Double standard

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Now, imagine the response if this guy was Palestinian or Iranian:

JERUSALEM (AP) — Stories about Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan’s alleged double life have been circulating for years.

Now, the Israeli-born businessman behind hits like Pretty Woman, Fight Club and L.A. Confidential has finally come forth with a stunning admission — for years he served as an Israeli spy, buying arms on its behalf and boosting its alleged nuclear program.

In a far-reaching interview aired Monday with Israel’s Channel 2 TV’s flagship investigative program Uvda, Milchan detailed a series of clandestine affairs in which he was involved and particularly how he helped purchase technologies Israel allegedly needed to operate nuclear bombs.

“Allegedly.” Because we don’t talk about Israel’s illegal nukes and the reason why Iran feels threatened.

“I did it for my country and I’m proud of it,” said Milchan, who ran a successful fertilizer company in Israel before making it big in Hollywood.

Even there, he says he continued with his clandestine work while maintaining close ties with Israel’s leadership.
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Yep

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Can’t argue with this. I know so many professional activists (not all of them, but a lot) who are trapped by the official policies of the people they work for to the point where they literally can’t see past them.

Some of them are really good at movement building. Most of the ones I’ve met are not. They maintain a system where white, privileged college graduates (usually from the same handful of schools) are permitted into the paid ranks. It’s one of the reasons why I never pursued a paid job as an activist — I’m not safe enough for these people.

Not good

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

So it’s even worse than we thought:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States is spewing 50 percent more methane — a potent heat-trapping gas — than the federal government estimates, a new comprehensive scientific study says. Much of it is coming from just three states: Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas.

That means methane may be a bigger global warming issue than thought, scientists say. Methane is 21 times more potent at trapping heat than carbon dioxide, the most abundant global warming gas, although it doesn’t stay in the air as long.

Much of that extra methane, also called natural gas, seems to be coming from livestock, including manure, belches, and flatulence, as well as leaks from refining and drilling for oil and gas, the study says. It was published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

The study estimates that in 2008, the U.S. poured 49 million tons of methane into the air. That means U.S. methane emissions trapped about as much heat as all the carbon dioxide pollution coming from cars, trucks, and planes in the country in six months.

That’s more than the 32 million tons estimated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Administration or the nearly 29 million tons reckoned by the European Commission.

“Something is very much off in the inventories,” said study co-author Anna Michalak, an Earth scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, Calif. “The total U.S. impact on the world’s energy budget is different than we thought, and it’s worse.”

Technology didn’t kill middle class jobs, public policy did

~ susie

Dean Baker:

A widely held view in elite circles is that the rapid rise in inequality in theUnited States over the last three decades is an unfortunate side-effect of technological progress. In this story, technology has had the effect of eliminating tens of millions of middle wage jobs for factory workers, bookkeepers, and similar occupations.

These were jobs where people with limited education used to be able to raise a family with a middle class standard of living. However computers, robots and other technological innovations are rapidly reducing the need for such work. As a result, the remaining jobs in these sectors are likely to pay less and many people who would have otherwise worked at middle wage jobs must instead crowd into the lower paying sectors of the labor market.

This story is comforting to elites, because it means that inequality is something that happened, not something they did. They won out because they had the skills and intelligence to succeed in a dynamic economy, whereas the huge mass of workers that are falling behind did not. In this story, the best we can do for those left behind is empathy and education. We can increase opportunities to upgrade their skills in the hope that more of them may be able to join the winners.

That’s a nice story, but the evidence doesn’t support it. My colleagues Larry Mishel, John Schmitt, and Heidi Sheirholz, just published a papershowing that the pattern of job growth in the data doesn’t fit this picture at all. This paper touches on a wide variety of issues related to technology and wage inequality, but first and foremost, it shows that the story of the hollowing out of the middle does not fit the data for the 2000s at all.

Since 2000, the increase in employment has occurred almost entirely in low-wage occupations. There has been a decline in relative employment for both workers in middle wage and high wage occupations. If this “occupational shift story” explained trends in wages we should expect to see sharply rising wages for retail clerks, custodians and other workers employed in low-paying occupations.

Of course, we see the opposite. Workers in these occupations continued to lose ground in the 2000s as they did in the prior two decades. Their wages barely kept pace with inflation over the last three decades.

The paper makes an impressive case that technology is not the main explanation for the rise in inequality that we have been seeing. In fact, even MIT economics professor David Autor, the leading proponent of the occupational shift story concedes this point. He was quoted in a New York Times column saying of the view that technology explains inequality:

It can suck all the air out of the conversation … All economists should be pushing back against this simplistic view.

Given the evidence compiled by Mishel et al, it would be difficult to maintain that technology has been the main culprit in the upward redistribution of income that we have seen.

AIPAC putting the wagons in a circle

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

http://youtu.be/FlShdx4hODg

Via Mondoweiss, the AIPAC handmaidens are preparing to do whatever they can to undermine the new agreement with Iran. For our sake, I hope they fail:

New York Senator Chuck Schumer was his usual hawkish self on Sunday evening. In an address to the OHEL Children’s Home and Family Services gala, Schumer railed against the deal the Obama administration struck with Iran and vowed that Democrats and Republicans would work to pile on more economic pressure on the country.

“Democrats and Republicans are going to work together to see that we don’t let up on these sanctions…until Iran gives up not only its nuclear weapons, but all nuclear weapon capability, all enriched uranium,” Schumer said. ”Every time the Arab world, the Palestinians, have risen against us, we have risen to defeat them. The one existential threat to Israel’s existence is a nuclear Iran.”

The Democratic Senator made the remarks to attendees at a fundraiser for OHEL Children’s Home and Family Services, an Orthodox Jewish welfare organization. Video of Schumer’s remarks were uploaded by Jacob Kornbluh, a New York-based reporter.

Schumer’s speech was a preview of the potential difficulties the Obama administration will have in convincing the most hawkish Senators and Representatives that sanctions should be held off.

President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry were successful in pressuring Congress to hold off on new sanctions before last weekend’s Geneva negotiations. During the talks, Kerry reportedly warned that new sanctions would be coming down the pike if no deal was struck to pressure Iran.

But a deal was struck, and now the Obama administration has to watch out for new Congressional efforts to sanction Iran–which would scuttle the deal reached to curb Iran’s enrichment program in exchange for some relief from economic pressure.

In a previous statement, Schumer said that the “disproportionality of this agreement makes it more likely that Democrats and Republicans will join together and pass additional sanctions when we return in December.” Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid called the Iran deal an “important first step” but did not fully close off the possibility that new sanctions would be enacted before the six-month deal with Iran is up.