David Koch

Amid concerns that Koch Industries could buy several major U.S. newspapers from Tribune Company, industrial billionaire David Koch was forced to step down as trustee of WNET, New York City’s largest public TV station, after the New Yorker revealed how WNET gave Koch inappropriate influence over its programming. Mr. Koch was floating a seven-figure donation over WNET’s leadership as the station aired a movie that portrayed him as a particularly greedy Manhattan resident.

Sure enough, WNET didn’t get David Koch’s hefty donation.

Last Thursday, David Koch submitted his resignation at a WNET Board of Trustees meeting, and Brad Johnson at Forecast the Facts* reports that Koch’s name was scrubbed from WNET’s website several days prior to the resignation. Koch Industries’ public relations website, KochFacts, released a preemptive response to the New Yorker article (which it has now urgently elaborated on), attempting to stifle New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer and the details of her newest piece. David Koch’s resignation as a WNET Trustee, coupled with telling quotes from WNET president Neal Shapiro and other sources, makes it clear that Koch had too much influence at the decreasingly-public TV station in New York.

The article is a fascinating culmination of two portions of the ongoing legacy of the Koch brothers: their desire to influence media, which is playing out with their company’s bid for the Tribune Company’s eight national daily newspapers, and their attempts to intimidate journalists and silence reporting they consider unfavorable.

Collapsed I-5 Skagit River Bridge, Washington State

Just after 7pm PT, a central portion of the I-5 Skagit River bridge in Washington State collapsed dumping several cars in the water. People were seen sitting on top of the cars, on top of the bridge wreckage waiting for rescue.

Live stream reporting from KIRO 7.

Live stream reporting from KOMO 4.

Continuing updates here.

Technical Details of the ‘riveted steel truss bridge’ from uglybridges.com. “Evaluation: Structurally deficient” “This website highlights the “ugly” condition of our nation’s bridges thanks to years of neglect and deferred maintenance.”

Infrastructure, infrastructure, infrastructure.

From Peterr:

That “all of our bridges” quote ought to shame the Austerians. Right now,
money can be borrowed for pennies if governments want to do capital
projects, making repairs/replacements of bridges like these so much cheaper
than they would be when the economy is perking along. But that makes too
much sense . . .

8:51 pm PT: Fingers crossed, but no reported fatalities.

Pic

Pic

Various reports that a wide load truck hit it.

Sour apple for the teacher?

Some employers, both large and small, have announced plans to limit their part-time workers to 29 hours a week specifically so they can avoid paying for health care for employees working 30+ hours a week, as required by the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare. Under the law, most of which takes effect in 2014, large employers are exempted from contributing anything towards healthcare costs of employees who work fewer than 30 hours a week. For full-time workers, companies must offer affordable insurance or face steep fines. Employers seeking to avoid this responsibility could impose a 29-hour ceiling on workers, and many are doing just that.

Obamacare prompts fears for low-wage workers as employers exploit the rules

Three years after the passage of Barack Obama’s signature healthcare law, labor advocates are warning that it could have the unforeseen consequence of harming some of the very low-wage employees it seeks to aid. The legislation’s incentive scheme, they say, could cause a shift toward part-time work that extends beyond companies like Papa John’s and Darden Restaurants, which last year publicized their plans to cut employee hours to avoid costs under the new law.

Other large businesses have announced plans to raise the prices of their burgers or widgets to recover the health care costs. There has been blowback, but probably not nearly enough, since the likes of Wendy’s, Darden (Olive Garden, Red Lobster), Taco Bell, etc. already make huge profits and pay minimum (or less for waitstaff) wages. Darden Restaurants tried reducing full-time staffing at some of its restaurants last fall, but after a lot of negative publicity, the chain said it would not change its staffing in 2014. At Whole Foods, workers who put in 30 hours a week already get full health benefits, but the company may consider reducing the number of those employees because the proposed rules include more expensive benefit requirements. So workers just scraping by in minimum-wage jobs will see their pay reduced even more. In a very real way, these workers are taking another pay hit so that more well paid full-time employees can get company-provided health insurance benefits.

Many of you will remember that my daughter is a teacher whose writings I’ve posted here occasionally. But she is not a contracted teacher with her own classroom, she is a full-time “instructional assistant” who teaches technology to every student in her elementary school. Each child in the school attends several “specials” in the course of a week, and my daughter teaches one of the specials. This scheme is supposed to help make up for the elimination of valuable enrichment programs such as art, music and gym in cash-strapped school systems all over the country. As an instructional assistant, my daughter is paid a smaller, hourly wage, and has very limited personal and sick days compared to a contract teacher, and no health benefits, even though she has the same workload as a regular classroom teacher, and instructs every student in the school each week. She also works with children who need extra help to keep up with their assignments, as part of an intervention program. She is a full-time teacher in every sense of the word.

But my daughter and her colleagues were just informed that her school system may reduce the hours of certain classes of employees to 29 hours per week to avoid providing health care benefits. They also propose to limit substitute classroom teachers to four days per week, as another way to avoid incurring the health care costs. The letter from the superintendent spells out the problem, and it is very real:

We currently pay approximately 1,700 employees–1,000 of which are benefit eligible, 700 of which are not benefit eligible. If hours are not reduced, [the school system] could incur an annual expenditure of $4,952/Single Plan, and $13,278/Family Plan for each employee working over thirty (30) hours per week, which could result in increased insurance costs and PPACA fines to the School Corporation in the amount of $1,000,000 – $2,600,000 annually.

I have no sympathy whatsoever for Wendy’s or Taco Bell and their desire to wiggle out of providing health insurance benefits to their underpaid workers, but what is an already cash-strapped public school system to do? They’re too large to get any exclusions offered to small businesses, and too large to qualify for subsidies. It’s not just MY family; this situation will be replicated all over the country, in schools that already are eliminating programs just to be able to continue to provide the basics. A lot of school systems use part time workers not only as support staff, but for instruction of children.

This is one way that the Affordable Care Act, whatever its good points — and there ARE some — will disadvantage not only low-paid workers in retail companies who will see their pay even further reduced, but also our public school children, as the schools are forced to make even more cuts. It is unlikely that in a 29-hour week, the “specials” teachers will be able to instruct all of the students every week.

I don’t have an answer. It is a problem I hadn’t even considered until it touched my own family. I wonder how many more surprises are in store for us as the ACA rolls out? This is a provision that could be tweaked, and some states have begun to draft legislation to address the problem. The Republican legislators who want nothing more than to see the ACA fail, are unlikely to cooperate in a fix. So we are between the proverbial rock and hard place, I fear.

President Obama is expected to announce that the eternal war on the world will have an end.

When?

He won’t say.

I too have an announcement.  I promise my drinking problem will end some day.

When?

I’m not saying.  But the celebrations of the armistice in 1918 began when plans for it were announced, and the partying continued until it actually happened.  Perhaps that is the best approach here.  As an aid to your festivities, let me present the…

Afternoon Obama Murder Rap Drinking Game
(which I promise to stop playing soon)

1. The President is going to admit that he has a murder problem and propose to correct it by murdering less in certain countries.  If examples occur to you of crimes you might commit that you could not continue committing by promising to limit your criminal activities in some countries but not in others, DRINK!

2. The President is going to claim to have targeted, or to have allowed an unnamed John Brennan to have targeted, only one U.S. citizen for murder but to have killed three by mistake, on top of three killed by President Bush by mistake.  If you can think of outrages you might commit that you could not go on committing by claiming that 86% of them were accidental side effects, DRINK!

3. The President is going to claim that the one U.S. citizen he or his subordinate chose to murder was an imminent (meaning eventual theoretical) threat to violently attack the United States, that capture was infeasible (meaning the target was hiding following lots of death threats, but his location was known anyway), and that said citizen was a senior operational leader of al Qaeda (or an associated group or was an adherent or a backstage groupie who had once met a guy whose cousin knew where an al Qaeda meeting was held one time).  If you understand what that means, DRINK!

4. The President is going to hope that nobody notices that laws against war and murder don’t include exceptions for people who invent lists of arcane criteria that they require themselves to meet before murdering.  If you think you could invent and meet at least three qualifications before engaging in some immoral behavior, DRINK!

5. The President is going to hope nobody notices that he did not actually meet his own criteria before murdering Awlaki.  Attorney General Eric Holder now says Awlaki was killed for actions, not words.  Prior to the deed, Holder said it was the “hatred spewed” on Awlaki’s blog that put him “on the same list with bin Laden.”  Asked if he wanted Awlaki captured or killed, Holder did not say “captured if feasible,” but evaded the question.  Awlaki, as far as we know, was never a member of al Qaeda.  Obama’s and Holder’s claims about Awlaki’s role in terrorist attacks are undocumented claims.  No evidence has been presented and no charges were ever brought in court.  If you think shouting “Whoever he is, and whatever he’s charged with, he did it!” would be a nifty way to get out of jury duty, DRINK!

6. The President is going to speed past the fact that over 99% of the people he’s murdered have not been U.S. citizens, and that the pretense of justification so lazily applied to U.S. citizens has not been bothered with at all in these cases.  He’s not going to discuss “signature strikes” targeting unknown people and whoever’s near them, or the targeting of the rescuers of victims.  He’s not going to discuss children, women, seniors.  He’s not going to discuss the posthumous identification of males as “enemy combatants” — a non-legal term that adds insult to murder.  He’s not going to discuss the many known cases in which the victims could quite feasibly have been captured, were clearly not involved with al Qaeda in any way, and lacked any capacity whatsoever to threaten the United States.  He’s going to propose applying the fraudulent, meaningless, and illegal standards he applies to murdering U.S. citizens to murdering non-U.S. citizens in the future … in some countries.  If you can think of some people who might not be satisfied with this reform, DRINK!

7. The President is going to claim to be moving some but not all drone kill operations from a secret agency technically lacking in Congressional oversight to a department Congress simply chooses not to oversee.  If this falls short of what you can imagine when you hear “most transparent administration ever,” DRINK!

8. The President will not be speaking about how some 75 other nations with drones should begin applying his standards to their own behavior.  If you think such matters are worth discussing, DRINK!

9. The President is going to brush over the question of where and how he will be ordering the murder of people by means other than missiles.  If you can think of ways this might become seen as a problem down the road, DRINK!

10. The President is going to speed past the existence of a massive ongoing U.S. war on Afghanistan, larger now than when Obama moved into the White House, and expected to continue for many years after it “ends” in another year and a half.  If his ability to get away with this strikes you as perhaps what he must love most about drones and how they change the conversation, DRINK!

11. If you have concerns that go unanswered about the global expansion of U.S. bases, threats to Syria, weapons provided to Israel, threats to Iran, or the gargantuan military budget, DRINK!

12. The President will leak a great deal of information about his kill list program in this speech, as he has done on some previous “I killed bin Laden!” occasions, and yet will fail to prosecute himself for espionage at the end of the speech.  If you believe laws should be applied equally to all, DRINK!

Well, it’s official folks…

Rand Paul: My colleagues just voted to arm the allies of al Qaeda

… Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) blasted members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Tuesday, which voted overwhelmingly to arm elements of the Syrian opposition in a bill co-sponsored by Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN). “This is an important moment,” Paul said, addressing his Senate colleagues. “You will be funding, today, the allies of al Qaeda. It’s an irony you cannot overcome.”

The legislation, which would authorize the shipment of arms and military training to rebels “that have gone through a thorough vetting process,” passed in a bipartisan 15-3 vote. Paul offered an amendment that would strike the bill’s weapons provision, but it was rejected along with another Paul amendment ruling out the authorization of the use of military force in Syria. (Connecticut Democrat Chris Murphy was the only senator to join Paul in support of the weapons amendment.)

…The dispute centers on the issue of whether the United States could properly vet Syrian rebels so that weapons and body armor would not fall into the hands of extremist groups, such as the al Qaeda-aligned al-Nusra Front. The Pentagon’s top brass has vacillated about whether it’s logistically possible to keep track of weapons as they enter a conflict involving a complex mix of opposition groups, as the new bill would require…

As Antiwar’s John Glaser noted…

For more than a year, the CIA has been facilitating the delivery of arms from countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar to Syrian rebel groups, although the Obama administration has stopped short of a decision to directly arm the rebels. This bill is aimed at pushing the president in that direction.

“The evidence is mounting that Syria has become a magnet for Sunni extremists, including those operating under the banner of Al Qaeda,” The New York Times almost a year ago. And in the past year, that reality has metastasized, with Jabhat al-Nusra – categorized by the State Department as an official terrorist organization with ties to al-Qaeda – developing into the rebels’ main fighting force.

Rand Paul was evidently skeptical of claims that rebels receiving arms will be vetted to ensure extremists don’t receive them. And with good reason: the process is made up of untrustworthy, third-party sources and intelligence officials told the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times as far back as a year ago that the truth is that the U.S. doesn’t know who is getting the money and weapons…

Now, about those possible Peace Talks, in Geneva, once again…

The Syrian rebels, U.S. disagree on peace talks…

The Syrian opposition said Wednesday it welcomes the promise of increased U.S. involvement in finding a solution to two years of war, but that it would not accept peace talks if top members of the regime of Bashar Assad are involved.

The stand of the country’s leading opposition group, the Syrian National Coalition, is in direct conflict with the peace talks that the Obama administration are seeking to help organize next month in Geneva…

…”We hope the U.S. will lead the international role to solving the conflict,” said Khaled Saleh, spokesman for the Syria National Coalition. “The coalition welcomes any solution as long as it meets the democratic aspirations of the Syrian people but it must start with the departure of Assad.”

Saleh repeated that the rebellion needs the United States and other Western nations to impose a no-fly zone over Syria to stop Assad’s warplanes as well as strategic military strikes on government positions. Kerry on Wednesday threatened to give non-lethal aid, such as medical kits and food, to the rebels if Assad did not join talks.

Meanwhile, Syria submits five names for possible peace talks…

However, that was not the end of the Senate’s foreign f*ckery today…

US: We’ll back Israel if it defends itself against Iranian nuke threat

The US Senate decided unanimously to support Israel should it pursue military actions to defend itself against the Iranian nuclear threat. The decision’s sponsors are the Foreign Affair Committee Chairman Robert Menendez (D) and senior Senator Lindsay Graham (R).

According to the resolution, the US will furnish Israel with diplomatic, military and economic support to defend its territory, citizens and existence. The resolution also determines that the US policy is to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons and take the necessary steps to pursue this policy.

Who’s defending against whom…?

*gah*

Here’s a bonus clip with RT’s Abby Martin interviewing Dr. Noam Chomsky that was published yesterday…

Abusing Prisoners Decreases Public Safety

–An interview with educator, author and former prisoner Shawn Griffith

By Angola 3 News

If given the attention it deserves, an important new book is certain to make significant contributions to the public discussions of US prison policy. The author, Shawn Griffith, was released last year from Florida’s prison system at the age of 41, after spending most of his life, almost 24 years, behind bars, including seven in solitary confinement. Facing the US PrisonProblem 2.3 Million Strong: An Ex-Con’s View of the Mistakes and the Solution was self-published just months after Griffith was released from what is the third largest state prison system in the US, after California and Texas.

Angola Prison

This new book’s thoughtful analysis and chilling reflections on what author Shawn Griffith experienced while incarcerated is a remarkable illustration of why the US public must listen to the voices of current and former prisoners who have stories that only they can tell. Griffith writes that “by integrating my own personal experiences with statistics and examples from different corrections systems around the nation, I am attempting to discredit the general perception that the system is designed to enforce and protect justice for everyone. The U.S. criminal justice system is an economically and politically profitable enterprise for special interest groups in this country. The general taxpayer needs to understand how the abusive policies fostered by these groups worsen the U.S. prison problem and the debt crisis through wasted corrections expenditures.”

Florida’s state prisons are the book’s main focus because “the majority of prisoners are incarcerated in state institutions. As of 2010, the US incarcerated 1,404,053 prisoners in state correctional institutions. For that reason, and based on my own twenty years of experience… Florida serves as an especially relevant test case for the changes needed in the US correctional system for two reasons. First is the size of Florida’s prison population and some of the political causes of its growth… Second, Florida has enacted some of the toughest sentencing laws of any state, causing correctional budgets to soar while educational budgets have been cut repeatedly,” writes Griffith.

After reading about the many different ways prisoners are abused, the very notion that US prisons are designed to rehabilitate or improve public safety, can only be viewed as a sick joke. Griffith writes that “hidden behind the walls, huge numbers of human beings have their spirits broken daily. Secretly, many suffer false disciplinary reports, illegitimate confiscation or destruction of personal property, physical beatings, rape, and sometimes fraudulent criminal penalties. Substandard nutrition, indifference to serious medical needs, and policies that encourage laziness have also become common. These practices help to sustain rates of recidivism, which is defined as a return to prison within three years of release.”

“Indeed, the strongest factor in reducing the rate of criminal recidivism is education, especially higher education, the one correctional expenditure that federal and state politicians have slashed.  This course must be reversed,’ writes Griffith, himself an example of the healing power of educational programs for prisoners. While incarcerated he began his long journey to full rehabilitation, gaining his GED and then taking over 40 accredited college correspondence courses with an emphasis on criminal justice, psychology, and marketing. He has a 3.5 GPA from Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. As a teacher in prison, he helped hundreds of inmates gain their GEDs.

Since his release in 2012, Griffith has lived in Sarasota, Florida where he founded Speak Out Publishing to publish other works of non-fiction that focus on tackling some of societies’ most pressing issues. Copies of Facing the US Prison Problem 2.3 Million Strong can be purchased directly from Griffith, through his website: www.speakoutpublishing.com, by mail: Speak Out Publishing, LLC at P.O. Box 50484 Sarasota, Florida 34232, or by phone: 941-330-5979.

Angola 3 News:         You write that this book “isn’t just a commentary on correctional problems and solutions…it is also to share the human side of the story.” Based on your experience of spending almost 24 years in a Florida prison, what is the human side of this story?

Shawn Griffith:         Sometimes I think people forget that prisoners and their families are people. The prisoners have committed crimes, but many of them come to prison with serious psychological issues, and they still have feelings like every person in this world. Most prisoners are not sociopaths, but instead human beings with more pain and trauma in their pasts than the average citizen. Committing crimes, for the most part, is a direct sign of their mental instability.

A good example was a murderer with the moniker, Arkansas. Arkansas was a real stand-up guy in prison. He was someone who kept his word, minded his own business, but had a violent father who instilled violent teachings into his head repeatedly during childhood. He would give a friend the shirt off of his back, but if you tried to harm him or get over on him, his training went into effect. He had some serious psychological issues that I saw him struggle with every day.