Obama still flush with cash from financial sector despite frosty relations

The WaPost reports that despite frosty relations with the titans of Wall Street, President Obama has still managed to raise far more money this year from the financial and banking sector than Mitt Romney or any other Republican presidential candidate, according to new fundraising data.

As a result, Obama has brought in more money from employees of banks, hedge funds and other financial service companies than all of the GOP candidates combined, according to a Washington Post analysis of contribution data. The numbers show that Obama retains a persistent reservoir of support among Democratic financiers who have backed him since he was an underdog presidential candidate four years ago.

What more do you need to know about whose side Obama is really on?

So long, Jerry Schad

Jerry Schad died on Thursday, September 22, 2011. He was 61.

Jerry wrote the Roam-O-Rama outdoors column for the Reader from 1993 to 2011. The undisputed expert on San Diego backcountry, Jerry loved to explore the desert ... and the rougher it got, the better he liked it.

Jerry also authored 16 books, including “Afoot & Afield in San Diego County,” the bible of San Diego hiking.

Jerry was diagnosed in March with final-stage kidney cancer and spent his last months in the care of his wife, Peg Reiter, in their downtown San Diego condominium. They got married shortly after the diagnosis.

The Death of Democracy

The NYTimes has an important story on the growing "wariness, even contempt, toward traditional politicians and the democratic political process they preside over."

“Our parents are grateful because they’re voting,” said Marta Solanas, 27, referring to older Spaniards’ decades spent under the Franco dictatorship. “We’re the first generation to say that voting is worthless.”

I always suspected democracy never stood a chance once it became a marketable commodity under capitalism, and once citizens were turned into consumers.

Now the question arises: What next?

Well, in point of fact the question has already been answered. In the US, in Russia, in the UK, in Greece, in Spain, and in scores of other deteriorating polities, the answer has been the same: the unbridled, unashamed (albeit untrumpeted) embrace of the Iron Law of Oligarchy. Kudos to Robert Michels (1875-1936) for having such foresight.

Volunteerism is Killing the Middle Class: Why buy the cow when you get the milk for free?

Have you ever done volunteer work you really loved, but found yourself saying, "Wow, I wish I could do this a a 'real' job"?

Well, chances are that in the past it would have been a paid job. However, the U.S. is so awash in people who are willing to do the work for free, that those who benefit from this spirit of volunteerism -- non-profits, institutions, and even for-profit healthcare and other operations -- simply have no need or incentive to staff these jobs as paid, regular employment.

I run into these well-meaning folks everywhere. Staffing state park and wildlife refuge visitor centers. Helping care for critters at the zoo or the shelter. Doing social interaction work at hospitals. Giving out tax assistance. Helping to restore an ecosystem.

Any of these would make great careers and jobs if there weren't already some bored or otherwise idle oldster willing to do the work for free. Instead, we have millions of Americans at risk of permanent unemployment, while gammy and grampy assuage their consciences for past greed or avarice by giving up free labor in their 'golden' years. (I don't include here the millions of young folks who do "volunteer" work to put on their college entrance essays. In my experience, for the most part they're just fucking around and don't really do much actual work. Thus, they're not the main problem.)

Ironically, outfits like Volunteer Match make a good living by exploiting the urge of many Americans to do for others for free. Where else but in America?

35 bodies dumped on road as Mexican drug war continues

The UK Guardian reports that masked gunmen have blocked traffic on a busy avenue in the Mexican coastal city of Boca del Rio and dumped the bodies of 35 murder victims in front of motorists. Veracruz state attorney general Reynaldo Escobar Pérez said the bodies were left piled in two trucks and on the ground of an underpass. The Gulf and Zetas drug cartels have been locked in a bloody war for control in Veracruz state over the last year.

To put this in context a bit ... the U.S.'s so-called "war on drugs" is every bit the policy failure that prohibition was to U.S. history in the early 20th century. But since we've cleverly figured out a way to offshore the worst socio-economic effects -- organised crime, mass murder, political and police assassinations, etc. -- there's no motivation whatsoever in this country to address this enormous policy failure.

We are such assholes in the world.

We're so screwed

If you can't wrap your head around the need for Government-stimulated job growth, Jim Jubak notes another rationale for spending on transportation. While both Dems and ReThugs dither about how best to drown government in Gover Norquist's bathtub ...

China is building airports, expanding its railway freight network, and adding thousands of miles of roads. U.S. ports fall further behind Hong Kong and Singapore and Vancouver by the day—and it’s not clear that any U.S. port will be ready for the bigger ships that will come sailing through an expanded Panama Canal. The 2009 “Report Card for America’s Infrastructure” by the American Society of Civil Engineers gave U.S. roads and bridges a grade of D- and the country’s transit systems got a D. According to the report 36% of major urban highways were congested—that means goods and people are sitting in traffic raising the cost of doing just about everything—and 33% of major roads were in poor or mediocre condition.

Short-sightedness ain't in it.

The C.I.A. as Judge, Jury, and Executioner

The Obama administration has vastly expanded the shadow war against foreign terrorists, using military special operations units and the C.I.A. to track down and kill thousands of individuals in a dozen countries.

There is a running argument about how many "non-combatants" have become collateral damage during all this extra-territorial killing. The C.I.A. claims that since 2001, 2,000 militants, and 50 noncombatants have died at their hands.

A new report by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism at City University in London tells a different story. It says that most of the 1,842 people killed in more than 230 strikes ordered by President Obama in Pakistan since 2008 were militants, but at least 218 may have been civilians. Mind you, that's just in Pakistan, and just since Barack Obama became president.

***

There seems little question that the drone program has been successful, enabling the United States to disrupt Al Qaeda and its allies in Pakistan’s lawless border region.

At the same time, no one seems interested in asking: Who decides that any particular individual is "guilty" of being a "terrorist," what is the burden of "proof," what level of "terrorist" activity merits the death penalty, and who objectively reviews that decision before Obama's dark-ops troops pull the trigger yet again?

We so suck

A story in the Guardian details how US and British intelligence quickly embraced Col. Gaddafi after he came in from the diplomatic cold in 2004.

One of Libya's senior rebel commanders has demanded an apology from the British and American governments following the discovery of secret documents which show MI6 and the CIA were involved in a plot that led to his capture and torture. Abdul Hakim Belhaj, the new security commander in Tripoli, told the Guardian he was considering suing over the episode.

Belhaj says he was captured and tortured in Bangkok by CIA agents, then turned over to Libya, where he was tortured for several more years. "I wasn't allowed a bath for three years and I didn't see the sun for one year," he told the Guardian. "They hung me from the wall and kept me in an isolation cell. I was regularly tortured."

***

Yes, I know it's a complicated, dangerous world. But when you lie down with despots and dictators, you will eventually have to deal with their victims. At least that's so as long as you care about democratic self-rule as a long-term goal for all peoples.

Krugman doesn't have Dem Disease

As do I ...

I still don’t know why the Obama administration was so quick to accept defeat in the war of ideas, but the fact is that it surrendered very early in the game. In early 2009, John Boehner, now the speaker of the House, was widely and rightly mocked for declaring that since families were suffering, the government should tighten its own belt. That’s Herbert Hoover economics, and it’s as wrong now as it was in the 1930s. But, in the 2010 State of the Union address, President Obama adopted exactly the same metaphor and began using it incessantly.

***

So who pays the price for this unfortunate bipartisanship? The increasingly hopeless unemployed, of course.

More ...

UPDATE: Actually, David Roberts over at Grist seems to have it figured out:

Dem Disease is an affliction that causes sufferers to prioritize being viewed as reasonable over securing reasonable policy. The primary symptom is a Tourette's-like inability to keep from revealing how much one is willing to concede in negotiations ... before negotiations begin. (Obama is, of course, a chronic sufferer -- though he goes beyond revealing what he's willing to concede to actually conceding it before negotiations begin, a sure sign the disease has reached its advanced stages.)

Revealed: US spy operation that manipulates social media

Shocking! Who would have ever thought The Man would exploit "social media" for his own ends?!

Personally, I always thought that the curious widespread governmental endorsement of "social media" was about getting Americans more and more comfortable with the idea that they have no privacy anymore. What better way to do that than by getting the masses to bare all willingly on-line?

But this works too.

***

The US military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.

A Californian corporation has been awarded a contract with United States Central Command (Centcom), which oversees US armed operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, to develop what is described as an "online persona management service" that will allow one US serviceman or woman to control up to 10 separate identities based all over the world.

The project has been likened by web experts to China's attempts to control and restrict free speech on the internet. Critics are likely to complain that it will allow the US military to create a false consensus in online conversations, crowd out unwelcome opinions and smother commentaries or reports that do not correspond with its own objectives.

More from the Guardian ...

First, kill all the cats

The USFWS reports that free-roaming domestic cats may kill hundreds of millions of songbirds and other avian species every year.

That's despicable. Please keep your damn cat in the house. While you're at it, spay or neuter it.

Impending breakthrough

Indeed. George Bush pissed away uncounted hundreds of billions waging an illicit, unnecessary war. Then hundreds of billions more bailing out Wall Street. But it's Spelunker Obama who fell for the fiscal restraint scam.

Dems are dopes.

Hexavalent Chromium

The Post reports that the Environmental Working Group (EWG) has analyzed the drinking water in 35 cities across the United States and found that most contained hexavalent chromium, a probable carcinogen that was made famous by the film "Erin Brockovich."

The study, which will be released Monday, is the first nationwide analysis of hexavalent chromium in drinking water to be made public. It comes as the EPA is considering whether to set a limit for hexavalent chromium in tap water. The agency is reviewing the chemical after the National Toxicology Program, part of the National Institutes of Health, deemed it a "probable carcinogen" in 2008.

Last year, California took the first step in limiting the amount of hexavalent chromium in drinking water by proposing a "public health goal" for safe levels of 0.06 parts per billion. If California does set a limit, it would be the first in the nation.

Ironically, all those rich Californians who moved to Bend, Ore., appear to have 'escaped' right into one of the worst contamination situations discovered so far.

But not to worry. I'm sure this'll be deemed one of those "job-killing" unnecessary regulations.

Peak Oil

Jim Kunstler's been warning about peak oil for years. But now, via Wikileaks, we learn that the US secretly fears that Saudi Arabia, the world's largest crude oil exporter, really may not have enough reserves to prevent oil prices escalating, confidential cables from its embassy in Riyadh show.

The cables, released by WikiLeaks, urge Washington to take seriously a warning from a senior Saudi government oil executive that the kingdom's crude oil reserves may have been overstated by as much as 300bn barrels – nearly 40%.

So far, we've been dodging a huge bullet that would arrive in the form of out-of-control turmoil in Egypt. Peak oil, together with turmoil that, say, closes the Suez Canal, could really put the U.S. nascent recovery (whatever that means) on its arse.

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