"Richard Reeves" - Lost Decade … Lost Generation?

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/lost_decade_lost_generation_20110914/

Posted on Sep 14, 2011

By Richard Reeves

"Soaring Poverty Casts Spotlight on ‘Lost Decade’ ” was the lead headline on Tuesday’s New York Times.

The story, by Sabrina Tavernise, got worse, paragraph by paragraph. More than 46 million Americans were living under the government’s official poverty line. That was the highest number in the 52 years the Census Bureau has recorded such data.

"This is truly a lost decade," said Lawrence Katz, a Harvard economics professor. "We think of America as a place where every generation is doing better, but we’re looking at a period when the median family is in worse shape than it was in the late 1990s."

"Median income fell across all working-age categories," reported Tavernise, "but the sharpest drop was among young working Americans, ages 15 to 24, who experienced a decline of 9 percent."

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"Robert Scheer" - One Betrayal Too Many

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/one_betrayel_too_many_20110915/

Posted on Sep 14, 2011

By Robert Scheer

It’s getting too late to give President Barack Obama a pass on the economy. Sure, he inherited an enormous mess from George W., who whistled “Dixie” while the banking system imploded. But it’s time for Democrats to admit that their guy bears considerable responsibility for not turning things around. 

He blindly followed President Bush’s would-be remedy of throwing money at the banks and getting nothing in return for beleaguered homeowners. Sadly, Obama has proved to be nothing more than a Bill Clinton clone triangulating with the Wall Street lobbyists at the expense of ordinary folks. 

That fatal arc of betrayal was captured by a headline in Tuesday’s New York Times: “Soaring Poverty Casts Spotlight on ‘Lost Decade.’ ” The Census Bureau reported that there are now 46.2 million Americans living below the official poverty line—the highest number in the 52 years since that statistic was first measured—and median household income has fallen back to the 1996 level. As Harvard economist Lawrence Katz summarized this dreary news: “This is truly a lost decade. We think of America as a place where every generation is doing better, but we’re looking at a period when the median family is in worse shape than it was in the late 1990s.”

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

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”

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BUTTERFLY

A wonderful story that was forwarded to me by a friend. Enjoy! - Gary

A man found a cocoon of a butterfly. One day a small opening appeared. He sat and watched the butterfly for several hours as it struggled to force its body through that little hole. Then it seemed to stop making any progress. It appeared as if it had gotten as far as it could, and it could go no further.

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KNOCKING ON THE DEVIL’S DOOR: OUR DEADLY NUCLEAR LEGACY – A DOCUMENTARY OF THE GREATEST URGENCY

“We must outlaw nuclear reactors.” – Admiral Hyman Rickover, the Father of the Nuclear Navy, to Congress in his farewell speech Gary Null, radio talk show host and author, with Producer Richard Gale, has produced a comprehensive indictment of nuclear power and weapons. The first thing the public needs to know is that it is not merely a debate about which way to go with policy. Rather, the nuclear issue is about life and death now. So a big public service is in exposing the nuclear industry’s lies that are killing people today at increasing rates. Premiered in August, Knocking on the Devil’s Door: Our Deadly Nuclear Legacy has taken on the political, financial, technical and other scientific aspects of a monstrously complicated and scary topic. In 135 minutes the film takes a semi-informed viewer from innocence to mind-blown amazement — and perhaps depression.

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"Terry J. Allen" - U.S. Drug Shortage: Big Pharma, Big Phuck-Up

http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/11935/u.s._drug_shortage_big_pharma_big_phuck-up

An under-regulated industry collapses in on itself; the sick pay the price.

BY Terry J. Allen

‘A lot of companies are making money hand-over-fist and not caring, not putting resources into old drugs with proven track records, and instead into ones that might be more profitable.’

The wait is over: Even without socialist healthcare you can enjoy drug rationing. More than 200 drugs—from chemotherapy staples to antibiotics, from anesthesia to morphine—are now being denied to critically ill people, rationed or scalped at stratospheric prices. Quality problems, including potentially deadly microbial contamination, caused more than half the recent shortages in injectable drugs, according to the Food and Drug Administration.

”Pharmacists are scrambling and desperate,” says Amanda Forster of Premier Inc., a major hospital drug-purchasing cooperative. Five years ago the FDA reported only 55 drugs in short supply; by 2010, there were 178; and this year, Premier predicts, 350. The majority are low-profit generics, but big-name drugs are also affected. Hard-to-make sterile injectables such as anesthesias and chemotherapies are particularly hard hit.

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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

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.

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"Tom Philpott" - The Global Economy in One Neat Chart

http://motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2011/09/expensive-guns-and-cheap-food-global-economy-one-chart

—By Tom Philpott

 Fri Sep. 16, 2011 12:46 PM PDT

From The Economist, an interesting snapshot of the global economy. The globe's two largest employers are military operations; the next two are, respectively, a "hypermarket" (supermarket plus department store) and an eatery chain, both renowned for their ability to profitably sell cheap food, in part by low-balling their vast, un-unionized workforces and squeezing their suppliers. Big guns and cheap eats: they make the world hum.

The Economist  

Tom Philpott is the food and ag blogger for Mother Jones. For more of his stories, click here. To follow him on Twitter, click here. Get Tom Philpott's RSS feed.

"Rick Ungar" - The Gaping Hole in Ron Paul's Health Care Policy

http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/09/ron-pauls-health-solutions-fail

—By Rick Ungar

| Fri Sep. 16, 2011 4:11 PM PDT

Gage Skidmore/Flickr

  

GOP presidential candidate, Ron Paul, believes that government must get out of the health care business, allow the free market to establish pricing for healthcare services, and leave it to seniors and the poor to financially manage their health care needs.

If you are wondering how the poor and the elderly are to do this without safety net programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, a visit to candidate Paul's campaign website reveals the basis for the Congressman's belief that the healthcare system will step up to care for the poor and elderly at no charge.

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"Adele M. Stan" - Would a Perry v. Obama Contest Be a Confederacy v. Union Rematch?

http://www.alternet.org/news/152441/would_a_perry_v._obama_contest_be_a_confederacy_v._union_rematch/

By: Adele M. Stan

For conservatives, Perry victorious would mean nothing less than the South as a phoenix in the form of an eagle, rising from the ashes of a short-lived and fallen nation.

September 16, 2011 |

Photo Credit: Tom Gill via Flickr

The history books tell us that the U.S. Civil War ended in 1865, with the surrender of the Confederacy at Appomattox. But underlying the present dynamics of American politics is an uneasy sense that the war never really ended -- and the Confederacy never quite surrendered.

President Barack Obama often looks to the presidency of Abraham Lincoln for inspiration; Texas Gov. Rick Perry, frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, once named Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee as one of the historical personages he'd like to include at a fantasy dinner party. At Perry's 2007 gubernatorial inauguration celebration, rocker Ted Nugent performed wearing a shirt emblazoned with the Confederate flag emblem.

Should Perry win the GOP presidential nomination, an obvious subtext of the presidential contest will be "Confederacy v. Union -- The Rematch." And, at the visual level, the theme will be conveniently reinforced by each man's respective race.

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