A huge killer tornado hit Moore, Oklahoma this afternoon.  Entire blocks of homes and businesses completely destroyed, with at least one elementary school decimated with multiple fatalities.  Reported by the KFOR TV meteorologist as 3 times the size of the May 3, 1999 tornado that hit the area.  As many as 30 children may have perished in the storm.

Here is a link to the Live report from KFOR.  And one from KOCO TV.

UPDATE:  37 fatalities so far confirmed by the medical examiner.  AP – http://bigstory.ap.org/article/tornadoes-slam-plains-midwest-1-dead-okla

John Lennon . . .

My role in society, or any artist’s or poet’s role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.

Current reality is a reflection of us all, it’s a reflection of the choices we’ve made on this death march we keep making between administrations of evil and administrations of lesser evil. While we’ve been busy just trying to survive, the masters of Earth Incorporated have been busy too. Very busy. The bridge to Peace is burning, the bridge to Justice is burning, the bridge to the Future is burning, the corporate masters are burning them all.

Michael Ruppert . . .

The US economy, the privately-owned Federal Reserve system, and the government which they operate like a franchise are the greatest enemies of the entire human race and especially the rapidly-deteriorating and fragile ecosystem which supports all life.

The corporate masters aren’t the only ones with the torches, they’re getting plenty of help from conservative arsonists determined to burn everything they don’t like or believe in, which pretty much includes everything except guns and the Book of Genesis.

Chris Hedges . . .

I think we have powerful proto-fascist movements in this country, and I look at the Tea Party, the militia, the Christian right, where they celebrate the language of violence, they celebrate the gun culture. They have a long list of people they don’t like. And I think that is a very – remains a very frightening and powerful undercurrent within American society.

All of us know on some level that it’s a kind of suicidal trajectory, and I think that it’s clear that the formal mechanisms of power are not going to save us, either from the rise of the security and surveillance state, the degradation of the ecosystem and the kind of fraying and destruction of what is left of our democracy.

I don’t know why so many progressives still believe it matters which corporate party controls the formal mechanisms of power. But I know what the consequences of their illusions have been. These illusion peddlers tell us they’re serious people, they tell us they’re realists, they expect us to believe that taking a brief death march break every two years to elect new guards is the best that we can do.

I’m not a preacher, I’m not a leader, I’m not here to tell anyone how to feel, but the harsh reality of what is happening can be seen along every agonizing mile of this endless march, it can be seen in the firelight of all those burning bridges, it can be heard in the roaring of the flames, a searing message is being written in fire for all the world to see . . .

The formal mechanisms of power are not the solution, they’re the problem.

The false world of the corporate masters gets all the attention while the real world we all live in is ignored. They tell each other that my world, your world, our world is theirs for the taking, that we’re powerless, but our world is beyond their reach, it is within us and cannot be corrupted, the moral courage of Gandhi lives on in us, the moral vision of Dr. King endures on our websites, the moral wisdom of the ages is reflected in everything we stand for and defend.

The corporate masters can burn all the bridges they want, there are other ways to cross the River of Life. We can find our way, limitless undying love is shining all around us like a million suns, calling us on and on, showing us the way. They can never change our world, they can never own it, they can never rule it, a higher consciousness is emerging, humanity is finally awakening from this long night of deceit and destruction, millions are seeking and finding the empowerment that comes from within, that has no limit, that liberates as it enlightens, that unifies at it expands.

We are many, they are few.

Our world will not fall. Their world will.

Jai Guru Deva Om . . .

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

What comes after Hope?

I worked for years as an editor at Pantheon Books. Its publisher, maybe the most adventurous in the business, was André Schiffrin. Among his many accomplishments, he “discovered” Studs Terkel (already a well-known Chicago radio personality), published his first oral history (Division Street: America), and made him a bestseller.  Sometime after I arrived at Pantheon in the mid-1970s, he asked me to take a last look at a new manuscript by Studs. It was the equivalent of sending the second team onto the field, but it began my own long relationship with the famed oral historian. He was an experience — a small man who, when he wasn’t listening professionally in a fashion beyond compare, never stopped talking. In doing so, he had an almost magical way of making those around him feel larger than life. Later, I would be the editor for two of his oral histories, one on death and the other on hope (in that splendid order and the second with the Studs-appropriate title Hope Dies Last).

Last October, Bill Moyers interviewed me about the dismal state of American politics.  As our conversation was ending, he suddenly asked: “What keeps you going against all the evidence?” At that moment, Studs came to mind. I mentioned editing “one of the greats of our world” and responded this way: “It turned out that when he wrote his book about hope, it was all about activists and the basic point he made was: in good times you could just be hopeful about your life. You didn’t have to be an activist. You didn’t have to be an anything.  In bad times, if you want to be hopeful, you have to take a step. You’ve got to take some step to do something in the world. And in that sense, TomDispatch is my medicine against despair.  So what makes me hopeful is doing TomDispatch.”

All true. But I realize now that it wasn’t quite a full response. I had left out one crucial figure in my life: Rebecca Solnit, who taught me how to hope in a world that seemed dismal indeed.  She was the one who — I’ve written about it before — slipped through the barely ajar door of my life in May 2003, at a moment as grim and dreary as any in my political experience. The largest antiwar movement ever to protest a war that had yet to happen had just packed its tents and gone home in despair, while Baghdad was occupied by American troops and George W. Bush and his top officials were in their “mission accomplished” triumphalist mode.  Many activists then feared that they would remain so forever and would have dismissed out of hand someone who suggested that their Pax Americana dreams of domination would begin unraveling in mere weeks (as happened), not decades or centuries.

Ten years ago, exactly to the day, I published Rebecca’s miraculous piece “Acts of Hope,” which she would later expand into her book Hope in the Dark. It was written to welcome that “darkness” which seemed already to be enveloping us.  It was written with a sense of how the expectable unravels, of how the future surprises us, often enough with offerings not of horror but of hope.

With few people can you ever say, she (or he) changed my life, changed the very way I understand our world. For me, she’s one of the few — and she’s still doing it with her miraculous new book (out in June), The Faraway Nearby.  She taught me how to look into that future darkness with hope. Like Studs, she taught me that acting, even while not knowing, is a powerful antidote to despair. So it means the world to me that she’s returned to the subject of hope to celebrate the tenth anniversary of her arrival in my life and at TomDispatch. Tom

Too Soon to Tell
The Case for Hope, Continued
By Rebecca Solnit

Ten years ago, my part of the world was full of valiant opposition to the new wars being launched far away and at home — and of despair. And like despairing people everywhere, whether in a personal depression or a political tailspin, these activists believed the future would look more or less like the present.  If there was nothing else they were confident about, at least they were confident about that. Ten years ago, as a contrarian and a person who prefers not to see others suffer, I tried to undermine despair with the case for hope.

A decade later, the present is still contaminated by the crimes of that era, but so much has changed. Not necessarily for the better — a decade ago, most spoke of climate change as a distant problem, and then it caught up with us in 10,000 ways. But not entirely for the worse either — the vigorous climate movement we needed arose in that decade and is growing now. If there is one thing we can draw from where we are now and where we were then, it’s that the unimaginable is ordinary, and the way forward is almost never a straight path you can glance down, but a labyrinth of surprises, gifts, and afflictions you prepare for by accepting your blind spots as well as your intuitions.

The despairing of May 2003 were convinced of one true thing, that we had not stopped the invasion of Iraq, but they extrapolated from that a series of false assumptions about our failures and our powerlessness across time and space. They assumed — like the neoconservatives themselves — that those neocons would be atop the world for a long time to come. Instead, the neocon and neoliberal ideologies have been widely reviled and renounced around the world; the Republicans’ demographic hemorrhage has weakened them in this country; the failures of their wars are evident to everyone; and though they still grasp fearsome power, everything has indeed changed. Everything changes: there lies most of our hope and some of our fear.

I’ve seen extraordinary change in my lifetime, some of it in the last decade. I was born in a country that had been galvanized and unsettled by the civil rights movement, but still lacked a meaningful environmental movement, women’s movement, or queer rights movement (beyond a couple of small organizations founded in California in the 1950s). Half a century ago, to be gay or lesbian was to live in hiding or be treated as mentally ill or criminal. That 12 states and several countries would legalize same-sex marriage was beyond imaginable then. It wasn’t even on the table in 2003.  San Francisco’s spring run of same-sex weddings in 2004 flung open the doors through which so many have passed since.

If you take the long view, you’ll see how startlingly, how unexpectedly but regularly things change. Not by magic, but by the incremental effect of countless acts of courage, love, and commitment, the small drops that wear away stones and carve new landscapes, and sometimes by torrents of popular will that change the world suddenly. To say that is not to say that it will all come out fine in the end regardless. I’m just telling you that everything is in motion, and sometimes we are ourselves that movement.

Unstoppabilities

Written by Amanda Marcotte for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.

Will sexting laws hurt victimized young women?

While I suspect most teen sexting is relatively harmless, most of us are rightly concerned about incidents in which naked pictures of teenagers get forwarded and distributed without their consent. In most cases, a girl shares a nude photo of herself with a boy (or man, in some cases) whom she trusts will behave appropriately with this vulnerable image, only to have him show it off to others, post it online, or otherwise try to shame her for it. In a couple of sad cases, the humiliated girl has even committed suicide. It’s a problem that needs fixing. Unfortunately, West Virginia’s approach — to outlaw sexting and charge those found “possessing, distributing or producing sexually inappropriate photos, videos or other media” with delinquency — is exactly the wrong way to go about this.

This law may be well-intentioned, but it will almost certainly serve mainly or even entirely to punish victims who are already enduring a public humiliation. After all, the only way that a “sext” will come to the government’s attention is if it’s being disseminated, usually without the person in the photograph’s permission. Private text messages that are kept private will, for obvious reasons, not draw legal attention.

I can confidently predict how the enforcement of this law will turn out most of the time: A girl will send a nude picture to a boy. He will forward it, publish it, and share it generally. Once it becomes known that the picture is out there, the girl, who is already suffering from a public shaming, will be charged with delinquency. The boy who originally forwarded the message may get charged, but in many or most cases, probably not. After all, it’s easier to prove that she was engaged in sexting, because of the image, than to bother to figure out who forwarded it first. They can’t charge everyone who shared the image, right? So she, the victim of this hateful behavior, will be the one punished. It’s tailor made for victim-blaming and abuse.

How do I know that’s how it will go down? Well, common sense should be good enough, but we also have actual real-world evidence. High schools have already experimented with punishing students for sexting, and the punishments often fall more heavily on the girl whose only crime was trusting too much, and not the boys who violated her trust. Jezebel reported in April about a teenage girl who sent a topless photo of herself to her male friends, and sure enough, she was the one who got expelled while the boys weren’t punished.

The American Civil Liberties Union shared a similar story from 2010 in which the girls in the sexts were charged with child pornography, even though the photos didn’t show nudity:

( Pigging Out With Koch)

By Jerry Waxman

In case you haven’t heard the news, the Chicago Tribune reported that headline the day that Truman won the election in 1948. Their track record has been about as accurate ever since that date. The great and iconic columnist Mike Royko went to work for them in 1984 only after Rupert Murdoch bought the Chicago Sun Times. Some of Royko’s choicest criticisms against Murdoch were “No self-respecting fish would want to be wrapped in a Murdoch paper” and “His goal is not quality journalism. His goal is vast power for Rupert Murdoch, political power”. It’s amazing how something said 30 years ago is still relevant today. Current Tribune ownership couldn’t possibly be more right wing than Murdoch so why is Chicago still in the hands of the Democrats? Could it be that Murdoch’s and Sam Zell’s message just sucks? That may not be a scholarly treatise but you can bet that it’s pretty accurate. Cities like Philadelphia have recently witnessed the demise of a formerly great newspaper, The Philadelphia Inquirer, bought by Moses Annenberg in 1930 to take advantage of his racing sheet empire, but elevated by his son, Walter and again by the Knight organization over the years. McClatchy bought it from the Knights and then sold it to a group of conservative businessmen who in their own Charles Foster Kane egos thought it would be “fun to own a newspaper.” P.S.  They are in receivership.

So, let’s say that you had a couple of billion dollars just lying around and your candidates nationally had just been whupped in the 2012 elections after you and your allies had spent a gazillion dollars trying to get them elected. What would you do? Well, it might be “fun to own a media empire”, especially at fire sale rates; after all, the price mentioned is approximately 15% of what Sam Zell originally paid for it. For Charles and David Koch the sale is mere pocket change. They wouldn’t even miss it if the enterprise failed, and they would make more money by giving it to Mitt Romney to liquidate. Business people look at bottom lines. Forgetting what it costs to buy, the day to day costs of running that media empire would be dear. It would take years to make things profitable if that’s even possible. They are better off just buying out all the advertising space in all of the enterprises and spreading their message that way. No muss, no fuss, plenty of coverage.

Many people in Central Florida are very concerned about this because the Tribune Corp owns the Orlando Sentinel, the region’s only print daily, and fear that a Koch takeover could spell doom and gloom in the region and cancel any hope of objective journalism in Central Florida, yet the conservative element is hoping and praying that they will. Upon hearing the news blogger Tom Tillison posted on his Facebook page “Be still my beating heart!”  Yet, West Orlando News Online publisher Keith Longmore, a true progressive, thinks that this could be the best thing to happen for his publication.

Florida Watch Action head, Amy Ritter, is quite upset about the possibility of a Koch Bros. takeover and organized a protest Thursday afternoon, May 15, at the offices of the Orlando Sentinel. Approximately 30 protesters waving signs showed up. Prior to the organized protest several members of the Sentinel staff came out to say hello, but were completely silent on the issue. Similar demonstrations have taken place in cities like Allentown, Pa., Chicago and Los Angeles where Tribune papers are. In Los Angeles, many staff members threatened to quit if the sale went through, but L.A. is a big media town with many more opportunities than Orlando. This is an extremely small media market, and you don’t want to lose your job here. We did manage to espy Scott Maxwell, Mark Schlueb and Dave Damron, but they were nowhere to be found once the protest started. Other members of the press were there and recorded the event, however, no broadcast or cable stations were present. As far as I am aware the only videos taken were by yours truly and Tom Tillison.

(Left to right  Tom Tillison, BizPac Review, Billy Manes, Orlando Weekly, Mark Schlueb and Scott Maxwell of the Sentinel)

Ritter addressed the crowd of about fifty voicing her concerns about the Sentinal turning into a propaganda machine for the Koch Bros narrow Tea Party type views Other speakers included Sue Casterline, a subscriber for over 30 years, who will cancel her subscription if the Koch’s buy the paper, Holly Fussell, a Rollins College student, who uses the Sentinel for research and she fears that her information will be tainted by Koch ownership and Melissa, another concerned student who echoed Casterline’s and Fussell’s concerns. Ritter then ended the gathering with a chant and encouraged everyone to wave signs at rush hour traffic.

Ritter states that there will be other actions and that the community at large needs to know what’s happening. The Sentinel can’t comment on it and the Koch Bros. will not comment on a pending sale. A spokesman for the Kochs said that they invest in a lot of business opportunities and that the Tribune Company is just one. That’s all well and good, but I don’t want to wake up one morning and find out that Dewey won in 2014. Do you?

Don't you feel sorry for poor Jamie Dimon?

On May 21, shareholders of JPMorgan Chase will have the opportunity to express their views of the Chairman/CEO of the mega-bank, and PR people have been filling the inboxes of every possible media outlet. They even got to the New York Post which ran an Op-Ed by Charlie Gasparino on Dimon’s bad feeling about splitting the roles of Chairman of the Board and Chief Operating Office:

Dimon hates the idea of splitting the two roles; he thinks the separation would make it more difficult to manage the world’s biggest bank, with line managers unsure who’s really calling the shots.

He’s right: Anyone thinking that having two people at the top means better corporate governance only has to look at all the corporate scandals at firms with a separate CEO and chairman, with Enron and Worldcom leading the way.

That’s pretty rich coming from a Fox Business News guy, writing for another part of Rupert Murdoch’s empire, but failing to mention the problems with phone hacking, bribery and those ugly arrests, all that under a single Chairman/CEO.

Gasparino has much in common with Andrew Ross Sorkin and Steven Davidoff of the New York Times Dealbook. Just like Gasparino, both Professor Davidoff and Sorkin are focused on how unfair this all is to the Great Man, but none of them mention of the rat’s nest of crooked business at JPMorgan.

For that, you have to look at the blogosphere. Josh Rosner of Graham-Fisher issued a major report listing the many laws JPMorgan broke under Dimon’s control. Here’s a list pulled from Rosner’s report by Dave Dayen at Naked Capitalism, where you can read the report for yourself. Apparently Sorkin, Davidoff and Gasparino just don’t see ther relevance:

Bank Secrecy Act violations;
Money laundering for drug cartels;
Violations of sanction orders against Cuba, Iran, Sudan, and former Liberian strongman Charles Taylor;
Violations related to the Vatican Bank scandal (get on this, Pope Francis!);
Violations of the Commodities Exchange Act;
Failure to segregate customer funds (including one CFTC case where the bank failed to segregate $725 million of its own money from a $9.6 billion account) in the US and UK;
Knowingly executing fictitious trades where the customer, with full knowledge of the bank, was on both sides of the deal;
Various SEC enforcement actions for misrepresentations of CDOs and mortgage-backed securities;
The AG settlement on foreclosure fraud;
The OCC settlement on foreclosure fraud;
Violations of the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act;
Illegal flood insurance commissions;
Fraudulent sale of unregistered securities;
Auto-finance ripoffs;
Illegal increases of overdraft penalties;
Violations of federal ERISA laws as well as those of the state of New York;
Municipal bond market manipulations and acts of bid-rigging, including violations of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act;
Filing of unverified affidavits for credit card debt collections (“as a result of internal control failures that sound eerily similar to the industry’s mortgage servicing failures and foreclosure abuses”);
Energy market manipulation that triggered FERC lawsuits;
“Artificial market making” at Japanese affiliates;
Shifting trading losses on a currency trade to a customer account;
Fraudulent sales of derivatives to the city of Milan, Italy;
Obstruction of justice (including refusing the release of documents in the Bernie Madoff case as well as the case of Peregrine Financial).

And, exhale.

Dayen’s list doesn’t include on-going investigations like LIBOR or the London Whale trades now revealed to be a serious problem, and it doesn’t include the most recent scandals like manipulation of Interest Rate Swap Index fraud, which may or may not involve JPM. But why would that matter to shareholders? After all, the stock is up about 10% in just the last few days, and is back to the glory days pre-Great Crash.

Rosner explains that JPM has paid out $8.5 billion in penalties, interest and so on since 2009, about 12% of income between 2009 and 2012, with much more to come. Those unknown future costs are described in many pages of its 10-K, including footnote 31 starting on page 316, without mentioning an actual amount held in reserve for possible litigation and mortgage put-back losses. Whatever it is, JPMorgan estimates that it might be up to $6 billion on the low side. 10-K at 316.

Shareholders who care about law-abiding management might wonder if Dimon is worth it. They might want to take Dimon up on his promise to leave if the vote goes against him.

Note:  Originally posted on the web site of the Chicano Veterans Organization.

Despite my frustration with today’s toxic politics, the Republicans continue to use various forms of “seditious rhetoric” and which must always be challenged, otherwise our standing as military veterans, does not becomes us, and therefore, our lack of “standing tall” for the Constitution makes us a hapless non-entity for espousing our ‘brand’ of politics.  Thusly, we must ask ourselves the proverbial question relative to our being staunch Democrats and members in good standing within the Democratic Coalition, knowing that on some issues we will “win” while on other issues we will “lose.”

And this proverbial question is the following:  “Are we ‘constitutional’ Progressives with a firm grasp of the Unassailable Facts?”

I believe so since we continue to espouse our continuing support for both the New Deal and the Great Society, and that’s just for starters.  However, today’s conservatives espouse their seditious rhetoric, and like-minded Progressives very seldom challenge these seditious comments.  And in today’s latest installment among conservatives here in Arizona, Republicans in support of an expanded Medicaid program, are being called “traitors” by those Republicans in opposition to an expanded Medicaid.  Subsequently,  or in contrast, the Republicans in support of an expanded Medicaid, have taken their velvet gloves off and are now calling the Republicans in opposition to an expanded Medicaid, “traitors” too.

And in yesterday’s book salon here at Firedoglake.com and where Dina Hampton’s book and titled, Little Red:  Three Passionate Lives Through the Sixties and Beyond, was discussed in great detail and with over 100 comments.  To wit, the “anchor” of these three separate and distinct persons, the Communist Party champion of Black Power, Angela Davis, the New Left advocate in Tom Hurwitz, and the neo-conservative for ‘no boundaries’ on Empire in the person of Elliot Abrams, was the subject under discussion.

As such, all three attended the same school called the Little Red School House and the Elizabeth Irwin High School, collectively known as the Little Red. Subsequently, a divergence in a political life, that in all likelihood, won’t make the footnote section of any publication authored by historians of the future.  And for those among us and who lived through this era, we well understand that none managed to corral any votes as either Elected or Appointed Officials. And therein, is the difference, when we write our ‘history’ and with our ‘starting point’ being the history that is accurately representative of and reflective of the Sonoran Desert.

And my being grey of beard, long in the tooth, and an obvious Contrarian, I never got to pose this proverbial question, and find if or not, would these three persons now see themselves as “constitutional” Progressives?

But more on point, several days ago, the new President of the National Rifle Association, not only called President Obama a “fake president” but went on to suggest that the Civil War was an example of an armed citizenry, and thusly, training all able bodied Americans in the use of a prodigious amount of military weaponry, each trainee will have developed the skill set to repulse ‘tyranny,’ of any sort. Subsequently, any disagreeing with James Porter is equivalent to ‘bordering’ on Treason.

And yet, today, I have found only one person, via the Internet, that has taken the time to challenge Porter, and perhaps, permit me to lead you to Ed Kilgore of the Washington Monthly Magazine, and from several days ago when he said the following:

Am I perhaps being unfair to these people in suggesting that they are behaving like America-haters and are flirting with treason?  I don’t thinks so.  Porter and those like him could dispel this sort of suspicion instantly, any time they wanted, by just saying, Let’s be clear:  the kind of ‘tyranny’ we are arming ourselves to forestall is something entirely different from anything Americans have experienced since we won our independence—a regime engaged in the active suppression of any sort of dissent, and the closure of any peaceful means for the redress of grievances.  We’re not talking about the current administration, or either major political party, as presently representing a threat of tyranny.

I’m not holding my breath for any statements like that to emerge from the NRA, or indeed, from the contemporary conservative movement.  It’s ironic that people who almost certainly think of themselves as patriots—perhaps as super-patriots—are deliberately courting the impression that loyalty to their country is strictly contingent on the maintenance of law and policies they favor, to be achieved if not by ballots then but bullets.  Republican politicians should be repudiating such people instead of celebrating them, accepting their money and support, and even adopting their seditious rhetoric.

In closing, historians in the future will be utilizing the nomenclature for the “constitutional” Progressive and albeit, the “liberal” label will become an outdated acronym and non-comparable to the ever-increasing “Demographics is Destiny” mindset, and especially for those of us and who ascribe to being categorized with the Nixon’s “racial and ethnics” and furthermore, where we are overwhelmingly Progressive in our politics.

Jaango