DAMIEN CAVE, - The New York Times
Stephan: This is the latest on the prohibition trend. Clearly the rest of world is losing patience with the Obama Administration's continuation of America's utterly dysfunctional policies on Marijuana. They're tired of the death, tired of the wasted money, tired of the destroyed families, tired of the power of criminal oligarchs, and they are going to change course as a result. As for Obama, who knows.
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay – The agricultural output of this country includes rice, soybeans and wheat. Soon, though, the government may get its hands dirty with a far more complicated crop – marijuana – as part of a rising movement in this region to create alternatives to the United States-led war on drugs.
Uruguay’s famously rebellious president first called for ‘regulated and controlled legalization of marijuana
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RAJIV CHANDRASEKARAN, - The Washington Post
Stephan: The bridges in your town may be ready to fall down, your roads may be pocked with potholes, and your schools may have plumbing ready to burst but, hey, think about what your money -- through your tax dollars -- are doing to build the infrastructure in Afghanistan. And its all going to be worthwhile right? Well, perhaps not, as this report makes clear. And what about Iraq? Keep this in mind though, these reconstruction projects in Iraq and, now, Afghanistan have made a few companies and the people that control them wildly rich. It'll all trickle down right?
A U.S. initiative to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on construction projects in Afghanistan, originally pitched as a vital tool in the military campaign against the Taliban, is running so far behind schedule that it will not yield benefits until most U.S. combat forces have departed the country, according to a government inspection report to be released Monday.
The report, by the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, also concludes that the Afghan government will not have the money or skill to maintain many of the projects, creating an ‘expectations gap
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SUZANNE GOLDENBERG, US Environment Correspondent - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: The idea to use corn for ethanol was a mistake from the get go, as I have memorialized in SR over and over. As everyone knows by now corn is not a good choice for creating ethanol. And beneath all of the technical arguments is the fundamental truth that it pits food against fuel. That doesn't matter when the weather is good, fuel is plentiful, and corn is abundantly available. But, when none of those things obtain, as is the case now, home truths come to the fore.
The Obama administration was urged on Monday to stop diverting grain to gas amid warnings of an ‘imminent food crisis’ caused by America’s drought.
US government forecasts of a 4% rise in food prices for US consumers because of the drought have sharpened criticism of supports for producing fuel from corn-based ethanol.
Meanwhile, research published last week by the New England Complex Systems Institute warned of an ‘imminent food crisis’ because of the diversion of corn stocks to ethanol.
‘Necsi has warned for months that misguided food-to-ethanol conversion programs and rampant commodity speculation have created a food price bubble, leading to an inevitable spike in prices by 2013. Now it appears the ‘crop shock’ will arrive even sooner due to drought, unless measures to curb ethanol production and rein in speculators are adopted immediately,’ the researchers warned.
In the latest move, the country’s meat, dairy and poultry producers called on the Environmental Protection Agency to suspend this year’s quotas for corn ethanol production.
‘The extraordinary and disastrous circumstances created for livestock and poultry producers by the ongoing drought in the heart of our grain growing regions requires that all relevant measures of relief be explored,’ said the petition to the EPA’s administrator Lisa Jackson.
It went […]
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PAT GAROFALO, - Think Progress
Stephan: All these privatization schemes, be it prisons, schools, or hospitals, have only one real priority -- profit. People do this because they think they can make large sums of money. In every case, inevitably profit conflicts with the supposed actual purpose of the project, and purpose is compromised. Privatized prisons, schools, and hospitals, study after study has shown, always cost tax payers more, and most produce inferior outcomes.
All of this arises from the fantasy that government is 'bad' inherently, and can never do anything well. This is a complete contradiction to what the Founder's believed and tried to create... but who cares about facts. It is hard to believe anyone believes such nonsense, but millions do, and it is destroying the country.
According to preliminary findings of an investigation by Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), the ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, many for-profit colleges pay their executives based almost exclusively on corporate profitability, without taking into account student outcomes. Cummings’ office received documents from 13 for-profit schools, which showed just where the schools place their proirities:
The documents obtained during the course of this investigation indicate that the single most significant measure for determining executive compensation at these schools is corporate profitability, including factors such as operating income, earnings, profits, operating margins, earnings per share, net cash flow, and revenue. Companies use various combinations of these factors to determine the majority of executive compensation.
As discussed below, some companies provided no documents demonstrating links to student achievement when determining executive compensation, other companies provided documents with vague references to student achievement, and other companies provided documents that included specific compensation percentages linked to student performance measures. In all cases, however, the majority of compensation paid to company executives is based on measures relating to corporate profitability rather than student achievement.
As ThinkProgress has documented, predatory for-profit schools rely heavily on taxpayer dollars […]
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TIM MURPHY, Reporter - Mother Jones
Stephan: That a large number of people, particularly blue collar white men, believe this sort of thing constitutes an alarming trend. This is tinfoil hat country and it has a large population. Glenn Beck, in his recent rally in the Cowboys Stadium, in Texas, drew 65,000 people willing to pay to hear him speak. Many came from hundreds, even thousands of miles away. We need to take these people seriously, because they are very serious, and it is emotion, particularly anger, fear, and a sense of victimization, not facts that is driving them.
Here’s the first right-wing conspiracy theory about the shootings that killed 12 people and injured dozens more at a midnight screening of the latest Batman movie in Aurora, Colorado, over the weekend.
All indications from the Aurora Police Department are that Batman gunman James Holmes acted alone, for reasons that have yet to be established. But Larry Pratt-the president of Gun Owners of America, a far-right Second Amendment group that’s backed by prominent people like Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.)-has a different theory. Pratt believes the timing of Holmes’ rampage, which left 12 people dead and 58 wounded, seemed designed to coincide with the upcoming negotiation of the United Nations Small Arms Treaty. A press release sent out to radio bookers on Tuesday advertising Pratt’s availability noted that, ‘In an article posted at The New American
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