July 23, 2012

Why Athens has lived to regret hosting the Olympic Games

from the Toronto Star:



ATHENS—For Babis Bilinis, the legacy of the 2004 Athens Olympics is this depressing walk to the Aegean Sea.

Carefully, first, across the four lanes of a road that still lacks the pedestrian crossing the government promised. Across the tracks of the light-rail line that runs where the beach used to begin. Under a low bridge, past the homeless Roma who spend their days in its shadows, into the abandoned 25,000-square-metre patch of dirt and scrub that used to be sea.

Finally, down two steep steps, to the cement waterfront boardwalk that leads toward the Games’ 9,600-seat beach volleyball stadium — which has also been abandoned, weeds growing unchecked through its once-pristine sand, bird droppings staining its concourses, its folding seats flapping in the coastal breeze. You can walk right in.

The Greek government wanted to build other Games venues on this reclaimed seaside property beside the volleyball stadium. After a fight from Bilinis’ community activist group, the government plunked the buildings elsewhere, then erected a fence around the prime land. In 2006, Bilinis’ group and hundreds of supporters tore the fence down. But save for the Roma and a few hardy recreational fishermen, the land remains unused — like numerous other Olympic facilities and properties in Athens. ...............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/1229485--why-athens-has-lived-to-regret-hosting-the-olympic-games

July 23, 2012

Gun Laws and the Myth of the Slippery Slope

from No More Mr. Nice Blog, via AlterNet:



Gun Laws and the Myth of the Slippery Slope


When I drive a car, how many serial numbers am I required to carry with me? The car has a government-issued license-plate number. It has a vehicle identification number that I'm not at liberty to remove or obscure. I have to carry a government-issued driver's license with a license number. If I'm stopped by the police, I have to surrender this license and a registration form. And on and on.

And yet no one, apart from a tiny handful of ultra-libertarians, ever argues that we're on a slippery slope to the seizure of all private vehicles by a totalitarian government. Even car-related laws that generate public outrage -- red-light cameras, GPS tracking of cars by the police -- don't lead to fears that the freedom to drive itself is on the verge of being taken away. People get drivers' licenses, stop at red lights, pull over when the cops demand it -- and mostly still feel that they have the freedom to drive where they please. They still look at cars (some models, at least) and imagine liberation on the open road.

Why is it impossible for gun owners to feel the same way?

What's odd is that gun owners don't even seem to feel tyrannized by hunting regulations. Think about it: we have hunting seasons and hunting licenses and restrictions on the numbers of certain animals you're allowed to shoot -- and while quite a few people flout these laws, there's no well-funded mass movement arguing that all of these laws should be abolished, that anyone should be able to hunt any animal at any time, and that failure to allow this is jackbooted fascism. ...............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/1044799/gun_laws_and_the_myth_of_the_slippery_slope/

July 23, 2012

Spain carnage reveals rescue fund fig leaf

FRANKFURT (MarketWatch) — Empty-handed European policy makers may have little choice but to turn to a reluctant European Central Bank to tame fears that Spain, the euro zone’s fourth-largest economy, may soon require a full-fledged sovereign bailout after borrowing costs soared Monday to crisis levels, strategists said.

“The pressure will be growing on the ECB to do something,” said Piet Lammens, fixed-income strategist at KBC Bank in Brussels, while acknowledging that the central bank remains deeply reluctant to head down that path again.

The yield on Spain’s 10-year government bond jumped a quarter of a percentage point to 7.44%, setting a new euro-era high after pushing well above the 7% level generally viewed as unsustainable over the long run in terms of borrowing costs. Yields rise as bond prices fall.

“The rise in the 10-year yield well beyond 7% carries a very distinct reminder of events in Greece in April 2010, Ireland in October 2010 and Portugal in February 2011,” said Simon Derrick, senior currency strategist at Bank of New York Mellon in London. “In each case a decisive move beyond 7% signaled the start of a collapse in investor confidence that, in each case, led to a bailout within weeks.” ...................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/spain-carnage-reveals-rescue-fund-fig-leaf-2012-07-23?dist=lcountdown

July 23, 2012

Mitt’s Offshore Shenanigans: The Bigger Story

from Too Much: A Commentary on Excess and Inequality:



Mitt’s Offshore Shenanigans: The Bigger Story
July 21, 2012

All those official government stats on the maldistribution of wealth in the United States — and the world — vastly understate the actual extent of our contemporary inequality, says a landmark new study on global tax havens.

By Sam Pizzigati


Are America’s rich getting richer? They’re certainly making much more than ever before. Every official income measure we have shows that America’s most affluent are upping their incomes at a much faster clip than everyone else.

How fast? Between 1980 and 2010, notes an analysis of IRS tax data this past spring by economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty, incomes for America’s top 1 percent more than doubled, after inflation, to an average $1.02 million.

Average incomes for the nation’s top 0.1 percent, over that same span, more than tripled, and at the tippy top of America’s economic summit — the top 0.01 percent — average incomes more than quadrupled, to $23.8 million in 2010.

And what about the rest of us? After inflation, average incomes for America’s bottom 90 percent actually fell — by 4.8 percent — between 1980 and 2010. Americans in this 90 percent averaged $31,337 in 1980, only $29,840 in 2010. ...............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://toomuchonline.org/mitts-offshore-shenanigans-tax-havens/

July 23, 2012

Chris Hedges: The Careerists

from truthdig:



The Careerists

Posted on Jul 23, 2012
By Chris Hedges


The greatest crimes of human history are made possible by the most colorless human beings. They are the careerists. The bureaucrats. The cynics. They do the little chores that make vast, complicated systems of exploitation and death a reality. They collect and read the personal data gathered on tens of millions of us by the security and surveillance state. They keep the accounts of ExxonMobil, BP and Goldman Sachs. They build or pilot aerial drones. They work in corporate advertising and public relations. They issue the forms. They process the papers. They deny food stamps to some and unemployment benefits or medical coverage to others. They enforce the laws and the regulations. And they do not ask questions.

Good. Evil. These words do not mean anything to them. They are beyond morality. They are there to make corporate systems function. If insurance companies abandon tens of millions of sick to suffer and die, so be it. If banks and sheriff departments toss families out of their homes, so be it. If financial firms rob citizens of their savings, so be it. If the government shuts down schools and libraries, so be it. If the military murders children in Pakistan or Afghanistan, so be it. If commodity speculators drive up the cost of rice and corn and wheat so that they are unaffordable for hundreds of millions of poor across the planet, so be it. If Congress and the courts strip citizens of basic civil liberties, so be it. If the fossil fuel industry turns the earth into a broiler of greenhouse gases that doom us, so be it. They serve the system. The god of profit and exploitation. The most dangerous force in the industrialized world does not come from those who wield radical creeds, whether Islamic radicalism or Christian fundamentalism, but from legions of faceless bureaucrats who claw their way up layered corporate and governmental machines. They serve any system that meets their pathetic quota of needs.

These systems managers believe nothing. They have no loyalty. They are rootless. They do not think beyond their tiny, insignificant roles. They are blind and deaf. They are, at least regarding the great ideas and patterns of human civilization and history, utterly illiterate. And we churn them out of universities. Lawyers. Technocrats. Business majors. Financial managers. IT specialists. Consultants. Petroleum engineers. “Positive psychologists.” Communications majors. Cadets. Sales representatives. Computer programmers. Men and women who know no history, know no ideas. They live and think in an intellectual vacuum, a world of stultifying minutia. They are T.S. Eliot’s “the hollow men,” “the stuffed men.” “Shape without form, shade without colour,” the poet wrote. “Paralysed force, gesture without motion.” .................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_careerists_20120723/

July 23, 2012

America: A Nation of Wildebeest

from Consortium News:


America: A Nation of Wildebeest
July 22, 2012

Exclusive: The slaughter of 12 moviegoers at the new Batman film in Aurora, Colorado, recalls other moments of horror known by names like Columbine, Virginia Tech, Tucson. But the repetition of such gun violence and the lack of a coherent response make Americans seem like a nation of Wildebeest, says Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry


Whenever some deranged gunman, armed with an assault rifle or some other combat weapon, slaughters young Americans – at a college or a high school or a mall or, now, a movie theater – I think of those documentaries showing Wildebeest on their migrations through crocodile-infested rivers.

In their frightened eyes, you can see that the herd knows that each crocodile will pick off an individual Wildebeest, flip it in the air, break its back and then drag it away to be devoured. But the herd still crashes through the river presumably with the understanding that most of them will survive. The Wildebeest may even be emotionally numbed to the fate of the unlucky ones.

In a way, that is what Americans have become. As we send our children off to school or off to a party or off to the movies, we know instinctively that some of them may well die at the hands of some troubled person who has obtained a powerful weapon and has decided to avenge some imagined slight by murdering strangers.

Sometimes, the dead are in large numbers (like at the Aurora, Colorado, multi-plex theater), but usually it’s just one or two at a time. We just hope that it’s not our kids. .................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://consortiumnews.com/2012/07/22/america-a-nation-of-wildebeest/

July 23, 2012

America’s Twisted Notion of Freedom

from Consortium News:


America’s Twisted Notion of Freedom
July 22, 2012

In America, “freedom” now means the right to inflict harm on the community, whether it’s the freedom of Wall Street bankers to gamble recklessly, the freedom of the rich to shut factories and off-shore jobs or the freedom to swagger around with deadly weapons. That freedom has struck again in Colorado, writes Lawrence Davidson.

By Lawrence Davidson


Well here we go again. Late in the evening of July 20, “a masked gunman entered a Colorado movie theater playing the new Batman movie and “opened fire … killing at least 12 people and wounding 50.” The gunman was not a large anthropomorphized bat but rather a young white male, and he “was armed with a rifle, a shotgun and two handguns” all of which he had legally obtained.

This is nothing new in the Land Of The Free. Among the more notable victims of the nation’s love affair with deadly weapons have been Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Ronald Reagan (wounded) and, of course, John Lennon.

Then there are the recent (and periodically ongoing) mass murders among the population at large: the Columbine High School shootings, the Beltway sniper incidents, the Virginia Tech massacre, and the 2011 Tucson killings. To this can be added the daily shootings that occur in every city in the country. Taking the representative year of 2007, there were 31,224 deaths from gunshots with 17,352 of them (56 percent) being suicides. The numbers have, generally, been going up.

Those who stand against tightening up the nation’s presently useless gun laws have a variety of arguments most of which are in good part delusional. Thus:

1. EXCUSE NUMBER ONE – Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. .................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://consortiumnews.com/2012/07/22/americas-twisted-notion-of-freedom/

July 22, 2012

Asshole Iowa Repug Governor acts like an asshole Repug governor

(Guardian UK) Lawyers acting for prisoners given mandatory life without parole sentences for murders they committed aged 13 to 17 are vowing to challenge the governor of Iowa, Terry Branstad, over his open defiance of a recent US supreme court ruling that bans such penalties.

Branstad, a Republican, wielded his executive powers last week to ensure, in effect, that none of the 38 juvenile murderers in Iowa who were sentenced to die in captivity will ever become free. The governor commuted their sentences, as he is required to under the supreme court judgement issued in June that prohibits mandatory life without parole sentences for offenders convicted of murders they committed under the age of 18.

But Branstad went on openly to confound the ruling of the highest court in the nation by imposing an alternative 60-year sentence on all of Iowa's 38 prisoners in that position. Taking their median age at the time of offences to be 15, that would mean that the first time these individuals could even apply for parole would be at the age of 75.

Lawyers acting for the juveniles offenders have reacted to Branstad's move with outrage. ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2012/jul/22/iowa-governor-defies-juvenile-sentencing

July 22, 2012

US hawks rally to defend defense

from Asia Times:



US hawks rally to defend defense
By Jim Lobe


WASHINGTON - While Iran, Russia, and China are all pretty scary, the ominous word "sequestration" is what is keeping right-wing hawks and their friends in the defense industry up at night. After rallying their forces for most of the past year, their campaign to avoid the "specter of sequestration", as they often refer to it, shifted into high gear on Capitol Hill this past week, as top industry executives were summoned to testify to the urgency of the threat.

At stake could be as much as US$600 billion in Pentagon funding - much of which would presumably be spent on lucrative procurement contracts for new weapons systems - over the next 10 years, as well as what the hawks see as the further erosion of US global military dominance.

"It is clear that if the process of sequestration is fully implemented," warned three of the right's most hawkish think tanks the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Heritage Foundation, and the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) in a joint statement entitled "Defending Defense" last week, "the US military will lack adequate resources to defend the United States and its global interests".

"The specter of sequestration threatens the US defense industrial base at a time when China, Russia, and other military competitors are ramping up their defense industries," according to the statement, which helped raise the curtain on this week's mantra from the military-industrial complex: hundreds of thousands of workers could lose their jobs as early as October one month before the election unless the sequestration nightmare goes away. .................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/NG21Dj10.html

July 22, 2012

Another Study Finds Fewer Young People Getting Driver’s Licenses

from Transportation Nation:



Another Study Finds Fewer Young People Getting Driver’s Licenses
By Alex Goldmark | 07/20/2012 – 4:42 pm


Young people aren’t lining up to drive like they used to. Year over year, fewer 16 to 24 year-olds are getting driver’s licenses according to a new study released today by Michael Sivak and Brandon Schoettle of the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute.

Take 16 year-olds: In 2008, 31 percent of them got driver’s licenses. In 2010 it fell to 28 percent. That’s part of a steady trend the researchers track back to 1983. That’s when Return of the Jedi, Scarface and The Outsiders were in theaters, and 46 percent of 16 year-olds were licensed to drive. Now, with Netflix and iTunes, they don’t need wheels to get to the movies.

Take this response we received from a listener in Florida when our partner The Takeaway asked young people about their driving habits:



The U. Mich study found that the driver’s license drop was a bit sharper for older teens: the percentage fell five percent for 18 year-olds from 2008 to 2010. Using Census and Federal Highway Administration data, the researchers identified a general decline in the percentage of people who sign up for a driver’s license across almost all age groups, but it was especially pronounced for younger would-be drivers. .................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://transportationnation.org/2012/07/20/percentage-of-young-persons-with-a-drivers-license-continues-to-drop/