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BART Cut Cell Service on Spur of the Moment, Emails Show – The Bay Citizen
In the wake of the scandal, BART officials characterized the [cell phone service] shutdown as a difficult decision made after rider safety was weighed carefully against the rights of the protesters.
“We struggled with that decision,” spokesman Linton Johnson said at an Aug. 16 press conference. “That was a gut-wrenching decision. This agency takes free speech seriously.”
But emails that BART released to The Bay Citizen this week show the decision was made on the spur of the moment with little discussion of the possible consequences.
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Occupy Wall Street: A timely call for justice – The Washington Post
I love every little thing about these gloriously amateurish sit-ins. I love that they are spontaneous, leaderless and open-ended. I love that the protesters refuse to issue specific demands beyond a forceful call for economic justice. I also love that in Chicago — uniquely, thus far — demonstrators have ignored the rule about vagueness and are being ultra-specific about their goals. I love that there are no rules, just tendencies.
I love that when Occupy Wall Street was denied permission to use bullhorns, demonstrators came up with an alternative straight out of Monty Python, or maybe “The Flintstones”: …
Most of all, I love that the Occupy protests arise at just the right moment and are aimed at just the right target. …
“Economic justice” may mean different things to different people, but it’s not an empty phrase. It captures the sense that somehow, when we weren’t looking, the concept of fairness was deleted from our economic system — and our political lexicon. Economic injustice became the norm. …
It’s not that investment bankers should be held responsible for all the ills of the world. It’s that Wall Street is emblematic of an entire economic and political system that no longer seems to have the best interests of most Americans at heart.
…We have no shortage of politicians in this country. What we need is more passion and energy in the service of justice. We need to be forced to answer questions that sound simplistic or naive — questions about ethics and values. Detailed policy positions can wait.
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A Step-by-Step Guide to Leaving Your Big Predatory Bank – Politics – GOOD
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People For the American Way: Tell Ohio TV Stations – Pull ‘Building a Better Ohio’s’ Ad!
Cincinnati resident Marlene Quinn had filmed a TV ad for our friends at the “No on Issue 2″ campaign — the campaign to repeal Senate Bill 5, Ohio’s version of the Wisconsin bill that stripped public workers of their collective bargaining rights. In the ad, she told the story of her grandson and great-granddaughter’s rescue by firefighters, and rightly made the case that passage of Issue 2 on the ballot this November, affirming SB 5, would lead to less firefighters there to protect Ohioans.
In a shockingly underhanded move, a leading right-wing group in the fight, Building a Better Ohio, stole the footage of Marlene for its own ad, and presented it in a way that made it look like Marlene was for Issue 2!
Ten Ohio TV stations have already pulled the ad and we’re going to keep the pressure on the rest until do too.
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Lee Smolin on science and democracy | Video on TED.com
Physicist Lee Smolin talks about how the scientific community works: as he puts it, “we fight and argue as hard as we can,” but everyone accepts that the next generation of scientists will decide who’s right. And, he says, that’s how democracy works, too.
[Aristotelian/heirarchical, Newtonian/liberal, self-organizing and relational universes.]
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Joseph Stiglitz and Lawrence Lessig at Occupy Wall Street | Open Culture • by Dan Colman
Joseph Stiglitz …won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2001.The money quote from his appearance had less to do with economics per se and more with democracy: “We have too many regulations stropping [sic] democracy, and not enough regulations stopping Wall Street from misbehaving.” …
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Bipartisan Group Wants U.S. to Get Serious About Geoengineering – Miller-McCune
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Falling Cost of Renewables Softens Nuclear Shutdown – Miller-McCune
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Climate Optimist Revisits Failures of His ‘Wedges’ Paper – Miller-McCune
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Third Parties: The Avant-Garde of Change – Miller-McCune
…debate unrolling over whether a new party could even logistically surmount the many structural impediments to funding a campaign and getting on the ballot. (Richard Winger compiles a rather awe-inspiring archive of obstacles here.) …
History, however, suggests that third parties don’t need to win races to matter in the marketplace of ideas …
Gillespie, though, compiles a long list of third-party priorities — once fringe values outside the Democratic and Republican platforms — that are now national policy, from government transparency to term limits to the progressive income tax to the direct election of U.S. senators. Third parties also get credit for foresight on child labor, anti-trust laws, public land trusts, Social Security and earlier versions of Obama’s health care law.
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Public Feels Military’s Pain But Won’t Share It – Miller-McCune
The longest war in U.S. history is being fought by the smallest percentage of its population.
The resulting implications — which Jeff Shear touched on for Miller-McCune.com earlier this year — are unsettling. As these wars have moved off of the front page, and as the soldiers fighting them have moved into sixth and seventh deployments, is a disconnect evolving between the country’s servicemen and civilians?
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Three Reasons for Creating a Single Ocean Health Index – Miller-McCune
Just over 75 years ago, there was no easy way to track how well a nation’s economy and its people were doing. Data from all kinds of measures existed, but it was hard to interpret what they all meant. Responding in part to the dramatic declines of the Great Depression, the U.S. Congress in 1934 asked renowned economist Simon Kuznets to develop a method for gauging the condition, or health, of the United States. He came up with what we now know as the gross domestic product, or GDP.
Although criticisms abound about its utility or appropriateness as a measure of national well-being (including from Kuznets himself), the use of GDP has had an indelible and transformative impact on global economics, policy, and markets.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
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