WILLIAM ALDEN, - The Huffington Post
Stephan: We are in serious trouble because we cannot create the political will to overcome the corporatocracy that has consumed our government like a cancer. We have no one to blame but ourselves.
We need to rebuild ourselves, which will produce millions of jobs, radically change our financial structure, and our legal system, to constrain the virtual corporate states, to prepare for the Green Transition, and the energy conversion that will be its principal feature.
We are not seriously doing any of these things, and we are going to pay a horrendous price for this failure. There should be two million people on the Mall.
Markets stumbled and economists darkened their forecasts as a dismal jobs report underscored that the U.S. economy’s core remains battered two years after the officially declared end of the recession.
The major U.S. stock indices fell at the open Friday morning and continued falling, on the heels of a employment report that showed the jobless rate tick up to 9.2 percent in June as non-farm payrolls gained only 18,000 jobs. The Labor Department’s numbers fell far below economists’ predictions of about 100,000 new jobs and made the previous month’s disappointing report seem less like a fluke and more like a developing trend, delivering a sobering portrait of the nation’s economic health and dashing hopes for future strength.
‘Anybody doing business planning in the second half of the year — if you’re a retail firm, and you’re looking at back-to-school sales, or you have to order for Christmas — your orders are going to be much more modest,’ said John Silvia, chief economist at Wells Fargo.
‘You can always write off one month of disappointing unemployment numbers,’ he added. ‘To write off two is a very different story.’
Stocks plunged after the employment numbers showed the weakest job growth since September. The Dow Jones Industrial […]
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SUSAN CRABTREE, - Talking Points Memo
Stephan: This is not just a single event, it is the latest manifestation of a growing trend. I don't know how you feel about it but I think it is the naked contempt for ordinary citizens its demonstrates, and the sense of entitlement it displays, that I find particularly offensive. Note his interview reported at the end. The fact that he is a liar about something so blatantly known and witnessed is just further confirmation of his character, and the nature of an entire class of American conservative politicians. This story reads like a scene written by Maxim Gorky.
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), a leading advocate of shrinking entitlement spending and the architect of the plan to privatize Medicare, spent Wednesday evening sipping $350 wine with two like-minded conservative economists at the swanky Capitol Hill eatery Bistro Bis.
It was the same night reports started trickling out about President Obama pressing Congressional leaders to consider changes to Social Security and Medicare in exchange for GOP support for targeted tax increases.
The pomp and circumstance surrounding the waiter’s presentation, uncorking and decanting of the pricey Pinot Noir caught the attention of another diner who had already recognized Ryan sitting with two other men nearby.
Susan Feinberg, an associate business professor at Rutgers, was at Bistro Bis celebrating her birthday with her husband that night. When she saw the label on the bottle of Jayer-Gilles 2004 Echezeaux Grand Cru Ryan’s table had ordered, she quickly looked it up on the wine list and saw that it sold for an eye-popping $350, the most expensive wine in the house along with one other with the same pricetag.
Feinberg, an economist by training, was even more appalled when the table ordered a second bottle. She quickly did the math and figured out that the $700 in wine […]
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Stephan: Because of theocratic crippling of American science we are falling behind in the area of stem cell research, as this shows.
Thanks to Mike Austin.
Surgeons working at Karolinska University Hospital in Sweden have taken a huge step forward for regenerative medicine by successfully executing the world’s first synthetic organ transplant. The donor-less transplant saved the life of a 36-year-old cancer patient, who is doing well now after having received a new windpipe grown from his own stem cells.
This story is about as international as it gets: The Eritrean patient, Andemariam Teklesenbet Beyene, was pursuing his doctorate in geology in Iceland when his trachea was consumed by an inoperable tumor that grew so bad that it was actually blocking his breathing. So 3-D scans of his windpipe were sent to scientists at University College London, which crafted a glass scaffold that was a perfect match for Beyene’s trachea and two main bronchi.
The scaffold was in turn was sent to Sweden, where it was soaked in stem cells from Beyene’s own bone marrow. The stem cells took hold and within just two days had filled the scaffold, creating a new trachea that is, biologically speaking, Beyene’s own tissue. A 12-hour operation by an Italian surgeon specializing in trachea operations removed Beyene’s windpipe and all signs of the cancer and then replaced it with the new, lab-grown […]
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Scott Russell Sanders, - Orion Magazine
Stephan: This points raised in this article will be very familiar to SR readers, and this essay puts them together very elegantly.
Scott Russell Sanders lives in southern Indiana, where he has written twenty books of fiction and nonfiction. Earth Works, a volume of his selected essays, will appear in spring 2012.
Thanks to Rick Ingrasci, MD.
Anyone who pays attention to the state of the planet realizes that all natural systems on which human life depends are deteriorating, and they are doing so largely because of human actions. By natural systems I mean the topsoil, forests, grasslands, wetlands, rivers, lakes, oceans, atmosphere, the host of other species, and the cycles that bind them together into a living whole. By human life I mean not merely the survival of our species, but the quality of our existence, the prospects for adequate food, shelter, work, education, health care, conviviality, intellectual endeavor, and spiritual growth for our kind far into the future.
So the crucial question is, why? Why are those of us in the richest countries acting in such a way as to undermine the conditions on which our own lives, the lives of other species, and the lives of future generations depend? And why are we so intent on coaxing or coercing the poorer countries to follow our example? There are many possible answers, of course, from human shortsightedness to selfish genes to otherworldly religions to consumerism to global corporations. I would like to focus on a different one-our confusion of financial wealth with real wealth.
To grasp the […]
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JOHN PILGER, - New Statesman
Stephan: This is what we look like from the U.K. One has to go to the foreign press to get a sense of proportion as to what is going on in this country.
Thanks to James Spottiswoode.
Obama’s greatest achievement is having seduced, co-opted and silenced much of liberal opinion in the US.
Barack Obama speaks in front of a screen showing his Twitter message.
US President Barack Obama speaks in front of a screen showing his Twitter message at the start of a ‘Twitter Town Hall’ July 6, 2011. Photograph: Getty Images.
How does political censorship work in liberal societies? When my film Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia was banned in the United States in 1980, the broadcaster PBS cut all contact. Negotiations were ended abruptly; phone calls were not returned. Something had happened. But what? Year Zero had already alerted much of the world to Pol Pot’s horrors, but it also investigated the critical role of the Nixon administration in the tyrant’s rise to power and the devastation of Cambodia.
Six months later, a PBS official told me: ‘This wasn’t censorship. We’re into difficult political days in Washington. Your film would have given us problems with the Reagan administration. Sorry.’
In Britain, the long war in Northern Ireland spawned a similar, deniable censorship. The journalist Liz Curtis compiled a list of more than 50 television films that were never shown or indefinitely delayed. The word ‘ban’ was […]
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