Tag: Open Thread

Jan 10 2014

On This Day In History January 10

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

January 10 is the 10th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. There are 355 days remaining until the end of the year (356 in leap years).

On this day in 1901, a gusher signals start of U.S. oil industry

A drilling derrick at Spindletop Hill near Beaumont, Texas, produces an enormous gusher of crude oil, coating the landscape for hundreds of feet and signaling the advent of the American oil industry. The geyser was discovered at a depth of over 1,000 feet, flowed at an initial rate of approximately 100,000 barrels a day and took nine days to cap. Following the discovery, petroleum, which until that time had been used in the U.S. primarily as a lubricant and in kerosene for lamps, would become the main fuel source for new inventions such as cars and airplanes; coal-powered forms of transportation including ships and trains would also convert to the liquid fuel.

Crude oil, which became the world’s first trillion-dollar industry, is a natural mix of hundreds of different hydrocarbon compounds trapped in underground rock. The hydrocarbons were formed millions of years ago when tiny aquatic plants and animals died and settled on the bottoms of ancient waterways, creating a thick layer of organic material. Sediment later covered this material, putting heat and pressure on it and transforming it into the petroleum that comes out of the ground today.

(emphasis mine)

There had long been suspicions that oil might be under [“Spindletop Hill.” The area was known for its sulfur springs and bubbling gas seepages that would ignite if lit. In August 1892, George W. O’Brien, George W. Carroll, Pattillo Higgins and others formed the Gladys City Oil, Gas, and Manufacturing Company to do exploratory drilling on Spindletop Hill. The company drilled many dry holes and ran into trouble, as investors began to balk at pouring more money into drilling with no oil to show for it.

Pattillo Higgins left the company and teamed with Captain Anthony F. Lucas, the leading expert in the U.S. on salt dome formations. Lucas made a lease agreement in 1899 with the Gladys City Company and a later agreement with Higgins. Lucas drilled to 575 feet (180 m) before running out of money. He secured additional funding from John H. Galey and James M. Guffey of Pittsburgh, but the deal left Lucas with only a small share of the lease and Higgins with nothing.

Lucas continued drilling and on January 10, 1901, at a depth of 1,139 ft (347 m), what is known as the Lucas Gusher or the Lucas Geyser blew oil over 150 feet (50 m) in the air at a rate of 100,000 barrels per day (16,000 m3/d)(4,200,000 gallons). It took nine days before the well was brought under control. Spindletop was the largest gusher the world had seen and catapulted Beaumont into an oil-fueled boomtown. Beaumont’s population of 10,000 tripled in three months and eventually rose to 50,000. Speculation led land prices to increase rapidly. By the end of 1902, over 500 companies were formed and 285 active wells were in operation.

Production began to decline rapidly after 1902, and the wells produced only 10,000 barrels per day (1,600 m3/d) by 1904. On November 14, 1925, the Yount-Lee Oil Company brought in its McFaddin No. 2 at a depth of about 2,500 feet (800 m), sparking a second boom, which culminated in the field’s peak production year of 1927, during which 21,000,000 barrels (3.3 GL) were produced. Over the ten years following the McFaddin discovery, over 72,000,000 barrels (11.4 GL) of oil were produced, mostly from the newer areas of the field. Spindletop continued as a productive source of oil until about 1936. It was then mined for sulfur from the 1950s to about 1975.

America’s first documented oil spill

Jan 09 2014

Punting the Pundits

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Richard (RJ) Eskow: Now We Know: JPMorgan Chase Is Worse Than Enron

It’s beginning to look as if JPMorgan Chase has had a hand in every major banking scandal of the last decade. In fact, it’s the Zelig of Wall Street crime. Take a snapshot of any major bank fraud and chances are you’ll see JPMorgan Chase staring out at you from the frame.

Foreclosure fraud, investor fraud, cheating customers, market manipulation, LIBOR… and now, the coup de grace to JPM’s tattered reputation: a $2 billion fine for closing its eyes and covering up as Bernie Madoff literally bilked widows and orphans, along with a lot of other families and charities. (Here’s a list of investors.)

Does Jamie Dimon, the bank’s CEO, still think people don’t say enough nice things about him? Do his friends? More importantly, how does the largest bank in the country (measured in assets) get away with being worse than Enron?

That one’s easy: By being the largest bank in the country.

Robert Sheer; Exposing Public Wickedness Is More American Than Apple Pie

It’s the revolt of the geeks. Edward Snowden is John Peter Zenger digitized, a post-Internet free-press hero soaring above the security obsessions of the past decade to assert the inalienable requirements of individual sovereignty in a wired world.

It was Zenger whose journalistic efforts to expose the wrongdoing of a colonial governor appointed by the crown landed him in jail facing the charge of “seditious libel,” quite similar to that brought against Snowden for exposing the NSA’s illegal spying.

Their defense is the same: True patriotism demands a vigilant confrontation with government infamy. “I know not what reason is,” Zenger published in his defense back in 1734, “if sapping and betraying the liberties of a people be not treason.” After Zenger spent more than eight months in jail, a jury of his peers exonerated him and his cry for an unfettered free press came to be enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.

Mark Weisbrot: How Change Takes Place in the United States: The Minimum Wage

Last week, the New York Times reported that “Democratic Party leaders … have found an issue they believe can lift their fortunes both locally and nationally in 2014: an increase in the minimum wage.”

This is a good signal that millions of underpaid workers in the world’s richest country will finally get a raise. It’s not a done deal yet, but it’s worth looking at how we got to this point.

Although the fact that the majority of Americans were not sharing in the gains from economic growth had been well known and well documented for decades, it was not a significant political issue until a grassroots movement, known as Occupy Wall Street, made it one. [..]

Unfortunately the White House-supported increase in the minimum wage to $10.10 over two years — important as it is — will not reverse that much of the damage of the past four decades. Now imagine a movement for labor law reform, of the kind that President Obama promised to support in his 2008 presidential campaign: in particular, the Employee Free Choice Act, which would restore the rights of U.S. workers — vastly degraded since 1980 — to form unions and bargain collectively. Of course the big business lobbies would fight it much harder than a minimum wage increase. But in 2009, when the Democrats had the Congress as well as the presidency, there was at least a possibility.

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: Marijuana Injustices

I have no desire to smoke marijuana, partly because doing so might drive me back to the cigarette habit I broke two decades ago. I don’t want to be one of those “cool parents” who pretend to be as culturally advanced as their kids. In my case, that’s a ridiculous aspiration anyway.

And I agree with those who call attention to the dangers of excessive indulgence in marijuana and want to encourage people to resist it. Nobody wants us to become a nation of stoners.

Nonetheless, I have come to believe that we should legalize or at least decriminalize marijuana use. The way we enforce marijuana laws is unconscionable. The arrest rates for possession are astoundingly and shamefully different for whites and African-Americans. The incongruence between what our statutes require and what Americans actually do cannot be sustained.

Dean Baker: Obamacare and Those Invincible Youngsters

There is an ongoing media obsession with the number of young people who sign up for health care insurance through Obamacare. We have been repeatedly told that the success of the program depends on large numbers of healthy young people — the “young invincibles” — signing up for the program. [..]

The key issue about the success of the exchanges has always been their ability to attract healthy people of all ages. The subsidy from healthy to less healthy already exists in the employer provided insurance market where employers effectively deduct the same amount from workers’ wages for insurance regardless of their health condition. So this re-distributional aspect of Obamacare already exists in the market that provides most people with their insurance.

The other reason why the focus on the young invincibles is harmful is that it distracts the public from looking at ways to improve Obamacare. These focus on reducing or eliminating the role for private insurers in the system as well as other sources of waste.

Jan 09 2014

On This Day In History January 9

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

January 9 is the ninth day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. There are 356 days remaining until the end of the year (357 in leap years).

On this day in 1493, Italian explorer Christopher Columbus, sailing near the Dominican Republic, sees three “mermaids”–in reality manatees–and describes them as “not half as beautiful as they are painted.” Six months earlier, Columbus (1451-1506) set off from Spain across the Atlantic Ocean with the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria, hoping to find a western trade route to Asia. Instead, his voyage, the first of four he would make, led him to the Americas, or “New World.”

Mermaids, mythical half-female, half-fish creatures, have existed in seafaring cultures at least since the time of the ancient Greeks. Typically depicted as having a woman’s head and torso, a fishtail instead of legs and holding a mirror and comb, mermaids live in the ocean and, according to some legends, can take on a human shape and marry mortal men. Mermaids are closely linked to sirens, another folkloric figure, part-woman, part-bird, who live on islands and sing seductive songs to lure sailors to their deaths.

West Indian manatees are large, gray aquatic mammals with bodies that taper to a flat, paddle-shaped tail. They have two forelimbs, called flippers, with three to four nails on each flipper. Their head and face are wrinkled with whiskers on the snout.

Manatees can be found in shallow, slow-moving rivers, estuaries, saltwater bays, canals, and coastal areas – particularly where seagrass beds or freshwater vegetation flourish. Manatees are a migratory species. Within the United States, they are concentrated in Florida in the winter. In summer months, they can be found as far west as Texas and as far north as Massachusetts, but summer sightings in Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina are more common. West Indian manatees can also be found in the coastal and inland waterways of Central America and along the northern coast of South America, although distribution in these areas may be discontinuous.

Manatees are gentle and slow-moving animals. Most of their time is spent eating, resting, and traveling. Manatees are completely herbivorous.

West Indian manatees have no natural enemies, and it is believed they can live 60 years or more. As with all wild animal populations, a certain percentage of manatee mortality is attributed to natural causes of death such as cold stress, gastrointestinal disease, pneumonia, and other diseases. A high number of additional fatalities are from human-related causes. Most human-related manatee fatalities occur from collisions with watercraft.

Jan 08 2014

Punting the Pundits

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Wednesday is Ladies’ Day.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Katrina vanden Heuvel: 2014 promises plenty of positive change

Will 2014 feature more of the same Washington gridlock, austerity, partisan posturing and just plain stupidity that made 2013 so miserable? The dysfunction got so bad that the media celebrated Congress merely for agreeing on a budget, one that will damage the economy but not as much as last year. That Congress could pass something, anything, made it seem like carping to note that legislators cruelly cut off emergency jobless benefits for workers unable to find work and stupidly killed the wind energy production tax credit, essential to that vital industry.

But the widespread predictions that 2014 will witness only more of the same ignore the growing reality that, outside the Beltway, people are beginning to stir and change is in the air. [..]

Currents such as these aren’t yet a tidal wave. The citizens in motion aren’t yet a consolidated movement. But 2014 begins not only with change in the air but also with change taking place on the ground. Washington may continue to be gridlocked. Across the country, however, people are starting to move.

Heidi Moore: The GOP couldn’t be more wrong about cutting unemployment insurance

If the government has any responsibility to its people, it’s not to force them into poverty when they have no other financial options

How do you improve the economy? If you ask some Republican members of Congress, the best way is to throw 1.3 million people into deeper poverty, starting this week.

For some time, right-wing think tanks and conservative politicians have held on to a number of arguments that they believe prove it’s a good idea to let unemployment benefits lapse for 1.3 million people. None of those arguments holds up under the least bit of scrutiny. America’s economy would be far better off if Congress extended unemployment benefits.

To look at their points, one by one, is to understand that the Republican opposition to extending unemployment benefits is dishonest. It also stands to alienate many Republican voters, particularly in the south, where poverty is widespread.

Zoë Carpenter: Eighty-Six Percent of Americans Think the Government Should Fight Poverty

Fifty years after President Lyndon Johnson announced a “War on Poverty,” a majority of Americans believe that persistent economic hardship is the result of a broken economy, not of personal or government failures. They broadly agree that the government has a responsibility to use its resources to fight poverty, and should pursue a target of reducing it by half over the next decade.

Those are the conclusions of a public opinion survey published Tuesday by the Center for American Progress. The report assessed perceptions of poverty in general, as well as opinions of the War on Poverty in retrospect and of policy proposals on the table now. As lawmakers move to cut benefits and refuse to consider serious investments in the economy, in education and in healthcare, the survey is another reminder that those are precisely the investments people want the government to make.

Michelle Goldberg: This Is David Brooks on Drugs

he fact that David Brooks’s wistful, self-satisfied moralism cloaks a serious moral obtuseness is usually hardly worth noting. It’s simply to be expected, as predictable as Tom Friedman bumping into a taxi driver with pithy insights about globalization or Ross Douthat disapproving of his coevals’ sex lives. Still, Brooks’s lament about marijuana legalization is astonishing in its blindness to ruined lives and the human stakes of a serious policy debate. Somehow, he’s written a whole column about the drug war that doesn’t once contain the words “arrest” or “prison.” It’s evidence not just of his own writerly weakness but of the way double standards in the war on drugs shield elites from reckoning with its consequences. [..]

What’s missing here, of course, is any reckoning with the social costs of that discouragement. According to Marijuana Legalization: What Everyone Needs to Know, a 2012 book by scholars at the Rand Corporation’s Drug Policy Research Center, there are currently 40,000 prison inmates with marijuana convictions, and “perhaps half of them are in prison for offenses related to marijuana alone.” A recent ACLU report tells us that between 2001 and 2010, there were over 8 million marijuana arrests in the United States, 88 percent of them just for possession.

Jessica Weisberg: [Undocumented Lawyers and Rogue States ]

In the first week of 2014, thirteen states increased their minimum wage, Colorado legalized recreational marijuana use and California restricted gun registration and granted more rights to transgender students. There are always new laws each January: Illinois banned anyone under 18 from using a tanning salon, Oregon now permits new mothers to keep their placentas, and Wisconsin has legitimized “pedal pubs”-which, for the uninitiated, refers to a dozen or so bicycles hitched together with a keg mounted on top. But the ideological aggressiveness of some of the 2014 laws have inspired many to proclaim 2014 as a “liberal moment.” Another example supporting the liberal moment thesis: the California Supreme Court ruled last week that an undocumented immigrant who passed the state bar should be able to practice law. [..]

Such laws have made the quality of life for undocumented immigrants vastly different from state to state: immigrants can get a driver’s license in New Mexico, and they pay the same tuition as their high-school classmates at any state university, but next door, in Arizona, they’ll never be eligible for a license and will pay three times as much for college as their peers. California has become, arguably, the most immigrant-friendly state in the country, having just implemented the Trust Act, a law that limits ICE’s power to hold and deport nonviolent immigrants.

Laura Wright Treadway: The Benefits of Digging in the Dirt

Nature schools are helping make outdoor play a priority for a generation of kids suffering from nature-deficit disorder.

In his 2005 book Last Child in the Woods, which introduced the world to the term “nature-deficit disorder,” journalist Richard Louv argued that children need to unplug from computers and smartphones and reconnect with the original way of learning about the world: by wandering around outside. Louv’s book, naturally, was a big hit with environmentalists (the National Audubon Society and Wilderness Education Association were among those who gave him awards). But now that I have a child of my own and read as much about parenting and child development as I do about the environment, I’m increasingly aware that it’s not just the eco-minded who are calling for more mud pies and fewer LeapFrog computers for preschoolers. It seems that everywhere I turn, there’s another reminder that our children need less time in front of screens and more time figuring things out for themselves. [..]

Parents are clearly willing to pay to get their kids outside more, and with good reason. Forty percent of U.S. school districts cut recess or physical education programs after Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001, partly in response to pressure to improve test scores. But the benefits of getting outside to play are manifold, particularly in natural settings. Studies show that exposure to nature can help reduce ADHD symptoms; in schools with an environmental education component, students score higher on standardized tests in math, reading, writing, and listening than their non-nature-exposed counterparts. Other positive effects include improved critical thinking, problem solving, and cooperation. And there are health benefits, too: kids who play outside more often are less likely to develop nearsightedness, obesity, diabetes, and vitamin D deficiencies.

Jan 08 2014

On This Day In History January 8

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

January 8 is the eighth day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. There are 357 days remaining until the end of the year (358 in leap years).

On this day in 1877, Crazy Horse and his warriors–outnumbered, low on ammunition and forced to use outdated weapons to defend themselves–fight their final losing battle against the U.S. Cavalry in Montana.

Six months earlier, in the Battle of Little Bighorn, Crazy Horse and his ally, Chief Sitting Bull, led their combined forces of Sioux and Cheyenne to a stunning victory over Lieutenant Colonel George Custer (1839-76) and his men. The Indians were resisting the U.S. government’s efforts to force them back to their reservations. After Custer and over 200 of his soldiers were killed in the conflict, later dubbed “Custer’s Last Stand,” the American public wanted revenge. As a result, the U.S. Army launched a winter campaign in 1876-77, led by General Nelson Miles (1839-1925), against the remaining hostile Indians on the Northern Plains.

On January 8, 1877, General Miles found Crazy Horse’s camp along Montana’s Tongue River. U.S. soldiers opened fire with their big wagon-mounted guns, driving the Indians from their warm tents out into a raging blizzard. Crazy Horse and his warriors managed to regroup on a ridge and return fire, but most of their ammunition was gone, and they were reduced to fighting with bows and arrows. They managed to hold off the soldiers long enough for the women and children to escape under cover of the blinding blizzard before they turned to follow them.

Though he had escaped decisive defeat, Crazy Horse realized that Miles and his well-equipped cavalry troops would eventually hunt down and destroy his cold, hungry followers. On May 6, 1877, Crazy Horse led approximately 1,100 Indians to the Red Cloud reservation near Nebraska’s Fort Robinson and surrendered. Five months later, a guard fatally stabbed him after he allegedly resisted imprisonment by Indian policemen

Jan 07 2014

Punting the Pundits

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Chris Hedges: The Last Gasp of American Democracy

This is our last gasp as a democracy. The state’s wholesale intrusion into our lives and obliteration of privacy are now facts. And the challenge to us-one of the final ones, I suspect-is to rise up in outrage and halt this seizure of our rights to liberty and free expression. If we do not do so we will see ourselves become a nation of captives.

The public debates about the government’s measures to prevent terrorism, the character assassination of Edward Snowden and his supporters, the assurances by the powerful that no one is abusing the massive collection and storage of our electronic communications miss the point. Any state that has the capacity to monitor all its citizenry, any state that has the ability to snuff out factual public debate through control of information, any state that has the tools to instantly shut down all dissent is totalitarian. Our corporate state may not use this power today. But it will use it if it feels threatened by a population made restive by its corruption, ineptitude and mounting repression. The moment a popular movement arises-and one will arise-that truly confronts our corporate masters, our venal system of total surveillance will be thrust into overdrive.

Tom Englehardt: American Jihad 2014: On the New National Security State Fundamentalists

Put it all together and what you have is a description of a militant organization whose purpose is to carry out a Washington version of global jihad, a perpetual war in the name of the true faith

In a 1950s civics textbook of mine, I can remember a Martian landing on Main Street, U.S.A., to be instructed in the glories of our political system.  You know, our tripartite government, checks and balances, miraculous set of rights, and vibrant democracy.  There was, Americans then thought, much to be proud of, and so for that generation of children, many Martians were instructed in the American way of life.  These days, I suspect, not so many.

Still, I wondered just what lessons might be offered to such a Martian crash-landing in Washington as 2014 begins.  Certainly checks, balances, rights, and democracy wouldn’t top any New Year’s list.  Since my childhood, in fact, that tripartite government has grown a fourth part, a national security state that is remarkably unchecked and unbalanced.  In recent times, that labyrinthine structure of intelligence agencies morphing into war-fighting outfits, the U.S. military (with its own secret military, the special operations forces, gestating inside it), and the Department of Homeland Security, a monster conglomeration of agencies that is an actual “defense department,” as well as a vast contingent of weapons makers, contractors, and profiteers bolstered by an army of lobbyists, has never stopped growing.  It has won the undying fealty of Congress, embraced the power of the presidency, made itself into a jobs program for the American people, and been largely free to do as it pleased with almost unlimited taxpayer dollars.

Dean Baker: All eyes on New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, America’s leading progressive

De Blasio is to the left of America’s Democratic party, but he’s no Marxist. Instead, he’ll likely usher in progressive policies

Reporting on the significance of Bill de Blasio becoming mayor of New York may have led some to fear that the Soviet Union was being reincarnated in the country’s largest city. While De Blasio is certainly to the left of many leaders of the America’s Democratic party, he is certainly no radical seeking to overthrow capitalism. Furthermore, even if he did plan to seize the means of production, his ability to do so as the mayor of a major city would be quite limited.

Nonetheless, there are many areas where the mayor of New York can have a substantial impact. The top of this list would be education policy. De Blasio’s predecessor, Michael Bloomberg, was a vocal and visible supporter of the education reform movement. While this movement has produced big profits for corporations in the testing business and made some policy entrepreneurs rich and famous, it has not done much to improve education for inner city kids. [.]]

There are certainly limits to what a big city mayor can do, but Mayor de Blasio can make a difference for both the people of New York and the country, if he is willing to try.

Nicolaus Mills: The US declared war on poverty 50 years ago. You would never know it

Lyndon Johnson declared an unconditional war on poverty for reasons both economic and moral. They are still relevant today

This 8 January marks the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson’s declaration of “unconditional war on poverty”. The statement came in a state of the union address that, because of its often drab prose, has rarely drawn much praise. But a half century later, it’s time to re-examine the case Johnson made in 1964 for remedying poverty in America.

In an era such as our own, when – despite a poverty rate the Census Bureau puts at 16% – Congress is preparing to cut the food stamp program and has refused to extend unemployment insurance, Johnson’s compassion stands out, along with his nuanced sense of who the poor are and what can be done to make their lives better.

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: On Unemployment, Today’s Congress Is Meaner Than George W. Bush

Why are we arguing about issues that were settled decades ago? Why, for example, is it so hard to extend unemployment insurance at a time when the jobless rate nationally is still at 7 percent, and higher than that in 21 states?

As the Senate votes this week on help for the unemployed, Democrats will be scrambling to win support from the handful of Republicans they’ll need to get the required 60 votes. The GOP-led House, in the meantime, shows no signs of moving on the matter. [..]

Similarly, raising the minimum wage wasn’t always so complicated. The parties had their differences on the concept, but a solid block of Republicans always saw regular increases as a just way of spreading the benefits of economic growth.

The contention over unemployment insurance and the minimum wage reflects the larger problem in American politics. Rather than discussing what we need to do to secure our future, we are spending most of our energy re-litigating the past.

Michael Wolff: Ezra Klein, Glenn Greenwald and the odd rise of personal brand journalism

Journalists are increasingly branching out on their own, but it’s a risky business that has yet to really show profitability

There is a new vision of journalism – call it the auteur school – in which the business shifts from being organized by institutions to being organized around individual journalists with discrete followings.

The latest development is the announcement by Ezra Klein that he will likely leave the Washington Post and is looking for investors to back him – with a reported eight figure investment (ie more than $10m!) – in an independent enterprise.

Last week Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, who ran the Wall Street Journal tech conference AllThingsD, announced that, following the WSJ ending its relationship with them, they were setting up in business backed by NBC and other investors.

Glenn Greenwald, who broke the NSA-Edward Snowden story for the Guardian, is the headliner in a new left-oriented journalism venture backed by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. [..]

And that leads to my cautionary question: is this all journalistic vanity and hubris, ending in certain tears, or is there plausible economic logic to individual journalistic fiefdoms?

Jan 07 2014

On This Day In History January 7

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

January 7 is the seventh day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. There are 358 days remaining until the end of the year (359 in leap years).

On this day in 1789, the first US presidential election is held.  The United States presidential election of 1789 was the first presidential election in the United States of America. The election took place following the ratification of the United States Constitution in 1788. In this election, George Washington was elected for the first of his two terms as President of the United States, and John Adams became the first Vice President of the United States.

Before this election, the United States had no chief executive. Under the previous system-the Articles of Confederation-the national government was headed by the Confederation Congress, which had a ceremonial presiding officer and several executive departments, but no independent executive branch.

In this election, the enormously popular Washington essentially ran unopposed. The only real issue to be decided was who would be chosen as vice president. Under the system then in place, each elector cast two votes; if a person received a vote from a majority of the electors, that person became president, and the runner-up became vice president. All 69 electors cast one vote each for Washington. Their other votes were divided among eleven other candidates; John Adams received the most, becoming vice president. The Twelfth Amendment, ratified in 1804, would change this procedure, requiring each elector to cast distinct votes for president and vice president.

In the absence of conventions, there was no formal nomination process. The framers of the Constitution had presumed that Washington would be the first president, and once he agreed to come out of retirement to accept the office, there was no opposition to him. Individual states chose their electors, who voted all together for Washington when they met.

Electors used their second vote to cast a scattering of votes, many voting for someone besides Adams with Alexander Hamilton less out of opposition to him than to prevent Adams from matching Washington’s total.

Only ten states out of the original thirteen cast electoral votes in this election. North Carolina and Rhode Island were ineligible to participate as they had not yet ratified the United States Constitution. New York failed to appoint its allotment of eight electors because of a deadlock in the state legislature.

Jan 06 2014

Punting the Pundits

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Richard (RJ) Eskow: The Generations Should Fight Their Retirement Battles Together

This recent piece by Ayobami Olugbemiga has much to recommend it, but the most striking thing about it may be this:  Mr. Olugbemiga manages to discuss the retirement crisis faced by Millennials for seven paragraphs without once blaming older generations for their woes. The author’s photograph suggests he’s too young to be a Boomer. He nevertheless manages to observe that older Americans are also facing a retirement crisis, and cites an AP story which notes that this is a global phenomenon. [..]

The generational war is a hoax. In this global economy the fight for retirement security should unite us, not divide us, across barriers of age and race. The generations share a common agenda: for job creation, stronger Social Security, and economic equality; and against job-killing and wage-suppressing trade deals, usurious debt, and runaway banks.

It’s going to take all of us, young and old, to fight for an agenda like that.

Mohamed A. El-Erian: Extending Unemployment Benefits Makes Good Economic Sense, Too

Our lawmakers will be debating this week the emergency benefits received by the long-term unemployed. There are solid economic and social arguments in favor of restoring these important benefits that lapsed on December 28 for 1.3 million Americans.

The social case is clear.

The long-term unemployed are among the most vulnerable segment of society today. They are also part of two problems whose size and duration are unprecedented in modern American history, and worrisome: the growing threat of high structural unemployment and the curse of excessive societal inequalities of income, wealth and opportunities.

For any given opportunity, the long-term unemployed face much greater difficulties in securing a job than others who have been unemployed for less time. (And, unfortunately, there are still quite a few of the latter too.)

Finally, the country can afford to pay these benefits without undermining other programs and priorities. And in no way does the monetary burden of these benefits threaten overall national wellbeing and financial soundness.

Dan Gillmor: My 2014 resolution: stop my country from becoming a surveillance state

This will be a vital year in the fight for privacy and an open internet. All Americans should join the cause before it’s too late

Our New Year’s resolutions tend to be well-meaning and hard to keep. That’s because we resolve to change our lives in fundamental ways – get fit, etc. But inertia and habit are the enemy of change, and we usually fall back into old patterns. It’s human nature.

Despite all that, I’ve made a resolution for 2014. It is to do whatever I can to reverse my country’s trajectory toward being a surveillance state, and to push as hard as possible for a truly open internet.

I realize I can’t do much on my own, and hope many others, especially journalists, will join in. This year may be pivotal; if we don’t make progress, or worse, lose ground, it may be too late.

Robert Reich: The Year of the Great Redistribution

One of the worst epithets that can be leveled at a politician these days is to call him a “redistributionist.” Yet 2013 marked one of the biggest redistributions in recent American history. It was a redistribution upward, from average working people to the owners of America. [..]

For years, the bargaining power of American workers has also been eroding due to ever-more efficient means of outsourcing abroad, new computer software that can replace almost any routine job, and an ongoing shift of full-time to part-time and contract work. And unions have been decimated. In the 1950s, over a third of private-sector workers were members of labor unions. Now, fewer than 7 percent are unionized.

All this helps explain why corporate profits have been increasing throughout this recovery (they grew over 18 percent in 2013 alone) while wages have been dropping. Corporate earnings now represent the largest share of the gross domestic product – and wages the smallest share of GDP – than at any time since records have been kept.

Hence, the Great Redistribution.

Mark Weisbrot: NAFTA: 20 Years of Regret for Mexico

Mexico’s economic growth stalled since the ‘free trade’ deal was signed with the US, and its poverty rate is about the same

It was 20 years ago that the North American Free Trade Agreement between the US, Canada, and Mexico was implemented. In Washington, the date coincided with an outbreak of the bacteria cryptosporidium in the city’s water supply, with residents having to boil their water before drinking it. The joke in town was, “See what happens, NAFTA takes effect and you can’t drink the water here.”

Our neglected infrastructure aside, it is easy to see that NAFTA was a bad deal for most Americans. The promised trade surpluses with Mexico turned out to be deficits, some hundreds of thousands of jobs were lost, and there was downward pressure on US wages – which was, after all, the purpose of the agreement. This was not like the European Union’s (pre-Eurozone) economic integration, which allocated hundreds of billions of dollars of development aid to the poorer countries of Europe so as to pull their living standards up toward the average. The idea was to push US wages downward, toward Mexico’s, and to create new rights for corporations within the trade area: these lucky multinational enterprises could now sue governments directly before a corporate-friendly international tribunal, unaccountable to any national judicial system, for regulations (eg environmental) that infringed upon their profit-making potential.

Robert Kuttner: Obamacare: Republican Obstruction or Needless Blunders?

Two words that strike fear into the hearts of insurers are Adverse Selection. That’s insurance-speak for the tendency of the sickest people to gravitate to the most generous insurance policies. The flipside is that young and healthy people, whose premiums are needed to subsidize the care of the sick, tend to avoid insurance that they think they can’t afford or won’t need. An insurance pool that includes only the sick will be astronomically expensive. [..]

But, unless everything breaks just right, the odds are that more voters will feel grumpy than grateful, due to dislocations, price hikes, and plain frustrations with healthcare.gov. Yes, much of this is the result of Republicans blocking cleaner and simpler legislation and the Supreme Court blocking mandatory expansion of Medicaid. Yet some of the blind spots were plainly the administration’s own.

There are many good features in President Obama’s health reform. Political prescience wasn’t one.

Jan 06 2014

On This Day In History January 6

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

January 6 is the sixth day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. There are 359 days remaining until the end of the year (360 in leap years).

On this day in 1838, Samuel Morse’s telegraph system is demonstrated for the first time at the Speedwell Iron Works in Morristown, New Jersey. The telegraph, a device which used electric impulses to transmit encoded messages over a wire, would eventually revolutionize long-distance communication, reaching the height of its popularity in the 1920s and 1930s.

Samuel Finley Breese Morse was born April 27, 1791, in Charlestown, Massachusetts. He attended Yale University, where he was interested in art, as well as electricity, still in its infancy at the time. After college, Morse became a painter. In 1832, while sailing home from Europe, he heard about the newly discovered electromagnet and came up with an idea for an electric telegraph. He had no idea that other inventors were already at work on the concept.

Morse spent the next several years developing a prototype and took on two partners, Leonard Gale and Alfred Vail, to help him. In 1838, he demonstrated his invention using Morse code, in which dots and dashes represented letters and numbers. In 1843, Morse finally convinced a skeptical Congress to fund the construction of the first telegraph line in the United States, from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore. In May 1844, Morse sent the first official telegram over the line, with the message: “What hath God wrought!”

Jan 05 2014

On This Day In History January 5

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

January 5 is the fifth day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. There are 360 days remaining until the end of the year (361 in leap years).

On this day in 1933, construction starts on what will become one of America’s most famous landmarks: the Golden Gate Bridge. When completed in 1937, the Golden Gate has a 4,200-foot-long suspension span, making it the world’s longest suspension bridge. Since opening to the public in May 1937, almost 2 billion vehicles have crossed the bridge, in both the north- and southbound directions.

The bridge was named not for its distinctive orange color (which provides extra visibility to passing ships in San Francisco’s famous fog), but for the Golden Gate Strait, where the San Francisco Bay opens into the Pacific Ocean. The bridge spans the strait and connects the northern part of the city of San Francisco to Marin County, California.

Before the bridge was built, the only practical short route between San Francisco and what is now Marin County was by boat across a section of San Francisco Bay. Ferry service began as early as 1820, with regularly scheduled service beginning in the 1840s for purposes of transporting water to San Francisco. The Sausalito Land and Ferry Company service, launched in 1867, eventually became the Golden Gate Ferry Company, a Southern Pacific Railroad subsidiary, the largest ferry operation in the world by the late 1920s. Once for railroad passengers and customers only, Southern Pacific’s automobile ferries became very profitable and important to the regional economy. The ferry crossing between the Hyde Street Pier in San Francisco and Sausalito in Marin County took approximately 20 minutes and cost US$1.00 per vehicle, a price later reduced to compete with the new bridge. The trip from the San Francisco Ferry Building took 27 minutes.

Many wanted to build a bridge to connect San Francisco to Marin County. San Francisco was the largest American city still served primarily by ferry boats. Because it did not have a permanent link with communities around the bay, the city’s growth rate was below the national average. Many experts said that a bridge couldn’t be built across the 6,700 ft (2,042 m) strait. It had strong, swirling tides and currents, with water 500 ft (150 m) in depth at the center of the channel, and frequent strong winds. Experts said that ferocious winds and blinding fogs would prevent construction and operation.

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