#OWS Highlights Authoritarian Police

Allison Kilkenny on December 18, 2011 – 10:47am ET

A funny thing happens when one uses the term “police state” to describe behavior by authorities in response to the Occupy protests.

Free Speech Zones

In late November, LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa released a midnight press release in anticipation of a raid on Occupy LA, which included this line: “During the park closure, a First Amendment area will remain open on the Spring Street City Hall steps.” The absurdity of that statement should be immediately apparent to anyone who understands how real journalism works. Good reporters don’t obediently stand in a “First Amendment area,” deliberately placed far away from the heart of the story. Reporters need to be able to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with protesters, precisely so they can witness how the police interact with them.

Earlier in the month, journalist Josh Harkinson reported on being alerted to the existence of something called the “frozen zone” when he attempted to cover the eviction of Zuccotti.

A white-shirted officer moved in with a bullhorn. “If you don’t leave the park you are subject to arrest. Now is your opportunity to leave the park.”

Nobody budged. As a lone drum pounded, I climbed up on the wall to get a better view.

“Can I help you?” an burly officer asked me, his helpfulness belied by his scowl.

“I’m a reporter,” I told him.

“This is a frozen zone, all right?” he said, using a term I’d never heard before. “Just like them, you have to leave the area. If you do not, you will be subject to arrest.”

…

He grabbed my arm and began dragging me off. My shoes skidded across the park’s slimy granite floor. All around me, zip-cuffed occupiers writhed on the ground beneath a fog of chemicals.

“I just want to witness what is going on here,” I yelped.

“You can witness it with the rest of the press,” he said. Which, of course, meant not witnessing it.

“Why are you excluding the press from observing this?” I asked.

“Because this is a frozen zone. It’s a police action going on. You could be injured.”

His meaning was clear. I let myself be hustled across the street to the press pen.

“What’s your name?”

His reply came as fast as he could turn away: “Watch your back.”

The state of open source in solar

 

Around 2016 (more or less) we are going to reach a crossover point, called grid parity. The cost per watt of buying, installing and using a solar system is going to get below the actual cost of buying electricity from the grid, below the cost of generating it with coal or natural gas and transporting it to you.

It’s at this point that I expect open source to shine, because the supply-demand balance will shift. Instead of having to push demand for solar systems, manufacturers will find themselves falling behind demand, just as PC makers began running short (despite production increases) of consumer demand for PCs in the late 1970s, after decades where salesmen had to call on folks to sell mainframes or minicomputers.

When a technology becomes common, when it starts to become standardized, when it has proven itself in the market, that’s when the savings and benefits of open source become obvious.

We’re just getting warmed up.

Justified

My new fave rave

Fans of Deadwood will remember Timothy Olyphant as the intense lawman turned store keeper. He returns as a Federal Marshall in this terrific series, produced by Elmore Leonard and based on a character from one of his stories. Exciting, colorful, sexy, powered by great writing — it’s a heaping helping of good fun.

IMDB: Justified

Time Lapse proof of The Green House effect

11/10/2009 | By Richard Darell

You probably brush the Green House effect off like most people thinking it’s something the governments are trying to use in order for us to buy other kinds of cars, more expensive foods etc. But, did you actually take the time to check for yourself what is really happening? Did you try and Google the evidence that will more than prove to you that the Green House effect is actually occurring as we speak. And in a speed you would have never expected.

I can openly admit that I did. I didn’t think about it until I saw this time lapse put together by a bunch of scientists with James Balog in the lead just to prove to us that if we are not doing something radical right now…well you get the picture. First I thought -”Another one that is going to blow us away using grafs and statistics.” But boy was I wrong.

Using over 25 time lapse cameras all custom made and positioned on bedrock ground in several different glaciers around the world shooting pictures every for over two and a half years they have put together a STUNNING time lapse of our doom if you will.

Banks: We’re breaking the law, OK?

60 Minutes (2/15/09)

How did the mortgage industry destroy itself and set off an economic collapse that ruined the finances of millions of Americans? Executives tend to hold themselves blameless, saying that no one could have seen the disaster coming.

Well, judge for yourself after you hear the story of Paul Bishop, who worked at the nation’s second largest savings and loan. World Savings Bank was among the industry’s most admired mortgage lenders. But Bishop says the kind of lending practices he saw were leading to a world of trouble that would ultimately result in billions in losses and a federal investigation.

What does Paul Bishop say he told executives at World Savings, three years before the crash?

“We’re breaking the law, okay? We’re breaking the law. You know we’re breaking the law. I know we’re breaking the law. What the hell do you think is going on here? You know, you’re granting too many people loans who simply can’t qualify,” Bishop told 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley.

Bishop’s story is a rare inside look at forces that tore the economy apart, as seen by a plain-spoken loan salesman who is now suing World Savings, claiming that he was fired for telling executives what they didn’t want to hear.

“I definitely talked to him about Enron. I said, ‘We’re sitting on an Enron.’ This is…bigger than Enron. I mean, we’re doing four billion a month in loans. If housing drops, housing value drops, people start to default, you know? This is a nightmare. These people will not survive it,” Bishop told Pelley.

Bishop was a mortgage salesman at World Savings San Francisco Loan Origination Center. He’d been a top salesman at IBM and spent years as a stock broker. Most everywhere he went, he had a reputation for speaking his mind and ruffling feathers. He joined World in 2002, in part, because of its history.

Bishop says the owners were Herb and Marion Sandler.

“And their reputation at the time was what?” Pelley asked.

“It was flawless, near as I could tell,” Bishop said.

In fact, Herb and Marion Sandler were legendary. In 1963, they started Golden West Financial and grew to 285 branches under the name World Savings. The Sandlers’ were known for careful, conservative lending. They’ve given away millions of dollars to charity and started an advocacy group for low income borrowers called the Center for Responsible Lending.

In 2006, just before the housing crash, the Sandlers sold their bank to Wachovia and pocketed $2.3 billion.

Trouble is, some of their money came from people like Betty Townes, who is financially ruined after being sold a series of World Savings mortgages she couldn’t afford.

Asked how many times she refinanced, Townes said, “Well we refinanced practically every year.”

World salesmen convinced Betty to refinance her mortgage four times in four years. She got about $20,000 each time. “Well, all I know that they told me this loan was best for me,” she told Pelley.

But how could it be best when Betty’s pension couldn’t qualify her for the loans?

“They told me that they would go by my husband’s payroll,” she said.

“Even though he’d been laid off from the shipyard?” Pelley asked.

“No, he’d passed away,” Townes replied.

Banks buy politicians — on sale, now!

Bill Moyers on PBS, February 13, 2009

On Tuesday, February 10, 2009 Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner unveiled the Obama administration’s plan to address the crisis in the financial sector. The strategy he outlined calls for the largest Federal intervention in banks and finance since the Great Depression, flooding as much as $2.5 trillion into the system. Given its size and scope — the bill’s lack of detail drew a widely negative response from analysts and economists.

Although he thinks the details are important, Simon Johnson, Professor of Economics at MIT, worries more that Geithner and the Obama administration won’t address a big underlying problem and be tough enough on the politically powerful banking lobby.

 

Too Big To Fail?

Johnson explains to Bill Moyers on the JOURNAL that the U.S. financial system reminds him more of the embattled emerging markets he encountered in his time with the International Monetary Fund than that of a developed nation. As such, Johnson believes that the U.S. financial system needs a “reboot,” breaking up the biggest banks, in some cases firing management and wiping out shareholder value. Johnson tells Bill Moyers that such a move wouldn’t be popular with the powerful banking lobby: “I think it’s quite straightforward, in technical or economic terms. At the same time I recognize it’s very hard politically.”Without drastic action, Johnson argues, taxpayers are merely subsidizing a wealthy powerful industry without forcing necessary systemic changes: “Taxpayer money is ensuring their bonuses. We’re making sure that banks survive. And eventually, of course, the economy will turn around. Things will get better. The banks will be worth a lot of money. And they will cash out. And we will be paying higher taxes, we and our children, will be paying higher taxes so those people could have those bonuses. That’s not fair. It’s not acceptable. It’s not even good economics.”

IBM, Smart; Forbes…

Nissan smart roads

Infrastructure

IBM’s ‘Smart’ Moves
by Andy Greenberg
Company revamps its infrastructure offerings just as the Senate is expected to approve billions in IT spending.

First came the lofty pronouncements. Now, comes the products–and the timing couldn’t be better.

Since November, IBM Chief Executive Sam Palmisano has been making futurist statements about the need for a “smarter” national infrastructure, using information technology to upgrade the nation’s roads, electric grid and health care system in a bid to increase their efficiency; to make America more internationally competitive and to create thousands of jobs.
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Warning to fellow writers: I sent a query to the Silicon Valley editor at Forbes about a year ago, re: HoloGenomics.

He declined, saying it wasn’t the sort of thing they do very often.

Except he did — on the same subject, a few weeks ago.

I asked the editors at Forbes how they were going to make this right.

Thus far, their worships have not deigned to reply.

I also proposed a piece on why the old media are dying …

Evil bastards

The GM genocide: Thousands of Indian farmers are committing suicide after using genetically modified crops

By Andrew Malone
Last updated at 12:48 AM on 03rd November 2008

When Prince Charles claimed thousands of Indian farmers were killing themselves after using GM crops, he was branded a scaremonger. In fact, as this chilling dispatch reveals, it’s even WORSE than he feared.

The children were inconsolable. Mute with shock and fighting back tears, they huddled beside their mother as friends and neighbours prepared their father’s body for cremation on a blazing bonfire built on the cracked, barren fields near their home.

As flames consumed the corpse, Ganjanan, 12, and Kalpana, 14, faced a grim future. While Shankara Mandaukar had hoped his son and daughter would have a better life under India’s economic boom, they now face working as slave labour for a few pence a day. Landless and homeless, they will be the lowest of the low.

Published by The San Francisco Chronicle

India’s Debt-Ridden Farmers Committing Suicide

By Jason Motlagh

Nashik, India — On a recent afternoon, Seetabai Atthre heard a faint cry from the edge of a vineyard that her family has cultivated for more than 40 years. Through the furrows, she found her husband, Vishal, smoldering on the ground next to an empty can of kerosene. He had lit himself on fire and died three days later in a local hospital.

Atthre attributes her husband’s suicide to a $5,600 debt. The farm located on the arid plains of northern Maharashtra state near the town of Nashik had not turned a profit in more than two years, and 65-year-old Vishal could no longer secure a bank loan to pay off interest on the debt.”This is wrong, and it’s killing us,” Sanjay Gangode said at a gathering of debt-ridden grape farmers in the region. “There is no future here.”

While India’s economy surges forward on the crest of globalization, thousands of farmers are taking their own lives every year to escape mounting debt and an uncertain future. According to the National Crime Records Bureau, at least 87,567 farmers committed suicide between 2002 and 2006. In Maharashtra state, there were 4,453 suicides in 2006, the last year for which statistics were made available, an increase of 527 compared with 2005. Sharp increases have also been reported in Andhra Pradesh and Chhattisgarh states.

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Do you know what is in your food?

Is it genetically engineered?

Frequently Asked Questions

Question: Why don’t the food manufacturers and the biotech companies want you to know if your foods have been genetically engineered?

Answer: Because if they are labeled, you will start asking questions such as “Have these genetically engineered foods been safety tested on humans?” The answer to that question is NO!

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Question: Doesn’t the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) require genetically engineered foods to be safety tested like they do for new drugs and food additives before they are sold to the public for consumption?

Answer: NO! With limited exceptions, under current FDA regulations, companies are not even required to notify the agency they are bringing new genetically engineered products to the market.

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Question: How much of the food I buy in the grocery stores contain genetically engineered ingredients?

Answer: Since genetically engineered soy and corn are used in many processed foods, it is estimated that over 70 percent of the foods in grocery stores in the U.S. and Canada contain genetically engineered ingredients.

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Question: Are people all over the world eating genetically engineered foods?

Answer: No, all of the European Union nations, Japan, China, Australia, New Zealand and many other countries require the mandatory labeling of foods that contain genetically engineered ingredients. As a result, food manufacturers in all those countries choose to use non-genetically engineered ingredients.

The Campaign

Bank on America

Bank on this.

 

Community-based movements to halt the flood of foreclosures have been building across the country. They turned out in Cleveland once again in October, when a coalition of grassroots housing groups rallied outside the Cuyahoga County courthouse, calling for a foreclosure freeze and constructing a mock graveyard of Styrofoam headstones bearing the names of local communities decimated by the housing crisis. (They did not, unfortunately, stop the more than 1,000 foreclosure filings in the county the following month.) In Boston the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America began protesting in front of Countrywide Financial offices in October 2007. Within weeks, Countrywide had agreed to work with the group to renegotiate loans. In Philadelphia ACORN and other community organizations helped to pressure the city council to order the county sheriff to halt foreclosure auctions this past March. Philadelphia has since implemented a program mandating “conciliation conferences” between defaulting homeowners and lenders. ACORN organizers say the program has a 78 percent success rate at keeping people in their homes. One activist group in Miami has taken a more direct approach to the crisis, housing homeless families in abandoned bank-owned homes without waiting for government permission.

It’s unlikely, though, that any of these activists will be able to relax soon. 

The Nation

 

When I was a lad, I ran off to San Francisco, like hippies from all over, to be free and unconventional and rid of the whole corporate America trip.

I ended up working at the Bank of America, thanks to a pink collar stoner chick who fudged my typing test.

While working at their headquarters, I learned about the proud heritage of the bank, which had rebuilt San Francisco in the early 20th century, in the wake of its great earthquake. 

Today, of course, bankers are universally regarded as monuments to heroic greed, spectacular corruption and epic incompetence–one short step above child molesters on the social scale. Adrift in their bubbles, intoxicated by their own emissions, only they remain unaware of this downward turn in public perception.

When a reporter for the AP politely asked them what they were doing with billions of dollars of the taxpayers’ bailout ransom, they sniffily replied to this effect: “Listen, you tawdry little man–we don’t give a fig about you and your shabby readers. We have parties to attend. Kindly pay up and shut up. Then find your way out.”

Men have short memories. It wasn’t so long ago in the long view of history that, faced with a similar situation, the rabble roused themselves in the streets of Paris and handed the nobility their heads. Good times.

Today, gun shops can’t keep up with demand.

Being a peaceful sort and averse to noise, I got to thinking that maybe it doesn’t have to come to bloodshed and armed insurrection.

Is it conceivable that bankers today are capable, if only in theory, of once again doing the right thing? Could they ever, even in an imagined world, earn their fat paychecks and lead us out of the mess that is largely their own creation? 

Trying to wrap my head around that wild notion, I am once again transported back to a more innocent era.

All across the nation

Such a strange vibration …

 

 

 

Camelot

You are One, under the stars.

That’s it… and look upon this moment. Savor it! Rejoice with great gladness! Great gladness! Remember it always, for you are joined by it. You are One, under the stars. Remember it well, then… this night, this great victory. So that in the years ahead, you can say, ‘I was there that night, with Arthur, the King!’ For it is the doom of men that they forget.

- Merlin, Excalibur