Stuart Jeanne Bramhall's Blog: The Most Revolutionary Act , page 1345

NEW YORK POLICE ACCIDENTALLY SHOW PEOPLE THEY ARE NOT NEEDED NOR WANTED

stuartbramhall:

 

 

De facto New York police strike reveals 1) that cops aren’t needed in NYC and 2) that life improves significantly without them.

Originally posted on Nevada State Personnel Watch:

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[The following post is by TDV Chief Editor, Jeff Berwick]

Showing that even the police are incredibly brainwashed by TV programming that always shows them as needed heroes the New York police may have made a career-threatening mistake by effectively going on strike this month.

The 34,500 uniformed members of the NYPD, which Mayor Bloomberg once called the world’s seventh largest army, had two of their members shot this month and in protest they decided to stop harassing people for awhile.

According to the New York Post, in the week after the shootings, citations for traffic violations fell by 94 percent, from 10,069 to 587 compared to the same week in 2013.  Summonses for low-level offenses like public drinking and urination also plunged 94 percent — from 4,831 to 300.  Even parking violations are way down, dropping by 92 percent, from 14,699 to 1,241. Drug arrests by cops assigned…

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Unemployed Youth: the Lost Generation

Recovery? What Recovery?

High youth unemployment is a defining characteristic of the current recession. Despite the so-called recovery, a fifth or more of young people under thirty remain unemployed. In most countries, youth joblessness is triple the general unemployment rate. In some regions with harsh austerity regimes, youth unemployment is increasing.

In the US the preferred approach to youth unemployment, both by government and the media, is to ignore it. Elsewhere the attitude towards youth unemployment is mixed. In Europe, the European Commission has appropriated $1 billion euros to address youth joblessness. Yet only Germany and Switzerland have come up with real solutions.

Pundits offer a variety of explanations for the stubborn problem of youth unemployment: globalization (i.e. jobs moving to the third world), automation (i.e. replacement of jobs with robots), the greed of baby boomers who refuse to retire (greasing the wheels for social security and pension cuts) and government policies that allow billionaires to suck all the money out of the economy for their personal pleasure.

An increasing number of economists see youth unemployment as symptomatic of structural economic changes related to the end of global growth. Despite all the corporate media babble about perpetual economic growth, the phenomenon is actually quite new. Prior to the harnessing of fossil fuels by the industrial revolution, all human civilizations were based on steady state economies.

Of the three documentaries below, the first, from Canada, is the best. Portraying youth unemployment as a permanent structural problem, it’s highly critical of the Canadian government for refusing to address it.

The four important points Generation Jobless (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation 2014) makes are

1) by 2030 half of all the current jobs will be gone

2) the “lost generation” (the 20% of Canadians under thirty who remain unemployed) is highly unlikely to ever land permanent good-paying jobs

3) Canadian universities are training young people for obsolete jobs instead of offering them new skills needed in the present economy.

4) Canada’s student loan program is a fraud – students are pressured to take on vast amounts of debt on the promise of good paying jobs that don’t exist.

The film disputes the frequent claim that a large aging population is a drag on the Canadian economy – the real drag on the economy is the underutilization of Canadian youth. This has drastic implications for the future health of the Canadian economy. Most of a society’s wealth comes from the skills of its workforce.

This first documentary also highlights two examples of programs that are successfully cutting youth unemployment, one at the University of Regina (UR) in Saskatchewan and the other in Switzerland.

The UR Guarantee program, which promising all entering students will be placed in a job on graduation, has a 97% success rate. From day one, the curriculum for all students includes career counseling and career education, consisting resume writing, interview skills and networking. Students also participate in an apprenticeship program in their chosen field, thanks to a cooperative agreement UR has with local businesses. Finally, they get a guarantee: any graduate who fails to find work in six months returns for an extra year (free of charge) to further hone their skills.

In Switzerland, youth unemployment is 2.8% (roughly a tenth of other industrialized countries), thanks to a high school program that allows them to start an apprenticeship at fifteen. The Swiss Employers’ Association helps local high schools set up their apprenticeships, which include white collar fields, such as health care, banking and IT, as well as the traditional trades.

The 2013 BBC documentary Young and Jobless is less hard hitting. Unlike the CBC documentary, it fails to emphasize the failure of the British government to acknowledge or address the problem of youth unemployment. In fact, it tends to trivialize the problem by comparing superficial snapshots of youth unemployment in different countries.

That being said, there’s an excellent segment about lawsuits American young people have filed (and won) against corporations that have exploited them via unpaid internships.

I was also intrigued by the number of countries that deal with youth employment by encouraging young people to emigrate (as we do in New Zealand). In Spain, for example, there are specific programs to assist Spanish youth in locating jobs in the UK. In contrast, Irish youth are encouraged to emigrate to Australia.

Video 3 Young, Jobless and Living at Home is a 2014 BBC documentary about the “boomerang generation,” the growing tendency of young people under thirty to move in with their parents, either because they can’t find jobs or because they can only find low paid, part time and/or temporary work that doesn’t cover their living expenses. Radio DJ Grey James follows six unemployed youth for six months.

The statistics say it all: in 2014 20% of young Brits under thirty were unemployed but twice as many (40%) were living with their parents.

photo credit: Caelie_Frampton via photopin cc

Also published in Veterans Today

4 Easy Ways to Slash Your BPA Exposure

stuartbramhall:

 

 

Studies link bisphenol A (BPA) with high blood pressure and asthma, obesity and brain and prostate development in children. And it’s everywhere.

Originally posted on thekirkshow:

The thing I hate most about shopping is not navigating a crowded store or staring at my pasty reflection under the dressing room’s harsh lighting. Nope, that stuff doesn’t bother me. If you ask me, the most dreaded store moment is watching the machine spit out a footlong receipt, and then swimming in awkwardness because no freakin’ way am I touching that thing.

“Um, can you just toss that for me?” I always ask—as I back away in horror.

OK, so that’s a slight dramatization, but it does accurately represent my feelings regarding receipts. My reason: they’re coated with bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical that the National Toxicology Program deemed worthy of “some concern for effects on the brain, behavior, and prostate gland in fetuses, infants, and children at current human exposures” after reviewing the research in 2008. Two studies just this year linked handling receipts to elevated levels of BPA in the body.

Previous research has shown an association between BPA and heart problems, as well as asthma and obesity risk in…

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New Hope for Underwater Borrowers

 

One for Our Side

Anti-eviction activists were thrilled with a November 25 ruling by the Federal Housing Finance Administration (FHFA), which seems to reverse the position taken by the Obama administration in federal court. Prior to the new ruling, homeowners foreclosed by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac (the Enterprises)* found themselves in the painful position of watching their foreclosed homes being sold for much less than they paid for them.

Deadbeat Homeowners vs Deadbeat Banks

As the 2008 economic collapse caused over inflated real estate values to plummet, more than a fifth of all mortgage holders (7.5 million) discovered that – through no fault of their own – they owned more on their mortgage than their property was worth. By December 2013, the percentage of underwater (aka negative equity) mortgages had decreased to 13% (6.4 million)  By December 4, 2014, thanks to an October “rally” in home prices (i.e. new real estate bubble) , this figure had dropped to 8% (4 million) .

Prior to the new ruling, both Fannie and Freddie (both owned by the taxpayer since they were nationalized** in September 2008) required homeowners who had been through foreclosure and wanted to buy their home back had to pay the entire amount owed on the mortgage. The Enterprises argued that allowing former home owners to repurchase their homes at the true (lower) market value created a “moral hazard” because it encouraged deadbeat home buyers to default on their mortgage to repurchase their property at its real value. I find this really rich, given that it was deadbeat banks and mortgage companies who caused the economic downturn to begin with.

Thanks to the new FHFA policy, both Fannie and Freddie must now permit the sale of existing real estate owned (REO) properties to any qualified purchaser (including the former owner) at the property’s fair-market value.

Old Policy Violated Massachusetts Law

A year ago, two Massachusetts residents filed suit against Freddie Mac, with the support of the Boston anti-eviction group City Life/Vida Urbana, for violating a Massachusetts consumer protection statute that explicitly forbids this type of refusal. On November 18, the Obama administration argued that state laws are non-binding on Fannie and Freddie while they’re under federal receivership. Extremely unfavorable publicity may partially explain the FHFA’s surprise ruling a week later. Now that the pressure of mid-term elections has passed, it’s quite a safe lame duck type decision.

City Life/Vida Urbana

City Life/Vida Urbana was first started (as the Jamaica Plain Tenants Action Group) in 1973 to pressure inner city slumlords to property maintain their buildings and to pressure the city of Boston to enact rent control. Since the 1980s, they have also campaigned against property speculation, gentrification and condominium conversion. Since 2008, defending against foreclosure and other evictions has been their primary focus. Joining forces with Occupy Our Homes, which grew out of Occupy Wall Street, they have employed a two prong approach. In addition to helping home owners fight fraudulent foreclosures legally in court, they also organize local activists to block evictions through mass occupation and civil disobedience in foreclosed homes. In many cases, the negative publicity this generates will pressure lenders to renegotiate more reasonable repayment terms.

Thanks to trainings City Life/Vida Urbana conducts across the US, many communities are starting grassroots anti-eviction organizations.

* Roughly half of all US mortgages are held by two government sponsored enterprises (GSEs), nicknamed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac because federal bureaucrats kept getting the two confused. The Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA), commonly known as Fannie Mae, was founded in 1938 under the New Deal. Its purpose was to expand the secondary mortgage market. The latter attracts new capital for mortgages by buying mortgage loans from banks and bundling them as securities to on-sell to pension funds, insurance companies and hedge funds. This allows lenders to reinvest their assets in more lending, theoretically increasing the supply of funding available for home purchases. Fannie was privatized in 1968 to become a publicly traded company. The Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (FHLMC), known as Freddie Mac, is a publicly traded GSE created in 1970 to further expand the secondary mortgage market.

**On September 7, 2008, George W Bush nationalized Fannie and Freddie by placing them under FHFA conservatorship and causing them to issue new senior preferred stock and common stock warrants to the US Treasury amounting to 79.9% of each GSE. In 2010 both were delisted from the New York Stock Exchange after Fannie’s stock traded below $1 a share for over 30 days. Since 2010 both stocks have continued to trade on the Over-the-Counter Bulletin Board.

photo credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com via photopin cc

Also published in Veterans Today

Origins of the police

stuartbramhall:

 

 

Excellent essay about the true history and purpose of the police – their primary purpose is crowd control and preventing collective resistance by the oppressed. The notion that they’re out there to prevent lawbreaking is a total myth.

Originally posted on Aletho News:

By David Whitehouse | Worx in Theory | December 7, 2014

The Five Points district of lower Manhattan, painted by George Catlin in 1827. New York’s first free Black settlement, Five Points was also a destination for Irish immigrants and a focal point for the stormy collective life of the new working class. Cops were invented to gain control over neighborhoods and populations like this.

In England and the United States, the police were invented within the space of just a few decades—roughly from 1825 to 1855.

The new institution was not a response to an increase in crime, and it really didn’t lead to new methods for dealing with crime. The most common way for authorities to solve a crime, before and since the invention of police, has been for someone to tell them who did it.

Besides, crime has to do with the acts of individuals, and the ruling elites…

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The Addiction of Compulsive Consumption

The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need

by Juliet Schor (Harper Perennial 1998)

Book Review

The Overspent American is a study of the psychological and sociological factors that drive Americans’ compulsive consumption. In the mid twentieth century, we all believed that a big boom in mechanization and productivity would translate into a significant increase in leisure time. Instead the 21st century found Americans working harder than ever. Growing income inequality, with a bigger percentage of our work product, going to corporate profit, is a big part of the answer. Another important part is compulsive spending patterns that have trapped Americans into in painful desire-debt-spend-overwork cycle.

In many, compulsive spending is an addictive behavior. Many shopaholics regret their purchases once they get them home and never use them.

According to Schor, around 80% of Americans feel that US society is too materialistic, while simultaneously under-estimating their own compulsive consumption and indebtedness. In 1998 (when Schor published The Overspent American), 80% of Americans had personal debt beyond their home mortgage. Across the entire population, average debt was the same as average annual income.

Schor’s purpose is to examine why the promise of greater leisure time due to greater mechanization and productivity never materialized. In 1998, when she wrote the book, Americans were working twice as hard in the fifties. In her few, this is only partly due to corporate exploitation. Many Americans are forced to work more hours than they would really like owing to the compulsive spending parents, especially if they get hooked into the desire-debt-overwork cycle.

Competitive Consumption

I had always blamed Americans’ obsessive consumerism on their constant bombardment, by the media, with psychologically sophisticated pro-consumption messaging. According to Schor’s and others’ research, the problem is far more complex.

Overspending, according to Schor is based in competitive consumption, i.e. the achievement of social status based on what you spend, rather than what you earn. It’s a very old phenomenon. Adam Smith mentions it in Wealth of Nations.

Schor’s research primarily concerns the middle class. Individuals with a strong working class identity tend to be less susceptible to competitive consumption pressures, in part because they have little or no discretionary income and limited access to credit and reject bourgeois ideals in favor of non-consumerist values (eg solidarity).

She also examines two specific groups that are oblivious to competitive consumption pressures. I found this particularly valuable in understanding my own lack of desire to consume and acquire material goods.

Defensive Spending

According to Schor, middle class Americans spend defensively for fear of losing status. The fear of falling behind and ceasing to be middle class became particularly intense in the 1970s, when US companies first began shutting down and moving overseas. Between 1980 and 1995, the upper 20% of the US population experienced an increase in income. Everyone else got a reduction in income. By 1996, the middle class was noticeably shrinking, despite the entry of women into the workforce.

People who were downsized between 1980 and 2000 incurred massive debts to preserve their middle class status. Unlike the fifties, middle class spending expectations no longer revolved around comfort but around conspicuous consumption of luxuries. If you couldn’t afford a four bedroom house, two cars, cable, a VCR, microwave, blender, coffee maker, computer, printer, expensive vacations, massages, personal trainers, lavish gifts at Christmas and other special occasions (one third of which gift receivers neither want nor use), you borrowed money on your credit cards to pay for it. Once you maxed out your credit cards, you ceased to qualify for middle class membership.

The Effect of TV

I was very surprised by the lack of hard research that TV ads stimulate consumption in adult spenders. In Schor’s studies, she found that consumer desires were mainly generated to by exposure to the lifestyles of a reference group, ie the group closest to us in the social hierarchy (workmates, family, friends). Where TV (and films) most influence spending is by offering an inflated view of how other Americans live and what they buy and own. This occurs because the vast majority of TV characters are upper middle class. With growing social isolation, TV itself serves as a reference group for many people.

Downshifters and Simple Livers

Schor classifies people who are resistant to compulsive consumption pressures as either downshifters or simple livers. I found the distinction she makes to somewhat arbitrary, especially when she refers to Quakers, Shakers, Transcendalists and hippies as downshifters. By her own definition, I would tend to call all these groups simple livers:  they resisted material accumulation out of moral conviction and were supported by a reference group that shared these values.

According to Schor, downshifters are more likely to be individuals who have given up compulsive consumption due to a debt crisis or intense work stress. They would prefer to have more money and time, but are forced to opt for time due to some personal crisis. Between 1990 and 1996, 20% of Americans downshifted voluntarily. Twelve percent did so involuntarily due to job loss or wage cuts.*

Simple livers reject the notion that material goods determine status. They set a low level of sufficiency income (some set it as low as $6,000 – 15,000 a year). Beyond this level, spending is no longer positive because it creates clutter, harms environment and alienates them from their peer group. They reject the notion that material goods determine status.

Voluntary simplicity circles first started in the Pacific Northwest in the 1990s. Thanks to immense popularity of The Simple Life by David Shi and Your Money or Your Life by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez, they are now widespread across the country.

*Thanks to ongoing recession, in 2014 the percentage of Americans involuntarily downshifted is nearly 50%.

**According to Schor’s classification system, I’m a simple liver. It’s something that seemed to come naturally because my parents were non-college educated simple livers who rejected conspicuous consumption in favor of non-material values. Most people in my current reference group (the Green Party) are also simple livers.

This is What Democracy Looks Like

2014 marks the fifteenth anniversary of the Battle of Seattle, the week of protests in November-December 1999 that shut down the World Trade Organization (WTO) Third Ministerial Round. Also known as the Doha Round, the intention of these negotiations was to significantly expand the power of multinational corporations to challenge democratically enacted labor, environmental and health and safety laws.

Opening ceremonies had to be canceled on November 30, when seventy to one hundred thousand global protestors stormed downtown Seattle and hundreds of activists chained themselves to cement pipes to block delegates’ access to the Paramount Theater. The police riot which ensued was our first encounter with the police militarization that would characterize the new millennium. Rather than simply arresting them, Seattle police beat, tear gassed and shot rubber bullets at peaceful protestors, journalists and passersby alike.*

Organizing Began in January 1999

I still lived in Seattle in 1999 and participated in the local organizing. We began in January 1999 when Mike Dolan, Public Citizen’s national field organizer, called the first planning meeting at the Seattle Labor Temple. Dolan continued to visit Seattle for monthly meetings, as well as coordinating organizing efforts in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Washington DC and other major US cities.

The biggest challenge in organizing the anti-WTO protest was that hardly any Americans had heard of the WTO in 1999, much less recognized the immense power Clinton was handing to private corporations with the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA) and the Global Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the treaty that created the WTO in 1994.

With 100,000 activists descending on Seattle, it became necessary to set up a home stay network to provide them with accommodation. I hosted seven activists in my home, two each from Los Angeles and Alaska, and three from the Mendocino County Rainforest Action Network.

The IFG Teach-In

The week started Friday night November 26, when 3,000+ of us packed into Seattle’s Symphony Hall for a two day teach-in organized by the International Forum on Globalization. World famous anti-globalization activists (including Indian anti-GMO activist Vendana Shiva, Malaysian economist and journalist Martin Khor, Canadian water activist Maude Barlow, Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki, French farmer activist Jose Bove, Ghanaian farmer activist Tete Hormeku, anti-sweatshop organizer Kevin Danaher and Owens Wiwa, brother of executed Nigerian environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa) each gave twenty minute presentations, followed by questions and small group discussion at the Seattle Art Museum across the street.

Maria Galaradin recorded all the presentations and has many of them archived at TUC Radio

On November 27-29, there were a series of small non-confrontational protest actions organized by specific interest groups. On November 28, I participated in a protest march to the Cargill grain elevator at the port to protest the corporate takeover of global food production by large companies such as Cargill and Monsanto. It was led by representatives of the Zapatistas, Via Campesino and the US National Family Farm Coalition.

Protest organizers had scheduled the main protest, involving fifty thousands global trade unionists and tens of thousands of farm and environmental activists for November 30, the day WTO negotiations were meant to start. We had planned three days of workshops and small localized protests for December 1-3.

Mayor Paul Schell Declares Martial Law

All this changed when Mayor Paul Schell declared martial law and made it illegal to carry anti-WTO signs, wear anti-WTO buttons, chant anti-WTO slogans or carry anti-WTO leaflets into downtown Seattle. Angered by the unprovoked police violence and suspension of our first amendment rights, organizers cancelled all previously scheduled events. Instead we held daily spontaneously organized marches into downtown Seattle – in direct defiance of Schell’s suspension of the Constitution.

Both of the videos below were produced in 2000. The first, Trade Off, by documentary filmmaker Shaya Mercer, focuses mainly on Dolan, his organizing strategy and the wide range of international organizers and groups who helped make the protest possible.

The second video This is What Democracy Looks like was produced by Seattle Independent Media Center, which would spawn the birth of the global IndyMedia network. This film focuses more on the militarized police violence against peaceful protestors and the role of the week long protests in convincing third world WTO delegates to reject the draconian demands of the US and its first world allies.

Obama Resorts to Secret Treaties

Despite numerous attempts by the Bush and Obama administrations, the Doha Round of negotiations was never revived – thanks to the staunch stance of third world delegates.

Obama’s solution has been to try to introduce the same draconian corporate protections through two secret treaties, the Transpacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). Negotiations for both treaties are being held in total secret. Although 600 corporations have been allowed to see (and write) the both of them, members of Congress and national parliaments are forbidden to see either treaty until they’re signed. Several sections of the TPPA draft have been leaked by Wikileaks. See New Zealand Kicks Off Global Protest Against TPPA

Obama is lobbying for fast track authority on TPPA. Under fast track, the Senate would be forced to vote the treaty up or down without debating its provisions. Congressional Democrats defeated Obama’s efforts to win fast track on TPPA earlier this year. Recently, however, the President expressed confidence a new pro-business Republican Congress will grant him this authority in 2015.

*Seattle Chief of Police Norm Stamper resigned one week after the WTO protests. He subsequently apologized, in 2009, for excessive and inappropriate use of force by Seattle police. In 2007, a federal jury ruled the city of Seattle was liable for arresting protesters without probable cause, a violation of their constitutional rights. As a result the city awarded a $1 million settlement to the 600+ activists arrested during the 1999 protests.

**The Zapatistas are a Mexican international liberation army founded in 1994 in reaction to the North American Free Trade Act (1994). They control several autonomous areas in rural Chiapas.

***Via Campesina is an international movement which coordinates peasant organizations of small and middle-scale producers, agricultural workers, rural women, and indigenous communities.

Ebay joins Google and others in dumping Alec over climate stance

stuartbramhall:

 

 

Sticking it to the Koch brothers, the world’s most socially backward billionaires and primary funders of ALEC. They’re also the main funders of the climate denial campaign.

Originally posted on thekirkshow:

Ebay announced on Thursday it’s severing ties with the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec) because of the lobbying group’s views on climate change. The online marketplace is the latest technology firm to part ways with the rightwing organization over environmental concerns.

“After our annual review of eBay’s memberships in trade associations and third-party organizations, we’ve decided not to renew our membership with Alec,” an eBay spokesperson said.

In September, Eric Schmidt announced Google would be leaving Alec because “they’re just literally lying” about climate change. This prompted a wave of departures from other tech companies, including Facebook and Yelp, over similar concerns. Microsoft had previously left Alec in July.

The current exodus from Alec marks a change from a previous round of departures, in which companies left Alec over concerns about its stance on “stand your ground” legislation.

Environmental activists welcomed eBay’s move. “This is a major victory…

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Grave Danger of Falling Food

Grave Danger of Falling Food

Tony Gailey (1989)

Film Review

This documentary is about Australian Bill Mollison, the father of the international permaculture movement. The title, which is ironic, refers to air drops of food aid (by the industrial north) to compensate the third world for destroying their food production systems. Mollison defines permaculture as a design system for housing, energy, water management, waste recycling and food production that follows nature’s engineering principles. Permaculture purposely mimics natural systems to create a permanent, sustainable culture for human beings.

In addition to exploring Mollison’s personal history and philosophy, Grave Danger of Falling Food offers a good introduction to permaculture design and the concept of permaculture zones.

Lifestyles that Restore the Planet

Despite Mollison’s lifelong concerns about the environmental devastation wreaked by industrial agriculture and multinational extractive industries, he has reservations about the war mentality of the environmental movement. Instead of “fighting” to save rain forests and endangered species, he thinks it makes more sense to get people as many people as possible to adopt lifestyles that naturally restore the planet.

The purpose of industrial agriculture, in his view, is to create profit rather than food. In their single minded search for profits, corporations essentially declared war on soil in 1940. In sixty years they have destroyed 70% of the planet’s topsoil by deluging it with chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides and killed off the wealth of microorganisms that make it fertile.

Applying Forest Principles to Food Production

Beginning his adult life as a lumberjack, he got fed up with destroying pristine forests to build homes for rich people and went to university to study and teach forest management. In 1972, it suddenly came to him that applying forest principles to food production would substantially increase yields, while simultaneously repairing the environmental destruction caused by 150 years of industrial capitalism.

He coined the term permaculture in 1978. From 1981 on, he has devoted his life to helping people to design farms and gardens based on permaculture principles.

Mollison has a special interest in urban permaculture, as it has the highest productive potential. By becoming self-sufficient in food production and water management (ie eliminating stormwater runoff and recycling gray water from showers, laundry etc and where possible, sewage water), cities offer the greatest potential energy and resource savings. By eliminating transport and packaging costs, locally grown food is automatically 95% cheaper.

Lawn Liberation

A strong believer in lawn liberation, Mollison has a special distaste for suburban lawns, which he considers a tremendous waste of water and energy. A food forest in the front yard uses 50% less water, is far less work and provides a continuous supply of healthy, chemical-free food. In the video below, a Denver woman has transformed her front lawn into a mini-food forest using permaculture design. According to Juliet Schor in The Overspent American, by 1995 were spending $7.6 billion annually on residential lawn care.

German Group Files War Crimes Against Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Other CIA Officials*

stuartbramhall:

 

 

That should put the brakes on their international travel for awhile.

Originally posted on Hwaairfan's Blog:

German Group Files War Crimes Against Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Other CIA Officials*

By Ryan Denson

If President Obama won’t do it, someone else will. Thankfully, a human rights group in Berlin, The European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, has begun the process of indicting members of the Bush Administration by filing criminal complaints against the architects of the Admin’s torture program.

Calls for an immediate investigation by the German human rights group was started after outrage ensued on the case of a German citizen, Khalid El-Masri, who had been captured by CIA agents in 2004  because of a mistaken identity mix-up and was tortured at a secret prison in Afghanistan.

Wolfgang Kaleck, the general secretary of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, said:

“By investigating members of the Bush administration, Germany can help to ensure that those responsible for abduction, abuse and illegal detention do not go unpunished.”

In an interview with “Democracy…

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