Thousands 'facing fuel poverty'
Rising unemployment and higher energy prices are likely to push hundreds of thousands more homes into fuel poverty..........about 4m households in England are already in fuel poverty, spending more than 10% of their income on energy.
The government says it has spent £20bn on cutting fuel poverty since 2000.
400,000 new ‘green-collar’ jobs
The Low Carbon Transition Plan, which will be unveiled by the environment secretary Ed Miliband on Wednesday, will set out how the government intends to meet legally binding targets on reducing greenhouse gas emissions put in place last year.
A central plank of the plan will be a large increase in the use of renewable energy, such as wind, solar and wave power.
There will also be extra incentives to speed the construction of offshore wind farms and grants for homeowners to invest in energy-saving technology such as insulation.
The Confederation of British Industry has attacked the government's energy policy as disjointed, claiming that investment is skewed towards wind power at the expense of nuclear and clean coal, and that this is deterring private investment. The business leaders are urging a reduction in the proportion of wind power expected by 2020 to provide a balance between low-carbon sources, including nuclear and fossil fuel, with carbon capture and storage alongside renewables.
This lobbying comes hard on the heels of a commitment by G8 leaders in L'Aquila that rich nations should cut emissions by 80% by 2050, with a global reduction of 50% by 2050 with the aim of limiting global warming to 2C above pre-industrial levels.
Iran, the media and the World Socialist Web Site
“Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play,” Joseph Goebbels once declared. In the case of the American media, it is hardly necessary for the government to play. The keyboard plays itself.
This is certainly true of the media’s treatment of the recent elections in Iran.
No sooner was the election over than the media settled on the desired interpretation of events: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was carrying out a “coup d’etat” through a “rigged” election. The opposition candidate, Mir Hossein Mousavi, enjoyed overwhelming support and was leading a “green revolution” for freedom and democracy.
This analysis has been presented without even the pretense of objectivity. The possibility that there might be different sides to the story, other interpretations of the election results, is completely ignored. Facts that contradict or call into question the desired conclusion are ignored.
The scale of Iranian state violence is inflated, while virtually nothing is said about US drone attacks on civilians in neighboring Pakistan that this week alone killed more than 80 people.
Nowhere in the mass media has there been a serious analysis of Iranian history (let alone the reactionary role of the US in that history) or the class dynamics of Iranian society. The actual program of Mousavi and his chief backer, the multimillionaire veteran of the regime, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, remains a blank page, as does Mousavi’s role in repressing left-wing opposition in the 1980s.
Propaganda in the guise of news and analysis has not been confined to the mainstream media. The major “left” publications—the Nation, Huffington Post, Democracy Now!, and many others—have fallen in line as well.
How I lost my health insurance at the hairstylist's
"I look at people’s skin tones all day long and try to decide the best coloring for their hair, and I can tell you this: gray is not a normal human skin tone. Get out of here right now and go see your doctor."
Later that day, at the oncologist/hematologist office, this new strange doctor takes blood, orders up an outpatient transfusion, tells you that you no doubt have acute myelogenous leukemia, could keel over dead at any moment as long as you are untreated, and should now go home and call him the very minute the HMO calls you and tells you to check into some local hospital or the other – but should on no account whatsoever check into that local hospital.
You are visited by a social worker, who surprises you by demanding to know not the details of your home life, or about your state of mind on being diagnosed with a more-lethal-than-not form of cancer, but simply: "Who is carrying your insurance, you or your husband?"
If you worked for a company that offered insurance, if you carried your family’s insurance, next year your insurer would slap a million dollar surcharge on the company policy for carrying a leukemia patient. The company would get the bill and someone in accounting would question "what is this extra million dollars we are being billed?"
The insurance company would explain to them that the million is for you, and it is yearly, but is, ahem, "fixable." They will say "as long as she is on your insurance (wink, wink) this charge will be there. So what you have to ask yourself (more wink, wink) is whether this employee is worth a million dollar a year salary on top of what you are already paying her."
Social worker said she had seen small business owners go almost broke trying to cover this charge, and had even heard of one who defiantly did go broke, throwing all of the employees out of work. But more usually, she said, they just fire you.
"Wait, wait!" say you, "Isn’t it illegal to fire someone for their health history? Suppose I’m all well and working?"
She looks at you with more pity, says yes, so of course they will have to find "cause" to fire you, which any employer can always do.
"But I am a very, very good employee!" you protest.
"Yes," she says, "but they can always find some cause." The real problem she goes on to explain, is that you will find a new job, that company’s insurer will slap them with the surcharge, they will take their turn at firing you, until you’ve been through six or seven jobs in a year, fired "for cause" from all of them, which of course looks very, very bad to a prospective employer.
"So in a year or so of this, you will not just be uninsurable, you will also be unemployable."
You ask her what you are supposed to do for health care and she says sooner or later the insurance companies would force you onto Medicaid – either by means of making you unemployable and broke, or by means of you being uninsured and going through any and all assets you have paying medical bills until you are broke and sick enough that you can’t work, and end up on Medicaid.
The IG Warrantless Surveillance Report
The IG Report is more notable for what it fails to address than for what it discloses, but that’s the nature of IG Reports. Most of the key players who authorized the illegal domestic spying — David Addington, John Yoo, Dick Cheney, Andrew Card, John Ashcroft, George Tenet — simply refused to talk to the IGs or, in many cases, didn’t even bother responding to their request. The IG’s have no power at all to compel them to do so; it’s entirely optional.
It turns out that from 2001 to 2003, Yoo was the only person at the OLC who was “read in” to the program. His boss, Jay Bybee, had no idea what Yoo was doing and first learned of the NSA program from media reports.
Cheney and Addington knew that Yoo was a hardened ideologue who would authorize anything they wanted.
Gonzales called Goldsmith to inform him that the President, in issuing the Authorization, had made an interpretation of law concerning his authorities and that DOJ should not act in contradiction of the President’s determinations.”
‘The President had made an interpretation of law’. Think about that.
If it is the case that the president can designate an Office of Legal Counsel functionary to immunize government officials and employees against criminal behavior, then it is true, to all intents and purposes that “if the president does it it’s not illegal.”
Why are Britain and the US engaged in military operations in Afghanistan? Why are British and US soldiers dying there? With the British losses over the last two weeks, some of the key leaders in prosecuting the Afghan campaign have addressed themselves to these questions, and it's interesting to note what they say.
When obliged to speak in earnest rather than merely playing with forms of rhetoric, they speak in plain terms. Whatever else it is, it's a war against terrorism
Feingold: Legal Memos on ‘Blatantly Illegal’ Surveillance Still in Place
“This report leaves no doubt that the warrantless wiretapping program was blatantly illegal and an unconstitutional assertion of executive power. I once again call on the Obama administration and its Justice Department to withdraw the flawed legal memoranda that justified the program and that remain in effect today.”
‘Most PSP Leads Were Determined Not to Have Any Connection to Terrorism’
Even though most PSP leads were determined not to have any connection to terrorism, many of the FBI witnesses believed the mere possibility of the leads producing useful information made investigating the leads worthwhile.
However, the DOJ [inspector general] also found that the exceptionally compartmented nature of the program created some frustration for FBI personnel. Some agents and analysts criticized the PSP-derived information they received for providing insufficient details, and the agents who managed counterterrorism programs at the FBI field offices the DOJ [inspector general] visited said the FBI’s process for disseminating PSP-derived information failed to adquately prioritize the information for investigation.
A long-awaited filing Thursday in the al-Haramain v. Bush terrorism case before a San Francisco federal judge presents a dare to the Obama administration: embrace the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance claims, invoke a secrecy doctrine that Attorney General Eric Holder has pledged to overhaul, or allow a case challenging the merits of warrantless surveillance to win.
“Warrantless surveillance of American citizens, in defiance of FISA, is unlawful and unconstitutional,” the motion quotes then-Senator Obama telling the Boston Globe in December 2007. Similar statements recounted in the motion come from Holder; Solicitor General Elana Kagan; Kagan’s deputy Neal Katyal; Assistant Attorney General David Kris; and Associate Deputy Attorney General Donald Verrilli.
Does God Hate Women? A directory of divine misogyny
"God told me to. I have to treat women as lesser beings, because it is inscribed in my Holy Book.”
"What would otherwise look like stark bullying is very often made respectable and holy by a putative religious law or aphorism or scriptural quotation . . . They worship a God who is a male who gangs up with other males against women.
They worship a thug."
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