:: NEWS COCKTAIL aka BlahBlahBlog ::

:: 8.27.2006 ::

:: "THE YEAR THE LEVEES BROKE" ::

By Greg Palast in New Orleans.
August 24, 2006

America went through a terrible year. The levees broke in New Orleans. When bodies floated in the streets, the Republican Congress saw an opportunity for more tax cuts and consolidation of the corporatopia they had created for their moneyed donors. The Democratic Party was clueless, written off, politically at death's door.

The year was 1927.

Back then, when the levees broke, America awoke. Public anger rose in a floodtide, and in that year, the USA entered its most revolutionary period since 1776. The thirty-four-year-old utility commissioner of Louisiana, Huey P. Long, conceived of a plan to rebuild his state based on a radical program of redistributing wealth and power. The ambitious Governor of New York, Franklin D. Roosevelt, adopted it, and later named it The New Deal. America got rich and licked Hitler. It was our century.


It's 1927 again.

But this time, the Haves and Have-Mores have something better for you than a New Deal. They are offering "opportunity" -- a lottery ticket instead of a guarantee. Like double-or-nothing in the stock market instead of Social Security -- will the suckers go for it? There's one born every minute. I can't believe they're the majority, but at last count, they numbered over 59 million. And they vote.

Years from now, in Guantánamo or in a refugee relocation "Enterprise Zone," your kids will ask you, "What did you do in the Class War, Daddy?" We may have to admit that conquest and occupation happened before we could fire off a shot.

The trick of class war is not to let the victims know they're under attack. That's how, little by little, the owners of the planet take away what little we have.

On Tuesday, your President, George W. Bush, will return to New Orleans, on the anniversary of the levee breach.

There is nothing new under the sun. A Republican president going for the photo op as the Mississippi rolls over New Orleans. It was 1927, and President Calvin Coolidge sent Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover, "a little fat man with a notebook in his hand," who mugged for the cameras and promised to build the city a wall of protection. They had their photos taken. Then they left to play golf with Ken Lay or, rather, the Ken Lay railroad baron equivalent of his day.

In 1927, the Democratic Party had died and was awaiting burial.
As The Depression approached, the coma-Dems, like Franklin Roosevelt, called for, of all things, balancing the budget.

Then, as the Mississippi waters rose, one politician, the state's electricity regulator, stood up on the back of a flatbed truck rigged with loudspeakers, and said, roughly,

"Listen up! They're lying! The President's lying! The rich fat jackals that are drowning you will do it again and again and again. They lead you into imperialist wars for profit, they take away your schools and your hope, and when you complain, they blame Blacks and Jews and immigrants. Then they drown your kids. I say, Kick'm in the ass and take your share of the wealth you created."

Huey Long was our Hugo Chávez, and he laid out a plan: a progressive income tax, real money for education, public works to rebuild Louisiana and America, Social Security old age pensions, veterans benefits, regulation of the big utility holding companies, an end to what he called, "rich men's wars," and an end to the financial royalism of the elite One Percent.

Huey Long even had the audacity to suggest that the poor's votes should count, calling for the end to the poll tax four decades before Martin Luther King succeeded in ending it. Long recorded his motto as a musical anthem: "Everyman a King." The waters receded, the anger did not, and, in 1928, Huey "Kingfish" Long was elected Governor of Louisiana.

At the time, Louisiana schools were free, but not the textbooks. The elite liked it that way, but Long didn't. To pay for the books, the Kingfish levied a special tax on Big Oil. But the oil companies refused to pay for the textbooks. Governor Long then ordered the National Guard to seize the oil fields in the Delta.

It was Huey Long who established the principle that a government of the people must protect the people, school them, build the infrastructure, regulate industry and share the nation's wealth -- and that meant facing down "the concentrations of monopoly power" of the corporate aristocracy -- "the thieves of Wall Street," as he called them.

In other words, Huey Long founded the modern Democratic Party.

FDR and the party establishment, scared witless of Long's ineluctable march to the White House, adopted his program, albeit diluted, called it the New Deal and later the New Frontier and the Great Society. America and the party prospered.

What happened to the Kingfish? The oil industry and local oligarchs had few options for responding to Governor Long's populist appeal and the success of his egalitarian economic program. On September 8, 1935, Huey Long, by then a U.S. Senator,
was shot dead. He was 42.

It's 1927 again.

**********
Excerpted from Greg Palast's just-released New York Times bestseller, "ARMED MADHOUSE: Who's Afraid of Osama Wolf?, China Floats Bush Sinks, the Scheme to Steal '08, No Child's Behind Left and other Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War."

posted by me

:: 10:38:00 PM [+] ::
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:: "Judge strikes down the warrantless eavesdropping program" ::

From The San Jose Mercury News
By Ron Hutcheson and Margaret Talev

WASHINGTON - In a scathing rebuke, a federal judge ruled Thursday that the Bush administration's warrantless eavesdropping program is unconstitutional and should be shut down, but legal scholars said the administration has a good chance of reversing the decision on appeal.

"There are no hereditary kings in America and no power not created by the Constitution," U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor of Detroit said in a 43-page opinion blasting the program.

Taylor said that the program, which President Bush secretly approved after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, violated the rights of free speech and privacy and went far beyond the president's authority. Administration officials say the surveillance program targets telephone calls and e-mails between the United States and suspected terrorists overseas.

The Justice Department immediately appealed the ruling, and all the parties agreed that the Bush administration is free to keep eavesdropping without warrants pending the Sept. 7 appeals-court hearing.

While the ruling was a clear victory for Bush's critics, it didn't end the legal battle over the government's secret eavesdropping. Legal scholars said the administration had a good chance of winning its appeal to the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, which handles cases from Michigan, Kentucky, Ohio and Tennessee.

"This isn't the definitive word," said Bruce Fein, a Washington lawyer who agreed with Taylor's conclusions. "This is going to the 6th Circuit. If the 6th Circuit goes against the government, it's going to the Supreme Court."

Read more here.

ALSO

Anti-terror wiretaps ruled illegal
Guardian Unlimited, UK
Dan Glaister in Los Angeles

The White House's so-called war on terror was dealt a blow yesterday when a federal judge ruled that a controversial wiretapping programme, authorised by President George Bush, was unconstitutional.

"It was never the intent of the framers [of the US constitution] to give the president such unfettered control, particularly where his actions blatantly disregard the parameters clearly enumerated in the Bill of Rights," wrote Judge Anna Diggs Taylor in her decision.

The decision came in the first court challenge to the government's wiretapping programme. The ruling represented "another nail in the coffin in the Bush administration's legal strategy in the war on terror," said Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, which brought the lawsuit on behalf of journalists, scholars and lawyers.

Read more here.

AND
From Wired News:
Judge Halts NSA Snooping
Watergate Echoes in NSA Courtroom

posted by me

:: 11:12:00 PM [+] ::
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:: "Power From the People" ::

From Wired News
By iMomus
Japan Railways' plans to harvest electricity from its passengers' bipedal locomotion points to a possible future where no step goes to waste.

ALSO by iMomus

The Curse of Storage
02:00 AM Jul. 18, 2006 -0400 Our ever-growing collections of information and objects can lead to thoroughly modern crises that echo the past.

Art School Inflatable
02:00 AM Jul. 4, 2006 -0400 Along with the angst and proving of talent, art schools' annual year-end shows reveal unexpected treasures. Where else will you see a party dress that inflates into a rubber dinghy?

posted by me

:: 6:16:00 PM [+] ::
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:: "Catch the Sky Falling" ::

Peter Jenniskens, Meteor Storm Chaser
From Space.com
By Edna DeVore

The Perseid meteor shower peaks this weekend. The best night to go out is Saturday night, August 12/13. The first hour of the night will be dark and a small number of Perseids will streak long tracks when they fall into Earth’s atmosphere at a grazing angle. Later in the night, the Moon will light up the sky; it’s just a few days past full Moon this weekend.

There are some that do everything in their means to try to see such outbursts. At the SETI Institute, Dr. Peter Jenniskens studies meteor showers. Over the past several years, he’s led several airborne research campaigns to travel to the right place on Earth and study these ephemeral bits of glowing debris as they plunge into our atmosphere. Jenniskens studies meteors in order to better understand comets and their contribution to the origin of life on Earth, as meteoroids are samples of the material that rained down on the Earth the carbon needed for life.

Read more here.

ALSO

Make the most of the meteor shower
MSNBC

posted by me

:: 10:28:00 AM [+] ::
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:: "World wide web is 15 years old" ::

From ComputerWeekly.com, UK
by Tash Shifrin
Monday 7 August 2006

The world wide web has quietly passed its 15th anniversary.

The web began as a project dubbed ENQUIRE, started by Sir Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 at the CERN physics laboratory on the France Switzerland border.

The project aimed to help researchers share information across computers, using the concept of hypertext links.

Links to the code behind the web were first posted to the alt.hypertext discussion board in August 1991. The first website went online later that year.

In 1993, CERN declared that the world wide web would be free for use by anyone. The html web page programming language was released the same year.

But despite the 15-year anniversary, Berners-Lee told this year’s World Wide Web Conference in Edinburgh that these are still early days. “We are at the embryonic stages of the web. The web is going to be more revolutionary,” he said.

He predicted “a huge amount of change to come” highlighting recent developments such as the Google search algorithm, the blogging online diary phenomenon and collaborative wikis.

ALSO

Remember, people are the threat, not the web
The Herald, UK

Readers' panel: Web anniversary
BBC News

The future of the internet according to Tim Berners-Lee
PC Authority, Australia

posted by me

:: 3:48:00 PM [+] ::
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