John McMurtry - "Social State" versus "Corporate State": FROM EUROPEAN FASCISM TO "GLOBAL MONEY-SEQUENCE ABSOLUTISM"

This essay is Part X of Prof John McMurtry's "The Undeclared World War, Human Rights versus Corporate Rights"

Corporate-system drivers of “deregulation”, “privatization” and “lower taxes” lead reversals of  civil commons evolution. When 70% of France supports the strikes against raising the public pension age in the Fall of 2010, resistance to the totalizing private-profit agenda grounds in the civil commons. Yet even as they are again attacked in Italy and Greece to pay private banks and bond issuers a year later, France’s uprising dissolves from view. More profoundly, Argentina’s’ triumphant default on the very same debt as Greece in 2002 is erased from public choice space. Any example of regaining the real economy from the money-sequence party is silenced – but the unspoken Latin American revolution from Argentina’s historic default carries on. Once released from the debt-money clawhold in the face of the direst IMF threats, it regrouped its economy to public direction, spectacular agricultural productivity, capital and export controls, and world-leading reduction of poverty.  

Read More:

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=30425

Caroline Arnold - In a Real World of Real People Can True Human Values Prevail?

Republicans seem to have adopted the position that humans act always and only according to cold calculations of how to maximize their personal rewards and minimize their personal costs.

This economic theory, called Homo economicus, conceives of humans as maximizing individuals – knowledgeable, rational and selfish.  It postulates that each person desires only his own profit and pleasure, always knows enough to determine his own best interest, and always reasons or calculates his benefit before acting, and that these individual decisions account for all social and economic organization – both societies and markets.

Critics have pointed out that real people do a lot of things a true Homo economicus would never do. Homo economicus would reason that it is pointless to vote, except against policies or politicians who threaten his personal rights or private gain, would see no reason to return a lost wallet, would never leave tips, volunteer to help neighbors, or serve their nation in the armed forces.

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/04/22

Harvey Wasserman - Obama's Atomic Solyndra?

Listen to Harvey show (Green Power and Wellness Hour) on Tuesday's at 2pm (Eastern Time) on PRN.fm

The future of nuclear power now hangs on a single decision by President Obama -- and us.

His Office of Management and Budget could cave to the unsustainable demands of reactor builders who cannot handle the standard terms of a loan agreement.  

Or he could defend basic financial procedures and stand up for the future of the American economy.

You can help make this decision, which will come soon.

It's about a proposed $8.33 billion nuke power loan guarantee package for two reactors being built at Georgia's Vogtle. Obama anointed it last year for the Southern Company, parent to Georgia Power. Two other reactors sporadically operate there. Southern just ravaged the new construction side of the site, stripping virtually all vegetation.

Read More:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/harvey-wasserman/obamas-atomic-solyndra_b_1433308.html?ref=green

James Ball - WikiLeaks supporters plan US foundation to restore funding

High-profile US supporters of WikiLeaks are planning to establish a foundation to break the 500-day "banking blockade" that has disrupted donations to the whistleblowing website.

WikiLeaks was forced to suspend many of its publishing operations in October last year after Visa, MasterCard and PayPal refused to process supporters' donations to the website, reducing its donation income by about 95%.

The move, which came after the US senator Joe Lieberman called on US companies to cut off services to WikiLeaks, was called a blockade by the organisation's editor-in-chief, Julian Assange, and came without any legal orders or actions against the site.

Supporters based in the US are now in talks with Assange to establish a US-based foundation aimed at funding organisations cut off by private companies in situations with first amendment implications.

At the forefront of the efforts are Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the US media, and John Perry Barlow, the former lyricist for the Grateful Dead and co-founder of the US online rights organisation Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

Read More:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/apr/20/wikileaks-500-day-banking-blockade

Chris Hedges - The Globalization of Hollow Politics

I went to Lille in northern France a few days before the first round of the French presidential election to attend a rally held by the socialist candidate François Holland. It was a depressing experience. Thunderous music pulsated through the ugly and poorly heated Zenith convention hall a few blocks from the city center. The rhetoric was as empty and cliché-driven as an American campaign event. Words like “destiny,” “progress” and “change” were thrown about by Holland, who looks like an accountant and made oratorical flourishes and frenetic arm gestures that seemed calculated to evoke the last socialist French president, François Mitterrand. There was the singing of “La Marseillaise” when it was over. There was a lot of red, white and blue, the colors of the French flag. There was the final shout of “Vive la France.” I could, with a few alterations, have been at a football rally in Amarillo, Texas. I had hoped for a little more gravitas. But as the French cultural critic Guy Debord astutely grasped, politics, even allegedly radical politics, has become a hollow spectacle. Quel dommage.

The emptying of content in political discourse in an age as precarious and volatile as ours will have very dangerous consequences. The longer the political elite—whether in Washington or Paris, whether socialist or right-wing, whether Democrat or Republican—ignore the breakdown of globalization, refuse to respond rationally to the climate crisis and continue to serve the iron tyranny of global finance, the more it will shred the possibility of political consensus, erode the effectiveness of our political institutions and empower right-wing extremists. The discontent sweeping the planet is born out of the paralysis of traditional political institutions.

Read More:

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_globalization_of_hollow_politics_20120423/

Russia Stunned After Japanese Plan To Evacuate 40 Million Revealed

A new report circulating in the Kremlin today prepared by the Foreign Ministry on the planned re-opening of talks with Japan over the disputed Kuril Islands during the next fortnight states that Russian diplomats were “stunned” after being told by their Japanese counterparts that upwards of 40 million of their peoples were in “extreme danger” of life threatening radiation poisoning and could very well likely be faced with forced evacuations away from their countries eastern most located cities… including the world’s largest one, Tokyo.

The Kuril Islands are located in Russia’s Sakhalin Oblast region and stretch approximately 1,300 km (810 miles) northeast from Hokkaidō, Japan, to Kamchatka, Russia, separating the Sea of Okhotsk from the North Pacific Ocean. There are 56 islands and many more minor rocks. It consists of Greater Kuril Ridge and Lesser Kuril Ridge, all of which were captured by Soviet Forces in the closing days of World War II from the Japanese.

The “extreme danger” facing tens of millions of the Japanese peoples is the result of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster that was a series of equipment failures, nuclear meltdowns, and releases of radioactive materials at the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant, following the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami on 11 March 2011.

Read More:

http://www.eutimes.net/2012/04/russia-stunned-after-japanese-plan-to-evacuate-40-million-revealed/

Avocado oil: The 'olive oil of the Americas'?

Atmospheric oxygen facilitated the evolution and complexity of terrestrial organisms, including human beings, because it allowed nutrients to be used more efficiently by those organisms, which in turn were able to generate more energy. However, as we find out more about how oxygen molecules work inside the body, more attention is being paid to their not-so-good effects, and researchers are seeking ways to thwart them. 

A number of environmental factors -- such as pollution, cigarette smoke and radiation -- can turn the oxygen molecules found in mitochondria, the power plants of cells, into free radicals. These unstable molecules destroy virtually all the normal molecules forming cells, such as lipids, proteins and even DNA, by turning them into free radicals, too. This destructive phenomenon is associated with aging and occurs in a variety of diseases, including hypertension and diabetes, which represent major challenges for health systems due to their great social and economic costs. Those costs have motivated scientists worldwide to undertake intensive searches for substances that bolster cell resistance to the harmful effects of free radicals.

Many studies of antioxidants in vegetables and fruits, such as carrots and tomatoes, have been completed with few encouraging results, says Christian Cortés-Rojo, a researcher at Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo in Morelia, Michoacán, México. "The problem is that the antioxidants in those substances are unable to enter mitochondria. So free radicals go on damaging mitochondria, causing energy production to stop and the cell to collapse and die. An analogy would be that, during an oil spill, if we cleaned only the spilled oil instead of fixing the perforation where oil is escaping, then the oil would go on spilling, and fish would die anyway."

Read More:

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-04/asfb-aot041712.php

Soda Consumption Increases Overall Stroke Risk

Researchers from Cleveland Clinic's Wellness Institute and Harvard University have found that greater consumption of sugar-sweetened and low-calorie sodas is associated with a higher risk of stroke. Conversely, consumption of caffeinated or decaffeinated coffee was associated with a lower risk. 

The study -- recently published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition -- is the first to examine soda's affect on stroke risk. Previous research has linked sugar-sweetened beverage consumption with weight gain, diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, gout and coronary artery disease.

"Soda remains the largest source of added sugar in the diet," said Adam Bernstein, MD, ScD, study author and Research Director at Cleveland Clinic's Wellness Institute. "What we're beginning to understand is that regular intake of these beverages sets off a chain reaction in the body that can potentially lead to many diseases -- including stroke."

Read More:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/04/120420123853.htm

FDA Failures Continue to Put Patients at Risk

In 1957, the Upjohn Company launched the antibiotic Panalba.  The drug was administered to thousands of Americans for more than a decade.  By 1968, Panalba sales totaled $18 million.  After years of complaints related to the drug, FDA Commissioner Herbert Ley Jr., reported that roughly one in five patients who received it suffered a serious allergic reaction – a blood reaction that killed twelve patients.  Although several ten-year-old Upjohn-sponsored studies showed that other drugs were safer, they kept it on the market because it generated roughly 12 percent of Upjohn’s domestic gross income.

In 1977, researchers at the Wharton School (U. Penn) wanted to know whether Upjohn’s social irresponsibility was unique within its corporate culture and, if not, how pervasive it was among US companies. Their report (Armstrong 1977) revealed that a “substantial proportion of managers may be expected to bring serious harm to others in situations where they feel it is proper behavior for their role:”

Further evidence was provided by the Panalba role-playing study, where 79% of the groups selected a highly irresponsible decision and none chose the decision that was free of irresponsibility. These results were due to the pressure of the role rather than to differences among individuals; differences in irresponsibility were not related to nationality or to age.

Read More:

http://www.omsj.org/corruption/fda-failures-continue-to-put-patients-at-risk

Alexander Tsiaras: Conception to birth -- visualized