"Michael Tracey" - Where Is Journalism School Going?

Michael Tracey | June 1, 2011

http://www.thenation.com/article/161086/where-journalism-school-going

Last fall, by a vote of 38 to 5, faculty at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism approved a doozy of a name-change. The board of trustees then lent its final imprimatur in March, and with that, one of America's leading journalism schools was henceforth known as – take a deep breath – “The Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications.”

There's a lot to unpack here, but I'd first call your attention to the faculty's apparent rejection of Associated Press-sanctioned grammatical norms. Given the industry's longstanding reverence for the AP stylebook as a semi-divine standard of journalistic propriety, this has the makings of a landmark decision.

That aside, I've found that the most common reaction people had to the news was something along the lines of, “What the heck is Integrated Marketing Communications?” Northwestern's website describes it as a “Medill-invented field,” which partially explains the widespread confusion. But even so, there seems something deliberately obfuscatory about the term; like it was “invented” in a boardroom by middle-aged white men desperately brainstorming ways to appear cutting-edge. Indeed, its function is ultimately reminiscent of those banal slogans often found in a college's promotional material, like “Commitment to Excellence” or “Where Leaders Look Forward.”

An IMC “certificate” is available to Northwestern undergraduates who complete five credits of requisite coursework. The program, according to Medill's website, prepares students for entry-level positions in fields like advertising, public relations, and “corporate communications.” Of course, there's nothing especially new or surprising about the actual curricula – business students are taught similar stuff, and PR-training has been a feature of journalism departments for years. The real question is why one of the country's leading journalism schools has elected to so fully integrate marketing into its identity. You need not be a stuck-up purist to prefer that the two be kept safely apart. Moreover, I think it's fair to say that journalism and marketing are in fact profoundly antithetical enterprises.

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"Eric Alterman" - The Problem of Republican Idiots

Eric Alterman | June 1, 2011

http://www.thenation.com/article/161078/problem-republican-idiots

One aspect of American politics that receives insufficient attention is that a significant percentage of self-identified Republicans—around half—are complete idiots. And the candidates who wish to be elected by them must pander to them, either by being idiots themselves—see “Bachmann, Michele”—or pretending to be. Nobody in the MSM is empowered to say this aloud. Indeed, the very act of pointing it out brands one a “liberal elitist” who is biased against proud, patriotic conservatives.

Well, so be it. A quarter of Republicans questioned profess to believe that ACORN is definitely planning to steal the 2012 election while another 32 percent think it might be. These numbers are admittedly lower than the 52 percent who, in 2009, went on record accusing ACORN of having stolen the election for Obama, but this should strike a person with normal mental faculties as a mite surprising, given that the organization no longer exists. Similarly, a recent poll of Republicans found that 48 percent of those questioned believe that Barack Obama was born in the United States. Again, this is almost double the 28 percent who believed it in February, but it is still rather low, given that Hawaii released the president’s long-form birth certificate to satisfy exactly this group of noisy idiots.

These are rather obvious examples, but it is hardly an exaggeration to insist that this astonishing combination of willful ignorance and stubborn stupidity can be found virtually everywhere Republican politics are discussed. Consider the kerfuffle over Newt Gringrich’s derisive comments about Paul Ryan’s budget proposal, made not long ago on NBC’s Meet the Press. In the first place, there is the problem of Gingrich being on the program at all. He was, I never tire of pointing out, its single most frequently booked guest in 2009, with five appearances, even though he held no official position in government and is the only ex–Speaker of the House ever to be invited on the show. (Nancy Pelosi, the actual Speaker at the time, did not appear at all that year.) In addition, we have the complication that although Gingrich is portrayed in the MSM as a genuine intellectual and potential president of the United States, both notions are just as crazy as Gingrich is. How else to explain a grown man who professes to believe that Obama’s political views can be understood “only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior”? And what about his insistence that the Obama administration leads a “secular-socialist machine” that represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union? Is this not enough to earn the boy a rubber jumpsuit?

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"Dean Baker" - The Drug Market Scam -- Why You Pay Way Too Much for Bad Medicine (And Bernie Sanders' Solution)

By Dean Baker, AlterNet
Posted on June 2, 2011, Printed on June 3, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/151176/the_drug_market_scam%3A_why_you_pay_way_too_much_for_bad_medicine_%28and_bernie_sanders%27_solution%29

Drugs are cheap. There are few drugs that would sell for more than $5-$10 a prescription in a free market. However, many drugs in the United States sell for hundreds of dollars per prescription and sometimes several thousand dollars per prescription. There is a simple reason for this fact: government-granted patent monopolies.

The government gives patent monopolies to provide an incentive for drug companies to carry through research. This is an incredibly backward and inefficient way to pay for research. It leaves us paying huge amounts of money for cheap drugs. It also often leads to bad medicine.

We can do better and Senator Bernie Sanders has proposed a way. He has introduced a bill to create a prize fund that would buy up patents, so that drugs could then be sold at their free market price. Sanders' bill would appropriate 0.55 percent of GDP (about $80 billion a year, with the economy's current size) for buying up patents, which would then be placed in the public domain so that any manufacturer could use them at no cost.

This money would come from a tax on public and private insurers. The savings from lower-cost drugs would immediately repay more than 100 percent of the tax.

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"David Sirota" - Has America Become a Corporate Police State?

By David Sirota, AlterNet
Posted on June 2, 2011, Printed on June 3, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/151186/has_america_become_a_corporate_police_state

"Corporate Police State," it's a fraught -- some might even say, overwrought -- term. But in its purest, apolitical form, it simply describes the periodic commingling of state and corporate power to protect private interests.

In the American psyche, any discussion of that phenomenon typically brings one of three images to mind. There's the Old Corporate Police State -- the sepia-toned America of decades long past, a place where state militias murder striking mine workers on behalf of Gilded Age barons and Congress empowers the government to forcibly ban work stoppages that defy corporate executives' wishes. There's the Fictional Future Corporate Police State -- that smoldering bombed-out world depicted in "Robocop," "Fortress" and every other dystopian flick in Hollywood's post-apocalyptic catalog. And there's the Foreign Corporate Police State -- think Dubai, Singapore, Monaco and every other lavish enclave defined by lots of rich people, lots of corporate headquarters, lots of heavily armed cops -- and almost no civil liberties.

By imagining the Corporate Police State primarily as a historical, fictional or foreign monster, these snapshots encourage us to believe that this monster poses no threat to us in the here and now. They encourage us, in other words, to ignore the monster's creeping advances in present-day America.

In just the last few years, the Corporate Police State has reared its head at every level of government.

States and municipalities, for instance, have toughened criminal penalties and immigration laws at the behest of the private prison industry; empowered Wall Street banks to not only collect taxes but levy additional tax penalties; and allowed energy companies to exploit so-called forced pooling statutes, thereby creating what one Republican governor calls a new power of "private eminent domain." One state is now even considering making it a criminal act to share your Netflix password with friends and family, because that is cutting into Netflix revenues.

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"Bill McKibben" - Three Strikes and You’re Hot Time for Obama to Say No to the Fossil Fuel Wish List

By Bill McKibben

By Bill McKibben
Posted on June 2, 2011, Printed on June 3, 2011
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175399/

In our globalized world, old-fashioned geography is not supposed to count for much: mountain ranges, deep-water ports, railroad grades -- those seem so nineteenth century. The earth is flat, or so I remember somebody saying.

But those nostalgic for an earlier day, take heart. The Obama administration is making its biggest decisions yet on our energy future and those decisions are intimately tied to this continent’s geography. Remember those old maps from your high-school textbooks that showed each state and province’s prime economic activities? A sheaf of wheat for farm country? A little steel mill for manufacturing? These days in North America what you want to look for are the pickaxes that mean mining, and the derricks that stand for oil.

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"Neev M. Arnell" - 18 U.S. veterans commit suicide daily; largely due to psychiatric drugs

by Neev M. Arnell

http://www.naturalnews.com/032598_veterans_suicide.html

(NaturalNews) "If mentally incapacitated troops are being drugged with dangerous, mind-altering drugs and deployed to battle against their will, how can we say that we have a volunteer army?" asked Alliance for Human Research Protection, the national network dedicated to advancing responsible and ethical medical research practices.

This is just one of the many criticisms being levied against the U.S. military in light of its liberal use of prescription medication, which is now being linked to rising suicide rates among soldiers.

A study released by the Army in June 2009 indicated that nearly as many American troops at home and abroad committed suicide in the first six months of 2006 as the number who had been killed in combat in Afghanistan during the same time period.

An average of 18 American veterans commit suicide every day. Now, the increasingly high number of deaths among both veterans and active duty soldiers--including suicides, accidental overdose, and lethal drug interactions--have now been linked to the exponential increase in the prescribing of drugs for post traumatic stress disorder, depression, and other psychological illnesses

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"John Atcheson" - Puff the Mighty Deficit Dragon -- Holding the American Economy Hostage

Published on Friday, June 3, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/06/03-2

by John Atcheson

Republicans are engaged in a dangerous game of brinksmanship over raising the debt ceiling.  It’s a game that could end in disaster.

The US is a debtor nation, and as such, we are desperately dependent upon good credit.  So far, we have been able borrow and borrow at favorable rates because “the full faith and credit of the US government” stands behind every bond, every borrowed dollar.

But that could change if Republicans continue their cynical game of economic chicken. 

What Republicans risk, even if they eventually capitulate and raise the debt ceiling, is the loss of this faith, and the unprecedented catastrophe that loss would bring on.

If the international community even suspects the US will routinely consider not honoring its debts, the cost of money for US industry, consumers and government would skyrocket almost overnight, bringing on the mother of all depressions, possibly with simultaneous inflation.

Republicans claim they’re doing this because they’re genuinely alarmed by the deficit, and that it poses a clear and present danger to us.

Let’s be clear. Republicans don’t give a damn about the deficit.  Here’s the proof.

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"Mark Sircus" - Magnesium Offers Strong Radiation Protection

by Mark Sircus., AC, OMD

http://www.naturalnews.com/032596_magnesium_radiation.html

(NaturalNews) One would not normally think that magnesium deficiency can increase the risk of cancer yet we will find that just as severe dehydration or asphyxiation can cause death, magnesium deficiency can lead directly to cancer. It is known that carcinogenesis induces magnesium distribution disturbances, causing magnesium mobilization through blood cells and magnesium depletion in non-neoplastic tissues. Magnesium deficiency is carcinogenic, and in the case of solid tumors, a high level of supplemented magnesium inhibits carcinogenesis.

Researchers from Japan's National Cancer Center in Tokyo have found that an increased intake of magnesium reduces a man's risk of colon cancer by over 50 percent. Several studies have shown an increased cancer rate in regions with low magnesium levels in soil and drinking water. In Egypt the cancer rate was only about 10 percent of that in Europe and America. In the rural fellah it was practically non-existent. The main difference was an extremely high magnesium intake of 2.5-3g in these cancer-free populations, ten times more than in most western countries.

For all of these reasons and a hundred more, magnesium oil remains the number one item in my cancer protocol and thus number one for radiation exposure. Magnesium is our first line of defense against both.

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"Nicole Parsons" - Apple named least green technology company

by Nicole Parsons

http://www.naturalnews.com/032593_green_technology.html

(NaturalNews) As a company, Apple has become a household name in such a way that one would be hard-pressed to find many people in the Western world who aren't at least somewhat familiar with the words "ipod" and "iphone". However, what you might not know is that Apple has found a place at the bottom of a list compiled by Greenpeace detailing the least environmentally green technology companies. Apple has earned its place on the list due to its "dirty data" practices, as their energy centers use a highly polluting coal power at the sites that are home to their servers instead of finding more ecologically friendly alternatives. Most recently, Apple's new North Carolina facility is being powered by Duke Energy using a mixture of coal (62%) and nuclear power (32%).

In this day and age people are becoming more socially and environmentally conscious. No longer are they happy to sit idly by, blissfully unaware of how the companies they support do business. As author of the list and IT policy analyst for Greenpeace, Gary Cook stated that "consumers want to know that when they upload a video to Youtube or change their Facebook status that they're not contributing to global warming or future Fukushima's."

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“Sarah Laskow” - Weekly Mulch: Activist Tim DeChristopher Convicted of Two Felonies

http://www.themediaconsortium.org/2011/03/04/weekly-mulch-activist-tim-dechristopher-convicted-of-two-felonies/

Posted June 2, 2011

by Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium blogger

Environmental activist Tim DeChristopher was convicted yesterday of two felony counts. DeChristopher was on trial for bidding on more than 22,000 acres of public land that he could not pay for: his two crimes are making false representations to the government and interfering with the land auction.

DeChristopher made the $1.79 million bid in order to “do something to try to resist the climate crisis,” he told Tina Gerhardt, in an interview published by AlterNet. But, as Kate Sheppard explains at Mother Jones, the judge threw out “the defense that his actions were necessary to prevent environmental damage on this land and, more broadly, the exacerbataion of climate change.”

“They’re hoping to make an example out of me.”

DeChristoper now faces the possibility of  a $75,000 fine and 10 years in prison. In an interview with YES! Magazine’s Brooke Jarvis, before the trial started, DeChristopher said he had faced the possibility that he would be found guilty.

“There is still the possibility of acquittal, but I think the most likely scenario is probably that I will be convicted,” he told Jarvis. “The prosecution has been very clear that they’re hoping to make an example out of me, to convince other people not to fight the status quo.”

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