Daphne Wysham - Measuring Progress -- A Better Alternative to the GNP

Published on Tuesday, October 25, 2011 by OtherWords

http://www.otherwords.org/articles/measuring_progress

Maryland's government is embracing an alternative way to monitor the state's wellbeing called the Genuine Progress Indicator, which brings depth to the analysis of the state's economic growth.

by Daphne Wysham

Tent cities and shacks sprung up on empty lots across the country. Food lines at soup kitchens wrapped around city blocks. Unemployment soared to 25 percent. Farmers watched helplessly as crop prices plummeted, then lost their land. The evidence was clear, yet at the height of the Great Depression, Congress lacked the tools to accurately measure just how the economy as a whole was faring. With no commonly accepted national income data, they had no guideposts upon which to base sound economic policy.

And so Congress turned to a young and promising Russian-American economist. U.S. lawmakers asked Professor Simon Kuznets of the National Bureau of Economic Research, who would go on to win the Nobel Prize in economics, to develop a data set to assess the state of the national economy. In 1937, Kuznets presented a vast volume of data on income to Congress. It became the Gross National Product (GNP).

With remarkable foresight and humility, Kuznets warned that his newly minted GNP shouldn't be used as an instrument of social policy. It could never adequately measure the things we value, he said, such as housework or caring for elderly parents. Nor, he warned, could the GNP distinguish between the growth of good and bad jobs. The data would be the same if workers earned their pay from employers who endangered their lives or guarded their health and safety. "Goals for more growth should be more growth of what and for what," Kuznets said.

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Dean Baker - A Generation of CEOs Who Don't Know How to Raise Wages

Monday 24 October 2011

by: Dean Baker, Truthout | Op-Ed

http://www.truth-out.org/generation-ceos-who-dont-know-how-raise-wages/1319469018

Those who follow the rants from our business leaders and their allies in politics and the media have been struck by a disquieting cry in recent months. We have been repeatedly told that, even though we have more than 25 million people unemployed or underemployed, businesses are unable to find qualified workers. 

For example, last week New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman took us [5]to Illinois, where Doug Oberhelman, the CEO of Caterpillar, one of the largest companies in the country, complained that he could not find qualified hourly workers for his manufacturing facilities. Oberhelman went on to complain that he also could not find engineering service technicians, or and even welders.

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Amy Goodman - Goldman Sachs v. Occupy Wall Street: A Greg Palast Investigation

Tuesday 25 October 2011

by: Amy Goodman, Democracy NOW! [3] | Interview

http://www.truth-out.org/goldman-sachs-v-occupy-wall-street-greg-palast-investigation/1319564419

A controversy in the banking community has arisen around the Occupy Wall Street movement. Greg Palast investigates the story behind Goldman Sachs’ recent decision to pull out of a fundraiser for the Lower East Side People’s Federal Credit Union in New York City after it learned the event was honoring the protesters at Occupy Wall Street. The investment bank withdrew its name from the fundraiser and also canceled a $5,000 pledge. Was the $5,000 a Goldman Sachs donation or actually American taxpayer bailout money Goldman set aside for community banks?

Guest:

Greg Palast, investigative reporter with the BBC and author of the books Armed Madhouse and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.

Amy Goodman: We turn now to a controversy in the banking community around the Occupy Wall Street movement. Recently, the financial giant Goldman Sachs pulled out of a fundraiser for a small Lower East Side bank that caters to poor people after it learned the event was honoring the protesters at Occupy Wall Street. The investment bank withdrew its name from the fundraiser and also canceled a $5,000 pledge.

But did Goldman Sachs actually use U.S. taxpayer bailout money to attack Occupy Wall Street’s not-for-profit community bank? Investigative reporter Greg Palast filed this report from Wall Street.

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Matt Taibbi - Wall Street Isn't Winning – It's Cheating

Published on Tuesday, October 25, 2011 by Rolling Stone

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/owss-beef-wall-street-isnt-winning-its-cheating-20111025

by Matt Taibbi

I was at an event on the Upper East Side last Friday night when I got to talking with a salesman in the media business. The subject turned to Zucotti Park and Occupy Wall Street, and he was chuckling about something he'd heard on the news.

"I hear [Occupy Wall Street] has a CFO," he said. "I think that's funny."

"Okay, I'll bite," I said. "Why is that funny?"

"Well, I heard they're trying to decide what back to put their money in," he said, munching on hors d'oeuvres. "It's just kind of ironic."

Oh, Christ, I thought. He’s saying the protesters are hypocrites because they’re using banks. I sighed.

"Listen," I said, "where else are you going to put three hundred thousand dollars? A shopping bag?"

"Well," he said, "it's just, they're protests are all about... You know..."

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Glenn Greenwald - How the Legal System Was Deep-Sixed and Occupy Wall Street Swept the Land

Published on Tuesday, October 25, 2011 by TomDispatch.com

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175458/tomgram%3A_glenn_greenwald%2C_how_the_rich_subverted_the_legal_system/

by Glenn Greenwald

As intense protests spawned by Occupy Wall Street continue to grow, it is worth asking: Why now? The answer is not obvious. After all, severe income and wealth inequality have long plagued the United States. In fact, it could reasonably be claimed that this form of inequality is part of the design of the American founding -- indeed, an integral part of it.

Income inequality has worsened over the past several years and is at its highest level since the Great Depression.  This is not, however, a new trend. Income inequality has been growing at rapid rates for three decades.  As journalist Tim Noah described the process:

“During the late 1980s and the late 1990s, the United States experienced two unprecedentedly long periods of sustained economic growth -- the ‘seven fat years’ and the ‘long boom.’ Yet from 1980 to 2005, more than 80% of total increase in Americans' income went to the top 1%. Economic growth was more sluggish in the aughts, but the decade saw productivity increase by about 20%. Yet virtually none of the increase translated into wage growth at middle and lower incomes, an outcome that left many economists scratching their heads.”

The 2008 financial crisis exacerbated the trend, but not radically: the top 1% of earners in America have been feeding ever more greedily at the trough for decades.

In addition, substantial wealth inequality is so embedded in American political culture that, standing alone, it would not be sufficient to trigger citizen rage of the type we are finally witnessing. The American Founders were clear that they viewed inequality in wealth, power, and prestige as not merely inevitable, but desirable and, for some, even divinely ordained. Jefferson praised “the natural aristocracy” as “the most precious gift of nature” for the “government of society.” John Adams concurred: “It already appears, that there must be in every society of men superiors and inferiors, because God has laid in the… course of nature the foundation of the distinction.”

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Mantoe Phakathi - Civil Society Groups Call for Action to Curb Land Grabbing

Published on Wednesday, October 26, 2011 by Inter Press Service

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/10/26

by Mantoe Phakathi

CHANGWON, South Korea - Civil society organisations are calling on governments in developing countries to stop leasing and selling out land to transnational corporations because it leads to land degradation and food insecurity.

Africa is one of the continents where corporations are flocking to lease or buy land for different projects such as mining, growing bio-fuel crops or construction – pushing rural poor communities off of their land.

"You find that the land is repossessed from poor people who are using it for farming to give way to bio-fuel crops or other projects that lead to land degradation," said Khadija-Catherine Razavi, executive director of the Centre for Sustainable Development (CENESTA), a non-profit organisation dedicated to promoting sustainable community- and culture-based development that mainly works in Iran and Southwest Asia.

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British Medical Journal - 1 in 5 medical journal articles include honorary and ghost authors

Public release date: 25-Oct-2011
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-10/uoc--yaw102411.php

British Medical Journal

Research: Honorary and ghost authorship in high impact biomedical journals - a cross sectional survey

Just over one in five (21%) of articles published in six leading medical journals in 2008 have evidence of honorary and ghost authorship, finds a study published on http://www.bmj.comtoday.

These results demonstrate that inappropriate authorship remains a problem in high impact biomedical publications, say the authors.

Inappropriate (honorary and ghost) authorship and the resulting lack of transparency and accountability have been important concerns for the academic community for decades. Honorary authors are individuals who are named as authors but have not contributed substantially to be able to take responsibility for the work. Ghost authors are individuals who have made substantial contributions to the work but are not named as authors.

In the 1980s, the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) developed guidelines for responsible and accountable authorship. These criteria are updated regularly and have been adopted by more than 600 biomedical journals. However, studies have found the prevalence of honorary authors to be as high as 39%, and ghost authors as high as 11% across a range of journals.

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Breitbart.com - Teen violence linked to heavy soda diet: study

Breitbart.com  Oct 24 07:11 PM US/Eastern

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.a78af65cc128f522f558eaa64f38258c.3d1&show_article=1

Researchers in the United States said on Tuesday they had found a "shocking" association -- if only a statistical one -- between violence by teenagers and the amount of soda they drank.

High-school students in inner-city Boston who consumed more than five cans of non-diet, fizzy soft drinks every week were between nine and 15-percent likelier to engage in an aggressive act compared with counterparts who drank less.

"What we found was that there was a strong relationship between how many soft drinks that these inner-city kids consumed and how violent they were, not only in violence against peers but also violence in dating relationships, against siblings," said David Hemenway, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health.

"It was shocking to us when we saw how clear the relationship was," he told AFP in an interview.

But he stressed that only further work would confirm -- or disprove -- the key question whether higher consumption of sweet sodas caused violent behaviour.

The new study was based on answers to questionnaires filled out by 1,878 public-school students aged 14 to 18 in the inner Boston area, where Hemenway said crime rates were much higher than in the wealthier suburbs.

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Bob Unruh - Test results suggest Gardasil doses contaminated

Questions surging about vaccination for sexually transmitted infection

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Posted: October 10, 2011
WND.com

By Bob Unruh
http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=353461

Just days after arguments over the controversial Gardasil vaccine returned to the nationwide headlines because of the GOP presidential debates, a new report suggests that the documented side effects including rheumatoid arthritis could be the result of contamination in the vaccine.

The report comes from InvestigateHers magazine, a New Zealand publication, which cited the work of a number of analysts and doctors on the topic of the Merck company product's side effects.

While officials in the United States say there have been only 0.05 percent of individuals who were vaccinated who have reported some kind of side effect, the actual number of those impacted is around 18,000.

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PF Louis - How to fight a grassroots battle against Monsanto -- and win!

by PF Louis

http://www.naturalnews.com/033980_Monsanto_boycotts.html

(NaturalNews) Writing to congressmen, the FDA and Obama, to stop Monsanto from contaminating the food chain, has proven fruitless. It's no use pretending we have a representative government when we are faced with a corporate plutocracy that owns the government.

Careerists have used the revolving doors between biotech industry and the USDA and FDA for years. Obama has chosen one of Monsanto's top revolving door careerists, Michael Taylor, as his "Food Czar." "So what now must we do?"

Boycotting GMOs

This makes good sense. But the biotech industry's successful lobbying for exemption from existing label legislation makes boycotting difficult. They are not required to label GMOs or foods containing GMOs. So how can the public know?

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