Undernews For March 02 2011

NOTE: The Review will be on the road for the next week so there will be no email updates. You can go to prorev.com for headlines or to http://prorevnews.blogspot.com for posted items.

Morning Line: Stalling in the fast lane
Sam Smith

I can't prove it, but I sure feel it. The Obama administration in recent weeks seems to have stalled out. Right in the middle of the fast lane at rush hour. We've got the Mid East uprisings, the Madison protests, financial disaster - and the self-proclaimed voice of hope and change has turned into a whisper.

Not that we really need him. After all, most of what he's done hasn't been all that good, but it's hard to think of other times when so much was going on outside the White House and so little inside. My best theory is that Obama got where he is by going with the establishment flow, but now the establishment is under attack from all sides, and in some countries even being toppled. It's a hard time for a poodle of the elite to know where and when to pee.

Not that Obama is alone. After all, almost all of what was once considered our leadership is now incompetent, ineffective, indifferent or irrational.

Which leaves a huge space for something new. And which is why what's happening in Madison is so exciting.

So keep puzzling, triangulating, bipartisaning and other such harmless activities, Mr. President. And keep staying out of the way because the story is no longer yours.
Jury nullification cont'd
We recently reported on the Obama administration filing charges against a man for seeking to inform citizens of their jury rights and of your editor's personal history on this issue. Here is some additional historical information:

Scott Horton, Harpers - America's Founding Fathers made their case to juries arguing for nullification. John Adams, when defending John Hancock in 1771, insisted that the juror has not merely the "right" but actually the "duty to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgment, and conscience, though in direct opposition to the direction of the court" and its understanding of the law. Conscience should serve as a safety valve, he argued, against unjust laws, or against just laws, unjustly applied

Since then, jury nullification has been used to block the prosecution of those who helped slaves flee captivity or who simply offered them education; to free those who faced prosecution for resisting military service in unpopular wars or whose conscience forbade them to bear arms; and to end the prosecution of women who sought abortions and the doctors who served them. In the December 1926 issue of Harper's Magazine, Walter Lippmann made the case for the use of jury nullification to address some of the extreme prosecutions resulting from the Volstead Act. In the December 1995 issue, Paul Butler argued that minorities should use jury nullification to press social issues. . .

Shortly before his death, Thomas Jefferson noted with disdain that judges were working hard to bury jury nullification. It reflected a pernicious "slide into toryism," he remarked in a letter to James Madison in 1826. In Jefferson's view, judges and prosecutors who rejected the jury's right of nullification were betraying the values of the Constitution and instead embracing those of the British Crown.
Flotsam & Jetsam: The forgotten war that still kills
Sam Smith

Recent news that the last American veteran of World War I had died didn't get a lot of attention because the war he fought in had long ago been forgotten by most Americans and is ignored by historians and the media. In my book, Why Bother, I wrote about it:
|||| How many school children are taught that, worldwide, wars in the past century killed over 100 million people? In World War I alone, the death toll was around ten million. Much of this, including the later Holocaust, was driven by a culture of modernity that so changed the power of institutions over the individual that the latter would become what Erich Fromm called homo mechanicus, "attracted to all that is mechanical and inclined against all that is alive." Becoming, in fact, a part of the machinery -- willing to kill or to die just to keep it running.

Thus, with Auschwitz-like efficiency, over 6,000 people perished every day during World War I for 1,500 days. Richard Rubenstein recounts that on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the British lost 60,000 men and half of the officers assigned to them. But the internal bureaucratic logic of the war did not falter at all; over the next six months, more than a million British, French and German soldiers would lose their lives. The total British advance: six miles. ||||

To me this is more than a history lesson. Death at an early age hung like a shroud over my family. My mother's brother had died while serving in World War I. Trained as a flying observer at Fort Sill, he was killed by a shell as he went to help with the liaison between the airplanes and the artillery. His first cousin was an aviator with the famed Lafayette Escadrille. He lost his life while on a scouting mission over German territory just a few months before his cousin died in France.

Another uncle, married to my mother's sister, came back from the war, where he had helped move dead bodies from the front. He never smiled again. Suffering from what we would call post traumatic stress syndrome, he committed suicide ten years later.

And one of my father's brothers was lost near Lisbon while serving in WWI as an officer aboard Admiral William Halsey's first command.

All this in a war that one hears little about anymore, yet in an important way would shape the next century of violence. As I noted:
|||| No one in that war was a person anymore. The seeds of the Holocaust can thus be found in the trenches of World War I. Individuals had became no better than the bullets that killed them, just part of the expendable arsenal of the state. . .

Some of the most important lessons of the Holocaust are simply missed. Among these, as Richard Rubenstein has pointed out, is that it could only have been carried out by “an advanced political community with a highly trained, tightly disciplined police and civil service bureaucracy.”

In The Cunning of History, Rubenstein also finds uncomfortable parallels between the Nazis and their opponents. For example, in 1944 a Hungarian Jewish emissary meets with Lord Moyne, the British High Commissioner in Egypt, and suggests that the Nazis might be willing to save one million Hungarian Jews in return for military supplies. Lord Moyne’s reply: “What shall I do with those million Jews? Where shall I put them?” Writes Rubenstein: "The British government was by no means adverse to the ‘final solution’ as long as the Germans did most of the work."

For both countries, it had become a bureaucratic problem, one that Rubenstein suggests we understand “as the expression of some of the most profound tendencies of Western civilization in the 20th century.”

These tendencies were not alien to America. General Curtis LeMay ran the air war against both Japan and North Korea, became head of the sacrosanct Strategic Air Command, and was one of the military heroes of his time. Here are just a few of his accomplishments as reported by Richard Rhodes in the New Yorker:

- The destruction of nearly 17 square miles of Tokyo with the loss of at least 100,000 civilian lives.

- The destruction of 62 other Japanese cities. Only Hiroshima and Nagasaki were spared -- reserved for their own special horror. In sum, more than a million Japanese civilians were killed. LeMay himself would admit years later, "I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal. Fortunately, we were on the winning side."

- The bombing of North Korean cities, dams, villages and rice paddies. Civilian deaths: more than two million.

In short, with the enthusiastic blessing of the American government, LeMay was directly responsible for the slaughter of about half as many civilians as died in the Holocaust. And LeMay had even grander schemes. His plan for defeating the Soviet Union included the obliteration of 70 Soviet cities in thirty days with thirty-three atomic bombs and the deaths of 2.7 million citizens. ||||

No time in history can match the century of mechanization of violence that began with World War I. Only when you add up all of China's wars from the 8th to 19th century do you come up with anything comparable.

And like so many important things that made us what we are, we don't even talk about it anymore. Except when you come from a family where so many uncles died as part of the story.
Police department turned ticketing into a bingo game
LA Times - A memo discovered in Bell police files appears to outline a game in which police officers compete to issue tickets, impound cars and arrest motorists. Titled the “Bell Police Department Baseball Game,” the memo assigns “singles,” “doubles,” “triples” and “home runs” to progressively more serious infractions, starting with parking tickets and moving on to vehicle impounds and felony arrests of drivers. “Non-performers,” the memo says, are “sent for minor league rehab stint.” The discovery of the memo comes as the U.S. Department of Justice is investigating whether Bell police violated the civil rights of residents through aggressive towing of cars and code enforcement. Part of the investigation focuses on claims by some officers that the department had quotas for issuing tickets and impounding cars, which they said was done to raise revenue for the city. Some officers said they were reprimanded when they did not meet goals.
School closings become a civil rights issue in Boston
Boston Globe - The US Department of Education is investigating a complaint that the Boston school system’s plan to close or merge more than a dozen schools to save money discriminates against black and Latino students and their parents...“Historically, disproportionate numbers of school closings have occurred in the predominantly black neighborhoods of the city,’’ said Nora Toney, president of the Black Educators’ Alliance. “The school closings have had a profound impact on our students, families, and community, creating constant disruption, instability, and uncertainty, while failing to provide the quality schools promised by the district.’’
Great cakes

Sign of the Times

Mid West protest

Bald eagles falling from the sky

Seattle Weekly - It was one thing when starlings, robins, and turtledoves were falling dead from the sky in places like Kentucky, Italy, and Arkansas. Those places are far from the Pacific Northwest, and the birds are just common species that no one cares about anyway. Well, now bizarre bird deaths have finally made their way to the PNW, and it's eagles that are falling from the sky. That's right, bald freaking eagles.

The Vancouver Sun reports that Maj Birch, manager of the Mountainaire Avian Rescue Society in Comox Valley on Vancouver Island, is currently caring for seven injured eagles that were starving and fell out of the sky. Several others didn't make it.

The reason behind the eagle deaths is, at least, less mysterious than the flocks of smaller birds that have dropped from the sky in droves elsewhere.

Birch blames a poor chum salmon run in the Comox Valley and on the mainland for leaving the birds with little to eat. Many birds are apparently subsisting by feeding at nearby landfills, where they are often poisoned from the garbage.

David Hancock of the Hancock Wildlife Foundation tells The Daily Mail that he saw the bald eagle count along the Chehalis River drop from more than 7,000 birds to less than 400 in a matter of days.
The Daley-Obama-Emanuel connection

Bruce A Dixon, Black Agenda Report - Last month, at the installation of the new White House chief of staff Bill Daley, President Obama declared the man had “public service in his DNA.” What Obama actually meant was that Daley, a lobbyist and JP Morgan Chase exec who helped write NAFTA, hailed from the predatory family of wolves that have ruled Chicago for two generations and who helped launch his own career.

For 43 of the last 56 years, some guy named Richard Daley has occupied the fifth floor office in Chicago's City Hall. And now Barack Obama has enabled the wolvish Daley clan to elect its own successor, Rahm Emanuel.

The city's public assets have been looted, leased and privatized, and its once extensive public transit system shrunken and starved for funds. Aggressive condemnation and demolition of private housing pursued almost exclusively in black areas from the 1960s onward, followed by the eradication of public housing beginning in the 1990s has driven hundreds of thousands of black residents from the city, while keeping rents and housing prices painfully high for those who remain. In 1983 Chicago was more than 42% African American. Now the percentage is under 30%.

Public broadcasting gets ready for the worst

Plain Dealer - These are nervous times at the area's public broadcasting stations. The budget bill passed this month by the U.S. House of Representatives would cut $61 billion in federal spending, including the $430 million allocated to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

About 70 percent of that CPB money is channeled to the nation's public radio and television stations. . .

"People ask me, 'Why do you care so much? It's only 10 percent of your budget,' " Wareham said. "My answer is that I'm about 5-foot-10-inches tall, and if I were 10 percent shorter, I would be about 5-foot-3. You would notice that. "It doesn't mean I would disappear, but I would be diminished. I would be less noticeable."

Nationally, CPB funds represent 15 percent of public stations' annual operating budgets. At stations in large cities or with substantial endowments, that figure can be as low as 7 percent. At stations in small cities and rural areas, it can be as high as 40 percent.
Obama backtracks on healthcare mandate

The Hill - President Obama backed a significant change to the healthcare reform law for the first time, supporting a plan that could delay implementation of the unpopular mandate to buy insurance. Speaking to the nation’s governors, Obama said states should be able to request waivers for implementing alternatives to the reform law starting in 2014, three years earlier than the law allows.

The president is supporting legislation that would allow states to receive waivers to pursue alternatives to the law, a change that could let states opt out, beginning in 2014, from the requirement that individuals buy insurance. Polls have shown the mandate is deeply unpopular with the public.

Obama announced his support for a bill proposed by Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Scott Brown (R-Mass.) and Mary Landrieu (D-La.) that would let states opt out of many of the law’s mandates until 2017.

San Francisco low flow toilets back up sewer pipes causing stench

SF Gate - San Francisco's big push for low-flow toilets has turned into a multimillion-dollar plumbing stink. Skimping on toilet water has resulted in more sludge backing up inside the sewer pipes, said Tyrone Jue, spokesman for the city Public Utilities Commission. That has created a rotten-egg stench near AT&T Park and elsewhere, especially during the dry summer months.

The city has already spent $100 million over the past five years to upgrade its sewer system and sewage plants, in part to combat the odor problem.
Now officials are stocking up on a $14 million, three-year supply of highly concentrated sodium hypochlorite - better known as bleach - to act as an odor eater and to disinfect the city's treated water before it's dumped into the bay. It will also be used to sanitize drinking water. . .

Not everybody thinks it's a good idea. A Don't Bleach Our Bay alert has just gone out from eco-blogger Adam Lowry who argues the city would be much better off using a disinfectant like hydrogen peroxide - or better yet, a solution that would naturally break down the bacteria.
Study: GOP spending plan would cost 700,000 jobs

Washington Post - A Republican plan to sharply cut federal spending this year would destroy 700,000 jobs through 2012, according to an independent economic analysis set for release Monday. The report, by Moody's Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi, . . predicts that the GOP package would reduce economic growth by 0.5 percentage points this year, and by 0.2 percentage points in 2012, resulting in 700,000 fewer jobs by the end of next year.

His report comes on the heels of a similar analysis last week by the investment bank Goldman Sachs, which predicted that the Republican spending cuts would cause even greater damage to the economy, slowing growth by as much as 2 percentage points in the second and third quarters of this year.

Bernanke's non-inflation

Henry Blodget, Business Insider -While we were filling up the tank this weekend, we were reminded that regular old unleaded gas now costs ~$3.50 a gallon.That's up at least $1 from last year, and $0.50 in the past few months.

Food prices are skyrocketing, too, just as they are everywhere else in the world. So we're just very relieved that Ben Bernanke keeps telling us that there's no inflation. Because we hate to think of what prices would be doing if there was!

Big drop in foreclosures as scandals scare banks

Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism - There has been evidence here and there of a marked fall in new foreclosure filings. Lender Processing Services, which handles more than half of the loans serviced in the US, said its revenues in its Default Services Group were down in the final quarter of the year. Why? Its revenues are tied to initial foreclosure filings, and its were off 33%, no doubt in large measure due to the robo signing scandal. Recall that it led many banks to halt foreclosures (some all over the US, others in judicial foreclosure states only) while they inspected the state of play and scrambled to revamp procedures. Banks piously claimed that they found no problems in the correctness of foreclosure actions and that ex making the changes needed to assure affidavits were proper, they were going to be back to business as usual post haste.

Now we already know that that isn’t the case. Since the robosigning scandal broke, foreclosure activity has been down. RealtyTrac reported that foreclosures in January were up only 1% over December levels, which was down 17% from the year prior.

Arctic Sea Ice Extent in January is Lowest in Recorded History

ENN - While extreme weather conditions and unusually cold temperatures have gripped much of North America and Europe this winter, unusually warm temperatures farther north produced the lowest Arctic sea ice extent ever recorded for the month of January, according to NASA. Areas such as Hudson Bay, Hudson Strait, and Davis Strait ¬ which typically freeze over by late November ¬ did not completely freeze until mid-January, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. And the Labrador Sea was also unusually ice-free. In this NASA graphic, based on satellite data, blue indicates open water, white illustrates high sea ice concentrations, and turquoise indicates loosely packed ice.

Someone needs to investigate congressional investigator Issa

What legalized marijuana could mean for your state's budget

ENDS

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