This Major City’s Drinking Water Was Fine. Then Came the Private Water Company.
[Community]
This Major City’s Drinking Water Was Fine. Then Came the Private Water Company.
by Julia Lurie
Posted May 29, 2017
“They will come in, rape your water company, and leave with money bags.”
This summer, 81,000 homes in Pittsburgh received a worrisome letter about their water. The local utility “has found elevated levels of lead in tap water samples in some homes,” it said. Seventeen percent of samples had high levels of the metal, which can cause “serious health problems.”
The situation was bad enough to attract the attention of Marc Edwards, the Virginia Tech professor who helped expose the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. “The levels in Pittsburgh are comparable to those reported in Flint,” he said in an interview with local TV station WPXI.
This was surprising because until this year, Pittsburgh’s lead levels had always been normal. So what happened? More…
John F Kennedy at 100
[Political]
John F Kennedy at 100
by Paul Craig Roberts
Posted May 28, 2017
This Memorial Day, Monday, May 29, 2017, is the 100th birthday of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States.
JFK was assassinated on November 22, 1963, as he approached the end of his third year in office. Researchers who spent years studying the evidence have concluded that President Kennedy was assassinated by a conspiracy between the CIA, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Secret Service. (See, for example, JFK and the Unspeakable by James W. Douglass)
Kennedy entered office as a cold warrior, but he learned from his interaction with the CIA and Joint Chiefs that the military/security complex had an agenda that was self-interested and a danger to humanity. He began working to defuse tensions with the Soviet Union. His rejections of plans to invade Cuba, of the Northwoods project, of a preemptive nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, and his intention to withdraw from Vietnam after his reelection, together with some of his speeches signaling a new approach to foreign policy in the nuclear age (see for example), convinced the military/security complex that he was a threat to their interests. More…
Google Panics and KILLS YouTube to Appease Mainstream Media and Corporate Advertisers
[Media]
Google Panics and KILLS YouTube to Appease Mainstream Media and Corporate Advertisers
By Nadeem Walayat
Posted May 28, 2017
Google has effectively decided to KILL YOUTUBE, turn it into an wholly advertiser friendly platform where there is no criticisms or review or political discourse or commentary, nothing controversial, no bad news. for instance where Tesco were never investigated for fraud or the BP oil spill never happened, no bad news reporting! A totalitarian youtube full of just puppies, kittens and mind numbing celeb vids , and lots of happy commercials for advertisers to flog their tripe on.
Of course creators can and many will still continue to publish videos on Youtube, it’s just that they are unlikely to get paid even 1% of the costs for producing the content for youtube to generate its traffic and ad revenues from. Which means that the quality of material published instead of continuing to improve, instead will steadily decline along with Youtube. So whilst it is inconceivable for most to imagine today but YouTube does appear destined to go the same way of other past dead tek dinosaurs, the likes of Myspace, Geocities and Flooz.com More…
Millions Paid to Administrator, Zero to Victims of Madoff
[Justice]
Millions Paid to Administrator, Zero to Victims of Madoff
By Eric Larson
Posted May 27, 2017
A firm hired by the U.S. to distribute $4 billion to victims of Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme has racked up $38.8 million in billings over four years. The investors are still waiting for their first checks, though. The Justice Department disclosed its payments to Richard Breeden, the Madoff Victim Fund administrator, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from Bloomberg News. Breeden’s fees, which are being paid from cash in the fund, cover his work through 2016.
The delay highlights how, 8 1/2 years after Madoff’s arrest, investors are still scrambling to recover money from a U.S. fund that was announced with great fanfare. Victims have recovered billions of dollars from another fund, but they have yet to be made whole. More…
The Myth of the Rule of Law
[Justice]
The Myth of the Rule of Law
by Robert Taylor
Posted May 27, 2017
Any state, no matter how powerful, cannot not rule solely through the use of brute force. There are too few rulers and too many of us for coercion alone to be an effective means of control. The political class must rely on ideology to achieve popular compliance, masking the iron fist in a velvet glove. Violence is always behind every state action, but the most efficient form of expropriation occurs when the public believes it is in their interest to be extorted.
Mythology is necessary to blunt the violent nature of state power in order to maximize the plunder of property — and, most importantly, provide an aura of legitimacy. The perception of legitimacy “is the only thing distinguishing a tax collector from an extortionist, a police officer from a vigilante, and a soldier from a mercenary. Legitimacy is an illusion in the mind without which the government does not even exist. More…
Nine Key Political Propositions for Building the Commons
[Community]
Nine Key Political Propositions for Building the Commons
by Martin O’Shaughnessy
Posted May 26, 2017
Although the politics of the common builds on the tradition of 19th century socialist associationism and 20th century workers’ councils, it can no longer simply be thought in an artisanal context or in that of the industrial workplace. Nor will it emerge from some sort of encirclement of capitalism from the outside, nor from some mass desertion.
There can be no politics of the common without a rethinking of property rights concerning the land, capital and intellectual ownership. Rights of use rather than rights of property must be the juridical axis for the transformation of society. It is necessary to find the correct form for the common production of society by creating institutions of self-government (whose role will be the production of the common) in all its sectors. More…
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Quotable Sayings
If we learned anything from our years of work trying to pass GMO labeling laws, it was this: As long as corporations own our politicians, no amount of public support, no amount of protesting a corporation, without also addressing our broken political system, will move us in the direction we want to go.
Micah White
The Shocking Truth about Our Money System and How We Can Break Free!
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Great story on why we need to remove ALL of our elected government representatives
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