On the brink
Bob Morris @ Nov 30th 2004 09:03 - Category: Unfiled ;
Archive for November, 2004
Kerry could fight, but won’t
Bob Morris @ Nov 30th 2004 08:58 - Category: Unfiled ;
Kerry apparently thinks that Al Gore’s mistake in 2000 was fighting for the recount in Florida, and if Gore hadn’t have done it, he would have been a viable candidate in 2004. So he has sat back, letting the Green and Libertarian Parties do the heavy lifting, not expressing more than the faintest hope that a recount in Ohio will change the result.
Kerry, who is worth over 700 million, is an insider and member of the power elite. He will never seriously challenge the system on anything. To do so would mean doors would close for him, and he would become a traitor to his class. Goodness, exclusive country clubs wouldn’t want a rogue Brahmin as a member, now would they?
Kerry and Bush are both ruling class with many shared interests. Thus, Kerry had little to attack Bush about.
Pentagon uncovers propaganda failures
Bob Morris @ Nov 30th 2004 08:37 - Category: Unfiled ;
Al-Qaeda and radical Islamists are winning the propaganda war against the United States, says a high-level Pentagon panel, which concluded that President George W Bush’s administration’s policies in the Middle East, its fundamental failure to understand the Muslim world and a lack of imagination in using new communications technologies are responsible.
The Bushies don’t want to understand the Muslim world. Rather they wish only to dictate terms to it. But their arrogance and blindness is backfiring, as those who were friends become become opponents and the US increasingly is without allies.
Starbucks grounds for gardens
Bob Morris @ Nov 30th 2004 08:35 - Category: Unfiled ;
Coffee grounds make great fertilizer for plants that need nitrogen. Just mix it in the soil. You can also use coffee grounds for composting.
Starbucks has a “Grounds for your Garden” program and gives away coffee grounds for free to anyone who asks.
The first Starbucks I tried already had someone who was taking all their coffee grounds! The next store gave me several pounds sealed in a special bag.
They save money on trash hauling, people get free fertilizer and composting material, and what would have been hauled to a trash dump is recycled - a good deal for all.
Coffee grounds make up 17 percent of Starbucks’ store waste by volume or 40 percent by weight.
The company has not calculated how much it saves on its trash bill through the program, but says it keeps about 25 percent of its grounds out of landfills.
The cunning criminal mind
Bob Morris @ Nov 30th 2004 08:33 - Category: Unfiled ;
A man who robbed a bank by handing a teller a note demanding money written on one of his own checks was sentenced to 11 to 23 months in Cumberland County Prison.
Only a pawn in their game
Bob Morris @ Nov 29th 2004 00:01 - Category: Unfiled ;
Ukraine ‘on brink of disaster’
Ukraine lurched deeper into crisis yesterday as pro-Russian leaders in the south and east of the country voted overwhelmingly to hold a referendum on granting their regions autonomy from the capital Kiev.
Ukraine is being manipulated any number of outside forces. The likely outcome is civil war as sections of the country secede, destabilizing the entire region for years to come. The breakaway areas are both pro-Russian and the most economically developed.
Western double standard on Ukraine
Whether it is Albania in 1997, Serbia in 2000, Georgia last November or Ukraine now, our media regularly peddle the same fairy tale about how youthful demonstrators manage to bring down an authoritarian regime, simply by attending a rock concert in a central square.
Two million anti-war demonstrators can stream though the streets of London and be politically ignored, but a few tens of thousands in central Kiev are proclaimed to be “the people”, while the Ukrainian police, courts and governmental institutions are discounted as instruments of oppression.
They won’t be discounted after they open fire. And given what they surely see as open rebellion, they will be opening fire soon enough, methinks - as would the military in any country faced with the same.
Enormous rallies have been held in Kiev in support of the prime minister, Viktor Yanukovich, but they are not shown on our TV screens. The demonstrations in favour of Viktor Yushchenko have laser lights, plasma screens, sophisticated sound systems, rock concerts, tents to camp in and huge quantities of orange clothing; yet we happily dupe ourselves that they are spontaneous.
The blindness extends even to the posters which the “pro-democracy” group, Pora, has plastered all over Ukraine, depicting a jackboot crushing a beetle, an allegory of what Pora wants to do to its opponents.
Gee, what political philospohy does a jackboot remind you of?
Pora continues to be presented as an innocent band of students having fun in spite of the fact that - like its sister organisations in Serbia and Georgia, Otpor and Kmara - Pora is an organisation created and financed by Washington.
More on Pora
US-Supported OTPOR now Ignites Ukraine
OTPOR is the mother group, financed by the US and George Soros among others, and they’ve been up to much destabilizing mischief elsewhere. Pora is their group in Ukraine. This is hardly a spontaneous uprising, more like a carefully planned coup attempt.
A student movement calling themselves PORA (”The Time Has Come”) has “perfectly” applied OTPOR’s tactics in it’s attempt to overthrow the pro-Russian administration in Ukraine.
Advisers and US election experts lead the Ukrainians as well.
In the so-called “Velvet Revolutions” in these three countries, US ambassadors iplayed a leading role. The “official” cost of the US supported Ukrainian opposition will be at least $14 million.
Get the picture?
Yet the Bushies are clumsy and rather than suceeding in seizing power though a stooge, their result will probably be an chaos with no one in charge.
And then there’s Yushchenko’s mystery ailment
Yushchenko accused the Ukrainian authorities of poisoning him. His detractors suggested he’d eaten some bad sushi. Adding to the intrigue, the Austrian doctors who treated him have asked foreign experts to help determine if his symptoms may have been caused by toxins found in biological weapons.
Yushchenko was known for his ruggedly handsome, almost movie-star looks. Now his complexion is pockmarked and a sickly green. His face is haggard, swollen and partially paralysed. One eye often tears up.
Bush’s Social Security plan to require vast borrowing
Bob Morris @ Nov 28th 2004 09:43 - Category: Unfiled ;
Proponents say the necessary amount of borrowing could vary widely, from hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars over a decade.
Why is such massive borrowing needed?
Under the current system, the payroll tax levied on workers goes to benefits for people who are already retired. Personal accounts would be paid for out of the same pool of money; they would allow workers to divert a portion of their payroll taxes into accounts invested in mutual funds or other investments.
The money going into the accounts would therefore no longer be available to pay benefits to current retirees.
So they want to take a reasonably solvent, quite workable system, and instead of fixing it, break it entirely, taking huge loans to finance it.
The beneficary here is Wall Street and the ruling elite. They are the ones who will make the money on the loans, and charge fat fees to “manage” the privatized investment accounts.
This is yet another Bush-led transfer of money from the middle class to the already wealthy. Retirees will be hurt, pensions slashed, all so a tiny few can get wealthier. Nowhere in these plans is an explanation of how this will aid retirees and preserve pensions.
Does your Social Security money feel safer knowing Bush wants to privatize it? I didn’t think so.
Ukraine showdown
Bob Morris @ Nov 28th 2004 09:26 - Category: Unfiled ;
Ukraine President calls for blockade to end
Riot police are surrounding the protestors who have been encamped for four days, blocking access to government buildings. I doubt this will end peacefully.
Pro-Russia Ukraine regions threaten to split off if Yuchchenko is elected.
Ukraine’s Yanukovich bastions in the southeast have warned that they would declare greater autonomy if their candidate fails to become president, fanning fears that the crisis could split the country.
Better a fascist capitalist than a socialist?
Bob Morris @ Nov 27th 2004 08:57 - Category: Unfiled ;
Shadow of anti-semitism over Ukraine’s disputed election
by British Helsinki Human Rights Group
Western television viewers and newspaper readers are being fed on a diet of propaganda about the current crisis in Ukraine. The orange flags and uniforms of the opposition fill our screens and decorate the front pages. “People power” and Western-orientated democrats are on the march against evil ex-communist oligarchs. Good is battling against evil for the soul of Ukraine.
Sadly it is not so simple. Western media and governments may have edited out the manifestations of extreme nationalism and anti-Semitism which disfigure the Ukrainian opposition’s rabble-rousing but history will record that in the run up to the disputed presidential elections, key opposition leaders, including Viktor Yushchenko, Julia Timoshenko and Alexander Moroz, defended anti-Semitic publications and accepted the backing of neo-Nazi groups as well as US and EU and so-called “civic society” NGOs. Nor were the anti-Semtic apologetics of the Ukrainian opposition unknown to key OSCE observers and EU parliamentarians who nevertheless ignored the dark shadow across Yushchenko’s campaign preferring instead to abuse his rival.
One wonders why D.C. and Europe are so determined to influence and intervene in an election in another country, given their oft-mouthed santimonious platitudes about respecting internal affairs in another country?
It is not the business of Washington or London or Ottawa to decide whether they accept the election results in the Ukraine. It is for the sovereign Ukrainian institutions to solve the process through the proper and existing legislative process, namely an examination of the complaints by the supreme court and the subsequent publishing of the results.
Hmm, maybe this has something to do with it…
Ukrainians are capable of solving their own problems without outside interference from the countries who are dying to install Yushchenko, no doubt so that lucrative arms contracts can be delivered to NATO and military bases set up on Russia’s borders.
Do as I say, not as I do?
Therefore the declaration by a number of western countries that they did not accept the result obtained by the Ukrainian Central Election Committee is ludicrous. What if the rest of the world tells the United States of America that it does not accept the result of the ballot in Ohio because it was rigged?
This article from a leading Rissian newspaper, continues.
The strongarm tactics used by the western stooge, Yushchenko, are typical of the anti-democratic processes set in motion by a rampant and militant Washington, crushed in the grip on a monetarist, neo-conservative crypto-fascist clique of elitists, whose corporate greed speaks louder than the mores of internacional diplomacy and whose thirst to dominate the world’s resources in the lifetimes of Rumsfeld and Cheney throws any moral concept into the trash bin.
Turk compares U.S. to Hitler
Bob Morris @ Nov 27th 2004 08:41 - Category: Unfiled ;
An official says the ‘genocide’ being committed in Iraq is the worst in human history.
The head of Turkey’s parliamentary human rights group has accused Washington of genocide in Iraq and behaving worse than Adolf Hitler, in remarks that underscore the depth of Turkish opposition to U.S. policy in the region.
Turkey used to be an ally, but then the Bushies have demonstrated a continuing genius for turning friends into opponents. This one bodes badly for Israel, as Turkey was about their only friend in the region.
If even part of this is true…
Bob Morris @ Nov 27th 2004 08:38 - Category: Unfiled ;
Saudis, Enron money helped pay for US rigged election
But we’re closing hospitals
Bob Morris @ Nov 26th 2004 10:34 - Category: Unfiled ;
Flu pandemic inevitable, plans needed urgently -WHO
Real estate prices are correcting in Los Angeles
Bob Morris @ Nov 26th 2004 08:39 - Category: Unfiled ;
After a startling rise in prices over the past several years, home prices in L.A. are dropping. My real estate agent tells me homes he showed a month ago at $899,000 are now $799,999 and that this drop started about a month ago with prices now 10-15% lower.
My condo just went into escrow. By previous L.A. standards, it took an eternity to sell - over three weeks. Two months ago it probably would have sold in a week, and at a higher price. Given the psychotic increase in price in the 33 months I owned it, I’m hardly complaining.
Why did I sell the condo?
Because Miss Monica (Sue Slater) and I are getting married Dec. 30, that’s why!
And the dollar will probably go lower
Bob Morris @ Nov 26th 2004 08:17 - Category: Unfiled ;
Dollar’s record low levels contributed to the record rise in gold prices to $450 an ounce. This is the highest price in 16 years as gold began to be increasingly viewed as an alternative investment.
Much of the fall of the dollar is due to the ballooning deficit caused by the immense amounts of money being spent on the Iraq war.
Those with money sitting around getting 1.5% in a savings account might want to look at the PIMCO Real Return funds, which invest in inflation-indexed bonds, with a current YTD return of almost 7%.
Cannon fodder
Bob Morris @ Nov 26th 2004 08:08 - Category: Unfiled ;
Guardsmen ”from California describe a prison-like, demoralized camp in New Mexico that’s short on gear and setting them up for high casualties.”
These are US troops being treated this way - by the US military!
Big surprise, huh?
Bob Morris @ Nov 24th 2004 09:33 - Category: Unfiled ;
The U.S. government knew of a plot to oust Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in the weeks before a 2002 military coup that briefly unseated him, newly released CIA documents show, despite White House claims to the contrary.
“This is substantive evidence that the CIA knew in advance about the coup, and it is clear that this intelligence was distributed to dozens of members of the Bush administration, giving them knowledge of coup plotting,” said Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archives.
Chavez, of course, returned to office a few days later, the coup failed, and the left is on the ascendant in Latin America.
Kos goes Socialist!
Bob Morris @ Nov 24th 2004 09:31 - Category: Unfiled ;
Labor Is The Source of All Wealth.
. . . so went the motto of the labor movement during the first real boom of labor organizing, around the turn of the last century. It’s an intuitive idea — without work, there is no food, no power, no industry, no construction. Without labor, all the money in the world is little but colored paper. As Joe Hill wrote in a more radical time,
If the workers take a notion,
They can stop all speeding trains;
Every ship upon the ocean
They can tie with mighty chains;
Every wheel in the creation,
Every mine and every mill,
Fleets and armies of the nation,
Will at their command stand still.
Which is, of course, true, although it’s certainly the case that working people in the US have never the kind of solidarity envisioned by Hill. I quote Hill’s verses simply to illustrate the elementary principle that it is only though human toil that wealth exists.
The Wobblies did have that kind of solidarity! The unionists who went on strike in the 30’s did too. Without them, we’d not have the 8 hour work day, safety regulations, and pensions. They fought, sometimes militantly, sometimes getting beaten by Pinkerton thugs hired by management. But in the end, they won. And they had plenty of solidarity. So, it’s happened before, and it can happen again. The history of labor in the US has been carefully erased, however at times, labor has been seriously militant. For example, in the 30’s in NYC on Labor Day, Communists had marches down one avenue, Socialists down another. Such militancy was nationwide and they got quite a lot accomplished.
But as Harold Meyerson brilliantly explains, the Bushies never let facts get in the way of some good winger ideology:
Though his reelection campaign brilliantly marketed President Bush’s anti-intellectualism, the truth is that his administration has trusted more to pure theory than virtually any modern president’s. The Iraq war is a triumph of ideology over the facts on the ground (it’s certainly not a triumph of anything else). And, as it’s currently shaping up, Bush’s second term looks to be even more theory-driven than his first.
Theory certainly is driving the administration’s tax policies. In his first term, Bush took an ax to the taxes on dividends and mega-estates. In his second term, according to a story by The Post’s Jonathan Weisman and Jeffrey H. Birnbaum, the president is looking at eliminating taxes on dividends and capital gains and creating generous tax shelters for all investment income. The theory here is that investment, not labor, is the real creator of wealth — so the taxes on investment income will be scrapped, while those on wages will keep rolling along.
It’s not theory that’s driving the Bushies. It’s that they are using theory as a philosophical cover for the immense and ongoing transfer of wealth from the middle class to the ultra-wealthy which is happening right now. Marxists call this divide the working class (who have only their labor to sell) vs. the bourgeoise (who own the means of production.) Thus, an M.D. who makes $200,000 a year is working class, because he doesn’t own the means of production. Increased taxes on the middle class, tax cuts for the super-rich, the ongoing looting of pension funds, the drive to “privatize” Social Security, bloated CEO salaries while workers get laid-off, etc.; these are all means of transferring wealth from the workers to the exploiters. That’s the Bush agenda.
And in the name of this theory, Bush seems willing to sacrifice much of the social compact that made America, in the second half of the 20th century, the first majority middle-class nation in human history.
As John Edwards — the message man of the 2004 primaries — so eloquently put it, Bush and his cronies favor wealth over work. And now they’re primed to enshrine their philosophy in law, even as it tears apart the American middle class.
If the middle class gets torn apart enough, they will get radicalized and get into the streets. It’s happened before, in many countries. Marxists call this “the contradictions of capitalism.”
Spam gets religion
Bob Morris @ Nov 24th 2004 08:54 - Category: Unfiled ;
The growth area in unsolicited e-mail is now messages that contain religious themes. And the bad news is that unlike commercial spam, it’s not illegal.
King/Drew trauma center in L.A. to close
Bob Morris @ Nov 23rd 2004 17:03 - Category: Unfiled ;
If you close a trauma center, people will die, there’s really no question about that. And to close a trauma center in a part of L.A. that desperately needs it, no matter how troubled the hospitial. seems criminal to me. Today, the Country Board of Supervisors voted to close it saying it was badly mismanaged and we can’t afford it anyway.
Hospitals all over L.A. have been closing, with more closures are coming. This is one of the more visible closings.
The war in Iraq costs 231 million a day - way more than what’s needed to keep the King/Drew trauma center open for a couple of years and to make the entire hospital solvent as well.
265 million = 4 billion?
Bob Morris @ Nov 23rd 2004 10:00 - Category: Unfiled ;
That’s what the California Insurance Commissioner apparently thinks, signing onto a deal for Wellpoint that will cost policyholders 4 billion. His price to protect the citizens of California was a paltry 265 million.
WellPoint’s deal with Anthem had been delayed for months by California Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi. The commissioner opposed it citing concerns about the rich bonuses it would bestow upon executives and fears that policyholders would end up paying $4 billion in transaction costs.
Garamendi relented this month when the companies agreed to earmark $265 million for California healthcare programs.
The transfer of wealth from the middle class to the ruling class continues unabated.
Why governments don’t like fuel-efficient cars
Bob Morris @ Nov 23rd 2004 09:59 - Category: Unfiled ;
Because it means less taxes paid on gasoline. So,, here in California a plan to put tracking devices in cars and charge drivers by the mile is being floated.
What a goofy idea! There are just so many reasons this couldn’t work. For example, the hack to crack such a device would probably be available within, oh, 15 minutes of the device being released. This would prompt an escalating race of California releasing a new device to foil the current crack, followed of course, by a new crack. Plus, the infrastructure for such a crazy idea, data from millions of cars each day being fed to a central computer system for billing seems 1) ponderous at best, 2) open to hacking, 3) expensive to maintain, and 4) <fill in the blanks>
Supporters, whose ranks include academics, urban planners and many transportation leaders, say that the tax on gasoline has not kept up with inflation. The tax has been stuck at 18 cents per gallon in California since 1994, and the additional federal tax is also about 18 cents. And as cars and trucks become more fuel efficient, it could get more difficult to collect enough funds to keep up with road construction costs.
So, rather than take the obvious route of raising the gas tax, which would be politically unpopular, they want track all California drivers. Why sure I want a tracking device in my car. Of course that data would never ever be misused to, say, monitor where antiwars organizer are driving - why that’s just paranoia, isn’t it? Of course it is…
Merry Christmas!
Bob Morris @ Nov 23rd 2004 09:56 - Category: Unfiled ;
More Doo-Dah tomfoolery!
Bob Morris @ Nov 22nd 2004 11:39 - Category: Unfiled ;
My camblog has more photos from the Doo Dah parade, including an Edsel police car…
More defeatism from the pretend opposition
Bob Morris @ Nov 22nd 2004 09:35 - Category: Unfiled ;
From an LA Times Op-Ed by Michael Kinsley
Has there ever before been a war that so many people disapproved of but so few wanted to stop? Have the reasons for starting a war ever been so thoroughly discredited without turning into reasons for ending it?
What a bizarre thing to say, that there are no reasons for ending the war. A majority, now oppose or feel uneasy about the war. These numbers will grow as the cost, both human and financial, of the war continues to escalate. But we need to be there in the streets, to be organizing, to be ready for this growing dissent, and not, as Kinsley is doing, wail that all is lost and hopeless.
What seems to be today’s antiwar position — it was a terrible mistake and it’s a terrible mess, but we can’t just walk away from it — was actually the pro-war position during Vietnam. In fact, it was close to official government policy for more than half the length of that war.
Rubbish. True, some antiwar groups, like Antiwar.com and United for Peace and Justice wavered and vacillated quite a lot at first, supporting the sanctions for example, but even they are now saying “Bring the troops home now.”
The ANSWER Coalition, who has been the lead organizer for most of the antiwar protests in the country, never wavered. “Bring the troops home now” has always been their slogan - as should be clear to anyone who has actually been to an antiwar demo or participated in the antiwar movement. Kinsley apparently has done neither.
Today’s antiwar cause doesn’t even have a movement, to speak of, let alone an agenda.
Again, rubbish. ANSWER has always had a clear agenda. Get in the streets. Organize. Don’t rely on the Democrats. Major change always is spearheaded by mass dissent.
Limousine liberals (this is a scathing term from the 60’s, a limousine liberal is someone who mouths platitudes but is never there at crunch time) like Kinsley do a disservice with their out of touch meanderings about how hopeless things are. Quite the contrary, the antiwar movement is united like never before, and growing fast.
