October 7, 2005

Easy Money in the Big Easy
By DAVE LINDORFF

The real idiocy of conservative free-market theory is being put on display in New Orleans.

At last count, the administration and the Republican Congress have pledged to throw $200 billion into New Orleans to "rebuild" the city. The money will allegedly go to all sorts of private enterprise projects designed to rebuild infrastructure, rebuild schools and hospitals, repair sewer systems, etc.

The amount of money it would take to do all this would be far, far less than the $200 billion Bush and Congress are talking about spending, but it would do much more than all their money will. Consider this: Hiring 100,000 people full-time for a year at $10/hour would cost $2 billion dollars--just one percent of Bush's princely promise. Hire them for the next five years, and you've still only spent $10 billion. Hiring back 3000 city workers, even at $50,000 a year per worker, would be $150 million, or $750 million over the next five years. Even if you throw in the cost of the materials that will be needed to clean and /or rebuild the housing in the city, we're still talking single-digit billions of dollars. This is all chump change to a federal government that is spending at least $5 billion a month on the war in Iraq and that is talking about spending $200 billion on New Orleans. more...

October 6, 2005

Legendary Broadcaster and Author Studs Terkel on President Bush, Mahalia Jackson, James Baldwin, Louis Armstrong, the Rebuilding of New Orleans and What Gives Him Hope

October 5, 2005

Bush has nominated his Texas crony as a stealth appointment to the Supreme Court. Although the Senate will be hard-pressed to discover Harriet Miers's positions on the critical issues, she does have a long record of loyalty to Bush, whom she calls "the most brilliant man I ever met." Bush undoubtedly knows where she stands - and it doesn't appear to be on the side of civil liberties.

Miers represented a string of large corporations, including Walt Disney Co., Microsoft, Ford, Chrysler, Honda, Citibank and the Bank of America. Like John Roberts, Harriet Miers has no history of protecting the rights of women, minorities, the poor, the disabled or the environment. more...

October 4, 2005

Following a concert at the Salt Lake City international jazz festival in July the city's mayor, Rocky Anderson, took some musicians and visiting mayors out for dinner. Some of them had beer; Anderson paid some of the bill.

In a week when John Roberts was confirmed as supreme court justice and Tom DeLay, House of Representatives leader, was indicted, this passes for front-page news in Utah. Here, in the home of Mormonism, no city employee is allowed to pay for alcohol with public funds when entertaining. "I truly feel like we're in the middle of a Kafka novel sometimes," says Anderson, who was unaware of the no-alcohol policy, and rescinded it on Thursday. "With a little bit of Taliban thrown in."

October 3, 2005

Ghost Town - Introduction

My name is Elena. I run this website and I don't have anything to sell.

What I do have is my motorbike and the absolute freedom to ride it wherever curiosity and the speed demon take me.

I have ridden all my life and over the years I have owned several different motorbikes. I ended my search for a perfect bike with a big kawasaki ninja, that boasts a mature 147 horse power, some serious bark, is fast as a bullet and comfortable for a long trips. here is more about my motorcycle

I travel a lot and one of my favorite destinations leads North from Kiev, towards so called Chernobyl "dead zone", which is 130kms from my home. Why my favorite? Because one can take long rides there on empty roads.

The people there all left and nature is blooming. There are beautiful woods and lakes.

In places where roads have not been travelled by trucks or army vehicles, they are in the same condition they were 20 years ago - except for an occasional blade of grass that discovered a crack to spring through. Time does not ruin roads, so they may stay this way until they can be opened to normal traffic again........ a few centuries from now. more...

October 2, 2005

For the past week in Washington, OCA (Organic Consumers Association) has been urging members of Congress not to reopen and subvert the federal statute that governs U.S. Organic standards (the Organic Food Production Act: OFPA), but rather to let the organic community and the National Organic Standards Board resolve our differences over issues like synthetics and animal feed internally, and then proceed to a open public comment period. Unfortunately most members of Congress seem to be listening to industry lobbyists more closely than to us. We need to raise our voices. (Send a quick letter to your Congresspersons online here)

Gitmo's Hunger Strikers
by Clive Stafford Smith Ê

"I am slowly dying in this solitary prison cell," says Omar Deghayes, a British refugee and Guant‡namo Bay prisoner. "I have no rights, no hope. So why not take my destiny into my own hands, and die for a principle?" Ê

This magazine goes to press on the forty-ninth day of the Guant‡namo hunger strike. In 1981 near Belfast, Bobby Sands and nine other members of the IRA starved themselves to death. The prisoners had insisted that they be treated as POWs rather than criminals. They died before the British government accepted that its use of kangaroo courts and its policy of "criminalization" did not just betray democratic principles; these methods functioned as the most persuasive recruiting sergeant the IRA ever had. How soon these lessons are forgotten. Three and a half years of internment without trial in Guant‡namo, and any US claim to be the standard-bearer of the rule of law has dissolved. Ê

But there are two important distinctions between the experience of Sands and Omar Deghayes: The US military has insisted on secrecy regarding Guant‡namo, and the US media have been compliant in their apathy. Despite the traditional British hostility to free speech, every moment of Bobby Sands's decline was broadcast live. In contrast, nothing we lawyers learn from our Guant‡namo clients can be revealed until it passes the US government censors. Thus, two weeks went by before the public even knew there was a hunger strike, and the military has been allowed to dissemble on the details since. more...

October 1, 2005

George W. Bush -- true to form -- is already backing away from the promises he made to the poorest victims of Katrina. Two weeks ago, he swore to do more to protect the most vulnerable. He pledged to "confront this poverty with bold action."

Great words. But now he and his Republican friends in Congress want to pay for rebuilding the Gulf Coast by cutting a trillion dollars from vital programs, half of which benefit those who have the least. A handful of Republican extremists even blocked a bi-partisan effort to provide emergency health insurance for folks displaced by the hurricane.

Where is Bush in the face of these attacks? Standing by silently.

*Bush can't have it both ways.* It's time to call him out.

Please join me in signing this letter to Bush demanding that he refuse to cut the safety net for the needy to pay for the Katrina rebuilding.

http://colorofchange.org/callhimout/

If they get enough signatures, ColorOfChange.org will start raising money for some hard-hitting, creative ads that will really put the heat on Bush.

Don't let the GOP hijack Katrina to hurt the poor even more. The government could pay for the entire $200 billion reconstruction effort--and have more than $100 billion to spare--if we just rolled back Bush's tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy.

You can sign the letter here:

http://colorofchange.org/callhimout/

Let's stand together to make sure those who were left behind are never left behind again.

Thanks.

October 7, 2005


October 6, 2005


October 5, 2005


October 4, 2005


October 3, 2005


October 2, 2005


October 1, 2005

Archives

No War in Iraq march.

Klezmatics

On April 3, 2005, Barbara and I went to see the Klezmatics, with guest Joshua Nelson, Jewish gospel singer. To quote the concert program, "Their soul-stirring Jewish roots music recreates klezmer in arrangements and compostions that combine Jewish identity and mysticism with a contemporary zeitgeist and a postmodern aesthetic. Since their founding in New York City's East Village in 1986, the Klezmatics have celebrated the ecstatic nature of Yiddish music with works by turn wild, spiritual, provocative, reflective and danceable." The concert was phenomenal.

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This site consists of original photographs and composites by Fletcher Oakes, unless otherwise credited.