'Cup and sauce and newspaper'by Anthony Ulinski
Good Morning!
I’ve had to dig around to find some things to read. It seems most of the MSM has had a post-midterm elections let down or something. So, it’s Monday and here we go!
Myanmar’s Suu Kyi has given her first speech since her release from house arrest. She has indicated her willingness to work with whomever she can on bringing democracy and freedom to the region. This is from Bloomberg.
“I am prepared to talk with anyone,” Suu Kyi said in Yangon, Myanmar’s former capital, according to The Irrawaddy, an online magazine run by Myanmar exiles that’s based in Chiang Mai, Thailand. “I have no personal grudge toward anybody.”
The speech sets the tone for Suu Kyi, 65, to re-engage with her supporters after spending 15 of the past 21 years in detention. She plans to listen to the views of her fellow citizens and push for national reconciliation in the country formerly known as Burma, where 2,200 political prisoners are still behind bars, according to the Irrawaddy.
“I think we will have to sort out our differences across the table, talking to each other, agreeing to disagree, or finding out why we disagree and trying to remove the sources of our disagreement,” Suu Kyi told BBC World Service radio in an yesterday. “There are so many things that we have to talk about.”
I’ve been trying to follow Obama’s upcoming decision on letting 9-11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed stay in that perpetual state of jail with no trial. There’s several good articles that have come up this week. First, there’s been the Salon piece by Dahlia Lithwick that headlines the idea that the U.S. has gone from decrying torture to celebrating it.
President Barack Obama decided long ago that he would “turn the page” on prisoner abuse and other illegality connected to the Bush administration’s war on terror. What he didn’t seem to understand, what he still seems not to appreciate, is that what was on that page would bleed through onto the next page and the page after that. There’s no getting past torture. There is only getting comfortable with it. The U.S. flirtation with torture is not locked in the past or in the black sites or prisons at which it occurred. Now more than ever, it’s feted on network television and held in reserve for the next president who persuades himself that it’s not illegal after all.
Today, Emptywheel has laid out the U.S. strategy for a never ending war based on never releasing these prisoners-in-limbo. It’s one of those reads that makes you tingle.
Obviously, it’s a further spineless capitulation on Obama’s part. It’s a concession, too, that all you have to do to eliminate the rule of law in this country is squawk in Congress and on Fox News.
It also serves as a guarantee that the 2001 AUMF declaring war against the now-50 al Qaeda members who had something to do with 9/11 will last forever–or at least for the rest of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s life.
Mind you, the government has been planning on making this a forever war since 2001, precisely so it could hold people like KSM forever.
Now, with the decision to just let KSM rot, it seems to me, that plan gains a new anchor (and none too soon! given that only a handful of al Qaeda members remain in Afghanistan, that justification was getting rather dicey). After all, the very decision not to try KSM in a military commission is an admission that it would not work for him–it might rule out the death penalty for him in any case, but a military commission judge actually has leeway to adjust any sentence on account of the extreme torture KSM underwent, meaning our torture of KSM might become a central issue in a military commission.
But any further delay in charging KSM in civilian court make it less likely they’ll be able to charge him in the future, because this current delay almost certainly violates any interpretation of speedy trial rights. You can’t just wait to charge someone until such a time as the political winds make it easier to do.
There’s an astounding article up on UK’s The Independent’s website about the future without birds called ‘None flew over the cuckoo’s nest.”
According to Henk Tennekes, a researcher at the Experimental Toxicology Services in Zutphen, the Netherlands, the threat of DDT has been superseded by a relatively new class of insecticide, known as the neonicotinoids. In his book The Systemic Insecticides: A Disaster in the Making, published this month, Tennekes draws all the evidence together, to make the case that neonicotinoids are causing a catastrophe in the insect world, which is having a knock-on effect for many of our birds.
Already, in many areas, the skies are much quieter than they used to be. All over Europe, many species of bird have suffered a population crash. Spotting a house sparrow, common swift or a flock of starlings used to be unremarkable, but today they are a more of an unusual sight. Since 1977, Britain’s house-sparrow population has shrunk by 68 per cent.
The common swift has suffered a 41 per cent fall in numbers since 1994, and the starling 26 per cent. The story is similar for woodland birds (such as the spotted flycatcher, willow tit and wood warbler), and farmland birds (including the northern lapwing, snipe, curlew, redshank and song thrush
Ornithologists have been trying desperately to work out what is behind these rapid declines. Urban development, hermetically sealed houses and barns, designer gardens and changing farming practices have all been blamed, but exactly why these birds have fallen from the skies is still largely unexplained.
However, Tennekes thinks there may be a simple reason. “The evidence shows that the bird species suffering massive decline since the 1990s rely on insects for their diet,” he says. He believes that the insect world is no longer thriving, and that birds that feed on insects are short on food.
Here’s two interesting ways to get involved with the Federal Debt issue. The first is to go to the NYT and use their widget to balance the budget yourself. BTD tired it here and came up with these suggestions to replace the cat food commission.
How I did it – 71% in revenue increases and 29% in spending cuts. What I raised – the estate tax to Clinton era levels (raised $50 billion), added a bank tax (raised $73 billion), added a millionaire’s tax (raised $50 billion), let the Bush tax cuts expire (raised $226 billion), raised the FICA ceiling (raised $50 billion). For spending cuts I adopted these proposals – reduced Social Security benefits for high earners (saved $6 billion), enacted medical malpractice reform (saved $8 billion), reduced the number of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan to 30,000 by 2013 (saved $86 billion), made defense spending cuts (saving $57 billion), eliminated farm subsidies (saved $14 billion) and “earmarks” (saved $14 billion.)
Swiss Economist Hans Gersbach suggests a that governments employ a thing called “vote-share” bonds. That’s kind of like those revenue bond votes that your school board and municipalities have to get you to vote on. These things, however, would be be given seniority status by how much buy in they got from voters. Interesting concept that and it’s explored at VOXEU.
- Each government bond is tied to the share of the votes that its underlying budget deficit adoption has received in parliament.
- A government bond that has a higher vote-share than another is senior. This creates a ladder of relative seniority for which the vote-share is the organising principle. At the top of the ladder are the bonds with the highest vote-share.
- Any government funds available for servicing and repaying government debt will always be turned first to the top of the ladder to satisfy the claims of the bond-holders with the highest seniority. The other bond-holders are served sequentially by moving down the ladder.
U.S. Economist Dean Baker takes the NYT to task for ignorance of unemployment over at FDL. Like other economists–me included–Baker is appalled that so many are obsessed with a deficit at at time when so many people aren’t working, aren’t paying taxes, and are in need of government services. That’s a signal that we’re going to continue running a deficit until that’s solved. Here’s Baker’s call to wake up.
We have more than 25 million people unemployed, underemployed, or who have given up work altogether. This is a real crisis. Furthermore, it is worth noting that these people are largely suffering as a result of the incompetence of the budget balancers. (The budget balancers were the same people who dominated economic debate in the years before the crash and could did not see the $8 trillion housing bubble that wrecked the economy and gave us the huge deficits that now have them so obsessed.)
Obviously it is politically popular in Washington to be obssesed by the deficit, but we are supposed to have an independent press in this country. It is utterly loony to be focused on the projected deficit in 2030, when we have tens of millions of people who are seeing their lives ruined today by the downturn. This is like debating the colors to paint the classrooms when the school is on fire with the students still inside. Given economic reality, it would make far more sense to use the effort devoted to construct an elaborate game like this to designing a route toward restoring full employment.
BostonBoomer pointed me over to this Secret Justice Department Report on the NYT that details how the U.S. State Department help NAZIs after World War 2. It’s been redacted but it’s still got some gripping narrative. Sections about Congresswoman Holtzman and stories from the 1970s on the realization that a lot of NAZIs got into the U.S are just amazing reads.
Raw Story describes the report in an equally gripping way.
A report the Justice Department has been trying to hide for the past four years offers the most detailed account yet of the CIA’s efforts to protect known Nazi war criminals in the United States.
The report, obtained by the New York Times, may be the most concrete account yet of the role that prominent members of Germany’s Nazi party played in the early, formative years of the CIA, following World War II. It alleges the CIA created a “safe haven” for Nazis believed to be of use to the US’s Cold War efforts.
One last thing!!! If you have been the recipient of a cartoon viral video that’s really just gold bug libertarian propaganda, please wait before passing it on! I’ve had so many people link to this factually-impaired thing that I’m going to spend a post this afternoon debunking it. Yes, it’s cute and uses cute language, but it has so much misinformation in it that I can’t just let it go viral without point out all the factual errors. So, that’s on my to do list today.
What’s on your reading and blog list today?
