Unreported

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Allison and Jamie discuss the relationship between hipsters and Hitler, give updates on the Bangladesh factory fire, talk about the targetting of journalists by Israel, the UN passing a resolution on female genital mutilation, drone stories, another innocent black teen gunned down, the ongoing fuckery known as the War on Drugs, global horrific treatment of women, and our future Water World.

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Listen to the new Citizen Radio and subscribe to the free podcast.

Surprise! The War on Drugs has failed, Allison and Jamie offer a touching tribute to Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in a reenactment of the War on Drugs’ genesis. Libertarians are still ridiculous, Fukushima has gone from bad to worse and now radioactive water threatens to spill into the ocean, the Sydney Morning Herald calls Noam Chomsky one of the most hated men in America, Republicans defund food regulation just in time for a huge E. Coli outbreak, Gov. Christie thinks a family of three can survive on $6,000 a year, and the GOP fears the vag (and boobies).

Plus, a very generous Maniac offers 5 Rebel memberships to any eager high schoolers out there who are enthusiastic activists in their own communities! Write Jamie with a brief summary of why you deserve the membership.

Check out Allison’s latest article at The Nation about seniors who are fighting back against the real death panels (austerity).

A few days ago, I wrote about Darrell Issa’s War on Regulation, and his shiny new mission statement:

The committee will query business leaders “about the government regulations that are doing the most harm to job creation efforts” and “examine how overregulation has hurt job creation.”

The implication here being that regulation is bad for the job market. Except, the FCC just proved that government intervention can be good for business. Cue a thousand teabaggers’ heads popping like champagne corks.

The story concerns Skype’s two year battle to get onto the iPhone. AT&T claimed its network could barely handle regular phone calls, so it definitely couldn’t facilitate web calls like those from Skype. The FCC decided that was anti-competitive behavior, so now you’ll soon be able to do video calls on whatever network you use. Alas, that means iPhone can no longer play the role of closed system corporate juggernaut, but it’s very good news for a business like Skype.

Skype’s evolution on the iPhone is an even clearer example of what happened after the FCC sets its precedent in the Google Voice case. In October 2009, a few months after the initial Google Voice probe, AT&T announced that it was no longer going to ban apps like Skype and Google Voice from placing calls over its 3G network. By May 2010, Skype had released a new version of its app that took advantage of AT&T’s new leniency. And now we have an app that can videochat on both networks.

So a flourishing business that employees lots of real-life people has a new product that will makes lots of money. That means more competition and more freedom between competitors. And here I thought the FCC’s only job was to ruin telecommunications companies and eat babies.

Listen to the new Citizen Radio and subscribe to the free podcast.

Darrell Issa is the new chairman of the House oversight committee, and he has decided to wage war against regulation. Jerry Brown, the Democratic governor of California, has big plans for his state, and they all involve austerity! Gitmo is still open, and may remain so, due to a complicated set of policies implemented by Obama and Congress. Anonymous takes on the Tunisian government, and some breaking (kind of) news about Prop 8. Also, Jamie plans for the War On Beck.

This, and all CR podcasts, are brought to you by the good folk at Vegan Essentials (http://veganessentials.com/). Buy cruelty-free products there and tell ‘em Citizen Radio sent you!

A hearing topic outline released today shows what Darrel Issa intends to investigate during his time as the new chairman of the House oversight committee.

The committee will query business leaders “about the government regulations that are doing the most harm to job creation efforts” and “examine how overregulation has hurt job creation.”

Of course, it was precisely the lack of regulation that led to some of the most spectacular catastrophes in modern American history: New Orleans’ faulty levees, the subprime housing bubble, Massey Energy Mine explosion, and BP oil volcano.

I agree that government regulation should be streamlined, and cleaned out (for example, regulators are far too cozy with the industries they’re meant to be supervising,) but let’s be honest. Republicans aren’t interested in streamlining. They want to do away with regulation entirely so our Galtian overlords can produce all of that sweet, sweet wealth that will totally trickle down… eventually. Even though it hasn’t really been trickling for a few decades now, and in fact “C.E.O.’s of the largest American companies earned an average of 42 times as much as the average worker in 1980, but 531 times as much in 2001,” and “[f]rom 1980 to 2005, more than four-fifths of the total increase in American incomes went to the richest 1 percent.”

Nick Kristof calls that America’s banana republic. I’m sure Issa calls that good ol’-fashioned Capitalism. Other Republican armchair philosophers have a funny idea about how to fix the country. Bobo says we shouldn’t be worried about the size of government, but rather if policy arouses energy, fosters skills, spurs social mobility and helps people transform their lives. It’s a nice theory, except when one pauses to consider the Republicans would like to facilitate the exact culture of unsupervised greed that led us to this place of enormous wealth disparity and recession – precisely the time when a strong social safety net and welfare benefits are so crucial.

Bobo blames big government for self-indulgence and irresponsibility, but there’s a difference between big government and corporatism. Big government can foster all the energy, skills, and social mobility Bobo pines for by implementing living wages, regulating business, and building infrastructure (take the New Deal, for example.) On the other hand, corporatism has led to America’s demise: the widening wealth divide, the unregulated casino known as Wall Street, the rot of Congress.

The program he points to as a “failure” of Big Government is welfare – unsurprisingly, since Bobo probably hasn’t seen a poor person since 1987.

The welfare policies of the 1960s gave people money without asking for work and personal responsibility in return, and these had to be replaced. The welfare reforms of the 1990s involved big and intrusive government, but they did the job because they were in line with American values, linking effort to reward.

Those welfare programs, by the way, keep millions of people from starving and going homeless. Of course, that (along with Social Security) are the only programs Republicans are truly interested in cutting. You see, waste is fine when we’re talking about a swollen military budget, endless wars, tax cuts for rich people (like David Brooks) who don’t need them, throwing money at the ol’ vampire squid, and creating a certain bureaucratic committee that ironically exists specifically to dismantle the very government that created it.

But gee golly gosh, folks, we just don’t have enough money for your bread and rent. Sorry. Maybe the five million of you out there who have been looking for work for around 99 weeks should have made a bigger effort, like Bobo says. Certainly, we shouldn’t place any unnecessary burden on the captains of industry who, ya’ know, wrecked the fucking planet by gambling with mortgages, and cost millions of Americans their jobs and homes. The real threat to our freedom are those welfare Queens!

The most dangerous part about Issa’s bathtub drowning commission is that he may occasionally mix in some legitimate (at least in theory) investigations, say, into Afghanistan. Such scrutiny should have been implemented by the Democrats and President Obama, but since they have failed to do so, Issa stands a chance of looking like a real political maverick. He may simultaneously launch an Afghanistan hearing while he hacks away at badly needed regulations.

Don’t get me wrong, there aren’t many useful regulations left, particularly in the financial industry, but Matt Taibbi highlighted a few reforms that made it into the financial reform bill that are pretty steller examples of regulation done right.

One is the new whistleblower provisions that would theoretically provide bounties for those who expose fraud and the like. Another is the provision that would force banks to retain at least a 5% stake in the mortgage-backed securities they sell to investors, although, as with nearly all the reforms in the bill, there is already a major effort underway to riddle this provision with loopholes. The audit of the Fed was a huge historical hurdle for congress to get over, I thought, and I guess the partial ban on prop trading was significant.

Now, I have no idea what the scope of Issa’s investigations will be, but I know financial regulations are the bane of the corporate government’s existence, and they’ll be enemy #1 for any committee charged with targeting anything resembling an impediment on “job creation” AKA “letting the financial terrorists do whatever they want lest they tank the NASDAQ.”

The WSJ published a ridiculous article yesterday that claims Capitalism saved the Chilean miners, and opens with a boldface lie when writer Daniel Henninger proclaims, “It needs to be said.” Does it, Daniel? Does it really?

Henninger believes the rescue of the miners is a smashing success for free market Capitalism because without that nifty drill bit, which was the only tool capable of freeing the workers, those blue-collar suckers would still be trapped in the belly of the earth with Satan and his fiery army. You see, the drill bit was developed by a company for a profit, which obviously means regulation and anything else that stands in the way of the righteous free market, is are killing Chilean miners. Or something.

In reality, Capitalism helped contribute to the mine disaster. That is, hyper-Capitalism, the most warped version of Capitalism, which sacrifices regulation in the name of profit, led to mine disasters that culminated with 33 men being trapped deep below ground in darkness for 69 days.

Dick Blin, a spokesman for the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers’ Unions in Geneva, says the Chile accident is a sign that the workplace safety culture needs to change in Chile. As proof, Blin cites the fact that the San Jose Mine was closed down for safety violations in 2006 and 2007.

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* Updated the headline: I originally wrote that Rand Paul said the following statement. It was actually his equally oblivious father, Ron. The rest of the article is really about Rand’s previous statements that illustrated how disengaged he is from average Americans, and his sense of entitlement that probably comes from his awful dad, whose terribleness is demonstrated in the quote.

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At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if Rand Paul turned out to be a DNC plant.

BP’s $20 billion escrow fund is a “PR stunt” that came about through a “suspicious” process, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) said Tuesday night.

Though Paul didn’t go as far as fellow Texan Rep. Joe Barton (R), who called the fund a “shakedown,” he nevertheless said the “process is sort of suspicious.”

“They have agreed to this and this is sort of a PR stunt as far as I’m concerned,” Paul told Fox News. “BP had already been making a lot of payments to people who had been injured.”

He said this… on television…while the crisis is still happening.

This follows Rand’s comments about unemployed people being a bunch of lazy shit sacks, who are too “picky” and insist on passing up all kinds of sweet, sweet employment opportunities (like the jobs that don’t offer benefits or a living wage).

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Surely, the BP disaster deserves the obsessive coverage it has received (thus far). But at the risk of missing some other important stories, I want to briefly address two somewhat overlooked catastrophes – one that has already taken place, and one that possesses the potential to be horrific, but we still have time to stop.

Many Americans would be surprised to hear there’s another domestic oil spill – in Salt Late City. (via)

Chevron says a hole the size of a quarter caused their pipeline to rupture around 33,000 gallons of oil into the creek.

The manager of Chevron’s refinery in the Salt Lake City area said Monday that the company believes the rupture in the 10-inch pipeline was caused by an electrical arc that traveled through a metal fence post. Mark Sullivan says the arc acted like an electrical torch, causing the hole.

Sullivan couldn’t say how long the pipeline was leaking before Chevron was notified of the problem Saturday morning. But Salt Lake City Mayor Ralph Becker says residents could smell the odor of petroleum overnight Friday.

The spill has coated about 300 birds at area creeks and ponds, and the oil is possibly threatening an endangered fish.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iRUwVMK11Q]

Chairman of the Salt Lake City Council,  J.T. Martin, calls the event a horrible tragedy.

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A bird covered in oil flails in the surf at East Grand Terre Island along the Louisiana coast Thursday, June 3, 2010. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)

The other day, I was discussing the “branding” of the BP disaster with a friend. Calling this catastrophe a “spill” seems like a laughable understatement, and my phrasing (the “oil geyser”) wasn’t really catchy. A few weeks ago, the term “oil volcano” emerged, I think because it was first used by Rachel Maddow, and I believe it captures the severity of the situation.

So this thing, the oil volcano, has been pumping thousands of barrels of oil into the ocean every single day. That much is undeniable. BP can’t approach the media and say, “Epic disaster is all over, folks!” because there are cameras (now HD video) down there, filming the whole thing.

The company attempted to use dispersants (hundreds of thousands of gallons of the toxic stuff) in order to coagulate the oil and sink it to the bottom, conveniently hiding the true toll of the oil volcano from the world. Except, that didn’t work entirely, and some endangered birds got snagged in the sludge.

Literally, there is nothing BP can now do in order to mend its public image except lie. And lie they have. Tony Hayward blamed workers’ illnesses on food poisoning instead of acknowledging exposure to oil fumes and dispersants tend to make individuals sick. BP denied the existence of those massive underwater oil plumes. You know, the ones NOAA just confirmed exist.

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President Tony Hayward

The President and the media can’t help BP rush through the unpleasantness of poisoning the ocean quickly enough. First, the government (starting with Bush, but extending through Obama’s reign) staffed the MMS with incompetents, who apparently alternated between allowing oil and gas company workers to fill out their own inspection forms, accepting Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl tickets from offshore drilling companies, and smoking crystal meth.

What I’m trying to say is, the MMS was extremely busy, which is probably why they didn’t notice BP’s blowout preventer had a dead battery in its control pod, leaks in its hydraulic system, a “useless” test version of a key component and a cutting tool that wasn’t strong enough to shear through steel joints in the well pipe and stop the flow of oil in the event of a fiery explosion, which by the way, totally happened. But who has time to check superfluous stuff like a blowout preventer? I mean, that meth isn’t going to smoke itself.

BP has shown a desire to cover its own ass by allegedly forbidding clean-up crews to wear respirators so as to avoid future negligence lawsuits even as it continues to dump toxic dispersants, which have been banned in the UK, ignoring the EPA’s pleas to find a less toxic (and extremely available) version.

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