Over a pleasant dinner with Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers, MD, yesterday evening in Towson, MD,  the couple discussed the recent protests which they helped lead in Chicago at the NATO gathering and explained the problems they faced.

As is often the case with protest movements, a few people have infiltrated whose aims and values are very different from those espoused and agreed to by the vast majority of the other participants.

There are those few individuals who do not share the message or values of the demonstrators but who want to draw attention by violence against police and they surge to the front.

There are also ‘protestors’ who are working for the authorities.  In some cases (but far from all), they are there to start trouble to discredit the demonstrators.   More often they simply serve the useful role of communicating to the authorities the benign nature of the gathering.

The couple  lamented that the result brought about by the violent few  are headlines and articles that place the demonstration in a bad light.  This obscures their message from being heard or written about.

However, at times there are unprovoked police harassment and even arrests of person who are or plan to demonstrate 

We received the following from Kevin Zeese this morning:

“Here’s an article on the attack on journalists at the NATO protests. The final video is an archived livestream of journalists being harassed by the police before the protests — car pulled over, guns drawn, searched (aggressively) and allowed to go. They believe the livestreaming of the event is what saved them from a worse fate.”

“…We reverse and remand with instructions to allow the amended complaint and enter a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of the eavesdropping statute as applied to audio recording of the kind alleged here.

“The Illinois eavesdropping statute restricts a medium of expression commonly used for the preservation and communication of information and ideas, thus triggering First Amendment scrutiny. Illinois has criminalized the nonconsensual recording of most any oral communication, including recordings of public officials doing the public’s business in public and regardless of whether the recording is open or surreptitious. Defending the broad sweep of this statute, the State’s Attorney relies on the government’s interest in protecting conversational privacy, but that interest is not implicated when police officers are performing their duties in public places and engaging in public communications audible to persons who witness the events.

“Even under the more lenient intermediate standard of scrutiny applicable to contentneutral burdens on speech, this application of the statute very likely flunks. The Illinois eavesdropping statute restricts far more speech than necessary to protect legitimate privacy Interests; as applied to the facts alleged here, it likely violates the First Amendment’s freespeechand free-press guarantees.” …  (more)

EDITOR: Of course this is subject to reversal by the current Supreme Court which, by its Bush vs. Gore and Citzens United decisions have shown its disregard for the Constitution.

PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER:  …Though they have anxiously watched for months as Corbett has fielded political hits on everything from policy to personality, they are now encouraging the governor to shake things up in hopes of shaking off what they think is turning into a growing image problem.

Next week, according to four sources speaking on condition of anonymity, a small circle of heavyweights in the Republican Party, known as the governor’s “kitchen cabinet,” will be quietly meeting with Corbett in Harrisburg to push for changes to his top staff in the Capitol.

Their quarrel is not over policy, but with what some senior state Republicans see as political clumsiness: an inability or unwillingness to sell his agenda and his successes to the public, while at the same time allowing a tense or even dysfunctional relationship with the Republican-controlled legislature to fester unchecked.

If nothing changes, said one senior GOP figure, this is the fear: “He’ll be a one-term governor.”…  (more)

EDITOR:  What a bunch of nonsense.  Corbett is unpopular because he has sold out to Marcellus Shale interests and others to fund his election and is repaying them at the expense of the education of our youngsters and the well being of our society. 

LOS ANGELES TIMES:   …Egged on by actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus and an array of environmental groups, the City Council voted 13 to 1 to phase out plastic bags over the next 12 months at an estimated 7,500 stores. Councilman Bernard Parks cast the lone no vote…

Council members quietly backed away from a more controversial plan to also ban use of paper grocery bags, which was first proposed by appointees of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

Wednesday’s vote kicks off a four-month environmental review of the bag ban, followed by passage of an ordinance putting it into effect. Larger stores would then have six months to phase out plastic bags and smaller markets a 12-month phase-out period. For paper bags, retailers would be required to charge 10 cents per bag starting one year after the plastic bag is enacted…  (more)

USA TODAY:  The typical American household would have paid nearly all of its income in taxes last year to balance the budget if the government used standard accounting rules to compute the deficit, a USA TODAY analysis finds.

A U.S. household’s median income is $49,445, the Census reports.

The big difference between the official deficit and standard accounting: Congress exempts itself from including the cost of promised retirement benefits.

Yet companies, states and local governments must include retirement commitments in financial statements, as required by federal law and private boards that set accounting rules…  (more)

 EDITOR:  The three  remedies to this problem are stimulating the ecnomy back to prosperity,  returning to the higher  normal rates of taxation,  opening the boarders to Latinos who tend to be younger and have more children, and ‘real’ inflation at a rate of 2%  a year.

USA TODAY:…. Captured Los Zetas territory boss, Juan Carlos Antonio Mercado, said he ordered the murders to spread fear and reinforce the reputation of his cartel as a syndicate that will stop at nothing to dominate the drug trade.

Such grisly violence against ordinary people seemed unimaginable to the residents of San Juan Cosalá and nearby villages, and has rattled the Americans and others who have moved to the region to spend their lives in the sun.

“It’s paradise lost, at least for the short term,” says Steven Miller, a retired Air Force major from Las Vegas who has spent most of the past eight years in the Chapala area… (more)

EDITOR:   This is all because of our ill conceived ‘War on Drugs.’   Alcohol prohibition was reversed within a little over a decade, even though it required a Constitutional amendment to do so.  We allowed states and communities to regulate alcohol as they chose and, where legal, it was taxed, regulated and controlled.

We can’t even bring ourselves to view all the harm that is being done and alter our statutes.  It is not only sad, but tragic.  And the worse is yet to come.

The only sign of hope is not based upon wisdom or compassion, but  a burgeoning awareness of the cost of imprisoning so large a part of our population and its consequences.

From the FINANCIAL TIMES:

The shale gas boom in the US has led to a big drop in its carbon emissions, as power generators switch from coal to cheap gas.

According to the International Energy Agency, US energy-related emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, fell by 450m tonnes over the past five years – the largest drop among all countries surveyed.

Fatih Birol, IEA chief economist, attributed the fall to improvements in fuel efficiency in the transport sector and a “major shift” from coal to gas in the power sector. “This is a success story based on a combination of policy and technology – policy driving greater efficiency and technology making shale gas production viable,” Mr Birol told the Financial Times…

Click here to read the full article.

EDITOR: Pennsylvania has the good fortune to be a prime source of this new energy but our governor, Tom Corbett, refuses to tax it as do other states.   He reported received over a million dollars towards his gubernatorial campaign from Marcellus Shale interests.

By Bill Keisling

I have come to the interesting conclusion that no one — the public, the state, no Harrisburg city or state official — knows how much debt Steve Reed ran up in his tenure as mayor of Harrisburg.

What we should be doing is telling our readers just what the bottom line debt is — and no one seems to know.

In other words, as far as I can tell, no one has a handle on the total indebtedness of the City of Harrisburg. I also believe it is in no public official’s interest to break this troubling news to members of the public.

This is not only about the debt.  Harrisburg’s public got into this mess precisely because they were left in the dark, and out of the loop. This bad practice of intentionally leaving the public and the taxpayers in the dark continues to this day.

It is not only about debt incurred with bond issues, I’ve learned. Mayor Steve Reed, it seems, attempted to leverage and borrow on just about anything that was and wasn’t nailed down. He sought loans on the ground UNDER buildings. He attempted to sell things like tax liens to third parties — at great disadvantage to taxpayers over time, but with the advantage to Reed of receiving temporary cash flow.

All this becomes important not only to our overall story, but also our attempt to figure out the mess Harrisburg is in — as well as the personality of Steve Reed.

In the book Catch-22, Joseph Heller writes of First Lieutenant Milo Minderbinder, and his Milo Enterprises, which sold and borrowed just about every piece of equipment and property he could get his hands on. Is that what we have with Mayor Reed?  It is the reasonable question.

FINANCIAL TIMES:  ….About two years ago some large businesses and wealthy individuals began seriously to ask, “if the euros were to unwind, in which currency would my asset or contract be denominated?” The issue is not whether the euro coins in your pocket carry an Athenian owl or German imperial eagle. The issue is the status of bank deposits and loans, residential mortgages and commercial contracts, as well as wages and prices. The drain of funds from Greek banks is an indication that ordinary people are now thinking in these terms.

Europe’s hapless politicians, having asserted that exit from the single currency was impossible, must now claim that exit would be relatively easy. Only then can they plausibly threaten the Greek electorate with expulsion if they vote the wrong way. But exit was never impossible, never easy and even when it was publicly unthinkable central banks would have been negligent not to have put in place contingency plans.

That is why even though Greece is a small part of the eurozone, a Greek exit is an existential threat to it. Once a path to exithas been defined, business and individuals will have a template for understanding the consequences of further unwinding…  (more)

EDITOR:  According to Wikipedia :” Furthermore,  [the European Central Bank (ECB)]  has the exclusive right to authorise the issuance of euro banknotes. Member states can issue euro coins but the amount must be authorised by the ECB beforehand (upon the introduction of the euro, the ECB also had exclusive right to issue coins).

Please pardon the pun, but we must confess that the ramifications of leaving the eurozone remains ‘Greek’ to us.  At least the above sheds some light.

NEW YORK TIMES Editorial:  …Many schools market themselves to students without explaining the real costs of attendance. Letters informing them about financial aid awards often blur the distinction between loans and grants to make the school look like a better deal than it is. And once students enroll, they are generally left on their own as they borrow year after year.

The Obama administration has taken some important steps to address these problems. A proposal would require colleges to clearly disclose costs in a standardized “shopping sheet” that would let students see the aid they are receiving and the debt that they would incur. Later this year, it plans to post an Internet “scorecard” that rates each college nationally on affordability and value — defined by graduation rates and whether graduates earn enough on average to repay their debts.

A bill pending in the Senate would require both colleges and lenders to educate students about the differences between federal loans and riskier, more expensive private loans — and their borrowing options. Congress should also require schools to provide in-depth, annual loan counseling to students and set criteria for the information that must be provided. All schools should be required to disclose annually the average debt load of their graduates… (more)