Listen! That sound you hear is the shredding of the social contract. - Bill Moyers
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) suggested in a town hall meeting Tuesday that residents of states where marijuana is legal roll their blunts and smoke up before the next presidential inauguration, according to Bloomberg News.
"If you’re getting high in Colorado today, enjoy it,” said Christie, a 2016 presidential candidate, during the town hall meeting in New Hampshire, according to Bloomberg. “As of January 2017, I will enforce the federal laws.”
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...I can't help remembering the many instances detailed by the late, great Howard Zinn in his People's History of the United States, of European (and later European-American) colonizers' land grabs, forcible displacements, uncalled‑for physical abuse and gradual but relentless extermination of the continent's First Peoples. It seems we haven't changed very much since our colonial days. [/sigh]
The regimes that imposed mass privatization on Argentina and Bolivia were both held up in Washington as examples of how shock therapy could be imposed peacefully and democratically, without coups or repression. Although it's true that they did not begin in a hail of gunfire, it is surely significant that both ended in one.
In much of the Southern Hemisphere, neoliberalism is frequently spoken of as "the second colonial pillage": in the first pillage, the riches were seized from the land, and in the second they were stripped from the state. After every one of these profit frenzies come the promises: next time, there will be firm laws in place before a country's assets are sold off, and the entire process will be watched over by eagle-eyed regulators and investigators with unimpeachable ethics. Next time there will be "institution building" before privatizations (to use the post-Russia parlance). But calling for law and order after the profits have all been moved offshore is really just a way of legalizing the theft ex post facto, much as the European colonizers locked in their land grabs with treaties. Lawlessness on the frontier, as Adam Smith understood, is not the problem but the point, as much a part of the game as the contrite hand-wringing and the pledges to do better next time.
"But hype springs eternal..."You know, I think I really like the guy...
— Paul Krugman, The Return of Depression Economics / and the crisis of 2008, p. 146.
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| Stella, Steve, Kemah Jazz Festival, 2011 |
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| Pluto - Geysers? (see link below) |
Next week, Krugman reveals the GOP for what it really is...New York Times columnist Paul Krugman was blunt Monday when he speculated that real estate mogul Donald Trump was polling so well within the GOP presidential field because he's a "loudmouth racist."
"[Trump]'s a belligerent, loudmouth racist with not an ounce of compassion for less fortunate people," Krugman said in an interview with Bloomberg TV's Joe Weisenthal. "In other words, he's exactly the kind of person the Republican base consists of and identifies with."
The Nobel laureate further predicted that the 2016 election cycle would shake out like a repeat of the horserace that took place during the 2012 Republican presidential primaries. In his estimation, the GOP establishment had "lost control" over the current crop of candidates.
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Suppose you consider Tsipras an incompetent twerp. Suppose you dearly want to see Syriza out of power. Suppose, even, that you welcome the prospect of pushing those annoying Greeks out of the euro."[E]verything the European project was supposed to stand for" ... in theory. Coercion is coercion, and has never been about any noble principle; usually, as in this case, it's about making already rich entities (people, corporations, nations) richer while giving the already rich an opportunity to moralize against those who are not. The technique employed is not even novel; read Klein's The Shock Doctrine for several other truly horrifying examples within (many of) our own lifetimes.
Even if all of that is true, this Eurogroup list of demands is madness. The trending hashtag ThisIsACoup is exactly right. This goes beyond harsh into pure vindictiveness, complete destruction of national sovereignty, and no hope of relief. It is, presumably, meant to be an offer Greece can’t accept; but even so, it’s a grotesque betrayal of everything the European project was supposed to stand for.
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There is a Whataburger across the street from my beloved Star Pizza, and the Whataburger muthaf^<kers are forever arranging to tow cars from their lot, believing that their occupants are Star customers. There are signs all over the front door and lobby of Star warning people not to park there, but people in a hurry for great pizza don't always read very carefully. Besides, AFAIK, the Whataburger muthaf^<kers do not serve veggie burgers; Burger King and the few remaining indy burger joints do.
Does this appeal to you?
I look forward to the first LGBTQ pair who refuse to sign, then sue the judge for violating a Supreme Court order. Aside to the TPM hed editor: it's "... marry gay couples only if..." not "... only marry gay couples if...," the ghost of my mother advises you.
Judge
DePiazza
Not true! Texas was insane centuries before those exercises...
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| Piketty (Wikipedia) |
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| Atkinson (Wikipedia) |
To fully appreciate this book and its proposals, we should first place it in the larger setting of Atkinson’s career, for he has mainly produced the work of an infinitely cautious and rigorous scholar. Between 1966 and 2015, Atkinson published fifty or so books and more than 350 scholarly articles. They have brought about a profound transformation in the broader field of international studies of the distribution of wealth, inequality, and poverty. Since the 1970s, he has also written major theoretical papers, devoted in particular to the theory of optimal taxation, and these contributions alone would justify several Nobel Prizes. But Atkinson’s most important and profound work has to do with the historical and empirical analysis of inequality, carried out with respect to theoretical models that he deploys with impeccable mastery and utilizes with caution and moderation. With his distinctive approach, at once historical, empirical, and theoretical; with his extreme rigor and his unquestioned probity; with his ethical reconciliation of his roles as researcher in the social sciences and citizen of, respectively, the United Kingdom, Europe, and the world, Atkinson has himself for decades been a model for generations of students and young researchers.[/Steve takes a deep breath] Then by all means, let him instruct and inspire me as well in my limited pursuit of economics. Politically, these are times as parlous as the world has ever known; I can use all the inspiration I can find, from Atkinson or any comparable scholar.
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| Glock 41 |
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said in a statement: "It's disastrous that this bureaucratic mistake prevented existing laws from working and blocking an illegal gun sale. The facts undercut attempts to use the tragedy to enact unnecessary gun laws. The American people, and especially the victims' families, deserve better."
...Just so... JEB! is a perfect example of a "person unclear on the concept." Before Junior Bush wrecked the economy in his last year or so in office, I seldom even had to pick up the phone to get as much contract IT work as I wanted: clients came to me, not I to them. Then the flow slowed (over a surprisingly short period of time) and stopped... and no amount of phoning my usual sources of work, or even unusual possibilities, accomplished anything at all: I was involuntarily retired, probably five or ten years earlier than I had intended or expected. This was not my doing, nor was it my former clients' fault: the work just dried up, for them and hence for me. (NOTE to truly ignorant Republicans: yes, the Great Recession began just before 2008, the last year of GeeDubya Bush's administration, not the first of Obama's: "According to the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research (the official arbiter of U.S. recessions) the U.S. recession began in December 2007 and ended in June 2009, ...")
When asked about the crisis of unemployment, Bush stated, “Workforce participation has to rise from its all-time modern lows. It means that people need to work longer hours and through their productivity gain more income for their families.”
The economy should aim for 4 percent annual growth to sustain more jobs, he argued, so “we have to be a lot more productive.”
The comment was instantly assailed as both “out of touch” and incompetent. But the best takedown comes from the latest economic data reports: Americans overall work longer hours on average than peers in many other rich industrialized countries. Full-time employees clock about 47 hours weekly, according to recent surveys. Nearly 40 percent of full-time workers spend 50 or more hours at work each week. Most working households have seen their annual working hours tick up by 9 to 10 percent between 1979 and 2007. Plenty of workers, especially women, are even juggling more than one job.
Smug JEB!
It’s true that many people are working fewer hours than they’d like, but that’s not for want of trying: they’ve been unable to secure full-time work so they take up part-time gigs. According to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), the number of “involuntary part-time” workers has grown since the recession hit to more than 6.6 million.
And more than 3 million so-called “missing workers” have dropped out of the workforce altogether because they’ve become discouraged from even trying to seek a job. ...
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| Another recent Smash/Grab in Houston |
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| Safe!? |
SCOTUS On Abortion And Gay Marriage — Breyer's Glossip Death Penalty Dissent — Piketty et al Write To Merkel — Nichols At The Nation Interviews Bernie Sanders
Lauren Rankin at TPM:It’s been a wild couple of weeks at the Supreme Court, as a notoriously conservative court legalized same-sex marriage nationwide, upheld the Fair Housing Act, and preserved Obamacare subsidies for millions of Americans. Progressives were stunned and delighted at the Supreme Court’s seemingly leftward tilt, cheering Justice Anthony Kennedy for his decisive vote for marriage equality and commending Chief Justice John Roberts for strengthening Obamacare’s judicial footing.
On Monday, progressives had something else to cheer about, as Justice Kennedy once again joined Justices Breyer, Ginsburg, Kagan and Sotomayor—the liberal wing of the court—to allow 10 endangered Texas abortion clinics to remain open while the court decides whether to hear the full appeal. It was met with jubilation from abortion rights supporters who knew that, if this law had been allowed to go into effect, only nine abortion clinics would be left to service the more than five million Texas women of reproductive age. Allowing these clinics to stay open wasn’t just a progressive win; it was a life-saving order.
This move, coupled with their refusal to grant Mississippi’s request to allow them to close their clinic, all but ensures that the Supreme Court will take up abortion rights in their next term. They will likely grapple with whether TRAP laws—laws that single out abortion providers with onerous and unnecessary regulations in order to force them to close—are constitutional or if they do indeed pose an “undue burden” on women’s access to safe abortion care. Basically, the Supreme Court will likely rule on whether hostile states can close safe clinics or not. These implications are enormous.
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Liliana Segura at The // Intercept:...
In its 5-4 decision Monday, the Court concluded that this drug, midazolam, despite being linked to a number of botched executions, did not violate prisoners’ Eighth Amendment rights, because there was insufficient proof its use would necessarily put them at risk of an agonizing death. (The drug, a benzodiazepine, was chosen to replace barbiturates previously used as an anesthetic during lethal injection — for more, see my earlier coverage of Glossip here.)
But in an unusual and impassioned dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer read Glenn Ford’s name from the bench to illustrate why, putting particular execution protocols aside, the time has come to reconsider the death penalty altogether. “Last year, in 2014, six death row inmates were exonerated based on actual innocence,” Breyer wrote. “All had been imprisoned for more than 30 years.” In Ford’s case, he said, citing a remarkable mea culpa published by the Shreveport Times, “the prosecutor admitted that even ‘[a]t the time this case was tried there was evidence that would have cleared Glenn Ford.” This same prosecutor, Breyer noted, admitted that “at the time of Ford’s conviction, he was ‘not as interested in justice as [he] was in winning.’”
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"Five leading economists warn the German chancellor, 'History will remember you for your actions this week.' ”
"In his most revealing interview, the socialist presidential candidate sets out his vision for America." - John Nichols [An exceptional interview! Please go see for yourself why I feel America needs this man as President. - SB]
 | Are you following InTheNews from the Defending Dissent Foundation — Bill of Rights Defense Committee? No? You could be a better informed patriot, Fourth of July or any other day, if you did! |
I wrote this post on July 3, 2005, read it yesterday and decided that enough of it was worthwhile to merit reproducing it today, with a few amendments.
American Tune
Many's the time I've been mistaken,
And many times confused.
Yes, and [I've] often felt forsaken
And certainly misused.
But I'm all right, I'm all right;
I'm just weary to my bones.
Still, you don’t expect to be
Bright and bon vivant
So far away from home, so far away from home.
And I don't know a soul who's not been battered;
I don't have a friend who feels at ease.
I don't know a dream that's not been shattered,
Or driven to its knees.
But it's all right, it's all right;
We've lived so well so long.
Still, when I think of the road
We're traveling on,
I wonder what went wrong;
I can't help it, I wonder what went wrong.
And I dreamed I was dying;
And I dreamed that my soul rose unexpectedly,
And looking back down at me,
Smiled reassuringly.
And I dreamed I was flying;
And high above my eyes could clearly see
The Statue of Liberty,
Sailing away to sea;
And I dreamed I was flying.
We come on the ship they call the Mayflower;
We come on the ship that sailed the moon;
We come in the ages most uncertain hour,
And sing an American tune.
But it's all right, it's all right;
You can't be forever blessed.
Still, tomorrow's going to be another working day,
And I'm trying to get some rest,
That's all, I'm trying to get some rest.
— Paul Simon, 1973
Of all the creatures I have seen,Esther Kitty
Our Esther's best... and that is that!
Eliza may be fairest queen,
But Esther is the fur-est cat!
Your Maserati, Ferlinghetti,
Each is great, within his Beat,
But if you're seeking soft and pet‑ty?
Esther: no cat's half so sweet.
With Esther on your lap, your chair,
Your dining table... you'll discover
You are truly glad she's there —
The perfect pet: you gotta love 'er!
— Steve Bates
Guarantee:
• Equal rights
• Reproductive rights
• Equal pay for equal work!
