From Common Dreams: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/03/22-6

Why a money system dependent on constant growth can’t last

by David Korten

Published on Tuesday, March 22, 2011 by YES! Magazine

The unrealistic expectation that money should grow effortlessly in perpetuity [see my last blog] is more than an issue of unrealizable expectations. It combines with a Wall Street controlled debt-based money system to create an imperative for the economy to grow the profits of bankers, and thereby the richest among us, to keep the financial system, and thereby the economy, from collapsing.”For too long, we have put up with a money system designed to grow the financial assets of rich people at the expense of assuring continuing cycles of economic boom and bust, confining billions to lives of desperation, and reducing Earth to a toxic waste dump.

It is odd that we experienced a financial collapse in 2008 because of a credit crunch, a shutdown on lending, at a time when the world was already awash in money. BusinessWeek’s July 11, 2005, cover story shouted “Too Much Money” and spoke of a savings glut. Its June 11, 2008, European issue reiterated the theme: “Too Much Money, Inflation Goes Global.”

Most discussion of the financial crisis focuses on the details and misses the big picture. First, much of the money was tied up in the Wall Street casino rather than facilitating productive activity in the real economy and was simply pumping up a phantom wealth bubble. Second, virtually every dollar in the system was borrowed, because in our money system, banks create money by lending it into existence. When this debt is used to inflate financial bubbles and support Ponzi schemes, eventual default is inevitable.

Third, Wall Street and the Federal Reserve are joined in an alliance to keep “wage inflation” below the level of growth in the real cost of living. This assures that the benefits of productivity gains all go to owners rather than being shared with workers. It also keeps inflation confined to financial bubbles that inflate the phantom wealth financial assets of the rich.

Furthermore, it forces the bottom 90 percent of the population—the people who make their living by producing real goods and services—into debt at usurious interest rates to the top 10 percent to cover daily basic daily expenses. Inevitably, the amounts owed exceed the borrower’s ability to repay. The lenders then stop lending and foreclose on the assets of the desperate borrowers.

When a loan is repaid or goes into default, the debt is canceled and the money supply shrinks by that amount. Most loans continue to be repaid, but if new loans are not being issued, the demand for real goods and services falls because people don’t have the money to pay for them. As demand falls, businesses lay off workers, who then join those pushed into default.

The problem appears to be a lack of money, even though the total money in circulation is far more than enough to cover real-wealth exchanges in a rational real-wealth economy. The money, however, is locked up in the Wall Street casino economy rather than circulating in the real Main Street economy. Pouring public bailout money into Wall Street serves only to reflate the bubble. It does nothing to revive the real economy.

Continue reading at:  http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/03/22-6

Here’s and idea.  Make it illegal and subject to fine and/or prison for any elected official to go to to work for, lobby for or benefit in any way from any industry or corporation the passed any legislation regarding for ten years after they leave office.

Cut the pensions of all elected officials by 50%.  No special perks or benefits any retired civil servant would not receive.

From Raw Story: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/03/22/gop-offers-bill-cutting-pensions-for-new-federal-employees/

By Sahil Kapur
Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011

WASHINGTON – New legislation introduced in the Senate would slash retirement pensions for all federal employees hired starting 2013, invoking the argument that benefits for government workers are too generous and are a large contributor to budget deficits.

The “Public-Private Employee Retirement Parity Act,” offered Thursday by Sens. Richard Burr (R-NC) and co-sponsored by Tom Coburn (R-OK), would eliminate all pensions under the Federal Employees Retirement System (FERS) but keep the Thrift Savings Plan in tact. The bill would also apply to members of Congress.

“Right now, federal government workers receive far more generous retirement benefits than private sector employees,” Burr said in a statement. “The cost to taxpayers of these benefits is unsustainable and we simply cannot afford it. We cannot ask taxpayers to continue to foot the bill for public employee benefits that are far more generous than their own.”

Coburn said the FERS pensions program “serves to foster political careerism and should have been frozen years ago,” and fretted that “federal workers generally earn up to 20 percent more than their private sector counterparts.”

Critics fear that eliminating the security that comes with pensions — a major perk of relatively low-paying federal jobs — could conceivably sway bright workers away from working for the government.

Continue reading at:   http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/03/22/gop-offers-bill-cutting-pensions-for-new-federal-employees/

From The Dallas Voice: http://www.dallasvoice.com/contact-clay-jenkins-elba-garcia-add-transgender-protections-1069886.html

—  John Wright

Abortion Foes Target Family Planning Program

From NPR: http://www.npr.org/2011/03/22/134662664/abortion-foes-target-family-planning-program

by Liz Halloran
March 21, 2011

For more than four decades, the federal government has subsidized family planning programs that provide contraceptive and related health and family services to millions of low-income women and men.

The Title X Family Planning program, established in 1970 with bipartisan support in Congress and signed into law by President Nixon, has been largely noncontroversial.

It makes no funds available for abortion, and focuses on what Nixon characterized as the premise that “no American woman should be denied access to family planning assistance because of her economic condition.”

But funding for Title X, which serves more than 5 million men and women annually, is on House Republicans’ chopping block.

Supporters of defunding have characterized it as an effort to strip funds from Planned Parenthood and other organizations that use other funds to provide legal abortions, without singling out any particular group. The House in February voted 240-185 to defund Title X in the current budget year.

But even staunch anti-abortion legislators like Rep. Mike Pence, the Indiana Republican who has crusaded against federal funding for Planned Parenthood clinics, say that jettisoning the Title X program may be going too far.

Continue reading at:  http://www.npr.org/2011/03/22/134662664/abortion-foes-target-family-planning-program

Aaah gee, the real pedophile men in dresses are upset that people are calling them the organized misogynistic hate group that they truly are.

The best thing that could happen to the planet and humanity would be everyone realizing there is no gods and that all religion is a worthless scam.

I hate the Catholic Church and the evil filthy perverts that run it.  I hate them on a deep and personal basis.

I renounce all rites they ever performed on me.

From Reuters Africa: http://af.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idAFTRE72L4XU20110322

by Tom Heneghan
Tue Mar 22, 2011

GENEVA (Reuters) – People who criticise gay sexual relations for religious or moral reasons are increasingly being attacked and vilified for their views, a Vatican diplomat told the United Nations Human Rights Council on Tuesday.

Archbishop Silvano Tomasi said the Roman Catholic Church deeply believed that human sexuality was a gift reserved for married heterosexual couples. But those who express these views are faced with “a disturbing trend,” he said.

“People are being attacked for taking positions that do not support sexual behaviour between people of the same sex,” he told the current session of the Human Rights Council.

“When they express their moral beliefs or beliefs about human nature … they are stigmatised, and worse — they are vilified, and prosecuted.

“These attacks are violations of fundamental human rights and cannot be justified under any circumstances,” Tomasi said.

The Catholic Church has clashed increasingly in recent years with governments over sexual equality legislation. In Britain, it had to close down adoption services because they refused to allow same-sex couples to adopt orphans in their care.

Continue reading at:  http://af.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idAFTRE72L4XU20110322

I fail to see any real difference between the Catholic Church, the KKK, Wahhabism or Nazism.

From Think Progress: http://thinkprogress.org/2011/03/22/estate-tax-vs-middle-class-report/

– Kevin Donohoe

Mar. 22, 2011

Last week, ThinkProgress documented conservative efforts in twelve states to shift the tax burden onto the middle class even while cutting taxes for corporations and the wealthy. In three states, conservatives are going even further, proposing massive estate tax cuts for millionaires even as income inequality is at its worse since the 1920s. Here are the details:

MAINE: Tea Party Gov. Paul LePage’s (I) tax reform package would raise the state’s estate tax exemption from $1 million to $2 million — allowing four hundred of the state’s wealthiest estates to escape taxation. At the same time, the tax plan would raise property taxes on middle class Mainers while freezing health care funding for working parents, cutting money for schools, and raising the retirement age for public workers. Republican legislators want to go even further, and are currently considering eliminating the estate tax altogether.

Continue reading at:  http://thinkprogress.org/2011/03/22/estate-tax-vs-middle-class-report/

From The American Independent:  http://www.americanindependent.com/173694/nearly-all-of-texas-anti-abortion-subcontractors-are-christian-groups

By Patrick Brendel
03.15.11

From 2006 to 2010, the state spent $11.7 million on its Texas Alternatives to Abortion Services Program, with nearly $7 million of that finding its way to 33 nonprofits (all but one with Christian affiliations) via the state’s primary contractor, the nonprofit Texas Pregnancy Care Network, according to public records obtained by the Texas Independent.

The Alternatives to Abortion Program — funded by state and federal money — was created in the 2005 legislative session for “the development and operation of a statewide program for females focused on pregnancy support services that promote childbirth,” according to the contract between the Texas Health and Human Services Commission and TPCN.

Of the $6.9 million received by the 33 subcontractors, more than half went to three nonprofits. San Antonio’s Seton Home, a Catholic residential facility for homeless pregnant and/or parenting adolescents, has received $1.8 million through the state program. The vast majority of that, $1.7 million, was spent on counseling sessions.

Overall, reimbursements for counseling totaled $5.4 million for all 33 subcontractors, about 78 percent of the $6.9 million. The rest went to client referrals, classes on topics such as pregnancy and parenting, and for food, clothing and furniture pantries

Continue reading at:  http://www.americanindependent.com/173694/nearly-all-of-texas-anti-abortion-subcontractors-are-christian-groups

If you miss me at the back of the bus,
If you can’t find me no where.
Come on over to the left wing radical working class demonstration
I’ll be picketing right there

I don’t “identify as transgender” and SRS was so freaking long ago that my connection to transsexual is lost in the mists of time, but I care about the rights of people who are currently having to deal with it and this shit has gotten really tired.

I expected more from Clay Jenkins.  But ya know what I bet including the phrase “gender identity/gender presentation or perceived gender identity/gender presentation” never crossed the minds of the desirable marketing demographic A-list liberal gay and lesbian Democrats who go to his fund raisers and have his ear.

Housing, public accommodations, employment are class issues that are more concern to the unemployed and under-employed working class people than to the A-List  Gays and lesbians who often pride themselves on how straight they look and how well they have assimilated to the upper and upper middle class lifestyles thei privilege has bought them.

While the too obvious live in poverty, working jobs that are often mind and soul killing for poverty wages.

Riki Wilchins pointed out in her book “Read My Lips” how this isn’t even limited to transsexual or transgender people but includes the too feminine gay men and the too masculine lesbian women.

From The Dallas Voice: http://www.dallasvoice.com/dallas-county-adds-protections-gay-employees-transgender-1069872.html

—  John Wright

Posted on 22 Mar 2011

The Dallas County Commissioners Court voted earlier today to add sexual orientation to the county’s employment nondiscrimination policy.

However, the amendment adding “sexual orientation” to the policy does not include gender identity/expression, meaning it covers gay and lesbian employees but not transgender workers.

County Judge Clay Jenkins, who chairs the Commissioners Court, and Commissioner Elba Garcia told Instant Tea they were under the impression that sexual orientation includes gender identity/expression, which it does not. Jenkins and Garcia, both Democrats who took office in January, spearheaded the proposal to add sexual orientation to the policy.

<snip>

The city of Dallas’ employment nondiscrimination policy has included sexual orientation since 1995. However, a Republican majority on the Commissioners Court reportedly has prevented Dallas County from enacting similar protections. Jenkins and Garcia, along with Commissioner John Wiley Price, comprise a Democratic majority on the Commissioners Court for the first time in three decades.

<snip>

Jenkins also said that while he thought it was covered by sexual orientation, he’d be willing to revisit the issue of adding gender identity/expression to the nondiscrimination policy.

“It was our intent in adding sexual orientation to broaden that to include all members of the LGBT community,” he said.

Complete article at:  http://www.dallasvoice.com/dallas-county-adds-protections-gay-employees-transgender-1069872.html

From Common Dreams: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/03/22-10

by Bill McKibben
Published on Tuesday, March 22, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

What if I told you I’d found a political group that for a hundred years had managed to be absolutely right on every crucial political issue? A political lodestone, reliably pointing toward true policy north at every moment.

Sorry. But I have something almost as good: a group that manages to always get it wrong. The ultimate pie-in-the-face brigade, the gang that couldn’t lobby straight.

From the outside, you’d think the US Chamber of Commerce must know what it’s doing. It’s got a huge building right next to the White House. It spends more money on political campaigning than the Republican and Democratic National Committees combined. It spends more money on lobbying that the next five biggest lobbyists combined. And yet it has an unbroken record of error stretching back almost to its founding.

Take the New Deal, which historians have long since credited as saving capitalism in the U.S. FDR was dealing with a nation ruined by Wall Street excess—a quarter of the country unemployed, Americans starving and hopeless. He gave his first fireside chat of 1935 on April 28, and outlined a legislative program that included Social Security. The next morning , a prominent official of the Chamber of Commerce accused Roosevelt of attempting to ‘Sovietize’ America; the chamber adopted a resolution “opposing the president’s entire legislative package.”

Fast forward to the next great challenge for America. FDR, having brought America through the Depression, was trying to deal with Hitler’s rise. In the winter of 1941, with the British hard-pressed to hold off the Germans, FDR proposed what came to be called the Lend-Lease program, a way of supplying the allies with materiel they desperately needed.
Only 22% of Americans opposed the Lend Lease program—they could see who Hitler was—but that sorry number included the Chamber of Commerce. The lead story in the New York Times for February 6, 1941 began with the ringing statement from the Chamber’s president James S . Kemper that “American business men oppose American involvement in any foreign war.”

It’s not just that this was unpatriotic; it was also plain stupid, since our eventual involvement in that “foreign war” triggered the greatest boom in America’s economic history. But it’s precisely the kind of blinkered short-sightedness that has led the US Chamber of Commerce astray over and over and over again. They spent the 1950s helping Joe McCarthy root out communists in the trade unions; in the 1960s they urged the Senate to “reject as unnecessary” the idea of Medicare; in the 1980s they campaigned against a “terrible 20” burdensome rules on business, including new licensing requirements for nuclear plants and “various mine safety rules.”

Continue reading at: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/03/22-10

From People For the American Way

It’s time for some real change we can believe in. It’s time for the federal government to stop punishing loving same-sex couples. It’s time to repeal DOMA (the Defense of Marriage Act).

It’s becoming clear that the walls excluding LGBT Americans from equality under the law are coming tumbling down. The Judges and state legislatures who have come down on the side of equality are doing their jobs — now Congress and the President need to do theirs. Take action now to make sure that President Obama and Congress eliminate DOMA.

From Alternet: http://www.alternet.org/rights/150330/glenn_greenwald%3A_how_the_us_government_strikes_fear_in_its_own_citizens_and_people_around_the_world/

In a recent speech, Glenn Greenwald discussed how the government and media treatment of WikiLeaks reveals a total lack of respect for the law and government transparency.

By Glenn Greenwald
March 21, 2011

[Editor’s note: The following is a transcript of a speech that Constitutional lawyer and Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald delivered for the Lannan Foundation on March 8. The speech was transcribed by the blog Contumacious.]

I’ve been speaking more at events like this and at various college campuses and the like over the last year. And one of the things that typically happens before the event, is that there’s a lot of time and mental energy spent on figuring out what the topic of the speech is going to be, and what the title is going to be. The speaker and the sponsors of the event go back and forth over what will be an interesting topic, what’s timely, what will be interesting to people. And then the title gets worked on and changed and edited. I have several speeches planned over the course of the next month, and there are all different topics and titles that were all worked out as part of this arduous process. What I found is that, as much time and energy that’s spent on that process, it actually ends up being completely irrelevant, because I find that no matter what the topic is, I keep speaking about the same set of issues, no matter what the title is.

The reason why that happens is not because I have some monomaniacal obsession with a handful of issues I can’t pull myself away from no matter what the topic is. That may be true, but that’s not actually the reason. The reason is because political controversies and political issues never take place in isolation. They’re always part of some broader framework, that drives political outcomes, and that determines how political power is exercised. And so it doesn’t really matter which specific topic, or which specific controversy of the day you want to discuss, the reality is, you can’t really meaningfully discuss any of them without examining all the forces that shape political culture, and that shape how political outcomes are determined. So, in order to talk about any issue, you end up speaking about these same, broad themes, that are shaping, and I think plaguing, the political discourse in the United States.

This is something that I first realized when I started writing about politics in late 2005. One of the very first topics on which I focused was the scandal about the Bush administration eavesdropping on American citizens without the warrants required by law. This was first exposed by the NYT in December of 2005, so it happened around six weeks after I began writing about politics. I had this very naïve idea that this was going to be very straightforward and simple political controversy. The reason I thought that in my naiveté, was because what the Bush administration got caught doing [eavesdropping on Americans without warrants from the FISA court] is as clear as could possibly be a felony under American law. You can actually look at the criminal law that existed since 1978, when FISA was enacted. It says that doing exactly what the Bush administration got caught doing, is a felony in the U.S., just like robbing a bank, or extortion or murder, and that it’s punishable by a prison term of five years or a $10,000 fine for each offense.

The report that the NYT published was that there were at least hundreds and probably thousands of instances where American citizens were eavesdropped on illegally and in violation of the law. So, I thought that this was going to be a fairly straightforward controversy, because I had this idea that if you get caught committing a felony, and the NYT writes and reports on that and everybody’s talking about that, that that’s actually going to be a really bad thing for the person who got caught doing that. I know it was really naïve. I’m actually embarrassed to admit that I thought that, but that really is was I thought at the time. I also thought that basically everybody would be in agreement that that was a really bad thing to do….that thing that the law said for 30 years was a felony and punishable by a prison term and a large fine. And, as it turned out (and I realized this fairly quickly) none of that actually happened. It wasn’t a really bad thing for the people who got caught committing that felony.

And, not only did everyone not agree that that was a bad thing, very few people actually agreed that that was a very bad thing. So, what I thought I was going to be able to do was to take this issue and write very legalistically about it, and demonstrate that what the Bush administration had done was a crime, that it was a felony under the statute and that the legal defenses for it that they had raised were frivolous and baseless and that would be the end of the story. Crime committed, investigation commenced, punishment ensues. So what immediately happened, when I realized that none of that was really going on, of course then the question became why. Why was my expectation about what would happen so radically different than what in fact happened?

Continue reading at:  http://www.alternet.org/rights/150330/glenn_greenwald%3A_how_the_us_government_strikes_fear_in_its_own_citizens_and_people_around_the_world/

by Daniel Williams
Tuesday, March 22, 2011

SB 723, by Tommy Williams (R- The Woodlands) will be heard in the Senate Jurisprudence Committee at 1:30 TODAY. The bill would remove documentation of a court ordered “sex change” from the list of documents that can be used to prove identity when applying for a marriage license.

The family code’s list of potential identifying documents is extremely long; everything from school records to prison ID cards. When the list was created last session the inclusion of court ordered “sex changes” was non-controversial, not even meriting debate. Attempting to remove it now is a simple act of spite and Williams’ bill analysis makes it clear that his intention in passing this legislation is to outlaw marriage involving trans identified people in the State of Texas.

Please contact the members of the Senate Jurisprudence Committee and tell them to leave the law the way it is, vote NO on SB 723.

Chair Chris Harris 512-463-0109

Vice-Chair Jose Rodriguez 512-463-0129

John Carona 512-463-0116

Robert Duncan 512-463-0128

Mario Gallegos 512-463-0106

Joan Huffman 512-463-0117

Carlos Uresti 512-463-0119

From Raw Story: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/03/22/same-sex-marriage-prevents-argentinian-womans-deportation/

By David Edwards
Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011

A New York woman who immigrated from Argentina scored a court victory Tuesday with her wife in their efforts to halt deportation proceedings against her.

Government lawyers have agreed not to deport Monica Alcota, a citizen of Argentina, while her wife, Cristina Ojeda, proceeds with a green card petition on her behalf.

The two have been together since 2008, and were married in Connecticut in 2010. Ojeda filed a marriage-based alien relative petition on behalf of her wife in September 2010, according to Towel Road.

It’s the first time a married same sex couple has successfully argued that a pending deportation should be halted based on the Obama administration’s decision to no longer defend the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).

Rachel Tiven, the Executive Director of Immigration Equality, said earlier this month that the DOMA decision created “a new opportunity for families facing separation or who are separated.”

Her group represents LGBT individuals and their international partners who, because of DOMA, are not entitled to the same benefits (like a green card) under federal immigration law as straight couples.

Continue reading at:  http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/03/22/same-sex-marriage-prevents-argentinian-womans-deportation/