Podcast Powered By Podbean Download this episode (right click and save) Guest: Mike Adams Mike Adams is perhaps the most important voice of the generation to have emerged in alternative medicine and public health issues. Earlier he was immersed in the common mindset of most Americans – living a high-powered …
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Published on Wednesday, July 20, 2011 by In These Times
http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/11735/public_unions_urgently_need_to_re-frame_business_climate_game/
by Roger Bybee
For the past four decades, America’s 50 states have allowed themselves to be trapped as players in a multi-state race to the bottom staged by Corporate America.
The inter-state (and increasingly global) competition to offer corporations the most perfect “business climate” costs states a huge share of their tax revenues. Greg LeRoy, author of the Great American Jobs Scam, estimates the cost of state-level inducements at a staggering $50 billion annually, and journalist David Cay Johnston pegs the figure at about $70 billion.
The “business climate” game—with corporate taxes slashed ever lower, accompanied by reductions in taxes for the investor class—inevitably shifts the tax burden to homeowners and small businesses lacking the size and resources to claim subsidies.
Now the backlash against the corporate tax cuts has arrived—and it is being channeled not against the “free market”-preaching CEOs whose firms have actually benefited richly, but against public employees whose pay is actually lower than similarly-educated private-sector counterparts.
In states like New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Illinois, Democratic governors have rhetorically accepted the right of public workers to be organized and to bargain collectively.
Published on Tuesday, July 19, 2011 by The Activist
http://theactivist.org/blog/the-global-crisis-of-legitimacy
The world is not simply in the midst of a deep economic slump. This is but one aspect of the crisis of legitimacy that confronts almost all of the political and economic institutions that comprise the capitalist world system today. The ongoing revolt in the Arab world against political corruption and socioeconomic exclusion is unquestionably the most dramatic manifestation of this phenomenon, but the crisis of legitimacy is not confined to that region alone. The grievances that have fueled street protests and revolutionary movements from Morocco to Iran are shared in greater or lesser degrees by people all around the globe – the indignados of Puerta del Sol, the aganaktismenoi of Syntagma Square, students and public sector strikers in the U.K., and the hundreds of thousands of protesters who, for a brief time, turned Madison into a Midwestern version of Tahrir Square
In her invaluable 2003 book Forces of Labor, Beverly Silver identifies what she calls the “fundamental contradiction of historical capitalism,” the tension between the system’s drive to attain maximum profitability and its need to maintain legitimacy in the eyes of those it oppresses and exploits. She writes:
As the U.S. war in Iraq winds down, we are entering a familiar phase, the season of forgetting—forgetting the harsh realities of the war. Mostly we forget the victims of the war, the Iraqi civilians whose lives and society have been devastated by eight years of armed conflict. The act of forgetting is a social and political act, abetted by the American news media. Throughout the war, but especially now, the minimal news we get from Iraq consistently devalues the death toll of Iraqi civilians.
Why? A number of reasons are at work in this persistent evasion of reality. But forgetting has consequences, especially as it braces the obstinate right-wing narrative of “victory” in the Iraq war. If we forget, we learn nothing.
By Robert Scheer
So much for the meritocracy. Despite an elite education, effusive charm and brilliant wit, Barack Obama, like Bill Clinton before him, has ended up betraying his humble origins by abjectly serving the most rapacious variant of Wall Street greed. They both talk a good progressive game, but when push comes to shove—meaning when the banking lobby weighs in—big money talks and the best and the brightest fold.
The defining moment of Clinton’s capitulation was his destruction of Brooksley Born, the one member of his administration with the courage and prescience to warn him about the unregulated derivatives trading that ultimately led to the housing collapse. For Obama, it is his decision not to nominate Elizabeth Warren to run the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which she fought so hard to create.
Obama’s refusal to take the fight to Senate Republicans by nominating Warren should be taken as the vital measure of the man. This gutless decision comes after the president populated his administration with the very people who created the financial meltdown.
By Hal Crowther, Progressive Populist
Posted on July 18, 2011, Printed on July 20, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/151674/the_alarming_revival_of_ayn_rand%3A_the_right%27s_weirdest_idol_of_them_all
The Republican Party’s slapstick search for a leader would be heartwarming and sidesplitting, but for the tragic knowledge that one of these scrambling midgets will collect tens of millions of votes in the presidential election of 2012. Never have so many amounted to so little, talked so much rubbish, dreamed of an office so far above their abilities. Blood pressures rose among party elders when Donald Trump, marginally Republican and one of the greatest fools in the solar system, momentarily tossed his hairpiece into the ring and became the instant favorite.
The GOP dilemma — a golden opportunity to rule but nothing to say and no one to say it — is so desperate that my instinct is to help them sort it out. Could we make a start, at least, by dismissing candidates who called for President Obama’s birth certificate or raised the specter of Sharia law in America, followed briskly off the stage by lunatics who dismiss global warming as a socialist plot?
That would leave plenty of unbalanced extremists still in the running, yet reduce the stench of sheer evil and madness. The “birther” and Sharia cults reek of cheesy talk-radio racism; climate-change denial is a stranger faith yet, a political assault on basic science that insults a ground squirrel’s intelligence and casually threatens the survival of life on earth.
By Sherwood Ross
Global Research, July 20, 2011
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=25708
As eavesdroppers go, next to Uncle Sam and John Bull, Rupert Murdoch, the moral force behind Fox News, is an amateur.
That’s because a global eavesdropping scheme being run today by the United States and Great Britain dwarfs anything that Rupert Murdoch’s editors at The News of The World (TNTW) ever dared attempt.
British Prime Minister David Cameron may well deny he knew TNTW was tapping the phones of members of UK’s Royal household or those of American 9/11 victims. But he can’t claim he doesn’t know his country is a partner in ECHELON, which, according to Washington journalist Bill Blum, is a “network of massive, highly automated interception stations” that is eavesdropping on the entire world.
Alliance for Natural Health On July 19, 2011 @ 2:00 pm In Food Safety, Uncategorized | No Comments
http://www.anh-usa.org/nyt-attack-as-dshea-under-threat/
The New York Times made nasty insinuations about both the supplement industry and Sen. Hatch, one of the two authors of DSHEA—and got the facts completely wrong about ANH-USA.
The New York Times recently ran a piece about Sen. Orrin Hatch’s support for the supplement industry [1]. The article was full of innuendo about Sen. Hatch being in bed with supplement companies, in effect helping them make exaggerated claims to push their products. ANH got a similar treatment. The paper calls us “a trade group” (that is, a front for supplement companies) that helped defeat the McCain bill. This is similar to the treatment we received in the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) report [2] which also identified us as a trade group.
The Alliance for Natural Health is not a trade group—we are a consumer-run and consumer-serving advocacy organization. Contrary to what the Times piece suggested, it was our activists—consumers who themselves buy nutritional supplements—who helped defeat the McCain bill. Access to natural health products is a consumer choice, and the pressure to protect them from drug-related interests isn’t coming from industry, lobbyists, or Washington “politics” as the Times (and the CREW report before it) claimed, but from consumers like you.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Fmr-Fox-News-Executive-A-by-Daily-kos-110718-484.html
July 18, 2011
By Daily kos
By The Anomaly
Former Fox News executive Dan Cooper has claimed that a special bunker, requiring security clearance for access was created at the company’s headquarters to conduct “counterintelligence” including snooping on phone records:
“Has Roger Ailes been keeping tabs on your phone calls?”
That’s how Portfolio.com began a post back in 2008, when a former Fox News executive charged that Ailes had outfitted a highly secured “brain room” in Fox’s New York headquarters for “counterintelligence” and may have used it to hack into private phone records.
After helping chairman Roger Ailes create the Fox News channel in 1996, Cooper was fired for doing an anonymous interview with New York Magazine:
“I’m frightened right now,” said a former Fox employee, noting the vast array of powerful connections Ailes maintains throughout the political and media worlds. “I’ve been told that if Ailes figures out I talked to you, he’ll hunt me down and kill me.”
PPJ Gazette, July 18, 2011
http://ppjg.wordpress.com/2011/07/18/the-quiet-coup-the-implementation-of-agenda-21/
Debbie Coffey /Investigative Reporter/PPJ
People have noticed the 25 government agencies on Obama’s new White House Rural Council. And, they’re questioning what might be the need for all of them.
What people may not have noticed yet, is that the government agencies in this council are also on other councils. These councils, as well as the individual government agencies, are implementing international laws that have taken effect through Executive Orders, Memorandums of Understanding, agreements and regulations that most Americans don’t even know about. These have bypassed Congress. And, it also seems they have completely bypassed the Constitution.
The devil is in the details
Published on Tuesday, July 19, 2011 by YES! Magazine
http://www.yesmagazine.org/blogs/david-korten/liberate-america
by David Korten
The dominant story of the current political debate is that the government is broke. We can’t afford to pay for public services, put people to work, or service the public debt. Yet as a nation, we are awash in money. A defective system of money, banking, and finance just puts it in the wrong places
Raising taxes on the rich and implementing financial reforms are essential elements of the solution to our seemingly intractable fiscal and economic crisis. Yet proposals currently on the table fall far short of the need.
A newly released report of the New Economy Working Group, coordinated by the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC, goes beyond the current debate to call for a deep restructuring of the institutions to which we as a society give the power to create and allocate money. How to Liberate America from Wall Street Rule spells out the steps required to rebuild a system of community-based and accountable institutions devoted to financing productive activities that create good jobs for Americans and generate real community wealth.
Soaring Food Prices, Wild Weather, Upheaval, and a Planetful of Trouble
By Christian Parenti
What can a humble loaf of bread tell us about the world?
The answer is: far more than you might imagine. For one thing, that loaf can be “read” as if it were a core sample extracted from the heart of a grim global economy. Looked at another way, it reveals some of the crucial fault lines of world politics, including the origins of the Arab spring that has now become a summer of discontent.
Consider this: between June 2010 and June 2011, world grain prices almost doubled. In many places on this planet, that proved an unmitigated catastrophe. In those same months, several governments fell, rioting broke out in cities from Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, to Nairobi, Kenya, and most disturbingly three new wars began in Libya, Yemen, and Syria. Even on Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, Bedouin tribes are now in revolt against the country’s interim government and manning their own armed roadblocks.
And in each of these situations, the initial trouble was traceable, at least in part, to the price of that loaf of bread. If these upheavals were not “resource conflicts” in the formal sense of the term, think of them at least as bread-triggered upheavals.
Podcast Powered By Podbean Download this episode (right click and save) Today’s guest is Lester Brown discussing the “State of the World.” Podcast: Play in new window | Download (0.0KB) | Embed
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