Digby’s latest Post Stock market highs — and high unemployment: the new normal? struck me today because of a comment that Thurbers made on my post last night.

“We the People” are closer to the abused employees and/or the defrauded customers of Amy’s Baking Company. We are the real victims, but despite our numbers we are the ones with the least recourse and the least power to change the narrative.

- Thurbers comment 8 Firedoglake

It reminds me of the spot on Onion story, American People Hire High-Powered Lobbyist To Push Interests In Congress.

I’m really sick of how “the economy” is the stock market. It. Is. NOT. I also know that the constituents of unemployed and underemployed aren’t out there putting pressure on congress or the President.  (I’m thinking of paraphrasing SF Writer Harlan Ellison,  ”Dear Obama and Congress. Fuck you. Hire me!”)

When I was traveling cross country to see my sick mother two years ago unemployment was the real issue on people minds, I asked them why they thought the media was writing about the deficit. They didn’t have an answer. I asked if they had heard of Pete Peterson. Nobody had. “Would it surprise you to know that he is a billionaire and is making sure the media cover the deficit and ignore unemployment? Did you know that he is spending at least 500 million dollars to make sure the press cover this?” Nobody had heard of him.

One guy (an owner of a Popeye’s chicken franchise) said that there was probably some billionaire (he suggested George Soros) spending lobbying money to demand more government jobs. Or maybe the Unions were. I said, “Soros isn’t spending his money on this. The unemployed aren’t spending their money on this, they think it should be obvious. I don’t know what the Unions are doing, but they aren’t the force they once were.”

So my question is, if our elected representatives aren’t pushing for jobs, our liberal billionaires aren’t pushing for jobs, and we don’t have any highly paid lobbyists pushing for jobs, is there anyone who “counts” pushing for jobs? (And by that I mean someone who could get the attention of our congress, President or media.)

The media don’t want to write about the lack of jobs because “Stock market!” and frankly those stories are boring, nobody wants to write them and nobody wants to read them. Gawker is having a series on them and it’s like reading the sad stories on “Queen for a day” that women would tell so they could get a washing machine.

It feels like the unemployed have no leverage, no voice and nobody who is going to be their voice since they don’t have anything to give to the people who should be listening and who can make changes.

There is no sense of urgency about this problem in DC. Remember the urgency during the airlines slowdown? Inconvenience the politicians it’s, HAIR ON FIRE TIME. Millions unemployed year after year? They quote Jesus, “The unemployed will always be with us.”

The media need deadlines. Where is the ticking time bomb of this issue? Where is the disaster coverage of this disaster?

And why the hell aren’t the conservatives trying to hang unemployment around Obama’s neck?  Because it might help unemployed people get government jobs? How many jobs are the trumped up Benghazi scandal creating?

I didn’t mean this to be yet another long-winded Vulcan post, but Digby’s blog still doesn’t have a place to comment and so I’m bringing it to you.

I’d like to think that DC responds to events, but after new gun laws following Newtown got voted down, even though the majority of the voters wanted them, I’m thinking we need more than an event,  you need a goddamn money canon to shoot cash down the halls of Congress.

People sometimes talk about the people marching on Washington to get their attention. (“This time let’s bring real pitchforks!” They don’t care, only the hotels and restaurants in DC care. What will get their attention is if we jam more money down their throat than the other people bribing them. Since we can’t do that, then we need to cut off their money streams so that votes actual count for something again.  The reason that everyone is talking about getting money out of politics is that until that happens my voice is drowned out.

Speaking of money. I want something good to come out of the IRS scandal. Something the right doesn’t want.

I want Congress to rewrite the 501 c code laws. People are complaining about the IRS? Well the IRS is complaining too. “Give us better bright lines so we can define what “social welfare groups” can and can’t do.

I want them to change the rules so big corporations and rich individuals can’t give anonymous money.  I want to chase away the people who want to hide behind  front groups.  ”But that will hurt liberal groups too! Yeah right, as if George Soro is trying to hide. You don’t hide unless you are afraid that people will use that information against you. If they aren’t doing anything wrong what are they afraid of? I’m looking at you Ham Rove. Sure they will find another way, 527′s, laundering money through belief tanks and dead people foundations, but if they want to cry about the IRS thwarting them, let’s really give them something to cry about.

 Photos top: Shane Gorski bottom: RhonsTopModel Creative Commons Attribution license

Cross dressed at Spocko’s Brain

Institutional Investors Defend the Bridge for Jamie Dimon

Jamie Dimon easily beat back a non-binding shareholders proposal to split the jobs of Chairman and CEO at JPMorgan Chase, winning 68% of the vote. Institutional investors own over 73% of the stock of JPM. That means that many if not most mutual fund managers and plenty of pension fund managers and endowment managers voted to keep in office a man who has presided over a string of law-skirting but money-making operations. JPMorgan’s list of offenses, described here, have earned the bank tens of billions at the cost of only billions in fines, penalties and put-backs from bad mortgages. And the bank estimates that there is more coming, maybe $6 billion more than it has set aside in reserves. JPM’s earnings are up, boosted by release of some $1.5 billion from reserves, but with a bit of luck, the hit will come later, now that Dimon is safe.

Mutual fund managers and other money managers think that the only important thing is the bottom line, and it’s a fact that ignoring the law delivers truckloads of money to the bottom line. That’s especially true for banks that are too big to prosecute. Eventually law enforcement shows up, in the form of bank fetishists like Lannie Breuer and his faint-hearted boss, Eric Holder, but what can they do? A minor fine, requiring the bank to give up some of its gains? An unpleasant press release? Maybe a grilling before some mild Senators, more impressed by the possibility of a campaign contribution than any interest in locking up wrong-doers?

I particularly like the coverage in the Washington Post, under the title, How Washington Humbled JP Morgan Chase Chief Jamie Dimon, in which we learn that Washington didn’t humble Dimon at all. Legal troubles, like those reported by Senator Carl Levin of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, are irrelevant to Dimon, who wasn’t at the hearing to take any of the responsibility for the London Whale Trade losses or misstatements.

And I just love the coverage given to the Capo di tutti Capi by Andrew Ross Sorkin and Steven Davidoff in the New York Times Dealbook blog. To read their praise of JPM and its Great Man, you’d never know that the bank might have side-stepped a few legal rules on its way to being the Greatest Bank Ever! They were aided in their efforts by the lobbying of such privileged rich white old men as Warren Buffett, Rupert Murdoch, Michael Bloomberg, and Hank Paulson.

I don’t know how much difference it made,though. For money managers, the only important issue is earnings. For that you need a top banker who is utterly indifferent to legal matters, willing to ignore the Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferators Sanctions Regulations and the Iranian Transactions Regulations. And you need a Chairman/CEO who can fast talk his way out of trouble, like Dimon with his Fortress Balance Sheet and his presidential cuff-links. Isn’t it wonderful that people’s retirement is in part dependent of the ability of Jamie Dimon and his sleazy bank to make money?

But the real message these institutional investors and the privileged white rich old menare sending is that Dimon is their guy, and that politicians and regulators should do as he says. Right now, Dimon wants to defeat Brown-Vitter, which would force JPM to raise equity. Higher equity reduces the amount of money Dimon and his lieutenants can borrow, and it’s borrowing that increases the amount they can gamble for their profit and the taxpayers’ loss. That might mean lower compensation for the banksters. Gasp! But the win restores any political strength Dimon may have lost, and increases his ability to stop Brown-Vitter. That hurts everybody by leaving the mega-banks with their Obama/Holder/Breuer/Congressional approved status as Too Big To Fail.

Thanks a lot, institutional investors. We salute your willingness to subordinate basic law-abiding competence to sleazy money-grubbing. How very 21st Century of you.

An oversized puppet of the Wendy's mascot, provided by the People's Puppets of Occupy Wall Street, took part in silent street theater to convince the fast food giant to sign onto the Fast Food campaign. (Coalition of Immokalee Workers)

Originally posted at In These Times.

While rain pattered gently on the concrete steps of Manhattan’s Union Square last Saturday, a group of workers were giving the assembled crowd a tour of the sun-scorched fields of Florida’s tomato farms. The performers had turned the urban square into a stage for a street theater performance, depicting backbreaking labor and tussles with industry goons emblazoned with corporate food brand logos.

By dramatizing a farm scene amid the bustle of Greenwich Village, Chelsea and the surrounding neighborhoods, the activists of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers highlighted the connection between farmworkers’ daily struggles and the villain of the drama: Wendy’s restaurants, which are the primary target of the group’s Fair Food campaign for decent labor standards in an industry built on modern-day serfdom.

The Union Square rally-–featuring a brass band adorned with Wendy’s trademark red pigtails and tomato-shaped placards proclaiming “Justice” and “Derechos” for farmworkers–-was part of a nationwide series of Fair Food demonstrations that are helping bridge the conceptual gap between food consumerism and farm labor, a sector replete with poverty wages and brutally exploitative conditions in the fields. The Coalition has been campaigning for months to push Wendy’s and theFlorida supermarket giant Publix to sign a Fair Food agreement like the agreements brands like Chipotle and Trader Joe’s have already signed.

The Fair Food Program mandates about an additional penny in wages for each pound of tomatoes picked by Florida workers. That seemingly trivial amount, when multiplied by the massive scale of tomato agriculture, adds up to a meaningful difference in the lives of thousands of farmworkers who typically lack a living wage and basic labor protections: Since January 2011, the penny-per-pound premium has put some $10 million in their pockets, which could mean a raise of more than 60 percent for some low-wage laborers.

CIW activist Oscar Otzoy told Working In These Times in Spanish that, by spreading the word through rallies across the country, “We take action directly against the corporations that are responsible for the conditions that we’re facing. Because in the market context that exists, it’s these big companies that profit the most from the work that we as farmworkers are doing. And as they continue profiting, we continue facing the conditions that have existed for so long.”

Otzoy, who has been working in the United States for seven years, noted that although immigrant workers are at the center of their campaign, the exploitative conditions have affected all farmworkers–those with and without papers and even U.S. citizens, because the production structure is inherently exploitative. “Our goal with this program is to get to a day when everyone, regardless of their status, is treated with dignity and respect on the job,” he said.

To prevent abuses like wage theft and forced labor, the Fair Food Program sets a broad code of conduct that ensures compliance with labor laws, “including zero tolerance for forced labor and systemic child labor,” a binding commitment to an auditing process for growers, and a system for workers to file complaints against employers. The program also deploys health and safety monitors to help protect workers from the many hazards lurking in hot, pesticide-laden fields.

The agreement is anchored by the 2010 commitment by Florida’s major growers’ association, Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, representing about 90 percent of the state’s producers. Since then, the Coalition’s program has attracted massive support from consumers, community groups and upscale foodies, and pressured numerous industry purchasers to sign on. The Coalition’s unique, worker-led organizing model fuses consumer education and outreach with grassroots labor mobilization, and in the process reveals interlinked systems of consumption and production. In effect, their movement envisions “food justice” as structural change within a massively consolidated industry.

Wendy’s is seen as the “last holdout” among major fast food chains. However, advocates notethat, ironically, CEO Emil Brolick was something of a fast-food pioneer in 2005, when the company he led then, Taco Bell, became the first corporate buyer to sign the Fair Food Agreement.

According to statistics released by the US Department of Agriculture earlier this month, 31 percent of the managed honeybee colonies died in the winter. Since fruiting is dependent on fertilization, a result of pollination, honeybee decline can impact agriculture. We can directly link honeybees to one out of every three bites of food that we put on our table.

The Plight of the Honeybee
Billions of dollars—and a way of life—ride on saving pollinators.

Western nations rely heavily on managed honeybees—the “moveable force” of bees that ride in trucks from farm to farm—to keep commercial agriculture productive. About a third of our foods (some 100 key crops) rely on these insects, including apples, nuts, all the favorite summer fruits (like blueberries and strawberries), alfalfa (which cows eat), and guar bean (used in all kinds of products). In total, bees contribute more than $15 billion to U.S. crop production, hardly small potatoes.

The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) explains that Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) is a hive condition where “very low or no adult honey bees present in the hive but with a live queen and no dead honey bee bodies present.” According to interviews of beekeepers in the documentaries, this condition can occur within a matter of a few hours.

The USDA further suggests that possible causes of colony decline could be due to unusually warm winter, bee diet (ie: protein, in particular), or cyclic disease, but also states that scientific connections are lacking for the theories. While the European Commission (EU) has ” has banned the pesticides associated with colony collapse disorder in bees,” the US has not done so yet. Oddly, the report contains this statement:

A comprehensive and sensitive analytical survey was done for the presence of 200 pesticides in bee, comb, and pollen samples from 23 states. No specific pattern of pesticide residues emerged that correlates with honey bee deaths March 2010

To be precise, the study linked in the statement says this:

Conclusions/Significance

The 98 pesticides and metabolites detected in mixtures up to 214 ppm in bee pollen alone represents a remarkably high level for toxicants in the brood and adult food of this primary pollinator. This represents over half of the maximum individual pesticide incidences ever reported for apiaries. While exposure to many of these neurotoxicants elicits acute and sublethal reductions in honey bee fitness, the effects of these materials in combinations and their direct association with CCD or declining bee health remains to be determined.

Will we fund or ignore the “remains to be determined” part? Would it surprise you at all to learn that yesterday, three large agrichemical pesticide companies came forward with plans to fund research for bee decline?

Monsanto, Bayer, Sygenta Fund Bee Research

Bayer and Sygenta “produce neonicotinoids,” and Monsanto uses the pesticides to coat seeds. These pesticides have been banned in Europe, as mentioned above. From wiki: “Neonicotinoids are a class of neuro-active insecticides chemically related to nicotine. The development of this class of insecticides began with work in the 1980s by Shell and the 1990s by Bayer.[1]”

Leo Tolstoy said, “The closer we examine the honeybee, the more we realize the workings of a beehive encompass territories beyond our comprehension.” USDA bee laboratory scientist Dr. Jeffrey Pettis explains in Vanishing of the Bees that CCD is difficult to study because there are no bee corpses to examine when a colony literally vanishes. (video at 15:30). So far, scientists have investigated, and eliminated as possibilities, several microbial and viral suspects. Haunting how accurate Tolstoy’s quote really was. But what is maybe even more haunting is that the beehive workings will be studied with funds that have direct interest in the outcome of the research.

One of the scientists in the documentary reveals other suggestions for honeybee decline, that he has received in his email, including cell phones, the Rapture, Outer Space, and the ‘Russians-have-implanted-genes-and-they-are-beaming-them-from-satellite.’ While the scientist is confident that the persistent cell phone tower rumor is now known nonsense, he does say that the issue of genetically modified crops, while scientists have observed no direct evidence, deserves a bit more attention.

What saddens in the documentary is that we have exploited the honeybee, with factory farming practices such as feeding the bees empty sugar calories, killing the queens and replacing them with younger queens introduced in cages, and artificial insemination, with the likes of a scientist’s backward after-remark, “She looks a little rough, but she’ll come around.” There have been only too few, it seems, efforts at returning the bees to their natural state. When bees disappear, it’s wrong- surely some basic humanity instinct still exists in all of us.

Vanishing of the Bees full documentary:

BBC Documentary titled Who Killed the Honeybee?

Related:

One-Third of U.S. Honeybee Colonies Died Last Winter, Threatening Food Supply

Bees and the European neonicotinoids pesticide ban: Q&A

The US rejects Europe’s banning of these chemicals:

US rejects EU claim of insecticide as prime reason for bee colony collapse
“Government study points to a combination of factors for decline in population, breaking away from singling out pesticides”

Beepocalypse Redux: Honeybees Are Still Dying — and We Still Don’t Know Why

Monsanto stung by drop in bee population

Monsanto, Bayer seek answers to bee losses

“This is a difficult, high stakes battle,” said Peter Jenkins, a lawyer with the Center for Food Safety, which sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in March on behalf of a group of U.S. beekeepers and environmental and consumer groups over what they say is a lack of sound regulation of the pesticides in question.

“They may have a lot of money. But… we’re going to win,” Jenkins said.

Hi, y’all.

It’s been humid and windy by turns today in Austin. Strange to think the breezes that bring pleasant relief to me are, in a way, the same winds which devastated so many.

Tonight’s musical selection is “I Lost Myself” by Lauren Mann and the Fairly Odd Folk, from their album Over Land and Sea.

Would you drink a vaportini?

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What’s on your mind tonight? It’s an open conversation in the comments.

"Oil-Free" Lake Conway

On March 29 ExxonMobil, the most profitable company in the world, spilled at least 210,000 gallons of tar sands crude oil from an underground pipeline in Mayflower, Arkansas. The pipeline was carrying tar sands oil from Canada, which flooded family residences in Mayflower in thick tarry crude. Exxon’s tar sands crude also ran into Lake Conway, which sits about an eighth of a mile from where Exxon’s pipeline ruptured.

A new batch of documents received by Greenpeace in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) has revealed that Exxon downplayed the extent of the contamination caused by the ruptured pipeline. Records of emails between Arkansas’ DEQ and Exxon depict attempts by Exxon to pass off press releases with factually false information. In a draft press release dated April 8, Exxon claims “Tests on water samples show Lake Conway and the cove are oil-free.” However, internal emails from April 6 show Exxon knew of significant contamination across Lake Conway and the cove resulting from the oil spill.

When the chief of Arkansas Hazardous Waste division called Exxon out on this falsehood, Exxon amended the press release. However, they did not amend it to say that oil was in Lake Conway and contaminant levels in the lake were rising to dangerous levels, as they knew to be the case. Instead, they continue to claim that Lake Conway is “oil-free.” For the record, Exxon maintains that the “cove,” a section of Lake Conway that experienced heavy oiling from the spill, is not part of the actual lake. Exxon maintains this distinction in spite of Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel saying unequivocally “The cove is part of Lake Conway…The water is all part of one body of water.” Furthermore, Exxon water tests confirmed that levels of Benzene and other contaminants rose throughout the lake, not just in the cove area.

Though Exxon was eventually forced to redact their claim that the cove specifically was  “oil-free,” the oil and gas giant has yet to publicly address the dangerous levels of Benzene and other contaminants their own tests have found in the body of Lake Conway. The Environmental Protection Agency and the American Petroleum Institute don’t agree on everything, but they do agree that the only safe level of Benzene, a cancer causing chemical found in oil, is zero. Benzene is added to tar sands oil to make it less viscous and flow more easily through pipelines.  Local people have reported fish kills, chemical smells, nausea and headaches. Independent water tests have found a host of contaminants present in the lake.

Dead fish in Palarm creek, which Lake Conway drains into. Palarm creek is a tributary of the Arkansas River.

According to Exxon’s data, 126,000 gallons of tar sands crude oil from the pipeline spill is still unaccounted for.

Exxon’s spill emanated from the Pegasus Pipeline, which like the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, connects the Canadian Tar Sands with refineries in the Gulf of Mexico.

As we originally reported on DeSmogBlog in November 2011:

At the “Media & Stakeholder Relations: Hydraulic Fracturing Initiative 2011” conference [in Nov. 2011] in Houston, Matt Pitzarella, Director of Corporate Communications and Public Affairs at Range Resources, revealed in his presentation that Range has hired Army and Marine veterans with combat experience in psychological warfare to influence communities in which Range drills for gas.

As CNBC reported, Range spokesman Matt Pitzarella boasted to the audience:

“[“…looking to other industries, in this case, the Army and the Marines. We have several former PSYOPs folks that work for us at Range because they’re very comfortable in dealing with localized issues and local governments. Really all they do is spend most of their time helping folks develop local ordinances and things like that. But very much having that understanding of PSYOPs in the Army and in the Middle East has applied very helpfully here for us in Pennsylvania.”

[**Listen: MP3**]

At that same conference, Matt Carmichael, External Affairs Manager at Anadarko Petroleum Corporation, suggested three things to attendees during his presentation:

“If you are a PR representative in this industry in this room today, I recommend you do three things. These are three things that I’ve read recently that are pretty interesting.

“(1) Download the U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Manual [audible gasps from the audience], because we are dealing with an insurgency. There’s a lot of good lessons in there, and coming from a military background, I found the insight in that extremely remarkable. (2) With that said, there’s a course provided by Harvard and MIT twice a year, and it’s called ‘Dealing With an Angry Public.’ Take that course. Tied back to the Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency [Field] Manual, is that a lot of the officers in our military are attending this course. It gives you the tools, it gives you the media tools on how to deal with a lot of the controversy that we as an industry are dealing with. (3) Thirdly, I have a copy of “Rumsfeld’s Rules.” You’re all familiar with Donald Rumsfeld — that’s kind of my bible, by the way, of how I operate.”

[**Listen: MP3**]

We learned a lot more from this episode about the gas industry’s aggressive intimidation tactics and personnel, so please read the original report and additional coverage for further details.

The use of PSYOPs by active military personnel on U.S. citizens is illegal and a violation of the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948, as Michael Hastings of Rolling Stone explained in his February 2011 investigative story uncovering the fact that U.S. military generals had used PSYOPs on members of Congress. The Smith-Mundt act “was passed by Congress to prevent the State Department from using Soviet-style propaganda techniques on U.S. citizens.”

To this day, there has been no Congressional investigation of the oil and gas industry’s usage of PSYOPs personnel and tactics on U.S. soil.