Dirty Hippies » United States

A Radical Idea for Radical Times

Tom Sullivan — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 02:18:15 +0000

“Mail is like oxygen. It’s there and you count on it, and you don’t get worried about it until it disappears. There is going to be concern by a lot of people if this goes away. The national concern is going to be enormous.” — Tonda Rush, president of the National Newspaper Association, commenting on the unraveling of the United States Postal Service

So here’s a radical idea for radical times: Nationalize the United States Post Office.

Just writing the words makes my eyes spin around in my head. The Ryan-esque view that it would un-American to un-privatize an operation like the United States Post Office is such a retromingent exercise in inverse reasoning that I regret not being clever enough to come up with a corporate flak-friendly name for it. Like right-sizing or blamestorming or activating synergies of scale.

Yet in the up-is-down, Bizarro World that is Washington, D.C., privatizing the United States Postal Service — Benjamin Franklin’s United States Post Office — makes Bizarro sense. Drape its coffin in a flag and watch right-thinking patriots salute as FedEx hauls it over to Arlington for burial.

There isn’t anything more core to what America’s founders thought government of, by and for the people is for than delivering the mail, except maybe raising an army. Both are authorized in the same article in the U.S. Constitution. (The tea party loves them some Article 1, Section 8.) Like the military, the United States Post Office is a public service as well as a public trust. And Republicans such as Congressman Darrel Issa (R-CA) want to privatized it because it doesn’t make a profit ? When did the U.S. Army ever turn a profit? This is how conservatives honor the founders’ vision? By dressing up like them and dismantling the country they shed blood to build?

Of course, Republicans (mostly) in Congress are hard at work on privatizing not just the United States Post Office, but the military, too, by diverting work traditionally done by GIs to for-profit, private contractors that can charge a tidy markup to cost-conscious American taxpayers. With hundreds of billions of public dollars on the table, the con is simple. More middle-man profit equals Freedom . No middle man profit equals Tyranny . It’s almost as if they want to dismantle the country’s core infrastructure, to strip America bare — like locusts — of every financial resource before moving on….

Speaking of tyranny, here’s Howie Klein at (Down With Tyranny):

There’s a lot of money to be made in privatizing the post office — not for us, of course, but Wall Street drools at the prospect. And, of course, Republicans and their Blue Dog allies are doing everything in their power to undermine and sabotage the post office for exactly that reason.

At the Huffington Post , Dave Jamieson examines what a post-post office America would look like. Take tiny Syria, Virginia, for example, where for over a hundred years the post office has resided in a walk-in closet-sized office inside Syria Mercantile Company, the village general store. Villagers faced with the closure of this resource may have to drive as far as 20 miles over back-country roads to mail a package or buy stamps.

The absurdity is the insistence by Congress that the United States Post Office operate as a profitable business or go “bankrupt.” As if a constitutionally authorized agency can? As if the Constitution or common sense requires it? Certainly the United States Post Office faces competition in major markets, and from the Internet, but what has that to

175 Chickens in 1 Minute?!

James Boyce — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 16:07:30 +0000

You’d think the USDA would see the flaw of logic in letting the people who make the food inspect the food and decide if it is actually safe to eat.

The USDA has decided in its infinite wisdom, despite pink slime and a few other debacles of the food industry, to test a program allowing chicken companies to check their own livestock and decide whether or not the chickens are safe to eat.

The USDA claims this will save them tens of millions of dollars.

Well, USDA, I can save you even more. If you’re going to let the chicken companies inspect their own chickens, just trash the whole program, because I guarantee you they will decide “ALL of our chickens are safe!”

At some point, you would hope someone at the USDA (and I looked it up, there are over 100,000 employees there) would have raised their hand and pointed out the glaringly obvious: “Uh, since these guys are selling us chicken/beef/fish/whatever, don’t you think they are going to say that everything they’re selling is safe?”

Ideally, another person (we’re up to 2 out of 100,000 – a push perhaps, but I woke up optimistic this morning) would have seconded the first person’s statement and then, just maybe, we could have our food actually inspected before we eat it.

Which, I will point out to the USDA and its 100,000 employees, is generally considered to be their core job.

And it gets worse.

Right now, the USDA inspectors (who are independent, don’t work for the chicken companies, and aren’t driven by chicken company profits for holiday bonuses) inspect 35 chickens a minute for lovely things like bile, feces and random spare parts that got through processing.

That’s a chicken every two seconds.

Should you so desire, take two seconds to inspect the next chicken you see at the store. It’s really not a lot of time, but with some practice you could get pretty good at it – which is a nice thought because you are essentially performing the task that stands between me eating a relatively clean chicken or a feces- and bile-covered chicken. (There is a difference, Mr. USDA, trust me on this one.)

Well, under this new program, the chicken companies will rubber stamp – er, I mean inspect 175 chickens a minute. 175! That’s just under three chickens a second.

Are you thinking, “Wait a minute, 175 chickens a minute? That’s impossible!” Well congratulations – you are now ahead of 100,000 USDA employees in the class on food safety.

I have a little test for you and the USDA: if you can even count to 175 in sixty seconds, I might reconsider my opposition.

If you can’t, you need to sign this petition, share it with the world, put it up on Facebook.

Even better, if you know anyone at the USDA, send it to them and ask them to see what they can do for you, for me, and for everyone who prefers their chickens to be properly inspected, let alone inspected at all.

This post originally appeared at HandPicked Nation.

Romney’s Mysterious Million Dollar Donor

Diane Sweet — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 12:47:41 +0000

Mitt Romney has been kicking ass on the campaign fundraising trail, leaving his GOP rivals in the dust raising $15-20 million through June 30, 2011:

“Obviously, Romney has leveraged his standing in the polls to raise early money in the race,” said Tobe Berkovitz, a professor at Boston University’s College of Communication.

Is Romney’s early campaigning really paying off…or is it really paying off?

MSNBC’s Michael Isikoff reports:

A mystery company that pumped $1 million into a political committee backing Mitt Romney has been dissolved just months after it was formed, leaving few clues as to who was behind one of the biggest contributions yet of the 2012 presidential campaign.

—

“I don’t see how you can do this,” said Lawrence Noble, the former general counsel of the Federal Election Commission, when asked about the contribution from the now defunct company.

If the only purpose of W Spann’s formation was to contribute to the pro-Romney group, “There is a real issue of it being just a subterfuge” and that could raise a “serious” legal issue, Noble said. Even if that is not the case, he added, “What you have here is a roadmap for how people can hide their identities” when making political contributions.

I would say that I hope someone keeps a close eye on the Romney campaign’s records, but I’m certain that Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, and Ron Paul will see to that.

Tread carefully, Mittens…

[Photo by DonkeyHotey]

Libya No-Fly Zone: “Limited Intervention” Is Like a Gateway Drug for War

Joshua Holland — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 20:07:47 +0000

Having mixed feelings about the no-fly zone established over Libya by the UN Security Council seems wholly appropriate. One can’t ignore the massacre perpetrated by Gaddhafi’s air-force, yet at the same time, events of the past decade have given the concept of “humanitarian intervention” a black eye. We can thank the neocons for that.

The good news is that Obama said exactly the right thing about his policy at today’s presser:

Obama, offering his first justification to Americans for getting the U.S. military involved in Libya, said the goal is to protect Libyan citizens from what he called Gaddafi’s campaign of repression against his people.

And he said the U.S. role would be limited.

“The United States is not going to deploy ground troops into Libya and we are not going to use force to go beyond a well-defined goal, specifically the protection of civilians in Libya,” he said.

The problem is that it’s easier said than done; once the “international community” resolves to use military force, history suggests those modest goals are easily replaced with a more far-reaching policy — it’s easier to engage militarily than it is to disengage.

The classic example is probably Truman’s decision not to cease his campaign in Korean after achieving the originally stated goal of pushing the North Koreans past the 38th parallel — a decision that cost tens of thousands of lives before eventually leading to a decades-long stalemate along that very same 38th parallel.

But Bush the senior’s intervention in Somalia is also illustrative, and more similar to Libya in terms of context. Most people think of Somalia as a disaster — a boondoggle made famous by Blackhawk Down. But what many don’t remember is that it began with what was arguably among the most successful examples of humanitarian intervention in the history of the United Nations.

In the early 1990s, Somalia was facing a humanitarian crisis — its people were starving. Aid was being diverted by the “Somali warlords” and aid workers’ lives were being threatened. The UN Security Council authorized a modest intervention, UNOSOM I, with very limited and achievable goals: to create a safe zone through which vital humanitarian supplies could be delivered. This worked pretty well: Blue Helmets secured the main port, and the major thoroughfares through which food, medicine and other relief aid could be delivered.

It wasn’t perfect, however. The warring factions defied the UN, the ceasefire that had been established was broken many times and less than 100% of the aid got through. But matters got considerably worse with the launch of UNOSOM II, which had a much broader mandate — nation-building — and authorized all necessary means to achieve it.

Of course, authorizing and doing are two different things, and the UN has no troops of its own, so what we eventually ended up with was a sweeping mandate backed by a woefully insufficient military force for the task at hand. The legitimacy of the intervention was questioned, and the whole enterprise soon devolved into a typical interventionist farce.

So the worrisome thing about this Libyan no-fly zone is what happens next. Gaddhafi isn’t going to cede power, his forces appear to be in control of large swaths of the country. His military probably won’t be able to simply crush the rebel forces with ease, which is obviously a good thing. But it means we’ll likely see a stand-off, and it will be very tempting for the “international community,” having invested in the despot’s ouster, to escalate that no-fly zone to a peace-keeping force in Benghazi, and who knows where that might lead.

The “limited humanitarian intervention” certainly has its appeal, but easily becomes a gateway drug leading to the hard stuff.

Spanish High Court Rules Torture Case Against US Can Proceed

Joshua Holland — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 21:30:40 +0000

Spain’s highest court ruled that a controversial case against US officials for authorizing the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay could proceed, rejecting an attempt by a Spanish prosecutor to end the investigation. The decision is a major victory for human rights activists, and a blow to the US government.

According to a cable released by Wikileaks, the Obama administration tried to kill the case, one of two being pursued by Spanish authorities. Here’s a report by the Miami Herald:

It was three months into Barack Obama’s presidency, and the administration — under pressure to do something about alleged abuses in Bush-era interrogation policies — turned to a Florida senator to deliver a sensitive message to Spain:

Don’t indict former President George W. Bush’s legal brain trust for alleged torture in the treatment of war on terror detainees, warned Mel Martinez on one of his frequent trips to Madrid. Doing so would chill U.S.-Spanish relations.

Rather than a resolution, though, a senior Spanish diplomat gave the former GOP chairman and housing secretary a lesson in Spain’s separation of powers. “The independence of the judiciary and the process must be respected,” then-acting Foreign Minister Angel Lossada replied on April 15, 2009. Then for emphasis, “Lossada reiterated to Martinez that the executive branch of government could not close any judicial investigation and urged that this case not affect the overall relationship.”

And here’s some background on the case, from the Center for Constitutional Rights:

On April 27, 2009, Judge Baltasar Garzón issued a decision opening a preliminary investigation into what he termed “an authorized and systematic plan of torture and ill-treatment on persons deprived of their freedom without any charge and without the basic rights of any detainee, set out and required by applicable international conventions,” in US detention facilities. This decision related to the alleged torture and abuse of four former Guantánamo detainees: Hamed Abderrahman Ahmed, Ikassrien Lahcen, Jamiel Abdul Latif Al Banna and Omar Deghayes. All four men had previously been the subject of a criminal case in Spain, but were subsequently acquitted because of the use of torture and other forms of serious abuse to which they had been subjected during their detention and interrogations at Guantánamo; Judge Garzón had previously issued the extradition requests for Messrs Al Banna and Deghayes. Mr Ahmed is a Spanish citizen and Mr Ikassrien had been a Spanish resident for more than 13 years. The decision presents six pages of facts related to the torture and abuse the four men suffered including being held in cells made of chicken-wire in intense heat; being subjected to constant loud music, extreme temperatures and bright lights; constant interrogations without counsel; sexual assault; forced nakedness; threats of death; and severe beatings. The preliminary investigation did not name potential defendants, but included “possible material and instigating perpetrators, necessary collaborators and accomplices.” Judge Garzón found that the facts relate to violations under the Spanish Penal Code, the Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions, the Convention Against Torture, the European Convention for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, and the Organic Law of the Judicial Power (Article 23.4).

The principle of universal jurisdiction for prosecuting human rights abuses is grounded in the terrible consequences of impunity. If a country has the will to prosecute its own offenders, and a neutral judiciary with which to do so, foreign courts won’t take up the case.

But that is obviously not the case with the United States, where a former president has admitted publicly to personally authorizing the torture of prisoners, yet no domestic investigation was launched in order to bring him or his advisors to justice.

PS: My 2007 interview with CCR’s Michael Ratner is among my favorites: Human Rights Crusader Michael Ratner: We’ll Keep Going After Bush and Cheney When They Leave Office

Cross-posted around town.

State Labor Attacks — Not Just Wisconsin

Dave Johnson — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 22:43:41 +0000

The attack on public-employee unions in Wisconsin is in the news because of the large Egypt-style turnout of supporters at the state capital (70,000 on Saturday!), and the dramatic theater effect of Democratic Senators leaving the state to delay a vote on the measure, and give the public time to rally.

Today the rallies are spreading to other states where public employees are under attack.

Wisconsin

After “ginning up” a budget deficit with tax cuts and breaks for corporations, Governor Scott Walker introduced a “Budget Repair” bill that strips public employees of collective bargaining rights. The bill, however, exempts firefighters and police, whose unions supported Walker’s candidacy.

Over the weekend 70,000 people flooded the capital in Madison to protest the governor’s plan to eliminate collective bargaining rights. The State’s Democratic Senators remain out of the state, continuing to delay a vote on the bill.

Power Plant No-Bid Sale: On another front it came to light that the “Budget Repair” bill also contains a provision allowing the sale of the state’s power plants on a no-bid basis. The most likely beneficiary would be Koch Industries, which already has pipelines and coal operations in Wisconsin. Control of power plants gives them an in-state, top-to-bottom vertical chain. Koch was a major supporters of Governor Walker’s candidacy as well as being the group that is promoting the budget hysteria, busing the Tea Party supprters to the state capital for counter protests. The Koch Brothers are also a primary funder of ALEC, the organization that wrote the budget bill the outlaws collective bargaining and enables the sale of the state power plants on a no-bid basis to … Koch Industries.

This appearance of a quid-pro-quo raises the question whether this is a deal to repay Repubican backers, quietly giving huge wealth public assets to the Koch Brothers.

Ohio

In Ohio Gov. John Kasich introduced a bill to strip public employees of collective bargaining rights. Unlike Wisconsin this bill strips right from all public employees.

NY Times: Thousands Gather to Protest Bill in Ohio

Protestors packed into Ohio’s State Capitol building and several thousand more gathered outside on Tuesday, as its legislature planned new hearings on a bill that would effectively end collective bargaining for state workers and dramatically reduce its power for local workers, like police officers and firefighters.

Indiana

Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels introduced anti-union “Right To Work” legislation to strip public and private unions from being able to collect dues from members. Other bills remove collective bargaining rights from teachers, as well as implementing a voucher program in opposition to public schools.

Indiana Democrats flee state to protest anti-union bill

Indiana Democrats are reportedly joining their Wisconsin counterparts in staging an exodus from their state to protest a new union-busting Republican measure.

Only two of Indiana’s 40 House Democrats showed up for a session Tuesday morning, precluding Republicans from attaining the votes needed to proceed on motions. The rest are fleeing to Illinois to stage a walkout…

Only 58 lawmakers were present, falling short of the 67 required for a quorum.

Michigan

In Michigan the Republican legislature introduced anti-union measures allowing cities and schools to terminate labor union contracts, eliminate required binding arbitration for police and fire departments and repealing “prevailing wage” laws.

Tennessee

In Tennessee Republicans in the legislature are finalizing a bill to remove collective bargaining rights from teachers. A march is planned for Saturday in the state capital.

Iowa

In Iowa Governor Terry Branstad says the state’s labor laws are too friendly to unions and is asking for,

“veto power” over state worker pay and benefit agreements, giving the governor and legislators authority to reject negotiated union contracts which legislators or the governor find unacceptable.

Branstad also wants health care benefits for state workers to be set by the governor and legislators and no longer be part of contract negotiations.

Florida

In Florida the legislature is considering a bill, SB 830, that prevents union dues from being deducted from paychecks, and prohibiting dues from being used for political activity without written consent. Florida Gov. Rick Scott, however, sides with labor on this one,

“My belief is as long as people know what they’re doing, collective bargaining is fine,” Scott said in an interview with Tallahassee’s WFLA FM radio station.

Join With Labor

The AFL-CIO has an action page up:

Stop Attacks on Working Families

Corporate CEOs spent more than $1 billion to elect politicians and now they want pay back. Recently elected politicians in many states are already saying “thank you” by pushing dangerous legislation that attacks workers.

Please add your name to our petition urging state legislators to stop attacks on workers—we’ll deliver your signature to your state legislators.

March 10 Summit on Jobs and America’s Future

On March 10, 2011, the Summit on Jobs and America’s Future will bring together leaders and activists who understand that America faces a jobs crisis – and who are committed to building a political movement for sustainable economic growth, dynamic job creation, and a revival of the American economy.

Free. $15 with lunch. Register here.

This post originally appeared at Campaign for America’s Future (CAF) at their Blog for OurFuture. I am a Fellow with CAF.

Sign up here for the CAF daily summary.

Welcome to Dirty Hippies. Shampoo Not Included.

James Boyce — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 17:32:53 +0000

Welcome. If you are here today, you can tell your kids someday “I used to go to that Dirty Hippies blog before anyone knew about.” So welcome and here is our mission statement, such as it is – otherwise known as our new ‘About’ section

“The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This blog is a collection of people of all ages, from all walks of life, from professors and students, from business executives to business students. But as diverse as we are, we are united by two core beliefs. First, we believe not only in our country, but in all people who call themselves Americans. We believe that this country, and all our citizens, are well worth working for, and fighting for. e will stand up and work together, for ourselves and for our children and for some contributors here, for their grandchildren. We also believe that to succeed in our mission, we need to help each other – so we support, help and work with each other, not against each other, for our common good.

So thanks for stopping by. Read, enjoy, contribute your comments and pass the site on. For more information, please drop us a line.