Crossposted from DocuDharma

I’m actually a great admirer and have been for years.  I freely admit that I’ve adjusted my writing style based on his which I think works much better for Front Page pieces than my 2500 word Jim Blaine homages.

He has a new temporary gig-

Writing Stuff Elsewhere

Atrios, Eschaton

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Doing a weekly online column for USA Today until the election. I’ll use it to promote some crazy ideas.

Viva Social Security

By Duncan Black, USA Today

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Instead of considering some exciting new program to try to encourage workers into saving more, another Rube Goldberg incentive contraption designed to nudge individual behavior in the right direction, we should increase the level of retirement benefits in the existing Social Security program.

That sounds like blasphemy because we’ve all been fed the myth that Social Security is bankrupt. It is almost universally accepted in policy circles and in the pundit class that strengthening Social Security involves cutting future benefits relative to what current law promises because according to current projections, Social Security only has the ability to pay promised benefits in full until 2033, and then 75% of them thereafter. The basic thinking is that we must promise to cut benefits now so that we won’t necessarily have to cut them 22 years from now. What?

Imagine if that is how we treated defense spending. Since it appears budgets will be tight in the 2030s, best to mothball all those aircraft carriers today. Who would buy that argument?

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Social security is only bankrupt to the extent that our political leaders lose the will to invest in a decent retirement for American workers.

Crossposted from DocuDharma

Who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled.

Breuer Admits That Economists Have Convinced Him Not to Indict Corporations

by emptywheel

Posted on September 14, 2012

I’ve become increasingly convinced that DOJ’s head of Criminal Division, Lanny Breuer is the rotting cancer at the heart of a thoroughly discredited DOJ. Which is why I’m not surprised to see this speech he gave at the NYC Bar Association selling the “benefits” of Deferred Prosecution Agreements.  (h/t Main Justice) He spends a lot of his speech claiming DPAs result in accountability.

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But the real tell is when he confesses that he “sometimes-though … not always” let corporations off because a CEO or an economist scared him with threats of global markets failing if he held a corporation accountable by indicting it.

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None of this is surprising, of course. It has long been clear that Breuer’s Criminal Division often bows to the scare tactics of Breuer’s once and future client base. (In his speech, he boasts about how well DPAs and NPAs have worked with Morgan Stanley and Barclays, respectively.)

It’s just so embarrassing that he went out in public and made this pathetic attempt to claim it all amounts to accountability.

Crony Capitalism, American Style

L. Randall Wray, EconoMonitor

September 16th, 2012

Our nation’s top cops freely admit that they have no interest in prosecuting criminal behavior perpetrated by our elite 1% at the top of our crony capitalism pyramid. As reported at Naked Capitalism, Lanny Breuer, head of the DOJ’s Criminal Division, practically brags about the absence of criminal convictions for all the fraud perpetrated over the past decade. He freely admits that when his department suspects a big bank of fraud, he calls in the bank’s team to provide a flashy presentation showing why it should not be investigated. The banksters make the argument that actually prosecuting fraudsters would be bad for crony capitalism, which of course scares the bejeebers out of Washington. So Breuer’s office then makes nice with the banksters, and they all go back to doing what they’ve been doing-moving all wealth to the cronies in the top 1%.

The Wall Street bank’s business model is fraud.

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You all already understand that mortgage brokers and property appraisers were in cahoots-overvaluing property to justify out-sized mortgages. You know that brokers pushed “don’t ask, don’t tell” “Liar’s loans” to put borrowers into loans they could not afford, and that they doctored loan documents after borrowers had signed them to cover up the lender’s fraud. And you know that the Wall Street banks created MERS to evade proper recording of property records, effectively wiping out half a millennium of record keeping so that no one any longer knows who owns what.

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(I)n fact, in many cases mortgages were never bundled into the securities. So it is not just a problem with the quality of the mortgages backing the securities. And it is not just a problem with the fact that the trustees lied about what was behind the securities. And it is not just a problem of splitting off the notes from the deeds. There is accumulating evidence that the only thing backing securities is an empty “paper bag“: mortgages were never actually securitized. The securities your pension fund might be holding were never worth a dime because they securitized air.

And many of these securitizations were supposed to be REMICs, which offer tax advantages but only if done properly. Guess what. One of the rules is that the mortgages must be put in the REMIC almost immediately. That rule was probably rarely followed; and of course if the mortgages were never put there at all, REMIC rules were certainly violated so the investors owe huge backtaxes. Wall Street’s response is to make a new “Wall Street Rule”: hey we all did it, and if the IRS pursues taxes and if we are pursued for fraud, then the whole system blows up. This is precisely the kind of line Breuer finds irresistibly logical, so you can bet his office won’t be going after the securitizers.

What I think is shocking is that a President of the United States would go behind closed doors and declare to a group of wealthy donors that they are ‘victims’, entitled to handouts, and don’t have to take ‘personal responsibility’ for their thefts and fraud.

Bruce Hornsby and The Range- That’s just the way it is

Danielle Dax- Tomorrow Never Knows

Even being a big dance club star remaking a Beatles hit won’t park feet on the parquet unless it’s Twist and Shout (this particular arrangement from Blast The Human Flower (1990)).

Cokie’s Law

At this point, it doesn’t much matter whether she said it or not because it’s become part of the culture. I was at the beauty parlor yesterday and this was all anyone was talking about.

As you know I only report the most scurrilous rumors and I ran across one today that even Yves Smith hesitated to talk about-

Condom used as evidence in Assange sex case ‘does not contain his DNA’ Daily Mail. Remember, this IS the Daily Mail!

Well, like most journalisticy ‘institutions’ The Daily Mail is a fine training ground for stenography OR fiction and in this case they have the benefit of being backed up by Wiki Leaks Central as reported by TheMomCat (The Tangled Web That Nations Weave: Part 2 Tue Aug 21, 2012).

Not only is the Arctic a poor place to drill for local environmental reasons, the truth of the matter is that if we merely burn all our “proven” reserves as of RIGHT NOW, we condemn the entire planet to mass extinction.

Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math

By Bill McKibben, Rolling Stone

July 19, 2012 9:35 AM ET

Scientists estimate that humans can pour roughly 565 more gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by midcentury and still have some reasonable hope of staying below two degrees.

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How good are these numbers? No one is insisting that they’re exact, but few dispute that they’re generally right. The 565-gigaton figure was derived from one of the most sophisticated computer-simulation models that have been built by climate scientists around the world over the past few decades. And the number is being further confirmed by the latest climate-simulation models currently being finalized in advance of the next report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “Looking at them as they come in, they hardly differ at all,” says Tom Wigley, an Australian climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. “There’s maybe 40 models in the data set now, compared with 20 before. But so far the numbers are pretty much the same. We’re just fine-tuning things. I don’t think much has changed over the last decade.” William Collins, a senior climate scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, agrees. “I think the results of this round of simulations will be quite similar,” he says. “We’re not getting any free lunch from additional understanding of the climate system.”

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The Third Number: 2,795 Gigatons

This number is the scariest of all – one that, for the first time, meshes the political and scientific dimensions of our dilemma. It was highlighted last summer by the Carbon Tracker Initiative, a team of London financial analysts and environmentalists who published a report in an effort to educate investors about the possible risks that climate change poses to their stock portfolios. The number describes the amount of carbon already contained in the proven coal and oil and gas reserves of the fossil-fuel companies, and the countries (think Venezuela or Kuwait) that act like fossil-fuel companies. In short, it’s the fossil fuel we’re currently planning to burn. And the key point is that this new number – 2,795 – is higher than 565. Five times higher.

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Think of two degrees Celsius as the legal drinking limit – equivalent to the 0.08 blood-alcohol level below which you might get away with driving home. The 565 gigatons is how many drinks you could have and still stay below that limit – the six beers, say, you might consume in an evening. And the 2,795 gigatons? That’s the three 12-packs the fossil-fuel industry has on the table, already opened and ready to pour.

We have five times as much oil and coal and gas on the books as climate scientists think is safe to burn. We’d have to keep 80 percent of those reserves locked away underground to avoid that fate. Before we knew those numbers, our fate had been likely. Now, barring some massive intervention, it seems certain.

Yes, this coal and gas and oil is still technically in the soil. But it’s already economically aboveground – it’s figured into share prices, companies are borrowing money against it, nations are basing their budgets on the presumed returns from their patrimony. It explains why the big fossil-fuel companies have fought so hard to prevent the regulation of carbon dioxide – those reserves are their primary asset, the holding that gives their companies their value. It’s why they’ve worked so hard these past years to figure out how to unlock the oil in Canada’s tar sands, or how to drill miles beneath the sea, or how to frack the Appalachians.

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If you told Exxon or Lukoil that, in order to avoid wrecking the climate, they couldn’t pump out their reserves, the value of their companies would plummet. John Fullerton, a former managing director at JP Morgan who now runs the Capital Institute, calculates that at today’s market value, those 2,795 gigatons of carbon emissions are worth about $27 trillion. Which is to say, if you paid attention to the scientists and kept 80 percent of it underground, you’d be writing off $20 trillion in assets. The numbers aren’t exact, of course, but that carbon bubble makes the housing bubble look small by comparison. It won’t necessarily burst – we might well burn all that carbon, in which case investors will do fine. But if we do, the planet will crater. You can have a healthy fossil-fuel balance sheet, or a relatively healthy planet – but now that we know the numbers, it looks like you can’t have both. Do the math: 2,795 is five times 565. That’s how the story ends.

Shell abandons Alaska offshore drilling efforts until next year

By Kim Murphy, Los Angeles Times

September 17, 2012, 12:53 a.m.

Shell Alaska said Monday it has abandoned its efforts to drill into hydrocarbon deposits in the offshore Arctic after the latest in a series of glitches on the company’s troubled oil containment barge resulted in damage to the high-tech dome designed to contain oil in the event of an underwater spill.

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The latest setback involves the oil containment barge, the Arctic Challenger, which has been delayed in Bellingham, Wash., undergoing a trouble-plagued retrofit overseen by Superior Marine Technical Services, a Shell contractor.

The vessel has been unable for weeks to win U.S. Coast Guard certification, following problems with some onboard safety systems, along with trouble fixing good stowage for the ship’s anchor chocks and the boom designed to flare gas in the event of a spill. Coast Guard officials documented four minor illegal fluid discharges from the vessel while it was moored in Bellingham.

Federal authorities have not allowed Shell to plumb into hydrocarbon deposits until the barge is on site in the Arctic, but the multimillion-dollar upgrade has been delayed with one problem after another while attempting to win certification from the Coast Guard.

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“However, during a final test, the containment dome aboard the Arctic Challenger barge was damaged,” she said.

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“We will begin as many wells … as time remaining in this season allows,” Op de Weegh said. “The top portion of the wells drilled in the days and weeks ahead will be safely capped this year, in accordance with regulatory requirements.”

Shell had commenced drilling an initial well in the Chukchi Sea earlier this month, but was forced to shut down the operation and move away when a large ice floe began approaching.

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In the Beaufort Sea, Shell is awaiting the conclusion of the fall Inupiat Eskimo whaling season, which could end as early as this week, before launching drilling operations there.

Shell boss defends Alaska project as ice halts drilling

Terry Macalister, energy editor, The Guardian

Sunday 16 September 2012 12.51 EDT

Speaking after a huge ice floe forced drilling 70 miles off the north-west coast of Alaska to be temporarily halted, Peter Slaiby, vice-president of Shell Alaska, insisted that the company had learned from the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

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Environmentalists say a spill similar to Deepwater Horizon would be catastrophic in a pristine environment badly affected by climate change and home to threatened mammals such as polar bears, bowhead whales and walrus.

Asked if another major spill would destroy the company’s reputation, Slaiby said: “I feel there is a helluva responsibility on my head, but we have clear accountability models. I have the ability to do things in the right way and I have the backing of the most senior leaders in Shell to do things the right way.”

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Slaiby, said the company fully understands the impact of carbon on climate change but said oil and gas are still needed to meet growing global energy demand in the near term. “The US Geological Survey says that about 25% of the world’s remaining hydrocarbon reserves are here [the Arctic]. And 25% of those are here in Alaska. Oil and gas are part of the mix, a big part of the energy puzzle, and we have to ensure local communities benefit economically.”

BP shares slide on fears over Deepwater negligence claim

Terry Macalister, energy editor, The Guardian

Wednesday 5 September 2012 13.36 EDT

“The behaviour, words and actions of these BP executives would not be tolerated in a middling size company manufacturing dry goods for sale in a suburban mall. Yet they were condoned in a corporation engaged in an activity (deep water drilling) that no less a witness than Tony Hayward (former BP chief executive) himself described as comparable to exploring outer space,” said the DoJ.

There had been earlier speculation that BP was in out-of-court talks with the DoJ about a wider settlement of criminal and civil charges but the latest department filing suggest no such deal is likely before new court proceedings start early next year.

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Privately the company is believed to be shaken by some of the aggressive language used by the department which comes in the middle of a volatile presidential election campaign.

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“BP died when it failed to cap the Macondo spill in the first few days. The CEO did a good job of saving BP from forced liquidation, but we do not believe he can revert to its pre-Macondo strategy,” he (Stuart Joyner, energy analyst at Investec Securities in London) added.

The increased anxiety over its position in the US, where it still has an enormous business, comes at a time when it is also struggling to find agreement with its Russian partners inside TNK-BP to dispose of its 50% shareholding there. That money might be needed to help pay any final bill for the Deepwater Horizon “blowout” in which 11 oil workers lost their lives and miles of beach front were damaged by the accompanying oil spill.

BP selling oil fields in Gulf of Mexico ahead of Deepwater Horizon fines

Dominic Rushe, The Guardian

Monday 10 September 2012 11.37 EDT

BP has agreed to sell some of its Gulf of Mexico oil fields for $5.6bn as it builds up cash reserves ahead of potentially huge fines for 2010’s Deepwater Horizon disaster.

The British oil giant is selling its interests in older smaller fields in the gulf to Plains Exploration & Production of Houston. BP will remain a major operator in the area.

“While these assets no longer fit our business strategy, the Gulf of Mexico remains a key part of BP’s global exploration and production portfolio, and we intend to continue investing at least $4bn there annually over the next decade,” chief executive Bob Dudley said in a statement.

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Analysts calculate that BP faces a fine of up to $20bn under the clean water act for the Deepwater Horizon disaster. The blowout killed 11 workers and pumped about 4.9m barrels of oil into the Gulf.

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Last week the US department of justice launched a withering attack on BP over its handling of the disaster. In court papers government lawyers said BP had made “plainly misleading representations” in its settlement proposals.

“The behaviour, words and actions of these BP executives would not be tolerated in a middling size company manufacturing dry goods for sale in a suburban mall,” wrote government lawyers.

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The sale brings the value of BP’s disposals since the 2010 spill to more than $32bn. BP is also looking to sell its Texas City refinery – the site of fatal explosion in 2005 that left 15 dead and 170 injured.

The staggering decline of sea ice at the frontline of climate change

John Vidal, The Guardian

Friday 14 September 2012 11.30 EDT

Cambridge University Sea ice researcher Nick Toberg, who has analysed underwater ice thickness data collected by British nuclear submarine HMS Tireless in 2004 and 2007, said: “This is staggering. It’s disturbing, scary that we have physically changed the face of the planet. We have about 4m sq km of sea ice. If that goes in the summer months that’s about the same as adding 20 years of CO2 at current [human-caused] rates into the atmosphere. That’s how vital the arctic sea ice is.

“In the 1970s we had 8m sq km of sea ice. That has been halved. We need it in the summer. It has never decreased like this before”.

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All over the Arctic the effects of accelerating ice loss and a warming atmosphere are being seen. The ecology is changing rapidly as trees and plants move north, new beetles devastate whole forests in Canada, Siberia and Alaska, and snowfall increases. Inuit and other communities report more avalanches, the erosion of sea cliffs and melting of the permafrost affecting roads and buildings. Whole coastal communities may have to be moved to avoid sea erosion.

With the ice loss has come a rush by industry for Arctic resources. Oil, gas, mining and shipping companies are all expanding operations into areas that until only 20 years ago would have been physically impossible.

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Other new research suggests that the loss of ice could be could be affecting the path and speed of the jet streams, possibly explaining why extreme weather in the northern hemisphere is lasting longer.

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“The ice is weak so it opens up water and allows more sunlight in which warms the water more which makes the ice break up more – so it accelerates the melt. There is hardly any old, multi-year ice left, so first year ice is now dominant. We are seeing less and less old thick ice,” says Toberg.

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What is suspected is that the formation of the sea ice produces dense salt water which sinks, helping drive the deep ocean currents. Without the summer sea ice, many scientists fear this balance could be upset, potentially causing major climatic changes.

“The Arctic ice cover is a lid on the planet that regulates the temperature. By taking it off you are warming it. Temperatures [everywhere] depend on it,” says Toberg.

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“This is a defining moment in human history,” said Kumi Naidoo, director of Greenpeace International in Amsterdam. “In just over 30 years we have altered the way our planet looks from space and soon the north pole may be completely ice-free in summer.

“Fossil fuel companies are still making profits despite the fact that climate change is so clearly upon us. Our politicians are putting corporate interests above scientific warnings and failing in their duties to the public”.

Climate change: all that is solid melts into water

The Guardian

Sunday 16 September 2012

It is the ice cap that keeps the Arctic cold. Sunlight that hits white ice bounces back into space. Dark ocean absorbs light, and therefore warmth, making the next winter’s ice pack thinner, and less enduring. The difference between the torrid tropics and the icy Arctic governs weather patterns in the northern hemisphere. The frozen ocean and permafrost at the perimeter prevents ground methane from escaping into the atmosphere and thereby accelerating global warming. The polar seas drive the marine ecosystem and fuel the north Atlantic fish stocks. So the consequences of ice loss could be considerable, although nobody with political authority seems so far to have sufficiently considered them.

Bad news from the far north has just been matched by a bleak warning from the tropics. German, US and Australian scientists report in Nature Climate Change on Monday that the double menace of increasing greenhouse gas emissions and rising ocean acidity could spell the end for most of the world’s coral reefs. These extraordinary and beautiful structures flourish at the limits of their tolerance. They like it hot, but not too hot. They tend to “bleach” and even die as temperatures rise: during 1998, 16% of all living corals perished in one exceptional tropic summer. Coral reefs deliver coastal protection, tourism and fishing for millions: the reefs are home, habitat and hunting territory for about a quarter of all marine species. The researchers used 19 different climate models to predict the effects of a 2C increase in global average temperatures, and found that by 2030 around 70% of the reefs would suffer what they politely call “long-term degradation”.

Thoughts on climate crisis speed – Polar ice "retreated faster than anyone expected, record smashed to smithereens"

By Gaius Publius, Americablog

9/16/2012 09:55:00 AM

If you’re hearing a theme, it’s that things are happening faster than anyone anticipated. That’s my main point. All of our models are wrong in the same direction – the bad one.

Climate predictions are consistently wrong to the slow side

Nearly all recent predictions of global warming speed have been wrong to the slow side. The crisis is proceeding faster than expectations, and that should scare the whole of humanity.

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If I’m right (and everyone playing this game has been wrong to the slow side), mark your calendars. Sometime in the next 10 years or so, we’ll know if we’ve pulled back from the brink or leaped over it.

By that I mean: If I’m right and we reach 1½°C by 2025 – the U.S. has just 35 years to pack its bags and move to Canada, a country that will still be able to grow things and maintain a national electrical grid.

Ready for the near-term geopolitical question of the century? What are the odds the Canadian government will let us all in? (Me, I place that at zero, but that’s just a guess. Some people think we’re universally loved.)

It’s about the naked aristocratic power to force people to wipe your bottom and lick your boots.

Bettman’s lockout will give you the Deja Blues

BY JEFF GORDON, St. Louis Today

September 13, 2012 12:25 pm

The gulf between the owners and players appears too great to bridge quickly. Barring a miracle, the NHL will shut down Saturday. It will be the third stoppage in Bettman’s checkered tenure.

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This labor dispute is not all Bettman’s fault, of course, but he will ultimately flip the switch.  He is the lead negotiator for the owners. He is their mouthpiece.

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“It doesn’t matter what the sport is, and it doesn’t matter what the claimed economics are,” Fehr told reporters in New York. “The proposal is always the same. It is always, ‘The players will take a lot less money, and if not, we’ll lock you out.’ That’s what the proposal always is. It’s regrettable, but that’s the world we seem to live in.”

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And how would the owners fare after shelving the product?

The powerful NHL franchises can withstand a lengthy lockout, but many teams will suffer greatly as their fans move along to other interests. Another significant shutdown will force many franchises into heavy ticket discounting when play resumes.

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These men can’t help themselves. They can make almost any system fail with their resolute commitment to irresponsible management.

Some of the most vehement anti-union owners – Ed Snider (Flyers), Philip Anschutz (Kings) and Craig Leipold (Wild) – have some of the most ludicrous contracts on their books. These guys are pushing the hard line after personally fueling the league’s salary inflation.

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Bettman is demanding that the players help protect the owners from themselves. NHL history suggests this is an impossible task.

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And, as always, the NHL will lag behind the other major team sports in terms of general U.S. popularity.

Why the NFL would rather lockout referees than pay $16 million

Nicolaus Mills, The Guardian

Wednesday 12 September 2012 13.26 EDT

What is surprising is that the league wants a new labor war now. The country is in a recession, but pro football is thriving. NFL revenues are currently $9.3 billion a year and expected to climb to between $12 and $14 billion.

The refs, for their part, are seeking benefits that they put at $16.5 million over the five years of a new contract. In a 32-team league that amounts to just $500,000 per team, less than what a typical pro player earns in a single season. ($1.9 million average NFL player salary or $770,000 median NFL player salary).

Were the NFL serious about ending the current lockout, all it would have to do is offer up the $16.5 million the refs say they need. The refs have made their $16.5 million demand so public that they have left themselves no wiggle room to ask for more.

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Still, what the regular refs are asking for in their new contract is modest in light of their employer’s growing wealth. If the refs have overreached, it has been in believing their nearly 1,500 years of collective NFL experience would spare them from being treated as disposable, middle-class employees.

Like thousands of teachers and municipal workers who in recent years have been forced into accepting pay and benefit cuts, the refs are finding they are more on their own than they ever imagined.

The NFL is willing to defend its bottom line at all costs, even if that means showing its worst side. Remember, until medical evidence proved them wrong, NFL officials sought to minimize how dangerous the concussions players so often experience are. The lockout of the referees follows this same penny-wise-pound-foolish pattern.

Corporate-Led Education Reform Movement Ignores Solvable Problems to Carry Out Its Agenda

By: David Dayen, Firedog Lake

Tuesday September 11, 2012 9:06 am

To the extent that there are problems, it appears clear that they have to do with resources. The schools in the lowest-income areas have no air conditioning. Roofs leak. The cafeteria is full of roaches. Mold sits in the ventilation systems. Kids don’t get textbooks for weeks. Administrators pack classrooms with 40 and 50 students at a time. These are pretty obvious and solvable problems.

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Worse, there’s apparently money in the system to make these repairs, in the form of TIFs or Tax Increment Financing, that have been re-routed to pet projects, including a Hyatt Hotel and the Chicago Board of Trade.

The corporate-funded “education reform” movement, however, neglects these demonstrable problems. They prefer to describe American education, and in this case Chicago education, as in a state of perpetual crisis (You would think that, regarding Chicago, they would blame the guy in charge of the city’s public schools from 2001 to 2009, current Education Secretary and reform movement leader Arne Duncan). They use this assumption of a crisis, picked up by the media and prominent politicians, as a pretext to enact wide-ranging interventions into schools that may just need a solid roof, no lead in the paint and some relief from the heat. They want to overhaul so-called “failing schools,” and hand them over to entities which don’t run them any better but which make a lot of money for investors and for-profit vendors.

This is a very good overview of the Chicago Teachers Union strike, and this serves as a marker for what Chicago teachers want out of their schools. It’s about a teachers union that finally said no to the rightward drift of education policy, led by a new mayor committed to the corporate-led reform agenda. The issues of student testing evaluations and the like are the means to the end of the ultimate privatization of the education system. When you look at assessment that doesn’t incorporate the standardized tests, you see that the schools have progressed, with student achievement on the rise. But that would be deeply harmful to the corporate-led reform agenda.

The Worst Teacher In Chicago

By: Greg Palast Report, Firedog Lake

Thursday September 13, 2012 3:41 pm

In a school with some of the poorest kids in Chicago, one English teacher-I won’t use her name-who’d been cemented into the school system for over a decade, wouldn’t do a damn thing to lift test scores, yet had an annual salary level of close to $70,000 a year. Under Chicago’s new rules holding teachers accountable and allowing charter schools to compete, this seniority-bloated teacher was finally fired by the principal.

In a nearby neighborhood, a charter school, part of the city system, had complete freedom to hire. No teachers’ union interference. The charter school was able to bring in an innovative English teacher with advanced degrees and a national reputation in her field – for $29,000 a year less than was paid to the fired teacher.

You’ve guessed it by now: It’s the same teacher.

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Let’s stop kidding ourselves. This is what Mitt Romney and Obama and Arne Duncan and Paul Ryan have in mind when they promote charter schools and the right to fire teachers with tenure: slash teachers salaries and bust their unions.

They’ve almost stopped pretending, too. Both the Right Wing-nuts and the Obama Administration laud the “progress” of New Orleans’ schools-a deeply sick joke. The poorest students, that struggle most with standardized tests, were drowned or washed away.

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Here is an actual question from the standardized test that were given third graders here in NYC by the nation’s biggest test-for-profit company:

“…Most young tennis stars learn the game from coaches at private clubs. In this sentence a private club is….” Then you have some choices in which the right answer is “Country Club – place where people meet.”

Now not many of the “people [who] meet” at country clubs are from the South Side of Chicago – unless their parents are caddies. A teacher on the South Side whose students are puzzled by the question will lose their pay or job. Students on the lakefront Gold Coast all know that mommy plays tennis at the Country Club with Raul on Wednesdays. So their teacher gets a raise and their school has high marks.

Chicago Teacher on Why He’s Striking Against Rahm Emanuel’s Pro-Business Education Agenda

By: Kevin Gosztola, Firedog Lake

Monday September 10, 2012 9:08 pm

When you make me cram 30-50 kids in my classroom with no air conditioning so that temperatures hit 96 degrees, that hurts our kids.

When you lock down our schools with metal detectors and arrest brothers for play fighting in the halls, that hurts our kids.

When you take 18-25 days out of the school year for high stakes testing that is not even scientifically applicable for many of our students, that hurts our kids.

When you spend millions on your pet programs, but there’s no money for school level repairs, so the roof leaks on my students at their desks when it rains, that hurts our kids.

When you unilaterally institute a longer school day, insult us by calling it a “full school day” and then provide no implementation support, throwing our schools into chaos, that hurts our kids.

When you support Mayor Emanuel’s TIF program in diverting hundreds of millions of dollars of school funds into to the pockets of wealthy developers like billionaire member of your school board, Penny Pritzker so she can build more hotels, that not only hurts kids, but somebody should be going to jail.

When you close and turnaround schools disrupting thousands of kids’ lives and educations and often plunging them into violence and have no data to support your practice, that hurts our kids.

When you leave thousands of kids in classrooms with no teacher for weeks and months on end due to central office bureaucracy trumping basic needs of students, that not only hurts our kids, it basically ruins the whole idea of why we have a district at all.

When you, rather than bargain on any of this stuff set up fake school centers staffed by positively motived Central Office staff, many of whom are terribly pissed to be pressed into veritable scabitude when they know you are wrong, and you equip them with a manual that tells them things like, “communicate with words”, that not only hurts our kids, but it suggests you have no idea how to run a system with their welfare in mind.

Neil Armstrong memorial packs Washington cathedral

By Ian Simpson, Reuters

7 mins ago

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first person to set foot on the moon, was praised in a NASA memorial service at the National Cathedral on Thursday as a humble hero who led mankind into space.

Mourners who filled the vast Episcopal cathedral to mark Armstrong’s death last month heard him eulogized as a dedicated team player who shunned the limelight for decades after piloting the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing.

“He embodied all that is good and all that is great about America. Neil, wherever you are, you again have shown us a way to the stars,” Eugene Cernan, the last man on the moon as the commander of the 1972 Apollo 17 mission, said in a tribute from the pulpit.

Crossposted from DocuDharma

This puts us a mere 5 years behind Atrios who celebrated his 10th anniversary earlier this year and 3 years behind dK.

1827 days.  30,833 essays posted (17 a day).  20,089 featured (11 a day).  343,863 comments (188 per day).

Yes, that seemed like an awful lot to me too.  The initial values are taken directly from the database which sequentially numbers each essay and comment.  The larger amount of essays includes everything that the post button was pushed on including static, draft, and deleted pieces as well as all those that were not featured on the Front Page.  The featured essays come from direct measure of the number of Main Archive Pages (now 673 @ 30 per page +19 from the inception of the site on August 17, 2007) starting at our very first essay on our official launch day, September 12, 2007 (page 667 currently).

So 11 features a day seems reasonable since we’re currently running around 8 or 9, but 188 comments?  Well, if you average them out per feature you end up with about 17 comments which is not orders of magnitude outrageous when you consider that many of the 30% that didn’t make the Front Page got comments too, some quite a few.

Even if the numbers are a little inflated though, it’s still quite a record of accomplishment and I want to thank you, our readers and contributors, for making it such a success.

There are 2 individuals I’m going to publicly embarrass- Robyn and mishima.  They’ve been part of the site since before the beginning and the consistent high quality of their work as well as its dependability is an example for anyone, including myself.

For your amusement I thought you might like to see our opening day line up-

September 12, 2007

• Muse in the Morning by: Robyn
• The Morning News by: ek hornbeck
• So Today’s The Big Day! by: ek hornbeck
• Welcome New Users by: ek hornbeck
• in Other news… by: pico
• Launch Strategy Open Thread by: buhdydharma
• A Blog is Born: Announcing ~ Docudharma! by: buhdydharma
• Four at Four by: Magnifico
• Oh Freedom! by: OPOL
• Pragmatists and Idealists: A Word About John Kerry by: Armando
• They Must Know We’re Here by: Turkana
• Spin by: LoE
• Thank You, You Insufferable Bastards! by: buhdydharma
• Midnight Cowboying – Osama Bin Laden: "War on Terror Has Jumped the Shark" by: pinche tejano

Another damned, thick, square book!  Always scribble, scribble, scribble!  Eh, Mr. Gibbon?

Doing the research for one of these retrospectives exposes you to some pretty interesting content, parts of which you are expected to be familiar with even if you weren’t around for the entertainment.  Here’s some meta from pre-launch.

• Look And Feel by: ek hornbeck Tue Aug 21, 2007
• So Say We All by: ek hornbeck Thu Aug 23, 2007
• Why We Are Here by: Armando Thu Aug 30, 2007
• Time Out by: ek hornbeck Wed Sep 05, 2007
• I/P by: ek hornbeck Fri Sep 07, 2007

And our first Hide Rates–

• How to Promote Defundamentalism by: Seneca Doane Fri Sep 07, 2007

We talked a lot about regulating controversy.  Oddly the central concept, having Editors debate questionable actions in private and recommend temporary penalties for misbehavior to buhdy who would make the final decision instead of automatic banishment based on witch-hunting mobs, didn’t generate nearly as much as the questions of whether it should be possible to express disapproval of a statement without further explanation (Wrong!) and if Pony was simply too cutesy to live.

When we found out there was no way for Members to examine hidden comments and uprate them if they disagreed with the assessment, we suspended ratings for all but Admins and Editors until Soapblox could fix the problem (a big surprise to sites that had been using ratings but not checking them).

• Meta Meat: Hidden Comments and Flamewars by: buhdydharma Sat Sep 15, 2007
• On Civility by: ek hornbeck Sun Sep 16, 2007
• Civility Lecturing: The short version by: buhdydharma Sun Sep 16, 2007
• on Armando and civility by: Jerome a Paris Sun Sep 16, 2007
• I don’t give a rat’s ass what you think about me. by: ek hornbeck Thu Sep 20, 2007

Unfortunately, some people have difficulty following the Eight Fold Way (and distinguishing a metaphor from scripture I might add).

• How Dare Brown People Participate In Politics? by: Armando Mon Nov 26, 2007
• Racist Rhetoric: Alleging Race Baiting by: Armando Tue Nov 27, 2007
• Response To Point Of Personal Privilege by: Armando Wed Nov 28, 2007
• Why "Civility" Is a Joke by: Armando Wed Nov 28, 2007
• A Problem of Race And Ethnicity by: Armando Fri Nov 30, 2007
• On Civility (Reprint) by: ek hornbeck Fri Nov 30, 2007

Have I mentioned I like irony?

I kind of miss the big guy and expect his disputes with Jeralyn over Zimmerman/Martin and Markos over… well everything, to soon lead to his finding something of substance to write about.  He wasn’t always wrong you know.

• "They All Disappoint&quot by: Armando Sun Dec 09, 2007
• From The "Pols Are Pols" File by: Armando Tue Dec 18, 2007

Later I’ll be re-publishing So Today’s The Big Day! which is kind of about the positive energy we felt when we opened our doors and Welcome New Users which describes some of the basic tools and organization.  Our handling of HTML has gotten much better with time so we now do have formatting buttons and a literal character (backslash-‘\').  While technically limited to avoid spam, there’s no practical cap on your daily essays if you get in touch with TheMomCat or I.  We monitor pretty closely, but we’re not instantly available necessarily.  I’ve kind of come to enjoy the slower pace where no one sets a serious time limit for you to provide linked evidence of your unfounded accusations, conspiracy theories, and catalog of calumnies and slanders!

I hope you’re enjoying your experience here as much as we do providing you a forum to have it.  I’m looking forward to many more years of stimulating discussion and thought provoking pieces.

Nostalgia Posted:

• So Today’s The Big Day!
• Welcome New Users

Andrew Sullivan

James Carville

Austan Goolsbee as aired

Extended Interview Pt. 1

Extended Interview Pt. 2

Extended Interview Pt. 3

Bill Richardson

Ed Rendell