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Forging his way through the predictable UK media censorship: Dr Andrew Wakefield Responds to Measles Outbreak in Swansea
July 21, 2011 Much of life can never be explained but only witnessed.
NAIROBI (AFP) - A baby hippopotamus that survived the tsunami waves on the Kenyan coast has formed a strong bond with a giant male century-old tortoise in an animal facility in the port city of Mombassa, officials said
July 20, 2011 Published on Wednesday, July 20, 2011 by In These Times
http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/11735/public_unions_urgently_need_to_re-frame_business_climate_game/
by Roger Bybee
For the past four decades, America's 50 states have allowed themselves to be trapped as players in a multi-state race to the bottom staged by Corporate America.
The inter-state (and increasingly global) competition to offer corporations the most perfect “business climate” costs states a huge share of their tax revenues. Greg LeRoy, author of the Great American Jobs Scam, estimates the cost of state-level inducements at a staggering $50 billion annually, and journalist David Cay Johnston pegs the figure at about $70 billion.
The “business climate” game—with corporate taxes slashed ever lower, accompanied by reductions in taxes for the investor class—inevitably shifts the tax burden to homeowners and small businesses lacking the size and resources to claim subsidies.
Now the backlash against the corporate tax cuts has arrived—and it is being channeled not against the “free market”-preaching CEOs whose firms have actually benefited richly, but against public employees whose pay is actually lower than similarly-educated private-sector counterparts.
In states like New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Illinois, Democratic governors have rhetorically accepted the right of public workers to be organized and to bargain collectively.
July 20, 2011 Published on Tuesday, July 19, 2011 by The Activist
http://theactivist.org/blog/the-global-crisis-of-legitimacy
The world is not simply in the midst of a deep economic slump. This is but one aspect of the crisis of legitimacy that confronts almost all of the political and economic institutions that comprise the capitalist world system today. The ongoing revolt in the Arab world against political corruption and socioeconomic exclusion is unquestionably the most dramatic manifestation of this phenomenon, but the crisis of legitimacy is not confined to that region alone. The grievances that have fueled street protests and revolutionary movements from Morocco to Iran are shared in greater or lesser degrees by people all around the globe – the indignados of Puerta del Sol, the aganaktismenoi of Syntagma Square, students and public sector strikers in the U.K., and the hundreds of thousands of protesters who, for a brief time, turned Madison into a Midwestern version of Tahrir Square
In her invaluable 2003 book Forces of Labor, Beverly Silver identifies what she calls the “fundamental contradiction of historical capitalism,” the tension between the system’s drive to attain maximum profitability and its need to maintain legitimacy in the eyes of those it oppresses and exploits. She writes:
July 20, 2011 As the U.S. war in Iraq winds down, we are entering a familiar phase, the season of forgetting—forgetting the harsh realities of the war. Mostly we forget the victims of the war, the Iraqi civilians whose lives and society have been devastated by eight years of armed conflict. The act of forgetting is a social and political act, abetted by the American news media. Throughout the war, but especially now, the minimal news we get from Iraq consistently devalues the death toll of Iraqi civilians.
Why? A number of reasons are at work in this persistent evasion of reality. But forgetting has consequences, especially as it braces the obstinate right-wing narrative of “victory” in the Iraq war. If we forget, we learn nothing.
July 20, 2011 By Robert Scheer
So much for the meritocracy. Despite an elite education, effusive charm and brilliant wit, Barack Obama, like Bill Clinton before him, has ended up betraying his humble origins by abjectly serving the most rapacious variant of Wall Street greed. They both talk a good progressive game, but when push comes to shove—meaning when the banking lobby weighs in—big money talks and the best and the brightest fold.
The defining moment of Clinton’s capitulation was his destruction of Brooksley Born, the one member of his administration with the courage and prescience to warn him about the unregulated derivatives trading that ultimately led to the housing collapse. For Obama, it is his decision not to nominate Elizabeth Warren to run the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which she fought so hard to create.
Obama’s refusal to take the fight to Senate Republicans by nominating Warren should be taken as the vital measure of the man. This gutless decision comes after the president populated his administration with the very people who created the financial meltdown.
July 20, 2011 By Hal Crowther, Progressive Populist
Posted on July 18, 2011, Printed on July 20, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/151674/the_alarming_revival_of_ayn_rand%3A_the_right%27s_weirdest_idol_of_them_all
The Republican Party’s slapstick search for a leader would be heartwarming and sidesplitting, but for the tragic knowledge that one of these scrambling midgets will collect tens of millions of votes in the presidential election of 2012. Never have so many amounted to so little, talked so much rubbish, dreamed of an office so far above their abilities. Blood pressures rose among party elders when Donald Trump, marginally Republican and one of the greatest fools in the solar system, momentarily tossed his hairpiece into the ring and became the instant favorite.
The GOP dilemma — a golden opportunity to rule but nothing to say and no one to say it — is so desperate that my instinct is to help them sort it out. Could we make a start, at least, by dismissing candidates who called for President Obama’s birth certificate or raised the specter of Sharia law in America, followed briskly off the stage by lunatics who dismiss global warming as a socialist plot?
That would leave plenty of unbalanced extremists still in the running, yet reduce the stench of sheer evil and madness. The “birther” and Sharia cults reek of cheesy talk-radio racism; climate-change denial is a stranger faith yet, a political assault on basic science that insults a ground squirrel’s intelligence and casually threatens the survival of life on earth.
July 20, 2011 By Sherwood Ross
Global Research, July 20, 2011
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=25708
As eavesdroppers go, next to Uncle Sam and John Bull, Rupert Murdoch, the moral force behind Fox News, is an amateur.
That's because a global eavesdropping scheme being run today by the United States and Great Britain dwarfs anything that Rupert Murdoch's editors at The News of The World (TNTW) ever dared attempt.
British Prime Minister David Cameron may well deny he knew TNTW was tapping the phones of members of UK's Royal household or those of American 9/11 victims. But he can't claim he doesn't know his country is a partner in ECHELON, which, according to Washington journalist Bill Blum, is a “network of massive, highly automated interception stations” that is eavesdropping on the entire world.
July 20, 2011 Alliance for Natural Health On July 19, 2011 @ 2:00 pm In Food Safety, Uncategorized | No Comments
http://www.anh-usa.org/nyt-attack-as-dshea-under-threat/
The New York Times made nasty insinuations about both the supplement industry and Sen. Hatch, one of the two authors of DSHEA—and got the facts completely wrong about ANH-USA.
The New York Times recently ran a piece about Sen. Orrin Hatch’s support for the supplement industry [1]. The article was full of innuendo about Sen. Hatch being in bed with supplement companies, in effect helping them make exaggerated claims to push their products. ANH got a similar treatment. The paper calls us “a trade group” (that is, a front for supplement companies) that helped defeat the McCain bill. This is similar to the treatment we received in the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) report [2] which also identified us as a trade group.
The Alliance for Natural Health is not a trade group—we are a consumer-run and consumer-serving advocacy organization. Contrary to what the Times piece suggested, it was our activists—consumers who themselves buy nutritional supplements—who helped defeat the McCain bill. Access to natural health products is a consumer choice, and the pressure to protect them from drug-related interests isn’t coming from industry, lobbyists, or Washington “politics” as the Times (and the CREW report before it) claimed, but from consumers like you.
July 20, 2011 http://www.opednews.com/articles/Fmr-Fox-News-Executive-A-by-Daily-kos-110718-484.html
July 18, 2011
By Daily kos
By The Anomaly
Former Fox News executive Dan Cooper has claimed that a special bunker, requiring security clearance for access was created at the company's headquarters to conduct "counterintelligence" including snooping on phone records:
"Has Roger Ailes been keeping tabs on your phone calls?"
That's how Portfolio.com began a post back in 2008, when a former Fox News executive charged that Ailes had outfitted a highly secured "brain room" in Fox's New York headquarters for "counterintelligence" and may have used it to hack into private phone records.
After helping chairman Roger Ailes create the Fox News channel in 1996, Cooper was fired for doing an anonymous interview with New York Magazine:
"I'm frightened right now," said a former Fox employee, noting the vast array of powerful connections Ailes maintains throughout the political and media worlds. "I've been told that if Ailes figures out I talked to you, he'll hunt me down and kill me."
July 20, 2011 PPJ Gazette, July 18, 2011
http://ppjg.wordpress.com/2011/07/18/the-quiet-coup-the-implementation-of-agenda-21/
Debbie Coffey /Investigative Reporter/PPJ
People have noticed the 25 government agencies on Obama’s new White House Rural Council. And, they’re questioning what might be the need for all of them.
What people may not have noticed yet, is that the government agencies in this council are also on other councils. These councils, as well as the individual government agencies, are implementing international laws that have taken effect through Executive Orders, Memorandums of Understanding, agreements and regulations that most Americans don’t even know about. These have bypassed Congress. And, it also seems they have completely bypassed the Constitution.
The devil is in the details
