aficionados: Gen Y's love of heightened experiences, flavors that are complex and layered, with acidic zip

Mashup Artists: this is all about customization, especially in appreciating and (better yet) creating hybrid cuisines and flavors

Planet Savers: Gen Y's social consciousness, an interest in local and organic, fair trade and vegetarian/vegan options even for omnivores

Amped and Gorgeous: Gen Y is nutraceutical and supplement savvy, having been raised by health-conscious Boomer parents

Authentic "Kewlness": What makes some foods and products cool to Gen Y? Hint: look under the radar

All told, the report offers plenty of ideas about the best ways for manufacturers, marketers and foodservice operators to thrive. Prepare yourself - this is one generation whose taste buds you'll be tickling for a long, long time.

HUGE ANTARCTIC ICE SHELF ON BRINK OF COLLAPSE

Alister Doyle, Reuters - A huge Antarctic ice shelf is on the brink of collapse with just a sliver of ice holding it in place, the latest victim of global warming that is altering maps of the frozen continent. . The flat-topped shelf has an area of thousands of square kilometers, jutting 20 meters (65 ft) out of the sea off the Antarctic Peninsula. But it is held together only by an ever-thinning 40-km (25-mile) strip of ice that has eroded to an hour-glass shape just 500 meters wide at its narrowest. In 1950, the strip was almost 100 km wide. . .

The Wilkins once covered 16,000 sq km (6,000 sq miles). It has lost a third of its area but is still about the size of Jamaica or the U.S. state of Connecticut. Once the strip breaks up, the sea is likely to sweep away much of the remaining ice. . .

In total, about 25,000 sq km of ice shelves have been lost, changing maps of Antarctica. Ocean sediments indicate that some shelves had been in place for at least 10,000 years.

WHY AREN'T MUSICIANS BIGGER SOUND FREAKS?

Steve Guttenberg, CNET - It seems like most musicians I meet are more into making music than listening to it. They don't care about how music sounds at home; many are satisfied with the sound they get from boom boxes or chintzy computer speakers. Some tell me they're more focused on the way the players play than the sound.

Sure, I've met a few musicians with ears for sound. That happened just recently when I struck up a conversation with jazz drummer and audiophile Billy Drummond.

He readily conceded my point: "Getting a good hi-fi isn't high on their list of priorities. Like everybody else, musicians listen to music while they're on the computer or sending e-mails. That's what music is now, a backdrop, so fidelity isn't important anymore."

Sad, but true, so what is music for? Drummond had a ready answer. "It's for people to enjoy," he said. "It can take you somewhere, you can dance to it, music conjures emotions. For musicians it's an expression, a way to challenge ourselves, and it can be inspiring.". . .

Drummond's saying all the right things, so I was a little embarrassed to ask about sound quality, does that matter? Drummond was getting excited. "Absolutely," he said, "especially when I'm listening to music in all its splendor over my system, it's second only to being in the concert hall. I'd rather do that than watch a movie.". .

You can hear "the sound" on a car radio or a cheap boom box, so what does an expensive hi-fi bring to the party? Drummond doesn't miss a beat, "OK, if you bring a musician to your house and sit him down in front of your high-end system and play Miles, he will acknowledge the difference. Now, they can really hear his sound. That's what happens when I bring musicians over and let them hear that kind of thing. They get it, and say something like, 'Man, I need to get new speakers.'"

GALLERY

STUNNING PHOTOS OF A TROUBLED ANTARCTIC
FEDERAL JUDGE SAYS RECORD COMPANIES CAN'T COLLECT RESTITUTION FOR EACH ILLEGAL DOWNLOAD

Jacqui Cheng, Arstechnica - Record companies cannot collect restitution for every time a song has been illegally downloaded, a US District judge has decided. Judge James P. Jones gave his opinion on United States of America v. Dove, a criminal copyright case, ruling that each illegal download does not necessarily equate to a lost sale, and that the companies affected by P2P piracy cannot make their restitution claims based on this assumption. . .

Jones wrote in his opinion that equating each download with a lost sale is a faulty assumption. "Those who download movies and music for free would not necessarily purchase those movies and music at the full purchase price," Jones wrote. "Although it is true that someone who copies a digital version of a sound recording has little incentive to purchase the recording through legitimate means, it does not necessarily follow that the downloader would have made a legitimate purchase if the recording had not been available for free."

It's important to note that this decision does not directly affect the thousands of civil cases that the RIAA has launched against accused copyright violators. . . . Still, the Dove ruling is reassuring in that it emphasizes once again the concept that a sheer number of downloads doesn't necessarily equal monetary losses.

BREVITAS

CRASH TALK

Christian Science Monitor - The smallest and most endangered of Detroit's three major carmakers, Chrysler forged a major alliance Tuesday with Fiat, in which Chrysler grants the Italian automaker a 35 percent ownership stake. The partnership promises to help the storied Chrysler brand name survive - something some analysts saw as doubtful without an alliance or merger. The deal will help Chrysler bring more fuel-efficient cars to market, plugging a big gap in its product line. And it will help the most domestic of America's Big Three to become more global. . . The United Auto Workers union voiced support for the deal, echoing the theme of job preservation. . . Fiat, a specialist in small cars, gives Chrysler the chance to piggyback design and production efforts with its new partner and shift its product lineup in an era when consumer preferences and government policies may push carmakers toward fuel-efficient vehicles.

Pro Publica - The TARP hasn't saved the nation's major banks, and the Obama administration doesn't know what to do to save them. That is the unusually sober takeaway in the morning's major papers, following yesterday's sharp decline for banks in the stock markets. . .

Not surprisingly, "fear" and "nationalization" are the words that crop up the most -- as in investors' fear of being wiped out by a government takeover. As the Journal puts it, "The fact that nationalization is considered by some to be possible and is roiling markets reflects the failures of repeated government interventions to stem a widening crisis of confidence in the banking system."

So far, the Treasury Department has spent roughly $230 billion pumping money into the nation's banks (billions more have gone to the auto companies and AIG). But as the Washington Post puts it, that money "did not succeed in stabilizing the industry," and according to unnamed Obama administration officials, it's "increasingly likely" that the remainder of the $700 billion in bailout money won't do the trick either.

The New York Times, Post and Journal all juggle a variety of alternative solutions: they range from the apparently leading contender of creating a "bad bank" to house the banks' toxic assets to nationalization.

The underlying choice there is whether to protect shareholders or taxpayers. The "bad bank" model would involve the government buying and holding the banks bad assets -- but there are worries the government would overpay. In another case of unusual bluntness, the Times reports:

If policy makers were even remotely honest, [financial industry] analysts said, they would force banks to take huge write-downs and insist on a high price in return for taking bailout money. For practical purposes, that could mean nationalization or partial nationalization for many banks.

But as the chorus of calls for nationalization grows, the Journal notes a reluctance among U.S. officials' to take "the most extreme step -- nationalizing banks altogether -- worried about the government's ability to run them. The challenges of running Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two large mortgage-finance firms the government took over last fall, are seen as evidence of that."

Chief Organizer - A report has detailed the extensive efforts by companies around the USA in actually lowering wages by 10-15% across the board marking a trend not seen since the Great Depression. Part of the story focused on even union agreements, including one in the core trucking industry represented by the Teamsters, where the union had agreed to a 15% wage rollback in hopes that the company could survive, rather than see its drivers walking, rather than riding, the streets in this recession.

This is not the concessionary two-tiered bargaining that we all remember from twenty years ago. In those days senior workers might be red-circled at their current rates or frozen for some time, while newer workers were brought in at a lower rate and staggered over years in an on-going catch-up, but there is no way to paint a smile on a wage reduction.

Middle Class - $350 billion have been distributed to the nation’s largest financial institutions so far. Yet, struggling middle-class homeowners have enjoyed no apparent benefit from an expenditure of taxpayer dollars sold to them with a promise to pursue foreclosure mitigation efforts. . . In the next five years, 8.1 million homes of all mortgage types will be lost to foreclosure. [Neither] the Treasury Department, Congress, nor financial institutions have been held accountable for the lack of action on this housing crisis.

Nearly eight in ten seriously delinquent homeowners are not on track for any loss mitigation, a figure that has worsened over time. One in five loan modifications made in the past year is currently delinquent. Thus, not only are government efforts to prevent initial foreclosures falling short, but loan modification programs are failing to keep homeowners in their homes in the long term.

INAUGURATION

Noam Levey, LA Times - More than a million giddy spectators convened on the national mall to watch Barack Obama take the oath of office today, but it is unclear if the crowd surpassed the record believed to have been set three and half decades ago at Lyndon B. Johnson's 1965 inauguration. Though early estimates Tuesday ranged as high as 2 million, satellite images of Obaam's swearing-in suggested the actual size of the throng may have been closer to half that, according to Clark McPhail, a sociologist who has been analyzing crowds on the mall since the '60s.

"It was sparser than I thought," said McPhail, an emeritus sociologist from the University of Illinois. "There were lots of open spaces.". . . Tuesday morning, the hometown Washington Post initially cited security sources who put the crowd at 1.8 million. The Associated Press, which did its own analysis, estimated "more than 1 million.". . . Johnson's inaugural crowd was estimated at 1.2 million. . . McPhail pointed to relatively uncrowded sections of the mall between the Capitol and the Washington Monument and to thin crowds along the parade route to explain his estimate.

RULES OF THUMB

Soothe ice cream headaches - Press your tongue flat against the roof of your mouth, covering as much as you can. "Since the nerves in the roof of your mouth get extremely cold, your body thinks your brain is freezing, too," says Abo. "In compensating, it overheats, causing an ice-cream headache." The more pressure you apply to the roof of your mouth, the faster your headache will subside.

Best times to memorize things - "If you're giving a speech the next day, review it before falling asleep," says Candi Heimgartner, an instructor of biological sciences at the University of Idaho. Since most memory consolidation happens during sleep, anything you read right before bed is more likely to be encoded as long-term memory.

FURTHERMORE . . . .

Daily Star, UK - Coastguards have been told to fill in a form before setting off on rescues. Britain's 400 lifesaving units must complete "vehicle pre-journey risk assessments" Bosses want the teams to describe the type of rescue and journey they are about to undertake. The forms ask for the date and time, reasons for journey and any risks they might encounter. Rescuers have to fill in "actions taken to mitigate risk", before deciding if the risk is "acceptable". One coastguard said: "When we were first told about this, we simply couldn't believe it. When we get a call asking us to go out and rescue someone, we need to go there without delay.But they are asking us to waste time in the office filling out this stupid form. Also, none of us really knows what we are realistically meant to fill in. I mean, how are we meant to know what risks there might be before we get there? And do they expect us to get a full weather forecast before we go out? It's ridiculous. All we want to do is save lives. The impression we get is that the bosses are doing everything they can to make sure their hands are legally clean if there is any kind of problem."

FINDING YOUR WAY AROUND THE REVIEW WEB SITE

GENERAL

SEARCH SITE
LATEST NEWS
LATEST HEADLINES
ARTICLES & LINKS BY TOPIC
RSS FEEDS
EMAIL US
AMERICAN TRENDS
AMERICAN STATS
WEB TOOLS

THE PROGRESSIVE REVIEW
Washington's Most Unofficial Source
611 Pennsylvania Ave SE #381
Washington DC 20003
202-423-7884
Editor: Sam Smith

UNSUBSCRIBE: If you receive your copy via Yahoo please follow instructions at the top or bottom of your message. All others, send us an e-mail with 'unsubscribe' in the subject line.

TO DONATE TO THE PROGRESSIVE REVIEW

DONATE THROUGH PAYPAL

BOOKS
WHY BOTHER?
GREAT AMERICAN POLITICAL REPAIR MANUAL

MUSIC
SAM SMITH'S DECOLAND BAND & OTHER GIGS

© Scoop Media