100 Slaves 100 Enemies

Sprint Nextel, has provided law enforcement authorities with the GPS coordinates of its customers some eight million times—apparently without its customers knowing anything about it.

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Sprint insists that subscribers can turn the GPS function off if they wish. But an expert interviewed by TPM says that Sprint can almost certainly reactivate it remotely.

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There is little evidence of the Obama Administration charting a different course, or insisting on accountability for their predecessors.

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It’s reasonably clear that Sprint is not alone. In his paper, Soghoian points to the harmonious relationship that has arisen between telecommunications service providers—oblivious to federal and state criminal law requiring them to protect the privacy of their customers—and the Justice Department.

via Eight Million Reasons for Surveillance Oversight—By Scott Horton (Harper’s Magazine).

Sewers at Capacity, Pollution Spills Into Waterways
New York Times
November 22, 2009
By CHARLES DUHIGG

from the Toxic Waters series

EXCERPTS:

In the last three years alone, more than 9,400 of the nation’s 25,000 sewage systems — including those in major cities — have reported violating the law by dumping untreated or partly treated human waste, chemicals and other hazardous materials into rivers and lakes and elsewhere, according to data from state environmental agencies and the Environmental Protection Agency.

But fewer than one in five sewage systems that broke the law were ever fined or otherwise sanctioned by state or federal regulators, the Times analysis shows.

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There is no national record-keeping of how many illnesses are caused by sewage spills. But academic research suggests that as many as 20 million people each year become ill from drinking water containing bacteria and other pathogens that are often spread by untreated waste.

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New York City’s 14 wastewater treatment plants, which handle 1.3 billion gallons of wastewater a day, have been flooded with thousands of pickles (after a factory dumped its stock), vast flows of discarded chicken heads and large pieces of lumber.

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Several years ago, city officials estimated that it would cost at least $58 billion to prevent all overflows. “Even an expenditure of that magnitude would not result in every part of a river or bay surrounding the city achieving water quality that is suitable for swimming,” the department wrote. “It would, however, increase the average N.Y.C. water and sewer bill by 80 percent.”

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The only real solution, say many lawmakers and water advocates, is extensive new spending on sewer systems largely ignored for decades. As much as $400 billion in extra spending is needed over the next decade to fix the nation’s sewer infrastructure, according to estimates by the E.P.A. and the Government Accountability Office.

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Legislation under consideration on Capitol Hill contains millions in water infrastructure grants, and the stimulus bill passed this year set aside $6 billion to improve sewers and other water systems.

But that money is only a small fraction of what is needed, officials say. And over the last two decades, federal money for such programs has fallen by 70 percent, according to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, which estimates that a quarter of the state’s sewage and wastewater treatment plants are “using outmoded, inadequate technology.”

“The public has no clue how important these sewage plants are,” said Mr. Connaughton of the Brooklyn site. “Waterborne disease was the scourge of mankind for centuries. These plants stopped that. We’re doing everything we can to clean as much sewage as possible, but sometimes, that isn’t enough.”

from a 2005 Census bureau report featured in today’s New York Times article, Survey Shows Hard Times Before Recession

• one in five Americans needed help from family, friends or outsiders to pay for basic needs
• 14% not able to meet essential expenses on their own, like paying the mortgage and buying sufficient food.
• more than a million households lacked appliances such as refrigerators and stoves
• 9 percent of households over all and more than 25 percent of those below the poverty line could not afford nutritionally adequate food without resorting to food pantries or other emergency supplies or to scavenging
• 20 percent of blacks said they stayed at home because they were concerned about their safety, and 32 percent of blacks said they were afraid to walk alone at night

WASHINGTON — The number of Americans who lived in households that lacked consistent access to adequate food soared last year, to 49 million, the highest since the government began tracking what it calls “food insecurity” 14 years ago, the Department of Agriculture reported Monday.

The increase, of 13 million Americans, was much larger than even the most pessimistic observers of hunger trends had expected and cast an alarming light on the daily hardships caused by the recession’s punishing effect on jobs and wages.

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Problems gaining access to food were highest in households with children headed by single mothers. About 37 percent of them reported some form of food insecurity compared with 14 percent of married households with children. About 29 percent of Hispanic households reported food insecurity, compared with 27 percent of black households and 12 percent of white households. Serious problems were most prevalent in the South, followed equally by the West and Midwest.

via Hunger in U.S. at a 14-Year High – NYTimes.com.

These facts are indeed troubling, but why is the recession the culprit? The additional 13 million people seems to be the hook of the story, which causes shock and awe. But wasn’t it alarming enough that 36 million people were hungry in the United States before the recession; “alarming” meaning this should have been taken care of immediately?

When you look at the breakdown above of problems of gaining access to food, you have to wonder if the reason that this is now an “alarming” story is that “worthy” people are now going hungry instead of just the usual single mothers and non-white people, who I guess we’re just supposed to expect to go hungry.

Here we have another example of how this government does not take care of its own people. It illustrates the success of those who wished to “make government smaller” which has meant stripping away public services while making sure corporate interests, such as bank bailouts, remain sound and intact.

There have been suggestions that the Fed chose to negotiate weakly, Mr. Barofsky said, to give a “backdoor bailout” to A.I.G.’s banks. He said Mr. Geithner and the Fed’s lawyers had denied this, but added that “irrespective of their stated intent,” there was no doubt about the result: “Tens of billions of dollars of government money was funneled inexorably and directly to A.I.G.’s counterparties.”

Among its notable findings, the report challenged Goldman’s position that it should not have been forced to bear losses on its dealings with A.I.G. because it had successfully hedged away any exposure. Mr. Barofsky said that Goldman’s hedges were unlikely to have held up amid the market turbulence of late last year.

Audit Faults New York Fed in A.I.G. Bailout – NYTimes.com.

What’s holding us back is the last century of intense efforts to atomize people, to drive them towards the superficial things in life, like consumption. You have to fabricate consumers. You have to make people hate governments.

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Go back to the days when organizations and movements had to be built from scratch. There’s never some shining leader who comes along and says, “I’m going to lead you out of the woods.” These things are built up by consciousness-raising groups.

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I think small actions here and there and elsewhere are fine, but they have to coalesce.

Take the antiwar movement again. When I got started giving talks in the early 1960s, I was talking to small groups of people in somebody’s living room or maybe a church basement. Or we’d have to set up a meeting at the university with 20 different issues just to get people out to hear about the Vietnam War.

This is one thing they don’t teach you in school or write about in the papers; it’s too dangerous. People aren’t supposed to know what they can achieve, working together.

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The hard part is always going from understanding among individuals and small groups to integration and focused action. That takes effort and commitment. It doesn’t happen by itself; there are no manuals.

Kick-starting the environmental movement: An interview with Noam Chomsky | Briarpatch Magazine – Fiercely independent (& often irreverent) news & views..

found via The Comsky Archive – comsky.info

Here we have yet another example of one of America’s most Serious and respected “experts” advocating various policies while maintaining huge, undisclosed financial and personal interests in his advocacy.

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As the NYT put it:

As the scope of Mr. Galbraith’s financial interests in Kurdistan become clear, they have the potential to inflame some of Iraqis’ deepest fears, including conspiracy theories that the true reason for the American invasion of their country was to take its oil.

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“The idea that an oil company was participating in the drafting of the Iraqi Constitution leaves me speechless,” said Feisal Amin al-Istrabadi, a principal drafter of the law that governed Iraq after the United States ceded control to an Iraqi government on June 28, 2004.

via The sleazy advocacy of a leading “liberal hawk” by Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com.

While we may need additional revenue at some point, it makes far more sense to impose a financial transactions tax, which would primarily hit the Wall Street banks that gave us this disaster, than to tax the consumption of ordinary working families. We can raise large amounts of money by taxing the speculation of the Wall Street high-flyers while barely affecting the sort of financial dealings that most of us do in our daily lives.

via Making Wall Street Pay by Dean Baker | CommonDreams.org.

While it may be the U.S. metro in the worst environmental shape, Atlanta isn’t the only place whose residents contend with contamination. Top spots for toxicity are distributed throughout the country, with Detroit, Houston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Cleveland and Los Angeles right behind it.

via America’s Most Toxic Cities – Forbes.com.

The poor struggling oil companies. How will they survive?

Exxon’s and Shell’s Earnings Reflect Oil’s Price Decline – NYTimes.com.