The stories show the deeper wounds of unemployment, and especially long-term unemployment. It is not just the loss of a job, but the loss of community, routine and purpose. It means worse health. It means higher rates of divorce. It means alcohol abuse. All of these are also risk factors for suicide.
Society has enough food, housing and technology that the entire world’s population could work a lot less and still have all of the basic amenities of life. (Maybe we couldn’t all have mansions, fancy cars, and all the expensive cocaine we wanted, but we could live comfortable lives.) And they’d probably be more fulfilling if we didn’t spend our whole life working for someone else. But we don’t have such a society because our labor is not aimed at creating use-values for society but at creating profit for capital.
While Exxon-Mobile reaped over 100% growth of profits in 2010 and the auto corporations recorded their biggest profits in recent years, the workers’ wages and living standards declined and state-sector employees suffered harsh cutbacks and massive layoffs. It is clear that the recovery of corporate profit is based on the harshest exploitation of labor and the biggest transfers of public resources to the large private corporations. The capitalist state, with Democratic President Obama in the lead, has transferred billions to big capital via direct bailouts, virtual interest free loans, tax cuts and by pressuring labor to accept lower wages and health and pension givebacks. The White House plan for ‘recovery’ has worked beyond expectations – corporate profits have recovered; “only” the vast majority of workers have fallen deeper into crises.
The Hamptons were once an idyllic enclave where Manhattanites decamped to escape the bustle of city life. But in recent summers, the sleepy community on the Atlantic Ocean has become infested with pop-up shops, bass-thumping nightclubs, and publicity parties. If you look for it, though, the romantic charm of Long Island’s South Fork does still exist. We asked eight young people who do the East End right to show us around their Hamptons habitats.
With the help of the IMF and of the European Commission, Capital and the leaders of European countries are resolved to have the lower classes pay for the crisis.
What is at stake is social regression, rising unemployment, and a challenging of peoples’ fundamental rights.
The logic train of the war on terror and its fundamental rooting in Afghanistan had finally become clear. The perpetual Taliban/Al Qaeda threat fueled a perpetual war that could never be won, justifying an endless string of restrictions on civil liberties and governmental transparency, which then prevented Americans from seeing how their money was spent. Locked out of this “alternative geography of the United States,” Americans have become helpless to stop their democracy and their economy from being lifted right out from under them.
When it comes to “connecting the dots,” European activists have it all over their peers in the US. In Europe, coalition-building between single-issue groups has long been a primary strategy. Most European activists view war, climate change, privatization and globalization as part of the same problem – corporate control of the political system.
Media Access Project, a net neutrality proponent, panned the development.
"These ‘negotiations’ are illegitimate. They do not involve representatives of people who use the Internet for free expression and commerce, and they lack representation from the infant businesses that depend on an open Internet to build the future Ciscos, Microsofts, and Skypes," said MAP senior vice president Andrew Jay Schwartzman.
Miller and Stewart, who were both in BP's Vessels of Opportunity programme and were trained in identifying oil and dispersants, have been accused by some members of Mississippi's state government of lying about their findings.
"Why would we lie about oil and dispersant in our waters, when our livelihoods depend on our being able to fish here?" Miller asked IPS. "I want this to be cleaned up so we can get back to how we used to live. But it doesn't make sense for us or anyone else to fish if our waters are toxified. I don't know why people are angry at us for speaking the truth. We're not the ones who put the oil in the water."
The austerity measures that were supposed to fix Greece's problems are dragging down the country's economy. Stores are closing, tax revenues are falling and unemployment has hit an unbelievable 70 percent in some places. Frustrated workers are threatening to strike back.I think that it is a good idea to keep an eye on Greece to get a preview of events in other Western capitalist countries that are instituting programs of austerity.
According to Kindra Arnesen, of Louisiana’s Coastal Heritage Society, fishermen in the Gulf are being forced by dock owners to sign waivers that would make them and not BP potentially liable for any contaminated seafood. Arnesen notes that if the Food and Drug Administration “has waved this magic wand and says that the Gulf is clean and that the seafood is safe, let’s get some FDA mobile units on our docks and let’s do some chemical testing.”A similar, and most egregious example of "your" government lying to you was when Christine Whitman, Bush appointed head of the Environmental Protection Agency, publicly announced to the people of New York shortly after the 9/11 attack that
the toxins released by the attacks posed no threat to their health. On September 18, the EPA released a report in which Whitman said, "Given the scope of the tragedy from last week, I am glad to reassure the people of New York and Washington, D.C. that their air is safe to breathe and their water is safe to drink." She also said, "The concentrations are such that they don't pose a health hazard...We're going to make sure everybody is safe."Soon people became aware of the lie.
Countless people exposed to the pollution are suffering from symptoms of respiratory illnesses today, years after the attacks, like difficulty breathing, coughing, asthma, and even lung cancer and mesothelioma. As the years pass, more and more it has become obvious that more and more of our citizens have been infected with cancer and respiratory disease.
Ethiopia is one of the hungriest countries in the world with more than 13-million people needing food aid, but paradoxically the government is offering at least three million hectares of its most fertile land to rich countries and some of the world's most wealthy individuals to export food for their own populations.And this:
"The foreign companies are arriving in large numbers, depriving people of land they have used for centuries. There is no consultation with the indigenous population. The deals are done secretly. The only thing the local people see is people coming with lots of tractors to invade their lands.
"All the land round my family village of Illia has been taken over and is being cleared. People now have to work for an Indian company. Their land has been compulsorily taken and they have been given no compensation. People cannot believe what is happening. Thousands of people will be affected and people will go hungry."
Alarmingly, the pH drop observed so far and the predicted trajectory under current emissions trends are 100 times faster than any changes in prior millennia. Left unchecked, CO2 levels will create a very different ocean, one never experienced by modern species. Adaptation is even more unlikely because the effects of acidification, and the other struggles creatures face, interact. For example, increased CO2 levels can narrow the temperature range in which an individual can survive. We already see such constraints on corals and some algae, which become heat-stressed at lower temperatures than normal if exposed to higher CO2.
An Associated Press report today provided the first public details about CIA tapes of interrogations of accused 9/11 conspirator Ramzi Binalshibh. Last week, the American Civil Liberties Union requested information from the government about these tapes, specifically asking why the CIA appears never to have noted the tapes' existence in the ACLU's long-running litigation over records relating to the treatment of detainees. The government has not yet responded.
Right now the energy companies are winning, and winning easily. Because they're the most profitable business the world has ever seen, they have enormous influence. And because all they need to do is delay, so far they've barely even been bothered by environmentalists.The author grossly underestimates the problem. It is not just the energy companies that are the problem. It is the capitalist system which is built upon the use of fossil fuels that is the problem. This system requires ever increasing production and consumption in order to generate profits for the ruling classes. Fossil fuels have provided that; to end their use would destroy it. The power and the enormous wealth that private owners of the the world economy enjoy depend on the continuation of the system.
Farmers across the United States are reported to be going back to conventional non-GMO crops instead. According to a new report from the US Department of Agriculture, retail sales of organic food went up to $21.1 billion in 2008 from $3.6 billion in 1997. The market is so active that organic farms have struggled at times to produce sufficient supply to keep up with the rapid growth in consumer demand, leading to periodic shortages of organic products.
Well, "they," the ones that give the wars are not going to stop. "They" have too much at stake to give up the cash cow of wars for Imperial Profit, Power, and Expansion. "They" use the toady media to whip up nationalistic and patriotic fervor to get our kids to be thrown together with the victims in a meat grinder of destruction and we just sit here and allow them to do it.
The Empire preys on our kids using all the tools at its disposal: Economic panic, high college tuition, high unemployment and a mythology that the U.S. has some existential right to steal the resources of other nations.
In many cases, due to the lack of trained professionals in the peasant and indigenous organisations, Morales was forced to rely on “invitees” from the already existing state bureaucracy to run the government.Also, see this.
Most of Morales’ first cabinet came from these sectors, causing concern among the founding organisations of the MAS, who felt they were not being treated as they should be, with quotas in the government.
...Now in government, many of these groups began to view the MAS as a vehicle to access employment in the public service, just as the middle classes did with their parties when they were in power.
For a government determined to maintain social harmony, the protests and petitioning are vexing. Compared with farmers angry over seized land or retired soldiers seeking fatter pensions, the bank workers — educated, organized and knowledgeable about the Internet — are better equipped to outsmart the public security agents constantly on their trail.
The international banking industry and the international corporation have joined forces to create what is the modern large scale version of the old American “company store.” Best known in isolated mining towns, the corporation would build the company store to provide the necessities of life to its workers in the town. The wages of the workers and the prices in the company store would be aligned so that the workers never had any money left over at the end of the month. This ensured that the workers would never have the capital to be independent of the company or, even worse, to compete against it.
