Photo from Steve Rhodes’ photostream on Flickr.

IndyBay has reports and more photos. Counter-protesters greatly outnumbered Minutemen.

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The demand for wind technicians, those who can service a wind turbine, is so strong that colleges have trouble keeping students in class until they graduate - because wind companies keep hiring them after just a few months of school.

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California governor and centi-millionaire Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a draconian order today slashing the pay of tens of thousands of state employees to $6.65 an hour (until a budget is passed, then they get retroactive pay)

Gosh, I’m sure my friend who works for a state agency in a professional capacity should have no problem paying the mortgage on $6.65 an hour and that his mortgage company will certainly be understanding… Multiply that by 200,000, the number of employees getting the pay-cut, and you can see the financial devastation this will create for people who have nothing to do with passing a budget.

The state controller says he will refuse to implement the order because it would invite lawsuits from unions and hurt workers so lots of legal fireworks certainly will be forthcoming.

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- Plans to cleanse Beijing of smog not working despite previous closure of thousands of factories and banning automobiles.

- Water diverted from needy regions to prettify Beijing. Electricity too. Oh heck, no foreigners will see those rural peasants, so who cares if they go thirsty in the dark.

- China reneges on pledge to allow open Internet access during Olympics. If you can’t find bad things on the net while in Beijing then they must not exist, apparently.

Wikipedia: “‘Potemkin village‘ has come to mean, especially in a political context, any hollow or false construct, physical or figurative, meant to hide an undesirable or potentially damaging situation.”

Of course, every dissident in the region would like to do something spectacular while the whole world is watching. These Olympics could get real lively.

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New precast concrete sucks CO2 out of the air.

World’s largest onshore wind farm (909 megawatts) to be built in Oregon.

Algae based biofuels in plain English: Why it matters, how it works.

Utah’s solar fired furnace to power California for less than the cost of coal or gas.

2,000 MW wind farm will send power from Wyoming to Southern California.

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- The no naked shorts rule was finally enforced, but only for a privileged group of ailing financials.

- The Fed extended their emergency lending facility to January 2009.

- Cramer today was happily perky about how Citi could be a buy. (Sometimes he’s excellent. Other times, like this, he’s so obviously shilling that he makes a good contrary indicator.)

- FASB, as noted below, postponed the off-balance-sheet rule.

The jigsaw pieces are starting to fit. The government and big money are doing anything and everything they can to stave off what they clearly see as an impending, serious financial crisis (and not so coincidentally as a major threat to some fat cats.) But they’re doing in a deliberately opaque way that favors the wealthy over the economic well-being of the rest of us.

Damned if I didn’t think they were all die-hard capitalists. Didn’t they say they were? Let the strong kill the weak. Let the unhealthy die. That kind of thing. But now that the hunter has become the prey, they’re screaming protect me, bail me out, and I’m too important to let die.

This isn’t even state socialism. This is crony capitalism and an attempted theftocracy. But it won’t work. Those very same market forces they profess to believe in will, of course, prevail. (How could they not?) Look out below.

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From The Big Picture

Just when you think there is a glimmer of hope that some of these ne’er do well, lying, cheating, sniveling, cowardly bank CEOs might finally be forced to step up to the confessional and tell all, this comes along: FASB Postpones Off-Balance-Sheet Rule for a Year.

Which makes me wonder: How precarious is the financial health of the US banks and brokers that they need yet another year before they can, oh, I don’t know — disclose what they own on their balance sheets?

Things must be even worse then we think. How convenient this came just days after Merrill sold those CDOs for 22 cents on the dollar, something which presumably meant other banks and investment houses would now have to price their toxic garbage to realistic rather than fantasy values. Now they don’t have to. They can continue their charade of pretending the garbage has value, thus propping up their balance sheets.

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Nader actually said that on Sunday, according to Raw Story. He also called an elderly white woman a “political bigot.” A few months ago he said Obama was trying to “talk white.”

Nader has a consistent record of - and I’ll be charitable here - being tone deaf about race. Now he appears to be morphing into a cranky old man.

Ralphie boy, it’s time for you to retire. Before you completely destroy your legacy.

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From her Twitter stream, starting yesterday. (And people think Twitter is a foolish waste of time…)

I am totally serious. My Ob/Gyn was IN my vagina and an earthquake started rattling the room!

Wow. All it takes to go from 80 to 181 followers is a speculum in vagina during earthquake!

Was just interviewed via phone by senior writer at CNet about my vaginal earthquake experience

Just informed boss, as a result of my newfound Internet fame, am going to need my own parking space, or at least my vagina will

VagQuakes has gone mainstream. My ex boyfriend’s mom in Pittsburgh heard about the “incident” and e-mailed me to make sure I was OK

You might expect that my vagina would benefit from all this notoriety, but $20 says I’ll be eating macaroni and cheese on my couch tonight.

Just because I mention my vagina in a medical sense does not automatically mean I’d be interested in doing porn. Wait, how much will I get?

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My personal blog reviews the Krups Burr Grinder, which really does make for better coffee.

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The market partied yesterday because, hey, all the bad news must out by now, right? Well, we’ve heard that song and dance for some months now, haven’t we? Then more bad news comes out. (In the meantime, shorts like me lie in the weeds happily waiting for this little rally to start getting tired.)

Back to the party. More like a hangover, says Asymptotic Life, quoting this colorful trader.

“They’ve established a benchmark for everyone else,” said Michael Cohn, of Atlantis Asset Management. “These guys who have cash waiting on the sidelines for the final puke of these securities are now making phone calls trying to find out who else wants to puke, who else wants to sell at 22 cents on a dollar. There, that’s where the bottom hits.”

But Merrill only sold their hangover-producing older vintages (as they are called in CDO-land.)

The Merrill sale involved “U.S. super senior ABS CDO, the majority of which comprises older vintage collateral – 2005 and earlier.”

2 0 0 5 !

How many “Vintages” might we have left? 2 0 0 6, 2 0 0 7?

If the older vintages were like drinking Thunderbird, then the 2006-2007 vintages are akin to drinking Sterno - as they can be even more toxic.

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Readers comment on our post, Class and the Left.

Dave Riley on organizing

My view — and I know its one shared by others here in Australia in the  Socialist Alliance is that you do what you can given the options and opportunities and any one time. Any formation is going to be a product of many processes and different formats over time. But where the left stumbles is that it so often cannot address that question in the here and now. Instead there’s much talk of future parties and such but without the sense or substance to get there.

That’s the real problem: getting from “a” to “b” and then consciously navigating that journey.

Part of this may be because most Left groups are small and don’t have sufficient numbers, money, or power to effect mass change. So it all ends up kind of theoretical, from the outside looking in. One possible reason why (aside from the endless sectarian squabbling) is that the Left can use old phraseology and terms that are so loaded that they produce the opposite of the desired effect. Let me explain. Here in the States, where most people don’t know what socialism is, mentioning it too soon can drive away those you want to attract. Someone said that as soon as John Edwards mentioned the word “class” in his recent presidential primary campaign, he was dead meat. That’s just the way it is here. So, unless you want to launch a ten year campaign to educate the US public about the concept of class, then maybe new terms and ways of phrasing things are called for.

In the UK, things appear different. People know about class and what socialism is. I once read an interview with Reg Smythe, the comic strip artist who did Andy Capp. He mentioned in passing that in the UK you can tell a person’s class by the shoes they wear. I found that weird, as would many Americans, and asked two friends, one English, one from Wales, if it were true. Well of course, they answered, as if it was totally obvious. (Can you tell a person’s class in the US from their clothes? Sometimes. Sort of. But Symthe was very specific, to the point of delineating between the lower lower, lower middle, and upper lower classes. Such distinctions are not nearly as obvious here.)

So, the experience of class varies hugely from country to country, something organizers need to realize. Thus, tactics that work in one country may not in another. Most people in the US oppose the war and are also finding it harder to make ends meet. This would seem fertile recruiting grounds for the Left, but instead, the Left seems isolated, unable to connect on a mass level.

Vanguard parties don’t help. Those same tireless organizers in mass groups often are in little Left grouplets. There is an inherent conflict between doing mass work like antiwar organizing and recruiting for their little corpuscule. A very real danger is they will deliberately exclude people in the mass group who don’t follow their party line. This drives away the centrists and the curious, preventing the group from becoming a genuinely broad-based organization.

So how do we get from “a” to “b”? Ideas?

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Video tour of a beater of a house in Vista CA that sold for $465,000 in 2005. Yours for the bargain price of just $180,000. Jim’s commentary is a hoot.

Tip: Calculated Risk

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Readers comment on our post, Class and the Left.

DJ Mitchell wonders why left-leaning religious groups don’t get more cred.

Here’s an interesting question, noting that two of these examples are rooted in some form of religion: why is it that in much of the world, politicized religion leans left, but in this country it most often leans right? There are plenty of left-leaning religious people out there. The Unitarian victims of the TN church shooting are just one of many examples, and so are the Christian Peacemakers (Mennonites) who got kidnapped in Iraq last year. But they gain little political traction. Is it because the traditional Marxist Left considers religion anathema? Or is it that Americans as a whole, as the richest people in the world, have little use for leftist politics? Or is it something else?

Part of it, I think, is because religion got jacked by the extreme Right. Because, when you think about it, historically there have been plenty of progressive churches helping out with social causes. The civil rights movement of the 50’s-60’s was spearheaded by churches and MArtin Luther King. Unitarian Universalists played a major role in starting the No Nukes movement. Heck, the AFSC (Quakers) have been around longer most anyone.

Yes, Marxists sometimes do ridicule and attack people of faith, even when they are obvious potential friends and allies. And of course, religious folks have been known to attack Marxism, this is hardly a one-way street. All of which seems singularly self-defeating. People of faith and socialists are often at the forefront of social movements, doing the all the endless grunt work organizing. This is, in my opinion, because both have strong belief systems to sustain them.

Imagine what could be accomplished if hard Left and religious groups joined together in their common causes.

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15 tracks. Available digitally from Amazon for $6.99. DRM-free.

More from Rock The Net

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“So dirty even the Bush administration had to indict him,” says C&L.

All the felonies are for making false statements. I guess he didn’t see those two videos we just blogged about, a lawyer and a cop who say never talk to law enforcement. With politicians especially, the indictments often are for making false statements.

Like the cop in the video said, the suspect who thinks he’s smart, savvy, and important often will say things he wished he hadn’t.

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Filings for subprime class-action suits are up 400%.

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Doing so will save money - and lives. One reason: A decreased need to transport fuel to front lines in war zones means less chance of being attacked.

Yes, hybrid Humvees may be coming.

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Boing Boing features two videos, one by a lawyer, the other by a cop, that echo what a lawyer from the National Lawyers Guild once told me. If the FBI knocks on your door and says, can we ask you a few questions, your best and smartest response is to say No and close the door.

At the very beginning of the video, Prof. Duane addresses the — literally — unknowable extent to which federal laws and regulations have grown, so that even the government itself has no idea how many punishable offenses there are. It’s very easy for people with clean consciences to admit to violating laws and regulations they never knew existed.

What about the other side of the debate?

Responding in the same classroom to Prof. Duane, Office George Bruch of the Virginia Beach Police Department says … the professor is absolutely right.

Did you know that what you tell a cop that might help you if arrested can not be used in court because it’s hearsay? And that truthful statements can still come back and bite you? So, “any competent lawyer will always tell clients to keep their mouth shut” and save it for the trial. There’s lots more information like this on these videos.

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Intoxination says

Keep it up John. The more he sees that these attacks aren’t working, the worse they will get. Before long America will see the real McCain - Mr. Hot Headed, temper tantrum McCain. Then it will really be fun.

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Just a minor $5.7bn writedown and a desperate attempt to raise $8.5bn in new stock. But wait, didn’t they announce earnings last week yet made no mention of this?

Why did Merrill fail to disclose this write-down to shareholders when they reported on July 17th? The stock was $30.73 then; everyone who bought since then just got totally sandbagged.

Investigating who has been shorting the stock between then and now could prove instructive.

The financials traded today as if many people knew this was coming. How much non-public information leaked in advance of this announcement?

And how much other such information is “leaking.”

Merrill close at $24.35 today, down 11%. The earliest report of the Merrill writedowns on Yahoo News is after close of market. Seems like lots of people knew. (Other financials were down, but not nearly so much.)

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The Havana Note is a DC-based blog whose contributors include Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, a former aide to Colin Powell. They favor “engagement with Cuba” and, I assume, ending the embargo. They can be quite Cuba-friendly.

But they do think there’s co-dependent behavior going on, what with the “continued dysfunction of Washington’s dependence on the Embargo as a source of electoral votes” at witnessed by Sen. Joe Lieberman wanting an Omega 7 terrorist freed from US prison. Counterbalanced with that is Raul Castro as much as admitting the embargo isn’t isolating them but then using it as a pretext to justify more military spending and beef up security.

I argue that the embargo is more useful to Havana than to the Washington. Havana, unaffected by the sanctions, uses the blockade as an excuse to maintain a outsize military and to ramp up nationalism. It is an essential crutch for a Revolution that cannot find a modern, progressive pathway.

Hmmm. Substitute “Neoliberalism” for “Revolution” and they could be talking about the United States.

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Andy at Socialist Unity has a long, thoughtful post about why The Labour Party may well get crushed in the next general election. Much of the reason is due to Labour ignoring their traditional constituency as well as changing attitudes about class.

The proportion of society that is self-consciously working class is diminished, and there have been huge changes in social attitudes, and cultural diversification that have led to the traditionalist left being increasingly marginalised.

The common retort to which is that many of those who don’t see themselves as working class objectively still are, and if there was a higher level of class struggle then their political attitudes would change, but this puts the cart before the horse.

Traditional leftist analysis always comes back to this. If the masses knew how badly they were being shafted, then they’d do something. Well, maybe they do know but aren’t interested in your solution as presented. This ties in with Marxist dogma (which seeps in everywhere) that social change can only come from the working class,so, by God, if you aren’t what we define as working class then you must be worthless boojies. By that bizarre reckoning, Marx, Lenin, Castro, and Che would have been excluded because they came from well-off non-working class backgrounds.

In Marx’s day, class distinctions were distinct and obvious. But today, they are blurry and mashed-up. The Left unintentionally marginalizes itself by trying to force events of today to fit political theory from 150 years ago. Is class important? Absolutely. But since the Left is demonstrably not making inroads into organizing the working class (however it might be defined) then clearly new ideas and tactics are needed.

Mass change happens when the masses act together. Thus, to organize them you need to appeal (and listen) to all of them. Not just to those you deem most oppressed. More to the point, you need to light the fuse, provide initial help and guidance, then step out of the way and let them organize themselves. Because how else can a massive cross-class coalition happen except if it is organized by members of those very same classes? And not by hardcore Lefties trying to steer it.

Because too often such mass work is done by a little sectarian faction as a way to recruit for their organization. Sorry, can’t have it both ways. Either it’s really for the people or it’s for a Leftist corpuscle. The whole concept of a vanguard party somehow steering the masses in our current era of instant communications and feedback is archaic and no longer works - if it ever did. (Lenin didn’t do it the way Leninists often think he did. Instead, he had genuine mass support and encouraged internal disagreement.)

Socialist Unity ends with quoting Zoe Gannon

It is, and will always be, the challenge of the centre left to construct a cross class coalition – based on the hopes and fears of all; and understanding who the middle classes are and what they really care about is essential. How we do this is a challenge which will always be at the heart of the progressive left.

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The alleged human who murdered two people Sunday in a Tennessee church had a “stated hatred of the liberal movement” and apparently deliberately targeted a Unitarian church because of their liberal views.

KPD Chief Sterling Owen said … mental illness is not believed to be a factor in the suspect’s actions.

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Wide-ranging conspiracies do take place, whether you or I, or Charlie Brooker, are inclined to believe it or not.

So says Dan Hind in the Guardian responding to Brooker, who said 9/11 conspiracy theories are a bunch of paranoid hogtwaddle. So, maybe the Illuminati aren’t working with the Bilderbergers to control the world heroin market with the Queen of England.

But smaller, more plausible conspiracies certainly do exist, like, oh, a cabal in the White House pumping out lies and misinformation to allow them to invade Iraq. That kind of thing.

Then again, what is history but an ever-changing tale of conspiracies?

So it is hardly surprising that people – intelligent, level-headed people – are willing to believe that sophisticated conspiracies exist and that they are sometimes extremely important drivers of events. Given that they demonstrably do exist.

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