WELCOME TO OPINIONS BASED ON FACTS (OBOF)
&
THINGS
YOU MAY HAVE MISSED (TYMHM)
YEAR ONE
YEAR TWO
YEAR THREE
YEAR FOUR
OBOF YEAR FOUR INDEX
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-01
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Jan. 02, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-02
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Jan. 09, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-03
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Jan. 15,2014
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Agenda
1.
TPP v. DEMOCRACY (!!! This is a must read). (If there was
ever a need to call your Senator & Rep. it is
now).
Attempts to Fast Track it thru Congress.
2.
U. S.
3.
House Republicans demand cut in Wall Street
Watchdog
Dog budget.
-
TAKE NOTE:
I’ve been horrified by the growing number of articles that
predict Republicans could take over the Senate in 2014. What a nightmare: Republicans in
control of both the House and the Senate! You and I can’t let this happen.
Floyd
~~~
TPP v. Democracy
Dennis Trainor, Jr.
Acronym TV / Video Report
Published: Tuesday 14 January
Last week, legislation to fast track a vote on the Trans
Pacific Partnership was introduced in Congress.
President Obama, who, along with advisors from several hundred
corporations, has built the TPP in secret, away from the prying eyes of
Congress or the public, desperately wants this fast track authority. The grant of that authority is,
according to prevailing wisdom and the pro-neoliberal agenda Forbes
magazine contributor Dan Ikenson describes as something being “widely
considered necessary to complete and ratify the Trans-Pacific Partnership
agreement between the United States and 11 other Pacific-bordering nations, as
well as other prospective trade agreements."
Why is Fast track so
important?
Because President Obama, and the corporate advisors he so
willingly serves, knows full well that if there were a public debate on the
TPP, not only would it never pass, but people would take to the streets in a
1999 Battle in Seattle WTO protests kind of way.
The TPP is a Trojan horse that seeks to usher in a
backroom secret sweetheart deal for the global elite. Fast track avoids public debate- and would ask
for an up or down yes vote from members of congress who have not yet read the
agreement.
Neither have you. Some of you have read sections of the TPP, as
published by WikiLeaks as we reported on this program last November:
“Today, WikiLeaks
released the secret negotiated draft text for the entire Trans-Pacific
Partnership Intellectual Property rights chapter. According to the
WikiLeaks press release :" The WikiLeaks
release of the text comes ahead of the decisive TPP Chief Negotiators summit in
Salt Lake City , Utah
This is a major
leak because this top-secret trade deal that is, in fact, much more than a
trade deal. Remember NATFTA? Remember
the concept of Corporate Personhood from the Citizens United case? The TPP combines all of the worst elements of
NAFTA and Citizens United, shoots them up with steroids, sprinkles in a
speedball and codifies these principles into a trade agreement that is in fact
much more than a trade agreement.
We will have more
on that in a moment, but first to sum up what we do know already, based on
previous leaks of the working text about how the TPP would eclipse the concept
of corporate personhood, I’ll quote David Swanson of Roots Action, who writes that the TPP would make popular the
phrase Corporate Nationhood:“ Many of us have heard of corporate personhood. Corporations have been
given the Constitutional rights of persons by U.S. U.S. U.S.
How would U.S.
So, if you think the concept of a Representative form of
government of the people by the people and for the people is a farce in the age
of corporate personhood and the wealth divide that has hijacked the principles
of big D Democracy upon which this country is supposed to operate is a
farce now, imagine a world where food safety, the environment, workers rights,
and access to health care are further hijacked by corporate power.
That world is one in which a total corporate coup ushered
in by President Obama- in service to the 600 corporations who have advisors
with access to drafts of the TPP puts the neoliberal boot to the neck of you,
me and just about everyone we know. As Noam Chomsky describes the neoliberal
monster, it is built "to maximize profit and domination, and to set
the working people in the world in competition with one another so as to lower
wages to increase insecurity.”
You have all heard the demand, belted out in unison by
those who yearn to be heard, to "Show me what Democracy looks like”!If
there is any negative image of what Democracy looks like, any way to define a
thing by its opposite, it is the Trans Pacific Partnership.
Last week, legislation to fast track a vote on the Trans
Pacific Partnership was introduced in Congress.
President Obama, who, along with advisors from several
hundred corporations, has built the TPP in secret, away from the prying eyes of
Congress or the public, desperately wants this fast track authority. The grant of that authority is,
according to prevailing wisdom and the pro-neoliberal agenda Forbes
magazine contributor Dan Ikenson describes as something being “widely
considered necessary to complete and ratify the Trans-Pacific Partnership
agreement between the United States and 11 other Pacific-bordering nations, as
well as other prospective trade agreements."
Why is Fast track so
important?
Because President Obama, and the corporate advisors he so
willingly serves, knows full well that if there were a public debate on the
TPP, not only would it never pass, but people would take to the streets in a
1999 Battle in Seattle WTO protests kind of way.
The TPP is a Trojan horse that seeks to usher in a
backroom secret sweetheart deal for the global elite. Fast track avoids public debate- and would ask
for an up or down yes vote from members of congress who have not yet read the
agreement.
Neither have you. S
Some of you have read sections of the TPP, as published by WikiLeaks as we
reported on this program last November:
“Today, WikiLeaks
released the secret negotiated draft text for the entire Trans-Pacific
Partnership Intellectual Property rights chapter. According to the
WikiLeaks press release :“The WikiLeaks release of
the text comes ahead of the decisive TPP Chief Negotiators summit in Salt Lake City , Utah
This is a major
leak because this top-secret trade deal that is, in fact, much more than a
trade deal. Remember NATFTA? Remember
the concept of Corporate Personhood from the Citizens United case? The TPP
combines all of the worst elements of NAFTA and Citizens United, shoots them up
with steroids, sprinkles in a speedball and codifies these principles into a
trade agreement that is in fact much more than a trade agreement.
We will have more
on that in a moment, but first to sum up what we do know already, based on
previous leaks of the working text about how the TPP would eclipse the concept
of corporate personhood, I’ll quote David Swanson of Roots Action, who writes that the TPP would make popular the
phrase Corporate Nationhood:“Many of us have heard of corporate personhood. Corporations have been
given the Constitutional rights of persons by U.S. U.S. U.S.
”How would U.S.
So, if you think the concept of a Representative form of
government of the people by the people and for the people is a farce in the age
of corporate personhood and the wealth divide that has hijacked the principles
of big D Democracy upon which this country is supposed to operate is a
farce now, imagine a world where food safety, the environment, workers rights,
and access to health care are further hijacked by corporate power.
That world is one in which a total corporate coup ushered
in by President Obama- in service to the 600 corporations who have advisors
with access to drafts of the TPP puts the neoliberal boot to the neck of you, me
and just about everyone we know. As Noam Chomsky describes the neoliberal
monster, it is built "to maximize profit and domination, and to set
the working people in the world in competition with one another so as to lower
wages to increase insecurity.”
You have all heard the demand, belted out in unison by
those who yearn to be heard, to "Show me what Democracy looks like”! If there is any negative image of what
Democracy looks like, any way to define a thing by its opposite, it is the
Trans Pacific Partnership.
~~~
Toll Mounts Among U.S. Sailors Devastated by Fukushima
Harvey Wasserman
EcoWatch / News Report
Published: Sunday 12 January 2014
The roll call of U.S. sailors who say their health was
devastated when they were irradiated while delivering humanitarian help near
the stricken Fukushima nuke is continuing to soar.
So many have come forward that the progress of their
federal class action lawsuit has been delayed.
Bay area lawyer Charles Bonner says a re-filing will wait
until early February to accommodate a constant influx of sailors from the
aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan and other American ships.
Within a day of Fukushima
Then-Prime Minister Naoto Kan, at the time a nuclear
supporter, says “the first meltdown occurred five hours after the earthquake.”
The lawsuit charges that Tokyo
Had the Navy known, says Bonner, it could have moved its
ships out of harm’s way. But some sailors actually jumped into the ocean just
offshore to pull victims to safety. Others worked 18-hour shifts in the open
air through a four-day mission, re-fueling and repairing helicopters, loading
them with vital supplies and much more. All were drinking and bathing in
desalinated water that had been severely contaminated by radioactive fallout
and runoff.
Then Reagan crew members
were enveloped in a warm cloud. “Hey,” joked sailor Lindsay Cooper at the time.
“It’s radioactive snow.”
The metallic
taste that came with it parallels the ones reported by the
airmen who dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima ,
and by Pennsylvania residents downwind from
the 1979 meltdown at Three Mile Island .
When it did leave the Fukushima
area, the Reagan was so radioactive it was refused port entry in Japan , South Korea
and Guam . It’s currently docked in San Diego
The Navy is not systematically monitoring the crew members’ health problems. But
Cooper now reports a damaged thyroid, disrupted menstrual cycle, wildly
fluctuating body weight and more. “It’s ruined me,” she says.
Similar complaints have surfaced among so many sailors
from the Reagan and other U.S. ships that Bonner says he’s being contacted by
new litigants “on a daily basis,” with the number exceeding 70.
Many are in their twenties, complaining of a terrible
host of radiation-related diseases. They are legally barred from suing the U.S. Fukushima U.S.
The suit was
initially dismissed on jurisdictional grounds by
federal Judge Janis S. Sammartino in San
Diego
Bonner says Tepco should be subject to U.S. law because “they are doing business in America … Their second largest office outside of
Tokyo is in Washington DC
Like the lawsuit, the petitions ask that Tepco admit
responsibility, and establish a fund for the first responders to be
administered by the U.S.
In 2013 more than
150,000 citizens petitioned the United Nations to take
control of the Fukushima
The melted cores
from Units One, Two and Three are still unaccounted for. Progress in bringing
down Unit Four’s suspended fuel assemblies is murky at best. More than 11,000
“hot” rods are still scattered around a site where radiation levels remain high
and some 300 tons of radioactive water still flow daily into the Pacific.
But with U.S. support, Japan
has imposed a state secrets act severely restricting
reliable news reporting from the Fukushima
So now we all live in the same kind of dark that
enveloped the USS Reagan while its crew was immersed in their mission of mercy.
Petitions in the
sailors’ support are circulating worldwide on NukeFree.org, MoveOn, Avaaz,RootsAction and elsewhere.
The roll call of U.S. sailors who say their health was
devastated when they were irradiated while delivering humanitarian help near
the stricken Fukushima nuke is continuing to soar.
So many have come forward that the progress of their
federal class action lawsuit has been delayed.
Bay area lawyer Charles Bonner says a re-filing will wait
until early February to accommodate a constant influx of sailors from the
aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan and other American ships.
Within a day of Fukushima
Then-Prime Minister Naoto Kan, at the time a nuclear
supporter, says “the first meltdown occurred five hours after the earthquake.”
The lawsuit charges that Tokyo
Had the Navy known, says Bonner, it could have moved its
ships out of harm’s way. But some sailors actually jumped into the ocean just
offshore to pull victims to safety. Others worked 18-hour shifts in the open
air through a four-day mission, re-fueling and repairing helicopters, loading
them with vital supplies and much more. All were drinking and bathing in
desalinated water that had been severely contaminated by radioactive fallout
and runoff.
Then Reagan crew members
were enveloped in a warm cloud. “Hey,” joked sailor Lindsay Cooper at the time.
“It’s radioactive snow.”
The metallic
taste that came with it parallels the ones reported by the
airmen who dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima ,
and by Pennsylvania residents downwind from
the 1979 meltdown at Three Mile Island .
When it did leave the Fukushima
area, the Reagan was so radioactive it was refused port entry in Japan , South Korea
and Guam . It’s currently docked in San Diego
The Navy is not systematically monitoring the crew members’ health problems. But
Cooper now reports a damaged thyroid, disrupted menstrual cycle, wildly
fluctuating body weight and more. “It’s ruined me,” she says.
Similar complaints have surfaced among so many sailors
from the Reagan and other U.S. ships that Bonner says he’s being contacted by
new litigants “on a daily basis,” with the number exceeding 70.
Many are in their twenties, complaining of a terrible
host of radiation-related diseases. They are legally barred from suing the U.S. Fukushima U.S.
The suit was
initially dismissed on jurisdictional grounds by
federal Judge Janis S. Sammartino in San
Diego
Bonner says Tepco should be subject to U.S. law because “they are doing business in America … Their second largest office outside of
Tokyo is in Washington DC
Like the lawsuit, the petitions ask that Tepco admit
responsibility, and establish a fund for the first responders to be
administered by the U.S.
In 2013 more than
150,000 citizens petitioned the United Nations to take
control of the Fukushima
The melted cores
from Units One, Two and Three are still unaccounted for. Progress in bringing
down Unit Four’s suspended fuel assemblies is murky at best. More than 11,000
“hot” rods are still scattered around a site where radiation levels remain high
and some 300 tons of radioactive water still flow daily into the Pacific.
But with U.S. support, Japan
has imposed a state secrets act severely restricting
reliable news reporting from the Fukushima
So now we all live in the same kind of dark that
enveloped the USS Reagan while its crew was immersed in their mission of mercy.
Petitions in the
sailors’ support are circulating worldwide on NukeFree.org, MoveOn, Avaaz,RootsAction and elsewhere.
~~~
House
Republicans Demand Cuts For Wall Street Watchdogs in Budget Deal
Bill Moyers / Op-Ed
Wednesday 15
January 2014
NOTE FROM FLOYD:
I must admit, that this next article doesn't add up to
me. I must have missed something. I had reported to you earlier that they had
passed and the President had signed a two year budget. I will try to get straightened out on this by
next week.
On Monday evening, in an attempt to avoid another
government shutdown, House and Senate negotiators released a draft of a budget
deal — the first detailed spending agreement since 2011.
But less than two
weeks after outgoing Fed Chair Ben Bernanke said that “excessively tight” budgets were
“counterproductive,” and had made the recovery “weaker than it otherwise would
be,” the draft announced Monday maintains many of the cuts from the
disastrous sequester deal.
The
Guardian’s Dan
Roberts reports that Republicans had backed off
their previous demand for deeper cuts to the food stamp program, settling
instead for partially defunding Wall Street regulators.
Roberts writes:
Hal Rogers, the Republican
chairman of the House appropriations committee, singled out the budget for the
Securities and Exchange Commission in a press release, which received $324m
less than it requested and $25m taken from reserve she called “as l been pressing
Congress to curb the growing power of regulators like the SEC in the wake of
the financial crisis and Rogers said the spending bill had also [designated]
$44m to an economic review of its rule-making process.
This decision, and similar
cuts to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, brought an angry response from Wall Street campaigners.
“It is shameful that Wall
Street’s allies in Congress have again failed to fund the very agencies that
are charged with protecting Main Street and preventing another financial
crisis,” said Dennis Kelleher, president and CEO of Better Markets, an
independent nonprofit organisation that promotes the public interest in the fi nancial
markets.
“The only reason not to
fully fund the CFTC and the SEC is to protect Wall Street profits, bonuses and
reckless trading. This rewards Wall Street’s lobbyists and campaign cash while
endangering American families,” he added.
And while polls show
that Americans think public spending has increased dramatically, Politico reports that non-military discretionary
spending is still down significantly since Obama entered the White House:
What’s most telling is to
compare the numbers now with spending levels six years ago for fiscal 2008 —
the last full budget cycle under Obama’s predecessor, President George W. Bush.
Total discretionary
spending for 2008 was $1.176 trillion, more than half of which, or $642.1
billion, was designated for the Pentagon and military operations — in Iraq then as well as Afghanistan
That left $534.4 billion
among the 11 other appropriations bills, almost exactly what will be the case
now in the 2014 omnibus. The big difference is inflation. And when the Bush dollars are adjusted upward
to reflect changes in the cost of living since 2008, it shows that Obama will
be left with about 10 percent, or $53 billion, less than his predecessor.
But that comparison is
incomplete; according to the Census Bureau, the US
Finally, Sam
Stein reports for the Huffington Post that the scientific
community “isn’t happy” about the deal, which restores a fraction of the
sequester’s budget cuts for research. Stein writes:
…The NIH budget target
falls short of what both the White House and Senate Democrats wanted. House
Democrats said it was $714 million less than “the 2013 enacted level” of
$30.648 billion. According to the NIH’s own numbers, meanwhile, it is
approximately $950 million less than its 2012 level. In fact, the number is
lower than during President Barack Obama’s first year in office and, when
adjusted for inflation, is lower than it was in every year but the first of the
George W. Bush administration.
“The FY14 omnibus spending
bill falls short of restoring funding for lifesaving National Institutes of
Health (NIH) biomedical research,” said Carrie Wolinetz, president of United
for Medical Research, a coalition of leading research and medical institutions.
“The proposed package won’t adequately reverse the damage done by last year’s
budget sequester and ensure the nation’s biomedical research enterprise makes
continued progress in lifesaving research and development.”
The sequester
resulted from a 2011 standoff between the White House and House Republicans who
were threatening to not raise the government’s debt limit. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that
the cuts shaved 0.6 percent off last year’s economic growth and cost the
economy 750,000 jobs.
~~~
If the good Lord is
willing and the creek don't rise, I'll try to talk to you again next Wednesday
January 22, 2014.
God Bless You All
&
God Bless the United States of America
Floyd
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