Lindsey Graham: Consumer Protection Bureau 'Is Something Out Of The Stalinist Era'

WASHINGTON -- Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said on Sunday that an agency established to protect consumers from financial fraud "is something out of the Stalinist era."

Graham, speaking on NBC's "Meet The Press," was asked why Senate Republicans had filibustered President Obama's nominee to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was created as part of 2010's Wall Street reform.

Graham spoke as if the bureau had yet to be created and debate was over how to shape it, rather than discussing the nominee, Richard Cordray, the former attorney general in Ohio.

"This consumer bureau that they want to propose is under the Federal Reserve, no appropriation oversight, no board. It is something out of the Stalinist era," Graham said.

Attawapiskat Chief still rejects third-party manager

Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence maintains she has not agreed to third-party management, despite a line in a statement issued by the Minister of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development John Duncan on Sunday, pointing to the contrary.

"I am pleased that Chief Spence has acknowledged the necessity of working with our Government, the third party management team, and Emergency Management Ontario to get help to the residents of Attawapiskat," said Duncan in his statement.

However, speaking from her office in Attawapiskat, Chief Spence told CBC News, "His office did call me Sunday morning, but I made it clear. I'm not going to allow third-party management in my office."
"A third-party manager is not needed in my community," said Spence.

While Chief Spence does confirm that emergency supplies were received on Saturday, she adds the line in the statement is "misleading. The minister is misleading the people, my members."

Climate deal done, but future still hazy

DURBAN, South Africa — The Canadian government has left a historic climate change summit that salvaged the Kyoto Protocol, warning that it will drive a hard bargain to establish new international laws, or their equivalent, to slash all major global sources of heat-trapping pollution.

The 195 members of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change finished a record breaking, marathon session that finished two days behind schedule, charting a course towards a new regime to be finalized by 2015 in an effort to stave off dangerous human interference with the atmosphere.

"Although these negotiations will be difficult, we are cautiously optimistic that we will reach a new agreement by 2015," said Environment Minister Peter Kent.

The Kyoto agreement, signed and ratified by virtually all of the countries, apart from the United States, in 1997, will be extended, without participation from Canada, Russia and Japan who all said they wanted the other large emitting countries, including China and India, to take on their own commitments.

Inside Syria: the rebel call for arms and ammunition

The route across the Syrian border was marked by a single shining piece of string. It stretched from the road on the Turkish side for a few hundred metres to the steel and razor-wire fence that ran along the boundary.

The smugglers followed it silently and quickly, jumping from one stone to another in the moonlight. Each man carried a thick, plastic-wrapped load on his back. The plastic bundles rattled and clinked as they ran along.

Beyond the fence the shadows of men and animals moved. "Do you have money?" asked a Turkish voice.

"Next shipment," the Syrian replied.

A man with a scarf wrapped around his face held the coils of barbed wire flat while the cargo was passed across and loaded on to the backs of the waiting mules. Then the men hurried the animals away from the border and up into the mountains of northern Syria.

Emma Goldman Occupies Wall Street

One afternoon in mid-October a young woman—dressed in a white Victorian shirtwaist, long black
skirt and rimless glasses shorn of earpieces—stood up in
Zuccotti Park to announce that she was Emma Goldman and that she had traveled through time to tell those gathered in the park that she loved what they were doing. Nothing in the way of OWS street theater could have better invoked the spirit of the protest than the appearance of a principled anarchist, born nearly a century and a half ago, who never considered herself more American than when she was denouncing the brutish contempt in which capitalism held the feeling life of the individual.

“Feeling” was a key word for Emma Goldman. She always said that the ideas of anarchism were of secondary use if grasped only with one’s reasoning intelligence; it was necessary to “feel them in every fiber like a flame, a consuming fever, an elemental passion.” This, in essence, was the core of Goldman’s radicalism: a lifelong faith, lodged in the nervous system, that feelings were everything. Radical politics, in fact, was the history of one’s own hurt, thwarted, humiliated feelings at the hands of institutionalized authority.

It was the intensity with which she declared herself—in lecture halls, on open-air platforms, in school auditoriums and private homes, from theater stages and prison cells, the back of a truck or a courtroom stand—that made her world famous. That intensity—her signature trait—was midwife to a remarkable gift she had for making those who heard her absorb the pain inherent in whatever social inequity she was exposing. As the women and men in her audience listened to her, a scenario of almost mythic proportion seemed to unfold before their eyes. The homeliness of their own small lives became invested with a sense of drama that acted as a catalyst for the wild, vagrant hope—especially vulnerable to meanspirited times—that things need not be as they were.

Will Occupy Shut Down All West Coast Ports?

Around nine o'clock on the night of November 2, after more than 10,000 people marched to the Port of Oakland in support of Occupy Oakland's call for a general strike, an independent arbitrator declared the port unsafe for its workers, effectively securing its closure for the rest of the night. This Monday, Occupy Oakland will try to best its 12-hour port shutdown with a more ambitious West Coast "port blockade" joined by more than a dozen occupations from Anchorage to San Diego.

Occupy Oakland's renewed call to shut down the "Wall Street on the waterfront" was sparked in large part by the October firing of 26 port truckers in Los Angeles and Long Beach who wore Teamster T-shirts to work in defiance of their anti-union employer, the Australian-owned Toll Group. Monday's protests are also being billed as a protest against port terminals run by the Goldman Sachs-owned Stevedoring Services of America (SSA) and a show of solidarity with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union's rank-and-file—particularly in Longview, Washington, where the union is engaged in a contract fight with Export Grain Terminal, a subsidiary of the agribusiness giant Bunge.

Barucha Peller, a member of Occupy Oakland's West Coast port shutdown coordinating committee, said Monday's plans are an "unprecedented" stand for a movement that's only three months old. Activists have learned from the previous shutdown, she believes, and will work to avoid repeating mistakes such as blocking truck drivers mistakenly thought to be incoming nonunion workers. "November 2 we were organizing on the fly," she explained. "Now we're communicating a lot better with the port truckers and flyering a lot more down at the port." Both truckers and the ILWU members, she added, have had "really positive responses" to the plans.

Phone Hacking: Around 800 Victims Of News Of The World Phone Hacking, Says Met Police

Around 800 people had their phone hacked by the News of the World, according to the Metropolitan Police.

Officers involved with Operation Weeting, Scotland Yard’s phone hacking enquiry, revealed the numbers on Saturday, with Deputy Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers telling The Times newspaper: "We are confident we have personally contacted all the people who have been hacked or are likely to have been hacked."

According to the Guardian, the Metropolitan Police now believe that the “false hope” moment given to Bob and Sue Dowler, parents of the murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, may not have been caused by journalists working for the News of the World deleting phone messages.

"It is understood that while News of the World reporters probably were responsible for deleting some of the missing girl's messages, police have concluded that they were not responsible for the particular deletion which caused her family to have false hope that she was alive," said the report.

EPA links water contamination to fracking for the first time

In a first, federal environment officials have scientifically linked underground water pollution with hydraulic fracturing, concluding that contaminants found in central Wyoming were likely caused by the gas drilling process.

The findings by the Environmental Protection Agency come partway through a separate national study by the agency to determine whether fracking presents a risk to water resources.

In the 121-page draft report released Thursday, EPA officials said the contamination near the town of Pavillion, Wyoming, had most likely seeped up from gas wells and contained at least 10 compounds known to be used in frack fluids.

“The presence of synthetic compounds such as glycol ethers 2026 and the assortment of other organic components is explained as the result of direct mixing of hydraulic fracturing fluids with ground water in the Pavillion gas field,” the draft report states. “Alternative explanations were carefully considered.”

The agency’s findings could be a turning point in the heated national debate about whether contamination from fracking is happening, and are likely to shape how the country regulates and develops natural gas resources in the Marcellus Shale and across the Eastern Appalachian states.

Occupy Our Homes Gains Support Near A Foreclosed House In Brooklyn

BROOKLYN, N.Y. -- Until three days ago, Teresa Bolton didn't consider herself part of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Bolton is 55 and lives in East New York, Brooklyn, an hour's train ride from the skyscrapers of Manhattan's financial district, where the movement was born. But when occupiers appeared on her block this week, as part of a new national campaign to help homeless families move into vacant houses and resist foreclosure-related evictions, she opened her door.

"Occupy Wall Street came to me. I didn't go seek it out," she said, standing on her porch, wearing a navy turban and a pink sweatshirt, large silver hoops dangling from her ears. "I always wanted to be involved in something positive that was beneficial to everyone."

The street was relatively quiet on Friday afternoon. The exception: a few neighbors milling about on the sidewalk and a steady stream of white 20-somethings filing in and out of a house down the street. The neighborhood is home to mostly poor African Americans and Caribbean immigrants; Occupy Wall Street protesters are overwhelmingly white. On Friday, those activists were the only white people spotted in the neighborhood, besides the police officers stationed nearby. The house had a large banner stretched across it that read, "BANKS STEAL HOMES," and a sign perched on the roof declaring, "FORECLOSE ON BANKS NOT PEOPLE, OCCUPY WALL ST."

Israel is in the midst of a culture war

The right has been in power for a long time now, and now, in its 35th year in government, in the 64th year of the state, it has turned to the task of reshaping the country's character and faces almost no opposition

Anyone who says this is a matter of a few inconsequential laws is leading others astray; anyone who claims a reversible procedure is being deceptive; anyone who states reassuringly that this is a passing phase is trying to put one over. Even the person who thinks it's just an attempt at regime change is under a delusion. What we are witnessing is w-a-r.

This fall a culture war, no less, broke out in Israel, and it is being waged on many more, and deeper, fronts than are apparent. It is not only the government, as important as that is, that hangs in the balance, but also the very character of the state. Our way of life is about to change, from cradle to grave. For this reason, it could be the most pivotal battle in the country's history since the War of Independence.

We always knew that a few years without an external threat could strain the delicate seams: When the guns go silent, the demons roar. But no one predicted such an outburst of demons of every kind, all at once. The assault on the existing order is an all-out war, on every front; a political tsunami, a cultural flood and a social and religious earthquake, all still in their infancy. Those who call this an exaggeration are trying to lull you to sleep. The defeats and the victories up to now will determine the course of events: In the end, we will have a different country. The pretension of being an enlightened Western democracy is giving way, with terrifying speed, to a different reality - that of a benighted, racist, religious, ultranationalist, fundamentalist Middle Eastern country. That is not the kind of integration into the region we had hoped for.

Injured workers want justice, not poverty

Injured workers, community activists and trade unionists gathered Friday outside the Ministry of Labour at 400 University Avenue in Toronto, calling for better treatment for injured workers by employers, the government and the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB).

"The poverty of injured workers is a shame," said Marion Endicott, injured worker activist and community legal worker.

Especially since the compensation system was established to prevent injured workers from living a life of poverty.

In 1915, injured workers gave up the right to sue their employers in exchange for a compensation system that would allow injured workers to live a poverty-free, dignified life.

But over the years injured workers have seen their benefits eroded by inflation and clawbacks.

In order to restore their purchasing power, they want full cost of living adjustments, job security or full wage loss payments, and full coverage of all workers in Ontario.

Durban Climate Change Conference: Breakthrough Reached On Course For Future Accord

AP — DURBAN, South Africa - A U.N. climate conference reached a hard-fought agreement Sunday on a complex and far-reaching program meant to set a new course for the global fight against climate change for the coming decades.

The 194-party conference agreed to start negotiations on a new accord that would put all countries under the same legal regime enforcing commitments to control greenhouse gases. It would take effect by 2020 at the latest.

The deal also set up the bodies that will collect, govern and distribute tens of billions of dollars a year for poor countries. Other documents in the package lay out rules for monitoring and verifying emissions reductions, protecting forests, transferring clean technologies to developing countries and scores of technical issues.

Currently, only industrial countries have legally binding emissions targets under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Those commitments expire next year, but they will be extended for another five years under the accord adopted Sunday — a key demand by developing countries seeking to preserve the only existing treaty regulating carbon emissions.

The proposed Durban Platform offered answers to problems that have bedeviled global warming negotiations for years about sharing the responsibility for controlling carbon emissions and helping the world's poorest and most climate-vulnerable nations cope with changing forces of nature.

Finding a rights balance

Over the last couple of years, dozens of school boards across the country have introduced anti-discrimination policies aimed at protecting gay, lesbian and transgendered students from bullying. In most places, the initiatives have passed unopposed. But when the public board in Burnaby, B.C., tried to do so last spring, battle lines quickly formed.

Conservative parents demanded to know what the policy would mean for students who objected to homosexuality on religious grounds. Would they be told their views are discriminatory? Would they be “re-educated” if they spoke their minds? Supporters, in turn, accused the group of perpetuating homophobia and in short order things got ugly. Epithets flew on the comments sections of news sites, including racial slurs singling out Asian and Muslim parents opposed to the proposal (one comment on a story on Xtra.ca, the website of Canada’s gay and lesbian newspaper, featured a slur directed at Asian businesses, with the threat, “You will be run out of town”). Competing protests turned board meetings on the issue into media circuses. Demonstrators hoisted signs bearing slogans like “All love is the same,” or “Leave our children alone.”

It’s a controversy, in short, that seems sure to spawn a profusion of human rights complaints—the sort that commissions and tribunals have been eager to weigh in on in the past (a hate-speech complaint over the insult on Xtra.ca is already in the works). But if the protagonists go down this road, they’re bound to find a changed landscape at the other end. Over the past few weeks, Canada’s highest court has issued decisions curbing the powers of human rights tribunals, or making it harder for certain complainants to get a hearing, while government MPs have thrown their support behind a private member’s bill that would get the federal commission out of policing speech altogether.

Russian election protesters rally in 60 cities

In what has been called the largest ever showing of anti-government protest in post-Soviet Russia, tens of thousands gathered across the country Saturday — with a massive demonstration in Moscow — to rally against alleged election fraud.

Demonstrations were held in more than 60 cities and much of the public anger is being directed at Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and the ruling United Russia Party. There were fewer than 100 arrests nation-wide, indicating a surprising show of restraint by police.

The independent Russian election-observer group Golos said Saturday the "[United Russia Party had] achieved the majority mandate by falsification," confirming what opposition activists and independent monitors had already alleged as widespread fraud in last weekend's parliamentary elections. Demonstrators want the government to nullify those results and hold fresh elections.

Exact figures on the turnout were nearly impossible to confirm. Police said 25,000 amassed in a Moscow square while some protest organizers put the figure as high as 150,000.

At least 50,000 officers and riot troops were deployed in the city ahead of the demonstrations, the BBC reported. However, police appeared content to remain on the sidelines. Elsewhere in Russia, an estimated 7,000 protesters assembled in St. Petersburg, and demonstrations ranging from a few hundred people to a thousand were held in other locales.

Deal reached at UN climate talks

A UN climate conference reached a hard-fought agreement Sunday on a complex and far-reaching program meant to set a new course for the global fight against climate change for the coming decades.

The 194-party conference agreed to start negotiations on a new accord that would put all countries under the same legal regime enforcing commitments to control greenhouse gases. It would take effect by 2020 at the latest.

The deal also set up the bodies that will collect, govern and distribute tens of billions of dollars a year for poor countries. Other documents in the package lay out rules for monitoring and verifying emissions reductions, protecting forests, transferring clean technologies to developing countries and scores of technical issues.

Currently, only industrial countries have legally binding emissions targets under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Those commitments expire next year, but they will be extended for another five years under the accord adopted Sunday.

The proposed Durban Platform offered answers to problems that have bedeviled global warming negotiations for years about sharing the responsibility for controlling carbon emissions and helping the world's poorest and most climate-vulnerable nations cope with changing forces of nature.