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Daily Kos: Tell Us What You See
OCT 04, 2011
Tell us what you see. Do it by interview. Do it by documentation or video but do it. I have for the past two days really started looking and observing. I want to report what I am seeing in America. We cannot depend on the media so here we are. Friday, my little girl and I had to go run errands [...] My little girl said as we pulled into the drive-thru..Mama, why is that man in the street crying?
[...] I pulled the car out and pulled up to a man with a sign around his neck and now joined by a police officer. I rolled down the window and said, “My little girl noticed this gentleman and I wanted to know if we can help”. The man quickly said, “No..No..I am OK…I said, “it’s hot out here do you want some cola or water or food?” He dropped his head. My youngster was quite but again very observant . The policeman had a ticket book out then he put it away. My little one spoke up and said, “Why is the police giving him a ticket? What did he do? I looked at the policeman and said, “You want to explain that to my little girl”? He looked somewhat embarrased.
[...] I was told Angel Food Ministries had gone belly up and everyone in town almost was depending on the food pantry. That includes my family at the end of the month.
Yesterday I went to pay for reduced [school] meals for my daughters and saw a little girl with ragged clothes, shorts, and a little coat (it was chilly in mid Florida). She smiled so big. I noticed all of the childen had a fruit cup and bun with milk and juice for breakfast. I asked the cashier if the food had been cut back at the schools and she nodded with a big sigh, “yes, it has”. You seemed to be the only one out of the school sytem that noticed….That statement right there made me decide to start reporting what I see everyday because everyday it is getting worse.
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Hitler Letter About Jewish Annihilation At The Los Angeles Museum Of Tolerance
Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semitic 1919 Gemlich letter, described as the most significant document ever acquired by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, is now on display at the Los Angeles center’s Museum of Tolerance.
Hitler’s letter was typewritten decades before the Holocaust when he was a German soldier. It is believed to be Hitler’s first written comments calling for the annihilation of Jews.
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Canada weaning itself off exports to U.S. | Economy | News | Financial Post
Canadian companies are now 30% less dependent on exports south of the border than they were a decade ago, and if Canada’s economy wants to avoid a U.S. recession the best bet is to keep that trend going, according to a new report from CIBC World Markets.
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New Scientist TV: One-Minute Physics: How a particle can also be a wave
…in this video, animator Henry Reich ventures into the bizarre world of quantum mechanics, where electrons and protons can flip-flop between wave and particle properties.
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Stateless income: David Cay Johnston | Reuters
From the way Washington politicians in both parties tell it, you may well think that multinational companies favor low-tax jurisdictions when investing overseas. They don’t.
The multinationals prefer investing in high-tax jurisdictions because it so happens that is where they can earn the highest returns.
Multinational companies then reduce or eliminate those seemingly high taxes by using simple, widely used devices to take profits in low-tax and no-tax jurisdictions.
Such practices create “stateless income,” in the words of Edward Kleinbard, whose new scholarship on corporate taxation deserves our attention.
As defined by Kleinbard, stateless income means profits earned in a country other than where the firm is headquartered and subject to tax only in a third country which imposes little or no tax.
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Legal History Blog: Five Chiefs: Justice Stevens’ Memoir is Released
Justice John Paul Stevens’ memoir, Five Chiefs: A Supreme Court Memoir (Brown, Little, 2011), has been released. The book will be of interest to legal historians, including because Justice Stevens reportedly expresses strong opinions about history as a source of constitutional interpretation.
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Koch Brothers Rip-Off Taxpayers – Former Employee Comes Clean – YouTube
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George Soros Says He Sympathizes With Occupy Wall Street Protesters
10/ 3/11
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Most Americans Don’t Believe Nation Is Economically Divided – Politics – GOOD
Besides the rich getting richer, the poor are also getting much poorer. Fifteen percent of Americans now collect food stamps, and white Americans now have 20 times the wealth that black Americans do.
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‘We Are The 99 Percent’ Is the Best Populist Message We’ve Had in Years – Action – GOOD
I doled out some serious criticism last week to the still-evolving movement called Occupy Wall Street—namely, that it didn’t leverage the public’s power, that it took on too many issues, and that it was co-opting an outdated protest aesthetic that alienates the rest of the country. But there is a slogan and Tumblr blog attached to this movement that could fix some of these problems: We Are The 99 Percent.
This simple concept—that the vast majority of us are getting screwed because of policies that protect the rich minority—is the best populist message I’ve heard in years.
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Andrew Ross Sorkin’s assignment editor – Salon.com – Glenn Greenwald – 4 Oct 2011
The Occupy Wall Street protest has been growing in numbers, respectability, and media attention for several weeks now. Despite that, The New York Times‘ financial columnist who specializes in Wall Street coverage, Andrew Ross Sorkin, has neither visited the protests nor written about them — until today. In a column invoking the now-familiar journalistic tone of a zoologist examining a bizarre new species of animal discovered in the wild, Sorkin explains what prompted him to finally pay attention…
How interesting that when a CEO “of a major bank” wants to know how threatening these protests are, he doesn’t seek out corporate advisers or dispatch the bank’s investigators, but instead gets the NYT‘s notoriously banker-friendly Wall Street reporter on the phone and assigns him to report back. How equally interesting that if this NYT financial columnist can’t address the concerns and questions of a CEO “of a major bank,” he hops to it to find out what was demanded of him. …
Though the Tea Party was effectively annexed into the GOP, it did succeed in creating itself as a force within the Party which must be heeded and which cannot be entirely controlled by party leaders. Aaron Bady suggested today that perhaps that’s the best-case scenario to be realistically hoped for here: that these protests metastasize into a genuine protest movement that at least forces the Democratic Party to take heed, pay attention, and periodically make substantial concessions. That’s a reasonable view, but the unique value and promise of these protests is that they are independent of prevailing political institutions, and it’s difficult to see how these protests can simultaneously be fully integrated into those institutions while preserving that value.
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Daily Kos: Three more unions add support to Occupy Wall Street
OCT 04, 2011
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iCivics | Free Lesson Plans and Games for Learning Civics
iCivics (formerly Our Courts) is a web-based education project designed to teach students civics and inspire them to be active participants in our democracy. iCivics is the vision of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who is concerned that students are not getting the information and tools they need for civic participation, and that civics teachers need better materials and support.
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Daily Kos: Witnessing #occupywallstreet: the power …. of the people … ‘s mic
SEP 29, 2011
How many meetings have you been at where someone states a session has begun and people continue muttering amongst themselves? In a large crowd, that’s usually a large portion of the attendees. But here, the people are immediately engaged. They are the meeting. They are the sound. In service to each other, they amplify the voice of whomever is speaking. To do that, they must pay attention.
…It is explained every once in a while, during the assemblies, that the People’s Mic must repeat every word being said, even if it makes us uncomfortable or we don’t agree. We are an amplifier. … We are simply allowing each member of society to have a voice.
In theory, this is a beautiful ideal. In practice, it can be a challenge. I was very uncomfortable, for instance, when someone…started speaking about how the World Trade Center buildings were actually demolished by pre-installed explosives. … Did I really want to amplify that voice? …
What I came to understand was that by amplifying, in unison, it was not me personally amplifying as a statement of endorsement. It was me embodying a principle of allowing all voices to be heard. …
If you watch this movement from the outside, if you don’t take the time to plug in – really plug in, as in participate in the systems they are generating – and feel what it is they are doing, if you critique the movement without joining it, if you look at it from on high with your own sense of “wisdom” and what “needs to be done”, if you touch the edges of it, even thinking that you agree with why they are “protesting” and “what they they want”, but you start operating outside of it because you “know better” or “it takes too long” or “they don’t have a clear message” or whatever it is that you tell yourself, you are actually perpetuating that which they are recoiling from.
As long as there is a “they” and an “I”, you don’t get it and you can’t represent it. At the core of this movement is the profound notion that humanity is a “we”. That you and I must break down our old ways of “getting things done” and figure out how we all work together.
[I think the writer of this interesting journal entry just got a spiritual high-five from Martin Buber.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_and_Thou
It's a beautiful book; scroll down to External Links for the entire text.-L] -
The innocuously-named Regulatory Accountability Act (RAA) is a truly radical proposal that would upend the way agencies make the rules to implement the laws that Congress approves. It would supersede existing laws…and require federal regulators to jump through impossible hoops to carry out their agencies’ missions. …
The legislation would require that costs to businesses be prioritized over the public good. …
The legislation would move power away from federal science-based agencies and concentrate it in the courts.
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Daily Kos: Five million could be disenfranchised under new voting laws
New York University School of Law’s Brennan Center for Justice released a new study Monday detailing how widespread voter suppression has become as Republicans took over statehouses across the nation. …
These are just the laws passed so far. As many as 34 states have introduced legislation in the last 2 years to require government-issued photo identification to vote. At least 12 have introduced legislation requiring proof of citizenship, such as a birth certificate, to register to vote. As many as 13 states have introduced legislation ending same-day registration and limiting voter registration drives like those traditionally done by the League of Women Voters. At least nine states have introduced legislation to shorten early voting periods and four have tried to limit absentee voting.
The potential outcome of taking five million votes out of the mix in 2012? It could be the presidency, according to the Brennan Center.
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Democracy Class | Rock the Vote
Democracy Class is designed to engage high school students in civic education as a means to create early and long-term involvement in the political process. Through a 45-minute lesson plan, we focus on the history of voting, the power of voting to affect change on the issues most important to students, and active citizenship.
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Daily Kos: Whatever happened to civics? | 2 Oct 2011
I’m a teacher. I don’t formally teach social studies, or political science, or history, or government. But in order for my students to understand what I do teach—cultural anthropology and women’s studies—they have to have a basic understanding of how political systems work—especially ours—and need to know the basics about legislation, politics, civil rights and social change and how they are affected by political and social systems.
They don’t.
I teach college students at a working class state university. My entry level classes have students who are fresh out of mostly public high schools. …
With 2012 looming, only one of my students could name a Republican candidate for the primaries and wasn’t really sure what she was all about, nor could they articulate the difference between Democratic and Republican party platforms. Actually, they didn’t know what a platform was.
…each one of us, whatever label we wear—liberal, Democrat, progressive, activist—is responsible. Each one of us who does know how the system works, who votes, who has strong feelings about democracy and justice, has a responsibility to teach someone who as of yet doesn’t know this.
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Daily Kos: Crowdsource action: List all Facebook pages for Occupy solidarity events
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Prepare Your Digital Camera to Document a Protest – Wired How-To Wiki
Not only will the revolution be televised, but, as we’ve seen from the Middle East to Wall street, protests are being meticulously documented by ordinary citizens and journalists alike across the globe. … This article presents several tips and tricks for preparing your camera, keeping your camera safe, and maximizing the usefulness of your photos so they can be used as evidence in an article or a legal proceeding.
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House Progressives Embrace #occupywallstreet | slate.com – David Weigel
Oct. 4, 2011
In less than 24 hours, a massive group of unions will endorse the Occupiers with a march in New York…
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Daily Kos: They killed me in Vietnam, and I didn’t even know – Agent Orange 50 years of death
“Operation Ranch Hand” began on this date 50 years ago. Vietnam Agent Orange Relief and Responsibility Campaign has the story.
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Daily Kos: NOM attacks newborn baby
OCT 03, 2011
I don’t get it, sometimes. Is the goal to terrorize a child who will probably end up growing up heterosexual (but likely bullied for having gay parents) anyway?
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Daily Kos: And Now Some Awesome News From Maine.
SEP 28, 2011
They’ve collected what I hear tell is excess of 42,000 signatures, although their press release only says more than 40,000.
This in about a month and a half, with three more months still to go. At a bare minimum they need 57,000 valid signatures to get a marriage equality initiative onto the November, 2012 ballot. They’re 74% of the way to that first milestone, and almost 53% of the way to certain victory. Signature gathering began around August 18th, so they’ve been collecting at a rate of almost exactly 1000 signatures per day. …
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People For the American Way: Investigate and Enforce Ethics on the Supreme Court!
Efforts to hold Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas accountable for ethics violations just jumped to the next level.
A group of 20 House Democrats led by Rep. Louise Slaughter are now pushing for a Justice Department investigation into various possible ethics infractions by Justice Thomas.
Please sign our petition supporting the call for an investigation now.
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Support Rep. Edwards’ Amendment to overturn Citizens United | Free Speech For People
Watch Congresswoman Donna Edwards discuss her new Amendment to overturn the Citizens United ruling and restore the people’s power to limit corporate spending on elections.
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Matt Stoller: #OccupyWallStreet Is a Church of Dissent, Not a Protest « naked capitalism
29 Sep 2011
There are a lot of police, but unlike the portrayal in the press the relationship between the protesters and the police is fairly good. The arrests and macing you saw happened because protesters decided to march to Union Square without a permit, and many joined the march on the way. Police began arresting people to keep control of the streets, and that’s when the macings happened. I’m not downplaying what happened, but context is important for understanding why the camping in the park isn’t really problematic while the marching has seen conflict. Police and firefighters routinely come through the park to make sure there are no open flames and no tents, often to applause. …
The protesters are what you’d expect, a kind of hippie dippie group of students, anti-globalization activists, and antiwar movement actors. There are backrub circles, innumerable pizzas (“the food of revolutions”), but these people do not think of themselves as fringe in any sense. They believe themselves to represent all Americans who are frustrated by politics and finance. Whether or not this is true, what is happening is that there is a belief that their actions matter, that they themselves are moral beings who have dignity and power simply by the very act of self-expression. …
The anti-leadership non-hierarchical consensus method is designed to avoid the way that leaders can be smeared and/or co-opted. It does not really scale, and this is a serious challenge going forward. But ultimately, the energy of just having a bunch of people in one place for a long period of time is very different, and much more interesting, than just a march. The protesters are creating a public space for the discussion of economic justice, just by showing up. …
I don’t think anyone knows where and how this ends, or if it does.
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occupy wall street | whatisthewhat
[A virtual tour, with photos, of the different areas of Liberty Plaza.]
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occupy wall st. print corps | whatisthewhat
…some of the materials produced by the print corps of Occupy Wall St….
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Wall Street, mass arrests, and media | Politics Outdoors
These days, most large demonstrations are negotiated, even choreographed, in advance by the organizers and the police. They permit locations, arrange for sound, and even identify zones where protesters can be arrested. The leaderless Occupy Wall Street group hasn’t been negotiating with the police, and the open source ethos has allowed many competing messages to flourish within the ranks of the protesters.
This means less predictability–and more risk–for everyone involved.
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Society for the Preservation of Gaps in the Literature | Econometrics at Illinois
Rather than filling gaps in the literature one of the great accomplishments of serious research is to create gaps in the literature by debunking the nonsense of the past.
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…the standard economic accounts of the emergence of money from barter appears to be wildly wrong. …
Anthropologists…directly [observed] how economies where money was not used…actually worked. What they discovered was an at first bewildering variety of arrangements, ranging from competitive gift-giving to communal stockpiling to places where economic relations centered on neighbors trying to guess each other’s dreams. What they never found was any place, anywhere, where economic relations between members of community took the form economists predicted: “I’ll give you twenty chickens for that cow.” Hence in the definitive anthropological work on the subject, Cambridge anthropology professor Caroline Humphrey concludes, “No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money; all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing” …
[Barter] is widely attested in many times and places. But it typically occurs between strangers, people who have no moral relations with one another. …
The actual evidence is that…these more widespread pricing systems in fact emerged as a side-effect of non-state bureaucracies. …Sumerian Temples (and even many of the early Palace complexes that imitated them) were not states, did not extract taxes or maintain a monopoly of force, but did contain thousands of people engaged in agriculture, industry, fishing, and herding, people who had to be fed and provisioned, their inputs and outputs measured.
[Long-ish and fascinating. -L]
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A Closed World, a Role-Playing Game About Growing Up Queer
It’s a simple game (playable in a browser), but there’s some great art on display in certain sections, and a nice little soundtrack as well. Built by the Singapore-MIT Gambit Lab, A Closed World’s creators explain the game in this brief:…
You can play A Closed World at the link below.
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Obama’s “Jewish Problem” — The Monkey Cage
by John Sides on September 15, 2011
It’s worth remembering that this exact same narrative emerged in 2008. …See my old post documenting that the percentage of Jews voting Democratic has increased over time. …
So why won’t this meme die? In general, intra-party strife is newsworthy, as I’ve noted before. It’s not interesting when evangelical Christians dislike Obama. But when the base, including most Jewish voters, is “angry” or “demobilized”—no matter how weak the evidence—a thousand stories are spawned. …
When analyzing polls, you must always ask: “compared to what?” … A 5-point decline among Jews says little about Jews if there’s been a 5-point decline among basically every other demographic group.
The fixation on a trend among one group is doubly misleading because it gets your mind thinking about explanations idiosyncratic to that group. So with Jews, it’s because of Obama’s alleged dovishness on Israel. With Latinos, it’s because he hasn’t pushed comprehensive immigration reform. With working-class whites, it’s because he’s too elitist. And so on.
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“Ten Things Political Scientists Know that You Don’t” by Hans Noel
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I particularly love the “Occupied Wall Street Journal.” This is what happens when the nation’s English and journalism majors can’t get jobs!
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
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