Archive for September, 2009
FBI: Murder, violent crime dropped in 2008
- USATODAY.com WASHINGTON — Nearly all major crime categories dropped in 2008 despite the sagging economy and high unemployment, according to the FBI’s annual crime report out Monday.
Overall violent crime declined for the second straight year, including a nearly 4% drop in murder and a 2.5% drop in aggravated assault.
Although burglary was up 2%, car thefts plunged by nearly 13%, according to the report, which includes crime statistics from about 17,000 law enforcement agencies. Among other findings:
• The largest overall declines were recorded in the West, where murder was down 6.8% and car thefts dropped by nearly 17%.
• The 89,000 rapes recorded in 2008 were the fewest in two decades.
• Of the 14,180 murder victims in 2008, 2,428 were victims ages 20 to 24.
Full Story: FBI: Murder, violent crime dropped in 2008 – USATODAY.com.
Coal Slurry Smiles: NY Times Nails Clean Water Act Crimes and Punishment
Jeff Biggers – Many readers of the New York Times probably dropped their jaws in amazement at the lead story last Sunday: Seven-year-old Ryan Massey, of Prenter, West Virginia, smiled back with capped teeth, the enamel devoured by toxic tap water. His brother sported scabs and rashes, courtesy of the heavy metals–including lead, nickel–in their bath water.
If you think every American child should have the right to a glass of clean drinking water and a safe shower, then check out the accompanying slide show and video.
Thanks to Times reporter Charles Duhigg, the rest of the United States got a glimpse of daily life in the Saudi Arabia of coal–in the coalfields of Appalachia, where coal companies are “pumping into the ground illegal concentrations of chemicals–the same pollutants that flowed from residents’ taps.” And the coda: “But state regulators never fined or punished those companies for breaking those pollution laws.”
Full Story: Coal Slurry Smiles: NY Times Nails Clean Water Act Crimes and Punishment | CommonDreams.org.
Cheney and Rumsfeld’s ‘Close Friend’ Throws Out Suit Against Alleged Abu Ghraib Torturers
By Jeremy Scahill
On September 11, the US appeals court for the District of Columbia announced in a 2-1 decision that it was throwing out a lawsuit against CACI International and L-3 Communications Titan unit, which are being sued by Iraqi civilians for their alleged role in the torture and abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison. The companies provided interrogators at the prison at the height of the abuses there. The suit alleges that employees of the companies conspired with U.S. Army reservist Charles Graner, who was convicted of prisoner abuse on January 14, 2005 and is currently serving 10 years at Fort Leavenworth, and others to torture prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Several of the plaintiffs are Iraqis whose torture was depicted in graphic photos revealed over the past several years.
The judge who wrote the majority opinion, Laurence H. Silberman, said: “During wartime, where a private service contractor is integrated into combatant activities over which the military retains command authority, a tort claim arising out of the contractor’s engagement in such activities shall be preempted.”
The decision was swiftly celebrated by the private security industry. “The court’s decision today is an important step toward resolving all legal matters regarding the company’s mission and duties in Iraq,” Jody Brown, executive vice president for public relations at CACI, said in a statement. “We have said from day one that these lawsuits are completely without merit and designed to pursue a political agenda.”
Full Story: RebelReports – Cheney and Rumsfeld’s ‘Close Friend’ Throws Out Suit Against Alleged Abu Ghraib Torturers.
IAEA Conceals Evidence Iran Documents Were Forged
(IPS) - The International Atomic Energy Agency says its present objective regarding Iran is to try to determine whether the intelligence documents purportedly showing a covert Iranian nuclear weapons programme from 2001 to 2003 are authentic or not. The problem, according to its reports, is that Iran refuses to help clarify the issue.
But the IAEA has refused to acknowledge publicly significant evidence brought to its attention by Iran that the documents were fabricated, and has made little, if any, effort to test the authenticity of the intelligence documents or to question officials of the governments holding them, IPS has learned.
The agency has strongly suggested in its published reports that the documentation it is supposed to be investigating is credible, because it “appears to have been derived from multiple sources over different periods of time, is detailed in content and appears to be generally consistent”.
IAEA Safeguard Department chief Olli Heinonen signaled his de facto acceptance of the “alleged studies” documents when he presented an organisational chart of the purported secret nuclear weapons project based on the documents at a February 2008 “technical briefing” for member states.
Full Story: POLITICS: IAEA Conceals Evidence Iran Documents Were Forged – IPS ipsnews.net.
An inconvenient truth for the GOP: Canada’s system is better
Republicans want to ensure no public option creeps into the American system
- The Globe and Mail - It is rare for Canada to get noticed in the United States. In fact, it is almost unprecedented for anything Canadian to be the focal point of debate in Washington. Yet we have seen just that in recent months during the congressional wrangling over U.S. President Barack Obama’s attempts to reform health insurance.
Canada’s medicare system has suddenly been thrust into the spotlight south of the border. It has been pilloried by the Republicans in Congress, the subject of derisive and distorted television advertisements, described variously as a system of medicine by bureaucrat, a statist form of health care afflicted by gross inequities and inefficiencies, one that pales in comparison to the U.S. model. The hysterical tone of the anti-medicare rhetoric among Republicans would make one think Canada is North Korea.
But there is an inconvenient truth that the Republican ideology cannot dispute. Canada’s approach to providing citizens with universal health insurance is superior to the U.S. model of private insurance. When we get beyond the anti-medicare ideology and histrionics on Capitol Hill, we can establish this by reference to four basic numbers that give a good sense of our system versus the system in the United States.
Full Story: An inconvenient truth for the GOP: Canada’s system is better – The Globe and Mail.
For all Obama’s talk of overhaul, the US has failed to wind in Wall Street
Joseph Stiglitz | | The Guardian
With a blank cheque from taxpayers and no real reform the perverse incentives for risk-taking are bigger than ever
What went wrong? Have the right lessons been learned? Could it happen again? The anniversary of the Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy and the freezing of the credit markets that followed is an occasion for reflection. I fear that our collective response has been mistaken and inadequate – that we may just have made matters worse.
The financial sector would like us to believe that if only the Federal Reserve and the Treasury had leapt to the rescue of Lehmans all would have been fine. Sheer nonsense. Lehmans was not a cause but a consequence: a consequence of flawed lending practices, and of inadequate oversight by regulators.
Financial markets had lent on the basis of a bubble – a bubble in large part of their making. They had incentive structures that encouraged excessive risk-taking and shortsighted behaviour. And that was no accident. It was the fruit of vigorous lobbying, which strived equally hard to prevent regulation of changes in the financial structure, new products like credit default swaps – which, while supposedly designed to manage risk, actually created it – and ingenious devices to exploit poor and uninformed borrowers and investors. The sector may not have made good economic investments, but its political investments paid off handsomely.
9/12 March ‘Tea Party’ Photo: False Image Spread By Anti-Reform Activists
They LIED – again
Tea Party protesters trying to tout the size of their march on Washington last weekend have been passing around a photo of a packed National Mall. But the picture is years old.
Politifact asked Pete Piringer, public affairs officer for the D.C. Fire and Emergency Department, if the rally was big enough to fill that space. Piringer said no — and moreover, the picture can’t be from 2009.
Full Story: 9/12 March ‘Tea Party’ Photo: False Image Spread By Anti-Reform Activists.
Lots of Fear Remains Over Economy, Job Losses, Poll Finds
- washingtonpost.com- Despite fresh signs that the worst may be over for the beleaguered U.S. economy, there has been no letup in public fears about possible financial hardship ahead and there is broad concern that not enough is being done to avert another meltdown, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
Painful personal experiences over the past year continue to dampen the outlook of many Americans. About two-thirds of those polled say they have been hurt financially by the recession, with extensive reports that job losses and pay reductions are hitting home. Most call the economic situation a source of stress in their lives, and that anxiety also stems from apprehension of what may lie ahead for their families.
Nearly six in 10 Americans are now concerned about job or pay losses in the coming months, little changed since February, and there has been no increase in the percentage who see the federal government’s stimulus efforts as having an impact, even as the pace of layoffs has eased in recent months. And there is lukewarm public confidence that the government is enacting measures to stave off another financial crisis.
Full Story: Lots of Fear Remains Over Economy, Job Losses, Poll Finds – washingtonpost.com.
E-Up: Volkswagen ELECTRIC CAR Unveiled
FRANKFURT — German carmaker Volkswagen AG said it would unveil several new models at this week’s Frankfurt Auto Show, including an electric car called the E-Up.
At a reception before the start of the show Monday evening, the company said the E-Up compact would likely only go into production in 2013 and approach production levels of that of its other popular compact cars only by 2020.
The company said the front wheel drive car’s lithium ion battery will have 18 kilowatt hours energy capacity enabling a driving distance of around 130 kilometers, or about 80 miles, depending on driving style.
“One of the basic milestones on this timeline is the mass produced electric car,” Chief Executive Martin Winterkorn said in a statement.
Full Story: E-Up: Volkswagen ELECTRIC CAR Unveiled.
Dolphin slaughter turns sea red as Japan hunting season returns
| The Guardian- Taiji’s annual cull of bottlenose dolphins and pilot whales continues despite growing international condemnation
The tarpaulin covers have been meticulously erected, but they can’t completely mask the brutality of the slaughter unfolding below. Even from the clifftop, it is possible to hear the hunters’ voices and the thrashing of tail fins as their prey make a final, fruitless bid for freedom.
Occasionally a hunter emerges into the gaps between the covers, grimacing as he plunges his knife into the water. Minutes earlier the sea around him was emerald green. Now it is turning a deep crimson, the morning air tainted with the stench of freshly drawn mammal blood.
Full Story: Dolphin slaughter turns sea red as Japan hunting season returns | Environment | The Guardian.
Some showerheads harbor disease-causing bacteria
What’s in your showerhead? Don’t wanna know, do you?
- USATODAY.com- Too late, you’re reading this — it’s disease-causing “mycobacteria” microbes stuck there in their own slime.
“Microbes are everywhere, so in fact finding them in showers is not a surprise,” says Laura Baumgartner of the University of Colorado, Boulder, an author of the showerhead survey study. “Finding large numbers of (disease-causing) mycobacteria was a bit of a surprise, though.”
Released Monday by the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science journal, the study looked at 45 showerheads in nine cities, including Denver and New York. Using standard genetic tests, the team looked for microbes, expecting to find harmless varieties usually seen in tap water.
Full Story: Some showerheads harbor disease-causing bacteria – USATODAY.com.
Gold Continues to Rise to Record High
As the dollar has taken a beating in recent months, its value has plummeted, driving investors into the safety of commodities, including gold.
With the value of the dollar plummeting over concerns about the U.S. economy, the government’s ever-increasing debt, and added expenditures such as a major health care reform bill, investors are fleeing the greenback for the safety of commodities – especially gold.
Gold prices closed on Friday at $1,006.40 an ounce, a record-high, after rising $9.60 during trading. It marked the third time last week that gold prices have topped the $1,000 mark.
“Gold prices have been holding up better now than in previous occasions when they tried to rally high. Many [investors] were waiting for the $1,000-mark to be broken,” Carlos Sanchez, a precious metals analyst at CPM Group told CNNMoney.com. “The dollar has been weakening so that’s been a supportive factor.”
Last October, while the dollar appeared to be gaining some steam, gold prices fell to $720 per ounce.
Full Story: Economyincrisis.org – America’s Economic Report – Daily.
A national shame: when corporate interests trump those of the American people
What we are witnessing taking place in the U.S. Congress is repulsive and revolting.
What we are witnessing taking place in the U.S. Congress is repulsive and revolting; the fact that many of our elected representatives are blatantly and shamelessly stuffing their pockets with campaign contributions from healthcare corporations when, at the same time, they have been charged with the responsibility to develop effective legislation for health care reform. This is a massive conflict of interest and a failure of these legislators to uphold their oath of office. It is a disgrace to this nation and its people, a national shame.
This gross injustice to the American people is happening in full sight of the entire body of the House and Senate; all 535 of our elected representatives. There should be a massive rejection of the shameful behavior of those who are involved with this clear conflict of interest, but there is no outcry from fellow legislators, no demands for some kind of censure, no calls for an investigation; nothing, complete silence, not a whimper, or any objection whatsoever. It is simply accepted and condoned.
What is happening in this dark scenario is not only a national shame, it is a disgrace and a scar upon the American democracy. The entire issue of health care reform is of critical importance to the future of all Americans, to small businesses and to this nation’s on-going solvency. And yet, rather than the issue being taken very seriously, using objective debate and discussion, it has been turned into a feeding frenzy to obtain the campaign contributions that the special interests are dangling in front of our legislators.
Full Story: OpEdNews – Article: A national shame: when corporate interests trump those of the American people.
Saving Capitalism: America’s Trade Policy
Craig Harrington – economyincisis.org ~ American businesses act alone in global and domestic markets, while many foreign businesses act in concert with overarching policy goals.
Pat Choate, an economist and former Reform Party vice-presidential candidate, has seen the downfall of the American economy over the past decade. His goal as an economist and author is to spread the word about the degradation of our economic system, and the steps that must be taken in order to stave off disaster.
The third chapter of his new book, Saving Capitalism, deals with international commerce, and the unsustainable nature of American trade policy. Choate opens this chapter discussing the intense pressure put on even the largest American corporations by the state-backed enterprises they face off against in international markets.
American businesses act alone in global and domestic markets, while many foreign businesses act in concert with overarching policy goals. During the boom times this meant American companies raked in profits and swept up global markets. Unfortunately during the economic decline, well-capitalized and state-sponsored competition used their “golden opportunity” to strike back.
Ever since the shift toward nationalization several decades ago, individual nations have been the largest market forces in raw materials and energy – notably state-owned enterprises in oil and gas. Now, as Choate points out, nations are becoming more and more the centers of financial wealth as well.
Full Story: Economyincrisis.org – America’s Economic Report – Daily.
The Health Insurance Racket
By Robert Greenwald - Video
Welcome to the American health insurance industry.
It is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost. There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply. If the United States is to survive, long-standing American concepts of “fair play” must be reconsidered.
Though these words echo his famous endorsement of working “the dark side” in order to triumph in the “war on terror,” they were not, in fact, written by Dick Cheney. They come from the Doolittle Report, which was commissioned by President Eisenhower in 1954 to craft an intelligence strategy for winning the cold war. From a strategic perspective, the threat posed by global communism, headquartered in a massive, nuclear-armed superpower with almost 6 million men under arms, and Al Qaeda, a networked, globally distributed group of thousands of nonstate actors, could not be more different. But the national security state’s understanding of each as an existential threat was, and continues to be, nearly identical. The enemy is ingenious, relentless and unencumbered by the procedural and moral niceties that hamstring the bureaucrats of a liberal democracy. Victory — indeed, survival — requires us to become more like them.
Full Story: The Health Insurance Racket | Politics | AlterNet.
The Secret Government: What a Real Bipartisan Probe of Bush-era Crimes Should Look Like
By Christopher Hayes, The Nation - From CIA assassinations to domestic spying, a sweeping investigation of government crimes is not only possible — it has been done before.
It is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost. There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply. If the United States is to survive, long-standing American concepts of “fair play” must be reconsidered.
Though these words echo his famous endorsement of working “the dark side” in order to triumph in the “war on terror,” they were not, in fact, written by Dick Cheney. They come from the Doolittle Report, which was commissioned by President Eisenhower in 1954 to craft an intelligence strategy for winning the cold war. From a strategic perspective, the threat posed by global communism, headquartered in a massive, nuclear-armed superpower with almost 6 million men under arms, and Al Qaeda, a networked, globally distributed group of thousands of nonstate actors, could not be more different. But the national security state’s understanding of each as an existential threat was, and continues to be, nearly identical. The enemy is ingenious, relentless and unencumbered by the procedural and moral niceties that hamstring the bureaucrats of a liberal democracy. Victory — indeed, survival — requires us to become more like them.
9/12 Protest: Here’s What Fox News Didn’t Broadcast | Video
Max Blumenthal,
“The death panel rumor is just one of a rapidly growing array of conspiracy theories reverberating through the Republican base. Each one is more hysterical than the last.”
While Fox News cameras covering the so-called 9.12 Project on the National Mall lurched away from signs morphing President Barack Obama’s face into Adolph Hitler’s, I zoomed in. Histrionics and manufactured paranoia were hard to avoid at the massive September 12 anti-Obama rally orchestrated by Fox News host Glenn Beck and former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey’s corporate lobbying front group, Freedom Works.
When I dove into the angry mob with a camera, I captured scenes of self-proclaimed “real Americans” declaring that the community organizing group ACORN was Obama’s version of Hitler’s SS; that the President planned to establish concentration camps for right-wing dissidents; and that Obama was raising a private army in the guise of a civilian volunteer force. The death panel rumor is just one of a rapidly growing array of conspiracy theories reverberating through the Republican base. Each one is more hysterical than the last.
Conspiracism has proven a useful tool for distracting many of the 9.12 Project participants I met from their own economic interests. Having been convinced through endless hours of right-wing media that government involvement in their healthcare would lead to totalitarian slavery, some demonstrators told me they were content to not have healthcare at all. Others said they would stop collecting their Social Security as soon as “the government gets out of my life.”
Full Story: 9/12 Protest: Here’s What Fox News Didn’t Broadcast | Video | AlterNet.
Obama’s big silence: the race question
Has the president turned his back on black America? 
Naomi Klein – The Guardian - Americans began the summer still celebrating the dawn of a “post-racial” era. They are ending it under no such illusion. The summer of 2009 was all about race, beginning with Republican claims that Sonia Sotomayor, Barack Obama’s nominee to the US Supreme Court, was “racist” against whites. Then, just as that scandal was dying down, up popped “the Gates controversy”, the furore over the president’s response to the arrest of African American academic Henry Louis Gates Jr in his own home. Obama’s remark that the police had acted “stupidly” was evidence, according to massively popular Fox News host Glenn Beck, that the president “has a deep-seated hatred for white people”.
Obama’s supposed racism gave a jolt of energy to the fringe movement that claims he has been carrying out a lifelong conspiracy to cover up his (fictional) African birth. Then Fox News gleefully discovered Van Jones, White House special adviser on green jobs. After weeks of being denounced as “a black nationalist who is also an avowed communist”, Jones resigned last Sunday.
The undercurrent of all these attacks was that Obama, far from being the colour-blind moderate he posed as during the presidential campaign, is actually obsessed with race, in particular with redistributing white wealth into the hands of African Americans and undocumented Mexican workers. At town hall meetings across the US in August, these bizarre claims coalesced into something resembling an uprising to “take our country back”. Henry D Rose, chair of Blacks For Social Justice, recently compared the overwhelmingly white, often armed, anti-Obama crowds to the campaign of “massive resistance” launched in the late 50s – a last-ditch attempt by white southerners to block the racial integration of their schools and protect other Jim Crow laws. Today’s “new era of ‘massive resistance’,” writes Rose, “is also a white racial project.”
Full Story: Obama’s big silence: the race question | Naomi Klein | Comment is free | The Guardian.
The Most Damning Internal Emails Of The Financial Crisis (PHOTOS)
In case you haven’t heard, emails live forever. Which may mean that the full story of the financial crisis is lying dormant somewhere on a few forgotten servers in the bowels of Wall Street.
Until those emails surface, we’re going to have be content with the below compilation of some of the most disturbing and damning internal emails of the financial collapse. Just last week, the WSJ reported that UBS employees reportedly referred to the products they were marketing as “vomit.” This discussion actually occurred on an email thread titled “95pts Wine Spec. Best Ignanello since 1997″ (hat tip to Reuters’ Matt Goldstein.) Others in the below list worried they were “incompetent” — or dreamed of retiring before the world economy collapsed.
Which internal email is the most damning? Check out our photos below and pick the worst of the batch. (If you have any other candidates, leave them in the comments section and we’ll add them to the list.)
Full Story: The Most Damning Internal Emails Of The Financial Crisis (PHOTOS).
Arianna Discusses Whether Obama WiArianna On “Countdown”: Dems Sacrificed A Public Option For Bipartisanship — And They Won’t Get Either (Video)
Arianna appeared on “Countdown” tonight to discuss the prospects for health care reform, and whether or not President Obama will forgo Republican support in order to pass meaningful reform.
Full Story: Huff TV: Arianna Discusses Whether Obama Will Forgo Support From The GOP In Order To Pass Health Care Reform (VIDEO).
FBI figures: One drug bust in US every 18 second
Raw Story » America is a nation at war, overseas in Iraq and Afghanistan, and at home.
According to the newly released Federal Bureau of Investigation Uniform Crime Report for 2008 every 18 seconds someone is arrested and charged with violating drug laws.
Another striking figure in the report: of the 1,702,537 drug arrests in 2008, 82.3 percent were for simple possession of a contraband substance. Nearly half, 44 percent, were for possession of marijuana.
According to San Francisco Weekly’s calculations, 2008 saw one marijuana arrest every 37 seconds.
Full Story: Raw Story » FBI figures: One drug bust in US every 18 second.
New York preparing charges against Bank of America execs
The Raw Story » AP: Judge rejects SEC-BofA deal; Cuomo preps charges 
Judge throws out $33M SEC-BofA settlement, orders trial; Cuomo preparing to file charges
A federal judge on Monday rejected a $33 million settlement between the Securities and Exchange Commission and Bank of America Corp., saying the SEC’s accusations of inadequate disclosure by the bank over bonuses paid at Merrill Lynch must now go to trial.
Full Story: The Raw Story » AP: New York preparing charges against Bank of America execs.
Most US doctors back public health option: poll
The Raw Story | Most US doctors approve of a “public option” to supplement private health care insurance in the United States, as proposed by President Barack Obama, a poll showed Monday. 
A total of 62.9 percent of physicians who participated in the survey by the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) said they favored a public option, or government insurance plan, against 27.3 percent backing a private system alone.
Another 9.6 percent favored a completely government-owned health care coverage system.
“It’s clear that the majority of US physicians support both public and private options to expand coverage,” NEJM said, noting that between 52 and 69 percent of Americans favor a supplemental public option.
Full Story: The Raw Story | Most US doctors back public health option: poll.
Domestic violence is a “pre-existing condition”?
Insurance companies have used the excuse of “pre-existing conditions” to deny coverage to countless Americans. From cancer patients to the elderly suffering from arthritis, these organizations have padded their profit margins by limiting coverage to patients deemed “high risk” because of their medical condition.
But, in DC and eight other states, including Idaho, Mississippi, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Wyoming, insurance companies have gone too far, claiming that “domestic violence victim” is also a pre-existing condition.
Words cannot describe the sheer inhumanity of this claim. It serves as yet further proof that our insurance system is broken, destroyed by the profit-mongering of the very companies whose sole purpose should be to provide Americans with access to care when they need it most. In 1994, an informal survey conducted by the Subcommittee on Crime and Criminal Justice of the United States Senate Judiciary Committee revealed that 8 of the 16 largest insurers in the country used domestic violence as a factor when deciding whether to extend coverage and how much to charge if coverage was extended.
Full Story: SEIU – Service Employees International Union – Domestic violence is a “pre-existing condition”?.
Beck loses 50 percent of his advertising dollars.
Think Progress » Today, Color of Change announced that since it launched a boycott of Glenn Beck’s Fox News show a month ago, the controversial host has lost half of his estimated advertising revenue:
According to the data collected, the amount of money spent by national advertisers on Beck’s program per week was at its highest at approximately $1,060,000, for the week ending August 2, 2009. ColorOfChange.org launched their campaign at the end of that week and since then, 62 advertisers have distanced themselves from Beck. Data collected for the week ending September 6, 2009 shows Beck’s estimated ad revenue at $492,000, equal to a loss of $568,000.
“Fox News Channel has consistently claimed they haven’t lost revenue as advertisers abandon Glenn Beck, but the numbers prove otherwise,” said Color of Change Executive Director James Rucker. “Fox News Channel has a limited amount of ad positions. If 62 companies refuse to run ads on two of their 24 hours of programming, they are losing inventory.”
Full Story: Think Progress » Beck loses 50 percent of his advertising dollars..
Rich nations will have to forget about growth to stop climate change
| guardian.co.uk - Economic expansion cannot be achieved forever if greenhouse gases are to be curbed, warns the leading economist and author of the UK’s government’s report on climate change
Rich nations will need to reconsider making growth the goal of their societies, according to the leading economist who wrote the government’s report on climate change.
Lord Stern said that although robust expansion could be achieved until 2030 while avoiding dangerous levels of greenhouse gas emissions, rich nations may then have to consider reining in growth.
“Will other restraints kick in? Probably, they will,” said the former World Bank chief economist and author of the 2006 Stern review on the economic costs of climate change. “At some point we would have to think about whether we want future growth. We don’t have to do that now.” The priority, he told the Guardian, was to break the link between carbon emissions and economic output.
Full Story: Stern: Rich nations will have to forget about growth to stop climate change | Environment | guardian.co.uk.
The Continuing Disaster of Wall Street, One Year Later
Robert Reich
As he attempted to do with health care reform last week, the President is trying to breathe new life into financial reform. He’s using the anniversary of the death of Lehman Brothers and the near-death experience of the rest of the Street, culminating with a $600 billion taxpayer financed bailout, to summon the political will for change. Yet the prospects seem dubious. As with health care reform, he has stood on the sidelines for months and allowed vested interests to frame the debate. Nor has he come up with a sufficiently bold or coherent set of reforms likely to change the way the Street does business, even if enacted.
Let’s be clear: The Street today is up to the same tricks it was playing before its near-death experience. Derivatives, derivatives of derivatives, fancy-dance trading schemes, high-risk bets. “Our model really never changed, we’ve said very consistently that our business model remained the same,” says Goldman Sach’s chief financial officer.
The only difference now is that the Street’s biggest banks know for sure they’ll be bailed out by the federal government if their bets turn sour — which means even bigger bets and bigger bucks.
Full Story: Robert Reich’s Blog: The Continuing Disaster of Wall Street, One Year Later.
CNN’s Lou Dobbs Loophole: Review of Dobbs’ Immigration Reporting Shows ‘Most Trusted Name in News’ Holds Prime-Time Host to Different Standard
Media Matters for America - WASHINGTON – September 14 – Today, in light of CNN host Lou Dobbs’ reported plans to help lead the lobbying campaign of anti-immigration organization Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) on September 15 and 16, Media Matters for America revisited some of the most egregious conspiracy theories, hate speech, and undisclosed conflicts of interest in Dobbs’ immigration reporting. Upon learning of Dobbs’ central role at the FAIR event, Media Matters President Eric Burns sent a letter to Jon Klein, president of “the most trusted name in news,” asking that Dobbs be prohibited from participating; thus far, the letter has yielded no response.
“It is hard to believe that CNN — a network never shy to tout itself as the only cable news channel doing ‘straight’ reporting — would allow one of its hosts to help lead an anti-immigration lobbying campaign,” said Burns. “But when it comes to the network’s journalistic integrity, CNN seems to have a Lou Dobbs loophole.”
Burns continued: “In fact, it is laughable that after years of reporting marred by baseless conspiracy theories, indefensible hate speech, and undisclosed conflicts of interest, Dobbs still enjoys prime-time billing on the ‘most trusted name in news.’ ”
BACKGROUND:
Upon hearing of Dobbs’ scheduled appearance at the annual FAIR “Hold Their Feet to the Fire” radio host rally, Media Matters sent a letter to CNN noting that Dobbs’ — and by extension the network’s — association with an anti-immigration organization deemed a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center would damage a network whose credibility already took a severe beating following the controversy surrounding Dobbs’ promotion of “birther” conspiracy theories.
Rise in commercial real estate vacancy rates leads to meltdown concerns
| Sacramento Bee - From an unfinished shopping mall in Elk Grove to the ghostly quiet office parks of South Placer, the slump that has overtaken commercial real estate could rival the meltdown in the housing market.
Across the Sacramento region, vacancy rates have soared while rents and property values have plummeted, leaving many landlords struggling to pay their mortgages. A few are in bankruptcy protection.
Sacramento’s troubles are worse than most, according to national analysts, but the threat looms across the entire country. With the national economy seemingly poised for a recovery, some experts fear the recession could be prolonged if commercial loans go bust like residential mortgages.
“It’s very analogous to what happened with the residential market,” said Mark Friedman, a prominent Sacramento commercial developer. “Money was cheap, growth was rapid, and we built a lot more product than we needed.”
Treasury: US economy needs indefinite life support
Raw Story » The US economy is recovering from the shock of last year’s banking collapse, but could continue to need financial assistance for an indefinite period into the future, the Treasury Department stated in a report released Monday.
The report (PDF), entitled “The Next Phase of Government Financial Stabilization and Rehabilitation Policies,” states that “although we are rolling back emergency support programs that are no longer needed, significant parts of the financial system remain impaired. Unanticipated events could intensify pressure on the financial system. In this context, it is prudent to maintain capacity to address unforeseen developments.”
The report said, as quoted by The Hill: “In those markets where conditions have improved, it is unclear whether the improvements achieved to date will persist without a period of continued government support.
Full Story: Raw Story » Treasury: US economy needs indefinite life support.
The 50 Richest Members of Congress
- Roll Call - Downturn Hits Even the Wealthiest Lawmakers
Even membership in Congress’ most exclusive club couldn’t insulate lawmakers from the economic downturn.
According to Roll Call’s annual examination of House and Senate financial disclosure forms, while the 50 richest Members of Congress remain financially flush — each with a minimum net worth of nearly $5.5 million — many of them suffered significant financial losses in 2008.
Lawmakers on this year’s list reported a combined loss of more than $275 million from their minimum net worth since 2007. While the combined wealth of the 50 richest Members tallied approximately $1.3 billion in 2008, that figure falls nearly $171 million short of the previous club, which put up a total of almost $1.5 billion.
Full Story: The 50 Richest Members of Congress – Roll Call.
Poll: News media’s credibility plunges to all-time low
Just 29 percent of the 1,506 adults surveyed by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press between July 22-26 said news organizations generally get the facts straight.
Sixty-three percent said news stories are often inaccurate, up from 34 percent in a 1985 study, Pew said.
Sixty percent of those polled said the press is biased, up from 45 percent in 1985. Just 26 percent in the latest survey said that news organizations are careful their reporting is not politically biased.
Seventy-four percent said news organizations tend to favor one side in dealing with political and social issues. Eighteen percent said they deal fairly with all sides.
Full Story: Raw Story » Poll: News media’s credibility plunges to all-time low.
Debtor’s Revolt: Woman Refuses To Pay Off Bank Of America Credit Card (VIDEO)
For years, Ann Minch of Red Bluff, Calif., has carried a balance of several thousand dollars on her Bank of America credit card, making minimum monthly payments of about $130, sometimes paying an extra $50 or $100. She says she’s never missed a payment.
Bank of America rewarded her loyalty this year by repeatedly raising her interest rate, which reached 30 percent in July.
Fed up, the 46-year-old stepmother of two turned to YouTube.
“There comes a time when a person must be willing to sacrifice in order to take a stand for what’s right,” said Minch in a Sept. 8 webcam video. “Now, this is one of those times, and if I’m successful this will be the proverbial first shot fired in an American debtors’ revolution against the usury and plunder perpetrated by the banking elite, the Federal Reserve and the federal government.”
Minch announced that she’d be dumping Bank of America, refusing to pay off her credit card debt unless she was offered a lower rate. She explained that she’d been a reliable customer even though she’d lost her job as a mental health case manager. She said bank reps refused to negotiate her interest rate when she called them to complain a few weeks ago.
Full Story: Debtor’s Revolt: Woman Refuses To Pay Off Bank Of America Credit Card (VIDEO).
George S. McGovern — The Simple Health-Care Solution: Medicare for Everyone
– washingtonpost.com- For many years, a handful of American political leaders — including the late senator Ted Kennedy and now President Obama — have been trying to gain passage of comprehensive health care for all Americans. As far back as President Harry S. Truman, they have urged Congress to act on this national need. In a presentation before a joint session of Congress last week, Obama offered his view of the best way forward.
But what seems missing in the current battle is a single proposal that everyone can understand and that does not lend itself to demagoguery. If we want comprehensive health care for all our citizens, we can achieve it with a single sentence: Congress hereby extends Medicare to all Americans.
Those of us over 65 have been enjoying this program for years. I go to the doctor or hospital of my choice, and my taxes pay all the bills. It’s wonderful. But I would have appreciated it even more if my wife and children and I had had such health-care coverage when we were younger. I want every American, from birth to death, to get the kind of health care I now receive. Removing the payments now going to the insurance corporations would considerably offset the tax increase necessary to cover all Americans.
Full Story: George S. McGovern — The Simple Health-Care Solution: Medicare for Everyone – washingtonpost.com.
Obama’s Speech: ‘Too Big to Fail’ Gets Bigger
– NYTimes.com – The third in our series on President Obama’s speech today — a year after the collapse of Lehman Brothers — on financial regulation and the economy.
One of the central goals of President Obama’s regulatory overhaul plan is to rein in banks and financial institutions that are “too big to fail.” The meltdown that followed the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers exactly one year ago, followed by the nightmarish spectacle of bailing out reckless giants like American International Group and Citigroup, are things that policymakers never want to see again.
“Too big to fail isn’t a policy; it’s a problem,” Ben S. Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, has often remarked.
But at least for the moment, Too Big To Fail is an even bigger problem now than it was before the crisis. And while Mr. Obama has offered two basic ideas to address it, his economic team has yet to offer anything close to a concrete plan.
Full Story: Obama’s Speech: ‘Too Big to Fail’ Gets Bigger – Economix Blog – NYTimes.com.
Are Foreign Purchases of U.S. Treasury Bonds Being Faked?
Everyone knows that the American government is gaming the market for treasury bonds to some extent.
For example, the government has itself bought some U.S. Treasuries.
Some writers, such as Rob Kirby and Ellen Brown, go much further, alleging that Bernanke and the boys have also used hedge funds in the Cayman Islands to secretly buy huge sums of U.S. treasuries using dollars printed by the Federal Reserve, while pretending that independent “Caribbean banks” are doing the buying. See this, this and this. I have no idea whether or not they are right.
Perhaps most dramatically, Keith Fitz-Gerald (Contributing Editor to Money Morning, Investment Director of the Money Map Report and editor of the New China Trader) – who has seemed like a very level-headed guy in the past – is now claiming that the U.S. government has recently changed the rules so that the Fed can itself buy U.S. treasuries but claim that the buyers are foreign:
The U.S. Government wants the public to believe that China, Japan and Europe are still happily buying U.S. debt to fund the American economic turnaround. The only problem is – they’re not…
Group Tied To Swift Boat Veterans, Willie Horton Ads Supporting Blue Dogs
The American Future Fund is going to be running ads supporting Blue Dogs and their efforts to kill the public option:
The American Future Fund, a conservative group, has just announced a national television campaign defending the Blue Dogs, including Peterson. The Minnesota script, which starts, “Is our congressman, Collin Peterson, brain dead?” refers to Rep. Pete Stark, D-Calif., who recently called the Blue Dogs “brain dead” and beholden to insurance companies.
In fact, the Blue Dog Political Action Committee has raked in more than $1.1 million for the 2010 election cycle, the most of any other leadership PAC on Capitol Hill, according to CQ MoneyLine. About $300,000 of that came from health care interests.
The American Future Fund is a 501(c)4 nonprofit that does not have to reveal its funding source and is not governed by the FEC. Key players in the group include GOP operatives like media strategist Larry McCarthy, the Ailes Communications veteran who produced the Willie Horton ad for George H.W. Bush. Last year the AFF ran an ad against Al Franken which triggered a complaint to the FEC from the Minnesota Democratic-Farm-Labor Party, saying the ad constituted electoral advocacy and was outside the bounds of what a nonprofit is allowed to do. The FEC found that there was no violation.
The pro-Blue Dog ads will also run in the districts of Mike Ross and Baron Hill, as well as in Washington DC. Text of the ad:
Full Story: Campaign Silo » Group Tied To Swift Boat Veterans, Willie Horton Ads Supporting Blue Dogs.
Why capitalism fails
- The Boston Globe - The man who saw the meltdown coming had another troubling insight: it will happen again
Since the global financial system started unraveling in dramatic fashion two years ago, distinguished economists have suffered a crisis of their own. Ivy League professors who had trumpeted the dawn of a new era of stability have scrambled to explain how, exactly, the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression had ambushed their entire profession.
Amid the hand-wringing and the self-flagellation, a few more cerebral commentators started to speak about the arrival of a “Minsky moment,” and a growing number of insiders began to warn of a coming “Minsky meltdown.”
“Minsky” was shorthand for Hyman Minsky, a hitherto obscure macroeconomist who died over a decade ago. Many economists had never heard of him when the crisis struck, and he remains a shadowy figure in the profession. But lately he has begun emerging as perhaps the most prescient big-picture thinker about what, exactly, we are going through. A contrarian amid the conformity of postwar America, an expert in the then-unfashionable subfields of finance and crisis, Minsky was one economist who saw what was coming. He predicted, decades ago, almost exactly the kind of meltdown that recently hammered the global economy.
Full Story: Why capitalism fails – The Boston Globe.
Pawlenty called out on false claim that large numbers of undocumented immigrants are using public services.
Think Progress » Pawlenty called out on false claim that large numbers of undocumented immigrants are using public services.
Today on ABC’s This Week, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R) defended Rep. Joe “You Lie!” Wilson’s (R-SC) concern that undocumented immigrants would be able to get federal health care benefits. Although Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius stated that President Obama and Congress have made it clear that undocumented immigrants shouldn’t “have access to the new health insurance exchange,” Pawlenty claimed that they will still will “show up” and “get the services” because no one checks their citizenship status. When Stephanopoulos called out his inaccurate claim, Pawlenty stumbled for a response:
PAWLENTY: Well, there’s a missing piece here, George. And even if you have language that says illegal immigrants will not be a part of this program — unless you have the enforcement mechanism in place, it doesn’t mean much. In Minnesota, we have laws that say illegal immigrants won’t get many services, but unless somebody actually checks, guess what, they show up and they get the services.
STEPHANOPOULOS: There’s been a study done by the House Oversight Committee that showed these Medicaid provisions, they spent about $8 million to enforce and they caught eight illegal immigrants.
PAWLENTY: Well, clearly, though, if you have a law that’s unenforced, it isn’t much of a law. So first of all, if the secretary is saying we’re going to have a provision in the bill that says illegal immigrants will not be covered, that’s progress, but we also need to make sure we can back that up with proper enforcement.
Watch it:
Santorum ‘thinking about’ a run for president in 2012.
When U.S. Catholic leaders on Friday “challenged” Rick Santorum to run for president in 2012, the former Republican Pennsylvania senator admitted that he was indeed “thinking about it.” Santorum told the annual Catholic Leadership Conference that he was torn between concerns for his family and the “real opportunity for success”:
“On the other side,” he added, “as a father, I’ve got to think about whether they are going to have a country to live in … Are they going to be able to practice their faith in a way that’s consistent with what the Church teaches.”
Full Story: Think Progress » Santorum ‘thinking about’ a run for president in 2012..
Stiglitz Says Banking Problems Are Now Bigger Than Pre-Lehman
(Bloomberg) – Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize- winning economist, said the U.S. has failed to fix the underlying problems of its banking system after the credit crunch and the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.
“In the U.S. and many other countries, the too-big-to-fail banks have become even bigger,” Stiglitz said in an interview today in Paris. “The problems are worse than they were in 2007 before the crisis.”
Stiglitz’s views echo those of former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, who has advised President Barack Obama’s administration to curtail the size of banks, and Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer, who suggested last month that governments may want to discourage financial institutions from growing “excessively.”
Full Story: Stiglitz Says Banking Problems Are Now Bigger Than Pre-Lehman – Bloomberg.com.
Long-Term Unemployment Unprecedented
Comparing the first 19 months of the current recession to those of previous economic downturns, the EPI found that the unemployment rate has risen more rapidly and jobs have disappeared faster
economyincisis.org – The current recession has been by far the most severe of the past five decades. Already the longest and deepest since the Great Depression, the rate at which the economy has deteriorated has been unprecedented, according to a study conducted by the Economic Policy Institute.
Comparing the first 19 months of the current recession to those of previous economic downturns, the EPI found that the unemployment rate has risen more rapidly, jobs have disappeared faster, those without employment have remained as such for much longer and employees typically sheltered during recession have been more susceptible to job loss.
Looking back at the first 19 months of the last seven recessions, the EPI determined that the national unemployment rate has risen more rapidly during the current recession than during any other previous economic downturn since 1960. From December 2007 to June 2009, the national unemployment rate rose 4.5 percent. The only other time in the last five decades that the unemployment has come close to rising as rapidly occurred in November 1974 at 4.0 percent.
Full Story: Economyincrisis.org – America’s Economic Report – Daily.
President Obama’s First Big Trade Decision
Will President Barack Obama honor his 2008 campaign promises to enforce U.S. trade laws?
We’ll have our answer no later than September 17, 2009 when the President is required by trade law to accept, reject or modify the International Trade Commission’s (ITC) recommendations to impose for three years increased duties on Chinese-made tire imports that threaten U.S. domestic tire production and the jobs of American tire workers.
This is a high-stakes decision. If the President approves the ITC’s recommendations, the balance of American manufacturing and its remaining 11.5 million workers may also be able to use these trade laws to fend off the rising surge of imported manufactured goods from China and elsewhere. If not, they will surely face a massive surge of subsidized Chinese imports, which will threaten their very survival.
Full Story: Economyincrisis.org – America’s Economic Report – Daily.
Rachel Maddow: Republican Rump Roast & Their Small Angry Tent
Rachel Maddow weighs in on the fringe elements of the conservative movement taking over the Republican party
Full Story: YouTube – Rachel Maddow: Republican Rump Roast & Their Small Angry Tent.
Afghanistan: What Are These People Thinking?
Foreign Policy In Focus | One of the oddest — indeed, surreal — encounters around the war in Afghanistan has to be a telephone call this past July 27. On one end of the line was historian Stanley Karnow, author of Vietnam: A History. On the other, State Department special envoy Richard Holbrooke and the U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal. The question: How can Washington avoid the kind of defeat it suffered in Southeast Asia 40 years ago?
Karnow did not divulge what he said to the two men, but he told Associated Press that the “lesson” of Vietnam “was that we shouldn’t have been there,” and that, while “Obama and everybody else seems to want to be in Afghanistan,” he, Karnow, was opposed to the war.
It is hardly surprising that Washington should see parallels to the Vietnam debacle. The enemy is elusive enemy. The local population is neutral, if not hostile. And the governing regime is corrupt with virtually no support outside of the nation’s capital.
Full Story: Foreign Policy In Focus | Afghanistan: What Are These People Thinking?.
How We Sabotage Young Girls
Girls are encouraged to be nice, quiet, perfect, polite — at the expense of their authenticity and sense of self.
Excerpted from The Curse of the Good Girl: Raising Authentic Girls with Courage and Confidence by Rachel Simmons. Reprinted by arrangement with The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc. Copyright (c) August, 2009.
Our culture is teaching girls to embrace a version of selfhood that sharply curtails their power and potential. In particular, the pressure to be “Good”—unerringly nice, polite, modest, and selfless—diminishes girls’ authenticity and personal authority.
The Curse of the Good Girl erects a psychological glass ceiling that begins its destructive sprawl in girlhood and extends across the female life span, stunting the growth of skills and habits essential to becoming a strong woman. This book traces the impact of the curse on girls’ development, and provides parents with the strategies to break its spell.
Almost ten years ago, I founded the Girls Leadership Institute, a summer enrichment program for middle- and high-school girls. I began asking largely middle-class groups of girls to describe how society expected a Good Girl to look and act. Here is a sample response:
Full Story: How We Sabotage Young Girls | Reproductive Justice and Gender | AlterNet.
Health Reform Will Create a Dieting Revolution
Look out fast food; when insurance companies can’t dump the sick, they will have to strongly support healthy diets, or lose money.
To listen to President Obama’s speech on Wednesday night, or to just about anyone else in the health care debate, you would think that the biggest problem with health care in America is the system itself — perverse incentives, inefficiencies, unnecessary tests and procedures, lack of competition, and greed.
No one disputes that the $2.3 trillion we devote to the health care industry is often spent unwisely, but the fact that the United States spends twice as much per person as most European countries on health care can be substantially explained, as a study released last month says, by our being fatter. Even the most efficient health care system that the administration could hope to devise would still confront a rising tide of chronic disease linked to diet.
That’s why our success in bringing health care costs under control ultimately depends on whether Washington can summon the political will to take on and reform a second, even more powerful industry: the food industry.
Full Story: Michael Pollan: Health Reform Will Create a Dieting Revolution | | AlterNet.
The Nightmare of Christianity: How Religious Indoctrination Led to Murder
The authoritarian culture of the Christian right pushed a deeply disturbed young man named Matthew Murray over the edge.
Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from Max Blumenthal’s new book Republican Gommorah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party published by Nation Books.
A few miles down the road from Colorado Springs [a home to James Dobson's Focus on the Family], in the quiet bedroom community of Eldredge, a deeply disturbed young man named Matthew Murray followed the unfolding debacle at New Life Church [once under the stewardship of Pastor Ted Haggard] with an interest that bordered on obsession. Murray, a sallow-faced, bespectacled 24-year-old, had been indelibly scarred by a lifetime of psychological abuse at the hands of his charismatic Pentecostal parents. Murray’s mind became crowded with thoughts of death, destruction, and the killings he would soon carry out in the name of avenging what he called his “nightmare of Christianity.”
On an online chat room for former Pentecostals, Murray heaped contempt on his mother, Loretta, a physical therapist who homeschooled him to ensure that his contact with the outside world was severely limited. “My ‘mother,’” Murray wrote, “is just a brainswashed [sic] church agent cun,t [sic]. The only reason she had me was because she wanted a body/soul she could train into being the next Billy Graham…”
He went on:
Full Story: The Nightmare of Christianity: How Religious Indoctrination Led to Murder | | AlterNet.
Right Wingers Marching in DC Is Big News — But the Same Old Faces Are Pulling the Strings
The men behind the religious right make a comeback with the Tea Party movement.
Glenn Beck will tell you that this weekend’s march of right-wing activists on Washington was six months in the making.
Don’t believe a word of it. Try 40 years.
As disgruntled white taxpayers joined conspiracy theorists, gun enthusiasts, state-sovereignty activists and outright racists on Pennsylvania Avenue, the long-time leaders of the American right, whose pedigrees go back to the 1964 presidential campaign of Sen. Barry Goldwater, R-Ariz., no doubt witnessed a day they thought might never come.
Never before has the right taken to the streets in such numbers. (Estimates range between 50,000 and 100,000 attending the post-mach rally at the U.S. Capitol building.) Marching has long been the province of the left, most notably in the civil rights movement. But the election of the nation’s first African-American president, a moderate liberal, in a time of economic crisis, yielded right-wing leaders the gold of backlash.
Full Story: Right Wingers Marching in DC Is Big News — But the Same Old Faces Are Pulling the Strings | Politics | AlterNet.
The End of Welfare Water and the Drying of the West
Red Snow Warning – By Chip Ward
The End of Welfare Water and the Drying of the West
Pink snow is turning red in Colorado. Here on the Great American Desert — specifically Utah’s slickrock portion of it where I live — hot ‘n’ dry means dust. When frequent high winds sweep across our increasingly arid landscape, redrock powder is lifted up and carried hundreds of miles eastward until it settles on the broad shoulders of Colorado’s majestic mountains, giving the snowpack there a pink hue.
Some call it watermelon snow. Friends who ski into the backcountry of the San Juan and La Plata mountain ranges in western Colorado tell me that the pink-snow phenomenon has lately been giving way to redder hues, so thick and frequent are the dust storms that roll in these days. A cross-section of a typical Colorado snowbank last winter revealed alternating dirt and snow layers that looked like a weird wilderness version of our flag, red and white stripes alternating against the sky’s blue field.
The Forecast: Dust Followed by Mud
Here in the lowlands, we, too, are experiencing the drying of the West in new dusty ways. Our landscapes are often covered with what we jokingly refer to as “adobe rain” — when rain falls through dust, spattering windows or laundry hung out to dry with brown stains. After a dust “event” this past spring, I wandered through the lot of a car dealership in Grand Junction, Colorado, where the only color seemingly available was light tan. All those previously shiny, brightly painted cars had turned drab. I had to squint to read price stickers under opaque windows.
Full Story: Tomgram: Chip Ward, The Ruins in Our Future.
China Probes ‘Unfair Trade’ in U.S. Chicken and Auto Products
Bloomberg.com - China announced dumping and subsidy probes of chicken and auto products from the U.S., two days after President Barack Obama imposed tariffs on tires from the Asian nation.
Chinese industries complain that they’re being hurt by “unfair trade practices,” the nation’s Ministry of Commerce said on its Web site yesterday. The dumping investigation relates to poultry alone, a spokesman said in Beijing today. The ministry didn’t specify the value of imports of the products.
Rising protectionism may hamper world trade and undermine the global economy’s recovery from recession, the European Central Bank said last week. The U.S. placed tariffs starting at 35 percent on $1.8 billion of tire imports from China, backing a United Steelworkers union complaint against the second-largest U.S. trading partner.
Full Story: China Probes ‘Unfair Trade’ in U.S. Chicken and Auto Products – Bloomberg.com.
Interest Only Mortgage Time Bomb: $71 billion in Loans will Reset in next 12 Months.
Total Loans Outstanding at $908 Billion. Average Balance of $324,000.
Interest only (IO) loans seemed like a viable mortgage option when home prices were appreciating on a double-digit basis every year. The interest only loan allowed borrowers the option of making no principal payments for 5, 7, or even 10 years. Now why would someone not make any principal payment for such a long time? The way these mortgages were pitched, people would buy a home for 3, 5, or 7 years and would sell their home before the reset period. Yet the housing bubble has burst and home prices are now below the average balance of these mortgage in many areas. Recent data has the median U.S. home price at $178,000 while the average loan amount of an interest only loan is $324,000. How many of these loans are out there? Try 2.8 million. Many in overpriced states that have taken the brunt of the housing downturn.
As I discussed before, option ARM loans are a smaller amount of loans with a total amount of $189 billion outstanding. The option ARM will have more problems simply because borrowers went with even less than interest only, they went with the negative amortization option. That is, their principal balance is now higher than when they initially purchased the home. With interest only and option ARM loans you pay on the front-end for this riskier product. Borrowers simply looked at the initial payment and ignored points, recast dates, reset periods, and the inevitable payment jump after a few years. These loans are products of an ideal market with no home price declines. That is the only thing that could destroy these loans but not only did we get lower prices, we got a crashing housing market.
Nurses in Kansas Support Health Insurance Reform
Nurses in Kansas and across the nation have joined President Obama in pushing for health insurance reform. One of the longstanding purposes of the Kansas State Nurses Association is working for the “improvement of health standards and the availability of health care services for all people.” One of the chief roles a nurse has is to be a staunch patient advocate, so it’s no surprise we stand boldly for reform. This past weekend, I had a discussion with a colleague who practices in the Kansas City, KS area about the current health insurance reform debate and our first-hand observations as nurses. She underscored the need for urgent reform from not only a practical perspective, but also touched on the political ramifications that command we take action now: “We see the reality of the need for health care insurance reform everyday in the lack of suitable coverage for our patients, decisions on how our long our patients can be hospitalized, in how carefully we must nurse our documentation to qualify for reimbursement, the cost of our own health care policies, and the unsustainable costs to the state and federal government. For those who insist on obstructive negativity in even talking about how to deal with the health care insurance problem, beware, the likelihood of approaching this problem again in the future will be low with such a high political cost being evident,” she said.
Craig Gunther :: Nurses in Kansas Support Health Insurance Reform
You may have seen the president of the American Nurses Association, Becky Patton, alongside President Obama at the White House on numerous occasions in support of reform. As she stated in her introductory remarks there last Thursday, “We believe a health care system that is patient centered, accessible and delivers quality care for all is something that should not be a partisan or political issue nor the target of scare tactics that no medical professional should support or condone.” She is there, in part, to represent the voice of Kansas nurses. The members of the Kansas State Nurses Association are also members of the American Nurses Association, as we are a one of the many constituent member associations who belong to the ANA.
Full Story: Forward Kansas. :: Nurses in Kansas Support Health Insurance Reform.
What the Federal Government Can Do to Encourage Green Production
Note: apparently this is based on work financed by a grant from IBM
The green movement has reached a tipping point in recent years. Private industry now realizes that using green production techniques not only improves the environment but also can provide significant financial benefits by reducing waste, regulatory costs, and potential long-term liabilities. This report identifies six factors that currently discourage industry from undertaking green production methods. Many of these can be ameliorated if the federal government provided greater leadership in creating expectations that consumers, investors, and industry include environmental considerations in their day-to-day decision making. The author recommends the next Administration and Congress conduct open discussions on how different segments of society can take a part in addressing environmental challenges can raise awareness, increase demand by consumers, and result in increased investments by investors and industry. Providing measurement tools for assessing progress can help as well. Green movement, green production, Nicole Darnall, EPA, Environmental Protection Agency, mandatory environmental product labeling, product labeling, environmental, environment, technical assistance, environmental accounting, environmental auditing
Full Story: The Center for the Business of Government: Publications – Grant Reports.
A Hundred Holocausts: An Insider’s Window Into U.S. Nuclear Policy
By Daniel Ellsberg 
Editor’s note: This is the first installment of Daniel Ellsberg’s personal memoir of the nuclear era, “The American Doomsday Machine.” The online book will recount highlights of his six years of research and consulting for the Departments of Defense and State and the White House on issues of nuclear command and control, nuclear war planning and nuclear crises. It further draws on 34 subsequent years of research and activism largely on nuclear policy, which followed the intervening 11 years of his preoccupation with the Vietnam War. Subsequent installments also will appear on Truthdig. The author is a senior fellow of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.
American Planning for a Hundred Holocausts
One day in the spring of 1961, soon after my 30th birthday, I was shown how our world would end. Not the Earth, not—so far as I knew then—all humanity or life, but the destruction of most cities and people in the Northern Hemisphere.
What I was handed, in a White House office, was a single sheet of paper with some numbers and lines on it. It was headed “Top Secret—Sensitive”; under that, “For the President’s Eyes Only.”
The “Eyes Only” designation meant that, in principle, it was to be seen and read only by the person to whom it was explicitly addressed, in this case the president. In practice this usually meant that it would be seen by one or more secretaries and assistants as well: a handful of people, sometimes somewhat more, instead of the scores to hundreds who would normally see copies of a “Top Secret—Sensitive” document.
Full Story: Truthdig – Reports – A Hundred Holocausts: An Insider’s Window Into U.S. Nuclear Policy.
Dangerous staph germs found at West Coast beaches
SAN FRANCISCO — Dangerous staph bacteria have been found in sand and water for the first time at five public beaches along the coast of Washington, and scientists think the state is not the only one with this problem.
The germ is MRSA, or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus – a hard-to-treat bug once rarely seen outside of hospitals but that increasingly is spreading in ordinary community settings such as schools, locker rooms and gyms.
The germ causes nasty skin infections as well as pneumonia and other life-threatening problems. It spreads mostly through human contact. Little is known about environmental sources that also may harbor the germ.
Finding it at the beach suggests one place that people may be picking it up, said Marilyn Roberts, a microbiologist at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Full Story: Dangerous staph germs found at West Coast beaches.
The Underfunding of Education in America
by Ann Robertson 
Teachers in public education throughout the country have been struggling for decades, trying to educate children with insufficient funds and resources. But the present economic crisis has gutted even these inadequate budgets so that many teachers can now only pretend to educate, given the impossible conditions.
Nor has higher education been exempt from budget cuts. The good news is that faculty members at Oakland University, a public university in Michigan, have decided to fight back, as reported in The New York Times, September 4, 2009. Their decision was triggered when asked to accept a three-year salary freeze, a request that came on the heels of an almost 50 percent pay raise for the campus president, elevating his salary from $250,000 to $350,000, far above the average faculty pay. The administration also wants to increase the number of part-time faculty and increase faculty health care co-payments.
The rationale for this unseemly raise for the president was the usual: those running the university wanted to make his salary competitive with presidents’ salaries at comparable universities. But those who advance this argument never explain why the presidents’ salaries in general have skyrocketed nor why the first were allowed to begin the ascent.
In fact, the elevation of presidents’ salaries has resulted from a carefully crafted policy foisted on universities by politicians who in turn are being pushed by business interests. Corporations have been clamoring for lower state taxes across the country, and education has constituted a huge drain on state budgets. When education costs are reduced, taxes can be lowered. So rather than playing their traditional collegial role with the faculty, campus presidents have been recast into the role of bosses with the directive to ferret out and eliminate what for those in power is inefficiency and waste. But such a role requires handsome monetary rewards because, for most, it is a thankless task. The fact that this new campus mode of operation is antithetical to a community of scholars and the pursuit of knowledge is of little concern to those whose only conception of value is money.
Full Story: The Underfunding of Education in America.
Fifty questions on 9/11
Global Research
It’s September 11 all over again – eight years on. The George W Bush administration is out. The “global war on terror” is still on, renamed “overseas contingency operations” by the Barack Obama administration. Obama’s “new strategy” – a war escalation – is in play in AfPak. Osama bin Laden may be dead or not. “Al-Qaeda” remains a catch-all ghost entity. September 11 – the neo-cons’ “new Pearl Harbor” – remains the darkest jigsaw puzzle of the young 21st century.
It’s useless to expect US corporate media and the ruling elites’ political operatives to call for a true, in-depth investigation into the attacks on the US on September 11, 2001. Whitewash has been the norm. But even establishment highlight Dr Zbig “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski, a former national security advisor, has admitted to the US Senate that the post-9/11 “war on terror” is a “mythical historical narrative”.
The following questions, some multi-part – and most totally ignored by the 9/11 Commission – are just the tip of the immense 9/11 iceberg. A hat tip goes to the indefatigable work of 911truth.org; whatreallyhappened.com; architects and engineers for 9/11 truth; the Italian documentary Zero: an investigation into 9/11; and Asia Times Online readers’ e-mails.
None of these questions has been convincingly answered – according to the official narrative. It’s up to US civil society to keep up the pressure. Eight years after the fact, one fundamental conclusion is imperative. The official narrative edifice of 9/11 is simply not acceptable.
Fifty question:
1) How come dead or not dead Osama bin Laden has not been formally indicted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as responsible for 9/11? Is it because the US government – as acknowledged by the FBI itself – has not produced a single conclusive piece of evidence?
Full Story: Fifty questions on 9/11.
Department of Labor Releases List of Slave-Made Goods (End Human Trafficking )
After receiving over 5,400 letters from Change.org community members, the Department of Labor released their long-awaited report on goods produced by child labor and forced labor today. Thank you all for urging DOL to release this important tool for consumers!
This list was mandated by anti-trafficking legislation back in 2005, but the Bush administration dragged their feet for years. Now, thanks to your voices and the hard work of NGOs like Polaris Project and the International Labor Rights Forum, it’s finally here. This list is a huge boon for consumers who want to choose slave-free products. With this list, we as consumers can finally hold companies and countries accountable for the slavery they use in making the goods we buy, and we can decisively take action to prevent slavery in the production of consumer goods. Today, we as consumers are more powerful to end slavery than ever before. And you, through Change.org, helped make that happen.
The report tops out at a daunting 194 pages, and can be read in it’s entirety here. But let’s face it — no one wants to read 194 page government report, no matter how useful it may be. So here are some of the highlights I’ve found in my initial read-through:
Full Story: Department of Labor Releases List of Slave-Made Goods (End Human Trafficking – Change.org).
Skipping Spouse to Spouse Isn’t Just a Man’s Game
In the United States and much of the Western world, when a couple divorces, the average income of the woman and her dependent children often plunges by 20 percent or more, while that of her now unfettered ex, who had been the family’s primary breadwinner but who rarely ends up paying in child support what he had contributed to the household till, climbs accordingly. The born-again bachelor is therefore perfectly positioned to attract a new, younger wife and begin building another family.
Small wonder that many Darwinian-minded observers of human mating customs have long contended that serial monogamy is really just a socially sanctioned version of harem-building. By this conventional evolutionary psychology script, the man who skips from one nubile spouse to another over time is, like the sultan who hoards the local maidenry in a single convenient location, simply seeking to “maximize his reproductive fitness,” to sire as many children as possible with as many wives as possible. It is the preferred male strategy, especially for powerful men, right? Sequentially or synchronously, he-men consort polygynously.
Women, by contrast, are not thought to be natural serializers. Sure, a gal might date around when young, but once she starts a family, she is assumed to crave stability. After all, she can bear only so many children in her lifetime, and divorce raises her risk of poverty. Unless forced to because some bounder has abandoned her, why would any sane woman choose another trot down the aisle — for another Rachael Ray spatula set? Spare me extra candlesticks, I’m a one-trick monogamist.
Full Story: Basics – Skipping Spouse to Spouse Isn’t Just a Man’s Game – NYTimes.com.
ScienceNOW: Watch the Clock to Lose Weight
When we eat may be just as important as what we eat. A new study shows that mice that eat when they should be sleeping gain more weight than mice that eat at normal hours. Another study sheds light on why we pack on the pounds in the first place. Whether these studies translate into therapies that help humans beat obesity remains to be seen, but they give scientists clues about the myriad factors that they must take into account.
Observations of overnight workers have shown that eating at night disrupts metabolism and the hormones that signal we’re sated. But no one had done controlled studies on this connection until now. Biologist Fred Turek of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and graduate student Deanna Arble examined the link between a high-fat diet and what time of day mice eat. A control group of six nocturnal mice ate their pellets (60% fat by calories, mostly lard) during the night. Another group of six ate the same meal during the day, Turek says, which disrupts their circadian rhythm–the body’s normal 24-hour cycle.
After 6 weeks, the off-schedule mice weighed almost 20% more than the controls, Turek and Arble report today in Obesity, supporting the idea that consuming calories when you should be sleeping is harmful. Turek and Arble acknowledge that the disrupted mice ate a tad more and were a tad more sluggish, but the differences could not account for all of the weight gain.
Full Story: Watch the Clock to Lose Weight — Kean 2009 (903): 1 — ScienceNOW.
New Scientist: Underwater Mystery
During 1997, US undersea monitoring equipment heard a series of sounds far louder than any whale song. They were never heard again
IN THE summer of 1997, an array of underwater microphones, or hydrophones, owned by the US government picked up a strange sound. For a minute, it rose rapidly in frequency; then it disappeared. The hydrophones, a relic of cold-war submarine tracking, picked up this signal again and again during those summer months, then it was never heard again. No one knows what made the sound, now known as “The Bloop” (hear it at www.thebloop.notlong.com).
It’s not the only mysterious sound heard in the ocean. In May 1997, hydrophones picked up the “Slowdown” sound. Over the course of about 7 minutes, it slowly dropped in pitch, rather like the sound of an aeroplane flying past (www.theslowdown.notlong.com). Its origin has been only loosely pinned down: it seems to have originated from somewhere off the west coast of South America, and could be heard from 2000 kilometres away.
So what’s behind the strange noises? The Bloop sounds like it might have been created by an animal, but it is far louder than any whale song, so a marine creature that made it would either be bigger than any whale, or a much more efficient producer of sound. The most popular speculation about Slowdown is that it was caused by the break-up of Antarctic ice – which means it might give an indication of climate change.
Full Story: 13 more things: The Bloop – 02 September 2009 – New Scientist.
INTERVIEW-US labor head to push healthcare, labor law reform
if a new one is contentious, let’s just expand the old one (medicare) to include everybody. – endless october
* Says health reform should break insurers’ “stranglehold”
By David Morgan
WASHINGTON, Sept 13 (Reuters) – As President Barack Obama pushes for a deal on healthcare reform in Congress, the biggest U.S. labor federation is planning an intensive lobbying campaign to preserve the debate’s most contentious proposal: a new government-run health insurance program.
The AFL-CIO’s prospective new president, former Pennsylvania coal miner Richard Trumka, told Reuters in a weekend interview that he would start mobilizing the federation’s 11 million members soon after he takes the AFL-CIO helm later this week.
The campaign will also lobby Congress to enact top-priority labor law reforms and seek to generate momentum for an aggressive effort to turn out the union vote in the 2010 congressional elections.
Full Story: INTERVIEW-US labor head to push healthcare, labor law reform | Reuters.
Metal Finishing Plant Cited, Again, For Worker Exposure to Chromium VI
OSHA has cited Pride Plating Inc. with alleged willful, repeat, and serious violations following an inspection at the company’s facility in Grove, Okla. The company employs about 90 workers who provide a wide range of metal finish processes. Proposed penalties total $209,000.
Following its investigation that began March 4 at the facility, OSHA’s Oklahoma City Area Office issued a willful citation for Pride’s failure to perform periodic monitoring after initial monitoring indicated workers were exposed to chromium VI in excess of OSHA’s permissible exposure limit. OSHA defines a willful violation as one committed with intentional disregard of, or plain indifference to, requirements of the Occupational Safety and Health Act.
A citation for 10 repeat violations was issued for failure to provide safe walking surfaces; provide personal protective equipment for workers exposed to chromium; prevent workers from being overexposed to chromium VI; and properly train workers who have been exposed to chromium, caustics, and corrosives used in the facility. A repeat citation is issued when an employer previously has been cited for a substantially similar condition and the citation has become a final order.
Full Story: Metal Finishing Plant Cited, Again, For Worker Exposure to Chromium VI — Occupational Health & Safety.
Billionaires for Wealthcare at the US Capitol Today
Photo Essay - several photos
Protesters against US President Barack Obama’s health care plan and other policies gather in Washington, DC, on September 12, 2009. Tens of thousands of people carrying signs against the administration’s health care and what they view as out of control government spending marched on the US Capitol.
Full Story: Billionaires for Wealthcare at the US Capitol Today – pics – Democratic Underground.
Should we move to a 4-day work week – Permanently?
Take Friday off… forever -
The four-day week could boost employment, save energy and make us happier.
FANCY a three-day weekend – not just once in a while but week in week out? You may think your bosses would never agree to it, but the evidence suggests that employers, employees and the environment all benefit.
The four-day week comes in two flavours. One option is to switch from five 8-hour days to four 10-hour days, meaning overall hours and salaries stay the same. In August 2008, the state of Utah moved all of its employees, apart from the emergency services, to working 4/10, as it has become known. The hope was that by shutting down buildings for an extra day each week, energy bills would be slashed by up to a fifth.
The full results of this experiment won’t be published until October, but an ongoing survey of 100 buildings suggests energy consumption has fallen by around 13 per cent. The survey also found that 70 per cent of employees prefer the 4/10 arrangement, and that people took fewer days off sick.
Full Story: Better world: Take Friday off… forever – 09 September 2009 – New Scientist.
An unlimited and perpetual copyright?
Mozart and copyright
The wankers (now led by novelist Mark Helprin) are now arguing for unlimited and perpetual copyright? Really?
To me, and I think to most people, it’s a good thing that the authors of West Side Story were able to put their work together without constantly looking over their shoulder at whether or not things were getting too close to Romeo & Juliet or needing to somehow deny that that’s what they were doing. The fact that the work is more-or-less explicitly a retelling of an already classic cultural landmark gives it a kind of additional resonance. Trying harder to make it different in order to stay on the right side of the law would likely have actually made the thing seem more trite and derivative; if you simply rely on lazy clichés you’re not infringing on anyone in particular.
And of course that’s to say nothing of the fact that Shakespeare himself was often re-doing other works that prevailed in his time. The convention is to think of stronger intellectual property law as law that’s favorable to creators. And in some ways it is. But it’s important to note that the main users of copyrighted material are also creators. The output of this blog is copyrighted, but lots of the inputs—from quotations to photos to YouTube clips—are also copyrighted.
Full Story: Daily Kos: State of the Nation.
Better world: Legalise drugs
New Scientist
Far from protecting us and our children, the war on drugs is making the world a much more dangerous place.
SO FAR this year, about 4000 people have died in Mexico’s drugs war – a horrifying toll. If only a good fairy could wave a magic wand and make all illegal drugs disappear, the world would be a better place.
Dream on. Recreational drug use is as old as humanity, and has not been stopped by the most draconian laws. Given that drugs are here to stay, how do we limit the harm they do?
The evidence suggests most of the problems stem not from drugs themselves, but from the fact that they are illegal. The obvious answer, then, is to make them legal.
The argument most often deployed in support of the status quo is that keeping drugs illegal curbs drug use among the law-abiding majority, thereby reducing harm overall. But a closer look reveals that this really doesn’t stand up. In the UK, as in many countries, the real clampdown on drugs started in the late 1960s, yet government statistics show that the number of heroin or cocaine addicts seen by the health service has grown ever since – from around 1000 people per year then, to 100,000 today. It is a pattern that has been repeated the world over.
Full Story: Better world: Legalise drugs – 11 September 2009 – New Scientist.
Bush’s Economic Performance: A Final Tally
by Robert Freeman
Five years ago, Forbes magazine performed a worthy public service. The right-leaning business publication that dubs itself, “Capitalist Tool,” published a set of criteria by which to judge the economic performance of 10 post-war presidencies. It then evaluated each presidency against that set of criteria.
The criteria themselves are straightforward. They include GDP growth, real disposable personal income, employment, unemployment, inflation, and deficit reduction. All are mainstream metrics of economic performance. Data for each are readily available from public sources and are regularly updated.
It is a measure of Forbes’ integrity that it let the chips fall where they may. The top three performers were all Democrats: Clinton, Johnson, and Kennedy. The bottom three were all Republicans: Nixon, Eisenhower, and Bush I. The middle was a mixture of Republicans and Democrats: Reagan, Carter, Ford, and Truman.
Full Story: Bush’s Economic Performance: A Final Tally | CommonDreams.org.
Who’s going to jail for this? Economic Crisis: One Year Later
Senator Bernie Sanders Unfiltered -
Americans have suffered for a year through the worst economic decline since the Great Depression.
Millions of people have lost their jobs. We’re seeing people with very long-term unemployment. We are seeing older people who have lost their life’s savings and are now worried about how they are going to retire with dignity. We have seen people lose their homes, and we’ve seen people lose their pensions.
We’ve seen, in many ways, the collapse of the American middle class
Full Story: Senator Bernie Sanders Unfiltered.
Right Wing Lies about 9/12 Crowd Size Too Extreme Even for Fox News
The crowd size of Saturday’s Tea Bagger march probably did beat a long-standing record, however. It was likely the biggest whites-only rally in the capitol since 1925, when 35,000 people marched in support of the Ku Klux Klan.
Glenn Beck’s anti-Obama 9/12 march in Washington is over, but the fakery continues. During the event, an executive for Freedomworks, the DC-based lobbying firm headed by former GOP House leader Dick Armey that was hired to astroturf the event, took to the stage and, citing ABC News as his source, flatly lied about the crowd size, saying it was about 25 times the D.C. Fire Department’s estimates.
Then, in a move that is atypical of a “liberal media” outlet, ABC struck back:
Conservative activists … erroneously attributed reports on the size of the crowds to ABC News.
Matt Kibbe, president of FreedomWorks, the group that organized the event, said on stage at the rally that ABC News was reporting that 1 million to 1.5 million people were in attendance.
At no time did ABC News, or its affiliates, report a number anywhere near as large. ABCNews.com reported an approximate figure of 60,000 to 70,000 protesters, attributed to the Washington, D.C., fire department. In its reports, ABC News Radio described the crowd as “tens of thousands.”
Full Story: Pensito Review » Right Wing Lies about 9/12 Crowd Size Too Extreme Even for Fox News.
Rights Groups Sue Authorities for First Amendment Violations in Advance of G-20 Summit
ttorneys Call Denial of Permits to Activist Groups Bogus
Pittsburgh, PA – Today, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania (ACLU-PA) filed a complaint in the United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania on behalf of groups seeking to hold peaceful demonstrations in downtown Pittsburgh where the Group of 20 summit (G-20) will take place later this month. The complaint charges the U.S. Secret Service, the Department of Homeland Security, the City of Pittsburgh and the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources with violating the groups’ constitutional rights to free speech.
The plaintiffs include: CODEPINK; Pittsburgh Women For Peace; 3 Rivers Climate Convergence; Thomas Merton Center; Pittsburgh Outdoor Artists; Bail Out The People and G-6 Billion. The complaint was filed after repeated efforts to negotiate with the city regarding the permits.
“The City is unjustified in denying permits to these peaceful protestors,” said CCR Vice President Jules Lobel. “We hope the court will uphold and protect the core American values of free speech and the right to dissent.”
Autoimmune Disease: How To Stop Your Body From Attacking Itself
The incidence of autoimmune disease has tripled in the last few decades. 24 million Americans are now affected. In fact, it affects more women than heart disease and breast cancer combined.
But autoimmune disease isn’t just one condition …
You’re probably familiar with the most common autoimmune diseases, like rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, multiple sclerosis, inflammatory bowel disease, type-1 diabetes, hypothyroidism, and psoriasis. But there are many more autoimmune diseases that affect the nervous system, joints and muscles, skin, endocrine gland, and heart.
Full Story: Mark Hyman, MD: Autoimmune Disease: How To Stop Your Body From Attacking Itself.
The Man Who Saved A Billion Lives: Normon Borlaug Dies
DALLAS — Agricultural scientist Norman Borlaug, the father of the “green revolution” who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in combating world hunger and saving hundreds of millions of lives, died Saturday in Texas, a Texas A&M University spokeswoman said. He was 95.
Borlaug died just before 11 p.m. Saturday at his home in Dallas from complications of cancer, said school spokeswoman Kathleen Phillips. Phillips said Borlaug’s granddaughter told her about his death. Borlaug was a distinguished professor at the university in College Station.
The Nobel committee honored Borlaug in 1970 for his contributions to high-yield crop varieties and bringing other agricultural innovations to the developing world. Many experts credit the green revolution with averting global famine during the second half of the 20th century and saving perhaps 1 billion lives.
Full Story: Norman Borlaug Dead.
Monsanto – Public Enemy No. 1
The War of the Empire has many faces
The ‘war on terror’ has become nameless since our administration changed. But it is the same war, it has the same goals and it is as unwinnable as it always was. But certainly there are other ways of conquering the planet, says Washington. And so they impose the huge industries with their humungous profits on the entire world, corporations like Monsanto, Cargill, Dow, Bunge and others, giants that impose their own laws on world-wide agriculture and their goal is to make us eat only what they profit from.
Through lies and total lack of concern for the final outcome, they insert their hired crooks, their representatives, in top positions everywhere, make deals with corrupt governments all over the world, deals that make farmers the innocent victims of a world-wide scam. The result is disaster for the farmers and the poor people all over the world and enormous power for the Biotech Companies that suck the blood out of the earth and out of the people who used to cultivate it with their own millennia-old and environmentally safe methods.
Monsanto is just about the most callous, the most harmful, the most insidious of the whole gang of predators who are out to get on top of the world – and who are ruining it savagely in the process. They are busy ruining the environment irredeemably and the health of the inhabitants of this threatened world. Global warming doesn’t even have to play out its role, the biotech industry will play the part of the Grim Reaper, mowing down everything that does not add to their profits, ruining people’s health, playing hell with the earth’s ecosystems and biodiversity that has served the planet for millennia in a world that was mostly safe from predators, the kind of sharks that devour their prey without any afterthoughts.
Full Story: Monsanto – Public Enemy No. 1 By Siv O’Neall « Dandelion Salad.
A Mormon Speaks About Prop 8 in Church
Todd takes a stand against his own LDS Mormon church in a sacrament meeting for there political involvement in Prop 8. Using members cash and pressuring all members to fight against Gays and Lesbians rights.Todd quits the LDS Mormon Church for that reason.
The LDS MORMONS don’t want GAY PEOPLE around them they might get contaminated
“We do not intend to admit to our campus any homosexuals. If any of you have this tendency and have not completely abandoned it, may I suggest that you leave the university immediately after this assembly…We do not want others on this campus to be contaminated by your presence.” (Ernest Wilkinson, president of Brigham Young University, in a 1965 lecture to the BYU student body, titled: “Make Honor your Standard.”
Full Story: YouTube – A Mormon Speaks About Prop 8 in Church.
Steinbrück seeks global tax
Germany’s finance minister has called for a global tax to be imposed on financial transactions in an effort to end what he derided as “binge-drinking” on markets.
In one of the more radical steps mooted by a world leader to reform the financial system, Peer Steinbrück said receipts from the tax would be used to repay the cost to governments of tackling the crisis, including fiscal stimuli and bank rescue operations.
“The cost of the crisis should not be borne alone by small taxpayers,” he told the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper.
Full Story: FT.com / Europe – Steinbrück seeks global tax.
U.S. Trade Deficit Widens Most Since 1999
America’s problematic trade deficit grew at a record pace in July 2009 bolstered by surging demand for cars and oil. Bloomberg reports that the July figure was expected to be $27.3 billion, but the actual figure was closer to $32 billion. This represents a 16 percent increase from the June 2009 figure of $27.5 billion – this was in itself an upward revision from the previous estimate.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, this month-to-month percentage jump was the largest since 1999, representing an increasing reliance in the American economy on imported goods, services, and commodities. The trade deficits had decreased in size, though not disappeared, during the depths of the recession.
However, as certain sectors of the economy begin to “recover” the import-export gap will widen. This effect was seen in the most recent report from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The BEA reports that while July exports were valued at $2.7 billion more than the prior month, imports were a full $7.2 billion more.
Full Story: Economyincrisis.org – America’s Economic Report – Daily.
Real ‘Norma Rae’ dead of cancer after battle with health insurer
Insurers’ delays are ‘almost … like murder,’ Sutton said
The woman whose life inspired the 1979 film Norma Rae has died of cancer after struggling with her health insurance company, which had delayed her treatment.
Crystal Lee Sutton was 68. She had struggled for several years with meningioma, a form of brain cancer.
She became a hero to the labor movement in the 1970s, when she took on her employer, a North Carolina textile plant, and unionized the factory floor. Her story became famous nationwide in 1975 after New York Times reporter Hank Leiferman wrote Crystal Lee: A Woman of Inheritance.
Full Story: Raw Story » Real ‘Norma Rae’ dead of cancer after battle with health insurer.
Protest Crowd Size Estimate Falsely Attributed to ABC News – ABC News
ABC News Reported D.C. Rally Size in Tens of Thousands, Not 1M to 1.5M as Activist Said.
Conservative activists, who organized a march on the U.S. Capitol today in protest of the Obama administration’s health care agenda and government spending, erroneously attributed reports on the size of the crowds to ABC News.
Full Story: Protest Crowd Size Estimate Falsely Attributed to ABC News – ABC News.
Beck fan and 9/12 protest attendee explains why Obama will oppress ‘white America.’
Despite the tea parties’ ostensible purpose of opposing taxation, many of the signs today at the 9/12 march attacked President Obama using explicit racial and ethnic smears. Glenn Beck, who helped initiated the idea for the rally, has come under fire for similarly stating Obama has a “deep-seated hatred for white people.” ThinkProgress documented some of the hate at the protest, and also spoke to one attendee who shared Beck’s views. The attendee, like Beck, thought Obama hates whites, but also believed he will oppress the white race with communism. We asked him about the sign he was holding up, which showed Obama riding a white baby:
ATTENDEE: Barack was the name of the horse that Mohammed rode to heaven, alright a white horse.
Q: What does the white baby represent?
ATTENDEE: White America, because I do believe our President is a racist [...] But I think it’s mainly communism that he’s going to want to tell us what to wear, what to do, have his little red book like Mao because he really is a communist.
ThinkProgress’ Victor Zapanta produced a video from the rally today, and ThinkProgress reader Vikrum Aiyer submitted several photographs. Watch it:
Full Story: Think Progress » Beck fan and 9/12 protest attendee explains why Obama will oppress ‘white America.’.
Top Economists Say We Must Break Up the Insolvent Banks (Government Says Let’s Make Them Bigger)
The following top economists and financial experts believe that the economy cannot recover unless the big, insolvent banks are broken up in an orderly fashion:
- Nobel prize-winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz
- Nobel prize-winning economist, Ed Prescott
- Dean and professor of finance and economics at Columbia Business School, and chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush, R. Glenn Hubbard
- MIT economics professor and former IMF chief economist, Simon Johnson (and see this)
- President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, Thomas Hoenig (and see this)
- Deputy Treasury Secretary, Neal S. Wolin
- The President of the Independent Community Bankers of America, a Washington-based trade group with about 5,000 members, Camden R. Fine
- The Congressional panel overseeing the bailout
- The head of the FDIC, Sheila Bair
- The leading monetary economist and co-author with Milton Friedman of the leading treatise on the Great Depression, Anna Schwartz
- Economics professor and senior regulator during the S & L crisis, William K. Black
- Economics professor, Nouriel Roubini
- Economist, Marc Faber
- Professor of entrepreneurship and finance at the Chicago Booth School of Business, Luigi Zingales
- Economics professor, Thomas F. Cooley
- Former investment banker, Philip Augar
- Chairman of the Commons Treasury, John McFall
Others, like Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, think that the giant insolvent banks may need to be temporarily nationalized.
In addition, many top economists and financial experts, including Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer – who was Ben Bernanke’s thesis adviser at MIT – say that – at the very least – the size of the financial giants should be limited.
“Trigger” for a Public Option is Nonsense
Robert Reich
I was just on the phone talking with a reporter for a national media outlet who referred to Senator Olympia Snowe’s idea for a public option “trigger” as the “centrist position.” Whoa. When the mainstream media start naming something as “centrist” the game is almost over because just about everyone with any authority in our nation’s capital wants to be at the “center.”
Let me back up a step. The public insurance option has become a lightening rod for Republicans, hate radio jocks, Fox News, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, and lobbyists for the health-industrial complex who accuse the White House and Democrats of planning a “government takeover” of health care. Anything that has the word “public” in it is always an automatic target for their rants. But most Democrats understand that a public insurance option is essential to control healthcare costs and expand coverage — both because private for-profit insurers now face so little competition in most markets that only the prod of a public option will force them to lower costs and extend coverage, and also because a nationwide public option would have the scale and authority to negotiate lower rates with drug companies and healthcare providers, thereby pushing private insurers to do the same.
The White House is looking for a way to be in favor of a public option but also get enough Blue Dog Democrats — many of whom hail from swing districts and states, and therefore need some cover — to vote for it. One such cover is a Republican Senator from Maine, named Olympia Snowe. If she votes for the bill, Blue Dogs can calm their constituents — who have been worked up into a lather by the right — by saying “you see? Even a prominent Republican senator is voting for this.”
Full Story: “Trigger” for a Public Option is Nonsense.
Poverty and premature death still firmly linked
(Reuters ) – Poverty is as a strong a predictor of premature death today as it was a century ago, according to findings from a study in England and Wales.
“Despite all the medical, public health, social, economic, and political changes over the 20th century, patterns of poverty and mortality and the relations between them remain firmly entrenched,” states Dr. Ian N. Gregory, from Lancaster University, UK.
Gregory reached this conclusion after analyzing census and death data for 634 districts from the 1900s and directly comparing it with data from 2001.
During the twentieth century, major improvements in death rates were seen in England and Wales, the report indicates.
Full Story: Poverty and premature death still firmly linked | Health | Reuters.
Ohio health care lobbyist has $30,000 insurance bill
When Columbus, Ohio, health care lobbyist Rick Colby writes his monthly check of $2,556 for his family’s health insurance, his hand trembles.
“It’s a staggering amount of money, and there’s nothing I can do about it,” the 49-year-old Colby says. His insurance rates soared over the past decade after his daughter, Lauren, was diagnosed with a brain tumor and his wife, Trish, developed breast cancer.
After his daughter died at age 8 in 2007, his rates dropped by a few hundred dollars a month, but then shot up by 20 percent the following year, he said.
Full Story: Health-care debate: Ohio man has $30,000 insurance bill | McClatchy.
Venomous Visitors: Religious Right Leaders Had Run Of Bush White House
Religious Right leaders with a deeply divisive and politically extreme agenda were making themselves right at home in the Bush White House.
It is hardly a secret that the Religious Right helped elect President George W. Bush and exercised extraordinary influence with his administration. But if we need more evidence, it’s just been put on the table.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Government (CREW) has just released a report tallying visits to the Bush White House by major Religious Right players. CREW filed a request for visitor records that coughed up the information.
According to a Sept. 4 CREW press release, the count looks something like this:
* For the period April 2001 through June 2006, Focus on the Family Founder and Chairman Emeritus James Dobson visited the White House 24 times; 10 of those visits were to President Bush.
Full Story: Venomous Visitors: Religious Right Leaders Had Run Of Bush White House | The Wall of Separation.
Obama’s Squandered Summer
Frank Rich – - NYTimes.com
THE day before he gave his latest brilliant speech, Barack Obama repeated a well-worn mantra to a television interviewer: “My job is not to be distracted by the 24-hour news cycle.” The time has come for him to expand that job description. His White House has a duty to push back against the 24-hour news cycle, every 24 hours if necessary, when it threatens to derail his agenda, the nation’s business, or both. This was a silly summer, as wasteful in its way as the summer of 2001, when Washington dithered over the now-forgotten Gary Condit scandal while Al Qaeda plotted. The president deserves his share of the blame.
After a good couple of years of living with the guy, we know the drill that defines his leadership, for better and worse. When trouble lurks, No Drama Obama stays calm as everyone around him goes ballistic. Then he waits — and waits — for that superdramatic moment when he can ride to his own rescue with what the press reliably hypes as The Do-or-Die Speech of His Career. Cable networks slap a countdown clock on the corner of the screen and pump up the suspense. Finally, Mighty Obama steps up to the plate and, lo and behold, confounds all the doubting bloviators yet again by (as they are wont to say) hitting it out of the park.
So it’s a little disingenuous for Obama to claim that he is not distracted by the 24-hour news cycle. What he’s actually doing is gaming it for all it’s worth.
Full Story: Op-Ed Columnist – Obama’s Squandered Summer – NYTimes.com.
A year later, TARP rules revealed
Nearly one year after Congress passed a $700 billion package to rescue the financial system, the federal government has released its first restrictions on lobbying for bailout money.
The government late on Thursday quietly released rules governing communications between federal officials and outside parties regarding the rescue package. The rules are posted without fanfare deep on the Treasury website.
The new rules came the same day Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner testified that the package is already shifting to a “new phase” of recovery after the worst of the crisis has passed.
Geithner said on Jan. 27 that the Obama administration would release new rules to limit lobbyist influence, but the policy was released only eight months later. The government already is planning to wind down several of the programs.
Full Story: A year later, TARP rules revealed – TheHill.com.
Exclusive: 27-Year CIA Vet says Obama May be Afraid of the CIA … For Good Reason…
Alluding to the assassination of JFK, long-time high-level CIA analyst says Panetta and the President ‘afraid of these guys because these guys have a whole lot to lose if justice takes its course’…
During my interview last night with 27-year CIA analyst Ray McGovern on the Mike Malloy Show (which I’ve been guest hosting all this week), the man who used to personally deliver the CIA’s Presidential Daily Briefings to George Bush Sr., among other Presidents, offered an extraordinarily chilling thought — particularly coming from someone with his background.
In a conversation at the end of the hour (audio and transcript below), as I was trying to pin him down for an opinion on whether or not he felt it was appropriate for CIA Director Leon Panetta to have reportedly attempted to block a lawful investigation into torture and other war crimes committed by the CIA, McGovern alluded to a book about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and noted he felt it likely that both Panetta and President Obama may have reason to fear certain elements of the CIA.
“Let me just leave you with this thought,” he said, “and that is that I think Panetta, and to a degree President Obama, are afraid — I never thought I’d hear myself saying this — I think they’re afraid of the CIA.”…
Full Story: The BRAD BLOG : Exclusive: 27-Year CIA Vet says Obama May be Afraid of the CIA … For Good Reason….
Ex-Powell chief on Cheney: ‘The man is now just crazy’
Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to Bush Secretary of State Colin Powell, said in response to an interviewer’s question Thursday that he believes Cheney has gone a bit farther than too far. 
“I’ve come to the conclusion that the man truly is — whether he was that way when I knew him before, when he was Secretary of Defense, I don’t know, that’s not at issue with me any more — the man now is just crazy,” Wilkerson said.
Wilkerson was speaking in an interview with Andy Worthington at The Public Record, the author of a book on Guantanamo detainees.
Full Story: The Raw Story » Ex-Powell chief on Cheney: ‘The man is now just crazy’.
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Republicans Don't Care about Voter Fraud....owa Republicans are trying to dismiss claims that the vote count in Tuesday's Iowa Caucus was wrong. An Iowa voter told a local TV station yesterday that he noticed a 20-vote discrepancy in the count - and that Rick Santorum was the real winner of the Caucuses. Republican Party officials, though, are sticking to their first count - showing Mitt Romney as the winner by 8-votes - and there will be no recount.The Republican Party has launched a war on voters around the nation this year with strict new laws that will disenfranchise over 5 million Americans. They claim these laws are necessary to combat so-called voter fraud. Yet in Iowa - where there are no such laws - and where a very, very close and questionable election was just held - Republicans don't seem to care at all about getting it right.Clearly - the war on voters isn't about making sure the people's voices are represented accurately - it's about making sure poor people, young people, and minorities who tend to vote for Democrats - can't vote at all.-Thom(Who do you think won? Tell us here.) -
LEGALIZE Democracy
" We the corporations" On January 21, 2010, with its ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are persons, entitled by the U.S. Constitution to buy elections and run our government. __________
MOVE to AMEND
a project of the CAMPAIGN TO LEGALIZE Democracy
Help end Corporate personhood
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The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. 
