UNDERNEWS: June 15, 2011

Mob politics vs. political movements

Sam Smith

For the next year and a half you will be subjected to the latest developments in the great contemporary American fairy tale: a presidential campaign.

True, we will get to pick who we want to be Goldilocks and who the big bad bears, but citizen participation in a fantasy doesn’t make it any more real.

There has been over the past few decades a steady deterioration of the political difference between national Democratic and Republican politics, most notably with Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Today it is hard to define that difference given the strong bipartisan support for several illegal wars, the unconstitutional Patriot Act, and a bottomless desire to bail out Wall Street, and a stunning indifference to the financial problems of everyone else. On some days it seems like the only thing that stand between Obama and the Republican Party is his voter registration card. Even on his better days he is just – to borrow a favorite term of his White House a “distraction from the real issues.”

In fact, the political metaphor hardly works anymore. It’s more sensible to regard the two major parties as Mafia mobs fighting for control of a region known as the United States.

This isn’t to say that there isn’t a difference between them. But it’s about survival, however, not politics. The Demos tend to do less damage to our lives than the Repubs. Both mobs may beat the shit out your father, but the Demos are less likely to harm your children or your grandmother.

The importance of this distinction between politics and survival is important because, for one thing, it spares us of the totally false myth that got Obama into office in the first place. Obama turned out to be the Bernie Madoff of the Democratic Party. He conned millions into giving him their hope and change and then ripped them off.

This doesn’t mean that one doesn’t vote for a Demo thug as president or some lower position, but it means that one does so recognizing that the selection of the least dangerous mob in town is a far different matter than backing a political cause.

Once one has made that important distinction the whole nature of politics changes. It is no longer about icons, but about issues. It’s not about elections but about what happens before and after elections. It is no longer about identifying with a party but with a movement.

We are in desperate need of an anti-war movement, an anti-Wall Street movement, an anti-foreclosure movement, and anti-corporate bribery movement, and a new labor movement just to name a few.

Yes, there are wonderful folk attempting to build such movements, but it doesn’t help when liberals and their media constantly lower their goals to Obama’s uncertain, misguided, misleading and unimaginative solutions or when public interest groups adopt the same narrow objectives and insider trading style typical of corporate lobbyists.

If America is to be saved, it will because of movements outside the mainstream political game. It’s always been like that and will continue to be so.

So enjoy the fairy tale that is bubbling up around us. Vote for the bastards who will be do us the least harm. But if you want to be part of the story – and you are whether you desire it or not – then that only thing that will really matter is what you do outside the voting booth.

For in the end, there’s nobody who can make a better difference but us.

Word

You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake - Jeanette Rankin

Pocket paradigms

Recent decades have been characterized by the invasive influence of an arrogant, autistic, and amoral class of late 20th century MBAs and similar members of the technocratic elite. This class junked sixty years of social democracy, helped wreck the economy, made every American worker a temp-in-waiting, carpet bombed the English language, trashed every moral concept in their way, and twisted reality so effectively they even convinced many that they were sex objects.

And they are everywhere. You will find them running schools and universities and managing once great museums. They talk mush, think mush, market mush, report mush, and defend mush. They attempt to make up in certitude what they lack in wisdom; they can't tell the difference between a phrase and a product; and they create infantile and self-serving distortions of economic principles that they declare to be the only principles in life worth observing. They are, in the end, just so many more televangelists, but with themselves as God. Perhaps worst of all, they are without the capacity for shame. Like other sociopaths, they are remorseless.

The fraud, the huckster, the salesman are not new phenomena in America; what is new is that they now so strongly control every estate of our society. Those of a nature that would have once caused Americans to close the door, hang up, or say "no thank you," now teach our children, run our government, and tell us what to think. They are the Enron generation, filled with postmodern version of Willy Loman: "He don't put a bolt to a nut, he don't tell you the law or give you medicine. He' s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine."

We have assigned a wealth of practical tasks to those who think in abstractions, speak in cliches, use paperwork as a pacifier, and convert morality, policies and human aspiration into a bunch of numbers or legal restrictions. Perhaps most sadly - and most dangerously - they have learned their values from sources far removed from the thinking of those philosophers, writers and politicians who gave America its greatest moments.. - Sam Smith

Bilderberg: Where Richard Perle, Henry Kissinger, Charlie Rose, Robert Rubin, David Rockefeller and Robert Gates get to cut secret deals in the name of America

Alex Newman, Global Research - The amount of publicity garnered by the secretive Bilderberg conference this year in St. Moritz, Switzerland, far surpassed the coverage afforded to past gatherings of the elite cabal, with major media outlets and international news wires finally reporting on the yearly event after refusing to do so for over five decades. Protests, the alternative media, and anti-Bilderberg politicians played an important role in spreading the news.

Bilderberg, named after the Dutch hotel where members first met in 1954, brings together some of the most influential figures on Earth. More than 120 top-level officials in government, banking, media, finance, business, think-tanks, armed forces, and even European royalty attend the confab every year.

Among the confirmed 2011 European and Canadian attendees were the British Chancellor of the Exchequer (“in his official capacity,” according to the Treasury), the President of the European Central Bank, the head of Canada’s central bank, the queens of the Netherlands and Spain, the Crown Prince of Norway, a representative of the unimaginably vast Rothschild banking empire, finance ministers, heads of state, and many more.

A reporter on the scene for the U.K. Guardian said there were also individuals in attendance who were not on the official list ¬ a regular occurrence discovered almost every year. Among them were German Chancellor Angela Merkel, NATO Secretary-General Anders Rasmussen, and Socialist Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero of Spain. Microsoft founder and multi-billionaire Bill Gates was reportedly spotted as well.

A handful of non-Westerners also attended, including Turkish business moguls and members of the political class in Turkey. A senior representative of the brutal Communist dictatorship ruling mainland China was there as well. So was a Russian oligarch.

More than two dozen prominent members of the American elite attended, too. An especially interesting cadre at the 2011 event included some of the masters of the internet world: The co-founder of Facebook; the executive chairman of Google; the co-founder and executive chairman of LinkedIn; the founder and CEO of Amazon.com; the commander of the American military’s “cyber command”; Microsoft’s Chief Research and Strategy Officer; and others.

Representatives of the non-digital American elite were out in force as well. Among them were former Ghaddafi adviser and Bush-era neo-con extraordinaire Richard Perle; billionaire David Rockefeller, who openly boasted in his autobiography of conspiring to erect a global political and economic system; Robert Rubin, former Treasury Secretary and current co-chairman of the immensely powerful, world-government-promoting Council on Foreign Relations; the vice-chairman of Citigroup; TV personality Charlie Rose; former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who frequently and publicly calls for what he refers to as a “New World Order”; the president of the World Bank; and others.

Top officials in the Obama administration were also there including ¬ quite ironically ¬ the Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust. Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg and Director of the National Security Agency Keith Alexander were also on the official list, as were former Federal Reserve and military chiefs. Not on the public list but spotted at the conference, according to unconfirmed reports from correspondents in St. Moritz, was Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.

By any objective standard, a meeting of over 120 of the world’s most powerful individuals would seem to be extraordinarily newsworthy. But until recently, the confab rarely attracted even a passing mention in the establishment press. The eerie silence fueled deep suspicion and innumerable theories about what the group may be plotting in secret. This year, however, was different, at least in terms of media coverage…

Analysts speculated that the so-called “mainstream media” establishment ¬ which is rapidly losing its market share as news consumers increasingly turn to alternative sources ¬ was essentially forced to cover the conference in an attempt to salvage what remains of its credibility. . .

Some Bilderberg opponents have also suggested arresting U.S. attendees, citing the Logan Act. That law prohibits Americans from negotiating policy with foreign officials.

Critics of the confab are, of course, routinely derided as conspiracy “theorists” or worse by establishment apologists. The government-funded BBC recently ran a vicious smear piece against people suspicious of Bilderberg, trying to link opposition to secret meetings of global policy makers with anti-Semitism and other unsavory associations. . .

But leaks and public statements by attendees over the years ¬ reported on by the BBC, ironically ¬ reveal that the cabal was instrumental in more than a few world-changing occurrences. The continental super-state known as the European Union and the failing regional “euro” currency, for example, are just a few of the developments in recent decades attributed to Bilderberg.

Anecdotal evidence also suggests the group plays an important part in the seemingly unexplainable rise to power of national leaders. Bill Clinton, for example, attended the conference in 1991 as a virtually unknown state governor. The following year he became President. Then-presidential candidate Barack Obama was reportedly there in 2008. British Prime Minster David Cameron and former PM Tony Blair both went to Bilderberg before rising to the top as well. So did a multitude of global power brokers too long to list.

Bring back Anthony Weiner, fast. . .

NEWT GINGRICH ON A BEACH AS HIS STAFF PACKS THEIR BAGS

Obama has added diversity to the courts

Al Kamen, Washington Post - Nearly half the federal judges appointed by President Obama so far have been women.

Of Obama’s 86 district and circuit judges so far, 39 (45 percent) have been women. If you add his two Supreme Court justices, it’s close to 47 percent, according to Senate Judiciary Committee figures. That’s more than double the percentage of women named by George W. Bush (22 percent) and substantially higher than Clinton’s 28 percent total. (The Bush and Clinton figures are final numbers after eight years.)

In addition, half of the 14 Asia-Pacific Americans on the bench are Obama appointees. Included in that group are the first Vietnamese American, the first Chinese American and the first Korean American federal judges. One Obama nominee, if confirmed, would be the only Native American now on the federal bench.

For the diversity bean-counters, 22 percent of Obama’s judicial appointees have been African Americans, compared with 7 percent for Bush and 16 percent for Clinton. Some 11 percent of Obama’s appointee have been Hispanics, compared with 9 percent for Bush and 7 percent for Clinton.

Study: Danger of prostate cancer underrated

Telegraph, UK - Experts at King's College London have now found the proportion of men with prostate cancer who actually die from it to be higher than previously thought.

Examining records for 20,181 men with the disease who died between 1997 and 2007, they found prostate cancer was the principal cause of death in 49 per cent of them.

Some 12 per cent of deaths were due to other cancers, 17 per cent to heart disease, eight per cent from pneumonia and 13 per cent from other causes.

One of the authors, Professor Henrik Moller, head of analysis and research at the NCIN, said: "Our findings challenge the commonly-held view that most men with prostate cancer will die with the disease rather than from it."

Prostate cancer is the second most common cancer in men after lung cancer, with 37,000 new cases annually in Britain. More than 10,000 men die from it every year.

TSA had "Mexican hunters" at Newark airport

CNN - Security screeners at Newark Liberty International Airport singled out Mexican and Dominican passengers for nearly two years, according to a federal report obtained by The Star-Ledger newspaper.

The racial profiling was so prevalent in 2008 and 2009 that some TSA employees at the airport referred to their colleagues as "Mexican hunters," a Star-Ledger story based on the 2010 internal report said.

According to the Star-Ledger, the report said TSA agents stationed at the Newark airport would stop Mexicans and Dominicans, asking them additional questions, reviewing their passports and visas and searching their luggage. The report did not specify how many agents were involved, but "leaves no doubt that the process was widespread," the newspaper said.

"The report said Mexican and Dominican passengers were singled out for scrutiny of their travel documents as an easy way to drive up the number of referrals by Newark's (behavior detection officer) unit so that it would appear productive," the newspaper said.

Pretty bad even for a GOP ad

AD BEING USED AGAINST DEMOCRATIC WOMAN CANDIDATE
Those with socialist health plans live longer

Washington Post - Large swaths of the United States are showing decreasing or stagnating life expectancy even as the nation’s overall longevity trend has continued upwards, according to a county-by-county study of life expectancy over two decades.

In one-quarter of the country, girls born today may live shorter lives than their mothers, and the country as a whole is falling behind other industrialized nations in the march toward longer life, according to the study.

Led by Christopher J. L. Murray and Sandeep C. Kulkarni of the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, the study covers the years 1987 to 2007 and updates an earlier analysis of U.S. life expectancy through the 1990s. As they had previously, Murray and his colleagues found huge variation in life expectancy in the United States, with some of biggest extremes right around Washington. Fairfax County’s men, for example, had the longest life expectancy in the country, 81.1 years in 2007. In the city of Petersburg, 25 miles south of Richmond, life expectancy was 14 years less, and at 66.9 years among the lowest for men in the country.

Gingrich set up charity that promotes his political views

ABC News - A non-profit charity founded by Newt Gingrich to promote freedom, faith and free enterprise also served as another avenue to promote Gingrich's political views, and came dangerously close, some experts say, to crossing a bright line that is supposed to separate tax-exempt charitable work from both the political process and such profit-making enterprises as books and DVDs.

The charity, Renewing American Leadership, not only featured Gingrich on its website and in fundraising letters, it also paid $220,000 over two years to one of Gingrich's for-profit companies, Gingrich Communications. It purchased cases of Gingrich's books and bought up copies of DVDs produced by another of the former House speaker's entities, Gingrich Productions.

"The spirit of operating a non-profit organization is to work for the public good regardless of the politics that are involved," said Daniel Borochoff, president of the American Institute of Philanthropy, in an interview with ABC News. "I believe it violates that spirit."

GOP plan would ration healthcare

Mark Karlin, Buzzflash - Awhile back, BuzzFlash posted a commentary on how Eric Cantor was, in essence, promoting rationing that would mean some seniors would die for lack of treatment under the Paul Ryan Medicare proposal.

Cantor admitted that treatment would be based on the ability to afford different levels of coverage. It was a rather shocking admission - considering that Ryan is still implausibly claiming that his Groupon voucher (coupon) approach to Medicare will not cut back on access for seniors. Yet, Cantor's rare candor went all but unnoticed by the corporate mainstream press.

Private insurance is as varied as a used car warranty, and most Americans cannot afford medical insurance that is all-encompassing. Private insurance, except for top executives and the wealthiest, is trending toward higher deductibles, more restricted coverage and more vigorous challenge to claims.

For most people, even with private, for-profit insurance, health care is rationed right now.

Even for Medicare as we know it, there are restrictions, premiums, deductibles, co-pays, supplemental policies etc. An Associated Press article today notes that many seniors, under Medicare, cannot afford prohibitively priced life-saving drugs.

In short, there is no medical insurance in the United States that does not ration care, and Medicare, in fact, is the fairest, regardless of income. According to Paul Krugman, it is also the most inexpensive policy when it comes to what the gross national cost of insurance might otherwise be for America's seniors.

Santorum wants to jail doctors who perform abortions

Appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press, former Senator and GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum offered two stunningly maximalist positions on abortion ¬ abortion should be flatly banned even in cases of rape or incest, and doctors who perform abortions should face criminal charges:

QUESTION: Do you believe that there should be any legal exceptions for rape or incest when it comes to abortion?

SANTORUM: I believe that life begins at conception, and that that life should be guaranteed under the Constitution. That is a person.

QUESTION: So even in the case of rape or incest, that would be taking a life?

SANTORUM: That would be taking a life, and I believe that any doctor that performs an abortion, I would advocate that any doctor that performs an abortion, should be criminally charged for doing so.

Judge slams copyright troll Righthaven

Electronic Frontier Foundation- In a decision with likely wide-ranging impact, a judge in Las Vegas today dismissed as a sham an infringement case filed by copyright troll Righthaven LLC. The judge ruled that Righthaven did not have the legal authorization to bring a copyright lawsuit against the political forum Democratic Underground, because it had never owned the copyright in the first place. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Fenwick & West LLP, and Las Vegas attorney Chad Bowers are defending Democratic Underground.

Righthaven sued Democratic Underground last fall over an excerpt of a Las Vegas Review Journal news story that a user posted on the forum, claiming that the newspaper had transferred copyright to Righthaven before it filed the suit. However, a document unearthed in this litigation showed that the copyright assignment was a sham and that Righthaven was merely agreeing to undertake the newspaper's case at its own expense in exchange for a cut of the recovery.

"In dismissing Righthaven's claim in its entirety, Chief Judge Hunt's ruling decisively rejected the Righthaven business model of conveying rights to sue, alone, as a means to enforce copyrights," said Laurence Pulgram, head of copyright litigation at Fenwick & West in San Francisco. "The ruling speaks for itself. The court rejected Righthaven's claim that it owned sufficient rights in the copyright, stating that claim was 'flagrantly false--to the point that the claim is disingenuous if not outright deceitful.'"

Judge Hunt also noted that "Righthaven has made multiple inaccurate and likely dishonest statements to the Court" ...

As part of his ruling today, the judge ordered Righthaven to show why it should not be sanctioned for misrepresentations to the court. The Court permitted Democratic Underground's counterclaim to continue against Stephens Media -- the publisher of the Review Journal -- allowing Democratic Underground to show that it did nothing wrong in allowing a user to post a five-sentence excerpt of a 50-sentence article.

"This kind of copyright trolling from Righthaven and Stephens Media has undermined free and open discussion on the Internet, scaring people out of sharing information and discussing the news of the day," said Opsahl. "We hope this is the beginning of the end of this shameful litigation campaign."

Another reason a national electronic health data base is dangerous

Canadian Medical Association Journal - The province of Ontario is contemplating the creation of electronic health records that could include a patient’s psycho-social, financial and legal history, a provincial official has indicated.

But so comprehensive and sweeping is the proposed database that privacy and legal experts say they are “appalled” and “stunned.”

The province’s plans, sketched at an e-Health conference in Toronto, Ontario earlier this month by Grant Gillis, director of E Health standards for E Health Ontario, would see the creation of comprehensive profiles about all Ontario patients, including their “social history.”

The records could include information about a patient’s education, employment, financial status, legal history, residence history, sexual orientation and spirituality, Gillis told the conference. Gillis also indicated that the information could include a category called “risk.” Some examples found on forms provided by stakeholders during our engagement process include: Risk of falls/wandering; Risk of harm to others; [and] Risk of patient having perhaps been exposed to an infectious disease.”

In response to an inquiry about the appropriateness of including some manner of legal and psychological risk profile in the health profiles of the province’s 13 million residents, Gillis said the risk category had been included in the template after early consultations with clinicians and other stakeholders. He added that access to the records would be carefully controlled by state-of-the-art computer confidentiality barriers, and that information included in the social history category of the electronic health records would not necessarily be accessible to everyone. Only “authorized persons” would likely have the right to access parts of the health record containing sensitive information about a patient’s risk assessment or legal history, he said.

The latter reassurance is unconvincing, says Khaled el Eman, Canada Research Chair in Electronic Health Information at the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Medicine in Ontario.

The notion of huge government patient health databases that include psycho-social profiles is highly problematic, he says. “A big concern would be how this data would be used or disclosed for secondary purposes once it is collected. This is not an issue that is being discussed, but once the data is there, it can be used [in] many unanticipated ways and it is not clear what controls there would be on these secondary uses and disclosures, if any. Should one go by precedent, there may not be many constraints or controls.”

Obama cons: the transparency myth

Drafted by FBI Whistleblowers Sibel Edmonds & Coleen Rowley

• According to a new report to the president by the Information Security Oversight Office the cost of classification for 2010 has reached over $10.17 billion. That's a 15 percent jump from the previous year, and the first time ever that secrecy costs have surpassed $10 billion. Last month, ISOO reported that the number of original classification decisions generated by the Obama administration in 2010 was 224,734 -- a 22.6 percent jump from the previous year.

• Obama has invoked baseless and unconstitutional executive secrecy to quash legal inquiries into secret illegalities more often than any predecessor. The list of this President's invocations of the "state secrets privilege" has already resulted in shutting down lawsuits involving the National Security Agency's illegal wiretapping -- Jewel vs. NSA & Shubert vs. Obama; extraordinary rendition & assassination -- Anwar al-Aulaqi; and illegal torture -- Binyam Mohamed.

• Obama’s presidency has amassed the worst record in US history for persecuting, prosecuting, and jailing government whistleblowers and truth-tellers. President Obama's behavior has been in stark contrast to his campaign promises which included live streaming meetings online and rewarding whistleblowers. Obama’s Department of Justice is twisting the 1917 Espionage Act to press criminal charges in five alleged instances of national-security leaks -- more such prosecutions than have occurred in all previous Administrations combined.

• The Obama DOJ's prosecution of former NSA official Thomas Drake who, up till June 9, faced 35 years in prison for having blown the whistle on the NSA's costly and unlawful warrantless monitoring of American citizens typifies the abusive practices made possible through expansive secrecy agreements and threats of prosecution.

• President Obama has set a powerful and chilling example for potential whistleblowers through the abuse and torture of Bradley Manning, whose guilt he has also publicly stated prior to any trial by his, Obama's, military subordinates.

• Obama is the only president who has reenacted Fahrenheit 451 by actually having his agency collect and burn a book due to a never-justified classification excuse: Lt. Col Tony Shaffer’s Operation Dark Heart.

• Under President Obama, the FBI has launched a series of raids and issued grand jury subpoenas targeting nearly two dozen antiwar activists. Over two thousand six hundred arrests of protesters in the US have been made while Obama has been president, further encroaching on the exercise of First Amendment rights.

• President Obama has initiated a secret assassination program, has publicly announced that he has given himself the power to include Americans on the list of people to be assassinated, and has attempted to assassinate at least one, Anwar al-Aulaqi.

• President Obama has maintained the power to secretly kidnap, imprison, rendition, or torture, and he has formalized the power to lawlessly imprison in an executive order. This also means the power to secretly imprison. There are some 1,700 prisoners outside the rule of law in Bagram alone.

• The Obama Administration is also busy going after reporters to discover their sources and convening grand juries in order to target journalists and news publishers.

• President Obama promised to reveal White House visitors' logs. He didn't. In response to outrage over his refusal to reveal the names of health insurance CEOs he had met with and cut deals with on the health insurance reform bill, he announced that he would release the names going forward, but not those in the past. And going forward he would withhold names he chose to withhold. White House staff then began regularly meeting lobbyists just off White House grounds in order to avoid the visitors' logs.

• President Obama has sent representatives to aggressively pressure Spain, England, and Germany to shut down investigations that could have exposed the crimes of the Bush era, just as he has instructed the US DOJ to avoid such matters. This includes his refusal to allow prosecutions of the CIA for torture, following a public letter from 8 previous heads of the CIA informing him that he had better not enforce those laws.

What the Elzabeth Warren fiasco tells us about the Obama administration

Naked Capitalism - It is obvious that Elizabeth Warren should head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. In the face of increasingly vocal bank opposition to the notion of an effective bank watchdog for consumers, she’s done better than anyone anticipated. And despite the Republican bluster about using a pro forma session to keep the Senate in business to block a recess appointment, the Democrats could break that maneuver if they wanted to.

So why does Team Obama try to hide its choice not to appoint her behind silly “compromises” like its trial balloon of serving up the CFPB’s number two, Raj Date, as a candidate to lead the agency? The Republicans have already said they will approve no one unless they can cut off CFPB’s air supply by controlling its budget. You can’t negotiate with someone who won’t negotiate. Your options are to defy them or capitulate.

The failure of the Team Obama to move beyond this impasse is revealing. It isn’t merely a sign that the Administration is in bed with the banksters. That’s a given. We predicted that Warren would not get the job.

But what is astonishing is how she has managed to out maneuver them and how Team Obama has failed for months to come up with responses. It isn’t as if this crowd feels any compunction to hide the contempt it has for the idea of keeping prior promises. . .

The multiple hazards of being a hotel worker

Hotel Workers Rising - Studies show that hotel workers have an injury rate 25% higher than all service workers, and among hotel workers¬housekeepers experience the highest injury rates. In a survey of over 600 housekeepers, 91% of housekeepers reported having suffered work-related pain. Nearly all housekeepers are women, and research shows that women are 50% more likely to be injured than men who work at hotels. Latina housekeepers are twice as likely as their white counterparts to get injured on the job.

Over time, cleaning hotel rooms can lead to debilitating injuries that in some instances require surgical intervention, physical therapy, or lead to permanent disability, like the loss of the full use of one's arm. Hotel housekeepers face the risk of injury due to heavy workloads. Lifting mattresses that can weigh over 100 pounds, pushing heavy carts across carpeted hallways, bending up and down to clean floors and make beds, and climbing to clean high surfaces all take a physical toll.

In a 2010 study of hotel worker injuries from 50 U.S. hotels published in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine, housekeepers working at Hyatt hotels had the highest injury rate of those hotels studied.

At some Hyatt hotels, room attendants clean as many as 30 rooms a day, nearly double what is commonly required in the industry. This workload leaves room attendants as little as 15 minutes to clean a room¬that's 15 minutes to make beds, scrub clean the toilet bowl, bathtub and all bathroom surfaces, dust, vacuum, empty the trash, change linens¬among other things.

Thanks to the courage of the housekeeper at the Sofitel New York, a curtain has been pulled back on the world of sexual misconduct that housekeepers sometimes face from guests. Backed by a union of hotel workers, the Sofitel housekeeper has reported assault, taking on one of the most powerful men in the world--Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Inspired by her stand, more housekeepers are coming forward to share their own stories and launch a campaign to break the silence about the routine sexual misconduct and other forms of abuse that housekeepers face at work.

While sexual assault is uncommon, housekeepers' stories reveal a pervasive pattern of harassment and unsafe working conditions for the women¬predominantly immigrants¬who work in the industry. Among other things, women routinely endure indecent exposure and other indignities from male guests.

Too often, hotels have been complicit in the culture of silence around this issue, telling housekeepers that the guest is always right.

An American Idol election

A few days ago we ran a piece in which we noted American Idol's function as a model for American politics. We were closer to the mark than we thought

Paul Bedard, US News - It worked to make Carrie Underwood country music's top star, so doesn't it make sense to use the American Idol model to pick a president? That's the thinking behind Votocracy.com, a new social media presidential election game that could have a significant impact on future elections.

"Are we serious? Sure. Are we having fun? Yes," says cofounder Bryan Lee.

Here's how it works: Candidates are nominated on Votocracy.com's Facebook page. Primaries will be held next year in every state and eventually one candidate from each state and the District of Columbia will be chosen via Web voting.

The 51 will then go on a reality TV show next summer modeled after American Idol, where the public votes to keep their favorites in the competition. The winner will then be given some money to actually campaign, though he or she won't be on the official 2012 presidential ballot.

"We need to get a lot more people engaged," Lee tells Whispers. "Our mantra is more voices, more choices."

Candidates pay $99 to run, and Votocracy.com provides the platform for uploading position papers and campaign videos.

What the DC taxi industry can tell you about the free market

One of the reasons I don't take seriously talk by either Democrats or Republicans about the virtues of the free market is the DC taxi system. The DC taxi system was long one of the great - but exceedingly rare - examples of a free market at work. And it was clear that the city's establishment didn't like it. In a heavily Democratic city, leaders worked hard to end the opportunities the taxi business offered to lower income - and mainly black - workers in order to turn it into a corporate controlled industry. The first step was to require meters because without them a corporate cab company couldn't tell how much the driver was earning. Now the drive's on for medallions, a classic example of insider capitalism - Sam Smith

Subterranean Dispatcher, Common Dreams - Amid the sweltering humidity at dusk in Washington D.C., taxicab drivers line up their cars at a Sunoco gas station on the corner of 15th and U Street. The mostly African immigrant drivers circulate flyers among each other, discussing the fate of their jobs and making arguments about the need to organize.

One driver pulls in and drops off a petition.

For the past month, this has been the scene at several gas stations and other taxicab hubs throughout the district where drivers have been coming together everyday to organize against a proposed restructuring of the city's cab industry.

The flyers they carry urge other cabbies and passengers to call their representatives on the city council and to speak out against plans to transform the D.C. taxicab market from an open and largely driver-run industry into what would essentially amount to a cartel system. Such changes would codify the domination of a few owners of the largest cab companies and leave over 4,000 drivers jobless.

The new system that has been proposed in the city council would involve the sale of "medallions" to cab drivers and companies who meet certain qualifications. Owning a medallion, which would increase in value over time, would be obligatory for anyone operating a cab in the city.

Further compounding the threat posed to drivers by this new system are attempts by the interim chair of the D.C. Taxicab Commission, Dena Reed, to rewrite the existing framework that oversees the industry. Reed has proposed changes to that framework - known as Title 31 - that will confer more authority to hack inspectors, require drivers to buy a new vehicle every five years, and allow inspectors to suspend or revoke drivers' licenses for minor infractions such as having over- or under-inflated tires.

A coalition of cab drivers and companies has been formed under the leadership of the Small Business Association of D.C. Taxicab Drivers to resist these abuses and defend the drivers' jobs. The association includes 16 different driver-owned companies and associations representing over 4,000 drivers.

A medallion is a metal plate attached to a vehicle that allows it to operate as a taxi. Medallions have existed in many cities since the 1930s. Washington D.C. is one of the few cities in the nation that does not operate under this system.

A medallion system would force thousands of drivers to either work for a big company or join the unemployment line. While there are currently over 10,000 licensed cab drivers in D.C., the medallion bill will cut that amount in half, limiting the number of medallions to just 4,000 and unnecessarily imposing a scarcity that will drive up fares. According to an analysis produced last year by D.C. Chief Financial Officer Natwar Gandhi, cities with medallions have fares that are 25 percent higher than cities without medallions.

Indeed, the medallion bill has been fixed to benefit a few large companies who are also underwriting its passage into law. The regulations allow a few longtime and politically-connected kingpin players to solidify their control over much of the cab industry in D.C.

In city after city, the introduction of medallions has benefited a small group of drivers and owners at the expense of both drivers and riders.

In the 1930s, New York City sold medallions for $10. Today a medallion in the Big Apple costs up to $700,000. In Boston, medallions cost around $400,000. For established cab companies, the new system proposed for D.C. would have prices start at $250 while newer drivers would pay up to $10,000. Once the medallions are in place, prices would shoot up, leading to a significant rise in fares and making it financially prohibitive for aspirant independent drivers to enter the industry.

Sam Smith, Washington City Paper, 1994 - Just when DC needs every taxpayer it can get its hands on, the city is once again on the verge of making it harder for someone to make a living here. The city government appears close to requiring meters for the DC's 8000 cabs, a move that would severely hobble, if not destroy, the taxi industry as a major tool of local upward mobility.

DC now has more cabs per capita than any other city in America. If all of DC's cabs were owned by one company, the firm would be the city's largest private employer. The industry serves as a remarkably efficient example of what is known as para-transit, that is to say a form of moving people about more public than a car, but less so than, say, a bus.
Yet this could change quickly once meters are installed. The reason is that meters would, for the first time, allow the entry of major corporations into the local taxi business. Without meters, only the drivers knows for sure how much they are earning. With meters, corporations can easily keep accurate track of revenue. For the first time in our city's history, our cab industry will become attractive to big business.

These corporations, if they follow the pattern, will seek not the free marketplace but rather the collaboration of the government in a massive restraint of trade. In the taxi industry this has been traditionally done through some sort of cap on the number of cabs. For example, a study by the Department of Justice found that 87 percent of some 100 cities with taxi service restricted entry in some way. Chip Mellor of the Institute for Justice has noted that Denver routinely turned down every application for a new taxicab company from 1947 on. Chicago and LA are closed. Boston's permit costs $60,000 and New York's $140,000.

A similar trend could be expected in DC as large -- and perhaps out-of-town -- corporations move to take advantage of taxi-metering. The impact on the industry could be phenomenal. If DC had proportionally as many cabs as Paris or London, our fleet would drop more than 90%. While DC has one cab for every 75 citizens, New York City has only one for every 600.

There is almost an iron law of non-competition in the taxi industry. It dates back at least to 1636, when the owners of Thames water taxis got King Charles I to restrict the number of horse-drawn hacks to 50 in order to cut down on the land-borne competition. And it is as recent at 1962, when Chicago Mayor Richard Daley guaranteed 80% of any new cab permits to one of his buddies.

With meters, not only would the ease with which one can hail a DC cab likely disappear, so would a remarkable tradition of individual entrepreneurship -- particularly for minorities -- that the city has enjoyed almost from its beginning. My wife, local historian Kathryn Schneider Smith, found in studying the estate records of DC free blacks in the early 19th century that typically the most successful trade was that of a hack driver. Among the reasons: ownership of one's means of livelihood, a business relationship with the white community, and relief from some of the black codes -- the city's apartheid-type rules that among other things set a curfew on blacks.

Again, when blacks moved into the city in large numbers in the 1950s, it became common to find cabs providing a first or second job for new arrivals trying to gain a foothold on the economic ladder. The cab in front of a black-owned home then was a symbol of the taxi's importance in giving economic substance to the promise of civil rights.

Today, the story is being repeated, only this time the beneficiaries are more often immigrants speaking an awkward dialect, a group without a movement, without a Martin Luther King Jr., and towards which hostility is increasingly sanctioned. The question of cab service has become inexorably intertwined with attitudes towards immigration and with the ethnic economic triage under which the last to come to town lose.

Although anti-immigrant prejudice is seldom explicit, its offspring crop up constantly in discussion of cab service -- concern over lack of knowledge of the city or cheating or "cleanliness." Since there is no evidence that DC cabs are any dirtier than those elsewhere, the question of cleanliness seems to suggest that something else is really being discussed here. One senses when reading Post complaints on this matter that it presumes if cabs were driven by a better class of employees under the control of proper members of the Board of Trade and Federal City Council, everything would be, for some reason, neater.

Likewise, there is an assumption that with meters, fare cheating would decline. Again the evidence is lacking. In fact, if there is one universal of the global cab industry it is that cabdrivers cheat, reflecting little more than that cabbies tend to be extraordinarily knowledgeable natives who do a lot of business with extraordinary ignorant visitors. A study by US News & World Report this year found, in fact, that DC was no worse than most of the major cities it looked at. While the USN&WR study found overcharges of about 5 bucks on an DC airport run, it also reported that in New York one should ask a taxi dispatcher for the best route to your destination: "A driver who takes the Belt Parkway from JFK to midtown, for example, can add $20 to a $25 to $30 fare." The reporters were overcharged $5 bucks for a similar run in Chicago, cheated by limo drivers in San Francisco, reported occasional $20 overcharges in Boston, and so forth. Even the DC cab commission's own study found that passengers were overcharged only 17% of the time, while being undercharged 10% of the time. This in a city where you need to be conned by a factor of 50% to equal cab rates in many other places.

Weiner case filled 17% of last week's news hole

Jim Romenesko, Pointer - That makes it the fourth-most covered scandal involving elected officials since the Project for Excellence in Journalism began tracking news in January 2007. (#1 is Rod Blagojevich’s corruption case; #2, Eliot Spitzer’s prostitute problems; and #3, Larry Craig’s “wide stance.”) Anthony Weiner was easily the dominant newsmaker last week, with nearly triple the coverage devoted to President Obama.

PEJ’s Mark Jurkowitz reports:

The week’s No. 2 story was the economy (11% of the news hole) ...The economy was followed closely by the continuing upheaval in the Mideast (11%)....Coverage of the presidential campaign dropped last week, filling 8% of the newshole compared with 12% the previous week.

Recovered history

MUG SHOTS OF FAMOUS MUSICIANS

Grand jury looking into Abu Ghraib

Politico - A federal prosecutor has launched a secret grand jury to investigate possible CIA war crimes at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, Time magazine reported.

Federal prosecutor John Durham, who was first appointed to probe the destruction of CIA interrogation videotapes by Attorney General Michael Mukasey in 2008, is now working on an expanded probe authorized by the Obama Justice Department that includes cases of alleged abuse of terror suspects in U.S. custody.

Time reported on Monday that one Durham-issued subpoena said the federal grand jury “is conducting an investigation of possible violations of federal criminal laws involving War Crimes (18 USC/2441), Torture (18 USC 243OA) and related federal offenses.”

CNN's Presidential Idol

Edward Morrissey, The Week - Monday's CNN debate managed to combine the usual inanity with a healthy dose of incompetent innovation. CNN selected John King as the moderator and the timekeeper, and needless to say, that didn’t exactly work out well. Instead of signaling with a light that time had expired, King started grunting a few seconds after candidates began their answers... or when King felt the answers were non-responsive... or whenever King felt like grunting. This led to several exchanges when the contestants ¬ darn it, candidates ¬ asked King if they could please finish speaking before he jumped to the next question.

That's not to say that we didn’t learn some important answers from our potential candidates during the evening. Thanks to a brilliant new addition to the debate format, CNN and King managed to teach us that Rick Santorum prefers Jay Leno over Conan O'Brien, Tim Pawlenty prefers Coke to Pepsi, Ron Paul prefers BlackBerries to iPhones, and Michele Bachmann prefers Ludwig von Mises to John Maynard Keynes. Of course, I’m only joking on the last point. Why would a media debate moderator ask about economic policy? King actually asked Bachmann in her difficult "This or That" question to choose between Elvis Presley or Johnny Cash, and Rep. Bachmann immediately disqualified herself from Round Two by picking both. No bonus prizes for Bachmann this time!

In fact, we heard about those four topics as well as Mitt Romney’s chicken-wing preference ("Spicy"!), Herman Cain's pizza crust choice ("Deep dish," in his trademark baritone), and Newt Gingrich’s talent-show pick (American Idol over Dancing with the Stars) before King or any of the reporters asked the panel about energy policy. That’s no joke; CNN didn’t bother to ask a question about energy policy until the very end of a two-hour presidential debate. Only two questions early in the debate directly addressed jobs, despite unemployment being one of the most important issues for voters this year, and King cut Romney short on the first by telling him that "we'll have a lot of time on the topic."

$6.6 billion in Pentagon cash headed for Iraq missing; could be largest US theft in history

Paul Richter, Los Angeles Times - After the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the George W. Bush administration flooded the conquered country with so much cash to pay for reconstruction and other projects in the first year that a new unit of measurement was born.

Pentagon officials determined that one giant C-130 Hercules cargo plane could carry $2.4 billion in shrink-wrapped bricks of $100 bills. They sent an initial full planeload of cash, followed by 20 other flights to Iraq by May 2004 in a $12-billion haul that U.S. officials believe to be the biggest international cash airlift of all time.

This month, the Pentagon and the Iraqi government are finally closing the books on the program that handled all those Benjamins. But despite years of audits and investigations, U.S. Defense officials still cannot say what happened to $6.6 billion in cash ¬ enough to run the Los Angeles Unified School District or the Chicago Public Schools for a year, among many other things.

For the first time, federal auditors are suggesting that some or all of the cash may have been stolen, not just mislaid in an accounting error. Stuart Bowen, special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, an office created by Congress, said the missing $6.6 billion may be "the largest theft of funds in national history."

The hidden calculator on your browser

If you have set Google as your default search provider, you can use the browser’s address bar as an instant calculator. Simply enter the calculation in the address bar, Google will compute the answer on its own servers and will send you the result as a “search suggestion.” You don’t even have to press the Enter key. This works with IE and Google Chrome while in the case of Firefox, you’ll have to type the expression in the browser’s search box instead of the address bar.

Word

Obama to train 10,000 new American engineers each year. No word yet on which country they'll work in - Fark

FBI expands abuse of citizens' privacy

Common Dreams - Even your trash can may not be safe from the government’s eyes.

New rules: The FBI wants to use details found in trash to pressurise someone to help an investigation or work out whether they might be a threat to agents. Around 14,000 agents are getting more powers to search databases, examine household trash and use surveillance teams to scrutinise targets.

An inspector general found in 2007 it abused the ‘national security letters’ system that allows the access of personal information with no court order.

New guidelines will allow them to search without making a record of it - with the FBI saying it will help speed up operations.

Another new piece of guidance surrounds surveillance squads, who can currently only be used once in an assessment.

But now agents will be able to use them repeatedly – although time limits on physical surveillance will remain.

Things they don't tell you about the military

Business Insider - In 2007, the amount of money labeled 'wasted' or 'lost' in Iraq -- $11 billion -- could pay 220,000 teachers salaries In 2007, the amount of money labeled 'wasted' or 'lost' in Iraq -- $11 billion -- could pay 220,000 teachers salaries

America's defense spending doubled in the same period that its economy shrunk from 32 to 23 percent of global output.

The total known land area occupied by U.S. bases and facilities is 15,654 square miles -- bigger than D.C., Massachusetts, and New Jersey combined.

The Pentagon budget consumes 80% of individual income tax revenue

Two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Defense Department still has more than 40 generals, admirals or civilian equivalents based in Europe

The amount the government has spent compensating radiation victims of nuclear testing ($1.5 billion) could fully educate 13,000 American kids

The Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety

The U.S. has 5% of the world's population -- but almost 50% of the world's total military expenditure

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War is, at first, the hope that one will be better off; next, the expectation that the other fellow will be worse off; then, the satisfaction that he isn't any better off; and, finally, the surprise at everyone's being worse off - Karl Kaus

Furthermore. . .

A short history of boredom

Where the hot dog came from

Half of American families couldn't find an extra $2000 in a pinch

CIA to use drones in America's fourth illegal war

Pay $10,000 and you can have your photo taken with Michelle Obama

How common is infidelity?

FEMA says totally destroyed house has "insufficient damage" to get aid

Recovered history: America's grim experiments in eugenics

Mari Marcel Thekaekara: Two gracious women I knew

Nearly 200 of Obama's biggest donors have gotten plum government posts

One quarter of counties had fewer births than deaths & 90% of these were rural

Bipartisan suit against Lybian war

Gov Perry praises group that blames gays for creating the Nazis

The biggest loser of the GOP debate

Ten corporations that worked with the Nazis

Brits afraid of American style healthcare

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