Everyone’s a Socialist After a Natural Disaster

Ted Cruz’s hypocrisy won’t stop government from helping in the wake of Hurricane Harvey, but Texas will be needing help for a long time.

By Joan WalshTwitter

Ted Cruz defends his 2013 decision to vote against Sandy aid amid Harvey’s destruction on August 28, 2017. (MSNBC)

You know the old saying: There are no atheists in foxholes. I’ve got a new one: We’re all socialists after a natural disaster. Even Texas Senator Ted Cruz. The hypocrite who tried to block Hurricane Sandy aid to the East Coast in 2012 is now demanding the federal government expedite emergency funds for the survivors of Hurricane Harvey along the Gulf Coast of Texas, and in Houston, the nation’s fourth-largest city. East Coast Democrats are happy to help, though New Jersey Governor Chris Christie tried to renew his relevance by beefing with his party mate over his Sandy selfishness. The Washington Post gave Cruz three Pinocchios for claiming on Monday that he blocked Sandy aid only because it was larded with pork. It was not. But even in a disaster, Cruz can’t help lying.

Driving to Austin in March, I saw the way Houston emerges from the bayou—and then goes on and on, for what feels like forever. So much building, and so much water, even in dry times. This petrochemical-industry capital is built on land that is almost guaranteed to flood with regularity. With its lack of zoning laws and bias toward development, Houston is a monument to unfettered capitalism. Unfettered capitalism backed by government-backed flood insurance, that is—privatizing profit, socializing risk. But it’s also a multiracial metropolis led by a black mayor and a Latino police chief, with an insurgent progressive movement that elected a progressive Harris County district attorney just last year. We can see the best and the worst of the country in microcosm, and so far, the best is winning. With or without the “leadership” of President Trump.

As Melania Trump’s snakeskin stiletto heels clicked across the White House driveway Tuesday morning, it was obvious this Texas visit was about image over substance. (By the time she touched down in Corpus Christi, it should be noted, she’d changed into sneakers.) Accompanying the president and first lady, Ben Carson wore a HUD Emergency Team jacket (I wondered: Is there any such thing?), while Small Business Administration director Linda McMahon was decked out in an SBA Assistance jacket. Melania Trump wore a black hat emblazoned FLOTUS, so nobody would mistake her for anybody else, while Trump wore his trademark USA hat—you can buy it for $40 at his campaign website, by the way—to show he meant business. He didn’t bother to talk to any victims, or comfort any families. It’s hard to imagine a presidential visit accomplishing less.

“What a crowd, what a turnout,” said the narcissist who just fired his long-time advance man because the turnout at his Phoenix rally last week wasn’t big enough. “We’ll congratulate each other when it’s all finished,” he promised Texas Governor Greg Abbott at their FEMA briefing. That seemed like a rare case of Trump’s telling the straightforward truth—when does he not congratulate himself?

Away from the photo op, the real heroes were saving lives. One man on MSNBC talked about organizing rescue operations through social media, and it felt good to hear something positive about social media, not merely about white supremacists using it to organize their rallies. On Tuesday morning I couldn’t stop watching as a flotilla of boats—from volunteers with kayaks and jet-skis to pool rafts to big fishing boats, along with official government emergency vessels—made its way back and forth in a newly flooded northwest Houston neighborhood, ferrying residents to safety. We’ve obviously learned a lot from earlier disasters. During Hurricane Katrina, people refused to leave their homes if they couldn’t take their pets; many perished. During this rescue operation we’ve seen plenty of dogs and cats, along with their families, in the rescue flotillas.

Reporters have been among the heroes, risking their lives not merely to cover the story but also to rescue the stranded themselves. Maybe some Texas Trump supporters will remember this when Trump demonizes “dishonest” reporters and “fake news.” But The New York Times has also shown us the weaknesses of establishment media that, for all their great reporting, continue to wait for Trump to act like a president—and even to inaccurately suggest he’s finally doing so. On Monday, a widely criticized Times story that depicted the president as “anything but disengaged” had to be repeatedly rewritten, and its headline changed, to dampen the tone of cheerleading. On Tuesday, the normally savvy Glenn Thrush wrote about Trump’s “reclaiming” his power to unify—as if he ever used his power to unify anyone but those in his base. Esquire’s Charles Pierce saidits lead “may be the single wrongest sentence in the history of wrongness, and of sentences.”

I think a lot of us take solace from these images of neighbor helping neighbor, so different from the shots of white supremacists with tiki torches and violent neo-Nazis that have dominated our televisions this summer. We are “stronger together,” as one now-retired politician tried to tell us, roughly a year ago. We also need government at a time like this—and Texas is going to need a lot of it. Louisiana’s Democratic Governor John Bel Edwards has sent rescue workers and equipment to his neighbor next door—but he might need it back right away, as New Orleans copes with new flooding. It’s worth remembering: Trump has no Homeland Security chief, no head of the National Hurricane Center, and his budget proposed an 11 percent cut to FEMA. Is there any chance this disaster will force a reckoning with the scale of massive storms that are being worsened by climate change—and the fact that we’ve had three “hundred-year storms” (actually, Harvey is said to be a 500-year flood) in 12 years. It may be that Texas being a Republican state will help leverage federal resources. Governor Greg Abbott is promising the recovery will be “Texas style—better than ever.” But will “Texas style” ever reflect respect for the land and the water, for safety over developers’ profits, for the truth about climate change over petrochemical-industry propaganda? We can dream

As we saw with Katrina, Harvey is hitting poor Houstonians of color the hardest. They tend to live closer to the petrochemical plants and thus the water in which they are trapped is more dangerous. The man often called “the father of the environmental-justice movement,” Texas Southern University sociologist Robert Bullard, told The Huffington Post these are “sacrifice zones.”

“They not only have to deal with flooding in their homes, but pollution in water that’s contaminated when water floods refineries and plants,” Bullard said. “You’re talking about a perfect storm of pollution, environmental racism, and health risks that are probably not going to be measured and assessed until decades later. The fact is that laissez-faire, unrestrained capitalism and lack of zoning means people with money can put protections up, and people without can’t.”

I’ve found myself wondering if this will change Houston demographically the way Katrina changed New Orleans. Houston was one of the few progressive success stories from last November, with a strong movement on the ground and genuine organizing that’s changed the power structure. Will some of Houston’s low-income residents wind up scattered to distant Texas cities and unable to return? We won’t know that for a while. All we know right now is that a great American city is asking for, and getting, the support of state, local, and federal government, along with the kindness of neighbors to accomplish an unprecedented rescue operation. The entire Gulf storm has claimed only nineteen lives so far. These multiracial rescue teams, whether they’re government responders or volunteers, show us living up to our highest values. Air Force One took off after a two-hour visit, and Texas went back to work.

Joan WalshTWITTERJoan Walsh, The Nation’s national-affairs correspondent, is the author of What’s the Matter With White People? Finding Our Way in the Next America.

https://www.thenation.com/article/everyones-a-socialist-after-a-natural-disaster/

The Houston flood disaster: A social crime of the American oligarchy

29 August 2017

The world is looking on in shock as Houston, Texas, the fourth-largest city in the United States, is engulfed by flood waters. At least nine people are dead, a figure that will no doubt rise in the coming days. Thousands remain stranded, awaiting rescue. Tens of thousands have been forced to take shelter in emergency accommodations. Some of the worst rain is yet to come.

The catastrophic flooding engulfing Houston and southeast Texas is spreading to cities as far away as Dallas and Austin and threatening to once again overwhelm New Orleans, Louisiana. Hurried evacuations are being organized in cities throughout the region, as well as previously unaffected neighborhoods in Houston, where residents are being forced to abandon their homes as officials release water from overwhelmed and endangered reservoirs.

Twelve years after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, an even larger and more populous metropolitan area is being turned into a scene of indescribable suffering. The countless examples of human solidarity among the victims, overwhelmingly working class and of all races, contrast starkly with the indifference and incompetence of the government and political establishment.

Like Katrina, Hurricane Harvey has lifted the lid on the ugly reality of American society, exposing colossal levels of social inequality, pervasive poverty and ruling class criminality. Behind the mindless media commentary, generally favorable to the White House and the right-wing Republican governor of Texas, and the pro-forma statements of politicians, one senses nervousness and fear that this latest demonstration of the failure of American capitalism will trigger an eruption of social indignation.

But the authorities cannot conceal their complacency and indifference. In a disgusting performance, President Donald Trump gave a press conference Monday in which he combined lavish praise for the official response to the flood disaster, calling it “incredible to watch” and a display of “cooperation and love,” with bathos about “one American family” that “hurts together and endures together.”

Reciting his scripted remarks as though he were reading the phonebook, Trump offered no proposals to relieve the suffering of the victims or provide them with money to rebuild their lives. He evaded a question about his proposal to slash hundreds of millions of dollars from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), including steep cuts to the Federal Flood Insurance Program.

FEMA administrator William “Brock” Long on Monday gave himself and the government a blanket amnesty for their dereliction, declaring, “You could not forecast this up. You could not dream this forecast up.”

The Wall Street Journal sounded the same theme in an editorial posted Monday. “Immunity from nature’s fury,” the newspaper wrote, “is an illusion that humans cultivate until we are forced to confront that fury again. We forget the damage that storms and earthquakes can do.”

This renunciation of any responsibility for the unfolding disaster in Houston was combined with praise for the massive accumulation of wealth among the uppermost layers of society, declaring that “Complex societies can better cope with the damage if they have a reservoir of accumulated wealth” among “private sources.” Thus, according to the leading mouthpiece of Wall Street, the answer to the unfolding tragedy in Texas is the further enrichment of the financial oligarchy!

Such claims that catastrophic events like the Texas flood are inevitable “natural disasters,” and nothing can be done either to forestall, contain or manage them, are self-serving lies.

Houston is the most frequently flooded urban area in the country. Officials at the federal, state and local level were repeatedly warned by scientists and weather experts that the license given to real estate developers and speculators to pave over wetlands, as well as the government’s refusal to build proper flood defenses, was setting the city up for an unprecedented flood disaster. These warnings were ignored.

This is the 21st century, not the Dark Ages, and the United States is the richest country in the world. Four hundred years ago, the Dutch figured out how to build cities situated below sea level. The US is, moreover, home to some of the most advanced research and engineering institutes in the world. Yet supposedly no one could have anticipated or planned for the flooding of a major city on the Gulf of Mexico?

What has been done in the 12 years since Katrina to prevent more hurricane disasters? Nothing! Or, more accurately, less than nothing, because Katrina was seized on as an opportunity to treat New Orleans as virgin territory for the privatization of public assets and establishment of a free market paradise for big business, to be replicated across the country. The most overt example of this plundering operation was the dismantling of the public school system in favor of private, for-profit charter schools.

Catastrophes such as the Texas flood are social crimes, committed by a financial aristocracy that has spent the past half-century plundering the country and neglecting its social infrastructure, while accumulating unimaginable sums of personal wealth. According to the corporate-controlled media and the entire political establishment—Democrats no less than Republicans—there is no money to build up flood defenses or rebuild crumbling bridges, roads and water systems, modernize and expand public transport or provide decent schools and housing for the population.

But there are trillions of dollars stashed away in the bank accounts and stock portfolios of the rich and the super-rich. Hundreds of billions are squandered every year on the instruments of war.

The country staggers from one preventable disaster to another: Katrina in 2005, the BP oil spill in 2010, Superstorm Sandy in 2012, and now Harvey. In between are countless floods, tornadoes, fires and other events that wreak havoc on working class and poor families, who are left to fend for themselves by a ruling elite drowning in its own excess.

Just as in the feudal era, when the development of society required the expropriation of the landed aristocracy, so today society must seize control of its own resources from the modern aristocracy of finance and corporate wealth. The barbarians of today, who hoard society’s wealth and say nothing can be done to address poverty, disease, war or repression, must go the way of all ruling classes that stand in the way of social progress.

It is not that society cannot afford the type of social investment needed to prevent or minimize the impact of events such as Hurricane Harvey. What society cannot afford is the rich.

It is to the working class—united across all racial, national and ethnic lines, both in the US and internationally—that the task falls of removing this monstrous obstacle to progress from the historical scene. The capitalist parasites must be expropriated, their wealth used to meet social needs, and their stranglehold over the means of production shattered to allow the rational, planned and humane development of economic and social life on the basis of socialist ownership and democratic control of industry, finance and the planet’s natural resources.

Barry Grey

WSWS

Kochs Bankroll Movement to Rewrite the Constitution

NEWS & POLITICs

Austerity advocates claim that they need only to convince five of seven targeted states to get on board.

By Alex Kotch / Exposed by CMD

March 24, 2017

Photo Credit: GongTo / Shutterstock

A constitutional convention, something thought impossible not long ago, is looking increasingly likely. Under Article V of the U.S. Constitution, if 34 state legislatures “issue a call” for a constitutional convention, Congress must convene one. By some counts, the right-wing only needs six more states. Once called, delegates can propose and vote on changes and new amendments to the U.S. Constitution, which, if approved, are currently required to be ratified by 38 states.

There are two major legislative pushes for a convention at the state level. One would attempt to engineer a convention for a balanced budget amendment only, and the other tries to secure an open convention for the purpose of limiting the power and jurisdiction of the federal government. But once a convention is underway, all bets are off. The convention can write its own rules, resulting in a wide-open or “runaway” convention that can make major changes to the constitution and even change the number of states required to ratify those changes.

If America gets saddled with a runaway convention, the Koch coterie of funders will be to blame. Most of the groups pushing the convention idea are being underwritten by one or more institutions tied to billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch.

Attempts to Limit Topic of the Convention Likely to Fail

On Feb. 24, Wyoming became the 29th state to pass a resolution requesting a convention specifically to add a single balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. Many of these legislative resolutions also attempt to set the rules for the convention and limit who can attend it to a select list of largely GOP state leaders.

Austerity advocates claim that they need only to convince five of seven targeted states—Arizona, Kentucky, Minnesota, Montana, South Carolina, Virginia, and Wisconsin—to get on board, and they will have enough states to convene a convention. As the Center for Media and Democracy has reported, three linked measures were just introduced in Wisconsin and were placed on a fast track to approval.

Another faction representing a broader “Convention of States” initiative is advocating an open constitutional convention to limit “the power and jurisdiction of the federal government.” Because this open convention format would be called on a particular subject rather than a particular amendment, representatives would likely vote on any number of measures.

Legislatures in nine states—Arizona, Georgia, Alaska, Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, Indiana, Oklahoma, and Louisiana—have signed on to the Convention of States resolution,. Texas appears likely to join in, as the state Senate approved a Convention of States bill in February. Republican Gov. Greg Abbott is fiercely campaigning for a convention and has deemed it an “emergency issue.” In 2016, he published a 70-page plan that includes nine proposed amendments aimed at severely limiting federal authority, even allowing a two-thirds majority of the states to override a Supreme Court ruling or a federal law.

Groups like the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Common Cause, and the Center for Media and Democracy have raised the alarm about these efforts. No convention has been called since 1787 in Philadelphia where George Washington presided.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities explains why any convention call, no matter how narrowly written, is likely to result in a “runaway” convention. A convention is empowered to write its own rules, including how delegates are chosen, how many delegates attend and whether a supermajority is required to approve amendments.

Nothing in the Constitution prevents a convention, once convened, from setting its own agenda, influenced by powerful special interests like the Koch groups. A convention could even choose an entirely new ratification process. “The 1787 convention ignored the ratification process under which it was established and created a new one, reducing the number of states needed to approve the new Constitution and removing Congress from the approval process,” writes CBPP.

Legal uncertainly surrounds the entire effort, which is sure to be litigated if successful. For instance, are states bound by resolutions passed many years ago? Will states withdraw their approval? Some states, like Delaware and New Mexico, have already moved to do so.

The Koch Connection to the Push for a Constitutional Convention

Libertarian billionaires Charles and Dav id Koch have long opposed federal power and federal spending. Koch Industries is one of the nation’s biggest polluters and has been sanctioned and fined over and over again by both federal and state authorities. In response, the Kochs have launched a host of “limited government” advocacy organizations and have created a massive $400 million campaign finance network, fueled by their fortunes and those of their wealthy, right-wing allies, that rivals the two major political parties.

The Kochs’ Americans for Prosperity says it favors a balanced budget convention. Such an austerity amendment would drastically cut the size of the federal government, threatening critical programs like Social Security and Medicare and eviscerating the government’s ability to respond to economic downturns, major disasters and the climate crisis.

AFP has opposed an open convention, calling it “problematic.” But whatever qualms the Kochs might have, they continue to be a bedrock funder of the entire convention “movement.”

Running the “Convention of States initiative” is an Austin, Texas-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit called Citizens for Self-Governance (CSG). CSG reported revenue of $5.7 million in 2015, more than double its haul from two years earlier, when it launched its Convention of States Project, according to Dallas News. It now boasts 115,000 “volunteers,” although that figure may represent the number of addresses on its email list.

The group is not required to disclose its donors, but research into other organizations’ tax records by the Center for Media and Democracy, Conservative Transparency and this author show a web of Koch-linked groups having provided nearly $5.4 million to CSG from the group’s founding in 2011 through 2015:

• Donors Trust, a preferred secret money conduit for individuals and foundations in the Koch network of funders, has given CSG at least $790,000 since 2011.
• The Greater Houston Community Foundation, which is funded by Donors Capital Fund (linked to Donors Trust) and the Kochs’ Knowledge and Progress Fund, has donated over $2 million since 2011.
• The Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program, which has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from Donors Capital Fund, gave $2.5 million from 2012-2013.

Citizens for Self-Governance also has two Koch-connected board members. Eric O’Keefe is a director of the Wisconsin Club for Growth, a group which has taken in considerable funding from Koch-linked groups like the Center to Protect Patient Rights, and was at the center of the long-running “John Doe” criminal investigation of Scott Walker’s campaign coordination with dark money groups.

O’Keefe was thenational field coordinator for the Libertarian Party when David Koch ran for Vice President in 1979 on the Libertarian Party ticket. The party’s platform called for the end of campaign finance law, the minimum wage, “oppressive Social Security,” Medicaid, Medicare and federal deficit spending.

The Koch agenda has not changed much since.

Another board member is Tim Dunn, an oilman from Midland, Texas who is vice chairman of the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), a right-wing think tank that’s raked in over $1 million from Koch family foundations, $160,000 from Koch Industries in 2012 alone and at least $1.8 million from Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund.

Dunn runs another political group, Empower Texans, which supports Republican candidates and has taken in funds from Donors Trust and “Americans for Job Security,” a Koch-tied dark money group that was slapped with a severe fine by the FEC for its involvement in a dark money shell game intended to disguise the origin of its funds.

Both TPPF and Empower Texans back the constitutional convention idea.

What’s more, a 501(c)4 nonprofit connected to CSG, the Alliance for Self-Governance (which does business as Convention of States Action), received $270,000 in 2012 from Americans for Limited Government, which has received funding not only by Donors Capital Fund but by two Koch-funded political groups, the Center to Protect Patient Rights and Americans for Job Security.

Those two groups exchanged millions of dollars in 2010 and 2012, illegally hiding the source of funding for political expenditures, lying to the Internal Revenue Service and making unlawful contributions to pass-through groups, prompting investigations and historic fines by the both the State of California and the Federal Elections Commission. Eric O’Keefe’s Wisconsin Club for Growth also funneled $450,000 to Alliance for Self-Governance in 2012, at a time when WCFG was battling the Walker recall.

Any time any organization is named “self-governance” or “limited government” you can be sure that Wisconsin’s Eric O’Keefe is either a founder or on the board, and indeed O’Keefe is tied to all three organizations: CSG, the Alliance for Self-Governance and Americans for Limited Government.

If the Kochs and their friends don’t want an open constitutional convention, they’ve sure done a lot to aid the effort.

American Legislative Exchange Council

CSG also has ties to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a corporate bill mill that unites conservative politicians with big-business lobbyists who develop cookie-cutter “model” legislation behind closed doors at ALEC meetings.

ALEC has long been funded by Koch Industries and a representative of Koch Industries sits on its executive board, while representatives from the Kochs’ Americans for Prosperity groups fund and sit on various committees. ALEC has also received funding from Koch family foundations. CMD estimates this funding to be over $1 million, though the actual total could be much higher. In addition, ALEC gets funding from Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund.

According to Common Cause, “no group has been more influential” in promoting an Article V convention than ALEC. In 2011, ALEC commissioned a handbook for state legislators on how to push for a constitutional convention. The group has produced at least three model balanced budget amendment bills and has endorsed several model bills calling for a convention to vote on constitutional amendments, such as requiring Congress to get approval by two-thirds of the states before imposing new taxes or increasing the federal debt or federal spending.

CSG has sponsored ALEC conferences and led sessions focused on a constitutional convention. In 2015, ALEC’s board of directors officially endorsed CSG’s open convention plan as a “model” bill. The group had previously endorsed a balanced-budget-only plan. ALEC’s Jeffersonian Project, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit formed in 2013, has been lobbying state legislators to propose such a convention, CMD reports.

More Koch Money Pushing Austerity Amendment

Another group, the Florida-based Balanced Budget Amendment Task Force, is backing a balanced budget convention bill that 29 states have approved. In its effort, the group has lobbied for the bill and attended ALEC conferences and other similar events. On its website, the task force lists ALEC and the Heartland Institute as partner organizations.

“ALEC has been instrumental in providing us a forum within which to present our campaign, recruit sponsors, and approve model legislation that legislators can be confident in,” claims the site.

Another big backer of the balanced budget amendment approach is the Chicago-based Heartland Institute, which is also tied to the Koch brothers. A member of ALEC, it has received $5.6 million from the Donors Capital Fund since 2011 and tens of thousands of dollars each from the Charles Koch Foundation and the Claude R. Lambe Foundation. Heartland publishes posts praising or defending the Kochs and even put out an annual environmental report from Koch Industries.

“The Heartland Institute has put the full weight of its influence behind the BBA Task Force as well as other campaigns in order to encourage the states to use their power to amend the U.S. Constitution,” reads the site.

Compact for America, formed by a former counsel with the conservative Goldwater Institute and staffed by more Goldwater alumni, has its own balanced budget convention proposal, which only four states have signed on to. The institute, which promotes many of ALEC’s model bills, has taken in big donations from Donors Trust, Donors Capital Fund and the Charles Koch Foundation.

If America faces the madness of a runaway convention, voters of both parties will know whom to blame.

Mary Bottari contributed to this article.

Alex Kotch is an independent investigative journalist based in Brooklyn, NY. Follow him on Twitter at @alexkotch.

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/kochs-bankroll-movement-rewrite-constitution?akid=15358.265072.6ZI-Ew&rd=1&src=newsletter1074479&t=8

Dakota pipeline showdown at Standing Rock: When a powerful corporate chief is resisted by defenders of Native American ceremonial grounds

SUNDAY, OCT 23, 2016 05:00 AM PDT

Kelcy Warren, Energy Transfer Partners’ well-heeled chief, meets his match in North Dakota with Lakota Sioux

JIM HIGHTOWER

(Credit: Afp/getty Images)

In bad movies (and bad history alike), the Native American ceremonial pipe figured prominently as symbol of defeat — typically in a cliched scene of subdued chieftains signing a treaty of surrender and passing around a “peace pipe” in a sorrowful gesture to seal the raw deal.

The reality is that the communal smoking of a ceremonial pipe, often filled with tobacco, is a centuries-old tradition rich in spiritual meaning for many Native people who see it as an eternal channel through which tribes seek metaphysical strength, courage and endurance. The ceremonial pipe both shapes and conveys Native people’s living history, a story that’s perpetually being written.

Indeed, a dramatic new chapter is unfolding this year in a volatile confrontation on a remote stretch of the Northern Plains in rural North Dakota. It’s a “Battle of Two Pipes,” pitting the cultural power symbolized by the Native American pipe against the bruising financial power of a giant pipeline, owned by Energy Transfer Partners.

In 2014, ETP, a Texas oil behemoth, went public with its scheme to build a massive oil pipeline from the fracking wells of the Bakken oil fields in northwestern North Dakota. ETP’s 30-inch-wide Dakota Access pipeline would cut a 1,172-mile-long scar diagonally through the heart of North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa and Illinois.

If ETP’s $3.8 billion line is completed, it would carry 570,000 barrels of oil a day through most of the four states’ watersheds and wildlife habitats; it would transit hundreds of farms and ranches and make 200 river crossings. All the water and land in its path would be endangered, for one unpleasant fact about pipelines is that they regularly leak, sometimes rupture and can blow up (an especially relevant concern with fracked Bakken oil, which is not only some of the dirtiest crude on the planet but also is exceptionally flammable and “more prone to explosions than earlier thought,” according to U.S. officials).

Kelcy Warren is the honcho of Energy Transfer Partners and its parent financial outfit, Energy Transfer Equity, a fossil fuel colossus that also owns Sunoco oil and Southern Union gas. Warren’s company — with such an unkempt environmental record plus national notoriety for bulldozing over opposition from outraged landowners and communities — regularly has state and federal regulatory authorities to clear its pat. This is done the old-fashioned way: Warren, ranked by Forbes as the 86th richest American, pumps big bucks into the campaign coffers of key politicos, drawing from corporate funds as well as his personal $5.45 billion fortune.

Consider Warren’s recent Texas play. For the last two years, ETP has laid siege to one of the Lone Star State’s most spectacular and environmentally unique regions — the mountainous, desert ranch country of Big Bend, which includes historic sites and artifacts of Comanche, Mescalero, Chiso and other indigenous cultures dating back more than 14,000 years. Despite adamant local protests, ETP is presently ripping the land with the 148-mile-long, 42-inch Trans-Pecos Pipeline that will export gas from West Texas to Mexico. “We feel like we’ve been invaded,” said one member of the local citizens group, Defend Big Bend.

They have been — with the Obama administration’s approval and the collusion of their own state officials, who blithely handed the sledgehammer of the state’s power of eminent domain to the private corporation, letting it take people’s land for its own profit.

Why? Follow the money. Since 2013, CEO Warren has become Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s No. 4 donor by personally bestowing $700,000 on the governor’s campaigns. Last November Warren’s coziness with Abbott came full circle when the governor awarded the pipeliner a seat on the prestigious Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission, ironically making Warren an environmental “steward” of state parks in the area he is presently despoiling.

And he plans on destroying more majestic American land, too, for Warren’s contested Dakota Access pipeline would run just outside of the town of Cannon Ball, North Dakota, along the northern edge of the Standing Rock Reservation. Warren was so obtuse that he didn’t realize (or care) that the tribe’s deep connection to the area adjacent to Standing Rock doesn’t stop at the reservation’s arbitrary boundaries: The Dakota Access pipeline project would gouge right through ancestral lands and burial grounds.

Corporate routers likely assumed that the reservation’s 8,500 mostly impoverished Lakota Sioux had no clout, so there was no need to get their permission, especially since the pipeline wouldn’t actually be on tribal land. Bad assumption. Imagine a corporation running a pipeline through Arlington National Cemetery.

Not since the days of General George Custer has an Anglo been as surprised as Kelcy Warren by a powerful force of Indians thwarting his ambition. You can learn more and donate to the tribes’ fight at standingrock.org and sacredstonecamp.org.

SALON

Race, class and police murder in America

11 July 2016

In the aftermath of the mass shooting of police officers in Dallas, Texas Thursday night, the American media and political establishment has sought to portray the police killings of unarmed people and widespread protests against police violence as proof of deepening and unbridgeable racial divisions in the United States.

According to the media presentation, the homicidal actions of police across the country are somehow a manifestation of “white people” expressing their elemental, collective racial hatred of African-Americans.

The New York Post, for example, ran a banner headline proclaiming “Civil War,” while the New York Times led its Sunday opinions section with a column titled “Divided by Race, United by Pain.”

This presentation is grotesquely at odds with reality. What is taking place in America is not a race war, but rather public protest against police violence in a country where more than a thousand people a year are executed without trial by police forces run amok.

Racism, of course, exists and it may be a factor in many police killings. Blacks are targeted for police attack in numbers disproportionate to their share of the population. But the facts themselves demonstrate that the scourge of police violence and murder is not limited to blacks or minorities, but extends to working people and youth of all races and ethnicities, especially the poorest and most vulnerable sections of the working class.

According to a database compiled by the Guardian, through July 9, 571 people had been killed so far this year by police in the US. The dead included 88 Hispanics and 138 African-Americans, but nearly half—281 people—were white. Last year 1,146 people were killed by the police, of which the majority, 586, were white.

Many of the cops who carry out these murders are themselves members of minority groups. Three of the six officers charged in the April 2015 killing of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, an outrage that sparked nationwide demonstrations, were African-American. In that city, as in many others where police brutality is rampant, both the mayor and the police chief were black.

Even the government seems unable to rein in the police. When New York Mayor Bill de Blasio made comments deemed sympathetic to protests against police violence, following the police killing of Eric Garner in Staten Island, he faced a virtual insurrection by New York City police.

The claim, made without either factual substantiation or historical explanation, that the United States is suddenly convulsed by sectarian hatred, is a falsehood that does not withstand any serious analysis. It is being promoted as part of a narrative that serves definite political interests.

This presentation conceals the nature of the state and distracts attention from the fundamental questions of social class that are at the root of the relentless exercise of police brutality and murder. The wave of state violence takes place under specific conditions: a deepening economic and social crisis, an immense growth of social inequality, mounting signs of a resurgence of class struggle and a broad process of political radicalization within the American working class.

The number of days lost to major strikes in the US in 2015 was nearly four times that of 2014, and this year, with the month-long strike by Verizon workers, the figure will be far higher still. Even more disturbing to the ruling class, there are mounting signs, including the near-rebellion last year by autoworkers, that the trade union bureaucracy is losing its grip on the working class. And the mass support among workers and especially among youth for the campaign of Bernie Sanders, who describes himself as a socialist and talks of a “political revolution” against the “billionaire class,” has revealed the widespread growth of anti-capitalist sentiment, to the horror of the ruling elite.

The aim of the campaign to inundate the public with a racialist narrative concerning police violence and all other aspects of American society is to divert attention from the capitalist system itself and head off the development of what the ruling class fears most—a broad, popular movement uniting the working class in the struggle against this economic system.

This requires grossly distorting popular attitudes toward race. There have, in fact, been vast changes—generally of a healthy character—since the heyday of Jim Crow segregation in the South and widespread racial discrimination in the North. In the America of the 1930s and 1940s, lynchings of blacks were virtually a daily occurrence. The great mass of African-Americans in the South did not have access to the ballot, and there were virtually no black political representatives.

Fifty years ago, in 1966, Edward Brooke was elected senator from Massachusetts, becoming the first African-American popularly elected to the United States Senate. Police forces throughout the country were almost exclusively white, and intermarriage between blacks and whites was virtually unknown.

These circumstances were radically altered by a 30-year upsurge of the working class between 1934 and 1964, which broke the back of segregation in the South and led to the racial integration of state institutions, including the police and all levels of government. The United States, after all, elected an African-American president in 2008 and reelected him in 2012.

Today, 87 percent of Americans, including 84 percent of whites, say they support interracial marriage, up from 4 percent in 1958. Fifteen percent of all new marriages in 2010 were interracial, more than double the share in 1980.

What really happened last week? The killings of two black men, Alton B. Sterling and Philando Castile, both caught on video, sparked outrage and opposition throughout the United States and internationally. With less publicity but no less chillingly, local media published a video showing police executing Dylan Noble, a 19-year-old white man in Fresno, California, as he lay motionless on the ground. Mass protests by people of all ethnicities throughout the country were met by the arrest of hundreds of demonstrators, carried out by highly militarized police who look and act like occupation forces.

As for the actions of Micah Johnson, the Dallas shooter, the fact that he himself was killed by means of a bomb-wielding robot—the first incidence of drone-type warfare within the borders of the United States—makes it difficult to determine what his precise motives were.

While it seems that his actions were to some extent motivated by police killings of African-Americans, it is also the case that he was a military veteran who spent nearly a year in Afghanistan. His actions follow the pattern of the dozens of mass shootings, many by military veterans, that take place in the United States every year.

The promotion of a sectarian outlook is embraced by politicians and academics who have a deep and vested interest in racial politics. They generally have nothing but praise for President Obama, who has presided over eight years of unending war, growing social inequality and poverty, and the arming of police departments with military-grade weapons throughout the country. These purveyors of racial politics are indifferent to the social distress of broad sections of the working class and have no proposals to improve their plight.

We urge all workers and youth to reject the reactionary, racialist narrative being peddled by the media and political establishment. The struggle against police violence, like all great social questions, requires uniting all sections of the working class in a common struggle against the capitalist system.

The World Socialist Web Site Editorial Board

Obama backs attack on encrypted communication

By Evan Blake
14 March 2016

Speaking at the music, film and tech festival South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, Texas on Friday, US President Barack Obama delivered his most open comments yet backing the attack on encryption and the FBI’s ongoing lawsuit with Apple.

The high-profile legal case centers on the ability of the FBI, NSA and other state surveillance agencies to get “backdoor” access to encrypted cell phone data. On February 16, a California federal court judge granted a Justice Department request for an order requiring Apple to write new software that can bypass the iPhone’s security features.

While the FBI initially claimed that the software would be used solely to crack the phone of Syed Rizwan Farook, one of the attackers in last December’s mass shooting in San Bernardino, the aim is to set a precedent that would justify the wholesale nullification of encryption.

The development of anti-encryption technology will destroy one of the last remaining privacy protections for the global population, whose use spiked following the 2013 Edward Snowden revelations of mass NSA spying on the entire planet’s communications. Apple—one of the major collaborators in PRISM and other NSA spying programs—has argued that its compliance with the order will set an illegal and unconstitutional precedent for the government to unlock any individual’s phone.

Obama presented his views on privacy before an audience of roughly 2,100 technology executives and enthusiasts at the close of an interview with Evan Smith, the editor-in-chief of The Texas Tribune.

While posturing as impartial in the “privacy versus security debate,” Obama clearly expressed the dominant view held by state officials that the public has no right to privacy and that Apple and the other tech companies should fold in their dispute over encryption.

Throughout his comments, Obama sought to minimize the extreme demands being made by the FBI, which threaten to eliminate encryption capabilities. At various points, he loosely compared the cracking of digital encryption to such commonplace privacy infringements as the issuing of a home search warrant, airport security checks, tax collecting methods and road blocks for drunk driving tests, while moralizing against “fetishizing our phones above every other value.”

Obama began by falsely juxtaposing the FBI’s demand for anti-encryption software to a standard home search conducted with a warrant. He continued this specious line of reasoning by comparing encrypted cell phones to Swiss bank accounts, saying, “And the question we now have to ask is, if technologically, it is possible to make an impenetrable device or system where the encryption is so strong that there’s no key, there’s no door at all, then how do we apprehend the child pornographer? How do we solve or disrupt a terrorist plot? What mechanisms do we have available to even do simple things like tax enforcement? Because, if, in fact, you can’t crack that at all, government can’t get in, then everybody is walking around with a Swiss bank account in their pocket—right? So there has to be some concession to the need to be able to get into that information somehow.”

This is simply a statement that the government has to have access to all communications, rendering the purpose of encryption null and void.

Regarding the likelihood that this anti-encryption software could be used universally to unlock all encrypted cell phones, Obama feigned ignorance, declaring, “That is a technical question. I’m not a software engineer. It is, I think, technically true, but I think it can be overstated.”

Concluding his remarks, Obama postured as being “way on the civil liberties side of this thing,” before saying, “I anguish a lot over the decisions we make in terms of how to keep this country safe, and I am not interested in overthrowing the values that have made us an exceptional and great nation simply for expediency. But the dangers are real. Maintaining law and order and a civilized society is important. Protecting our kids is important. And so I would just caution against taking an absolutist perspective on this.”

In an effort to erode widespread suspicion of the security apparatus, Obama flatly lied about the significance of the Snowden revelations, declaring, “the Snowden issue vastly overstated the dangers to U.S. citizens in terms of spying, because the fact of the matter is, is that actually our intelligence agencies are pretty scrupulous about US persons, people on US soil. What those disclosures did identify were accesses overseas with respect to people who are not in this country. A lot of those have been fixed.”

With his remarks in Austin, Obama has sought to manipulate public opinion to enable Congress to enact long-planned legislation that will require technology companies to install “backdoors” to allow the government universal access to encrypted data. His administration declined to pursue such legislation last fall, but renewed it through the legal system and Congress in the wake of the San Bernardino attacks.

In his remarks, Obama noted that his administration has “engaged the tech community aggressively to help solve this problem.”

These comments represent a continuation of those made earlier this year to tech executives in Silicon Valley, at which Obama urged the tech leaders to “work together to combat terrorism and counter violent extremism online,” according to an official White House statement.

 

 

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/03/14/obam-m14.html

The Republican debate and the degradation of US politics

27 February 2016

The appearance of the Republican presidential candidates Thursday night in Houston, Texas was described by CNN as a debate. But there was no actual debating, in the sense of a discussion of issues or the offering of contrasting political programs. Instead, viewers were confronted with a repulsive display of the degraded state of official politics in the United States.

The three leading candidates—billionaire demagogue Donald Trump, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas—engaged in a barrage of name-calling, mudslinging, insinuation and insult that marked a new low in an already dismal series of such political freak shows.

Rubio set the tone with a series of prepared attacks on Trump’s business career, baiting him as an employer who hired illegal immigrants despite the real estate mogul’s current posture as the arch-hater of immigrants. (Trump advocates deporting 11 million undocumented immigrants). None of the candidates criticized Trump’s fascistic proposals to bar Muslims from entering the US or his support for waterboarding and other forms of torture.

Trump responded in kind, insult for insult, and generally fell back on boasting of his personal wealth as the ultimate answer to all criticism. From there, the “debate” descended even further into the realm of reality television, with simulated rage, threats and bombast pitched to the most backward and demoralized elements in American society.

Not only the candidates, but the CNN moderator, the reactionary pro-war hack Wolf Blitzer, and the audience, which responded to the verbal brawl with shrieks and catcalls, contributed to the demeaning spectacle.

American bourgeois politics has never been particularly edifying. However, Thursday’s spectacle marked a new low, a fact that was acknowledged even by some veteran media commentators. Bob Schieffer of CBS observed, “I thought things couldn’t get lower than they’d already reached in this campaign. I mean, the political discourse, but last night it went even below where I thought it could possibly go. I mean, no discussion of the issues, but people arguing, screaming, hollering. It was like kids out behind the barn rather than a political debate.”

The degraded character of Thursday’s event did not stop the media from treating it seriously afterwards, hailing Rubio’s performance as a stunning political comeback. This was a prearranged narrative. The Republican Party establishment is belatedly trying to check Trump’s momentum after his surge to frontrunner status, winning three of the first four contests and leading in most polls for 15 more statewide primaries and caucuses in the coming week.

Senator Lindsey Graham, who pulled out of the presidential race in the fall after failing to attract support in the polls, told a charity fundraising event in Washington Thursday night that Trump’s lead in the primaries and polling meant, “My party has gone batshit crazy.”

But the endorsement of Trump Friday by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who dropped out of the presidential campaign just over two weeks ago, is a signal that the “Stop Trump” movement is getting little traction. Trump is expected to sweep the Super Tuesday contests and is now favored to clinch the nomination before the end of March.

The level of discourse continued downwards in the 24 hours after the debate. Rubio accused Trump of being a “con artist” and suggested that he had wet his pants during the debate. Trump called Rubio a “nervous Nellie,” a “lightweight” and a “choker.”

Trump also threatened the media at a press conference, declaring that if he became president, “I’m going to open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money… So that when the New York Times writes a hit piece, which is a total disgrace, or when the Washington Post, which is there for other reasons, writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win money…”

One of the three, Trump, Rubio or Cruz, will likely become the Republican presidential nominee and potentially the next US president. The background of each of these individuals testifies to the decline in the caliber, even by American political standards, of the personnel advanced by the US corporate-financial elite to fill its most important government position.

Trump is, as he endlessly proclaims, a billionaire, who made his fortune servicing the personal needs of the wealthy through hotels, luxury apartments, resorts and casinos. After a series of financial near-disasters, including four corporate bankruptcies, he cemented his position, both monetarily and as a celebrity, through “The Apprentice” and “Celebrity Apprentice” reality TV programs, in which Trump as CEO hired high-level assistants from a list of applicants. It was there that he perfected the bullying, blowhard persona that is currently on display at campaign rallies and debates.

Cruz and Rubio are both first-generation Cuban-Americans who took slightly different paths. Rubio graduated from the University of Miami law school and went straight into local Republican politics, dominated by the fascistic anti-Castro exile milieu. He moved up from city commissioner to state representative before being chosen as House Speaker under then-Governor Jeb Bush.

Cruz came from a Texas milieu of ultra-right Christian fundamentalism and went straight to the highest levels of the Republican Party in Washington. After graduating from Harvard Law School, he clerked for Chief Justice William Rehnquist before working on the House Republican effort to impeach President Bill Clinton. Soon after, he participated in the Bush campaign’s efforts to halt vote-counting in Florida in the 2000 elections, which led to the Supreme Court’s notorious Bush v. Gore decision handing the White House to the loser of the popular vote. Denied a leading position in the Bush administration, he moved back to Texas to become solicitor general.

Both Rubio in 2010 and Cruz in 2012 were elected to the US Senate as challengers to the candidates favored by the Republican Party establishment. Both had the backing of the ultra-right Tea Party faction. The two first-term senators began planning presidential bids almost as soon as they arrived in Washington DC. They have each raised tens of millions in campaign funds from hedge fund investors and other billionaires.

Even by the meager standards of American two-party politics, the 2016 presidential campaign has been a demonstration of the staggering decay in the intellectual and moral level of the political representatives of the American ruling elite. This is true of the Democrats as well as the Republicans, although it takes somewhat different forms given the different roles the rival parties play in manipulating popular sentiments and allowing a narrow financial aristocracy to rule over a complex mass society of more than 330 million people.

The process has gone furthest in the Republican Party, which over the past four decades has become the main repository for what is most foul, bigoted and backward in American life. This was acknowledged in a remarkable column published in the Washington Post Friday by Robert Kagan, the neoconservative who was one of the leading apologists for the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the war crimes committed by the Bush administration. Kagan now declares that “the only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton.”

“Trump is no fluke,” Kagan writes. “Nor is he hijacking the Republican Party or the conservative movement, if there is such a thing. He is, rather, the party’s creation, its Frankenstein’s monster, brought to life by the party, fed by the party and now made strong enough to destroy its maker.” He described Trump as “tapping the well-primed gusher of popular anger, xenophobia and, yes, bigotry that the party had already unleashed.”

Kagan voices the mounting concern in ruling circles, Republican and Democratic alike, that the two-party system is fracturing and the reactionary, militaristic and authoritarian views advanced by Trump, all too openly and crudely, will provoke popular revulsion and completely discredit the entire political structure.

Kagan is wrong is stating that Trump is simply the Frankenstein creation of the Republican Party. He is, rather, a particularly naked expression of the criminality, parasitism, backwardness and moral degradation of the financial aristocracy that presides over American society and runs the political system and media.

Patrick Martin

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/02/27/pers-f27.html

Reverse Engineering Ahmed Mohamed’s Clock… and Ourselves.

by Anthony – posted 1:23 pm, September 17, 2015

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have something in common with Ahmed Mohamed: as a youngster, I was also an electronics enthusiast. At his age and even earlier, I frequently took apart electronic devices – anything from my own toys, to broken things around the house, and even that dirty garbage-picked black and white TV my parents dragged home that they knew I’d have a blast playing with (I did.) I’d try and troubleshoot, repair, or sometimes just disassemble things and salvage components for future projects. I’d try and imagine how all those bits and pieces, lengths of wires, mazes of conductive circuit board traces all came together to produce an image, or a sound, or some other useful function. I wanted to know how it all worked.

Without dating myself – fast forward a bunch of years, and I’m the same way. I’ve even picked up an engineering degree over the course of those years. I don’t have to only imagine how things work anymore, I have a pretty good understanding now. When shopping for electronic devices, my first instinct is to see if there’s a way to build one myself (and, I frequently do!) When something of mine breaks, I don’t send it back, I take it as a personal challenge to get it working again. If I fail, I still salvage useful parts – they might come in handy to fix something else later. This aspect of myself – being both methodical, and curious – hasn’t changed a bit over the years.

So, this story about a 14 year old boy in Texas that was arrested on suspicion of creating a bomb hoax (who, apparently just wanted to show off his latest electronics project to his teachers) that has blown up (no pun intended) all over the news and social media, caught my attention immediately. Not because of his race, or his religion, the seeming absurdity of the situation, the emotionally charged photo of a young boy in a NASA t-shirt being led off in hand cuffs, the hash tags, the presidential response… no, none of that. I’m an electronics geek. I was interested in the clock! I wanted to figure out what he had come up with.

I found the highest resolution photograph of the clock I could. Instantly, I was disappointed. Somewhere in all of this – there has indeed been a hoax. Ahmed Mohamed didn’t invent his own alarm clock. He didn’t even build a clock. Now, before I go on and get accused of attacking a 14 year old kid who’s already been through enough, let me explain my purpose. I don’t want to just dissect the clock. I want to dissect our reaction as a society to the situation. Part of that is the knee-jerk responses we’re all so quick to make without facts. So, before you scroll down and leave me angry comments, please continue to the end (or not – prove my point, and miss the point, entirely!)

For starters, one glance at the printed circuit board in the photo, and I knew we were looking at mid-to-late 1970s vintage electronics. Surely you’ve seen a modern circuit board, with metallic traces leading all over to the various components like an electronic spider’s web. You’ll notice right away the highly accurate spacing, straightness of the lines, consistency of the patterns. That’s because we design things on computers nowadays, and computers assist in routing these lines. Take a look at the board in Ahmed’s clock. It almost looks hand-drawn, right? That’s because it probably was. Computer aided design was in its infancy in the 70s. This is how simple, low cost items (like an alarm clock) were designed. Today, even a budding beginner is going to get some computer aided assistance – in fact they’ll probably start there, learning by simulating designs before building them. You can even simulate or lay out a board with free apps on your phone or tablet. A modern hobbyist usually wouldn’t be bothered with the outdated design techniques. There’s also silk screening on the board. An “M” logo, “C-94” (probably, a part number – C might even stand for “clock”), and what looks like an American flag. More about that in a minute. Point for now being, a hobbyist wouldn’t silk screen logos and part numbers on their home made creation. It’s pretty safe to say already we’re looking at ’70s tech, mass produced in a factory.

So I turned to eBay, searching for vintage alarm clocks. It only took a minute to locate Ahmed’s clock. See this eBay listing, up at the time of this writing. Amhed’s clock was invented, and built, by Micronta, a Radio Shack subsidary. Catalog number 63 756.

The shape and design is a dead give away. The large screen. The buttons on the front laid out horizontally would have been on a separate board – a large snooze button, four control buttons, and two switches to turn the alarm on and off, and choose two brightness levels. A second board inside would have contained the actual “brains” of the unit. The clock features a 9v battery back-up, and a switch on the rear allows the owner to choose between 12 and 24 hour time. (Features like a battery back-up, and a 24 hour time selection seems awful superfluous for a hobby project, don’t you think?) Oh, and about that “M” logo on the circuit board mentioned above? Micronta.

For one last bit of confirmation, I located the pencil box Ahmed used for his project. During this video interview he again claims it was his “invention” and that he “made” the device – but the important thing at the moment, at 1:13, we see him showing the pencil box on his computer screen. Here it is on Amazon, where it’s clearly labeled as being 8.25 inches wide. Our eBay seller also conveniently took a photo of the clock next to a ruler to show it’s scale – about 8 inches wide. The dimensions all line up perfectly.

So there you have it folks, Ahmed Mohamad did not invent, nor build a clock. He took apart an existing clock, and transplanted the guts into a pencil box, and claimed it was his own creation. It all seems really fishy to me.

If we accept the story about “inventing” an alarm clock is made up, as I think I’ve made a pretty good case for, it’s fair to wonder what other parts of the story might be made up, not reported factually by the media, or at least, exaggerated.

I refer back again to this YouTube video interview with Ahmed. He explains that he closed up the box with a piece of cord because he didn’t want it to look suspicious. I’m curious, why would “looking suspicious” have even crossed his mind before this whole event unfolded, if he was truly showing off a hobby project, something so innocuous as an alarm clock. Why did he choose a pencil box, one that looks like a miniature briefcase no less, as an enclosure for a clock? It’s awful hard to see the clock with the case closed. On the other hand, with the case open, it’s awful dangerous to have an exposed power transformer sitting near the snooze button (unless, perhaps his invention was to stop serial-snooze-button pressers by giving them a dangerous electrical shock!)

So again, I’m pointing all this out – about the specifics of the clock – not to pick on the poor kid. I’m picking on us, our culture, and our media. I don’t even care about the clock itself at this point.

If we stop and think – was it really such a ridiculous reaction from the teacher and the police in the first place? How many school shootings and incidents of violence have we had, where we hear afterwards “this could have been prevented, if only we paid more attention to the signs!” Teachers are taught to be suspicious and vigilant. Ahmed wasn’t accused of making a bomb – he was accused of making a look-alike, a hoax. And be honest with yourself, a big red digital display with a bunch of loose wires in a brief-case looking box is awful like a Hollywood-style representation of a bomb. Everyone jumped to play the race and religion cards and try and paint the teachers and police as idiots and bigots, but in my mind, they were probably acting responsibly and erring on the side of caution to protect the rest of their students, just in case. “This wouldn’t have happened if Ahmed were white,” they say. We’re supposed to be sensitive to school violence, but apparently religious and racial sensitivity trumps that. At least we have another clue about how the sensitivity and moral outrage pecking order lies.

Because, is it possible, that maybe, just maybe, this was actually a hoax bomb? A silly prank that was taken the wrong way? That the media then ran with, and everyone else got carried away? Maybe there wasn’t even any racial or religious bias on the parts of the teachers and police.

I don’t know any of these things. But I’m intellectually mature enough to admit I don’t know, and to also be OK with that. I don’t feel a need to take the first exist to conclusionville. But I do like to find facts where I can, and prefer to let them lead me to conclusions, rather than a knee jerk judgement based on a headline or sound bite.

I think the whole event – and our collective response, with everybody up to the President chiming in, says a whole lot about us. We don’t care that none of us were there and knows what happened, we jump to conclusions and assume we’re experts. We care about the story, but we don’t care about the actual facts. Headlines and click-bait are far more interesting than thinking for ourselves. We like to point out other any bit of perceived injustice or discrimination we can find – it’s practically a new national past-time. We like playing victim, and we like talking about victims – so much so we sometimes find victims where none really existed. We also like to find somebody to blame, even when there’s nobody at fault. We like to play social justice warrior on our Facebooks and Twitters, posting memes and headlines without digging in behind the sensationalism, winning bonus sensitivity points in the forms of likes and re-tweets. Once group-think kicks in, we rally around hash tags and start shouting moral outrage in a deafeningly loud national chorus. The media plays us like a fiddle, and we don’t even notice we’ve all been had.

As for me, I’m glad to apply the lessons I’ve learned as an electronics enthusiast to other aspects of life. There’s no emotion in troubleshooting a circuit, electricity doesn’t have morals. There’s just physics, and logic, and methodology. I think we could all benefit from applying a little more of that sort of thinking to these situations.

* Correction: A reader and commenter, Joe Donaldson, tracked down the clock in a Radio Shack catalog dated 1986. It’s likely that my guess of mid-to-late 70s was off by a bit, and it’s now obvious it was a model that was for sale in the mid 80s. Though it doesn’t really change the point, I want to post this correction here for accuracy sake and thank Joe for the heads up. (See the comment here, with link to the catalog page.)

 

 

 

http://blogs.artvoice.com/techvoice/2015/09/17/reverse-engineering-ahmed-mohameds-clock-and-ourselves/

Most US states saw jobs losses in March

By Ed Hightower
24 April 2015

The US Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics report on state and regional unemployment for March 2015 shows a deteriorating economic situation. Despite modest job growth nationally, nonfarm payroll employment declined in 31 states and the District of Columbia last month. Only 18 states saw an increase in employment.

In particular, states and regions that once benefited from a boom in domestic oil production are now hemorrhaging jobs as a result of the oil price decline. States with the largest over-the-month job losses were Texas (25,000), Oklahoma (12,900) and Pennsylvania (12,700).

In percentage terms, the largest over-the-month declines in employment occurred in Oklahoma (0.8 percent), followed by Arkansas, North Dakota, and West Virginia (0.6 percent each).

The rapid job losses in Texas—America’s second most populous state with 27 million residents, with an economic output equivalent to Spain—has generated concerns in major economic and political circles. March 2015 is the first time in 53 months that the state of has showed a net loss of jobs.

JP Morgan Chase economist Michael Feroli was among many analysts who predicted a severe loss of oil-related jobs in the state in late 2014, earning him the ire of then-President of the Dallas Federal Reserve who last month, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, publicly dismissed such predictions with contempt.

Referring to the March jobs report, Feroli said if the national economy had lost jobs in the same proportion as Texas did, the US would have lost 304,000 jobs last month, an amount associated with a full-blown recession.

The slump in oil prices threatens jobs in other industries, including steel and automobile manufacturing. The steel sector closely followed the boom in shale oil and natural gas production over the past several years when higher oil prices prevailed. Globally, the industry has undergone a restructuring over the last quarter century that is almost without parallel, forcing prices down and destroying jobs and productive infrastructure.

On Friday, United States Steel Corporation sent layoff notices to 1,404 workers involved in producing pipe and tube products used in the oil and gas sector. The layoffs could come as early as June for 579 employees at a plant in Lone Star, Texas, 166 at a factory in Houston, 255 at a mill in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and 404 managers in the company’s tubular operations.

Since March, US Steel has announced plans to idle its Granite City, Illinois, factory that employs 2,000 workers, a tubular steel facility in Ohio employing 614 workers, as well as layoffs and closures in Pennsylvania and Minnesota.

Ford Motor Company announced Thursday that it will idle 700 workers at the Michigan Assembly Plant in the Detroit suburb of Wayne starting June 22, citing decreased demand for more fuel-efficient vehicles. The facility produces a number of vehicles in this category, including the Ford Focus, Focus ST, Focus Electric, C-Max hybrid and C-Max Energi plug-in hybrid.

Sales of the Ford Focus fell 14.5 percent in March, and sales of the C-Max Hybrid were down 22 percent during the same period and by 31 percent during the first quarter. General Motors has announced similar plans for facilities making its more fuel-efficient models.

The United Steelworkers and the United Auto Workers unions accept without question the destruction of tens of thousands of jobs by the corporate giants, with the USW predictably blaming foreign steelmakers for “dumping” steel.

The report on state unemployment further exposes the Obama administration’s lies about the supposed economic “recovery.” It dovetails with poor economic figures in recent months, including retail sales, industrial production and home building, all of which point to a deepening economic downturn.

Flush with more than $1.3 trillion in cash—and benefiting from virtually free credit poured into the financial markets by the Federal Reserve—major corporations are not investing in expanding production. Instead they are pouring billions into stock buybacks and dividends to benefit wealthy investors, and to fuel a wave of mergers and acquisitions that will destroy even more jobs. Meanwhile the workers who remain are subjected to unrelenting demands for lower wages and benefits and higher levels of exploitation.

Financial news outlets are now referring to “mega-mergers.” A case in point is this month’s takeover by energy giant Shell of the smaller firm BG in a $70 billion deal. ExxonMobil is also widely expected to make a bid for BP. Both the Shell-BG mega-merger, as well as any acquisitions by rival ExxonMobil, will serve to boost profits not through new investment in infrastructure, but through layoffs, closures and the lowering of labor costs.

While better-paying jobs in the US manufacturing sector are evaporating, what little job growth there is consists largely of low wage service sector work. In one sign of the deteriorating conditions for workers in these industries, a study by the University of California’s Center for Labor Research and Education released April 13 found that a majority of spending on public assistance programs goes to households headed by someone who is working.

“When companies pay too little for workers to provide for their families, workers rely on public assistance programs to meet their basic needs,” Ken Jacobs, chair of the labor center and co-author of the new report said in a press release.

Thus, at the state and federal level, the US government subsidizes companies that pay poverty wages, to the tune of $153 billion per year.

According to the report, workers in a diverse range of occupations systematically rely on public assistance, and in staggering proportions, including frontline fast-food workers (52 percent), childcare workers (46 percent), home care workers (48 percent) and even part-time college faculty (25 percent).

While Wall Street executives are making record bonuses, four out of 10 bank tellers in New York City are forced to rely on some form of public assistance because their wages are too low to survive.

 

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/04/24/jobs-a24.html

City of Austin Braces For Massive Influx of Nerds

BY CATHY LEW

CREDITPHOTOGRAPH BY KITRA CAHANA/GETTY

The city of Austin has begun bracing for the arrival of what experts are predicting will be a record-breaking number of nerds. Residents have grown accustomed to the annual migratory patterns of nerds, particularly the mid-March influx, which most attribute to the South by Southwest festival. But what has baffled locals of late is the sheer diversity of the strains of nerd infiltrating the Texan capital.

Studies have found that what was originally identified as a homogeneous nerd population has now split into several distinct subspecies. A lead researcher explained, “What were once typical nerd signifiers—thick glasses, an obsession with gadgets, a certain loveable gawkiness—are no longer reliable markers. While all nerds originate from the same family (Nerdus loserus sapiens), they now display a wide range of character traits.”

One of the most prominent breeds, the music nerd, has long thrived in Austin. At times mistaken for a cool person, the music nerd is identifiable by the speed at which he or she informs you that SXSW “used to be about the music, man.” One such music nerd was found outside of the Spotify House wearing a made-to-look-vintage Talking Heads tee purchased in 2012. “It’s just a damn shame, you know?” she said, ashing her cigarette. “South-by was our oasis from all of the mainstream bullshit out there, a place where we could celebrate raw sound. I mean, people who don’t know the history don’t even realize that John Mayer was discovered here.”

Yet music nerds have faced challenges at SXSW following the rise of their natural enemy, the tech nerd. Tech nerds tend to exhibit fewer traditional nerd characteristics as they amass more wealth than other nerds could ever imagine. Outside the convention center, one tech nerd struggled to untangle his badge from his new Apple Watch, pausing to say, “Obviously the Apple Watch isn’t out yet, but I’m basically boys with Tim Cook.” He later followed up on LinkedIn: “Hey, if you plan on quoting me in your piece, please specify that I was wearing the expensive kind of Apple Watch, not the one for poors.”

One of the fastest-growing yet most difficult-to-classify types of nerd is the corporate-brand nerd. A relative newcomer to the Nerdus family, the corporate-brand nerd hides in plain sight, wearing expensive denim and Oxford shirts in whimsical colors, like salmon. Typical traits include a love of harnessing the power of human emotion and leveraging data to drive interactions. Asked how it felt to represent corporate-brand nerds at SXSW, one individual replied, “I actually reject the ‘nerd’ characterization. The personal brand that I’ve cultivated for myself is more that of an avant-garde tastemaker, or #AvanTastemaker. Do you need me to spell that?”

This year, Austin city officials have assured the public that they are taking extra precautions to keep the nerds contained. Authorities have already instituted fines for the overuse of words such as “disrupt,” “drones,” and “passionate storytellers” in public spaces. Later this week, anti-nerd task forces will begin to roll out their most drastic initiative—random WiFi outages.

Yet even with these preëmptive measures in place, new strains of nerd are expected to crop up every day at SXSW. One of the most dangerous types is already multiplying rapidly along Sixth Street: the dad nerd. Long thought to be extinct in these parts, dad nerds most successfully reach maturation in a cage of familial obligation and conference calls. When allowed to roam freely in new pastures, dad nerds are famous for going out too hard and overdoing it. Asked how he was enjoying Austin, one dad nerd exclaimed, “I loooooooooooove SXSWALDSJFASLKDJRELKDCCKKFRD!”

 

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