Inter Press Service - Durban May Be Last Chance to Stabilize Climate Under Two Degrees

Published on Monday, October 24, 2011 by Inter Press Service

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/10/24-8

Inter Press Service

CHANGWON, South Korea - The window to limit global warming to less than two degrees C is closing so fast it can be measured in months, a new scientific analysis revealed Sunday.

Without putting the brakes on carbon emissions very soon, large parts of Africa, most of Russia and northern China will be two degrees C warmer in less than 10 years. Canada and Alaska will soon follow, the regional study shows.

"If one is sincerely committed to limit global temperature increase to below two degrees C... (governments) committing to a global peak emission level and peak year makes sense from a science perspective," said Joeri Rogelj of the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science in Zurich, who headed the analysis published Sunday in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Governments will be meeting in Durban, South Africa starting Nov. 28 to launch the next round of climate treaty negotiations, which so far have failed to ensure their goal of less than a two-degree C increase will be achieved.

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Reuters - Wall Street Protest Plans Global Rally Ahead of G20

Published on Monday, October 24, 2011 by Reuters

http://in.reuters.com/article/2011/10/24/idINIndia-60096820111024

Reuters

(Reuters) - An anti-capitalist group which sparked the Occupy Wall Street movement has called for global protests on Saturday to demand G20 leaders impose a "Robin Hood" tax on financial transactions and currency trades.

Canada-based Adbusters wants the Occupy Wall Street protest movement against economic inequality to take to the streets to call for a 1 percent tax on such deals ahead of a Nov. 3-4 summit of the Group of 20 leading economies in France.

"Let's send them a clear message: We want you to slow down some of that $1.3 trillion easy money that's sloshing around the global casino each day -- enough cash to fund every social program and environmental initiative in the world," the activist group said on its website, www.adbusters.org.

Adbusters put out the initial call for Occupy Wall Street and since protesters set up camp in a park in New York City's financial district on Sept. 17, they have inspired solidarity demonstrations and so-called occupations around the world.

Thousands turned out for a global day of protests on Oct. 15, which were mostly peaceful apart from in Rome, where there were riots.

Occupy Arrests, a Twitter feed compiling arrests related to Occupy Wall Street, said that since the movement began five weeks ago nearly 2,400 people have been arrested around the world, including in New York City.

Occupy Wall Street prides itself on not having any leaders and doing everything by consensus at daily general assemblies. Adbusters has asked protesters to approve its plan for a "Robin Hood" tax and global protests at their general assemblies.

The proposal by Adbusters comes as some people question whether the movement can sustain momentum and and ask what will happen next. Critics accuse the group of not having a clear message.

"As the movement matures, let's consider a response to our critics. Let's occupy the core of our global system. Let's dethrone the greed that defines this new century," Adbusters said on its website.

The protesters say they are upset that the billions of dollars in bank bailouts doled out during the recession allowed banks to resume earning huge profits while average Americans have had no relief from high unemployment and job insecurity.

They also believe the richest 1 percent of Americans do not pay their fair share in taxes.

Occupy Wall Street is urging protesters to close their bank accounts and transfer their money to credit unions, a move that is due to culminate with a bank transfer day on Nov. 5.

Aaron Mehta and John Aloysius Farrell - Wealthy Corporations with a Trillion Dollars Stashed Offshore Lobby for a ‘Holiday’ from U.S. Taxes

By Aaron Mehta and John Aloysius Farrell

Nation of Change, October 24, 2011

http://www.nationofchange.org/wealthy-corporations-trillion-dollars-stashed-offshore-lobby-holiday-us-taxes-1319470039

Goaded by battalions of corporate lobbyists, members of Congress are working to give a select group of U.S. multinational firms like Apple, Oracle and Pfizer a lavish tax break on a trillion dollars stashed offshore.

The avowed goal is to generate jobs and investment, but the offshore tax holiday was tried before, in 2004, and the lion’s share of the benefits went not to unemployed workers and their families, but to corporate shareholders and executives.

With today’s high unemployment, and soaring costs for college, health care and other family essentials, critics are asking why an elite class of corporations and their shareholders should get a huge tax break on overseas profits.

The proposed tax holiday could cost the Treasury from $40 billion to $80 billion over the next decade, and the high cost of the measure is one reason that its prospects for passage are mixed.

But 73 members of Congress, both Republicans and Democrats, have signed up as co-sponsors. And cash-rich mega corporations are pushing hard for the tax break.

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Dean Baker - Jean-Claude Trichet's dire tenure at the ECB

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/oct/24/jean-claude-trichet-tenure-ecb?newsfeed=true

guardian.co.uk, Monday 24 October 2011 10.30 EDT

Jean-Claude Trichet will be retiring as head of the European Central Bank at the end of October. He will step into retirement having wreaked the sort of destruction on the European economy that hostile powers could only dream about. Tens of millions of people across the eurozone countries are unemployed or underemployed because of his mismanagement of Europe's economy.

Meanwhile, the world teeters on the brink of another financial crisis because of the failure of the ECB, along with the IMF, to effectively address the sovereign debt crisis. Most incredible of all, Trichet probably thinks he has done a good job.

This last point really is central because the ECB, like much of the economics profession, continues to be controlled by a bizarre clique that believes that the most important, and possibly only, goal that a central bank should pursue is a 2% inflation target. By this measure, the ECB has done reasonably well, even as the eurozone economy has crumbled around it. After all, inflation in the eurozone economies rarely exceeded 3% and averaged well under the 2% target over the last decade.

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Lynn Parramore - 4 Polls That Show Occupy Wall Street is Just Getting Started

By Lynn Parramore, AlterNet

Posted on October 24, 2011, Printed on October 25, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/152847/4_polls_that_show_occupy_wall_street_is_just_getting_started

After over a month of demonstrations, numerous dismissals, and thousands of arrests, Occupy Wall Street is gaining momentum. Over the last two weeks, polls have poured in revealing that Americans familiar with the protests largely support them. And since that familiarity will continue to increase, we can only conclude that the country's support for the movement will keep on growing. When you've got NYT pundit Charles Blow unfurling his hipster flag comparing OWS to legendary 90s band Nirvana, you know a tipping point has been reached!

Recent polls prove that when Americans hear this band, they dig it. Here’s a round-up:

Oct. 9-10 Time Magazine/Abt SRBI: This poll showed a 54 percent favorable rating of OWS, compared to a mere 27 percent thumbs up for the Tea Party. The same poll revealed a strong support for grievances associated with the movement. 86 percent of Americans polled thought that "Wall Street and lobbyists have too much influence in Washington"; 79 percent said that "the gap between the rich and the poor in the U.S. is too large"; 71 percent wanted prosecutions for "executives of financial institutions responsible for the financial meltdown in 2008"; and 68 percent believed that "the rich should pay more in taxes." Echoing the sense of alienation expressed by OWS protesters, 60 percent of respondents said that "the political debate in Washington and the media" does not represent their concerns.

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Rodrigue Tremblay - Financial Black Holes and Economic Stagnation

By Prof. Rodrigue Tremblay
Global Research, October 19, 2011
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=27177
“Financial markets are driving the world towards another Great Depression with incalculable political consequences. The authorities, particularly in Europe, have lost control of the situation. They need to regain control and they need to do so now.” George Soros, international financier, ( Does the Euro Have a Future?, New York Review of Books, September 15, 2011.) “The [financial] crisis was not a failure of the free market system and the answer is not to try to reinvent that system. ...Government intervention is not a cure-all." President George W. Bush, Thursday November 13, 2008

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AP - Government: Rich Getting Richer, More People Poor

Published on Saturday, October 22, 2011 by the Associated Press

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/10/22

Associated Press

WASHINGTON -- Fifty percent of U.S. workers earned less than $26,364 last year, reflecting a growing income gap between the nation's rich and poor, the government reported yesterday.

There were fewer jobs, and overall pay was trending down - except for the nation's wealthiest. The number of people making $1 million or more soared by over 18 percent from 2009, the Social Security Administration said, citing payroll data based on W-2 forms submitted by employers to the Internal Revenue Service.

Despite population growth, the number of Americans with jobs fell again last year, with total employment of just under 150.4 million - down from 150.9 million in 2009 and 155.4 million in 2008. In all, there were 5.2 million fewer jobs than in 2007, when the deep recession began, according to the IRS data.

The figures are just one more indication of the toll that the worst downturn since the Great Depression has taken on the U.S. economy. They were published as demonstrations rage on Wall Street and in cities across the nation protesting a widening income gulf between average wage earners and the nation's wealthiest.

The unemployment rate remains stuck at 9.1 percent, with more than 14 million out of work and 11 million other discouraged people who have stopped looking for work or are stuck in part-time jobs. Since 1980, roughly 5 percent of annual national income has shifted from the middle calls to the nation's richest households, according to the Census Bureau.

While the average U.S income last year was $39,959, the mean income - the figure where half earn more and half earn less - was much lower, $26,364. This disparity reflects the fact that "the distribution of workers by wage level is highly skewed," according to Social Security.

Median compensation last year was just 66 percent of the average income, compared with nearly 72 percent in 1980.

Zygmunt Bauman - How Global Capitalism Always Finds Fresh Green Pastures to Exploit and Demolish

By Zygmunt Bauman, Comment Is Free

Posted on October 20, 2011, Printed on October 23, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/152808/how_global_capitalism_always_finds_fresh_green_pastures_to_exploit_and_demolish

The news of capitalism's demise is (to borrow from Mark Twain) somewhat exaggerated. Capitalism has an inbuilt wondrous capacity of resurrection and regeneration; though this is capacity of a kind shared with parasites – organisms that feed on other organisms, belonging to other species. After a complete or near-complete exhaustion of one host organism, a parasite tends and manages to find another, that would supply it with life juices for a successive, albeit also limited, stretch of time.

A hundred years ago Rosa Luxemburg grasped that secret of the eerie, phoenix-like ability of capitalism to rise, repeatedly, from the ashes; an ability that leaves behind a track of devastation – the history of capitalism is marked by the graves of living organisms sucked of their life juices to exhaustion. Luxemburg, however, confined the set of organisms, lined up for the outstanding visits of the parasite, to "pre-capitalist economies" – whose number was limited and steadily shrinking under the impact of the ongoing imperialist expansion.

With each successive visit, another one of those remaining "virgin lands" was converted into a grazing field for capitalist exploitation, and therefore sooner rather than later made unfit for the needs of capitalist "extended reproduction" since no longer promising profits such an expansion required. Thinking along these lines (a fully understandable inclination, given the mostly territorial, extensive rather than intensive, lateral rather than vertical, nature of that expansion 100 years ago), Luxemburg could not but anticipate the natural limits to the conceivable duration of the capitalist system: once all "virgin lands" of the globe are conquered and drawn into the treadmill of capitalist recycling, the absence of new lands for exploitation will portend and eventually enforce the collapse of the system. The parasite will die because of the absence of not-yet-exhausted organisms to feed on.

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Progressive Radio Host Sandy LeonVest Tuesdays @ 6pm - The Magnetic Force of the Moment -- Perils and Potential on the Road to Transformation

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/10/24

Published on Monday, October 24, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

For all the head-scratching and hand-wringing in the corporate media over the “message” -- or lack of one -- as it turns out, the American people understand exactly what the Occupy Wall Street movement is talking about.

Evidence that the occupy movement has triggered some deeply dormant impulse in the American psyche is everywhere. Here in Northern California, “occupiers” are standing their ground in San Francisco, Oakland and other major cities. In San Francisco, protesters are refusing to leave Justin Herman Plaza, and police are preparing for a standoff. In the largely working class city of Oakland, where poverty is endemic and gang-related shootings are a near-daily occurrence, the protests are growing larger by the day. Last week, “Occupy Oakland" was given a notice by city officials to vacate Frank Ogawa Plaza. There too, demonstrators are refusing to leave until their demands are taken seriously. Those demands include increased regulation of banks and Wall Street investment firms and fundamental changes to the system of economic distribution.

In other parts of the Golden State, Wells Fargo is being targeted by occupiers in an organized effort to collectively withdraw funds. Earlier this month, hundreds of protestors shut down a Wells Fargo Bank in San Francisco's Financial District. Others are participating in protests, teach-ins and non-violence trainings in their cities or communities.

Here in Northern California, and across the nation, the “electricity of change” permeates the atmosphere. The potential for a collective awakening of “we the people” from cultural unconsciousness induced by the anesthesia of corporate consumerism is omnipresent.

It is a “Howard Beale moment.”

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Zach Carter - New Obama Foreclosure Plan Helps Banks At Taxpayers' Expense

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/10/24-12

Published on Monday, October 24, 2011 by Huffington Post

by Zach Carter

WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration is introducing a new program on Monday designed to lower monthly mortgage payments for more troubled homeowners.

Under the modified plan, "put back" liability at banks will be erased for any underwater mortgage that is refinanced through HARP, eliminating Fannie and Freddie's ability to sack lenders with losses in the event that the mortgage does not pan out. This, in effect, leaves the US taxpayer holding the toxic debt created by a private, profit-hungry bank. (Getty)

But a key new condition in the plan would shift the financial liability for refinanced loans from Wall Street banks to the American taxpayer. And by focusing on lower payments, the program does not confront what housing experts view as the core problem in the foreclosure crisis -- borrower debt that exceeds the value of one's home.

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