Attention Seattlites:
The Seattle Times ran a story in Sundays paper -

How an underdog named Mike McGinn took City Hall
How did Mike McGinn apparently take Seattle City Hall? The mayoral candidate had a fleet of volunteers so devoted they deferred graduate school, borrowed money from their parents and spent hours contacting voters for McGinn.

By Emily Heffter
Seattle Times staff reporter

……
By all accounts, McGinn was the underdog in the race. He was out-fundraised by more than 3-to-1, and he lacked big-name endorsements. He was opposed by Gov. Chris Gregoire, the chairman of the state Democratic Party, and most of the business and labor communities.

What he did have was a fleet of volunteers so devoted they deferred graduate school, borrowed money from their parents and spent hours contacting voters for McGinn.

The grass-roots campaign seemed to tap into Seattle’s idealism, as McGinn spoke about listening to people and bringing them to consensus, stopping plans for a deep-bore tunnel to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct and expanding light rail.

From: Democracy Now

Ten minutes of Zizek talking “Capitalism, Healthcare, Latin American ‘Populism’ and the ‘Farcical’ Financial Crisis”

Via: Troy Rhoades & Laurent Sauerwein

The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama’s administration refused to disclose due to “national security” concerns, has leaked. It’s bad. It says:

• That ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn’t infringing will exceed any hope of profitability.
• That ISPs have to cut off the Internet access of accused copyright infringers or face liability. This means that your entire family could be denied to the internet — and hence to civic participation, health information, education, communications, and their means of earning a living — if one member is accused of copyright infringement, without access to a trial or counsel.
• That the whole world must adopt US-style “notice-and-takedown” rules that require ISPs to remove any material that is accused — again, without evidence or trial — of infringing copyright. This has proved a disaster in the US and other countries, where it provides an easy means of censoring material, just by accusing it of infringing copyright.
• Mandatory prohibitions on breaking DRM, even if doing so for a lawful purpose (e.g., to make a work available to disabled people; for archival preservation; because you own the copyrighted work that is locked up with DRM)

They do it quietly in the night when no one is watching, or in this case in secret..

Alaskan Way Viaduct - Earthquake Simulation

From hugeasscity blog:

………Letter from five members of the Viaduct Advisory Stakeholders Committee:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
SEATTLE, WA — Oct. 26, 2009

Yesterday the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) released a dramatization showing the potential damage to the viaduct in the case of an earthquake. The probability of an earthquake strong enough to close the viaduct happening was stated as a 10% chance in the next ten years.

As citizens who served for a year in 2008 on the Viaduct Stakeholder Advisory Committee, we are disturbed that WSDOT did not share this video with us during the stakeholder process, even though it appears that they had paid Parsons Brinkerhoff to prepare it in 2007.

“From the beginning of the process, we had always operated under the assumption that the Governor meant what she said when she insisted that the Viaduct was coming down in 2012,” said Mike O’Brien.

“The deep bore tunnel was the only scenario that did not meet this strict deadline of removal of the viaduct by 2012,” commented Chuck Ayres. “All of the other scenarios we studied, including the two recommendations made by WSDOT, would have allowed for removal by 2012.”

“After watching the video, we are even more convinced that taking down the viaduct by 2012 should be a non-negotiable public safety priority of all parties involved,” said Mary McCumber.

“Would you sign a ten year lease on a building if you knew there was a 10% chance of it collapsing on you in those ten years?” asked Cary Moon. “By delaying the closure of the viaduct, that is in essence what we are asking the citizens of Seattle to do.”

Viaduct Stakeholder Advisory Committee members:

• Chuck Ayres 206.851.4312
• Rob Johnson 206.920.9578
• Mary McCumber 206.284.0605
• Cary Moon 206.624.1061 
• Mike O’Brien 206.200.2980

While the FCC pursues plans to enact some form of Net Neutrality, Senator John McCain attempts to remove anything to do with Internet Protocols (IP) from the jurisdiction of the FCC. Public pressure needs to be applied to make sure Net Neutrality is enabled.

McCain’s bill, the Internet Freedom Act, seeks to do the opposite of what its name implies by ensuring that broadband and wireless providers can discriminate and throttle certain traffic while giving preferential treatment to other traffic. Basically, those in power or those who pay more will have better access. Apparently we have different definitions of ‘freedom’.

According to the text of the McCain bill, the FCC “shall not propose, promulgate, or issue any regulations regarding the Internet or IP-enabled services.” Isn’t that what the FCC does? Isn’t that sort of like introducing a bill to prohibit the Treasury from printing money, or a bill to prohibit the IRS from collecting taxes?

Oddly, the bill also contains text stating that any regulations in effect on the day before the Internet Freedom Act is officially enacted are grandfathered in and exempt from the provisions of the Internet Freedom Act. The implication seems to be that if the FCC can formalize net neutrality rules before McCain can get the Internet Freedom Act signed into law, the net neutrality rules would still apply.

Net neutrality opponents claim that the free market can police itself and that any net neutrality restrictions will stifle innovation and competition. However, Comcast tried to throttle peer-to-peer networking traffic and only changed policy after the threat of FCC net neutrality rules. AT&T sought to block customers from using VoIP services from its wireless network, but changed policy out of fear of the net neutrality rules. The trend seems to be that these providers only do the ‘right thing’ when the net neutrality gun is pointing at their head.

Read entire article

This is not “news” but should not be forgotten. Sub Prime Mortgages were profitable for those selling them. They sure were expensive for America.

The management there, would encourage the loan officers, the subprime loan officers, to go into Baltimore city and target the churches, the African American churches, to get a relationship going with the minister or the reverend at the church and try to get that person to schedule some sort of meeting. They would call it a “wealth-building seminar” to get the parishioners of the church to attend. And any loan that was funded by Wells Fargo, whether a purchase or a refinance, $350 would then be donated to the church. And so, that was the incentive for the church to want to have these seminars there.

But what would happen is the only loan officers that would attend these seminars were generally the subprime loan officers. And on these conference calls, at one point, somebody made a joke who happened to be a white loan officer and said, “Well, will I be able to go to these seminars?” And they were told right there on the conference call, unless you were of color, you could not attend these conferences, these wealth-building conferences. So it seemed me—Wells Fargo didn’t come right out and say this; this is just what I saw—is that they wanted the African American Wells Fargo loan officers to sell loans to the African American community.

Wired Magazines Threat Level Blog has a good over view and latest news on the Elliot Madison arrest. It is clear to me there is a disconnect between the general public, the Obama Justice department and the murky world of law enforcement. There are so many different policing and intelligence services that share information and go off on a “terror” arresting people and invading their privacy; most Americans have no idea. First and fourth amendment rights are in great jeopardy today.


Elliot Madison
Photo by Bryan Derballa/Wired.com

Ruling Expected on Twittering Anarchist Raided Under ‘Rioting’ Laws
By Ryan Singel October 23, 2009

….. the U.S. Attorney’s Office defended the search in court, arguing that the broad search was just like those used in drug warrants, which were increasingly broadened over the last quarter century’s ill-fated War on Drugs.

The affidavits that supported the search warrant are under court seal, because the grand jury investigation is “complex and multi-state,” according to the prosecution.

The federal anti-rioting statute is serious business, and is seemingly easy to violate. For instance, it is a felony to “organize, promote, encourage, participate in, or carry on a riot; or […] to aid or abet any person in inciting or participating in […] a riot.” By that token, simply telling a person fleeing cops with batons which way to run makes you a felon.

One wonders how the Southern Christian Leadership Council and Martin Luther King, Jr. would have fared under that law, when he was in a Birmingham jail, writing letters urging people to support the direct-action program of sit-ins and marches. Those protesters were later attacked by police using dogs and fire hoses on the orders of Birmingham Sheriff Bull Connor.

Attention Seattlites
A group that is suing the Washington State Transportation Department over the tunnel project, arguing that WSDOT is illegally moving forward with the tunnel before completing a state-mandated environmental review; has released a boat load of documents. The records come from a massive public-disclosure request.

They are reviewed on PUBLICOLA site today.

From Publicola Online News:
BY ERICA C. BARNETT, 10/22/2009,

Public records from the state Department of Transportation (WSDOT) contain a number of disturbing revelations about the process that led WSDOT to move forward with the deep-bore tunnel on the downtown waterfront early this year…

Human Terrain

Film Makers Statement:

‘Human Terrain’ is two stories in one. The first exposes the U.S. effort to enlist the best and the brightest of American universities in a struggle for the hearts and minds of its enemies. Facing long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military adopts a controversial new program, ‘Human Terrain Systems’, to make cultural awareness a key element of its counterinsurgency strategy. Designed to embed social scientists with combat troops, the program swiftly comes under attack by academic critics who consider it misguided and unethical to gather intelligence and target potential enemies for the military. Gaining rare access to wargames in the Mojave Desert and training exercises at Quantico and Fort Leavenworth, ‘Human Terrain’ takes the viewer into the heart of the war machine and the shadowy collaboration between American academics and the armed services.

The other story is about a brilliant young scholar who leaves the university to join a Human Terrain team. After working as a humanitarian activist and winning a Marshall Scholarship to study at Oxford, Michael Bhatia returned to Brown University to conduct research on military cultural awareness. A year later, he left to embed as a Human Terrain member with the 82nd Airborne in Afghanistan. On May 7, 2008, en route to mediate an intertribal dispute, his humvee hit a roadside bomb and Bhatia was killed along with two other soldiers.

Video of Al Fraken questioning arbitration attorney, Jon Stewart’s commentary on Frankens amendment and statement from a victim of gang rape (KBR employee in Iraq) who has fought for 4 years to have her day in court.

LINK
Steven Shaviro has written a personal piece concerning the current “crisis” at Re-public. It is well worth reading.
Shaviro is a Professor of English at Wayne State University in Detroit, MI

Excerpt:
Even now, when the crisis is fully upon us, it’s impossible to understand it, or to make coherent sense of it. For the collapse takes place invisibly, and in slow motion. You can’t really see it as it happens. The day after all the credit dried up, the world looked the same as it had the day before. Eventually, you notice that there have been small, incremental changes. Some businesses have closed; there are less cars out on the street; there have been a few more break-ins in my neighborhood. But the “trickle-down” nature of these disruptions is such that you cannot ever view the changes directly.

The crisis is a disaster, in the sense described by Maurice Blanchot: “the disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact.” My house has not been changed in the time since the crisis hit. It is physically exactly the same as it was, and it is just as comfortable to live in. But it has nonetheless been impalpably transformed. It has gone from being a source of notional wealth to being a burdensome debt. Just a few years ago, the equity I held in it was greater than my yearly salary. But now, its market value is considerably less than the principal that I still owe the bank, according to the terms of my mortgage.

Of course, I am one of the lucky ones. I still have a well-paying job; and one that, as a tenured academic, I am unlikely to lose. I should be able to keep on paying my mortgage without defaulting — even though, strictly speaking, I am paying a considerable sum each month in return for a property value that no longer exists.The bank will continue to earn a profit from me — even as my own savings are negative, and still going down. Because of my employment situation, I won’t face the consequences of this deficit until I am forced to retire — something I hope I can hold off doing as long as possible.