"Michael Hudson" - Breakup of the Eurozone?

http://counterpunch.org/hudson05272011.html

By MICHAEL HUDSON

Last month Iceland voted against submitting to British and Dutch demands that it compensate their national bank insurance agencies for bailing out their own domestic Icesave depositors. This was the second vote against settlement (by a ratio of 3:2), and Icelandic support for membership in the Eurozone has fallen to just 30 per cent. The feeling is that European politics are being run for the benefit of bankers, not the social democracy that Iceland imagined was the guiding philosophy – as indeed it was when the European Economic Community (Common Market) was formed in 1957.

By permitting Britain and the Netherlands to blackball Iceland to pay for the mistakes of Gordon Brown and his Dutch counterparts, Europe has made Icelandic membership conditional upon imposing financial austerity and poverty on the population – all to pay money that legally it does not owe. The problem is to find an honest court willing to enforce Europe’s own banking laws placing responsibility where it legally lies.

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"Rania Khalek" - For Sale -- The Desperate States of America

Published on Tuesday, May 31, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/05/31-1

by Rania Khalek

While we have been frantically playing defense against relentless assaults on multiple fronts, from anti-union legislation to draconian anti-choice laws to the attempted privatization of Medicare, the selling off of public assets to the private sector has received little attention.

As states face a budget shortfall of $125 billion dollars for fiscal year 2012, leaders are searching for creative ways to fill budget gaps, while refusing to consider the one legitimate solution: forcing tax-dodging corporations and the rich to pay their fair share in taxes.  Rather than upset the moneyed interests who bought their seats in office, politicians of all stripes prefer to cut pensions, close schools, slash child nutrition programs, and most importantly privatize, privatize, privatize!

In 2008, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley auctioned off the city's 36,000 parking meters to a Morgan-Stanley lead partnership, for a lump sum of $1.15 billion.  According to Bloomberg, Chicago drivers will pay Morgan Stanley at least $11.6 billion to park at city meters over the next 75 years, 10 times what the system was sold for.  The Mayor used millions from the deal to help balance the budget, but since then, Morgan Stanley has raised parking fees 42%.  It now plans on stuffing more cars into fewer metered spaces by getting rid of marking lines, raising the number of metered slots and expanding the hours that require fees.  Chicago gave up billions of dollars in revenue for a short term fix and now, if the city faces another fiscal crisis, it will be left with an asset that generates revenue for Morgan Stanley.  Despite the controversy in Chicago, the Associated Press reports that New York is exploring private options for its parking spaces as well.

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"Andrew Nikiforuk" - Why Our 21st Century Slave Society Can't Last

By Andrew Nikiforuk, The Tyee
Posted on May 30, 2011, Printed on May 30, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/150914/why_our_21st_century_slave_society_can%27t_last

"A low-energy policy allows for a wide choice of lifestyles and cultures. If, on the other hand, a society opts for high energy consumption, its social relations must be dictated by technocracy and will be equally degrading whether labeled capitalist or socialist." -- Radical Catholic Theologian Ivan Illich

In 2009 a British family living in a four-bedroom house became the subject of a subversive energy experiment about modern slavery.

While the foursome flicked on gadgets one Sunday with the abandon of Roman patricians, an army of volunteers (The Human Power Station) furiously pedalled 100 bicycles next door to generate the needed energy.

The unsuspecting family, of course, had no idea they had been unplugged from a power grid fueled largely by fossil fuels.

At the end of the day the slave masters literally dropped their jaws when a BBC television crew introduced them to the exhausted slaves that boiled their tea. (Get this: it took 24 peddlers to heat the oven and 11 cyclists to make two slices of toast.)

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"Robin McKie" - Ocean Acidification Is Latest Manifestation of Global Warming

Published on Sunday, May 29, 2011 by The Observer/UK

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/may/29/global-warming-threat-to-oceans

Carbon dioxide pollution adds to threat to world's oceans and marine species

by Robin McKie, science editor

The infernal origins of Vulcano Island are easy to pinpoint. Step off the hydrofoil from Sicily and the rotten-egg smell of hydrogen sulphide strikes you immediately. Beside the quay, there are piles of yellow sulphurous rocks and chunks of pumice; the beach is made of thick, black volcanic sand; while the huge caldera that dominates the bay emits a constant stream of smoke and steam.

According to legend, this was the lair of the Roman god of fire, Vulcan, who gave his name to the island and subsequently to all other volcanoes. An early eruption here also provided history with one of the first recorded descriptions of a volcano in action.

But Vulcano's importance today has nothing to do with the rock and lava it has spewed out for millennia. It is the volcano's output of invisible carbon dioxide – about 10 tonnes a day – that now interests scientists. They have found that the gas is bubbling through underground vents and is making the island's coastal waters more and more acidic. The consequences for sea life are grim with dozens of species having been eliminated.

That discovery is highly revealing, and worrying, because Vulcano's afflictions are being repeated today on a global scale, in every ocean on the planet – not from volcanic sources but from the industrial plants, power stations, cars and planes that are pumping out growing amounts of carbon dioxide and which are making our seas increasingly acidic. Millions of marine species are now threatened with extinction; fisheries face eradication; while reefs that protect coastal areas are starting to erode.

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"Chris Hedges" - The Sky Really Is Falling

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_sky_really_is_falling_20110530/

Posted on May 30, 2011 - By Chris Hedges

The rapid and terrifying acceleration of global warming, which is disfiguring the ecosystem at a swifter pace than even the gloomiest scientific studies predicted a few years ago, has been confronted by the power elite with equal parts of self-delusion. There are those, many of whom hold elected office, who dismiss the science and empirical evidence as false. There are others who accept the science surrounding global warming but insist that the human species can adapt. Our only salvation—the rapid dismantling of the fossil fuel industry—is ignored by both groups. And we will be led, unless we build popular resistance movements and carry out sustained acts of civil disobedience, toward collective self-annihilation by dimwitted Pied Pipers and fools.

Those who concede that the planet is warming but insist we can learn to live with it are perhaps more dangerous than the buffoons who decide to shut their eyes. It is horrifying enough that the House of Representatives voted 240-184 this spring to defeat a resolution that said that “climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for public health and welfare.” But it is not much of an alternative to trust those who insist we can cope with the effects while continuing to burn fossil fuels.

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"Robert Fisk" - Who Cares in the Middle East What Obama Says?

Published on Monday, May 30, 2011 by The Independent/UK

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/who-cares-in-the-middle-east-what-obama-says-2290761.html

by Robert Fisk

This month, in the Middle East, has seen the unmaking of the President of the United States. More than that, it has witnessed the lowest prestige of America in the region since Roosevelt met King Abdul Aziz on the USS Quincy in the Great Bitter Lake in 1945.

While Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu played out their farce in Washington – Obama grovelling as usual – the Arabs got on with the serious business of changing their world, demonstrating and fighting and dying for freedoms they have never possessed. Obama waffled on about change in the Middle East – and about America's new role in the region. It was pathetic. "What is this 'role' thing?" an Egyptian friend asked me at the weekend. "Do they still believe we care about what they think?"

And it is true. Obama's failure to support the Arab revolutions until they were all but over lost the US most of its surviving credit in the region. Obama was silent on the overthrow of Ben Ali, only joined in the chorus of contempt for Mubarak two days before his flight, condemned the Syrian regime – which has killed more of its people than any other dynasty in this Arab "spring", save for the frightful Gaddafi – but makes it clear that he would be happy to see Assad survive, waves his puny fist at puny Bahrain's cruelty and remains absolutely, stunningly silent over Saudi Arabia. And he goes on his knees before Israel. Is it any wonder, then, that Arabs are turning their backs on America, not out of fury or anger, nor with threats or violence, but with contempt? It is the Arabs and their fellow Muslims of the Middle East who are themselves now making the decisions.

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"Fiona Harvey" - Worst Ever Carbon Emissions Leave Climate on the Brink

Published on Monday, May 30, 2011 by The Guardian/UK

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/may/29/carbon-emissions-nuclearpower

 
Exclusive: Record rise, despite recession, means 2C target almost out of reach

by Fiona Harvey

Greenhouse gas emissions increased by a record amount last year, to the highest carbon output in history, putting hopes of holding global warming to safe levels all but out of reach, according to unpublished estimates from the International Energy Agency.

The shock rise means the goal of preventing a temperature rise of more than 2 degrees Celsius – which scientists say is the threshold for potentially "dangerous climate change" – is likely to be just "a nice Utopia", according to Fatih Birol, chief economist of the IEA. It also shows the most serious global recession for 80 years has had only a minimal effect on emissions, contrary to some predictions.

Last year, a record 30.6 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide poured into the atmosphere, mainly from burning fossil fuel – a rise of 1.6Gt on 2009, according to estimates from the IEA regarded as the gold standard for emissions data.

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"Mike Adams" - CDC admits flu vaccines don't work (which is why you need a new one every year)

by Mike Adams, 

http://www.naturalnews.com/032558_flu_shots_wear_off.html

(NaturalNews) I'm always amused by the purchasing process of electronics or appliances at big box stores. On one hand, as their sales associate calmly explains to you, whatever product you're buying is such high quality that you'll be extremely satisfied with your purchase. But on the other hand, it's also such a complete piece of junk that you'd be smart to add on a two-year extended warranty so that when the gizmo breaks five seconds after you open the box, you can get a replacement for free.

The CDC and the vaccine industry are fronting a similar bit of contradictory logic. "Our vaccines work so well that they offer almost total immunity from the flu," they claim. And yet somehow they also work so poorly that they "wear off" after a year and require you to be re-vaccinated annually.

This is The Great Big Lie of the vaccine industry: The lie that says you have be re-vaccinated each and every year, often with the exact same strains you were vaccinated with the previous year. The coming winter flu vaccines for 2011, for example, are being manufactured with the same strains as the 2010 flu vaccines.

But if vaccines work so amazingly well as the CDC and the vaccine industry (fraudulently) suggests, then why do you need the same shot year after year?

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“Medical News Today” - Bike To Work Week And Reduce Heart Disease Risk By Half

Medical News Today, 20 May 2011  

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/225940.php

According to the British Medical Association, cycling just 20 miles a week can reduce the risk of coronary heart disease by 50%. A major study of 10,000 civil servants suggested that those who cycled 20 miles over the period of a week were half as likely to suffer heart disease as their non-cycling colleagues. 

In the interest of health, emission control and overall the launch of warm weather in the United States, The League of American Bicyclists is the national sponsor of Bike Month, and this year Bike to Work Week is May 16-20 and Bike to Work Day is officially Friday, May 20. 

Additionally, any regular exercise can reduce stress and depression and improve well being and self esteem. Cycling outdoors is also a good way to be one with nature and to feel the breath of the earth. It takes one's mind out of everyday life stress and rejuvenates his soul according to many avid bikers. 

Cycling makes the heart pound in a steady manner and helps improve cardio-vascular fitness. Studies have shown that cycling to work will increase cardiovascular fitness by 3-7%. Cycling uses the largest muscle groups the legs, raising heart rate to benefit stamina and fitness. 

Cycling is also a good way to lose those unwanted pounds. Steady cycling burns approximately 300 calories per hour. If you cycle for 30 minutes every day you would burn 11 pounds of fat in a year. Since it helps build muscle, cycling will also boost your metabolic rate long after you've finished your ride. There is a definite shaping, toning and firming of the thighs, the calf muscles and the pelvis region. Fat melts away and is replaced by muscle. Some studies suggest that cycling is one of the few exercises that can help reduce cellulite from the thigh region. There is relatively less stress on the knees and ankles while cycling as compared to other activities like running and aerobic exercises. 

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"Michael Laforgia" - Drugging juveniles: Doctors hired to evaluate kids in state custody have taken huge payments from drug companies

By MICHAEL LAFORGIA

Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

Updated: 5:39 p.m. Tuesday, May 24, 2011

http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/dosed-in-juvie-jail-drug-firms-pay-state-1491309.html

In Florida's juvenile jails, psychiatrists entrusted with diagnosing and prescribing drugs for wayward children have taken huge speaker fees from drug makers - companies that profit handsomely when doctors put kids on antipsychotic pills.

The psychiatrists were hired by a state juvenile justice system that has plied kids with heavy doses of the powerful medications, and the physicians have prescribed anti psychotics even before they were approved by federal regulators as safe for children.

One in three of the psychiatrists who have contracted with the state Department of Juvenile Justice in the past five years has taken speaker fees or gifts from companies that make antipsychotic medications, a Palm Beach Post investigation has found.

In two years, the four top paid doctors combined to accept more than $190,000 - all while working for DJJ. Three of the four psychiatrists still are seeing patients in state jails and residential programs.

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