'We Strive to Be a Compassionate, Decent, Hopeful Society' by rue

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

'We Strive to Be a Compassionate, Decent, Hopeful Society'

POSTED BY: RUE
UPDATED: Thursday, July 6, 2006 09:56
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Wednesday, July 5, 2006 12:31 PM

I have a vote and I'm not afraid to use it!

SOTU

January 31, 2006
'We Strive to Be a Compassionate, Decent, Hopeful Society'

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Hunger In America Rises By 43 Percent Over Last Five Years
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/10/051029093925.htm

Study Finds Billions Of Health Insurance Dollars Used For Administrative Costs
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/11/051110215547.htm

Worker Tells of Response by FEMA
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/21/national/nationalspecial/21response.
html?th&emc=th

U.S. Budget Deficit Hits Record in Feb
For the first five months of the current budget year, revenues totaled $873.1 billion ... spending during this period totaled $1.09 trillion.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp--yn/content/article/2006/03/10/AR2006
031001138.html

The CEOs of those firms with the most underfunded pensions, on average, received 72% more than the average large company CEO. 46 large companies paid no federal income tax in 2003, despite collectively earning $30 billion in profits.
http://www.faireconomy.org/press/2005/EE2005_pr.html

18 superwealthy families are largely responsible for financing the lobbying campaign aimed at repealing the estate tax; the Senate is scheduled to take up repeal next month.
The families, worth $185.5 billion, have financed and coordinated the campaign and have, until now, managed to hide their participation behind the trade associations and business groups they have formed to represent their interests

Advice on Boss's Pay May Not Be So Independent
By GRETCHEN MORGENSON
As head of Verizon, Mr. Seidenberg received $19.4 million in salary, bonus, restricted stock and other compensation, 48 percent more than in the previous year.
Others with a stake in Verizon did not fare so well. When Verizon closed the books last year, it reported an earnings decline of 5.5 percent. And yet, according to the committee of Verizon's board that determines his compensation, Mr. Seidenberg earned his pay last year as the company exceeded "challenging" performance benchmarks.

Bush Ordered Declassification, Official Says while The National Archives agreed to seal previously public CIA and Pentagon records and to keep silent about U.S. intelligence's role in the reclassification.

Microsoft creates plan for sharing security info with governments
http://www.gcn.com/vol1_no1/daily-updates/34955-1.html

Documents Reveal AT&T-NSA Surveillance Details Kevin Fogarty - eWEEK

The government (abruptly ended) an inquiry into a warrantless eavesdropping program because the National Security Agency refused to grant Justice Department lawyers the necessary security clearance.

The FBI secretly sought information last year on 3,501 U.S. citizens and legal residents from their banks and credit card, telephone and Internet companies without a court's approval, the Justice Department said Friday.

The government asked a federal judge here Friday to dismiss a civil liberties lawsuit against the AT&T Corporation because of a possibility that military and state secrets would otherwise be disclosed.

But the Bush administration is exploring a more radical measure to protect information it says is vital to national security: the criminal prosecution of reporters under the espionage laws.

In Secret Unit's 'Black Room,' a Grim Portrait of U.S. Abuse (Task Force 6-26)
It is difficult to compare the conditions at the camp (Camp Nama) with those at Abu Ghraib because so little is known about the secret compound, which was off limits even to the Red Cross.

Torture and inhumane treatment are "widespread" in U.S.-run detention centers in Afghanistan, Iraq, Cuba and elsewhere despite Washington's denials, Amnesty International said on Wednesday.

9/11 Group Says White House Has Not Provided Files
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/07/politics/07panel.html?oref=login

Chemical Used In Food Containers Disrupts Brain Development
URL: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/12/051203123328.htm

[bKonrad Steffen directs the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado at Boulder, a joint NOAA-university institute with a $40 million annual budget. Steffen studies the Greenland ice sheet, and when his work was cited last spring in a major international report on climate change in the Arctic, he and another NOAA lab director from Alaska received a call from Mahoney in which he told them not to give reporters their opinions on global warming.

Study Bolsters Greenhouse Effect Theory, Solves Ice Age Mystery
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/01/050128223438.htm

E.P.A. Accused of a Predetermined Finding on Mercury (Claimed by the USEPAs IG: senior management instructed staff members to arrive at a predetermined conclusion favoring industry)
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/04/national/04mercury.html?th

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Wednesday, July 5, 2006 12:44 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Iraq vets face another battle -- homelessness

Quote:
About 350 nonprofit service organizations are working with the Department of Veterans Affairs to help veterans. But the veterans still land on a hard bottom line: Almost half of America's 2.7 million disabled veterans receive $337 or less a month in benefits, according to the government. Fewer than one-tenth are rated 100 percent disabled, meaning they get $2,393 a month, tax free.

www.cnn.com/2006/US/07/05/homeless.vet.ap/index.html

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Don't piss in my face and tell me it's raining.

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Wednesday, July 5, 2006 3:39 PM

RUE

I have a vote and I'm not afraid to use it!

'We Strive to Be a Compassionate, Decent, Hopeful Society'

HOW DICK CHENEY SPENT HIS SUMMER VACATION By Ted Rall

U.S. Plants Seeds of Disaster in Kazakhstan

NEW YORK--Each summer, America's financial elite head for the Hamptons. But bold men who lust for power have an agenda far more ambitious than the seduction of Botox babes at cocktail parties where grown men wear pastels. They go where the real action is: the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan, home to the world's largest untapped oil reserves.

Dick Cheney has been spending a lot of time in the huge Central Asian republic, so much so that its windswept steppes have become his new Secret Undisclosed Location. Mostly the Acting President hangs out in Kazakhstan's landlocked hinterlands wooing a reviled dictator, the only ruler the nation has known since being evicted by the USSR in 1991. Thanks in part to more than $50 million a year in U.S. taxpayer money and ever-soaring bundles of military aid, Cheney hopes to secure "total energy dominance" via lucrative oil pipeline deals on behalf of GOP-connected energy companies.

Cheney is also sending a terrible message to the world's most repressive regimes: the United States still cares more about oil than democracy.

The Bush Administration has unleashed a full-court press of shuttle diplomacy in an effort to keep Nursultan Nazarbayev out of the orbit of Russia and China, America's rivals in the region. On May 5 Cheney appeared in the capital city of Astana with Nazarbayev at his side, hailing Kazakhstan's supposed political and economic liberalization. Declaring the police state America's "strategic partner," the veep invited Nazarbeyev to the White House this September for an official state visit with Bush--an honor recently denied to the president of China on human rights grounds. "I think the [Kazakh] record speaks for itself," Cheney said.

Indeed it does.

Kazakh opposition leader Galymzhan Zhakiyanov was scheduled to meet with Cheney in Astana. "I wanted to tell him about the problems we've faced building freedom and democracy here in Kazakhstan," he said, "and I wanted to remind Cheney of what President Bush said in his second inauguration speech--that the freedom and prosperity of citizens in the U.S. depends on the freedom and democracy of other countries in the world." But he never got to deliver that message, having been arrested by Kazakhstan's notorious militsia military police. Cheney didn't make a peep about Zhakiyanov's missed appointment.

"In reality," reports the Chicago Tribune, "most analysts agree Kazakhstan remains an authoritarian regime where opposition parties are banned without cause, independent media outlets are routinely shut down and corruption is rife throughout the government. In recent months, merely belonging to the opposition movement has become dangerous. Two prominent critics of the Kazakh government have been found shot to death since last fall. The death of one of those men, Zamanbek Nurkadilov, was ruled a suicide even though he had been shot three times, twice in the chest and once in the head."

Nurkadilov's body was discovered shortly after Bush wrote Nazarbayev to ask him "to make sure that economic reforms are backed up with bold democratic reforms" in time for the upcoming 2005 presidential election. Even though Nazarbayev won a Saddam-esque 91 percent of the vote in polling universally declared fraudulent by international observers, Bush didn't say a word.

After the "election," the bodies of outspoken former minister Altynbek Sarsenbaev and four members of his Nagyz Ak Zhol Party, reported Radio Free Europe, "were discovered on a desolate stretch of road outside Almaty on February 13, [2006], their bodies riddled with bullets and their hands bound behind their backs." As I write in my upcoming book about U.S. involvement in Central Asia, Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?, the Kazakh NSC (former KGB) "pinned the blame on Erzhan Utembaev, a former deputy prime minister then serving as head of administration of the Kazakh Senate, but political opponents and some militsia sources say Nazarbayev personally paid sixty thousand dollars to have him silenced." Again, there was no condemnation from the White House.

Cheney showed up to kiss up less than three months after the killings. The Bush Administration, hoping to convince the ruthless Nazarbayev to join its U.S.-backed Baku-Ceyhan Trans-Caucasus oil pipeline, remained silent about the Kazakh tyrant's unpleasant practice of dispatching his political critics.

"Since Cheney's May 5 visit with Nazarbayev," writes the Tribune, "opposition leaders pushing for democratic change in Kazakhstan are beginning to wonder about the Bush administration's commitment to the president's inauguration rhetoric."

Sergei Duvanov, deputy director of the Kazakhstan International Bureau for Human Rights and Rule of Law, accuses the U.S. of siding with vicious dictators against the millions of people they oppress. "Nazarbayev was very glad to hear what Cheney had to say, and understood it as carte blanche to come down harder on the opposition," Duvanov, a former journalist who spent a year and a half in a Kazakh prison on rape charges trumped up to silence his pro-democracy reporting, said. "He now understands that building democracy is not as important as oil and economic stability."

At first glance Kazakhstan appears to be booming. The country is "overrun with construction cranes," reports the New York Times. Almaty has its first French restaurant. There's even a Kazakh edition of Cosmopolitan magazine. But there are two economies, one for a tiny portion of wealthy elites, the other for everyone else. The Red Cross says that "three-quarters of Kazakhstan's 15.7 million population [lives] below the poverty line." Poverty is getting worse as spending by corrupt government officials and their oil-connected benefactors fuels inflation.

Someday, inevitably, those millions of Kazakhs will liberate themselves from Nazarbayev's rule. They, not him, will control the world's largest untapped oil reserves. And they won't forget America's role in prolonging their agony.

(Ted Rall is the author of "Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?," an analysis of America's next big foreign policy challenge.)

Copyright © 2006 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.

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Wednesday, July 5, 2006 4:55 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

THIS is what our young men and women are fighting and dying for? Why we've mortaged our children's future with a $16,000 "birth tax"?

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Don't piss in my face and tell me it's raining.

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Thursday, July 6, 2006 5:14 AM

GEEZER

Keep the Shiny side up

Quote:
Originally posted by rue:
Hunger In America Rises By 43 Percent Over Last Five Years
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/10/051029093925.htm

While I agree that the problem of hunger in America needs to be addressed, I must admit that the gymnastics required to get this frightening 43% figure go a bit beyond the bounds.

First why 1999 compared to 2004? That's easy if you look at percent of "food-insecure households with hunger" since 1998: 1998 = 3.7%, 1999 = 3.0%, 2000 = 3.1%, 2002 = 3.3%, 2003 = 3.3%, 2003 = 3.5%, 2004 = 3.9%. And the widest spread is 1999 to 2004. Why not use 1998, the earliest year in the USDA report? 1998 to 2003 actually shows an improvement, but that doesn't support the premise, does it?

Okay, so we have a .9% increase in "food-insecure households with hunger" as a percent of total households between 1999 and 2004. How does this get to 43%? Well, first there's an 8% increase in the number of households between 1999 and 2006. so even if the percentages stayed the same, there'd still be an 8% increase in the actual number of households. And there actually is a 30% difference between 3.0% and 3.9%. So we have an increase from 3.1 million to 4.4 million "food-insecure households with hunger" between 1999 and 2004. 1.1 million households is a significant number, but not as much publicity impact as a "43% increase in the hungry".

Now, let's examine "food-insecure households with hunger". USDA defines these thusly. "All households classified as food insecure with hunger have reported multiple indications of reduced food intake and disrupted eating patterns due to inadequate resources for food, although not all have directly reported that household members were hungry."
USDA also notes,"When interpreting food security statistics, it is important to keep in mind that households are classified as food insecure or food insecure with hunger if they experienced the condition at any time during the previous 12 months.
The rates of food insecurity and hunger on any given day are far below the annual rates. For example, the prevalence of hunger on an average day during the 30-day period from mid-November to mid-December 2004 is estimated to have been about 14-19 percent of the annual rate (see box), or 0.5-0.8 percent of households (614,000-854,000 households)."

So, "Hunger In America Rises By 43 Percent Over Last Five Years" is a good soundbite, but as a representation of the true picture, it's sort'a bogus.

Once again, I am in no way trying to dismiss the problem of hunger in the US, but the facts in the USDA report can stand on their on to raise the issue, without this kind of spin.

"Keep the Shiny side up"

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Thursday, July 6, 2006 7:58 AM

HERO

Quote:
Originally posted by Geezer:
While I agree that the problem of hunger in America needs to be addressed,

I did my part to address it a little over an hour ago...ham sandwich on that new square bagel bread. Very good. I plan a follow up program this evening with steakburgers on the grill...I'll let you know if it works to allieve the suffering we all feel.

H

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Thursday, July 6, 2006 9:56 AM

CHRISISALL

Quote:
Originally posted by SignyM:
THIS is what our young men and women are fighting and dying for? Why we've mortaged our children's future with a $16,000 "birth tax"?

Why do I get this mental picture of sharks circling tighter and tighter around a dwindling chunk of whale?

Chrisisall

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