“José Ignacio Torreblanca” - Five reasons why Europe is cracking up

http://www.opendemocracy.net/jos%C3%A9-ignacio-torreblanca/five-reasons-why-europe-is-cracking-up?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzEmail&utm_content=201210&utm_campaign=Nightly_2011-06-05%2005%3a30

José Ignacio Torreblanca, 3 June 2011

In Germany, France and Italy, but also in many other places, we find ourselves confronted with a generation of leaders ever more shortsighted and given over to electioneering: among them, none speak to Europe nor for Europe.

Denmark has reintroduced border controls with the populist excuse of controlling crime. By taking the step, the country that was once a model of democracy, tolerance and social justice has placed itself on the frontlines of a Europe that is increasingly surrendering to fear and xenophobia. Greece, meanwhile, has spent more than a year teetering on a cliff edge and few fellow European governments seem disappointed that it may abandon the euro - some of them are even secretly supporting the markets against Athens. Finland has thrown itself into the arms of xenophobic populism and, following in the footsteps of Slovakia, has refused to finance the bailout of Portugal. With elections around the corner, France and Italy have taken advantage of the Tunisian uprising to restrict the free movement of people within the European Union. And Germany, unhappy at managing the euro crisis amid regional elections, has broken ranks with France and the United Kingdom in the United Nations Security Council, ignoring the Libya crisis and undermining 10 years of European security policy.

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“Barry Estabrook” - E-I-E-I-Oh no: Decades of antibiotics in farm animals lead to deadly superbugs

http://www.grist.org/industrial-agriculture/2011-05-31-you-want-superbugs-with-that1

by Barry Estabrook

2 Jun 2011

Stuart Levy once kept a flock of chickens on a farm in the rolling countryside west of Boston. No ordinary farmer, Levy is a professor of molecular biology and microbiology and of medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine. This was decades ago, and his chickens were taking part in a never-before-conducted study. Half the birds received feed laced with a low dose of antibiotics, which U.S. farmers routinely administer to healthy livestock -- not to cure illness, but merely to increase the animals' rates of growth. The other half of Levy's flock received drug-free food.

Results started showing up almost instantly. Within two days, the treated animals began excreting feces containing E. coli bacteria that were resistant to tetracycline, the antibiotic in their feed. (E. Coli, most of which are harmless, normally live in the guts of chickens and other warm-blooded animals, including humans.) After three months, the chickens were also excreting bacteria resistant to such potent antibiotics as ampicillin, streptomycin, carbenacillin, and sulfonamides. Even though Levy had added only tetracycline to the feed, his chickens had somehow developed what scientists now call "multi-drug resistance" to a host of antibiotics that play important roles in treating infections in people. More frightening, although none of the members of the farm family tending the flock were taking antibiotics, they, too, soon began excreting drug-resistant strains of E. coli.

When Levy's study was published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1976, it was met with skepticism. "The other side -- industry -- could not believe that this would have happened. The mood at the time was that what happens in animals does not happen in people," said Levy, who serves as president of the Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics, in a telephone interview from his office at Tufts. "But we had the data. It was obvious to us even then that using antibiotics this way was an error and should be stopped."

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“Holger Nehring” - German angst and catastrophic modernity: switching off nuclear power

http://www.opendemocracy.net/holger-nehring/german-angst-and-catastrophic-modernity-switching-off-nuclear-power?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzEmail&utm_content=201210&utm_campaign=Nightly_%272011-06-04%2005%3a30%3a00%27

Holger Nehring, 3 June 2011

Germany's decision to decommission its nuclear power stations is the outcome of a half century of anxiety about technocratic modernity.

In the wake of an earthquake and following a massive tsunami, a series of major accidents occurred in the Fukushima dai-ichi nuclear plant from 11 March 2011 onwards. Soon after, German papers carried maps of radioactive clouds pushing from eastern Japan across Siberia closer and closer towards Germany. When Germans looked to the suffering in Japan, many also recognised themselves as potential victims. On Monday, 30 May 2011, chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian-Democratic/Liberal coalition government announced that it would pass a law that would mean the decommissioning of all of Germany’s nuclear reactors by 2022. Ironically, this may mean that it will import nuclear energy from other European countries, mainly France, in order to satisfy demand during peak periods.

Merkel’s move was an astonishing U-turn. She had previously agreed to renew the lease of life for Germany’s nuclear industry, effectively overruling her own minister for the environment. Following the Fukushima disaster in Japan, however, she decreed an immediate halt to the generation of nuclear power in the oldest German plants until safety tests had been carried out. She also put in place an ‘ethics commission’ consisting of high-ranking experts from politics, the humanities as well as the social and natural sciences in order to explore the moral issues involved. The decision to decommission nuclear power plants by 2022 follows directly in the wake of this commission’s recommendations

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"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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