“Nouriel Roubini: - The Instability of Inequality

Saturday 15 October 2011

by: Nouriel Roubini, Project Syndicate [3] | Op-Ed

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/roubini43/English

New York - This year has witnessed a global wave of social and political turmoil and instability, with masses of people pouring into the real and virtual streets: the Arab Spring; riots in London; Israel’s middle-class protests against high housing prices and an inflationary squeeze on living standards; protesting Chilean students; the destruction in Germany of the expensive cars of “fat cats”; India’s movement against corruption; mounting unhappiness with corruption and inequality in China; and now the “Occupy Wall Street” movement in New York and across the United States.

While these protests have no unified theme, they express in different ways the serious concerns of the world’s working and middle classes about their prospects in the face of the growing concentration of power among economic, financial, and political elites. The causes of their concern are clear enough: high unemployment and underemployment in advanced and emerging economies; inadequate skills and education for young people and workers to compete in a globalized world; resentment against corruption, including legalized forms like lobbying; and a sharp rise in income and wealth inequality in advanced and fast-growing emerging-market economies.

Of course, the malaise that so many people feel cannot be reduced to one factor. For example, the rise in inequality has many causes: the addition of 2.3 billion Chinese and Indians to the global labor force, which is reducing the jobs and wages of unskilled blue-collar and off-shorable white-collar workers in advanced economies; skill-biased technological change; winner-take-all effects; early emergence of income and wealth disparities in rapidly growing, previously low-income economies; and less progressive taxation.

The increase in private- and public-sector leverage and the related asset and credit bubbles are partly the result of inequality. Mediocre income growth for everyone but the rich in the last few decades opened a gap between incomes and spending aspirations. In Anglo-Saxon countries, the response was to democratize credit – via financial liberalization – thereby fueling a rise in private debt as households borrowed to make up the difference. In Europe, the gap was filled by public services – free education, health care, etc. – that were not fully financed by taxes, fueling public deficits and debt. In both cases, debt levels eventually became unsustainable.

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“Zaid Jilani” - The Other Occupation, How Wall Street Occupies Washington

Sunday 16 October 2011

by: Zaid Jilani, ThinkProgress [3] | News Analysis

http://www.truth-out.org/other-occupation-how-wall-street-occupies-washington/1318774400

As ThinkProgress has previously noted [5], the 99 Percent Movement has been set off thanks to long-standing economic inequities and and a recession caused primarily by Wall Street’s misdeeds.

Wall Street did not engage in reckless financial behavior — which plunged 64 million people worldwide into extreme poverty [6] — in a vacuum.

In order to engage in these practices that brought the world’s economy to its knees, Wall Street had to make sure that the federal government based in Washington, DC would both de-regulate the financial industry (and provide lax oversight) and that Congress and the Federal Reserve would bail out banks with few strings attached if they were in danger of failing

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"Joseph Mercola” - New Discovery Shakes the Foundation of Cancer Research

By Dr. Mercola

Posted By Dr. Mercola | October 15 2011

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2011/10/15/mayo-clinic-finds-massive-fraud-in-cancer-research.aspx?e_cid=20111015_DNL_art_1

In a scandal that has reverberated around the world of cancer research, the Office of Research Integrity at the U.S. Department of Health found that a Boston University cancer scientist fabricated his findings. His work was published in two journals in 2009, and he’s been ordered to retract them. But important studies by other scientists like those at the Mayo Clinic, who based their work on his findings, could now make 10 years of their studies worthless, according to commentary in Gaia Health.

It seems fairly evident that the cancer industrial complex is a highly lucrative, well-oiled system that tends to support funding for expensive drug treatments that don't address the cause of the problem, and have yet to make a significant dent in the decrease of the overall cancer rate in the US despite investing hundreds of billions of dollars. Much of the support comes from flawed and biased "research" studies that support the use of expensive drugs as detailed in the featured articles. 

Researchers, too, are well aware of the notoriety and money to be found in cancer research … particularly what may be deemedsuccessful cancer research (which unfortunately is often measured by the discovery of new drug treatments). But, as with many areas of medical research, it's important to read between the lines of "scientifically proven" studies, even those that are well accepted.

Often what you'll find is the research gives the perception of science when really it is a heavily manipulated process designed to control and deceive. Case in point, here again we have an example of widely accepted, published research that turned out to be fabricated.

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"Adele Stan" - Senate Report: The Last Big Corporate Tax Cut Did Not Create Jobs

by Adele Stan, Oct 16, 2011, AFL-CIO Blog

http://blog.aflcio.org/2011/10/16/senate-report-the-last-big-corporate-tax-cut-did-not-create-jobs/

If you listen to anti-worker politicians on the right, you’d think the answer to the nation’s ills lies in tax cuts, and not just the extension of the Bush tax cuts for America’s wealthiest human citizens. Corporate tax cuts are often hailed as the solution to America’s jobs crisis.

But a report issued this week by the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, led by Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), gives lie to that logic with its stark findings that a notable recent effort to create jobs through corporate tax cuts created a multi-billion-dollar corporate windfall that did not trickle down to America’s workers, and did not create new jobs.

A law designed to spur new jobs in the U.S. passed six years ago aimed to do so by allowing U.S. corporations that were holding profits overseas to bring that money back into the U.S. at an extremely low tax rate. Corporations brought home billions, but did not invest in U.S. operations or create jobs. From the Levin report, titled, “Repatriating Offshore Funds: 2004 Tax Windfall for Select Multinationals”:

 In 2004, the America Jobs Creation Act (AJCA) permitted U.S. corporations to repatriate income held outside of the United States at an effective tax rate of 5.25 percent instead of the top 35 percent corporate income tax rate. The purpose of this tax provision was to encourage companies to return cash assets to the United States, which proponents of the provision argued would spur increased domestic investment and U.S. jobs. In response, corporations returned $312 billion in qualified repatriation dollars to the United States and avoided an estimated $3.3 billion in tax payments, but the growth in American jobs and investment that was supposed to follow did not occur.

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"New Analysis" - Indian Point Nuclear Plant Can be Replaced with Cleaner, Safer Energy

CONTACT: Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

 October 17, 2011 

 Kate Slusark, 212-727-4592 

 Human and Financial Cost of Nuclear Crisis in New York Could Exceed Japan’s Fukushima Disaster

 WASHINGTON - October 17 - A wide range of safer, cleaner energy options is available to replace Indian Point Energy Center if the nuclear plant is not relicensed in 2015, according to an independent analysis commissioned by the Natural Resources Defense Council and Riverkeeper. Thanks to an energy generation surplus it can be done at no impact to the reliability of the region’s electricity supply and at modest cost. A related new NRDC analysis of the costs and consequences of an accident at Indian Point also reveals it could cause a catastrophe far worse than the Fukushima disaster in Japan.

“The world watched the nuclear crisis in Japan with fear and heavy hearts; no one wants to see a repeat here in one of the most densely populated regions of the country,” said NRDC President Frances Beinecke. “Fortunately, we have a wealth of safer energy sources ready to go that can fully replace the power from Indian Point. When we consider the human and economic costs of a nuclear crisis in New York, and the host of benefits from investing in clean energy, the solution is common sense.”

NRDC’s new risk analysis compares the human and financial costs of the Fukushima disaster to the potential risks of a nuclear crisis at Indian Point, and reveals that the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) still underestimates the danger posed to Indian Point from seismic activity. An accident at one of Indian Point’s reactors on the scale of the recent catastrophe in Japan could send a fallout plume south to the New York City metropolitan area, require the sheltering or evacuation of millions of people, and cost 10 to 100 times more than Fukushima’s disaster.

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"Robert Reich" - The Rise of the Regressive Right and the Reawakening of America

Published on Sunday, October 16, 2011 by Robert Reich's Blog

http://robertreich.org/post/11511074902

by Robert Reich

A fundamental war has been waged in this nation since its founding, between progressive forces pushing us forward and regressive forces pulling us backward. 

We are going to battle once again. 

Progressives believe in openness, equal opportunity, and tolerance. Progressives assume we’re all in it together: We all benefit from public investments in schools and health care and infrastructure. And we all do better with strong safety nets, reasonable constraints on Wall Street and big business, and a truly progressive tax system. Progressives worry when the rich and privileged become powerful enough to undermine democracy. 

Regressives take the opposite positions.

Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann and the other tribunes of today’s Republican right aren’t really conservatives. Their goal isn’t to conserve what we have. It’s to take us backwards. 

They’d like to return to the 1920s — before Social Security, unemployment insurance, labor laws, the minimum wage, Medicare and Medicaid, worker safety laws, the Environmental Protection Act, the Glass-Steagall Act, the Securities and Exchange Act, and the Voting Rights Act. 

In the 1920s Wall Street was unfettered, the rich grew far richer and everyone else went deep into debt, and the nation closed its doors to immigrants.

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"Bill McKibben" - Obama and the corruption of big oil

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Obama-and-the-corruption-o-by-Bill-McKibben-111014-937.html

October 14, 2011 By Bill McKibben For connoisseurs, Barack Obama's fundraising emails for the 2012 election campaign seem just a tad forlorn -- slightly limp reminders of the last time round. Four years ago at this time, the early adopters among us were just starting to get used to the regular flow of email from the Obama campaign. The missives were actually exciting to get, because they seemed less like appeals for money than a chance to join a movement. Sometimes they came with inspirational videos from Camp Obama, especially the volunteer training sessions staged by organizing guru Marshall Ganz. Here's a favorite of mine, where a woman invokes Bobby Kennedy and Cesar Chavez and says that, as the weekend went on, she "felt her heart softening," her cynicism "melting," her determination building. I remember that feeling, and I remember clicking time and again to send another $50 off to fund that people-powered mission. (And I recall knocking on a lot of New Hampshire doors, too, with my 14-year-old daughter.)

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"Eliot Spitzer" - Why Occupy Wall Street Has Already Won

By Eliot Spitzer, Slate

Posted on October 15, 2011, Printed on October 16, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/152746/eliot_spitzer%3A_why_occupy_wall_street_has_already_won

Occupy Wall Street has already won, perhaps not the victory most of its participants want, but a momentous victory nonetheless. It has already altered our political debate, changed the agenda, shifted the discussion in newspapers, on cable TV, and even around the water cooler. And that is wonderful.

Suddenly, the issues of equity, fairness, justice, income distribution, and accountability for the economic cataclysm–issues all but ignored for a generation—are front and center. We have moved beyond the one-dimensional conversation about how much and where to cut the deficit. Questions more central to the social fabric of our nation have returned to the heart of the political debate. By forcing this new discussion, OWS has made most of the other participants in our politics—who either didn’t want to have this conversation or weren’t able to make it happen—look pretty small.

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"Rory O'Connor" - Insiders voice doubts about CIA's 9/11 story

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Insiders-voice-doubts-abou-by-Rory-OConnor-111015-175.html

October 15, 2011 By Rory OConnor Former FBI agents say the agency's bin Laden unit misled them about two hijackers

A growing number of former government insiders -- all responsible officials who served in a number of federal posts -- are now on record as doubting ex-CIA director George Tenet's account of events leading up to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. Among them are several special agents of the FBI, the former counterterrorism head in the Clinton and Bush administrations, and the chairman of the 9/11 Commission, who told us the CIA chief had been "obviously not forthcoming" in his testimony and had misled the commissioners.

These doubts about the CIA first emerged among a group of 9/11 victims' families whose struggle to force the government to investigate the causes of the attacks, we chronicled in our 2006 documentary film "Press for Truth." At that time, we thought we were done with the subject. But tantalizing information unearthed by the 9/11 Commission's final report and spotted by the families (Chapter 6, footnote 44) raised a question too important to be put aside:

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"Frank Schaeffer" - How Christian Fundamentalism Helped Empower the Top 1% to Exploit the 99%

By Frank Schaeffer, AlterNet

Posted on October 13, 2011, Printed on October 15, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/152724/how_christian_fundamentalism_helped_empower_the_top_1_to_exploit_the_99

As the Occupy Wall street movement spreads across the country and the world, we must bring attention to the enablers of the top 1 percent exploiting the 99. Fundamentalist religion made this exploitation possible. Evangelical fundamentalism helped empower the top 1 percent. Note I didn't say religion per se, but religious fundamentalism.

Why? Because without the fundamentalists and their "values" issues, many in the lower 99 percent could not have been convinced to vote against their (our) economic self-interest; in other words, vote for Republicans who only serve billionaires.

Wall Street is a great target for long-overdue protest, but so are the centers of religious power that are the gatekeepers of Republican Party "values" voters that make the continuing economic exploitation possible.

Fundamentalist religion -- evangelical and Roman Catholic alike -- has delegitimized the US government and thus undercut its ability to tax, spend and regulate.

The fundamentalists have replaced economic and political justice with a bogus (and hate-driven) "morality" litmus tests of spurious red herring "issues" from abortion to school prayer and gay rights. The result has been that the masses of lower middle-class and poor Americans who should be voting for Democrats and thus their own economic interests, have been persuaded to vote against their own class and self interest.

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