‘Atomic’ blast after oil train derails, forcing evacuation of Canadian town Associated Press
Brazilian referee beheaded by spectators after he fatally stabs player Guardian
Hikikomori: Why are so many Japanese men refusing to leave their rooms? BBC (furzy mouse)
Those gut germs may shape your life from birth NBC
How to Destroy a Community New Inquiry (Lambert)
Lockdown Marco Arment (Lambert). On why Google killed Google Reader.
‘Master key’ to Android phones found BBC
China suspends PMI detail MacroBusiness
Pope Francis Shakes Up Church Establishment ABC
Mohamed ElBaradei’s appointment as Egypt’s interim PM thrown into doubt Guardian
Cracks Emerge as Egyptians Seek Premier New York Times
Rope-a-dope: The strategy of Egypt’s puppet masters Aljazeera. Lambert: “More nuanced than the headline.”
Passions of the Meritocracy: General David Petraeus and his wandering PhD Baffler (mookie)
Big Brother is Watching You Watch:
Bolivia latest country to offer asylum to Snowden CNN
The NSA’s mass and indiscriminate spying on Brazilians Glenn Greenwald
In Secret, Court Vastly Broadens Powers of N.S.A. Mew York Times
Come Saturday Morning: Reclaiming Our LIBERT-E Phoenix Woman, Firedoglake (Bev)
WHAT IT’S LIKE TO GET A NATIONAL-SECURITY LETTER New Yorker (spooz)
Customs & Border Protection Logged Eight-Fold Increase in Drone Surveillance for Other Agencies EFF (Mark P)
City Unions: Wall Street Looted Oakland Darwin BondGraham, East Bay Express (mookie)
Kevyn Orr to load bankers in a bus, show them Detroit’s worst neighborhoods Detroit Free Press (1 SK)
New York fast food worker: ‘I think I deserve to eat lunch’ Daily Kos (Carol B)
Bank of America Boosts U.S. 10-Year Yield Forecast to 3% on Jobs Bloomberg
MBS Clobbered and Treasury Yields Soar Following Purportedly Good Job Numbers Michael Shedlock (furzy mouse)
U.S. swaps regulator calls vote on cross-border rule Reuters. We’ll see how much of a “compromise” this is. George Bailey of Occupy the SEC is hopeful that the phased in approach referenced is the one advocated by CFTC Commissioner Bart Chilton.
Antidote du jour (furzy mouse):
Lily is a Great Dane that has been blind since a bizarre medical condition required that she have both eyes removed. For the last 5 years, Madison , another Great Dane, has been her sight. The two are, of course, inseparable.
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I wonder if it has occurred to the countries offering Snowden asylum that they should all separately grant asylum regardless final settlement destination, so as to reduce the probability of US pressure/retaliation.
Some have been wondering how Snowden has managed to avoid being seen during his time at the Moscow airport. I suppose its too much to hope that he is already in one of the countries that has offered him asylum after that fiasco with the Bolivian president’s plane.
Maybe the cosmetic surgery takes time to fully heal.
Maybe he’s learning another language in the meantime.
Maybe he’ll be introduced to last year’s winners of The Running Man game show, in the basement of some airport somewhere.
Maybe the US already killed him in order to avoid the questions of “what to do with him?” and possible MSM media scrutiny (which can’t avoid the substantive issues forever, can they?), like they did with OBL. Issuing a warrant, etc. might be “going thru the motions”.
I love to speculate…
I’m very much struck by the White House’s increasingly desperate behavior in trying to capture Snowden. Snowden must be in possession of some information that’s either incredibly incriminating or awfully embarrassing to the President. This also proves, once again, what a pathological Liar-in Chief Obama is when he stated last week that he’s “not going to be scrambling jets to get a 29-year-old hacker.”
Denying air-space access to a foreign head-of-state is an extraordinary move in diplomatic circles. The charges of ‘kidnapping’ are not appropriate, but if you’re Bolivia, this is just short of an act of war.
Now if Bolivian authorities forced down Air Force One and kept Obama cooling his heels for 7 hours while searching his plane for people they didn’t like, Obama wouldn’t hesitant to impose sanctions or even declare war on Bolivia.
How can Obama think of himself as the so-called “Leader of the Free world” when he’s totally incapable of putting himself in other people’s shoes?
From Diana Johnstone’s “The Servility of the Satellites” article at Counterpunch:
Johnstone makes the point in this article that the Affair Snowden “has revealed even more about Europe than about the United States.” It shows the subservience of France, Italy and Portugal in refusing the Bolivian president passage thru their air spaces. And it “confirms the completion of the transformation of Western democracies into something else…”
Democracy has slowly been destroyed in Europe. In the U.S. the destruction of democracy has been done with money that has bought the politicians.
This new entity combo of the EU and the US will be further strengthened by the free trade zone pact. But the politicians and media are tasked with keeping the illusion of democracy intact. This is the “managed democracy” that the intellectual Sheldon Wolin writes about. But when something like a Snowden affair happens and the plane of a country’s president is forced to land and be searched, that carefully concocted curtain has been torn down. Toto survived and got to go home. Snowden’s future may not be as rosy.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/07/05/the-servility-of-the-satellites/
It’s a good thought.
Come on mice, you’ll never bell the cat unless you work together.
~
And that’s why dogs are better than cats. :)
hey – there are some pretty amazing kitties, too!
“…Terfel’s life changed for the better, though, when Judy adopted a stray cat named Pwditat, who appointed herself as the dog’s service animal and pal. Pwditat walked up to Terfel, led him from his basket, and brought him out into the garden. She has continued to help the dog get around and enjoy life since moving in…”
http://www.lifewithcats.tv/2012/12/27/guide-cat-helps-her-blind-dog-friend/
But that’s because she wants to.
Damn, that’s cute. Okay, I love cats too :).
And certainly better than people.
On a perhaps unrelated note, all this new study of the microbiome in our guts and bodies generally is fascinating. I was listening to the results of some huge govt-funded study that concluded that the bacteria in our bodies qualifies as an entire additional organ in terms of size and importance to bodily function. Researchers are just scratching the surface of this new topic. Already lives are being saved: people who have been given antibiotic bombs to cure infections sometimes waste away because the antibiotics also kill all the healthy flora in their systems. Using “poop” suppositories from family members have saved more than one life from this wasting disease.`
One implication of this new research on the importance of alien micro-organisms for the functioning of a large organism is that it is impossible to bring back to life an extinct species, no matter how complete and well preserved is the DNA of the organism to be brought back to life.
Neat argument!
it also goes to diet. give two people the same meal and it’s probably one person will extract more calories from that meal than the other due to the gut ecology.
there’s a BBC documentary called “Guts” (also aired on PBS) that goes into the importance of gut bacteria in nice detail.
Def gonna check that out. Thanks!
Just remembering Lives of a Cell. (Lewis Thomas?) We were informed that every cell in our body is a collection of bacteria and that RNA itself is (was) thought to be of bacterial origin. 10,000 bacteria species in the gut doesn’t surprise me. It just makes me more adamant than ever against idiots like Monsanto.
Really makes you wonder where the bacteria stops and the person starts. Probly the same place where the money stops and the wealth starts. Right there! It’s on the map in your head.
Wait ’til Monsanto sells you its “New, Improved!” Gut Biome for a low, low $19.95 [a month [in perpetuity]].
Don’t worry. The alkaloids are harmless.
Regarding bacteria, all the plastic collecting in our oceans is creating microbial plastic reefs, a “plastisphere”. There is evidence of the plastic degrading, suggesting that the evolving microbes are feeding on it. Whether the plastic passes into the food chain or carry disease causing pathogens remains to be seen, but it provides a fascinating look at evolution in action.
“Using scanning electron microscopy and gene sequencing techniques, they found at least 1000 different types of bacterial cells on the plastic samples, including many individual species yet to be identified. They included plants, algae, and bacteria that manufacture their own food (autotrophs), animals and bacteria that feed on them (heterotrophs), predators that feed on these, and other organisms that establish synergistic relationships (symbionts). These complex communities exist on plastic bits hardly bigger than the head of a pin, and they have arisen with the explosion of plastics in the oceans in the last 60 years.”
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/06/130627142549.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Latest+Science+News%29&WT.mc_id=WordPress_LegalNews_Widget&cid=soc%3A103
That’s insane. I do hope the bacteria aren’t terribly harmful, because something tells me we aren’t going to be eliminating the plastic in our oceans anytime soon.
Perhaps methods could be ways to accelerate the biological degradation. Microbiologist Ian Marshall points out the sort of research that could be pursued:
“I think there needs to be a lot more work done here – maybe some enrichments with stable-isotope-labeled plastic followed by FISH/NanoSIMS or at least some FISH to figure out the identity of those cells buried halfway into the plastic. But I think that we at least need to stop dismissing these plastic materials as “inert” or “unable to biodegrade” and to start doing some research into whether this biodegradation is real and, if so, how fast it works and what factors affect it.”
http://schroedingersmicrobe.wordpress.com/2013/06/20/new-paper-on-biodegrading-plastics-in-the-north-atlantic/
@ “The NSA’s mass and indiscriminate spying on Brazilians”
Unlike in the UK and Germany, where Obama has his perritos falderos Merkel and Cameron to run interference for him, this knowledge has the potential to have real consequences in Brazil. There you have a government which is already in rebellion against US-imposed neoliberalism and is attempting to slip out from under the US neo-imperial jackboot.
And while we’re on the subject of Brazil, there was an article from links a couple of days ago that said the following:
The statement that “the Lula government never broke with neoliberal orthodoxy” is, I believe, false. As Paul Cooney notes here, neoliberalism is a doctrine of deindustrialization. And since industrialization has always been a primary emphasis of both the Lula and Dilma regimes, the neoliberal designation just doesn’t fit. It is no more appropriate for Brazil than it would be for Germany or China, even though Brazil has followed a very different path, that of spurring internal demand, which is at odds with the export model being pursued by China and Germany.
http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?pid=S1415-98482007000100001&script=sci_arttext
A more appropriate name for the political economy pursued by Lula and Dilma would be “conservative developmentalism.” As José Blanco notes:
And, as Stephan Schulmeister has pointed out, none of these distinctions are understandable within the framework of classical or neoclassical economics, where the economy is divided into only two parts: capital and labor. Either a Marxist or Keynesian perspective is needed.
Schulmeister, for instance, asserts that “There exist three types of participation in the production process, labour, real capital and finance capital, and, hence, three types of interests.”
http://stephan.schulmeister.wifo.ac.at/fileadmin/homepage_schulmeister/files/Navigation_Leipzig_22_06_13_ohne_verk.pdf
I don’t know if Michael Hudson is as influential in Latin America as Schulmeister, but he has hit similar notes:
Wow, I hadn’t seen that Micharl Hudson piece before. Very impressive–thanks for the link.
I second that – read quite a bit of Hudson and missed this one entirely.
The National Security Letter link takes you to the comment about American war crimes in Japan.
Here’s the right link:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/06/what-its-like-to-get-a-national-security-letter.html
Fixed, thanks.
“Rise of the Warrior Cop” Fascinating long read about militarization of American police forces. Cops are shooting gamblers, dogs, and people suspected of cock fighting. The author also challenges the rise of the dangerous extreme right wing, which has also encouraged the rise of paramilitary cops. There are some truly bizarre guest stars (okay, Stephen Segal) “Maybe it just comes down to that—we can get away with it, therefore we do it.”
http://www.salon.com/2013/07/07/%E2%80%9Cwhy_did_you_shoot_me_i_was_reading_a_book_the_new_warrior_cop_is_out_of_control/
That photo– ugh.
It is interesting how the postal service manages to avoid injury by dog without, you know, shooting to kill. Or shooting at all. And I’m sure the numbers of their encounters with dangerous dogs far eclipse police departments.
Anyway, it looks like many warrior cops view us as no differently than these “dangerous” wheaton terriers.
In the rural United States, you can have quite a few people on your property at any given time. Television/internet personnel maintain their commo lines, electric and natural gas meter readers, USPS/UPS/FedEx, surveyors, underground utility locate staff, and even fire or police. I’m amazed more people aren’t bitten by dogs on a regular basis, or maybe they just bring dog treats everyday.
Well, its only a matter of time before the US ends up like either Columbia or the USSR.
‘Land of the Free’ my ass.
Yes…South America, in the 80’s and 90’s.
The Pope Francis link is broken, or the story was pulled.
Try this one: http://abcnews.go.com/International/popes-reform-path-francis-shakes-church-establishment/story?id=19573297#.Udl-Zm3lflU
Fixed, thanks again.
Once this sea and area is commercialized… there will be no other… ever~
http://www.thelastoceanfilm.com/
So New Zealand is into illegal fishing too? I thought it was just Japan. Silly me. This is so discouraging when what we need is a moratorium on fishing almost the world over. And a concerted effort by all governments to restore oceans; clean up pollution and plastic garbage poisoning fish. I no longer eat fresh fish. I had almost given it up before Fukushima. But Fukushima was the last straw. If we can restore our oceans, we can do anything. Let’s just see what we can accomplish starting now.
“And a concerted effort by all governments to restore oceans”
If the world cant even agree to things like carbon emissions what makes you think they could come together on something like fishing? It wont happen.
By the way, speaking of carbon emissions, ocean acidification created by rising carbon levels may prove just as dangerous as overfishing or pollution. Among other things, its very likely that coral will be extinct within half a century due to increased bleaching from increased acidification.
The ocean is screwed. And no government is going to do anything. The contradictions of capitalism are too great to overcome by anything short of a world government. Not, by the way, that I advocate a world government.
“They don’t make any more waterfront.” But I did, with permaculture 25 years ago and wildlife has flourished; turtles, marsh rabbits, marsh hens, screech owl and all the fish. But I can’t leave the place without being robbed.
For sale.
Thanks for the effort.
I love to speculate.
Baffler post was fun.
I agree.
On another note, the Hikikomori story was way too short and superficial to be considered insightful …as it could and should have been.
After all, the case could very easily be made that a lot [perhaps most ?] of people appearing to lead what seems to be happy productive consumer lives, live in fact, a hollow pointless fucking existence. The difference being that the Hikikomori probably knows he’s leading a hollow pointless fucking existence.
It’s all a matter of perspective…
Snowden interview with der Spiegel (with help from Jacob Appelbaum and Lauren Poitras): Snowden said the NSA people are “in bed together with the Germans.”
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/edward-snowden-accuses-germany-of-aiding-nsa-in-spying-efforts-a-909847.html
Beware NSAmericans bearing beds!
Officials worry seniors being pushed out hospitals prematurely as Medicare seeks to cut costs
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
WEST PALM BEACH —
At 7:30 in the morning George Matsoukas’ phone rang with urgent news about his 96-year-old mother, who had fallen and broken her pelvis two days earlier.
It was their family physician, with what seemed to him a bizarre and unreasonable demand: Matsoukas needed to come immediately to remove his frail mother from JFK Medical Center in Atlantis. Matsoukas, a retired community college instructor who lives in West Palm Beach, was baffled.
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/news/officials-worry-seniors-being-pushed-out-hospitals/nYfkL/
@ Antidote (1st photo)
I was blown away by the resemblance of the dog on the right To John Inverdale. Sometimes gifts fall from heaven and bare arses get exposed like John and his BBC pimp. No refutation needed, just the light of day. Yuck!
Oops, forgot the context.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23214821
I apologize to the Great Dane for my insensitive remark. I’m truly very sorry.
Anna Russell: “Hamlet, the gr-r-r-e-at Dane….”
Sure. But I got a laugh, nevertheless ;)
>> Lockdown Marco Arment (Lambert). On why Google killed Google Reader.
I suspected as much. But, I have to wonder whether this will be “worth it” for Google to try to clone Facebook instead of (continuing?) positioning itself as “the open-standards company you love”.
For instance, once Google killed iGoogle and iReader, it made me ask why I’m still using their search engine. IOW, they’re hurting their brand. Now, I use DuckDuckGo.
To “serve Google right”, I hope other people follow suit.
The “How To Destroy a Community” link is fascinating. What’s happening in the Eve Online MMO game occurred in the late Soviet Union, and it is what’s happening now in real life here in the USA and the rest of the developed world.
May I ask how thats happening in the united states?
People still think of themselves as Americans, not Southerners or Northerners, or Virginians or Manhattanites.
I dont really see how the US is having a failure cascade. Even as America decays noticeably, and maybe even comes close to collapse, the majority of Americans are still vigorously, maybe even overly, proud of their identity as Americans.
Yeah, you know, I think maybe they already did that.
Agreements with private companies protect U.S. access to cables’ data for surveillance:
In Secret, Court Vastly Broadens Powers of N.S.A. (NY Times)
Yet another article exposing the NSA’s Kangaroo Courts and Peak-a-boo Oversight. The lack of real supervision, and the inability to articulate any real Mission* that calls for such surveillance makes a mockery of any legitimate spying function that the NSA may have.
Does NY Times raising issues like this signal a turning point in the Obama Administration’s ‘Trust Us’ posture on NSA spying?
– – –
* Anyone paying attention knows that good policing and human intel are much much more important for fighting terr0rism. Senator Udall and others have said that NSA spying made no significant contribution to preventing the 50 terr0rist incidents that NSA has claimed to help prevent.
Perhaps this wouldn’t be such a problem if Udall (back in 2008 when he was my Congressman) hadn’t voted for telecom immunity, thereby officially turning a blind eye to illegal wiretapping.
As written to a Bloomfield Hills Suburbanite living well:
I would suggest there is more to this than just corruption causing the decline in Detroit. Other cities faced similar corruption and somehow managed to survive in spite of it. The city that worked under white Mayor Richard Daley had its years of corruption and managed to survive. Intertwined with corruption there are other key and more important elements to this decline in the status of Detroit which I have posted on before and I will reiterate here again. With a very clear economic basis; I can say without Detroit, those wealthy and white neighborhoods surrounding it would never have come into being and would be little more than truck farms today. In “White Flight to the Suburbs” http://www.irp.wisc.edu/publications/focus/pdfs/foc32a.pdf ;Frey was able to confirm partially his hypotheses.
– By far the largest total effect on white suburban movement in the 39 SMSAs can be attributed to the extent of postwar suburban development- although in these newer and more rapidly growing cities there tend to be large counter streams that balance and to some extent mitigate the effects of the outflow of whites.
– Next in influence was the percentage of the city population that was black-a factor that to some extent measures the degree of daily contact between blacks and whites in the central city. We cannot, therefore, wholly discount racial factors in our analysis of the causes of white flight.
– Of equal influence, however, were the suburb/city tax differential, and the degree to which employment opportunities had recently moved to the suburbs (measured by the percentage of city dwellers commuting to the suburbs to work).
Perhaps, you also missed the legal story of Milliken vs Bradley? This court ruling and the resulting deterioration of Detroit adds to Frey’s points. This ruling closed the door on Detroit early on and well before corruption became a synonym for Detroit. What was allowed to happen in Minneapolis St.Paul was closed to Detroit. I can not think of many other rulings having such a disastrous impact other than Marquette Nat. Bank of Minneapolis v. First of Omaha Service Corp or the Untied Citizens ruling. Economically Detroit was cut off from the rest of the state through arbitrary state policy and the court system. One can wonder why or just assume NIMBY when it comes to race.
Recognizing that segregation was also extremely prevalent in Detroit’s school system, and that largely black schools performed much more poorly than largely white schools, the Detroit Board of Education passed an order in 1970 that would have bused white children to black schools, and vice-versa. A locally based recall campaign followed, and the state passed a law that voided the plan and kept school districts under neighborhood control.
Later that year, the NAACP sued the state and the school board in federal District Court, arguing that, as in Brown v. Board of Education, separate was not equal, and that the policies of the state and school board had deliberately kept the school system segregated. The case was entitled Milliken v. Bradley.
The district court found in favor of the NAACP and ordered the school district to draft a desegregation plan. The city presented the court with three different Detroit-wide plans, all of which the court rejected. The court then ruled that it was not possible to desegregate the Detroit Public School System without including the suburban communities. The city was ordered to submit a “metropolitan” plan that would eventually encompass a total of fifty-four separate school districts, busing Detroit children to suburban schools and suburban children into Detroit.
On appeal, however, the Supreme Court ruled against the NAACP. Even though the organization had presented evidence of housing segregation that operated on a metropolitan level, Chief Justice William Burger claimed that “the case does not present any question concerning possible state housing violations,” and Justice Potter Stewart, who cast the key fifth vote dooming a metropolitan remedy, asserted that housing segregation was caused by “unknown and unknowable causes.”
The impact of the case was enormous. According to Gary Orfield and Susan E. Eaton in their 1996 book Dismantling Desegregation, “By failing to examine housing, the Court gave neighborhoods that had successfully segregated their housing an exemption from school desegregation requirements. City neighborhoods that had not excluded, blacks, on the other hand, faced mandatory desegregation.” The court effectively blessed suburbs with all-white schools as “refuges for whites fearful of minorities moving into their schools,” Orfield and Eaton wrote.More generally, according to Dismantling Desegregation, the “Supreme Court’s failure to examine the housing underpinnings of metropolitan segregation” in Milliken made desegregation “almost impossible” in northern metropolitan areas. “Suburbs were protected from desegregation by the courts ignoring the origin of their racially segregated housing patterns.”
Detroit’s tax-base had already fallen significantly by 1970, while the suburbs were experiencing strong growth. In his 1976 State of the State address, then-Governor Milliken proposed that the Detroit area adopt a similar model. “There was a recognition that the unequal patterns of growth were going to continue unless something was changed,” said Robert Kleine, who served as the director of the Office of Revenue and Tax Analysis for the State of Michigan under Milliken.
But Milliken’s plan was never even taken up in the state legislature. According to Kleine, suburban municipalities were deeply resistant to the idea. He acknowledged, too, that no one advocated strongly on behalf of the proposal from the city, and that Milliken did not press the issue in the face of that resistance and apathy.
Had such a system been adopted, however, “What would have happened of course is that all the growth in the region, which was mainly in [neighboring] Oakland and Macomb Counties, would have been shared with the City of Detroit,” Kleine said. “That would have meant somewhat less revenue for some of the suburbs, but they would have done just fine. But Detroit would have had a substantial amount of additional revenue.”
As Remapping Debate has reported, the decline in Detroit’s tax base represents the greatest challenge to the city’s ability to sustain itself. It has responded to the loss in revenue by cutting services down to bare-bones and by raising taxes to the highest levels in the state. Kleine said that a regional tax-base sharing system would have mitigated the problem’s Detroit has faced with revenue.
Additionally, Orfield added, a fragmented system of taxation encourages individual municipalities to compete with one another by lowering taxes. “That competition has been very destructive in Detroit, because the city has had to keep its tax rates high to maintain services, while the suburbs have been able to draw people and investment out of the city by lowering taxes,” a process that encourages sprawl. Squandered Opportunities Leave Detroit Isolated” http://www.remappingdebate.org/article/squandered-opportunities-leave-detroit-isolated?page=0,3
“In effect, the city has been isolated from the belt of suburbs around it by law, by race, by education, and by economics. Due to isolation, the city can not compete with the suburbs around it and grow its tax base to improves its schools and infrastructure leaving it little more opportunity than the destruction of abandoned buildings and a shrinking city limit.
As written to Bloomfield Hills suburbanite . . .
I would suggest there is more to this than just corruption causing the decline in Detroit. Other cities faced similar corruption and somehow managed to survive in spite of it. The city that worked under white Mayor Richard Daley had its years of corruption and managed to survive. Intertwined with corruption there are other key and more important elements to this decline in the status of Detroit which I have posted on before and I will reiterate here again. With a very clear economic basis; I can say without Detroit, those wealthy and white neighborhoods surrounding it would never have come into being and would be little more than truck farms today. In “White Flight to the Suburbs” http://www.irp.wisc.edu/publications/focus/pdfs/foc32a.pdf ;Frey was able to confirm partially his hypotheses.
– By far the largest total effect on white suburban movement in the 39 SMSAs can be attributed to the extent of postwar suburban development- although in these newer and more rapidly growing cities there tend to be large counter streams that balance and to some extent mitigate the effects of the outflow of whites.
– Next in influence was the percentage of the city population that was black-a factor that to some extent measures the degree of daily contact between blacks and whites in the central city. We cannot, therefore, wholly discount racial factors in our analysis of the causes of white flight.
– Of equal influence, however, were the suburb/city tax differential, and the degree to which employment opportunities had recently moved to the suburbs (measured by the percentage of city dwellers commuting to the suburbs to work).
Perhaps, you also missed the legal story of Milliken vs Bradley? This court ruling and the resulting deterioration of Detroit adds to Frey’s points. This ruling closed the door on Detroit early on and well before corruption became a synonym for Detroit. What was allowed to happen in Minneapolis St.Paul was closed to Detroit. I can not think of many other rulings having such a disastrous impact other than Marquette Nat. Bank of Minneapolis v. First of Omaha Service Corp or the Untied Citizens ruling. Economically Detroit was cut off from the rest of the state through arbitrary state policy and the court system. One can wonder why or just assume NIMBY when it comes to race.
Recognizing that segregation was also extremely prevalent in Detroit’s school system, and that largely black schools performed much more poorly than largely white schools, the Detroit Board of Education passed an order in 1970 that would have bused white children to black schools, and vice-versa. A locally based recall campaign followed, and the state passed a law that voided the plan and kept school districts under neighborhood control.
Later that year, the NAACP sued the state and the school board in federal District Court, arguing that, as in Brown v. Board of Education, separate was not equal, and that the policies of the state and school board had deliberately kept the school system segregated. The case was entitled Milliken v. Bradley.
The district court found in favor of the NAACP and ordered the school district to draft a desegregation plan. The city presented the court with three different Detroit-wide plans, all of which the court rejected. The court then ruled that it was not possible to desegregate the Detroit Public School System without including the suburban communities. The city was ordered to submit a “metropolitan” plan that would eventually encompass a total of fifty-four separate school districts, busing Detroit children to suburban schools and suburban children into Detroit.
On appeal, however, the Supreme Court ruled against the NAACP. Even though the organization had presented evidence of housing segregation that operated on a metropolitan level, Chief Justice William Burger claimed that “the case does not present any question concerning possible state housing violations,” and Justice Potter Stewart, who cast the key fifth vote dooming a metropolitan remedy, asserted that housing segregation was caused by “unknown and unknowable causes.”
The impact of the case was enormous. According to Gary Orfield and Susan E. Eaton in their 1996 book Dismantling Desegregation, “By failing to examine housing, the Court gave neighborhoods that had successfully segregated their housing an exemption from school desegregation requirements. City neighborhoods that had not excluded, blacks, on the other hand, faced mandatory desegregation.” The court effectively blessed suburbs with all-white schools as “refuges for whites fearful of minorities moving into their schools,” Orfield and Eaton wrote.More generally, according to Dismantling Desegregation, the “Supreme Court’s failure to examine the housing underpinnings of metropolitan segregation” in Milliken made desegregation “almost impossible” in northern metropolitan areas. “Suburbs were protected from desegregation by the courts ignoring the origin of their racially segregated housing patterns.”
Detroit’s tax-base had already fallen significantly by 1970, while the suburbs were experiencing strong growth. In his 1976 State of the State address, then-Governor Milliken proposed that the Detroit area adopt a similar model. “There was a recognition that the unequal patterns of growth were going to continue unless something was changed,” said Robert Kleine, who served as the director of the Office of Revenue and Tax Analysis for the State of Michigan under Milliken.
But Milliken’s plan was never even taken up in the state legislature. According to Kleine, suburban municipalities were deeply resistant to the idea. He acknowledged, too, that no one advocated strongly on behalf of the proposal from the city, and that Milliken did not press the issue in the face of that resistance and apathy.
Had such a system been adopted, however, “What would have happened of course is that all the growth in the region, which was mainly in [neighboring] Oakland and Macomb Counties, would have been shared with the City of Detroit,” Kleine said. “That would have meant somewhat less revenue for some of the suburbs, but they would have done just fine. But Detroit would have had a substantial amount of additional revenue.”
As Remapping Debate has reported, the decline in Detroit’s tax base represents the greatest challenge to the city’s ability to sustain itself. It has responded to the loss in revenue by cutting services down to bare-bones and by raising taxes to the highest levels in the state. Kleine said that a regional tax-base sharing system would have mitigated the problem’s Detroit has faced with revenue.
Additionally, Orfield added, a fragmented system of taxation encourages individual municipalities to compete with one another by lowering taxes. “That competition has been very destructive in Detroit, because the city has had to keep its tax rates high to maintain services, while the suburbs have been able to draw people and investment out of the city by lowering taxes,” a process that encourages sprawl. Squandered Opportunities Leave Detroit Isolated” http://www.remappingdebate.org/article/squandered-opportunities-leave-detroit-isolated?page=0,3
“In effect, the city has been isolated from the belt of suburbs around it by law, by race, by education, and by economics. Due to isolation, the city can not compete with the suburbs around it and grow its tax base to improves its schools and infrastructure leaving it little more opportunity than the destruction of abandoned buildings and a shrinking city limit.
NSA ‘in bed with’ Germany and most others, Snowden
The United State’s National Security Agency works closely with Germany and other Western states on a ‘no questions asked’-basis, former NSA employee Edward Snowden said in comments that undermine Chancellor Angela Merkel’s indignant talk of “Cold War” tactics.
“They are in bed with the Germans, just like with most other Western states,” German magazine Der Spiegel quotes him as saying in an interview published on Sunday that was carried out before he fled to Hong Kong in May and divulged details of extensive secret US surveillance.
“Other agencies don’t ask us where we got the information from and we don’t ask them. That way they can protect their top politicians from the backlash in case it emerges how massively people’s privacy is abused worldwide,” he said.
His comments about cooperation with governments overseas, which he said were led by the NSA’s Foreign Affairs Directorate, appear to contradict the German government’s show of surprise at the scale of the US electronic snooping.
http://www.buenosairesherald.com/article/135468/nsa-in-bed-with-germany-and-most-others-snowden
European leaders are much like Inspector Renault in the movie Casablanca. They are shocked, shocked that gambling is going on in the casino, as they are quietly slipped their winnings.
I’d like to suggest you write a piece on this subject, which appeared in the L.A. Times:
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-credit-union-taxes-20130706,0,1944326.story
“Banks pushing for repeal of credit unions’ federal tax exemption.”
“With fast-growing credit unions posing more formidable competition to banks, industry trade groups are pressing the White House and Congress to end a tax break that dates to the Great Depression.”
Please see Barry Ritholtz on the subject of assignments:
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/comment-policy/