http://www.nlgsf.org/news/view.php?id=174
Police Violence Targets Occupy Oakland
January 30, 2012
NLGSF Demands Action From The Monitor On Police Misconduct
The
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Police Violence Targets Occupy Oakland Demonstration
http://www.nlgsf.org/news/view.php?id=174
Police Violence Targets Occupy
Jobs, Jobs and Cars
Jobs, Jobs and Cars
Paul Krugman
NY Times Op-Ed: January 27, 2012
Mitch Daniels, the former Bush budget director who is
now
President Obama's State of the Union address. His
performance was, well, boring. But he did say something
thought-provoking -- and I mean that in the worst way.
For Mr. Daniels tried to wrap his party in the mantle
of the late Steve Jobs, whom he portrayed as a great
job creator -- which is one thing that Jobs definitely
wasn't. And if we ask why Apple has created so few
American jobs, we get an insight into what is wrong
with the ideology dominating much of our politics.
Mr. Daniels first berated the president for his
"constant disparagement of people in business," which
happens to be a complete fabrication. Mr. Obama has
never done anything of the sort. He went on: "The late
Steve Jobs -- what a fitting name he had -- created
more of them than all those stimulus dollars the
president borrowed and blew."
Clearly, Mr. Daniels doesn't have much of a future in
the humor business. But, more to the point, anyone who
reads The New York Times knows that his assertion about
job creation was completely false: Apple employs very
few people in this country.
A big report in The Times last Sunday laid out the
facts. Although Apple is now
corporation as measured by market value, it employs
only 43,000 people in the
many as General Motors employed when it was the largest
American firm.
Apple does, however, indirectly employ around 700,000
people in its various suppliers. Unfortunately, almost
none of those people are in
Why does Apple manufacture abroad, and especially in
low wages.
fact that so much of the supply chain is already there.
A former Apple executive explained: "You need a
thousand rubber gaskets? That's the factory next door.
You need a million screws? That factory is a block
away."
This is familiar territory to students of economic
geography: the advantages of industrial clusters -- in
which producers, specialized suppliers, and workers
huddle together to their mutual benefit -- have been a
running theme since the 19th century.
And Chinese manufacturing isn't the only conspicuous
example of these advantages in the modern world.
workers who cost, on average, $44 an hour -- much more
than the average cost of American workers. And this
success has a lot to do with the support its small and
medium-sized companies -- the famed Mittelstand --
provide to each other via shared suppliers and the
maintenance of a skilled work force.
The point is that successful companies -- or, at any
rate, companies that make a large contribution to a
nation's economy -- don't exist in isolation.
Prosperity depends on the synergy between companies, on
the cluster, not the individual entrepreneur.
But the current Republican worldview has no room for
such considerations. From the G.O.P.'s perspective,
it's all about the heroic entrepreneur, the John Galt,
I mean Steve Jobs-type "job creator" who showers
benefits on the rest of us and who must, of course, be
rewarded with tax rates lower than those paid by many
middle-class workers.
And this vision helps explain why Republicans were so
furiously opposed to the single most successful policy
initiative of recent years: the auto industry bailout.
The case for this bailout -- which Mr. Daniels has
denounced as "crony capitalism" -- rested crucially on
the notion that the survival of any one firm in the
industry depended on the survival of the broader
industry "ecology" created by the cluster of producers
and suppliers in
G.M. and Chrysler had been allowed to go under, they
would probably have taken much of the supply chain with
them -- and Ford would have gone the same way.
Fortunately, the Obama administration didn't let that
happen, and the unemployment rate in
hit 14.1 percent as the bailout was going into effect,
is now down to a still-terrible-but-much-better 9.3
percent. And the details aside, much of Mr. Obama's
State of the Union address can be read as an attempt to
apply the lessons of that success more broadly.
So we should be grateful to Mr. Daniels for his remarks
Tuesday. He got his facts wrong, but he did,
unintentionally, manage to highlight an important
philosophical difference between the parties. One side
believes that economies succeed solely thanks to heroic
entrepreneurs; the other has nothing against
entrepreneurs, but believes that entrepreneurs need a
supportive environment, and that sometimes government
has to help create or sustain that supportive
environment.
And the view that it takes more than business heroes is
the one that fits the facts.
Jobs, Jobs and Cars
Jobs, Jobs and Cars
Paul Krugman
NY Times Op-Ed: January 27, 2012
Mitch Daniels, the former Bush budget director who is
now
President Obama's State of the Union address. His
performance was, well, boring. But he did say something
thought-provoking -- and I mean that in the worst way.
For Mr. Daniels tried to wrap his party in the mantle
of the late Steve Jobs, whom he portrayed as a great
job creator -- which is one thing that Jobs definitely
wasn't. And if we ask why Apple has created so few
American jobs, we get an insight into what is wrong
with the ideology dominating much of our politics.
Mr. Daniels first berated the president for his
"constant disparagement of people in business," which
happens to be a complete fabrication. Mr. Obama has
never done anything of the sort. He went on: "The late
Steve Jobs -- what a fitting name he had -- created
more of them than all those stimulus dollars the
president borrowed and blew."
Clearly, Mr. Daniels doesn't have much of a future in
the humor business. But, more to the point, anyone who
reads The New York Times knows that his assertion about
job creation was completely false: Apple employs very
few people in this country.
A big report in The Times last Sunday laid out the
facts. Although Apple is now
corporation as measured by market value, it employs
only 43,000 people in the
many as General Motors employed when it was the largest
American firm.
Apple does, however, indirectly employ around 700,000
people in its various suppliers. Unfortunately, almost
none of those people are in
Why does Apple manufacture abroad, and especially in
low wages.
fact that so much of the supply chain is already there.
A former Apple executive explained: "You need a
thousand rubber gaskets? That's the factory next door.
You need a million screws? That factory is a block
away."
This is familiar territory to students of economic
geography: the advantages of industrial clusters -- in
which producers, specialized suppliers, and workers
huddle together to their mutual benefit -- have been a
running theme since the 19th century.
And Chinese manufacturing isn't the only conspicuous
example of these advantages in the modern world.
workers who cost, on average, $44 an hour -- much more
than the average cost of American workers. And this
success has a lot to do with the support its small and
medium-sized companies -- the famed Mittelstand --
provide to each other via shared suppliers and the
maintenance of a skilled work force.
The point is that successful companies -- or, at any
rate, companies that make a large contribution to a
nation's economy -- don't exist in isolation.
Prosperity depends on the synergy between companies, on
the cluster, not the individual entrepreneur.
But the current Republican worldview has no room for
such considerations. From the G.O.P.'s perspective,
it's all about the heroic entrepreneur, the John Galt,
I mean Steve Jobs-type "job creator" who showers
benefits on the rest of us and who must, of course, be
rewarded with tax rates lower than those paid by many
middle-class workers.
And this vision helps explain why Republicans were so
furiously opposed to the single most successful policy
initiative of recent years: the auto industry bailout.
The case for this bailout -- which Mr. Daniels has
denounced as "crony capitalism" -- rested crucially on
the notion that the survival of any one firm in the
industry depended on the survival of the broader
industry "ecology" created by the cluster of producers
and suppliers in
G.M. and Chrysler had been allowed to go under, they
would probably have taken much of the supply chain with
them -- and Ford would have gone the same way.
Fortunately, the Obama administration didn't let that
happen, and the unemployment rate in
hit 14.1 percent as the bailout was going into effect,
is now down to a still-terrible-but-much-better 9.3
percent. And the details aside, much of Mr. Obama's
State of the Union address can be read as an attempt to
apply the lessons of that success more broadly.
So we should be grateful to Mr. Daniels for his remarks
Tuesday. He got his facts wrong, but he did,
unintentionally, manage to highlight an important
philosophical difference between the parties. One side
believes that economies succeed solely thanks to heroic
entrepreneurs; the other has nothing against
entrepreneurs, but believes that entrepreneurs need a
supportive environment, and that sometimes government
has to help create or sustain that supportive
environment.
And the view that it takes more than business heroes is
the one that fits the facts.
DNA Turning Human Story Into a Tell-All
DNA Turning Human Story Into a Tell-All
By ALANNA MITCHELL
The new view is fast supplanting the traditional idea that modern humans triumphantly marched out of
Instead, the genetic analysis shows, modern humans encountered and bred with at least two groups of ancient humans in relatively recent times: the Neanderthals, who lived in Europe and Asia, dying out roughly 30,000 years ago, and a mysterious group known as the Denisovans, who lived in
Their DNA lives on in us even though they are extinct. “In a sense, we are a hybrid species,” Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist who is the research leader in human origins at the Natural History Museum in
The Denisovans (pronounced dun-EE-suh-vinz) were first described a year ago in a groundbreaking paper in the journal Nature made possible by genetic sequencing of the girl’s pinky bone and of an oddly shaped molar from a young adult.
Those findings have unleashed a spate of new analyses.
Scientists are trying to envision the ancient couplings and their consequences: when and where they took place, how they happened, how many produced offspring and what effect the archaic genes have on humans today.
Other scientists are trying to learn more about the Denisovans: who they were, where they lived and how they became extinct.
A revolutionary increase in the speed and a decline in the cost of gene-sequencing technology have enabled scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in
Comparing genomes, scientists concluded that today’s humans outside Africa carry an average of 2.5 percent Neanderthal DNA, and that people from parts of Oceania also carry about 5 percent Denisovan DNA. A study published in November found that Southeast Asians carry about 1 percent Denisovan DNA in addition to their Neanderthal genes. It is unclear whether Denisovans and Neanderthals also interbred.
A third group of extinct humans, Homo floresiensis, nicknamed “the hobbits” because they were so small, also walked the earth until about 17,000 years ago. It is not known whether modern humans bred with them because the hot, humid climate of the Indonesian
This means that our modern era, since H. floresiensis died out, is the only time in the four-million-year human history that just one type of human has been alive, said David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School who was the lead author of the Nature paper on the Denisovans.
For many scientists, the epicenter of the emerging story on human origins is the Denisova cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia, where the girl’s finger bone was discovered. It is the only known place on the planet where three types of humans — Denisovan, Neanderthal and modern — lived, probably not all at once.
John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, whose lab is examining the archaic genomes, visited the cave in July. It has a high arched roof like a Gothic cathedral and a chimney to the sky, he said, adding that being there was like walking in the footsteps of our ancestors.
The cave has been open to the elements for a quarter of a million years and is rich with layers of sediments that may contain other surprises. Some of its chambers are unexplored, and excavators are still finding human remains that are not yet identified. The average temperature for a year, 32 degrees Fahrenheit, bodes well for the preservation of archaic DNA.
Could this cave have been one of the spots where the ancient mating took place? Dr. Hawks said it was possible.
But Dr. Reich and his team have determined through the patterns of archaic DNA replications that a small number of half-Neanderthal, half-modern human hybrids walked the earth between 46,000 and 67,000 years ago, he said in an interview. The half-Denisovan, half-modern humans that contributed to our DNA were more recent.
And Peter Parham, an immunologist at the Stanford University School of Medicine, has used an analysis of modern and ancient immune-system genetic components — alleles — to figure out that one of the Denisovan-modern couplings most likely took place in what is now southeastern China. He has also found some evidence that a Neanderthal-modern pair mated in west
He stressed, however, that his study was just the first step in trying to reconstruct where the mating took place.
Dr. Parham’s analysis, which shows that some archaic immune alleles are widespread among modern humans, concludes that as few as six couplings all those tens of thousands of years ago might have led to the current level of ancient immune alleles.
Another paper, by Mathias Currat and Laurent Excoffier, two Swiss geneticists, suggests that breeding between Neanderthals and modern humans was rare. Otherwise, they say, modern humans would have far more Neanderthal DNA.
Were they romantic couplings? More likely they were aggressive acts between competing human groups, Dr. Stringer said. For a model, he pointed to modern hunter-gatherer groups that display aggressive behavior among tribes.
The value of the interbreeding shows up in the immune system, Dr. Parham’s analysis suggests. The Neanderthals and Denisovans had lived in Europe and
When modern humans mated with them, they got an injection of helpful genetic immune material, so useful that it remains in the genome today. This suggests that modern humans needed the archaic DNA to survive.
The downside of archaic immune material is that it may be responsible for autoimmune diseases like diabetes, arthritis and multiple sclerosis, Dr. Parham said, stressing that these are preliminary results.
Although little is known about the Denisovans — the only remains so far are the pinky bone and the tooth, and there are no artifacts like tools. Dr. Reich and others suggest that they were once scattered widely across
Dr. Reich and others suggest that the interbreeding that led to this phenomenon probably occurred in the south, rather than in
But the questions of how many Denisovans there were and how they became extinct have yet to be answered. Right now, as Dr. Reich put it, they are “a genome in search of an archaeology.”
Donations can be sent to the
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
Montana Supreme Court Flouts Citizens United
Will It Be Reversed?
by JOHN DEAN
Weekend Edition January 27-29, 2012
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/01/27/montana-supreme-court-flouts-citizens-united/
On December 30, 2011, the
that the state’s one-hundred-year-old ban on corporate
political contributions should remain in full force and
effect, notwithstanding the January 21, 2010 ruling of
the
readers may recall, Citizens United was the
controversial decision holding that corporate campaign
contributions are protected as political speech under
the First Amendment of the
Supporters of the Citizens United ruling think that the
On the other hand, those who want to overturn Citizens
United and thus to reverse its corrosive impact, which
allows corporate money to be spent on partisan
politics have applauded the
action. They believe that
No one knows for certain, though, which side will ultimately prevail.
The
that it was fully cognizant of the Citizens United
ruling. Yet the MSC majority found that the state
statute at issue, the
with its ban on corporate contributions was importantly
different from the ban on corporate campaign money that
had been at issue in Citizens United.
Notably, the MSC opinion, Western Tradition
Partnership, Inc v. Attorney General of
closely and carefully considered by the state’s high
court, and was fully briefed by a number of amici from
national organizations, both for and against Citizens United.
The MSC held that when ruling in Citizens United, the
for the Federal restrictions on corporate political
speech,” and so had concluded that the federal statue
at issue there was “impermissible contravention of
the First Amendment.”
Stated a bit differently, the MSC opinion concludes
that, under Citizens United, (1) “the highest level of
scrutiny” must be applied to any restrictions on
speech, and (2) to impose such restrictions government
must “demonstrate a compelling interest.”
But the MSC added that when and if there is evidence
that passes this high level of scrutiny and proves that
a compelling interest has been shown, then restrictions
can be imposed on political speech. The MSC notes,
moreover, that the level of evidence that is needed to
satisfy heightened scrutiny will vary with the ˜novelty
and plausibility of the justification raised.” (Citation omitted.)
In short, the MSC believed it has found an exception to
Citizens United, one that allows
corporate money in politics, when there is evidence of
a compelling state interest to justify such action.
Corporate Money in
The four
Citizens United concluded that, based on the majority’s
opinion, there was no situation in which corporate
money could be excluded by the government in political
campaigns. The MSC opinion, however, reaches a very
different conclusion.
The MSC majority reasons as follows: “The Dissents
assert that Citizens United holds unequivocally that no
sufficient government interest justifies limits on
political speech. We disagree. The [
held that laws that burden political speech are subject
to strict scrutiny, which requires the government to
prove that the law furthers a compelling state interest
and is narrowly tailored to that interest.”
Accordingly, the MSC majority proceeded to assemble
facts showing that the
compelling state interest when ”one hundred years
ago”its members enacted the
corporations from making campaign contributions. What
was that interest? It was to reverse the situation as
it then stood in
time, utterly corrupted the state’s government.
The MSC majority also reasoned that that same potential ”of corporate funds breeding Corruption” remains just as compelling today as it was when the law banning corporate money was first adopted.
Thus, the MSC rhetorically asked if the law must now
be repealed because the problem of corruption has been resolved?
The MSC then answered its own question with another
question: “Does a state have to repeal or invalidate
its murder prohibition if the homicide rate declines?”
The MSC answered as followed: “We think not. Issues of
corporate influence, sparse population, dependence upon
agriculture and extractive resource development,
location as a transportation corridor, and low campaign
costs make
efforts of corporate control to the detriment of
democracy and the republican form of government.
Clearly sponsored candidates and
for over 100 years have made their modest election
contributions meaningfully count would be effectively
shut out of the process.”
The
for a compelling state interest regarding prohibiting
corporate funding of the election of judges and
justices in
firsthand experience.
Thus, under the ruling of Western Tradition Partnership
now at least”in full force and effect. Unsurprisingly,
however, it appears that the ruling is going to be
appealed to the
represented Citizens United, and who prevailed earlier
before the
been hired by Western Traditional Partners, and the
other parties, to seek review of the MSC ruling.
Testing
The MSC ruling was not unanimous; rather, the MSC was
divided, in a five-to-two vote. The two dissenting
under Citizens United for the MSC to carve out an exception.
Dissenting Justice James Nelson, who noted that he did
not personally agree with Citizens United, nonetheless
concluded that it was the “law of the land,” and thus,
that the
Justice Nelson asked: “Has the State of
identified a compelling state interest, not already
rejected by the Supreme Court, that would justify the
outright ban on corporate expenditures for political
speech effected by [
contributions]?”
He answered: “Having considered the matter, I believe
the Montana Attorney General has identified some very
compelling reasons for limiting corporate expenditures
in
is that regardless of how persuasive I may think the
Attorney General’s justifications are, the [
Supreme Court has already rebuffed each and every one
of them. Accordingly, as much as I would like to rule
in favor of the State, I cannot in good faith do so.”
Justice Nelson concluded that he would not be surprised
if the
Despite Judge Nelson’s stance, I believe that the
majority ruling in the MSC opinion is not baseless.
statutes; rather, they are discussions of the law and
reasoning. And the MSC reading of Citizens United is
not unreasonable.
Thus, maybe, just maybe, given the havoc Citizens United
has wrought in the 2012 election cycle’s the five
justices who overturned the one-hundred-year-old ban on
corporate money in federal elections will reconsider
their stances, agree with the MSC’s reading of their
ruling, and provide an exception.
Other states are tracking the
closely. For example, a
bill to adopt the
an exception to Citizens United, other states want to
follow quickly in embracing it.
Most likely, it will take a Constitutional amendment to
overturn Citizens United, and thankfully, efforts to
introduce just such an amendment are proceeding. But
the amendment process is very difficult, and while
public polling shows clear and overwhelming public
disapproval of the role of corporate money in politics,
this issue is not of the sort that moves large numbers
of people to take actions, and that is what is needed.
Rather, I expect public apathy to allow corporations
and their money to dominate politics under Citizen
United in 2012, and in the foreseeable future. It is a
mess, but a mess that favors Republicans, and a
powerful minority of Americans. Thus, the ugly
situation with respect to elections and corporate money
is going to get much worse before it gets better.
John Dean served as Counsel to the President of the
This column originally appeared in Justia’s Verdict.
___________________________________________