"BBC News" - Greece Needs More Cuts Not Higher Taxes, Says IMF

Published on Monday, September 19, 2011 by BBC News

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-14969034

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has told Greece it needs better tax collection and deeper spending cuts, not higher taxes, to avert its crisis.

The warning comes ahead of Greece's talks with the IMF and European authorities about whether it is doing enough to receive crucial funds.

Greece is trying to persuade them to release the next 8bn-euro (£7bn, $11bn) instalment of its EU-IMF loan.

It needs this money by next month to avoid defaulting on its debt.

The loan comes with the condition that Greece dramatically reduce its deficit, something that it plans to do by cutting the size of the state sector through redundancies, pay cuts and privatisations.

The IMF representative for Greece, Bob Traa, who is in Athens, said this was of crucial importance: "The public sector is very large. Another central element in our view must be to reduce public sector spending.

"This will inevitably require the closure of inefficient state entities as well as reductions in the excessively large public sector workforce and generous public sector wages, which in some cases are above those of the equivalent private sector workers."

Property tax

Greece is also proposing an emergency property tax, to be paid through household energy bills.

However, Mr Traa said this was not a good idea.

"In our view, you should not be drawn to higher and higher taxes on the limited tax base," he said. "This will neither be economically or politically sustainable."

He said a more efficient tax system would be more helpful and called for a "much stronger resolve to tackle the problem of tax evasion".

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"Agence France Presse" - Republicans Cry 'Class Warfare' Over Millionaire Tax

Published on Monday, September 19, 2011 by Agence France Presse

http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/Republicans-cry-class-warfare-afp-2078887871.html

Leading Republicans on Sunday spurned as "class warfare" an administration proposal dubbed "the Buffet rule" that would ensure millionaires are taxed at the same rate as the middle class.

President Barack Obama was expected to make the proposal on Monday, picking up on a repeated complaint by billionaire investor Warren Buffett that he pays taxes at a lower rate than his secretary, White House officials said.

"If he's feeling guilty about it, I think he should send in a check," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Buffet on NBC's "Meet the Press." "But we don't want to stagnate this economy by raising taxes."

Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, dismissed "the Buffet rule" as "just a political move by the president."

Increasing taxes on millionaires would add "a de minimis amount of money to the Treasury to pay off the debt," he said on CNN's "State of the Union" talk show.

"Tax code should be reformed for one purpose -- generate jobs. When you say we'll tax one percent of the economy, that's class warfare," said Graham, who called for reforms that would eliminate deductions and flatten income tax rates overall.

Echoing Graham, Representative Paul Ryan, a Republican from Wisconsin, said the administration's proposal was "going in the wrong direction."

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"Bernie Sanders" - Wall Street's Secret Oil Games

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Wall-Street-s-Secret-Oil-G-by-Bernie-Sanders-110916-871.html

September 16, 2011 By Bernie Sanders The top six financial institutions in this country own assets equal to more than 60 percent of our gross domestic product and possess enormous economic and political power. One of the great questions of our time is whether the American people, through Congress, will control the greed, recklessness and illegal behavior on Wall Street, or whether Wall Street will continue to wreak havoc on our economy and the lives of working families. I represent Vermont, where many workers drive long distances to jobs that pay $12 an hour or less. Many seniors living on fixed incomes heat their homes with oil during our cold winters. These people have asked me to do all that I can to lower outrageously high gasoline and heating-oil prices. I intend to do just that. Why have oil prices spiked wildly? Some argue that the volatility is a result of supply-and-demand fundamentals. More and more observers, however, believe that excessive speculation in the oil futures market by investors is driving oil prices sky high. A June 2 article in the Wall Street Journal said it all: "Wall Street is tapping a real gusher in 2011, as heightened volatility and higher prices of oil and other raw materials boost banks' profits." ExxonMobil Chairman Rex Tillerson, testifying before a Senate panel this year, said that excessive speculation may have increased oil prices by as much as 40 percent. Delta Air Lines general counsel Richard Hirst wrote to federal regulators in December that "the speculative bubble in oil prices has concrete detrimental consequences for the real economy." An American Trucking Association vice president, Richard Moskowitz, said, "Excessive speculation has caused dramatic increases in the price of crude oil, which harms end-users like America's trucking industry." I released records last month that documented the role of speculators and put the information on my Web site for three reasons.

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"The Guardian UK" - How bad is poverty in Rick Perry's Texas?

The Guardian UK, September 18, 2011

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/sep/15/texas-poverty-perry-wages-cppp/print

Texas governor Rick Perry is running for the Republican nomination on his economic record. But what is the state's record on poverty?

What is happening in Texas? According to a new report by the non-partisan Center for Public Policy Priorities , economic prosperity is passing millions of ordinary Texans by.

The reports authors write that:

Believing in the American Dream is as much a part of being a Texan as remembering the Alamo. Texans believe that by working hard, we will earn decent wages and make a good life for our families. Poverty, on the other hand, is a nightmare. New data … shows many more Texans living that nightmare

The research is based on new data from the US census bureau's Current Population Survey - which has just released figures on poverty, income and health insurance across the entire country.

The figures highlighted by the CPPP report show that unemployment in Texas has doubled, and poverty rates are shooting up, in comparison to the rest of the US. The report comes as Republican front runner Rick Perry emphasises his economic record as State governor.

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"Progressive Radio Network's Jeremy Stillman & Gary Null" - A Case of Contamination: Growing Concern over the Safety and Efficacy of Merck's Gardasil HPV Vaccine.

A Case of Contamination: Growing Concern over the Safety and Efficacy of Merck's Gardasil HPV Vaccine.

Gary Null & Jeremy Stillman

September 16, 2011

Recent reports on Gardasil points to a frightening cover-up by Merck, American medical authorities, and the media regarding the harmful nature of the popular HPV vaccine.

The controversy stems from one small phrase that appeared on the package insert of Merck’s Gardasil vaccine since it hit the market in 2006. It read:

“GARDASIL is not a live virus vaccine; it contains no viral DNA and is therefore incapable of causing infection”[1]

This assertion was given a stamp of approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and backed by major medical institutions including Health Canada and the World Health Organization (WHO).[2,3]

The results of a recent study commissioned by the vaccine safety organization SANE Vax provide compelling evidence that the Gardasil vaccine does, in fact, contain dangerous live strains of the HPV virus. The study examined the contents of thirteen vials of Gardasil from different countries around the world including the United States. It was found that 100% of the vaccines probed were contaminated with genetically modified HPV DNA, in other words, live strains of the human papiloma virus capable of infecting human beings.[4]

These findings strongly suggest that the Gardasil vaccine has been transmitting the HPV virus to an untold number of young boys and girls all over the world and causing the very condition it was designed to prevent. The alarming implications of this revelation are compounded by concern over the unpredictable and harmful effects that live laboratory-created DNA in vaccines can have on the body. Studies have linked genetically modified virus strains in vaccines to serious health disorders including autoimmune disorders and malignant tumors.[5]

This story is corroborated by Cindy Bevington, a multi-award winning investigative reporter who has done extensive research into Gardasil. In an interview on the Progressive Radio Network, Bevington noted that in April 2011, Merck quietly went about removing the information from their package insert which stated Gardasil did not contain live strains of HPV.[6] Neither Merck nor the FDA has responded to calls by the public to account for this shocking revelation.

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"Chris Hedges" - The Rev. Jeremiah Wright Recalls Obama’s Fall From Grace

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_rev_jeremiah_wright_recalls_obamas_fall_from_grace_20110919/

Posted on Sep 19, 2011

By Chris Hedges

Barack Obama’s politically expedient decision to betray and abandon his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, exposed his cowardice and moral bankruptcy. In that moment, playing the part of Judas, he surrendered the last shreds of his integrity. He became nothing more than a pawn of power, or as Cornel West says, “a black mascot for Wall Street.” Obama, once the glitter of power fades, will have to grapple with the fact that he was a traitor not only to his pastor, the man who married him and Michelle, who baptized his children and who kept him spiritually and morally grounded, but to himself. Wright retains what is most precious in life and what Obama has squandered—his soul.

The health of a nation is measured by how it treats its prophets. When these prophets are ignored and reviled, when they become figures of ridicule, when they are labeled by the chattering classes and power elite as fools, then there is no check left on moral decay and the degeneration of the state. Wright, who spent 36 years at the Trinity United Church of Christ on Chicago’s South Side, since the 2008 presidential campaign has endured slander and calumny and weathered character assassination, misinterpretation and abuse, and yet he doggedly continues Sunday after Sunday to thunder the word of God from pulpits across the country. 

I grew up as a Christian. My father was a pastor. I graduated from a seminary. I can distinguish a Christian pastor from the slick imposters and charlatans, from T.D. Jakes to Joel Osteen. Wright preaches the radical and unsettling message of the Christian Gospel. He calls us to live the moral life. He knows that the measure of our lives as individuals and as a nation is reflected in how we treat our most vulnerable. And he knows on whose side he stands. Obama, who like Judas took his 30 pieces of silver and betrayed someone who loved him, withers into moral insignificance in Wright’s presence. 

Obama, although his subservience to the war machine and Wall Street mocks the fundamental values of Dr. Martin Luther King, will preside Oct. 16 over the dedication of the King memorial on the Mall in Washington. He will lend himself to the venal cabal of the corporate and political elites who have hijacked King’s image. These political and corporate figures—many of whom donated significant sums to build the $120 million memorial (General Motors, which gave $10 million, uses the memorial in a commercial for its vehicles)—seek to silence King’s demand for economic justice and an end to racism and militarism. King’s vision is grotesquely deformed in Obama’s hands. To hear the voice of King we will have to turn from the choreographed and corporate-sponsored dedication ceremony to heed the words of a handful of men and women who are as reviled by the power brokers as King was in his own life, and yet who battle to keep the flame of King’s message alive.

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"Fiona Harvey" - More Than 30 Million Climate Migrants in Asia in 2010, Report Finds

Published on Monday, September 19, 2011 by The Guardian/UK

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/sep/19/climate-migrants-asia-2010

Numbers of people displaced by environmental and weather-related disasters likely to increase, Asian Development Bank warns

by Fiona Harvey, environment correspondent

More than 30 million people were displaced last year by environmental and weather-related disasters across Asia, experts have warned, and the problem is only likely to grow worse as climate change exacerbates such problems.

Tens of millions more people are likely to be similarly displaced in the future by the effects of climate change, including rising sea levels, floods, droughts and reduced agricultural productivity. Such people are likely to migrate in regions across Asia, and governments must start to prepare for the problems this will create, the Asian Development Bank warned.

The costs will be high – about $40bn is the likely price for adapting and putting in place protective measures, from sea walls to re-growing mangrove swamps that have been cut down, and that can help to protect against the impacts of storm surges.

But the problem is already taking effect, though at a much lower scale than is likely in the future. "While large-scale climate-induced migration is a gradual phenomenon, communities in Asia and the Pacific are already experiencing the consequences of changing environmental conditions including eroding shorelines, desertification and more frequent severe storms and flooding," the bank said at a workshop last week. This could lead to a widespread crisis across the region in coming years, if preparations are not made to deal with the current and probable future consequences.

Robert Dobias, climate change project chief at the Asian Development Bank, said that at present climate change is still a relatively small cause of migration, as economic causes loom largest and as environmental disasters happen independently of global warming. However, the problem is likely to increase in future years, with potentially severe consequences, including conflict as people are forced to move long distances.

Areas most at risk are low-lying islands such as the Maldives, whose environment minister, Mohamed Aslam, said the populations of entire islands in the archipelago had been forced to move. But coastal cities in developed regions could also face the threat of higher seas and storm surges, while regions that already suffer severe floods such as Bangladesh will have their risks intensified.

The Asian Development Bank warned that governments must start to make preparations now, to be ready for the multiplying threats, and because more extreme weather has already started to take effect, though changes so far have not been dramatic in their impact. "The number of extreme weather events is increasing and Asia and the Pacific is the region at the epicentre of weather disasters," the group said.

The bank is working on a report that will set out in detail the likely problems and propose a range of potential policy changes to help to deal with them. The report will be published next spring, though preliminary research is being disclosed at a series of regional conferences in the intervening months.

The probable solutions are likely to include measures to improve vital infrastructure, such as energy provision, transport systems and communication networks, in order to make such infrastructure more resilient to the effects of climate change.

"Karl Grossman" - Democracy, The Antidote to Nuclear Hegemony

Published on Monday, September 19, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/09/19-0

by Karl Grossman

The just-announced decision by Siemens, a major player in the nuclear industry, to withdraw entirely from nuclear power is a significant declaration by a corporation about nuclear power and the world’s potential energy future

“The chapter is closed for us,” Peter Loescher, chief executive of the Germany-based engineering group, said Sunday. “We are no longer going to participate in taking responsibility for building nuclear power stations or financing them.”

The Siemens decision follows that of the German government to, with the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant complex, abandon nuclear power­ to close the nation’s 17 nuclear plants, all of which were built by Siemens­ and pursue instead safe, clean, renewable energy led by solar, wind and geothermal.

It comes after Loescher saying, when a deal was struck in 2009 for a joint venture with Rosatom, Russia’s state nuclear company, that Siemens would become a “market leader in nuclear energy” challenging General Electric, Westinghouse and Areva.

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"Raj Patel" - Why Hunger Is Still With Us

Raj Patel

September 14, 2011

http://www.thenation.com/article/163402/why-hunger-is-still-with-us

Amid the joy of local, seasonal ingredients and tides of young people with dirt freshly lodged under their fingernails, it feels unkind to point to the bigger problems within the food system. But it’s worth tempering an optimism of the will with a pessimism of the intellect. Despite the food movement’s gains over the past decade, it’s hard not to feel the latter outweighing the former.

The full extent of the damage from the BP disaster will not be known for years, but if we are to learn anything now, we must confront the question: What are the true costs of our energy needs?

For every White House organic garden, there’s an appointee to the US Trade Representative’s office from the pesticide industry. Sasha and Malia may be getting good grub, but the global South still gets stuck with chemicals.

Harvests remain strong, and people still go hungry. This isn’t because of population growth—there’s enough produced to feed everyone on a Small Planet’s diet. But the economics of crop production have increasingly left concerns about human eating in the dust.

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"Michael Pollan" - How Change Is Going to Come in the Food System

By Michael Pollan, The Nation
Posted on September 16, 2011, Printed on September 19, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/152449/michael_pollan%3A_how_change_is_going_to_come_in_the_food_system

In the forty years since the publication of Frances Moore Lappé's Diet for a Small Planet, a movement dedicated to the reform of the food system has taken root in America. Lappé's groundbreaking book connected the dots between something as ordinary and all-American as a hamburger and the environmental crisis, as well as world hunger. Along with Wendell Berry and Barry Commoner, Lappé taught us how to think ecologically about the implications of our everyday food choices. You can now find that way of thinking, so radical at the time, just about everywhere--from the pages of Time magazine to the menu at any number of local restaurants.

To date, however, the food movement can claim more success in changing popular consciousness than in shifting, in any fundamental way, the political and economic forces shaping the food system or, for that matter, in changing the "standard American diet"--which has only gotten worse since the 1970s. Recently there have been some political accomplishments: food movement activists played a role in shaping the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act and the Child Nutrition Reauthorization Act, both passed in the last Congress, and the last couple of farm bills have thrown some significant crumbs in the direction of sustainable agriculture and healthy food. But the food movement cannot yet point to legislative achievements on the order of the Clean Air Act or the Clean Water Act or the establishment of the Environmental Protection Administration. Its greatest victories have come in the media, which could scarcely be friendlier to it, and in the food marketplace, rather than in the halls of Congress, where the power of agribusiness has scarcely been disturbed.

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