"Joshua Holland" - How Conservative Politicians Wait for God to Fix the Economy, With Frightening Results

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Posted on September 26, 2011, Printed on September 29, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/152538/how_conservative_politicians_wait_for_god_to_fix_the_economy%2C_with_frightening_results

Is it merely partisan politics and the misguided ideology of "austerity" that leads conservatives to reject commonsense fixes for this miserable economy? Or is something else going on?

It may well be the latter. A study released last fall suggests that the theology embraced by American religious conservatives may render them immune to evidence and reason when it comes to economic management. The study found that a sizable minority share a uniquely faith-based view of how the economy functions, believing that both good and bad outcomes are an expression of God's will, and are therefore beyond the reach of mere mortals.

This may help explain the disconnect between the gravity of our economic crisis and lawmakers' – especially conservative lawmakers' -- decided lack of a sense of urgency in addressing it. Consider for a moment three related facts that, taken together, cast what appears to be the sheer madness of our nation's economic stewardship in sharp relief.

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"Toni Nagy" - How Better Parenting Could Produce Fewer Greedy Bankers and More People Who Care About the Future of the Earth

By Toni Nagy, AlterNet
Posted on September 28, 2011, Printed on September 29, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/152563/how_better_parenting_could_produce_fewer_greedy_bankers_and_more_people_who_care_about_the_future_of_the_earth

Here is a theory: everyone who works for Wall Street has serious mommy and daddy issues. Actually, why not extend that to everyone who supports our current corporatized economic system? Think about it. If we didn't spend our money filling the hole in our souls with retail therapy and went to actual therapy instead, we wouldn't be living in a trashcan of a world. Maybe if we changed how we raised our children we could nurture a generation that would actualize true sustainability and economic rationality. Picture the possibility of transforming the world through parenting our kids in a way that prioritizes peace over power, longevity over profit, community over greed. And maybe those children of the future could be wearing those spiffy silver space suits made from recycled tinfoil.

Let's take a minute to really look at how our current system works. Companies make products, but in order for a company to make money they have to stay competitive with the other companies who make the same products. The way they do that is by cutting cost at every possible juncture. They use the cheapest stuff they can get away with and pay people as little as possible, so you end up buying crap made by people who are paid crap. And rather than lose you as a customer, the crap you buy is built to last only the least amount of time you will tolerate and still buy more. I mean I love children, but they are really horrible at sewing because my H&M dress doesn't last more than one washing before it starts coming apart.

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"Brad Friedman" - Diebold voting machines can be hacked by remote control

SALON.COM   Tuesday, Sep 27, 2011 08:01 ET

http://www.salon.com/news/politics/elections/2011/09/27/votinghack/index.html

Exclusive: A laboratory shows how an e-voting machine used by a third of all voters can be easily manipulated

By Brad Friedman

It could be one of the most disturbing e-voting machine hacks to date.

Voting machines used by as many as a quarter of American voters heading to the polls in 2012 can be hacked with just $10.50 in parts and an 8th grade science education, according to computer science and security experts at the Vulnerability Assessment Team at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. The experts say the newly developed hack could change voting results while leaving absolutely no trace of the manipulation behind.

"We believe these man-in-the-middle attacks are potentially possible on a wide variety of electronic voting machines," said Roger Johnston, leader of the assessment team "We think we can do similar things on pretty much every electronic voting machine."

The Argonne Lab, run by the Department of Energy, has the mission of conducting scientific research to meet national needs. The Diebold Accuvote voting system used in the study was loaned to the lab's scientists by VelvetRevolution.us, of which the Brad Blog is a co-founder. Velvet Revolution received the machine from a former Diebold contractor

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"Henry Giroux" - Corporate Media and Larry Summers Team Up to Gut Public Education: Beyond Education for Illiteracy, Vulgarity and a Culture of Cruelty

Tuesday 27 September 2011

by: Henry A. Giroux, Truthout | Op-Ed

http://www.truth-out.org/beyond-education-illiteracy-vulgarity-and-culture-cruelty/1317131147

NOTE: This article is based on the preface of Henry A. Giroux's latest book, "Education and the Crisis of Public Values: Challenging the Assault on Teachers, Students and Public Education" (Counterpoints: Studies in the Postmodern Theory of Education), published by Peter Lang Publishing; First printing edition (July 30, 2011).

Since the early 1970s, the rich, corporate power brokers and right-wing cultural warriors realized that education was central to creating a viable populist movement that served their interests. Over the last 40 years, the financial elites and their wealthy accomplices have not only mobilized an educational anti-reform movement in the name of "reform" to dismantle public education and turn it over to hedge-fund managers and billionaires; they have also taken a lesson from the muckrakers, critical public intellectuals, left-wing journals, progressive newspapers and educational institutions of the mid-20th century and developed their own cultural apparatuses, talk shows, anti-public intellectuals, think tanks and grassroots organizations. As the left slid into organizing around mostly single-issue movements since the 1980s, the right moved in a different direction, mobilizing a range of educational forces and wider cultural apparatuses as a way of addressing broader ideas that appealed to a wider public and issues that resonated with their everyday lives. Tax reform, the role of government, the crisis of education, family values and the economy, to name a few issues, were wrenched out of their progressive legacy and inserted into a context defined by the values of the free market, an unbridled notion of freedom and individualism and a growing hatred for the social contract.

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"Bernie Sanders" - Stand Up And Fight Back!

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Stand-Up-And-Fight-Back-by-Bernie-Sanders-110928-736.html

September 28, 2011 By Bernie Sanders On September 30th, just two days away, all Senate candidates will file detailed financial reports with the Federal Election Commission (FEC). These reports are important because they provide public information as to the state of campaigns.  They will reveal the amount of funds each candidate raises, spends, and how much "cash-on-hand' is in the bank.  A good FEC report will provide a significant boost for our campaign. The positive press it generates helps increase fundraising efforts, builds momentum and lets our opponents know that we will be fully prepared for whatever they throw at us. The absurd Citizens United Supreme Court decision has rewritten the rules of campaign finance and dramatically altered politics in America. With that decision, corporations and billionaires can spend as much as they want on a political campaign without any disclosure. As perhaps the most progressive member of the Senate, and as the longest serving Independent in American history, a weak report could make me vulnerable to an aggressive effort on the part of the National Republican Party, the Tea Party and numerous out-of-state special interests. The Big Money interests -- - Wall Street, the insurance companies, the drug companies, the oil and coal companies, the military-industrial complex -- are all chomping at the bit to take me down. My loss would be a huge trophy for the right wing. We must not let that happen. Please support my re-election campaign today. Right now, as you know, the U.S. House of Representatives is dominated by right-wing extremists who are intent on destroying virtually every program that benefits working families -- a record of social progress we struggled to establish over the last 80 years. While the Republicans give huge tax breaks to the rich and large corporations, they want to destroy Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. While they support larger and larger military budgets, they want to eviscerate the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and destroy the ability of public sector union workers to negotiate their contracts.

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"Robert Scheer" - The Men We Trusted to Lead Us

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_men_we_trusted_to_lead_us_20110928/

Posted on Sep 28, 2011

By Robert Scheer

Now he tells us. On Wednesday Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke referred to the nation’s unemployment rate as a “national crisis,” an obvious if depressing fact of life to the 25 million Americans who have been unsuccessfully attempting to find full-time employment.

But to finally hear those words from the man George W. Bush and Barack Obama both appointed to lead us out of the great recession is a bracing reminder of how markedly the policies of both those presidents have failed: “We’ve had close to 10 percent unemployment now for a number of years, and of the people who are unemployed, about 45 percent have been unemployed for six months or more,” Bernanke said. “This is unheard of.”

But why is Bernanke just now discovering this after having overseen the Fed’s purchase of trillions in toxic mortgage-backed securities from the too-big-to-fail banks that sacrificed people’s homes in a giant Ponzi scheme? Why did he throw all of that money at the banks without getting anything back in the way of relief for the people the bankers swindled? 

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"Paul Zimmerman" - Fukushima and the Battle for Truth

By Paul Zimmerman

Global Research, September 27, 2011

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=26798

Fukushima’s nuclear disaster is a nightmare. Ghostly releases of radioactivity haunt the Japanese countryside. Lives, once safe, are now beset by an ineffable scourge promising vile illness and death.

Large sectors of the population are accumulating significant levels of internal contamination, setting the stage for a public health tragedy.

A subtle increase in the number of miscarriages and fetal deaths will be the first manifestation that something is amiss. An elevated incidence of birth defects will begin in the Fall and continue into the indefinite future. Thyroid diseases, cardiac diseases and elevated rates of infant and childhood leukemia will follow. Over the next decade and beyond, cancer rates will soar.

Chernobyl was the harbinger of this heartbreaking scenario. It taught mankind the inescapable biological truths that emerge within populations internally contaminated by heightened levels of fission products. And yet, government and industry schemers attack these truths as unfounded scare-mongering. With cold indifference, they deny that Chernobyl was a mass casualty event. They turn a blind eye to a huge body of research and deviously proclaim that no evidence exists that more than a handful of people suffered harm from the Ukrainian disaster. They publish propaganda, draped in the guise of science, that dismisses the hazard of low levels of internal contamination. Believing their subterfuge to have been successful and intoxicated by their hubris, they are already positioning themselves to stage-manage the public’s perception of Fukushima. 

Japan’s government, its Nuclear Safety Commission, and the Tokyo Electric  Power Company have already demonstrated that they will do everything in their power to keep citizens ignorant of what is taking place. The emerging health crisis is scheduled to be erased. Following a time-tested blueprint worked out by prior radiation releases around the world, data relevant to assessing the medical impact of the accident will not be gathered. Radiation doses to the population will be woefully underestimated. The hazards associated with low levels of internal contamination will be obliterated from all discussions of risk. Academic journals that support the nuclear agenda will be flooded with bogus studies demonstrating that no health detriment was suffered by the population. The heightened incidence of childhood leukemia will be attributed to some as yet unidentified virus unleashed by population mixing following the evacuations caused by the tsunami. (This theory is currently in vogue to deny that the heightened incidence of leukemia among children under five years of age living nearby to nuclear reactors is radiation induced.)  The birth defects will be summarily dismissed as impossible because the risk models upheld by the International Commission on Radiological Protection don’t predict them. The possibility that the models are fraudulently constructed escapes consideration. (See a Betrayal of Mankind by the Radiation Protection Agencies, available as a free download at http://www.du-deceptions.com/excerpts.html.)

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Dr. Luc Montagnier - The Truth About AIDS

Dr. Luc Montagnier - The Truth About AIDS

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"Tana Ganeva": 5 Signs That America Is Moving Away from Religion

In between bragging about the number of people they've killed and vilifying gay soldiers, the GOP presidential candidates have spent the primaries demonstrating how little they respect the separation of church and state. Michele Bachmann seems to think God is personally invested in her political career. Both she and Rick Perry have ties to Christian Dominionism, a theocratic philosophy that publicly calls for Christian takeover of America's political and civil institutions. (Even Ron Paul, glorified by civil libertarians for his only two good policy stances -- opposition to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and drug prohibition -- sputtered about churches when asked during a debate where he'd send a gravely ill man without health insurance.) GOP pandering to the Religious Right is just one of those facts of American political life, like climate change denial and Creationism in schools, that leave secular Americans lamenting the decline of the country, and of reason and logic. Organized religion's grasp on the politics and culture of much of Europe has been waning for decades -- why can't we do that here? But there are signs that American attitudes are changing in ways that may tame religion's power over political life in the future.

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"Jon Collins:" Private prison company’s growth went hand-in-hand with political influence

It’s been almost two years since the privately-run prison in Appleton, Minnesota has held prisoners. But in early 2012, the prison’s owner, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), expects to fill Appleton’s Prairie Correctional Facility and another facility in Colorado with 3,256 inmates from California. In the last ten years, the revenue of CCA, the country’s biggest private prison company, has almost doubled, according to their annual reports. Critics say that CCA’s success, and even the likely reopening of the prison in Appleton, stems from their use of lobbying and campaign donations to push through tougher crime laws and increase detainment of illegal immigrants.

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