Agence France Presse - London Bankers 'Find Rich-Poor Divide Too Wide'

Published on Monday, November 7, 2011 by Agence France Presse

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/11/07-7

LONDON — Financial sector workers in Britain believe the gap between rich and poor is too wide, according to a survey by a think-tank published on Monday.

The report, by an institute linked to St Paul's Cathedral in London where anti-capitalist protesters have been camping since mid-October, said 75 percent of respondents thought the wealth divide was too big.

Bankers, brokers and corporate lawyers working in the City of London financial district were questioned about the ethics of their salaries and bonuses and corporate social responsibility.

Two-thirds of respondents said "salary and bonuses" were the main motivation for financial services professionals, with "enjoyment of the work" coming a distant second.

However, 70 percent of respondents believe bonuses and rewards for City workers should only reflect long-term success, rather than short-term performance.

Most financial services professionals in London think that deregulation of financial markets results in less ethical behaviour.

Deregulation in 1986 helped transform the City of London into a rival to Wall Street in New York.

But it changed a culture of financial partnerships -- where bankers and traders essentially betted on markets with their own money -- into a culture based increasingly on risk-taking.

The St Paul's Institute report, "Value and Values: Perceptions of Ethics in the City Today", was based on a survey of 515 financial professionals carried out between August 30 and September 12.

The 200-tent camp of protesters demonstrating against corporate greed outside St Paul's Cathedral -- an offshoot of the Occupy Movement, which began in Wall Street in New York -- has sharply divided the cathedral authorities.

Planned legal action against the activists was suspended and the head of St Paul's, Dr Giles Fraser, resigned rather than see protesters forcibly evicted.

Russ Baker - Corporate Media Stumped on How to Cover the Occupy Movement

Posted By Russ Baker On November 6, 2011 

]http://whowhatwhy.com/2011/11/06/corporate-media-stumped-on-how-to-cover-the-occupy-movement/

Conventional journalism is increasingly irrelevant in a time of crisis. We find abundant proof in a recent column [2] from the New York Times’ so-called “Public Editor,” who is supposed to somehow magically represent the public interest and rarefied ethical values to the rest of the paper.

In this column, he says the media is having difficulty figuring out how to cover Occupy Wall Street and its offshoots.

What are the themes? How should The New York Times cover this movement that resembles no other in memory?

Certainly, media organizations are intrinsically better able to cover snapshot moments like official actions and pronouncements than movements or complex and subtly if rapidly evolving situations—like climate change, or Occupy.

In any case, for answers, the Public Editor turns to colleagues outside The Times, and solicits their wisdom:

Stephen Buckley, dean of faculty, The Poynter Institute; former managing editor, St. Petersburg Times

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Suvendrini Kakuchi - Women Fight to Save Fukushima's Children

Published on Monday, November 7, 2011 by Inter Press Service

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/11/07-2

by Suvendrini Kakuchi

TOKYO - Hundreds of Japanese women have been converging on the Japanese capital demanding better relief for some 30,000 children exposed to nuclear radiation by the Fukushima meltdown.

"Official recovery policy focuses on decontamination rather than protecting the health of those most vulnerable - children and pregnant women," activist Aileen Mioko Smith told IPS.

"Our meetings with officials to force faster evacuation programmes for high-risk groups are only met with promises to clear radioactive waste. This is totally irresponsible," said Smith, who leads the non-government organisation (NGO) Green Action Japan.

Smith criticised the government and the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), operator of the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant, for focusing energies on defusing public tension by promising to reduce exposure in affected areas to below one millisieverts (a measure of radiation) per year.

On Wednesday, TEPCO admitted that one of the Fukushima reactors showed presence of radioactive material from a burst of nuclear fission, indicating fresh leakage.

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Sherle Schwenninger - Is the Eurozone About to Collapse--and How Will it Impact the US?

By Sherle R. Schwenninger, The Nation

Posted on November 7, 2011, Printed on November 8, 2011
http://www.thenation.com/article/164345/eurozone-brink-collapse

After days of drama-filled meetings, in late October eurozone leaders announced the latest “comprehensive” rescue plan. Although it was an improvement over earlier efforts, this package, too, came up short in that it failed to calm the markets and offer the eurozone a path back to economic growth. And without growth, there will be many more months of crisis.

The stakes are very high. The fate of the US economic recovery rests in part on whether Europe can keep its intertwined banking and debt crises from spiraling into full-fledged financial contagion, which would deal a damaging blow to an already fragile US economy. Yet the United States has little influence over European policy. Not only is Washington’s advice viewed with suspicion in Berlin and Paris (Europeans still rightly complain about the economic shock visited upon their economies by the collapse of Lehman Brothers); with austerity-drunk Republicans in charge of Congress, the United States can’t do much to help rescue Europe.

After days of drama-filled meetings, in late October eurozone leaders announced the latest “comprehensive” rescue plan. Although it was an improvement over earlier efforts, this package, too, came up short in that it failed to calm the markets and offer the eurozone a path back to economic growth. And without growth, there will be many more months of crisis.

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Desmond Tutu & Jody Williams - The Devil in the Tar Sands

Monday, November 7, 2011 by Project Syndicate

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/tutu14/English

Desmond Tutu & Jody Williams

CAPE TOWN – On Sunday, November 6, thousands of people encircled the White House as part of the ongoing effort to press US President Barack Obama to stop the Keystone XL pipeline. If the nearly 1,700-mile pipeline were to be built, it would run from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, through the heartland of the US, all the way to the Texas coast on the Gulf of Mexico. Should the project go ahead, Obama will have made one of the single most disastrous decisions of his presidency concerning climate change and the very future of our planet."There is no such thing as ethical fossil fuel, regardless of geographical origin. The ethical choice is to move as quickly as possible away from fossil fuels, period."

In August, some 1,250 people were arrested in front of the White House while protesting against Keystone. One of them was James Hanson, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who has been studying for decades the impact of fossil fuels on the environment. Hanson argues that the pipeline would sound the death knell for the world’s climate. Oil from the tar sands of Alberta is the dirtiest in the world, and its extraction is already causing problems. If Keystone is built, there will be increased efforts to expand oil production there, making a bad situation much worse.

Opposition to the pipeline throughout the US is growing in intensity – from the activists arrested in Washington, DC, to the governor of Nebraska, who is seeking state legislation to stop the pipeline from running through America’s biggest aquifer, to members of the US Congress, who have petitioned Obama about the project. The outpouring of opposition surprised the oil industry, its highly paid lobbyists, and especially TransCanada Corporation, which would build the pipeline. So, like many huge corporations facing public criticism, they and their allies are responding with a dubious new marketing effort.

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Joseph Stiglitz - The Globalization of Protest

Monday, November 7, 2011   

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/stiglitz144/English

Joseph Stiglitz

 NEW YORK – The protest movement that began in Tunisia in January, subsequently spreading to Egypt, and then to Spain, has now become global, with the protests engulfing Wall Street and cities across America. Globalization and modern technology now enables social movements to transcend borders as rapidly as ideas can. And social protest has found fertile ground everywhere: a sense that the “system” has failed, and the conviction that even in a democracy, the electoral process will not set things right – at least not without strong pressure from the street.

In May, I went to the site of the Tunisian protests; in July, I talked to Spain’s indignados; from there, I went to meet the young Egyptian revolutionaries in Cairo’s Tahrir Square; and, a few weeks ago, I talked with Occupy Wall Street protesters in New York. There is a common theme, expressed by the OWS movement in a simple phrase: “We are the 99%.”

That slogan echoes the title of an article that I recently published, entitled “Of the 1%, for the 1%, and by the 1%,” describing the enormous increase in inequality in the United States: 1% of the population controls more than 40% of the wealth and receives more than 20% of the income. And those in this rarefied stratum often are rewarded so richly not because they have contributed more to society – bonuses and bailouts neatly gutted that justification for inequality – but because they are, to put it bluntly, successful (and sometimes corrupt) rent-seekers.

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ScienceDaily - It Takes Two: Brains Come Wired for Cooperation, Neuroscientists Discover

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/11/111103190351.htm

ScienceDaily (Nov. 3, 2011) — When Nancy Grace and her partner danced a lively rumba to Spandau Ballet's 1980's hit, "True," on a recent "Dancing With the Stars," more was going on in the legal commentator's brain than worry over a possible wardrobe malfunction.

Deep in Grace's cortex, millions of neurons were hard at work doing what they apparently had been built to do: act and react to partner Tristan MacManus's movements to create a pas de deux that had the dancers functioning together (for the most part) like a well-oiled machine.

That is because the brain was built for cooperative activity, whether it be dancing on a reality television show, constructing a skyscraper or working in an office, according to a study led by Johns Hopkins behavioral neuroscientist Eric Fortune and published in the November 4 issue of the journal Science.

"What we learned is that when it comes to the brain and cooperation, the whole is definitely greater than the sum of its parts," said Fortune, of the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. "We found that the brain of each individual participant prefers the combined activity over his or her own part."

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American Society of Agronomy - Nitrogen Fertilizers' Impact on Lawn Soils

American Society of Agronomy
https://www.agronomy.org/news-media/releases/2011/1031/521/

NEWS RELEASE
Contact: James Giese, American Society of Agronomy, 608-268-3976, jgiese@sciencesocieties.org

U.S. lawns cover an area almost as large as Florida, making turfgrass our largest ‘crop’ and lawn fertilizer use a legitimate issue

MONDAY, OCTOBER 31, 2011 -- Nitrogen fertilizers from farm fields often end up in aquatic ecosystems, resulting in water quality problems, such as toxic algae and underwater ‘dead zones’. There are concerns that fertilizers used on lawns may also contribute to these problems. All of the lawns in the United States cover an area almost as large as Florida, making turfgrass our largest ‘crop’ and lawn fertilizer use a legitimate issue.

In a study funded by the National Science Foundation Ecosystem Studies and Long Term Ecological Research programs, researchers from Cornell University and the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies have utilized recent technological advances to measure gaseous nitrogen emissions in home lawns.

In the past, scientists have conducted nitrogen input-output studies on lawns to determine how much nitrogen is taken up by vegetation or deposited in soils, and how much is lost. These studies have rarely provided any accurate data, and the ‘missing’ nitrogen has usually been attributed to denitrification, a process that removes nitrogen from soils by converting nitrate into nitrogen gas.  

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Jim Horn - New Charter School Study More Bad News for Corporate Ed Reform

Published on Monday, November 7, 2011 by Schools Matter

http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2011/11/new-charter-study-by-mathematica-with.html

by Jim Horn

The first national charter school study was conducted in 2009 by CREDO at Stanford, and the co-funders of the study (the Walton Foundation and Pearson) were not enamored by the results. So bad were they for charter school fans that the study, though given skimpy coverage by the LA Times, was never reported by WaPo or the NYTimes, and received minimal coverage from one news magazine, U. S. News and World Report, which obviously did not get the memo:

June 17, 2009 12:58 PM ET | Zach Miners | Permanent Link | Print

On average, charter schools are not performing as well as their traditional public-school peers, according to a new study that is being called the first national assessment of these school-choice options. The study, conducted by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University, compared the reading and math state achievement test scores of students in charter schools in 15 states and the District of Columbia—amounting to 70 percent of U.S. charter school students—to those of their virtual "twins" in regular schools who shared with them certain characteristics. The research found that 37 percent of charter schools posted math gains that were significantly below what students would have seen if they had enrolled in local traditional public schools. And 46 percent of charter schools posted math gains that were statistically indistinguishable from the average growth among their traditional public-school companions. That means that only 17 percent of charter schools have growth in math scores that exceeds that of their traditional public-school equivalents by a significant amount.

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Hope Yen - Wealth Gap Between Young and Old at Widest Level Ever

http://www.heraldextra.com/news/national/article_06bf8df6-9b5a-5f6e-96a9-7b465643fcd1.html

Published on Monday, November 7, 2011 by the Associated Press

by Hope Yen

WASHINGTON -- The wealth gap between younger and older Americans has stretched to the widest on record, worsened by a prolonged economic downturn that has wiped out job opportunities for young adults and saddled them with housing and college debt.

The typical U.S. household headed by a person age 65 or older has a net worth 47 times greater than a household headed by someone under 35, according to an analysis of census data released Monday.

While people typically accumulate assets as they age, this wealth gap is now more than double what it was in 2005 and nearly five times the 10-to-1 disparity a quarter-century ago, after adjusting for inflation.

The analysis reflects the impact of the economic downturn, which has hit young adults particularly hard. More are pursuing college or advanced degrees, taking on debt as they wait for the job market to recover. Others are struggling to pay mortgage costs on homes now worth less than when they were bought in the housing boom.

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