02.Dec.2012 - NYC Shutting Down Occupy Sandy Relief, Organizing McDonalds and WalMart, Banksters = 4th branch of Government? Palestinian Statehood, Modern Day Slavery Victory, Tale of Lost American Liberty, Israel to Expand Settlements, Anti-Choice Zealots, Secret Watergate Files Released, more.

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NYC Threatens to Shut Down Occupy Sandy Relief Sites

While the history of relief efforts for Sandy victims in places such as Staten Island and Red Hook is still being written, a move on Friday by New York City will probably go down as one of the stupidest moves any governmental authority EVER made

http://my.firedoglake.com/tobywollin/2012/12/01/nyc-threatens-to-shut-down-occupy-sandy-relief-sites/

Israel Pushes New Settlement Homes After UN Palestine Vote

he Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, has ordered the construction of thousands of new homes in Jewish settlements in the occupied territories in what will be widely interpreted as retaliation for the United Nations vote to recognise a Palestinian state on Thursday.

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/330-131/14813-israel-pushes-new-settlement-homes-after-un-palestine-vote

Israel/Palestine
No more slaughter in Gaza!
http://www.socialistworld.net/doc/6045

Boy Scouts America: Anti Gay, Anti Atheist (BSA Blog Carnival)

The Boy Scouts Association of America not only promotes religion within their ranks, it explicitly states that without God in their lives, the children could never grow to become good people. This comes from the Boy Scout Handbook, in an archived version of the BSALegal.org website

http://martinspribble.com/archives/3554

Organizing McDonalds and Walmart
hat does the drama in Washington over the "fiscal cliff" have to do with strikes and work stoppages among America's lowest-paid workers at Walmart, McDonald's, Burger King, and Domino's Pizza? Everything.

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/14814-organizing-mcdonalds-and-walmart

Will the West Survive Climate Change?
This year, summer came on like a grudge, with record-breaking heat, inescapable drought, and the sense that the effects of climate change had arrived - and that life in America's mythic frontier might never be the same.

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/271-38/14812-will-the-west-survive-climate-change

Are Banksters and the Fed Becoming the Fourth Branch of Our Government?

Despite its pathetic propaganda encouraging us to practice doublethink, the Federal Reserve freely admits that it is privately owned, is a monopoly empowered by Congress, and that it operates independently from -- above? -- Congress and the president.   Yet it pays its private undisclosed shareholders/owners huge rewards . . that it extracts from U.S. taxpayers!

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Are-Banksters--the-Fed-Be-by-Richard-Clark-121201-585.html

For Amish, fastest-growing faith group in US, life is changing
As the Amish population in the US grows – forecast to hit 1 million by 2050 – the decline of farmland is forcing the community to spread to new areas and to evolve its agrarian culture.
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2012/1130/For-Amish-fastest-growing-faith-group-in-US-life-is-changing

Is it Time for Evangelicals to Stop Opposing Gay Marriage?

I asked this question of Jim Daly – head of Focus on the Family — about eighteen months ago.  Jim is a famously irenic figure: earnest, thoroughly likable, palpably compassionate, and absolutely devoted to causes such as adoption and immigration reform and opposing human trafficking.  He also helms an organization that, its reputation on the Left notwithstanding, devotes the vast majority of its resources into serving families and children and only a tiny proportion to political advocacy.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/philosophicalfragments/2012/11/26/is-it-time-for-evangelicals-to-stop-opposing-gay-marriage/

Now What? The State Of Palestinian Statehood

The United Nations General Assembly overwhelmingly passed a resolution Thursday that changed Palestinians' status to a "non-member observer state." It's a significant step in Palestinian-Israeli relations, but whether backward or forward depends on who's talking.

http://www.npr.org/2012/12/01/166313016/the-state-of-palestinian-statehood

Is The Voting Rights Act Outdated?

For more than four decades, the Voting Rights Act never lost a court decision as it cut a path for minorities' increased participation in elections.

http://www.npr.org/2012/12/01/166226641/is-the-voting-rights-act-outdated

Revolution is female: the uprising of women in the Arab world
The Arabic word for revolution, thawra, has a female gender. So does the word ’huriya (freedom), and so does the word intifada (uprising). Sara Abbas talks to the social media revolutionaries behind The Uprising of Women in the Arab World, a facebook group that is taking patriarchy head-on
http://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/sara-abbas/revolution-is-female-uprising-of-women-in-arab-world

A victory against modern day slavery
The ILO Domestic Workers Convention was unthinkable just a few years ago. It represents the culmination of years of effort by domestic workers, advocates, and officials to shine a spotlight on a long-ignored but significant sector of the workforce, says Nisha Varia
http://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/nisha-varia/victory-against-modern-day-slavery

Abortion Rates Drop By 5 Percent In US

Good news! The US abortion rate fell 5 percent between 2008 and 2009. Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published the details for 2009, the most recent year for which statistics are available, and noted that this was the biggest one-year decline in at least a decade.
http://www.care2.com/causes/abortion-rates-drop-by-5-precent-in-us.html

Bradley Manning: A Tale of Liberty Lost in America
Over the past two and a half years, all of which he has spent in a military prison, much has been said about Bradley Manning, but nothing has been heard from him. That changed on Thursday, when the 23-year-old US army private accused of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks testified at his court martial proceeding about the conditions of his detention.
http://prisonradio.wordpress.com/2012/12/01/bradley-manning-a-tale-of-liberty-lost-in-america/

Science, an essential part of culture
When peace was restored after the end of the Second World War, 44 countries convened in London to debate how to reconstruct educational systems and to enable countries to work together. Spurred on by France and Britain, the delegates decided to create an organization that would embody a culture of peace with the ultimate aim of preventing another world war. This was originally intended to be an educational and cultural organization, but two British biologists, Julian Huxley and Joseph Needham, proposed adding science to its agenda.
http://areycorneja.wordpress.com/2012/12/02/science-an-essential-part-of-culture/

Israel to expand settlements after UN vote on Palestine

The right-wing Zionist government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has issued the go-ahead for the construction of 3,000 new housing units in occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank and is putting 1,000 more on a fast track for permits. These moves are in retaliation for the United Nations General Assembly vote late Thursday night recognizing the Palestine Liberation Organization as a nonmember state.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2012/dec2012/pale-d01.shtml

What's Next for Anti-Choice Zealots?

After an election night thrashing, the movement hopes to make its message more palatable to the public.

http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/whats-next-anti-choice-zealots

8 Reasons Wall Street Greed Is the Cause, and the Solution, To Phony Fiscal Cliff Crisis

Big Finance is once again getting a free pass.

http://www.alternet.org/economy/eight-reasons-wall-street-greed-cause-and-solution-phony-fiscal-cliff-crisis

Strike Launches Largest Union Drive in US Fast Food History

hile the emblems of Wendy's, McDonald's, KFC, Domino's and other greasy dynasties are hard to escape in the American landscape, those who cook, clean, ring up orders and otherwise serve as the fulcrum of these franchises often go unnoticed. These workers, however, were hard to miss today as they stepped off burger assembly lines across New York City and into the street, picketing in front of their workplaces. The strike, which took place at numerous restaurants across the city, is the start of the largest effort to unionize fast food workers in American history. Organizers are calling the campaign Fast Food Forward.

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/315-19/14801-strike-launches-largest-union-drive-in-us-fast-food-history

Watergate Scandal: Secret Files Released
he US government has released more than 850 pages from the Watergate political scandal, providing new insights on privileged legal conversations and prison evaluations of several of the burglars in the case. A federal judge had decided earlier in November to unseal some material, but other records still remain off limits.

http://rsnorg.org/news-section2/318-66/14824--watergate-scandal-secret-files-released
New Orleans: Blaming the victims

The Army Corps of Engineers caught in (another) lie

Strategic Maneuvers

The Revolving Door from the Pentagon to the Private Sector

The sinking of the Titanic

If you ever thought the story sounded fishy...

Richard Dawkins: Now Praise Intelligent Design Bloomberg Praises ‘Occupy Sandy,’ Then Sends Police To Shut It Down

Occupy - The Movement And The Music - Spring 2013

Hundreds of Fast Food Workers Strike for Living Wage, Inspired by Wal-Mart Strike

US fiscal cliff could put economy into recessions

Breaking.. Laureates demand Nobel rescind Peace Prize to EU: time to award medals to Manning?

Marriage Equality Causes Fox News Analyst To Freak Out

DOCUMENTARIES OF THE DAY:

Cults: Dangerous Devotion

Religion|04 Nov, 2012|Buy the DVD|No Comments|Add to Playlist|90 mins

Video Not Working?

The Ascent of Money

History|04 Nov, 2012|Buy the DVD|No Comments|Add to Playlist|240 mins

Video Not Working?

Don't Look Now -- Banks Are Still Ruining America

AlterNet / By Les Leopold

 5 COMMENTS

6 Harsh Lessons from the JP Morgan Fiasco

JP Morgan Chase is part of an entwined system of too-big-to-fail institutions that are ripping us off.

 

 

Photo Credit: ShutterStock.com

 

 

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JP Morgan, the white knight of banking, supposedly weathered the 2008 crisis with little difficulty. It was not in danger of collapsing like Lehman Brothers and it did not really need bailouts in order to survive, or so it proudly proclaims. Furthermore, its CEO, Jamie Dimon, was known as “Obama’s banker,” a relatively liberal financier who cared both about his bank and his country.

Now, we know this was all a sham.

The truth is that there are no good banks and bad banks among the giants of finance.That’s just a feel-good story that gives us false hope that individuals and individual institutions can fix a system that is rotten to the core.

JP Morgan Chase is no different than other big banks, except that it is the biggest. It is part of an entwined system of too-big-to-fail institutions that are ripping us off. Leading up to the 2008 crash, it was up to its eyeballs packaging and selling mortgage-backed securities that were designed to fail. It helped pump up the housing bubble, profited while it was inflating and profited again while it burst. It was forced to pay a $153 million fine last year for “misleading big investors about the riskiness of mortgage-related securities it was selling just as the home-loan market was melting down.”

JP Morgan helped to crash our system in 2008 and profited handsomely from the bailouts it claimed it really didn’t need (but thank you very much, we’ll take them anyway). And now it's back in the gambling business just like all the other big banks and hedge funds. And should another crash come, we’ll again be asked to pick up the tab -- it's still “too big to fail” according to the conventional wisdom.

But the problem is bigger and deeper than it was even before the horrendous crash. On a day-to-day basis, these large financial institutions use their vast gambling enterprises, to extract profits from our economic system while creating little or no value in return. Economists call these profits “economic rents.” That's French for “rip-offs.” Where does this money come from if the banks are not creating new economic value? It comes from the rest of us in the form of stagnating wages, higher fuel costs and excessive financial fees on mortgages, credit cards and loans. It also comes from tax breaks for the super-rich that the rest of us have to make up. And finally it comes from the costs associated with financial crashes – bailouts, job loss and deficit-related problems.

How big is big?

• The top five U.S. banks own approximately 60 percent of all U.S. banking assets.
• Their combined assets total $8.5 trillion which is slightly larger than China’s GDP ($7.2 trillion).
• JP Morgan Chase heads the list with $2.3 trillion in assets, which is about the size of Great Britain's GDP. We’re talking big.

Fantasy finance fails again

While Jamie Dimon was using his political muscle to bend the Dodd-Frank rules so his bank could gamble at will, his bank was gambling at will. Oh, he would never call it gambling. He says it’s just hedging its other investments, which is the prudent, banker-like thing to do. But really, hedging is just a phrase that bankers use to justify any and all bets they want to place. And they want to place those bets because they are sure they can win. JP Morgan Chase made billions of dollars of profits on tens of billions in bets designed, supposedly, to protect the value of its corporate bond portfolio. (If you have a strong stomach for finance, you can get some of the gory details here.)

A large part of JP Morgan Chase's betting strategy involving playing the A.I.G. game using those nefarious credit default swaps we’ve been hearing so much about, and that JP Morgan Chase invented two decades ago. That game goes like this:

Make believe you’re an insurance company and you are writing insurance on corporate bonds that you don’t own. You guarantee that if the bonds fail, you will make the person you insure whole. In exchange you get premiums, just like a real insurance company. But you don’t call any of this insurance because:

• Insurance is heavily regulated – you have to have ample reserves to pay off losses. But if you call it a credit default swap you aren’t regulated as an insurance company.
• Also in the insurance industry you can’t take out a policy on your neighbor’s house unless you own it. That’s because about 800 years ago someone figured out that if you did, your neighbor’s house might mysteriously burn down. But in the credit default insurance game, you can insure anything and everything. You don’t need to own what you insure. And you are free to burn down others' assets if you can. 

This is supposed to allow you to hedge your risk. But since you can bet on bonds you don’t own, it quickly turns into a game of fantasy finance, much like fantasy baseball. It’s pure gambling and no one has yet to show that it has any redeeming economic or social value. (In fact, as an avid fantasy baseball gambler, I believe strongly that fantasy baseball is far more socially useful and far less dangerous that fantasy finance.)

Well, JP Morgan Chase’s gambling house – called the Chief Investment Office – decided to follow in the footsteps of A.I.G. and insure others who were betting on corporate bond derivatives. The bank figured out, just like A.I.G, that the more derivatives it insured, the more revenues it would receive in the form of premiums. It was like printing money (and then getting fat bonuses based on those hefty premiums). As long the corporate bond market didn’t go bad, they could just pocket those premiums and not worry about paying out on their insurance bets. Like A.I.G., they thought the risk of having to pay up was minimal.

Of course, they had incredibly complex ways to cover their bets. There derivatives piled onto derivatives like planes stacked up at JFK. But those strategies collapsed when the corporate bond market started to deteriorate over the past several months.

JP Morgan Chase became so big in this obscure casino market that they were able to manipulate it. At first the manipulation helped them milk the market for more than $3 billion in profits over the past several years. It was a rigged game while the relatively good times lasted. But the game turned sour when the corporate bond market deteriorated. That’s when being a big fish in a small market meant trouble. It means you can’t sell your gigantic positions to cover your bets because there are no buyers. Instead, hedge funds saw the bank as a beached whale and bet against it. To date, something like $13 billion has evaporated in the form of former profits and current losses, with more sure to come.

So, what are the lessons learned?

1. The big banks are still gambling. Shocking, isn’t it? Obviously, it’s a way of life. It’s built into the fabric of who they are. They always have at the ready a cover story about how they’re just hedging their assets, making markets for their customers and protecting their downside. Baloney. Their real motive is ever so simple --- money. Financial gambling is the quickest way to big bucks. When the big banks and hedge funds see the opportunity, they jump at it. It’s in the DNA of the banking system. It's what the financial elite are trained to do – all of them. And it will never change as long as we allow them to play with all that money. Why invest long-term in goods producing industries when you can milk your casino?

2. The big banks know that even if they get caught and fail, we will bail them out. JP Morgan, so far, has not taken down the entire financial system with its bad bets. But that’s more by luck than by design. We still don’t know the full extent of its losses. Everyone knows, however, that JP Morgan Chase will be rescued by the taxpayer should things get rough. There is zero chance that we will allow it to fail. How would you approach gambling in Las Vegas if you knew that your losses would always be covered?

3. Too big to fail also means too big to regulate. There are dozens of regulators who are “embedded” in JP Morgan Chase as well as the other large banks. That means that each day these federal regulators walk into their offices at JP Morgan Chase and pore over the books. Yet, they didn’t spot this casino until it already failed? That should tell us that Dodd-Frank can never handle these too-big-to-fail banks. The bill itself is now too big to implement, thanks to Jamie Dimon and his tireless lobbying efforts. Together the big banks watered down the bill and are now trying to drown it. But even a perfect bill would be impossible to fully implement in banks that are larger than large countries.

(Fox News, of course, is all over this angle. It’s a great chance to attack the Obama administration and regulations in general. But they have no solution other than letting the free market decide what’s best. That ought to really scare the big banks!)

4. To close the casino, the big banks must be broken up. There is no way to reform a too-big-to-fail bank without breaking it up into much smaller pieces. No bank should hold more than $50 billion in assets. Banking should be a public utility designed to aid the economy, not to enrich its biggest gamblers. It’s supposed to turn savings into investment, not into a craps game. And as long as they're too big to fail, they're gambling with other people's money. (A return to fully separating commercial banking from investment banking is a good start. But the separated banks also would need to be dramatically reduced in size.)

5. The JP Morgan crisis makes the case for a financial transaction tax. Big banks gamble in part because they have more money than they can profitably invest in firms that produce goods and services in the real economy. This excess money becomes their gambling stake and it makes them itchy to place their bets. The answer is to make each and every transaction more costly through a financial transaction tax – basically a very small sales tax on securities of all shades and colors. You want to write credit default insurance? You pay a small transaction tax that takes away a good deal of your potential profits. You want to buy a derivative, sell it, buy it again and then swap it for another? Then each transaction will cost you. This kind of tax would suck about $150 billion a year out of Wall Street putting downward pressure on financial salaries and bonuses. (The National Nurses United union is leading a campaign for this gambling tax. You can join the effort at www.robinhoodtax.org.)

6. Cap all bank compensation packages. For a very short while during the crisis our political leaders got religion about Wall Street incomes. They understood that bubble profits were based on fantasy finance that evaporated during the crash. The resulting damage and bailouts led to salary caps on bailed-out companies. But as soon as the banks returned the overt TARP bailout money, the caps disappeared. That was a huge mistake. They needed to be made permanent. Or if you want to be more fair-minded, the caps should stay in place until the unemployment rate returns to 5 percent.

Rather than looking for individuals to blame (even though so many richly deserve it) we should go after the entire banking system. Our case is simple. The big banks and their hedge fund friends crashed the economy with their reckless gambling. They killed 8 million jobs, caused a collapse in government revenues and led to mounting federal debts. Meanwhile state and local government services and employment were cut -- all thanks to Wall Street. Our financial elites should pay us back for the damage they caused. The only language they understand is money.

But wouldn’t that drive the best and the brightest out of the financial sector?

Exactly.

Les Leopold is the executive director of the Labor Institute and Public Health Institute in New York, and author of The Looting of America: How Wall Street's Game of Fantasy Finance Destroyed Our Jobs, Pensions, and Prosperity—and What We Can Do About It (Chelsea Green, 2009).

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Record number of Americans in poverty

Record number of Americans in poverty

By Joseph Kishore
14 September 2011

[REPRINT]

The poverty rate in the US soared to 15.1 percent in 2010, its highest level since 1993, according to a report released by the Census Bureau on Tuesday. Household incomes continued to fall sharply, amidst the worst jobs crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the number of people without health insurance increased.
The bureau's report documents a shocking decline in the living standards of millions of people, a devastating indictment of the policies of the Obama administration and the entire political establishment. The new figures cover conditions one year after the supposed beginning of the recovery in June 2009.
The poverty rate increased nearly a full percentage point, from 14.3 percent in 2009. It was the third consecutive annual increase in the poverty rate and the fourth consecutive annual increase in the number of people living in poverty. Last year, there were 46.2 million people living in poverty, defined at the absurdly low level of about $22,000 a year for a family of four and $11,000 a year for an individual.
The number of people earning less than twice the poverty rate (about $44,000 for a family of four) stood at 103 million in 2010, or about 34 percent of the population.
The percentage of children under 18 living in poverty increased from 20.7 percent to 22.0 percent. A total of 16.4 million children live in poverty, equivalent to the population of New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago and Houston combined.
The total number of people in poverty is equivalent to the combined population of the 50 largest cities in the United States. There are more people in poverty in the US in 2010 than during any year on record going back to 1959.
Since 2007, the poverty rate has increased from 12.5 percent to 15.1 percent, or 2.6 percentage points.

The poverty rate for African-Americans increased at a particularly rapid rate, from 25.8 percent in 2009 to 27.4 percent in 2010.
Millions of people live in what is known as “deep poverty,” with incomes less than 50 percent of the official poverty level (or less than about $11,000 a year for a family of four). The deep poverty rate increased from 6.3 percent in 2009 to 6.7 percent in 2010, an increase of 1.5 million to a total of 20.5 million people.
While children under 18 represent 24.4 percent of the overall population, they make up 36 percent of the population (7.5 million individuals) living in deep poverty.
The absolute number of people living in deep poverty and the deep poverty rate are both at the highest level since the government began tabulating these figures in 1975.
The Census report also documented a continued decline in income for working people, with the real median household income falling to $49,445 in 2010, down 2.3 percent ($1,154) from 2009. Since 2007, the report notes, “real median income has declined 6.4 percent and is 7.1 percent below the median household income peak that occurred in 1999.”
These averages mask the enormous inequality that has become the central feature of American society. The lowest 20 percent of households, with incomes of $20,000 or less, saw their share of total income fall from 3.4 percent to 3.3 percent. The top 20 percent took home more than 50 percent of all money income.
A report by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities notes that since 1999, real income “has fallen 12.1 percent for those at the 10th income percentile but only 1.5 percent for those at the 90th percentile. The income gap between those at the 10th and 90th percentile was this highest on record.”
Since 1999, real household income has fallen 5.5 percent for non-Hispanic whites, 14.6 percent for African Americans, 8.9 percent for Asians and 10.1 percent for Hispanics, according to the Census report.
For men with full-time, year-round jobs, the real median income is about the same today as it was in 1973, having remained largely flat for three decades.
Mass unemployment is a major driving force behind the decline in living standards, as corporations utilize the jobs crisis to push through wage and benefit cuts for those who are able to find work. Since 2007, the number of year-round, full-time workers fell by 9.4 million, a fall without parallel since the Great Depression.
These conditions have continued into 2011. Official unemployment stands at 9.1 percent, with the most recent jobs report from the Labor Department showing zero net job growth last month. The level of long-term unemployment is at a historic high. The percent of the population unemployed increased from 16.1 percent to 16.3 percent.

The number of people without health insurance in the United States was 49.9 million in 2010, an increase of nearly one million over 2009. The rise in the uninsured is a particularly damning exposure of the fraud of Obama's health care “reform,” which was in fact an opening shot in a drive to reduce health care costs for corporations and the government.
The rise in poverty is a product of the long-term decline of American capitalism, combined with the ferocious class war waged by the ruling class, now led by the Obama administration. Mass impoverishment is the outcome of a deliberate policy that has resulted in a vast transfer of wealth into the hands of a small corporate and financial aristocracy.
These indices of mass social distress come at a time of record profits, with corporations sitting on a cash hoard estimated at more than $2 trillion. The government has handed over trillions of dollars to the banks, inflating the stock market while bailing out the wealthy. Far from leading to an economic revival, the conditions for the vast majority of the population have suffered a catastrophic decline.
Amidst clear signs of a world economy sinking into a depression, the response of the ruling class is to push for massive austerity. States and local governments throughout the country are implementing cuts in the most basic programs to prevent poverty. The Michigan state government, for example, passed a measure this month that will cut 41,000 people from welfare assistance, including nearly 30,000 children, beginning October 1.
Meanwhile, after outlining a phony jobs proposal that will do nothing to address the unemployment crisis, the Obama administration is set to propose trillions of dollars in cuts to health care and retirement programs.
The administration has made a point of insisting that a proposal being worked on by a bipartisan budget deficit committee must include deep cuts in Medicare and Medicaid, the main federal health care programs.
To fight against these conditions, the working class must enter into industrial and political struggle.
The Socialist Equality Party calls for emergency measures to eliminate poverty, including a multi-trillion dollar public works program to employ tens of millions of workers in high-paying, productive jobs rebuilding infrastructure and meeting other critical social needs. A livable income to meet all basic needs is a social right that must be guaranteed to everyone.
To pay for this program, the SEP fights for a radical redistribution of wealth, including a 90 percent tax on all incomes over $500,000. Corporations, currently engaged in a hiring strike, must be taken over by the working class and run democratically in the interests of social need.
The implementation of these measures is impossible outside of a direct attack on the interests of the wealthy and on the capitalist two-party system, through the building of a mass socialist political movement of the working class.

Study: CEOs Who Fired Most Workers Earned Highest Pay

[Reprint]

A new study shows the CEOs who fired the most workers during the economic recession have also taken home the highest pay. According to the Institute for Policy Studies, the CEOs of the fifty corporations responsible for the worst layoffs were paid an average $12 million—42 percent more than the average for the Standard & Poor’s 500. [includes rush transcript]

Real Audio: http://play.rbn.com/?url=demnow/demnow/demand/2010/sept/audio/dn20100903.ra&proto=rtsp&start=00:45:18

MP3 Audio: http://traffic.libsyn.com/democracynow/dn2010-0903-1.mp3