In July 2009, at a lecture to the Stanford Business School, the CEO of British Petroleum Tony Hayward explains to attendees that BP was going in the wrong direction before he took over as CEO because, "we had too many people that were working to save the world."
And this:
Having killed 29 people at a mine with the worst safety record in the business, Massey CEO Don Blankenship came to Senate hearings into the accident to blame - his greed or carelessness or brutal disregard for anything but profits? Nope - federal regulators. This guy should be in jail. Here's the legal argument for it. Insult to Injury Dept: No Republicans turned up for the hearing.
Maniacal sociopaths. This world is being run by maniacal sociopaths.
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Jose Crow was a Nephite
Sen. Russell Pearce
Arizona State Senate
Dear Brother Pearce,
As a fellow Mormon, I was thrilled to learn that you based Arizona's brown people internment law on the Church's Twelfth Article of Faith: "We believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates, in obeying, honoring, and sustaining the law."
That's exciting. While Utahn's are well acqauainted with the Church's penchant for issuing secular laws, I did not expect to see it happen outside of Zion until Our Lord Jesus Christ establishes New Jerusalem in Jackson County, Missouri.
Are you planning to write other bills based on Mormon doctrine? If so, might I suggest you use 1 Nephi 4 from the Book of Mormon. You know the story. It's about how God sent Nephi back into Jerusalem to kill Laban and steal his brass plates. Remember how Nephi tried to weasel out of it by saying he might be up for an armed robbery, but murder made him queasy, and how God convinced him to do it by explaining, "It is better that one man should perish than that a nation should dwindle and perish in unbelief."
That bit of scripture would serve as a fine basis for a law mandating capital punishment for the Korihor-worshipping anti-Mormons who are trying to undermine the Church by making us feel silly for wearing sacred underwear. Isn't it better they die than for us to dwindle in unbelief and embarrassment?
I certainly think so.
Heterosexually yours,
Gen. JC Christian, patriot
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This Week In (tax free) Holy Crimes
Over the last seven days...
New Jersey: Pastor Moises Cotto charged with forcing two underage girls to videotape him having sex with a female parishioner.
New York: Youth Bible teacher Samuel W. Langley arrested for molesting a five year-old girl.
Texas: Pastor Mark Stewart arrested for shooting another pastor over a construction contract dispute.
Australia: Archbishop Philip Wilson accused of covering up crimes of pedophile priests.
Illinois: Pastor Howard Richmond arrested for swindling $475K from parishioners.
Missouri: Youth Pastor Jason A. Phillips charged with sexual assault on female minor.
Indiana: Youth Pastor Johnny Eugene Butler charged with multiple counts of sexual misconduct with a female minor.
New York: Father James J. McDevitt pleads guilty to two counts of molesting boys.
Missouri: Pastor Danny O'Guin charged with multiple felony counts of defrauding elderly parishioners.
Texas: Pastor Cornelius Hudson accused of defrauding an elderly couple out of their home.
Massachusetts: Bishops Joseph F. Maguire and Thomas L Dupre will be sued in civil court for their roles in shielding a now convicted pedophile priest. Dupre has been been accused of child molestation as well.
This Week's Winner
Brazil: Father Marcin Strachanowski has been charged with running a "pedophile dungeon" where he organized orgies with underage boys. One victim, who reports having been handcuffed to the priest's bed, says Strachanowski warned him that if the police were notified, "I already know the flowers I will place on your coffin." The Archdiocese of Rio has expressed its "regret."
There was a terrible plane crash in India — a plane overshot the runway and plummeted off a cliff to explode. 158 dead; 8 survived. You can guess where this is going: Koolikkunnu Krishnan, one of the survivors, chose to spit in the dead faces of all the casualties and sneer at their families.
"I've been thinking, 'Why me? Why me?' And I can only think that God wanted to give me a second life," he said from his hospital bed in Mangalore.
Keep this in mind, please. If you're ever in a tragic accident, and you survive while others are seriously harmed, don't claim it's because you're special and a divine being thinks you are more special than the others. Because you aren't, and because I'll think you're an insensitive moron if you do.
You know why some live and some die? Pure chance. It's not an indicator of heavenly privilege or destiny.
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No better demonstration of the futility of prayer.
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Meanwhile, in the Gulf ...
Oakwood Elementary's principal was placed on administrative leave Friday as school officials investigated why life like, 4-inch-long plastic fetus dolls were given to dozens of third-, fourth- and fifth-grade students.
On Thursday, the school staffer thought to be responsible for handing out the dolls was placed on leave.
Oakwood took another hit this week when the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia blasted its principal for inviting students and teachers to participate in prayer and Bible study. The organization said such acts are coercive and violate the Constitution.
These religious zealots keep pushing the envelope of craziness. They refuse to accept that legalized abortion is the law of the land and nothing will ever change that simple fact. Imposing their religious beliefs in such a manner is reprehensible. Plastic fetus dolls now, shoot-an-abortion-doctor semi-automatics later.
The hypocrisy of it all is that I'm sure that these people come from the same crowd of wingnuts that screamed out "Indoctrination!" when the President spoke to school kids advising them on the value of school and study.
Fire the stinking lot.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kn4-2qMErgM&feature=player_embedded
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Rand Paul doesn't appear on Press the Meat and Press the Meat gets even.
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Wall Street continues to thumb nose at Obama and American voters
J.P. Morgan Chase awarded its chairman and chief executive, Jamie Dimon, $91,000 in personal travel on the company jet in 2009, up from about $54,000 the previous year. His total perks increased 19 percent, to $266,000. Dimon, along with Goldman Sachs chief executive Lloyd Blankfein and McLean-based Capital One chief executive Richard Fairbank, also received sharply higher perks related to personal and home security.
"Marie Antoinette could fit into this crowd without missing a beat," said Nell Minow, co-founder of the Corporate Library, which found in recent studies of several thousand U.S. companies that more chief executives received club memberships than a year earlier, and companies paid more to cover executives' personal use of corporate planes. "Many people would think the solution would be not to be so provocative of unrest and unhappiness, but no, they're saying, 'Go ahead and do that, just build bigger walls around your house.' "
A review of the 29 largest publicly traded financial companies that received federal aid found that nearly one in three increased fringe benefits for their chief executives. Those raises contrast with the belt-tightening that many Americans have experienced during the recession.
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Ducking the limelight
The Times has a good backgrounder explaining why, amid all the sternly-worded letters and talk of moratoriums, deepwater drilling is still moving forward. Some of the reason is the usual Interior Department incompetence, but a lot of it is that Interior is just administering the current drilling laws, which are too lax.
There's one Senator quoted in the article, Ben Cardin of Maryland. Mary Landrieu, David Vitter, Jeff Sessions and Richard Shelby are all notable because of their absence. Vitter's an interesting example, because he was introducing amendments to force offshore drilling 8 months ago. Now he's criticizing Democrats for having too many media events around the spill.
For better or worse, regional delegations take the lead on legislation that affects their region. When farmers want something, John Thune, Kent Conrad and other farm state Senators and Representatives get together to make it happen. Chuck Schumer and the rest of the New York delegation keeps Wall Street in bonuses. If the Gulf state delegations aren't interested in drilling reform, Interior will continue to issue permits for wells almost twice as deep as Deepwater Horizon.
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The Smirking Chimp: The money spent for laws in campaign contributions, issue advertising, lobbying, ear marks, and bribes have provided an unequaled return on investment for some U.S. and international corporations. But their value for the U.S. public turns out to be negative, and the greater the price, the more severely negative.
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Grinding down the working stiffs
Of the top ten jobs held by the most people, only one, nursing, pays well. For the other nine, if you were to try to support a family on the wags you earned, you'd be collecting food stamps.
These are the top ten jobs and the average wage:
Retail salespersons $9.74
Cashiers $8.57
General office clerks $12.57
Combined food preparation and
serving workers, including fast food $8.28
Registered nurses $30.65
Waiters and waitresses $8.50
Customer service representatives $14.56
Laborers, material movers $11.11
Janitors and cleaners, except
maids and housekeeping cleaners $10.56
Stock clerks and order fillers $10.08
Some of the scarcer occupations make decent money. Mathematicians (2,770 jobs) average $44.99 an hour. Industrial psychologists (1,710) $40.03/hr. Prosthodontists make $53.42/hr, but there are only 660 of them. There are more locomotive firemen than that, 960, but they make a lot less: $22.63/hr.
The top ten jobs are all service-related and nine out of ten pay dogshit wages. Even in most of the factory jobs, you'd be hard-pressed to provide for a family on one paycheck.[1] It didn't used to be that way, but you'd probably have to be well into middle aged to remember when it wasn't that way.
I know that the Gettysburg National Military Park is public land, but granting a permit so that the Aryan Nations can have a rally in it seems in bad taste. Especially since the Aryan Nations is directly implicated in the senseless shooting death of some police officers in Arkansas.
Can any good come out of this?
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Business as usual in the Gulf of Mexico!
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Krugman: The Same Old Enemies.
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More Than Just An Oil Spill
The response of the Obama administration and the general public to this latest outrage at the hands of a giant, politically connected corporation has been embarrassingly tepid. We take our whippings in stride in this country. We behave as though there is nothing we can do about it.
The fact that 11 human beings were killed in the Deepwater Horizon explosion (their bodies never found) has become, at best, an afterthought. BP counts its profits in the billions, and, therefore, it's important. The 11 men working on the rig were no more important in the current American scheme of things than the oystermen losing their livelihoods along the gulf, or the wildlife doomed to die in an environment fouled by BP's oil, or the waters that will be left unfit for ordinary families to swim and boat in.
This is the bitter reality of the American present, a period in which big business has cemented an unholy alliance with big government against the interests of ordinary Americans, who, of course, are the great majority of Americans. The great majority of Americans no longer matter.
No one knows how much of BP's runaway oil will contaminate the gulf coast's marshes and lakes and bayous and canals, destroying wildlife and fauna — and ruining the hopes and dreams of countless human families. What is known is that whatever oil gets in will be next to impossible to get out. It gets into the soil and the water and the plant life and can't be scraped off the way you might be able to scrape the oil off of a beach.
It permeates and undermines the ecosystem in much the same way that big corporations have permeated and undermined our political system, with similarly devastating results.
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"BP has rebuffed demands from government officials and environmentalists to use a less-toxic dispersant to break up the oil from its massive offshore spill," despite Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) demands that it do so. The EPA says it is "evaluating all legal options" that it could use to force BP to make the change.
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4,399 soldiers killed in Iraq; 1,081 in Afghanistan.
Alan Grayson: This war is making you poor:
I can't say it any better, so I'll just paste this email from Alan Grayson.
(This) week, there is going to be a "debate" in Congress on yet another war funding bill. The bill is supposed to pass without debate, so no one will notice.What George Orwell wrote about in "1984" has come true. What Eisenhower warned us about concerning the "military-industrial complex" has come true. War is a permanent feature of our societal landscape, so much so that no one notices it anymore.
But we're going to change this. Today, we're introducing a bill called 'The War Is Making You Poor Act'. The purpose of this bill is to connect the dots, and to show people in a real and concrete way the cost of these endless wars. We're working to get co-sponsors in Congress, but, we need citizen co-sponsors as well. Become a citizen cosponsor today at TheWarIsMakingYouPoor.com. Act Now.
Next year's budget allocates $159,000,000,000 to perpetuate the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. That's enough money to eliminate federal income taxes for the first $35,000 of every American's income. Beyond that, leaves over $15 billion to cut the deficit.
And that's what this bill does. It eliminates separate funding for the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, and eliminates federal income taxes for everyone's first $35,000 of income ($70,000 for couples). Plus it pays down the national debt. Does that sound good to you? Then please sign our petition in support of this bill, and help us build a movement to end our permanent state of war.
The costs of the war have been rendered invisible. There's no draft. Instead, we take the most vulnerable elements of our population, and give them a choice between unemployment and missile fodder. Government deficits conceal the need to pay in cash for the war.
We put the cost of both guns and butter on our Chinese credit card. In fact, we don't even put these wars on budget; they are still passed using 'emergency supplemental'. A nine-year 'emergency'.
Let's show Congress the cost of these wars is too much for us.
Tell Congress that you like 'The War Is Making You Poor Act'. No, tell Congress you love it.
All we are saying is "give peace a chance." We will end these wars.
Together.Courage,
Alan Grayson
Sign the petition here.
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