SHAMUS COOKE, INFORMATION CLEARING HOUSE - In Washington each new day brings a fresh call to "reform entitlement programs" - Social Security, Medicare, etc., (in Congress, the word "reform" now means to eliminate, or drastically reduce). Tackling Social Security has been on the to-do list of the corporate elite for years, and they're not waiting any longer. After years of promoting this cause, conservative think tanks have now garnered solid support from the political establishment as a whole, which includes the Republican and Democratic parties.

The newest liberal recruit to the destruction of Social Security is Thomas Friedman, the influential columnist for The New York Times, who wrote recently:

"The president needs to persuade the country to invest in the future and pay for the past... We have to pay for more new schools and infrastructure than ever, while accepting more entitlement cuts than ever [Social Security, Medicare, etc.] when public trust in government is lower than ever."

The nonchalance which Friedman calls for cutting Social Security is indicative of the climate in Washington, where the last remnants of liberalism have been suffocated under the heavy demands of profit-hungry corporations, especially financial institutions and big banks. For political hacks like Friedman - and there are thousands of them - the only solution to curing the U.S. deficit is cutting social services in general, while specifically targeting Social Security and Medicare. . .

Obama's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform is a bi-partisan group that is set to attack Social Security in a way where, in the end, both political parties will be blamed, so that neither party is overburdened with guilt. The Republicans - having made their contempt for Obama more than known - are salivating at the chance to cooperate. . .

Since the foregone conclusions of Obama's panel will be so unpopular, the Washington Post explains that they will be announced after the fall elections, in December 2010.. . .

What will the "reformed" Social Security look like? Again, the conservative think tanks have an idea waiting in the wings: personal savings accounts. In the same way that 401(k)s killed the pension, Social Security is set to be privatized for the mighty benefit of Wall Street.

Just last week, Republican Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin announced a privatization plan that just happened to coincide with the creation of Obama's commission. Michael Hiltzik of The Los Angles Times called Ryan's plan "a roadmap for killing Social Security." He writes:

"His [Ryan's] privatization scheme would allow workers under 55 to place more than one-third of their current Social Security taxes into personal retirement accounts, with the ultimate goal of shifting most of that money into the stock market."

By creating individual accounts, Wall Street is bolstered while the public nature of Social Security is undermined, since Social Security is a "pay as you go" program: if workers under 55 decide to invest in Wall Street, and not to pay into the Social Security fund, older workers don't receive benefits. Social Security is thus dismantled.

Only workers who have money to save - and are gullible enough to trust their money to Wall Street - will put money in their new Social Security accounts._______________________________________________________

In the coming weeks we will be pointing you to a few but important new addresses due to Blogger changing its uploading system. Believe us, this wasn't our idea and so far we're keeping our cool better than a number of bloggers using the system who have come up with an large number of problems.

By simply asking our readers to change a few addresses, we hope to avoid these problems. Here are a couple for starters.

- The Flotsam & Jetsam page (Sam's essays) is now at http://prorevflotsam.blogger.com


- The Flotsam & Jetsam RSS feed is http://prorevflotsam.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

Should you lose these links, just go to the old F&J page - http://prorev.com/sam.htm - and you'll find the correct links at the top of the page.

Not as sexy as having Blogger redirect you - or migrate you, as they say, - to the new pages but considerably safer, it would seem, judging from other bloggers' tales of woe._______________________________________________________

PHYSICIANS FOR A NATIONAL HEALTH PLAN - The AMA's most recent look at the health insurance market - "Competition in health insurance: A comprehensive study of U.S. markets," released Feb. 23 and based on 2009 data - finds that 99% of 313 metropolitan areas tracked would be considered to have "highly concentrated" insurance markets under guidelines used by the U.S. Dept. of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission. In its 2009 version of the study, the AMA found that 94% of metropolitan areas were ranked "highly concentrated."

One insurer held 70% or more of the health plan market share in 24 of 43 states measured, up from 18 in 42 states in the previous year's study. In 92% of the 313 markets in the report, one insurer held at least a 30% share.

In past releases of its survey, the AMA has noted that insurer market dominance has allowed health plans to force physicians into take-it-or-leave-it contracts. But this year the AMA - echoing other experts - noted that market dominance has allowed plans to give patients take-it-or-leave-it pricing.


The health insurance companies have had an exemption from anti-trust laws since World War II. The House healthcare bill would end it. _______________________________________________________

Nancy Pelosi on Health Care: "We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it."_______________________________________________________

Sam Smith

Most of these provisions come from existing legislation or have been proposed by Democratic leaders. They eliminate a number of indefensible proposals including the unconstitutional individual mandate, any tax on higher cost plans, and any cuts in Medicare or Medicaid services - direct or covert. They also eliminate anything likely to confuse or scare voters such as insurance exchanges.

Funding can come by a tax on hedge funds, corporate bonuses and those earning more than $250,000 and by creating a White House commission to propose cuts and efficiencies in the Pentagon budget including an end to imperial wars and recovering the $2.3 trillion that Donald Rumsfeld in 2001 said the Pentagon had lost.

It's far from the bill I would like, but it is one that would be over a thousand pages shorter, full of benefits and short on scary things, and simple enough that even a network news anchor could understand it.

- Negotiate with drug firms for lower prices for pharmaceuticals covered by Medicare and Medicaid.

- Close the doughnut hole in Medicare drug coverage

- Allow young adults up to the age of 26 to stay on a parent's health insurance plan.

- Give the Department of Health and Human Services new authority to help states review annual premium rate increases.

- Encourage states to follow Maryland's example and negotiate prices with hospitals.

- If people like their current plans, they will be able to keep them.

- Ensure that Americans have portable, secure health care coverage – so that they won’t lose care if their employer drops their plan or they lose their job.

- End increases in premiums, lifetime limits or denials of care based on pre-existing conditions, race, or gender, and strictly limit age rating.

- End anti-trust examption for health insurance companies.

- Eliminate co-pays for preventive care, and cap out-of-pocket expenses to protect people from bankruptcy.

- Guarantee health care coverage td every child that includes dental, hearing and vision benefits.

- Provide health insurance for substantially more low income citizens and allow lower middle class citizens to buy into Medicare._______________________________________________________

HUFFINGTON POST - Volkswagen, Europe's largest European automaker, has big plans to dominate the nascent world of electric cars.

Volkswagen plans to sell 300,000 electric vehicles a year by 2018, which would translate to 3% of all sales. VW's hybrid ambitions could lead it to overtake Toyota as the world's largest automaker within eight years.

Key details of Volkswagen's strategy include introducing the company's first hybrid electric vehicle the Toureg 2010, and in 2013 three EVs, likely to be versions of the Jetta, Golf, and the Up. Here's Treehugger:

"A notable aspect of VW's approach is that it's banking on offering the EV as an option on already available and recognizable models as it has done with TDI diesel options. Instead of developing all new models to channel new tech into, as with, say, the Prius or Volt, VW seems intent on phasing new tech into an already familiar cars. . . "_______________________________________________________

The Congressional Hispanic Staff Association has found that hispanics make up less than three percent of chiefs of staff and legislative directors on the House side. In the Senate "only about 6 percent of the 4,100 U.S. Senate employees were people of color, which includes African-American, Asian and latino staff." In the rest of American they represent about 30% of the population.

As for the members themselves, for all the talk of moving into a post-racial election, when Senator Burris disappears there will likely be no blacks in the Senate. There are currently only three latinos. The Senate remains the most segregated place in the federal government. We have argued for decades for the creation of more, and particularly more urban, states but there is little interest in this and, besides, it was so much more fun talking about how Obama's election had changed America.

Nine percent of the House is black and six percent latino.

Women represent 17% of both the House and the Senate._______________________________________________________

NY TIMES - The Supreme Court decision allowing corporations to spend unlimited money on behalf of political candidates left a loophole that campaign finance lawyers say could allow companies to pay for extensive political advertising while avoiding the disclosure requirements the court appeared to leave intact.

Experts say the ruling, along with a pair of earlier Supreme Court cases, makes it possible for corporations and unions to donate anonymously to nonprofit civic leagues and trade associations. The groups can then use the money to finance the types of political advertisements that were at the heart of last month's ruling, in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.

Well before the Citizens United case, certain types of nonprofit organizations were able to pump millions of dollars into "electioneering communications" - highly pointed commercials about political issues that can even mention specific candidates - without revealing their donors.

For the first time, though, as a result of the ruling, corporations will be able to spend unlimited amounts of money on advertisements expressly advocating for a candidate's election or defeat. The ruling also clears the way, for the first time, for corporations to donate money to nonprofit groups that place advocacy advertisements._______________________________________________________

Guardian - Get an accountant, abstain from sex and similes, cut, rewrite, then cut and rewrite again – if all else fails, pray. Inspired by Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing, we asked authors for their personal dos and don'ts

Elmore Leonard: Never open a book with weather. . .

Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue. . .

Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said" . . .

Avoid detailed descriptions of characters, which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants", what do the "American and the girl with him" look like? "She had taken off her hat and put it on the table." That's the only reference to a physical description in the story.

Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

Diana Athill: Read it aloud to yourself . . .

Margaret Atwood: Take something to write on. Paper is good. In a pinch, pieces of wood or your arm will do.

Don't sit down in the middle of the woods. If you're lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road. . .

Roddy Doyle: Regard every new page as a small triumph - until you get to Page 50. Then calm down, and start worrying about the quality. . .

Helen Dunmore: Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. . .

Geoff Dyer: Don't write in public places. . . .

If you use a computer, constantly refine and expand your autocorrect settings. The only reason I stay loyal to my piece-of-shit computer is that I have invested so much ingenuity into building one of the great auto­correct files in literary history. . .

Anne Enright: Only bad writers think that their work is really good.

Imagine that you are dying. If you had a terminal disease would you finish this book? Why not? . . .

You can also do all that with whiskey.

Richard Ford: Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer's a good idea.

Don't have children.

Don't read your reviews.

Neil Gaiman: Write.

Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.

Put it aside. Read it pretending you've never read it before. . .

Laugh at your own jokes.

Lots more writers and lots more advice_______________________________________________________

Damian Kulash Jr, NY Times - My band is famous for music videos. We direct them ourselves or with the help of friends, we shoot them on shoestring budgets and, like our songs, albums and concerts, we see them as creative works and not as our record company's marketing tool.

In 2006 we made a video of us dancing on treadmills for our song "Here It Goes Again." We shot it at my sister's house without telling EMI, our record company, and posted it on the fledgling YouTube without EMI's permission. Technically, this put us afoul of our contract, since we need our record company's approval to distribute copies of the songs that they finance. It also exposed YouTube to all sorts of liability for streaming an EMI recording across the globe. But back then record companies saw videos as advertisements, so if my band wanted to produce them, and if YouTube wanted to help people watch them, EMI wasn't going to get in the way.

As the age of viral video dawned, "Here It Goes Again" was viewed millions, then tens of millions of times. It brought big crowds to our concerts on five continents, and by the time we returned to the studio, 700 shows, one Grammy and nearly three years later, EMI's ledger had a black number in our column. To the band, "Here It Goes Again" was a successful creative project. To the record company, it was a successful, completely free advertisement.

Now we've released a new album and a couple of new videos. But the fans and bloggers who helped spread "Here It Goes Again" across the Internet can no longer do what they did before, because our record company has blocked them from embedding our video on their sites. Believe it or not, in the four years since our treadmill dance got such attention, YouTube and EMI have actually made it harder to share our videos.

A few years ago, reeling from plummeting record sales, record companies went after YouTube, demanding payment for streams of their material. They saw videos, suddenly, as potential sources of revenue. YouTube agreed to pay the record companies a tiny amount for each stream, but - here's the crux of the problem - they pay only when the videos are viewed on YouTube's own site.

Embedded videos - those hosted by YouTube but streamed on blogs and other Web sites - don't generate any revenue for record companies, so EMI disabled the embedding feature. Now we can't post the YouTube versions of our videos on our own site, nor can our fans post them on theirs. If you want to watch them, you have to do so on YouTube.

But this isn't how the Internet works. Viral content doesn't spread just from primary sources like YouTube or Flickr Blogs, Web sites and video aggregators serve as cultural curators, daily collecting the items that will interest their audiences the most. By ignoring the power of these tastemakers, our record company is cutting off its nose to spite its face.

The numbers are shocking: When EMI disabled the embedding feature, views of our treadmill video dropped 90 percent, from about 10,000 per day to just over 1,000. Our last royalty statement from the label, which covered six months of streams, shows a whopping $27.77 credit to our account.

Clearly the embedding restriction is bad news for our band, but is it worth it for EMI? The terms of YouTube's deals with record companies aren't public, but news reports say that the labels receive $.004 to $.008 per stream, so the most EMI could have grossed for the streams in question is a little over $5,400.

It's decisions like these that have earned record companies a reputation for being greedy and short-sighted. And by and large they deserve it. But before we cheer for the demise of the big bad machine, it's important to remember that record companies provide the music industry with a vital service: they're risk aggregators. Or at least, they used to be.

To go from playing at a local club once a month to actually supporting yourself with music requires big investments in touring, recording and promotion - investments young musicians can't afford. My band didn't sign a contract with EMI because we believed labels magically created stars. We signed because no banker in his right mind would give a band the startup capital it needs.

Record companies, on the other hand, didn't used to expect that all their advances would be repaid. They spread the risk by betting on hundreds of artists at once, and they recouped their investments by taking the lion's share of the profits on the few acts that succeeded.

At least, this was all true when we signed our deal in 2000. Today, as the record industry's revenue model has collapsed with the digitization of its biggest commodities, companies are cutting back spending on all but their biggest stars, and not signing nearly as many new acts. If record companies can't adapt to this new world, they will die out; and without advances, so will the futures of many talented bands.

In these tight times, it's no surprise that EMI is trying to wring revenue out of everything we make, including our videos. But it needs to recognize the basic mechanics of the Internet. Curbing the viral spread of videos isn't benefiting the company's bottom line, or the music it's there to support. The sooner record companies realize this, the better - though I fear it may already be too late._______________________________________________________

GUARDIAN, UK - French anti-nuclear campaigners claim a new power plant being built in Normandy carries an accident risk of "Chernobyl proportions".

Sortir du Nucleaire, a protest network, says leaked confidential documents show that tests on the third-generation pressurized water reactor present a potentially catastrophic scenario.

The network has eight internal papers showing the results of tests on the European Pressurised Reactor that, it claims, reveal defects in the mechanism that controls the nuclear reaction. These defects, it says, could cause an explosion sending a massive cloud of radiation into the atmosphere.

The documents, leaked by an insider at the French electricity firm EDF, which will run the new Flamanville 3 power station, date from between 2004 and 2009. "They show the main arguments in favour of the EPR . . . are false," a spokesperson for Sortir du Nucleaire said._______________________________________________________

GUARDIAN, UK - For the first time since the dinosaurs disappeared, humans are driving animals and plants to extinction faster than new species can evolve, one of the world's experts on biodiversity has warned.

Conservation experts have already signaled that the world is in the grip of the "sixth great extinction" of species, driven by the destruction of natural habitats, hunting, the spread of alien predators and disease, and climate change.

However until recently it has been hoped that the rate at which new species were evolving could keep pace with the loss of diversity of life.

Simon Stuart, chair of the Species Survival Commission for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature - the body which officially declares species threatened and extinct - said that point had now "almost certainly" been crossed.

"Measuring the rate at which new species evolve is difficult, but there's no question that the current extinction rates are faster than that; I think it's inevitable," said Stuart.

The IUCN created shock waves with its major assessment of the world's biodiversity in 2004, which calculated that the rate of extinction had reached 100-1,000 times that suggested by the fossil records before humans._______________________________________________________

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ALTERNET - Much has been made of the fact that, when examined through the prism of gender, the Great Recession appears to have affected the employment of men far more than that of women. And, taken as a whole, that's true. According to figures by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate for men (age 20 and over) stands at 10 percent, while 7.9 percent of women rank among the unemployed. (When the recession began in December 2007, the unemployment rate among men and women was the same: 4.4 percent.)

But . . . you'll find a significant group of women struggling mightily against a brutal economic tide: single women with children. They, the breadwinners of their families, are more than twice as likely to be unemployed than married women who have a spouse present. While this has been true for the last ten years, the effects are amplified in the current economic crisis.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics showed the unemployment rate for married women at 6.1 percent, while that of single women "who maintain families," in the parlance of the BLS, reached a whopping 11.6 percent -- 68 percent higher than when the recession began. Add to that the fact that women, as a whole, earn only 77 cents for every dollar a man brings home, and you find many single women whose situation has gone from difficult to dire.

Indeed, married members of both sexes did better maintaining employment over the course of 2009, according to the BLS's own annual averages of its Household Data monthly surveys: 12 percent of people who had never married were unemployed by the end of the year; those who were widowed, separated or divorced suffered an unemployment rate of 9.2 percent, while married people (defined as having a spouse "present"), coasted by with a 5.5 percent rate of unemployment.

The effect on the nation's children has yet to be fully understood: 20 percent of all children today grow up in families headed by a single mother._______________________________________________________

ROB WITHERELL, UNITED STEELWORKERS . . . at the Western Massachusetts Jobs with Justice Conference in Holyoke - Due to decades of decay, we no longer have an economy capable of a quick recovery. The "good" news announced yesterday was that we "only" lost 36,000 jobs last month. If last year's stimulus bill has been effective as economic triage, and most likely it has been, then there is still a long, uncertain road to rehabilitation and recovery. . .

Let's imagine the situation in the Basque region in 1943. Still devastated from the Spanish Civil War, most notoriously the bombing of Guernica in 1937, the Basque region continued to be punished by Franco's regime, which forbid use of the Basque language and repressed Basque culture. Thousands were murdered for supporting the Republican forces, including the priest that Father Arizmendi replaced two years earlier, and nearly Father Arizmendi himself.

High unemployment. No social safety net. No pensions. Little access to capital and investments.

It is in this context that Father José María Arizmendiarrieta started up a small polytechnic school that was the seed for the phenomenon we know today as the Mondragon cooperatives. In 1956, five graduates of that school, with the assistance of Father Arizmendi, started the first Mondragon cooperative, Ulgor. A little over 50 years later, the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation employs over 100,000 people, with nearly all of them worker owners, and over $20 billion dollars in annual revenue.

So, what can we learn from them?

To start with, let's always remember that these cooperatives were started and supported not out of some utopian ideal, but rather a very pragmatic means of helping people put a roof over their heads, clothes on their backs and food on their tables. The goal was, and remains, to create jobs that can support their families and their communities.

The success of the Mondragon cooperatives comes from putting people first. . . We have become so conditioned to think that companies must prioritize profits above all else, usually for the sake of some group of unnamed, unknown shareholders, that's is hard for us to imagine any alternative.

Now keep in mind that this is no utopia, this is a highly competitive, for-profit business - just organized differently than most. As the saying goes at Mondragon: "This is not heaven and we are not angels."

At its best though, Mondragon could be a better way to run a business. A business that is sustainable, supports jobs, supports families, and supports communities. . .

The first thing we might want to consider are the ten Basic Principles of the Mondragon cooperatives:

Education . . . Sovereignty of labor. . . Instrumental and subordinate nature of capital. . . Democratic organization. . . Open admission. . . Participation in management. . . Wage solidarity. . . Inter-cooperation. . . Social transformation. . . Universal nature

How many corporate mission statements are out there where you can find ideals like "sovereignty of labor" and the "instrumental and subordinate nature of capital"? Not many, I'm sure. Yet these principles are why job creation and sustained employment are top priorities. Even during economic downturns, when unemployment is high, as it is now, the amount of layoffs within MCC are few and limited in duration. As noted by Judy Schwartz in a recent article, "During the 1980s, when Spain's unemployment hit 27 percent, Mondragon's hovered below 1 percent."

As a worker owned cooperative, ultimately all profits are kept by the workers. Although some portion of profits are pooled with other co-ops and used for finance, education and R&D, a significant piece of the pie is distributed directly to workers in the form of profit sharing or put into the workers' individual capital accounts. Shared risks become shared rewards.

Another key differentiation for Mondragon is the principal of democratic organization with "one person, one vote". Every worker-owner owns an equal share and has an equal vote through "one class" ownership. All worker-owners can participate in the General Assembly to elect its Board of Directors, which is comprised of fellow worker-owners in the cooperative. The Board appoints management within the cooperative for a limited term. Workers also directly elect a representative, internal Social Council to advise the Board and management on a range of employment issues, including wages and benefits.

Mondragon cooperatives also subscribe to a principle of wage solidarity. In most cases, the highest paid worker in the cooperative makes no more than 5 times the lowest paid worker in the cooperative. In contrast, CEO's at many multinational corporations take over 400 times the pay of the lowest paid worker. Wage solidarity means there is less disparity among workers and the communities in which they live, reinforcing the equality, and quality, of ownership.

Finally, the principle of social transformation means that a key part of the co-ops' mission is to support and invest in their communities by creating jobs, funding development projects, supporting education, and providing opportunity. Their communities, in turn, support the co-ops. . .

I was in nearby Bilbao for a meeting when a good friend, who also happens to be Mondragon's North American Delegate, suggested I go meet with the President of Mondragon Internacional at that time, Jesus Herrasti. In a good conversation, we found our organizations shared many key principles and ideas.

Over the year that followed, more conversations involving more people began to turn to specific ideas on how we might work together on projects in the U.S. and Canada.

In the context of the severe recession, we ultimately thought this was an idea and a partnership that shouldn't be kept under wraps until we figured out all the intricacies of launching a specific union co-op project.

The USW and Mondragon announced our alliance on October 27, 2009, with little more than a common set of principles and a general framework of how our alliance would work. Risky? Absolutely. Success is by no means guaranteed. . .

Despite still being in the preliminary stages of this alliance, I would argue that it has already been a success. Since our October announcement, we've gotten interest from people in all corners of the U.S. and Canada, plus the UK, France, Australia, and of course, Spain. . .

I've heard a number of people wonder openly about whether such an idea could really take root in an American culture steeped in individualism. I would reframe such questions in a slightly different way though. In the midst of economic devastation and oppression, the people who originally formed and supported the Mondragon cooperatives did so out of necessity to feed and provide for their families. They started their own schools, created their own jobs, provided their own health care and met their own banking and financing needs. Theirs is a story about self-reliance and pragmatism, not just idealism. Shared values such as self-reliance and ownership have deep roots in our culture and history. In the middle of this economic crisis, people are desperate for answers. . .

There are natural and historical alliances between the cooperative and labor union movements. Where those have diverged, we believe now is an important opportunity to bring them back together.

With Mondragon's assistance, we will seek to closely implement their worker-owner model in combination with our collective bargaining model in a way that makes the workplace more participatory and more accountable to the workers, but also protects the interests of the workers and establishes guidelines to ensure that all workers are treated fairly.

We must ensure that ownership means more than just the value of a share.

A core part of this hybrid will be to transform the role of the Social Council into a Union Bargaining Committee. To sustain this model, we must also ensure a dynamic labor-management relationship rooted in partnership, understanding the needs of both the business and the workers, and respect for the advocacy roles each must take on. . .

My union is undertaking this effort, like so many other things we do, because we know we cannot afford to rest on our heels. We cannot afford to insulate ourselves in the ongoing work of negotiating contracts and processing grievances. We must do more. For our members and for all workers.

We fight to protect the jobs we already have and the industries in which we work, but we also believe that our union can play an important role in creating new jobs, developing better business models, and growing new industries. . .

Father Arizmendi and five of his former students started a small co-op in the Basque region in 1956.

Imagine what we can do.

We have the power to change the world. The people right here, in this room, have the power to change the world, in ways both big and small.

What are we going to do with it?

We cannot afford to sit on our hands, we must act. We have the power and the responsibility to act. We can create good jobs. We can create jobs with justice. Now let's go do it._______________________________________________________

BBC - Almost four in five people around the world believe that access to the internet is a fundamental right, a poll for the BBC World Service suggests.
The survey - of more than 27,000 adults across 26 countries - found strong support for net access on both sides of the digital divide. Countries such as Finland and Estonia have already ruled that access is a human right for their citizens. International bodies such as the UN are also pushing for universal net access._______________________________________________________

TOM DELAY ON CNN - You know, there is an argument to be made that these extensions, the unemployment benefits keeps people from going and finding jobs. In fact there are some studies that have been done that show people stay on unemployment compensation and they don't look for a job until two or three weeks before they know the benefits are going to run out._______________________________________________________

BRUCE A DIXON, BLACK AGENDA REPORT- President Obama's new proposed nukes are in one of the poorest areas east of the Mississippi. Burke County Georgia is majority black, the home of existing commercial nuclear reactors and directly across the river from the Savannah River nuclear weapons facility. Its river is the fourth most polluted in the nation, and its residents are suffering a veritable epidemic of unexplained cancers, with no local, federal, public or private funds available to test their air, soil, water or environment for its causes. . .

President Obama's proposal to place a pair of new reactors in a majority black Georgia town a mere four miles from the existing nuclear weapons site at Savannah River and next door to Georgia Power's existing nukes at Vogtle selectively penalizes and endangers poor black communities and will cost black lives. . .

Until 2003 the federal government funded limited testing of the air, water and wildlife on the South Carolina side adjacent to the weapons plant, but this funding was discontinued during the Bush administration. As far as we know, nobody tests the air, ground water, wildlife or humans living on the Georgia side of the river, or near Georgia Power's existing reactors. But local residents do say there is a cancer epidemic in Waynesboro.

But Waynesboro, with a population of about 6,000, cannot afford to test the air and water. So far, no help is coming from Burke County or the state of Georgia either. The utility companies who make millions off their existing reactors at Vogtle, and to whom the Obama Administration wants to give $8 billion in free money for more nukes are under little or no obligation to test the air, the ground water, the local environment or the local population. Their only obligations are to their stockholders and the gods of profit._______________________________________________________

MAINE ACLU - the NYPD has subjected nearly 2.8 million people to stop and frisk over the past six years. "What's both interesting and scary is that the NYPD has documented every instance that stop-and-frisk was carried out. Therefore we know how many people were stopped, for what reason, and their race. The last factor is most important. The statistics reveal that white people need not fear an embarrassing frisk on a New York sidewalk anytime soon. Not only are most of the people stopped innocent, they are overwhelmingly either black or Hispanic. The NYPD is keeping all information about the stop on file in a database regardless of whether you were arrested or issued a summons. And they intend on keeping that information 'for use in future investigations'. So innocent people are being stopped, identified, and catalogued with the anticipation that sometime in the future they will be suspects. New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, cuts to the heart of the issue. If middle class and affluent white people were being victimized in this way, the stop-and-frisk and data retention policies would be inexcusable. But since the victims are poor and minorities, it's quietly accepted."_______________________________________________________