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Forging his way through the predictable UK media censorship: Dr Andrew Wakefield Responds to Measles Outbreak in Swansea
October 10, 2011 http://www.opednews.com/articles/US-Envoys-from-Hell-by-Eric-Walberg-111006-16.html
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October 7, 2011 By Eric Walberg The choice of US ambassadors to Central Asia and the Middle East gives one pause for thought. |
October 10, 2011 http://www.opednews.com/articles/Whose-Side-Are-You-On-The-by-Robert-Borosage-111008-92.html
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October 8, 2011 By Robert Borosage Once Occupy Wall Street demonstrations started to sweep across America, the mainstream media began to pay attention -- and sounded a chorus of criticism. The movement was disorganized; it had no agenda. It wasn't organized like the Tea Party. Fox News trotted out ace reporter Geraldo Rivera -- really -- to charge that European anarchists, paid illegal aliens, and out and out leftists were behind the innocent kids. Herman Cain led disapproving Republicans, calling the movement "un-American," when he should have been celebrating what it was doing for pizza sales. Virtually everything said about this movement is wrong. Stand back; take a clear look. Every politician should understand one thing: this is coming at you and you must decide. Whose side are you on? 1. Moral clarity Occupy Wall Street has no policy agenda, but it has utter moral clarity. The demonstrators have built an island of democracy in the belly of Wall Street. The bankers looking down on them would be on the street had not taxpayers bailed them out. And now they are confronted with students sinking under student debt with no jobs, homeowners who are underwater and can't find mortgage relief, workers desperate for work. |
October 10, 2011 By Chris Hedges
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/why_the_elites_are_in_trouble_20111009/
Ketchup, a petite 22-year-old from Chicago with wavy red hair and glasses with bright red frames, arrived in Zuccotti Park in New York on Sept. 17. She had a tent, a rolling suitcase, 40 dollars’ worth of food, the graphic version of Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” and a sleeping bag. She had no return ticket, no idea what she was undertaking, and no acquaintances among the stragglers who joined her that afternoon to begin the Wall Street occupation. She decided to go to New York after reading the Canadian magazine Adbusters, which called for the occupation, although she noted that when she got to the park Adbusters had no discernable presence.
The lords of finance in the looming towers surrounding the park, who toy with money and lives, who make the political class, the press and the judiciary jump at their demands, who destroy the ecosystem for profit and drain the U.S. Treasury to gamble and speculate, took little notice of Ketchup or any of the other scruffy activists on the street below them. The elites consider everyone outside their sphere marginal or invisible. And what significance could an artist who paid her bills by working as a waitress have for the powerful? What could she and the others in Zuccotti Park do to them? What threat can the weak pose to the strong? Those who worship money believe their buckets of cash, like the $4.6 million JPMorgan Chase gave a few days ago to the New York City Police Foundation, can buy them perpetual power and security. Masters all, kneeling before the idols of the marketplace, blinded by their self-importance, impervious to human suffering, bloated from unchecked greed and privilege, they were about to be taught a lesson in the folly of hubris.
Even now, three weeks later, elites, and their mouthpieces in the press, continue to puzzle over what people like Ketchup want. Where is the list of demands? Why don’t they present us with specific goals? Why can’t they articulate an agenda?
October 7, 2011 McClatchy Newspapers
last updated: October 04, 2011 05:36:17 PM
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/10/04/126142/study-a-fifth-of-war-veterans.html
WASHINGTON — Nearly 20 percent of the more than 2 million troops who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from mental health conditions, according to a new report.
They amount to more than half of the 712,000 veterans from both wars who have sought medical treatment since leaving military service. Nearly a third of those veterans may suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, one of the signature injuries of the conflicts.
Veterans for Common Sense, a nonprofit, nonpartisan activist group for veterans' interests, and health care issues in particular, compiled the statistics from a raft of government reports.
In whittling them down to just the bare data, the group created a grim shorthand for the toll the wars have taken on a generation of young men and women.
"A large number of people serving overseas have mental health impacts, and more and more are coming home," said Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs. "I am deeply concerned that we are not ready."
October 7, 2011 by: Henry A. Giroux, Truthout | Op-Ed
http://www.truth-out.org/got-class-warfare-occupy-wall-street-now/1317760461
We're young; we're poor; we're not going to take it anymore. -Occupy Wall Street chant
Class warfare has once again entered the vocabulary of mainstream national politics, but this time with a strange twist. Right-wing politicians such as Paul Ryan and various high-profile conservative media pundits and corporate-funded think-tank spokespersons have made visible what ruling classes have long tried to bury beneath the discourse of meritocracy and the myth of the classless society - that is, the harsh consequences of class power, hierarchical rule and savage inequality.
According to the ruling elite, the real class war is being waged against the belief in free and unfettered markets, the reign of unchecked capital, a culture of individualism and happiness itself - in spite of the fact that it is precisely these beliefs that serve the interests of Wall Street elites who brought the world to the brink of ruin in 2008. Arthur C. Brooks, the president of the ultra-right American Enterprise Institute, says it all in defending the legitimating and empty ideology of the rich and elites in his comment: "Free enterprise brings happiness; redistribution does not. The reason is that only free enterprise brings earned success."(1) In this insipid comment, railing against inequality amounts to railing against earned success. But the secret order of politics that haunts this statement is a fear of democracy matched only by a hysteria that fuels an unabated belief in the virtues of a plutocracy and a disdain for democratic ideals.
The appeal to "earned success" and individual entrepreneurial rings hollow given the millions of dollars in bonuses paid to failed CEOs and hedge fund managers and an economic recovery that has only benefited banks. With CEOs taking in millions in salary and bonuses while major corporations are laying off thousands of workers each month, the assertion that an unrestricted market is the only mechanism ensuring one's hard work pays off appears both disingenuous and desperate. What Brooks willfully omits is that any society in which morality disintegrates into self-interest and cruelty is celebrated as a central element of a market-driven social order has nothing to do with either freedom or democracy.
As thousands of young people are marching against corporate power and rallying in protest against the symbols of Wall Street greed across the United States, the political and economic elites respond by engaging in a form of class warfare and clinging to the celebration of the shark-like culture of casino capitalism, revealing all too clearly their own criminal behavior and how it represents a major threat to American democracy.
Of course, ruling elites have had good reason in the past to discredit or neutralize the concept of class warfare because it made visible vast differences of power and inequality between ruling elites and corporations and just about everyone else, especially the working classes and poor. It also functioned to focus attention on the violence and social costs of ongoing class warfare waged by the rich, along with the human suffering and dire material consequences of such struggles. After all, historically, the concept of class warfare conjures up images of American workers fighting collectively and valiantly to secure fair wages, safe working conditions, decent housing and control over their own labor. And the costs were often high. The struggle for decent working conditions and basic economic and labor rights was often met with the brutal acts of violence on the part of employers, rogue detective agencies and the National Guard.(2) A few historical examples include the Ludlow Massacre in which the Colorado National Guard used a machine gun to fire randomly into the tent city erected by the striking coal miners. Nineteen people were killed.(3) The same script, involving state and corporate violence against workers and their families, also played out in different incidents in the Spring of 1920 in West Virginia in what is known as the Matewan Massacre and the Battle of Blair Mountain. Hoover-type thuggery also resulted in a government attack on what was known as the Bonus Army in the early 1930s in which the Army shot and wounded 55 veterans. These are just a few of the many and more well-known conflicts waged against working people to protect class privilege over the course of the 20th century.
October 7, 2011 by: Greg Palast, Truthout | Investigative Report
http://www.truth-out.org/uber-vultures-billionaires-who-would-pick-our-president/1317769580
The untold story of the sources of the loot controlled by Paul "The Vulture" Singer, Ken Langone and the Kochs - and why they need to buy the White House.
Hedge fund magnate Paul Singer likes to breakfast on decayed carcasses. What he chews down is sickening, but just as nausea-inducing are his new tablemates: billionaires Ken Langone and the Koch Brothers, Charles and David.
Singer has called together the billionaire boys' club for the purpose of picking our next president for us. The old-fashioned way of choosing presidents - democracy and counting ballots and all that - has never been a favorite of this pack. I can tell you that from my investigations of each of these gentlemen for The Guardian. When the Statue of Liberty has nightmares, she dreams that these guys will combine to seize America via a cash-and-carry coup d'état.
Welcome to the nightmare. Singer, Langone and the Kochs last month decided to elect Chris Christie for us. The New Jersey governor's pseudocampaign went belly up before it began. But that's beside the point. Now that the Supreme Court has effectively ended campaign finance limits and allowed secretive contributions through "corporations," this new combine of the ultrawealthy should not be viewed as just a political threat to the Democrats, but as a threat to democracy.
Let me give you a rundown from my sulphur-scented files on these men who would be king-makers.
Billionaire 1: Ken Langone
October 7, 2011 Published on Friday, October 7, 2011 by The Nation
http://www.thenation.com/article/163844/occupy-wall-street-most-important-thing-world-now
by Naomi Klein
I was honored to be invited to speak at Occupy Wall Street on Thursday night. Since amplification is (disgracefully) banned, and everything I say will have to be repeated by hundreds of people so others can hear (a k a “the human microphone”), what I actually say at Liberty Plaza will have to be very short. With that in mind, here is the longer, uncut version of the speech.
I love you.
And I didn’t just say that so that hundreds of you would shout “I love you” back, though that is obviously a bonus feature of the human microphone. Say unto others what you would have them say unto you, only way louder.
Yesterday, one of the speakers at the labor rally said: “We found each other.” That sentiment captures the beauty of what is being created here. A wide-open space (as well as an idea so big it can’t be contained by any space) for all the people who want a better world to find each other. We are so grateful.
If there is one thing I know, it is that the 1 percent loves a crisis. When people are panicked and desperate and no one seems to know what to do, that is the ideal time to push through their wish list of pro-corporate policies: privatizing education and social security, slashing public services, getting rid of the last constraints on corporate power. Amidst the economic crisis, this is happening the world over.
And there is only one thing that can block this tactic, and fortunately, it’s a very big thing: the 99 percent. And that 99 percent is taking to the streets from Madison to Madrid to say “No. We will not pay for your crisis.”
October 7, 2011 Published on Thursday, October 6, 2011 by Rolling Stone
by Matt Taibbi
Amidst all the bad news coming out of Wall Street and the economy, here’s something good: California has backed out of the talks for the long-awaited foreclosure settlement, now making it far from likely that the so-called “Attorneys General” deal will happen anytime soon.
A foreclosure sign hangs on a fence in front of a foreclosed home in Richmond, California. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images) California Attorney General Kamala Harris sent a letter to state and federal regulators explaining that she pulled out because the proposed settlement amount for banks guilty of bad securitization practices leading up to the mortgage crisis – said to be in the $20 billion range – was too small. From Business Week:
Harris says in a letter to state and federal negotiators that the pending settlement is "inadequate" and gives bank officials too much immunity.
I’m convinced that the deal will eventually go through, however, after some further concessions are made. Certainly the absence of both New York (whose Attorney General Eric Schneiderman gamely started this mess by refusing to sign on or abandon his own investigation into corrupt securitization practices) and California will make it difficult for the banks to do any kind of a deal. But there is such an awesome amount of political will to get this deal done in Washington that it almost has to happen before the presidential election season really gets going.
If it does get done, expect a great deal of public debate over whether or not the size of the settlement was sufficient. Did the banks pay enough? Should they have paid ten billion more? Twenty? Even I engaged in a little bit of that some weeks ago.
But if and when that debate takes place, it will actually obscure the real issue, because this settlement is not about getting money from the banks. The deal being contemplated is actually the opposite: a giant bailout.
In fact, any federal foreclosure settlement along the lines of what’s been proposed will amount to a last round of post-2008-crisis bailouts. I talked to one foreclosure activist over the weekend who put it this way: “[The AG settlement] will be a bigger bailout than TARP.”
October 6, 2011 http://www.opednews.com/articles/Reagan-s-Greed-Is-Good-F-by-Robert-Parry-111005-931.html
October 5, 2011
By Robert Parry
So, it turns out that greed isn't good after all -- at least not for the vast majority of the American people. But this is a lesson that many U.S. opinion leaders still resist.
For the past three decades -- since Ronald Reagan's Republican landslide in 1980 -- the United States has undertaken arguably the most destructive social experiment in American history, the incentivizing of greed among the rich by halving their top marginal tax rates.
The idea -- once famously sketched out by right-wing economist Arthur Laffer on a napkin -- was to slash the tax rates on the rich to spur a "supply side" bonanza of economic growth and higher tax revenues for the government.
Before becoming Reagan's vice presidential running mate, George H.W. Bush labeled this tax strategy "voodoo economics," and Reagan's first budget director David Stockman warned that, without severe spending cuts, it could create a sea of red ink as far as the eye could see.
October 6, 2011 http://www.opednews.com/articles/What-s-Missing-Non-Electo-by-David-Swanson-111004-128.html
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October 4, 2011 By David Swanson Lately, the phrase "public servants" has struck me as ironic, not because government officials fail to serve the public, but because much of the public serves them. The public is the servants. Activist groups and individuals devote themselves to bettering the fortunes of political parties or politicians, at the expense of pressuring government officials to represent public demands. Nobody favors eliminating elections, and nobody favors eliminating activism. But there are those who cannot see how prioritizing money-marinated, gerrymandered, cable-news-controlled, unverifiable elections will reverse the train wreck in progress. And there are those who cannot see what it would mean to engage in activism that wasn't aimed at promoting electoral victories. Let me try to explain. Richard Nixon gave us the EPA. Barack Obama is giving us a tar sands pipeline, lower air standards, and more nuclear power. George W. Bush took the trouble to lie to Congress when starting wars. Barack Obama goes out of his way to not consult Congress at all. Richard Nixon was impeached. George W. Bush was not. The reasons for these differences have nothing to do with the character or upbringing of the presidents, and everything to do with public pressure, and with the communications and -- yes -- electoral systems through which public pressure can be brought to bear. Nixon didn't care more deeply about future generations than Barack Obama. Nixon faced public pressure, in the streets, in the suites, in the news, and in the halls of Congress. But ultimately, the purpose of public pressure must be to threaten electoral defeat, right? Must it? |
