Malcolm Moore - US Weapons 'Full of Fake Chinese Parts'

Published on Wednesday, November 9, 2011 by The Telegraph/UK

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/8876656/US-weapons-full-of-fake-Chinese-parts.html

Thousands of United States' warplanes, ships and missiles contain fake electronic components from China, leaving them open to malfunction, according to a US Senate committee.

by Malcolm Moore in Shanghai

The US Senate Armed Services Committee said its researchers had uncovered 1,800 cases in which the Pentagon had been sold electronics that may be counterfeit.

In total, the committee said it had found more than a million fake parts had made their way into warplanes such as the Boeing C-17 transport jet and the Lockheed Martin C-130J "Super Hercules".

It also found fake components in Boeing's CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter and the Theatre High-Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) missile defence system.

"A million parts is surely a huge number. But I want to repeat this: we have only looked at a portion of the defence supply chain. So those 1,800 cases are just the tip of the iceberg," said Senator Carl Levin.

In around seven in 10 cases, the fake parts originated in China, while investigators traced another 20 per cent of cases to the United Kingdom and Canada, known resale points for Chinese counterfeits.

In the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, counterfeit microchips are often smuggled out of factories, or burned off old computer circuit boards before having their identifying marks sanded off and repainted as new.

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Michael Parenti - Occupy America

Published on Wednesday, November 9, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/11/09-0

by Michael Parenti

Beginning with Occupy Wall Street in September 2011, a protest movement spread across the United States to 70 major cities and hundreds of other communities. Similar actions emerged in scores of other nations.

For the first two weeks, the corporate-owned mainstream media along with NPR did what they usually do with progressive protests: they ignored them. These were the same media that had given the Tea Party supporters saturation coverage for weeks on end, ordaining them “a major political force.”

The most common and effective mode of news repression is omission. By saying nothing or next to nothing about dissenting events, movements, candidates, or incidents, the media consign them to oblivion. When the Occupy movement spread across the country and could no longer be ignored, the media moved to the second manipulative method: trivialization and marginalization.

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RT America - Occupy Cal: Police Brutally Beat, Arrest Berkeley Students

http://www.commondreams.org/video/2011/11/10

Published on Thursday, November 10, 2011 by RT America

U.S. police in riot gear have clashed with student protesters at the University of California, Berkeley, after they refused to dismantle their camp. Tents were erected following a march against tuition fee increases for students - which was part of the broader Occupy Wall Street movement. Several activists were arrested, some were beaten by police with batons.

Video courtesy: http://www.youtube.com/user/MilesMathews, CalTV http://www.youtube.com/user/caltvinfo

Richard Eskow - Rebels and Messiahs, Ten Spiritual Ancestors for Occupy Wall Street

Monday 07 November 2011

by: Richard (RJ) Eskow, Campaign for America's Future

http://www.truth-out.org/rebels-and-messiahs-10-spiritual-ancestors-occupy-wall-street/1320761260

We started to make a list of people throughout history who might be considered Occupy Wall Street's spiritual forefathers and mothers, but it got so long it felt like the album cover forSgt. Pepper. Remember all those faces? So with great difficulty the list has been narrowed down to ten. There are rebels, organizers, poets, a conservative icon, and a surprise entry or two.

Each reflects some part of the heart, soul, and spirit of the movement - at least as I understand it. If others feel differently, hopefully they'll create their own list.

1. William Blake

He was pretty obscure in the 18th and 19th centuries, while he was alive. Poet, painter, mystic, troublemaker, what Blake valued couldn't be purchased in the marketplace:

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George Monbiot - The 1% Are the Very Best Destroyers of Wealth the World Has Ever Seen

Published on Tuesday, November 8, 2011 by The Guardian/UK

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/07/one-per-cent-wealth-destroyers

Our common treasury in the last 30 years has been captured by industrial psychopaths. That's why we're nearly bankrupt

by George Monbiot

If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire. The claims that the ultra-rich 1% make for themselves – that they are possessed of unique intelligence or creativity or drive – are examples of the self-attribution fallacy. This means crediting yourself with outcomes for which you weren't responsible. Many of those who are rich today got there because they were able to capture certain jobs. This capture owes less to talent and intelligence than to a combination of the ruthless exploitation of others and accidents of birth, as such jobs are taken disproportionately by people born in certain places and into certain classes

The findings of the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, winner of a Nobel economics prize, are devastating to the beliefs that financial high-fliers entertain about themselves. He discovered that their apparent success is a cognitive illusion. For example, he studied the results achieved by 25 wealth advisers across eight years. He found that the consistency of their performance was zero. "The results resembled what you would expect from a dice-rolling contest, not a game of skill." Those who received the biggest bonuses had simply got lucky.

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Travis Waldron - Wall Street Traders Have Profited More Under Obama Than In Eight Years Under Bush

By Travis Waldron on Nov 7, 2011

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/11/07/362488/wall-street-profit-obama-bush/

As protesters around the country take to the streets to protest the excesses of Wall Street banks that benefited from a federal bailout and quickly returned to profitability, new data from the financial industry has shed light on just how profitable those banks have been since the financial crisis brought the American economy to its knees three years ago.

Wall Street banks experienced years of unprecedented growth under President Bush, at least until the crisis of 2008. But in the two-and-a-half years since President Obama took office, the largest Wall Street banks have grown even larger, and profits at banks and trading firms have risen even faster than they did under Bush, the Washington Post’s Zachary Goldfarb reports:

Wall Street firms — independent companies and the securities-trading arms of banks — are doing even better. They earned more in the first 2 1/2 years of the Obama administration than they did during the eight years of the George W. Bush administration, industry data show. [...]

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Michael Snyder - Extreme Poverty Is Now at Record Levels

By Michael Snyder, The Economic Collapse

Posted on November 8, 2011
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, a higher percentage of Americans is living in extreme poverty than they have ever measured before.  In 2010, we were told that the economy was recovering, but the truth is that the number of the "very poor" soared to heights never seen previously.  Back in 1993 and back in 2009, the rate of extreme poverty was just over 6 percent, and that represented the worst numbers on record.  But in 2010, the rate of extreme poverty hit a whopping 6.7 percent.  That means that one out of every 15 Americans is now considered to be "very poor".  For many people, this is all very confusing because their guts are telling them that things are getting worse and yet the mainstream media keeps telling them that everything is just fine.  Hopefully this article will help people realize that the plight of the poorest of the poor continues to deteriorate all across the United States.  In addition, hopefully this article will inspire many of you to lend a hand to those that are truly in need.

Tonight, there are more than 20 million Americans that are living in extreme poverty.  This number increases a little bit more every single day.  The following statistics that were mentioned in an article in The Daily Mail should be very sobering for all of us....

About 20.5 million Americans, or 6.7 percent of the U.S. population, make up the poorest poor, defined as those at 50 per cent or less of the official poverty level.

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Henry Giroux - Beyond the Limits of Neoliberal Higher Education: Global Youth Resistance and the American/British Divide

Tuesday 8 November 2011

by: Henry A. Giroux, Campaign for the Public University

http://www.truth-out.org/beyond-limits-neoliberal-higher-education-global-youth-resistance-and-americanbritish-divide/1320688

“We need a wholesale revision of how a democracy both listens to and treats young people.”[1]

The global reach and destructiveness of neoliberal values and disciplinary controls are not only evident in the widespread hardships and human suffering caused by the economic recession of 2008, they are also visible in the ongoing and ruthless assault on the social state, workers, unions, higher education, students, and any vestige of the social at odds with neoliberal values. Under the regime of market fundamentalism, institutions that were meant to limit human suffering and misfortune and protect the public from the excesses of the market have been either weakened or abolished, as are many of those public spheres where private troubles can be understood as social problems and addressed as such.[2] Privatization has run rampant, engulfing institutions as different in their goals and functions as public schools and core public services,  on the one hand, and prisons, on the other. This shift from the social contract to savage forms of corporate sovereignty is part of a broader process of “reducing state support of social goods [and] means that states—the institutions best placed to defend the gains workers and other popular forces have made in previous struggles—are instead abandoning them.”[3] Faced with massive deficits, the U.S. federal government along with many states are refusing to raise taxes either on the rich or on wealthy corporations, while at the same time enacting massive cuts in everything from Medicaid programs, food banks, and worker retirement funds to higher education and health care programs for children. For example, Florida Governor Rick Scott has “proposed slashing corporate income and property taxes, laying off 6,700 state employees, cutting education funding by $4.8 billion, and cutting Medicaid by almost $4 billion. Scott’s ultimate plan is to phase the Sunshine state’s corporate income tax out entirely. He [wants] to gut Florida’s unemployment insurance system, leaving unemployed workers ‘with much less economic protection than unemployed workers in any other state in the country.’”[4] As social problems are privatized and public spaces are commodified, there has been an increased emphasis on individual solutions to socially produced problems, while at the same time market relations and the commanding institutions of capital are divorced from matters of politics, ethics, and responsibility. Free market ideology with its emphasis on the privatization of public wealth, the elimination of social protections, and its deregulation of economic activity now shapes practically every commanding political and economic institution in the United States. In these circumstances, notions of the public good, community, and the obligations of citizenship are replaced by the overburdened demands of individual responsibility and an utterly privatized ideal of freedom.

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Robert Parry - An Iraq-WMD Replay on Iran?

By Robert Parry

Consortiumnews  November 8, 2011

http://consortiumnews.com/2011/11/08/an-iraq-wmd-replay-on-iran/

The U.S. press corps and “independent” American weapons experts got almost everything wrong about Iraq’s purported WMD before the U.S. invasion in 2003. Now, much the same cast is returning to interpret dubious intelligence about Iran’s nuclear program, reports Robert Parry.

The American public is about to be inundated with another flood of “expert analysis” about a dangerous Middle Eastern country presumably hiding a secret nuclear weapons program that may require a military strike, although this time it is Iran, not Iraq.

In the near future, you will be seeing more satellite photos of non-descript buildings that experts will say are housing elements of a nuclear bomb factory. There will be more diagrams of supposed nuclear devices. Some of the same talking heads will reappear to interpret this new “evidence.”

You might even recognize some of those familiar faces from the more innocent days of 2002-2003 when they explained, with unnerving confidence, how Iraq’s Saddam Hussein surely had chemical and biological weapons and likely a nuclear weapons program, too.

For instance, back then, former United Nations weapons inspector David Albright was all over the news channels, reinforcing the alarmist claims about Iraq’s WMD that were coming from President George W. Bush and his neocon-dominated administration.

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Ed Silverman - The Number Of Drug Recalls Is Rising How Fast?

http://www.pharmalot.com/2011/11/the-number-of-drug-recalls-is-rising-how-fast/

By Ed Silverman // November 8th, 2011

During the third quarter of this year, the number of pharmaceutical recalls jumped to 150, compared with about 90 recalls during each of the first two quarters of 2011, according to FDA Enforcement Reports. Moreover, the recent tally dwarfs the roughly 65 recalls that were made during the last quarter of 2010 and nearly doubled the 80 recalls that were notched during the 2010 third quarter.

The simple reason for this spike is more aggressive activity by the FDA, according to Mike Rozembajgier of Stericycle, a medical waste management that examined the agency reports. “As the FDA increases its scrutiny of pharmaceutical and medical device supply chains, we can expect to see more recalls that affect consumers worldwide,” he tells us.

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