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March 25, 2014 - Los Angeles paid at least $204 million in fees to Wall Street in 2013, and probably significantly more, in addition to principle and interest payments, according to the report, "No Small Fees: LA Spends More on Wall Street than Our Streets [3]."

The study, issued today by a coalition of unions and community organizations, shows that due to revenue losses from the "Great Recession," L.A. "all but stopped repairing sidewalks, clearing alleys and installing speed bumps. It stopped inspecting sewers, resulting in twice the number of sewer overflows." L.A. spends at least $51 million more in Wall Street in fees than it allocates for its entire budget for the Bureau of Street Services.

The researchers caution that the $204 million figure likely underestimates the true amount, because under current disclosure rules, deals made with private equity companies and hedge funds do not have to be publically disclosed. Also, because the city does not list all these fees in one centralized report, hundreds of individual documents must be reviewed to uncover the amounts. As one of the report's researchers stated,

    "This is the first time an accounting of fees has been exposed for a specific public entity, and we don't think we have captured it all. So if you do this for every public entity, cities, counties, school districts, states, and universities, transportation agencies and other public entities we could be looking at an astounding amount of money for education and community services money sucked out of the system."

Astounding indeed. My back of the envelope estimate, extrapolating the L.A. experience to the economy as a whole, suggests that the fees Wall Street extracts from public entities could total more than $50 billion a year - enough to provide free tuition at every public college and university in the country....(Click title for more)

March 25, 2014 - A building in Harlem blows up because of a gas leak, killing at least eight people and injuring at least 70 others. A bridge collapse in Minneapolis killed 13 and injured 135. New Orleans' levees needed to be fixed but weren't, and more than 1,800 people died as a result. The Chamber of Commerce's Thomas Donohue said back in 2007, "Poorly maintained roads contribute to a third of all highway fatalities. That's more than 13,000 deaths every year."

These are just a few example of the harm done because we are not maintaining our country's public and private infrastructure. The problem of our crumbling infrastructure is not just costing us jobs and economic growth, it is killing people.

A building in New York City blew up because of poorly maintained gas lines. The explosion killed at least eight people and injured at least another 70. The problem extends much, much further than just this building. The New York Times, in "Beneath Cities, a Decaying Tangle of Gas Pipes," reports:

    In 2012 alone, Con Edison and National Grid, the other distributor of natural gas in the city, reported 9,906 leaks in their combined systems, which serve the city and Westchester County. More than half of them were considered hazardous because of the dangers they posed to people or property, federal records show. (There are more than 1.2 million miles of gas main pipes across the country. Last year, gas distributors nationwide reported an average of 12 leaks per 100 miles of those pipes.)

In 2010, a 30-inch gas pipeline exploded under a suburb in San Bruno, California and took out an entire neighborhood, killing eight people.

We read about the big ones: buildings blowing up, bridges falling down, people killed. But there are many, many near misses. From the Times story:

    "It's like Russian roulette," said Robert B. Jackson, a professor of environment and energy at Stanford University who has studied gas leaks in Washington, D.C., and Boston. "The chances are, you are going to be lucky, but once in a while, you're going to be unlucky."

    Striking in federal records is just how frequently there are near misses.

    Last year, a Bronx woman awoke in the middle of the night to the pungent odor of gas. Her husband checked it out, but after smelling nothing unusual, he lit a cigarette. Suddenly, there was a flash of fire that left his face badly burned. In 2011, a 28-year-old man in Bayside, Queens, saw smoke coming from a basement utility room just before a small explosion blew the door open. The cause was traced to a leak in a 54-year-old steel main in the street nearby.

It costs money to replace old pipelines, the outdated power grid, and all the rest of the old infrastructure. Most gas pipelines and electric power lines are the responsibility of the private sector, the ones who want government to "just leave us alone" and stop all the regulation. They want "government off our backs" so they can use the money they should be putting into infrastructure maintenance to give out as profits instead.

Our public roads, schools, bridges, airports, etc. also need maintenance and replacement. That costs money, too - "government spending."

But it also costs money to save money. If you put off maintenance until something breaks, you have to pay a lot more for replacement. And you have to pay the economic cost of bad roads, etc. By the same token if you deregulate and don't require private companies to do their needed maintenance, they'll shift that cost over into the profit line - for a while, until the damage is done, people are injured and penalties and fines are imposed. "Saving" money by putting off infrastructure maintenance costs money later, and now we see how it costs lives, as well....(Click title for more)

    I had a conversation with a progressive senator who is not a fan of super PACs and at the time did not have his own sort of individual super PAC... And I said, 'What is this like when you're going to go up against an opponent who does have a super PAC and does have a motivated one percenter in his corner?' And he said, 'It's like going into a boxing ring. I'm wearing boxing gloves. And the other guy has an Uzi....(Click title for more)

March 14, 2014 - If the US State Department's Victoria Nuland had not said "Fuck the EU," few outsiders at the time would have heard of Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, the man on the other end of her famously bugged telephone call. But now Washington's man in Kiev is gaining fame as the face of the CIA-style "destabilization campaign" that brought down Ukraine's monumentally corrupt but legitimately elected President Viktor Yanukovych.

"Geoffrey Pyatt is one of these State Department high officials who does what he's told and fancies himself as a kind of a CIA operator," laughs Ray McGovern, who worked for 27 years as an intelligence analyst for the agency. "It used to be the CIA doing these things," he tells Democracy Now. "I know that for a fact." Now it's the State Department, with its coat-and-tie diplomats, twitter and facebook accounts, and a trick bag of goodies to build support for American policy.

A retired apparatchik, the now repentant McGovern was debating Yale historian Timothy Snyder, a self-described left-winger and the author of two recent essays in The New York Review of Books - "The Haze of Propaganda" and "Fascism, Russia, and Ukraine." Both men speak Russian, but they come from different planets.

On Planet McGovern - or my personal take on it - realpolitik rules. The State Department controls the prime funding sources for non-military intervention, including the controversial National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which Washington created to fund covert and clandestine action after Ramparts magazine and others exposed how the CIA channeled money through private foundations, including the Ford Foundation.

State also controls the far-better-funded Agency for International Development (USAID), along with a growing network of front groups, cut-outs, and private contractors. State coordinates with like-minded governments and their parallel institutions, mostly in Canada and Western Europe. State's "democracy bureaucracy" oversees nominally private but largely government funded groups like Freedom House. And through Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland, State had Geoff Pyatt coordinate the coup in Kiev.

The CIA, NSA, and Pentagon likely provided their specialized services, while some of the private contractors exhibited shadowy skill sets. But if McGovern knows the score, as he should, diplomats ran the campaign to destabilize Ukraine and did the hands-on dirty work....(Click title for more)

Solidarity, Carl Davidson, CCDS