Rolling Stone has the article ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ Is Osama bin Laden’s Last Victory Over America by Matt Taibbi.

Now we have this movie out that seems to celebrate the use of torture against Arabs, and we’re nominating it for Oscars. Bigelow can say that “depiction is not endorsement,” but how does she think audiences will receive it in the Middle East? Are they going to sell lots of popcorn in Riyadh and Kabul during the waterboarding scenes?

Besides not wanting to see torture scenes, the bottom line, as Taibbi describes it above, is one reason we won’t be seeing this movie.

Perhaps I grew up on too many movies about World War II where we were taught to hate the Nazis because of their use of torture.  I can live with that.  I’d hate to think the next generations will be taught to love America because we use torture.  What is this world coming to?

RogerS lent me a copy of his DVD of Heist: Who Stole The American Dream?

The movie is best exsplained by its synopsis.

SYNOPSIS

HEIST: Who Stole the American Dream? is stunning audiences across the globe as it traces the worldwide economic collapse to a 1971 secret memo entitled Attack on American Free Enterprise System. Written over 40 years ago by the future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, at the behest of the US Chamber of Commerce, the 6-page memo, a free-market utopian treatise, called for a money fueled big business makeover of government through corporate control of the media, academia, the pulpit, arts and sciences and destruction of organized labor and consumer protection groups.

But Powell’s real “end game” was business control of law and politics. HEIST’s step by step detail exposes the systemic implementation of Powell’s memo by BOTH U.S. political parties culminating in the deregulation of industry, outsourcing of jobs and regressive taxation. All of which led us to the global financial crisis of 2008 and the continued dismantling of the American middle class. Today, politics is the playground of the rich and powerful, with no thought given to the hopes and dreams of ordinary Americans. No other film goes as deeply as HEIST in explaining the greatest wealth transfer of our time. Moving beyond the white noise of today’s polarizing media, HEIST provides viewers with a clear, concise and fact- based explanation of how we got into this mess, and what we need to do to restore our representative democracy.

If you know how this country got in the mess we are in, this is a good refresher course. There may be some details you missed. In that case the movie fills in some of the gaps. If you think the cause of troubles is that Social Security and Medicare are too generous for us to be able to afford, what an eye opener this movie will be for you.

The movie is so distressing, I was almost going to joke that RogerS turns out to be no friend of mine.

The Massachusetts Chapter of The Sierra Club has an item about Backing the Ban on Incinerators.

Tell MassDEP Commissioner Kenneth Kimmell to maintain the ban on incineration and enforce waste bans. Comments will be accepted until February 15, 2013, 5pm, and sent to: John Fischer at dep.swm@state.ma.us or by mail to: John Fischer, MassDEP, One Winter Street, Boston, MA 02108. Please copy the Sierra Club on your communication at office@sierraclubmass.org.

As an example, here is the email that I wrote to the MASS DEP.

Subject:	Comments about the proposed lifting of the moratorium on incinerators
Date:	Mon, 21 Jan 2013 14:48:14 -0500
From:	Steven Greenberg <steve@ssgreenberg.name>
To:	dep.swm@state.ma.us
CC:	office@sierraclubmass.org

John Fischer,

Do not lift the moratorium on incinerators in Massachusetts.

In the Tellus Report, commissioned by the Commonwealth, there is all the necessary information on why the moratorium should not be lifted. Not only did Massachusetts commission this report, but the link takes you to the report posted on the Massachusetts web site.

The department that commissioned this report owes us all an explanation of why they would take action that is contrary to the technical, environmental, and economic information that they already have at their disposal.

Until such explanation is forthcoming, the moratorium should remain or perhaps be turned into a permanent ban.

/Steven Greenberg

KirstieP has sent me information about this issue.  One item is the press release from Clean Water Action, State backs away from garbage reduction policy.

Three years after MassDEP drafted a statewide Solid Waste Master Plan for reducing trash called “Path to Zero Waste,” the Patrick Administration appears to have veered off the path.

The Administration has announced it will soon release a new proposal to lift the 22-year-old moratorium on more incinerators.DEP asserts that the reason for the unexpected policy shift is that Massachusetts is running out of landfill space and needs more ways to dispose of garbage. But environmental and public interest groups protest that new disposal sites are unnecessary because MassDEP could conserve landfill space by enforcing its own regulations against disposal of certain recyclable materials at transfer stations, landfills, and incinerators. The list of materials that are banned from disposal includes commonly trashed items such as paper, cardboard, wood, bottles, cans and more.

The incinerator companies and their lobbyists probably have the obvious ulterior motives for pushing for the lifting of the moratorium.

I suspect that the public could be easily fooled into thinking incineration is a good idea because the waste seems to disappear when incinerated.  Some of it may no longer be visible, which is the true definition of disappear, but that does not mean it doesn’t exist.  Except in nuclear reactions, matter does not go away or be turned into energy.

If you weigh the waste after it is incinerated and include the weight of what goes up the smokestack, then you won’t find any loss of mass.  It’s all still there.

Some people are thinking of the air around us the way we used to think about rivers.  We used to think that you can dump your waste into rivers, and it will all be washed away and diluted,  We know now that their is a limit to how much we can put in a river before we exceed its capacity to dilute and wash away.  That started to become obvious when we could start to see the remains of what we had dumped into the rivers.  The diluting and washing away idea only works to postpone the time when we recognize that we have not solved the problem.

Some of the latest incinerator technology claims to get the particle size of the smokestack effluent down to sizes which are below what we normally think of as causing visible air-pollution.  That just means we can’t see it, but it doesn’t mean that it is no problem.  In fact, if it is problematical to put some of these toxins into solid waste landfills, then why would we want to set them loose in the air we breathe.

We are much better off keeping a close eye on the containment of the toxic solid waste that we cannot recycle or reuse, than we are to let it go into the wild, where we have little idea of where it is going or the harm that it is causing.

It may turn out that these nano-particles of incinerated waste are biologically more dangerous than the larger particle.  From a high-tech point of view, I know that issues are being raised about semiconductor nano-technology.  People are concerned that we do not have a thorough understanding of the consequences of nano-particles entering the body.  This concern is raised about things that are engineered to be helpful.  We should show at least as much concern about nano-particles of toxic material that were not ever intended to do good to the human body.

MaryA has provided me with the link to the Tellus Report, Assessment of Materials Management Options for the Massachusetts Solid Waste Master Plan Review.  The link is to the report as posted on the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’ own web site.  It was commissioned by the state and published in December of 2008.  So the state government cannot claim that it is unaware of this information.

The report’s disclaimer says:

This report was prepared by the Tellus Institute, a not-for-profit research and policy organization under a contract with the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection. The report (including its summary and analysis of information) is entirely the work of the Tellus Institute and its subcontractors on this project. The opinions expressed in this report are those of the Tellus Institute and do not necessarily reflect MassDEP policies.

There is a great 9 page executive summary at the beginning of this 68 page report.

Reuters has the story Analysis: Budget constraints limit Obama’s second-term agenda.

Many budget experts expect Congress will ultimately conclude that the spending caps are too severe to work. The drive to cut spending could abate in coming years as well if an expanding economy boosts tax revenues and narrows budget deficits.

But meanwhile, Obama will have few resources to implement his economic vision.

“When I hear an aggressive agenda for investment, given the numbers we’re looking at under the Budget Control Act I tend to be highly skeptical,” Minarik said.

Does it occur to many people that there is something wrong with an economic policy that forces actual harm on the economy to avoid the mythical problem of adequate investment in the economy’s future which requires the collection of more taxes than are now being collected?

There are two solutions to the mythical problem,

1. Collect more taxes.  The money going into the hands of people who can afford to save, suck liquidity right out of the economy that needs that liquidity to be invested.  That’s not a criticism of the people who save.  It is just a statement of reality.
2. Recognize that deficits during a recession is just a problem of appearances, and just spend what needs to be spent.  Some people who apply micro-economic standards to the macro-economic federal budget don’t like the look of the bookkeeping fiction of a deficit.

The Real News Network has the interview Stewart vs Krugman and the Religion of Austerity that is the latest installment of William Black’s Finance and Fraud Report.

Black attributes this call for austerity to a new dogma of the moneyed interest. However, when you see behavior that appears to be magic to you, it is time to apply Greenberg’s Law of Counterproductive Behavior.

Then read the book The Shock Doctrine to understand what is really going on.

In THE SHOCK DOCTRINE, Naomi Klein explodes the myth that the global free market triumphed democratically. Exposing the thinking, the money trail and the puppet strings behind the world-changing crises and wars of the last four decades, The Shock Doctrine is the gripping story of how America’s “free market” policies have come to dominate the world– through the exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries.

The New Yorker has the article Republicans Accuse Obama of Using Position as President to Lead Country by Andy Borowitz.

The Texas congressman said that if Mr. Obama persists in executing the office of the Presidency as defined by the Constitution, he could face “impeachment and/or deportation.”

Did I fail to mention that Andy Borowitz is what they call a humorist?

MaryA has sent me more information about the incinerator issue in Massachusetts.

There is a Feb. 15 deadline for responding to the Mass Dept. of Environmental Protection about lifting the moratorium.

Health Risks from Waste Incineration – Dr. Paul Connett Speaking in Christina Lake
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38PfTRQlJzQ

The “voodoo economics” of incineration
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htgZK_QNrdk

nano-particles, free radicals, and antioxidants
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zm9YzhOrB9Q

dioxinated babies, part 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0YPoGdeDoY

dioxinated babies, part 2, “the beginning of the end”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QqxUgEPjXg

Energy from Waste: Part 1 -The Myths Debunked
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XB5iOtxlpCs

Trash and the Incinerator: Detroit’s Dirty Truth
http://www.emeac.org/2012/04/trash-and-incinerator-detroits-dirty.html

Toxic Tour Stop One: The Detroit Incinerator
http://www.mlive.com/news/detroit/index.ssf/2012/10/toxic_tour_stop_one_the_detroi.html

Inside America’s Most Indebted City
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/08/31/160379247/inside-americas-most-indebted-city

Coalition Against the Incinerator (CAI)
http://www.stoptheburn.com

Incineration: A Poor Solution for the 21st Century, by Dr Paul Connett
http://www.slideshare.net/FrankieDolan/incineration-a-poor-solution-for-the-21st-century-by-dr-paul-connett

What has come over The New York Times for publishing the piece Public Goals, Private Interests in Debt Campaign.

In Washington’s running battles over taxes and spending, Mr. McCrery and his colleagues at Fix the Debt have lent a public-spirited, elder-statesman sheen to the cause of deficit reduction. Leading up to the fiscal negotiations, they set up grass-roots chapters around the country, met with President Obama and his aides, and hosted private breakfasts for lawmakers on Capitol Hill. In recent days, Fix the Debt has redoubled its efforts, starting a new national advertising campaign and calling on Mr. Obama and Congress to revise the tax code and reduce long-term spending on entitlement programs.

But in the weeks ahead, many of the campaign’s members will be juggling their private interests with their public goals: they are also lobbyists, board members or executives for corporations that have worked aggressively to shape the contours of federal spending and taxes, including many of the tax breaks that would be at the heart of any broad overhaul. While Fix the Debt criticized the recent fiscal deal between Mr. Obama and lawmakers, saying it did not do enough to cut spending or close tax loopholes, companies and industries linked to the organization emerged with significant victories on taxes and other policies.

This is the kind of information that The New York Times usually tries to hide when they get on some political kick to convince us to do something that is not in our own best interests.  How did they let this article escape?

Of course it has been obvious for a long time that Simpson-Bowles has an agenda that does not align with the needs of the other 98% of us.  Even the 2% will eventually rue the day that they get what they are pushing for.  Apparently these people learn nothing from the history of the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution.  That lesson being that if you do manage to monopolize the wealth and income through manipulation of the government, evenutally the people will get so fed up they will just do away with your government.