Stephan: Here is what I take away from this article: This is the virtual corporate state at its most naked. VCSes make vast profit because they no longer have any national allegiance; their geography is the world. You can see from their patterns of focus and investment how little they care for the well-being of American society. They shelter in the U.S. because here they can to various degrees buy or control every branch of government, and protect themselves, while profiting from building the protection. You don't break laws when you make the laws.
We are not going to get out of this crisis until we learn that a society's most important national asset is the quality of life of its people.
Strong second-quarter earnings from McDonald’s, General Electric and Caterpillar on Friday are just the latest proof that booming profits have allowed Corporate America to leave the Great Recession far behind.
But millions of ordinary Americans are stranded in a labor market that looks like it’s still in recession. Unemployment is stuck at 9.2 percent, two years into what economists call a recovery. Job growth has been slow and wages stagnant.
‘I’ve never seen labor markets this weak in 35 years of research,’ says Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University.
Wages and salaries accounted for just 1 percent of economic growth in the first 18 months after economists declared that the recession had ended in June 2009, according to Sum and other Northeastern researchers.
In the same period after the 2001 recession, wages and salaries accounted for 15 percent. They were 50 percent after the 1991-92 recession and 25 percent after the 1981-82 recession.
Corporate profits, by contrast, accounted for an unprecedented 88 percent of economic growth during those first 18 months. That’s compared with 53 percent after the 2001 recession, nothing after the 1991-92 recession and 28 percent after the 1981-82 recession.
What’s behind the disconnect between strong corporate […]
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SHELLEE TYLER, - Planetsave
Stephan: It's not as if some people don't see it coming. And they are certainly speaking out. The problem is too few people listen.
Climate change poses a major threat to future peace and security, a senior UN official has warned. Achim Steiner from the UN Environment Program said climate change would also ‘exponentially
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Saturday, July 23rd, 2011
HENRY MCDONALD, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: Imagine how bad it has to have gotten within the clerical structure of the Roman Catholic Church, with its distorted and increasingly grotesque sexual issues, to make an Irish Prime Minister, in what you used to be one of the most Catholic countries on Earth, speak out in this way.
DUBLIN –The archbishop of Dublin has said the Irish prime minister’s attack on the Catholic church following a report on child sex abuse in the country should be a wake-up call for clergymen.
Enda Kenny launched his unprecedented attack on the Vatican in the Irish parliament, accusing it of downplaying the rape and torture of Irish children by clerical sex abusers.
He said the recent Cloyne report had exposed an attempt by the holy see to frustrate the inquiry into child sex abuse just three years ago and illuminated the ‘dysfunction’ and the elitism still dominant in the Vatican.
Archbishop Diarmuid Martin – close to tears in an interview on RTE Television – said the only way all allegations, abuse and cover-ups could be exposed was through invasive audits of each diocese. ‘I’m very disappointed, annoyed,’ he said.
‘What do you do when you’ve got groups, whether in the Vatican or in Ireland, who try to undermine what is being done or simply refuse to understand what has been done?’
The archbishop said the diocese of Cloyne had ignored Vatican policy issued in 2001 by the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict.
‘What does that say? What sort of a cabal is this that is […]
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Saturday, July 23rd, 2011
KELLEY JEANIE, - News in a Box
Stephan: This is one of the diseases that won't be caught in time in thousands of poor women because the Religious Right is killing Planned Parenthood. So it will continue to mutate and spread in this new form, until we have a major medical crisis. This is what happens when policy is made with no reference to actual facts.
Gonorrhea is a sexual disease that had a cure if the treatment was based on an antibiotic, but the scientists found that the disease had a dangerous mutation that is very resistant on the cure with antibiotics.
The disease that was one treated with a penicillin treatment is now resistant at this kind of medicine and the doctors are worried about the repercussions. The experts found a mutation of this disease that is not responding to any kind of antibiotic.
More, the scientist warns that the sexual transmission disease might become a global health problem, especially in this moment when in Japan there was discovered a case of gonorrhea, having the mutation H041, that is incurable. Gonorrhea disease evolved in the last years and all the treatment became one by one inefficient.
There is not very long time since the treatment was based only on the antibiotics, from the cephalosporin category, but for this new mutation, the treatment is not efficient.
The scientist that discovered the mutation, Magnus Unemo, from Swedish Reference Laboratory for Pathogenic Neisseria, said that from the beginning of this treatment and now, the germ that triggers the disease, Neisseria gonorrhea, has a remarkable resistance.
The scientists said that the phenomenon is […]
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Saturday, July 23rd, 2011
PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS, - Counterpunch
Stephan: As readers will instantly recognize this pretty closely parallels my own thinking.
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury, Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal, and professor of economics in six universities. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, was published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com
Thanks to Rick Ingrasci, MD.
Recently, the bond rating agencies that gave junk derivatives triple-A ratings threatened to downgrade US Treasury bonds if the White House and Congress did not reach a deficit reduction deal and debt ceiling increase. The downgrade threat is not credible, and neither is the default threat. Both are make-believe crises that are being hyped in order to force cutbacks in Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.
If the rating agencies downgraded Treasuries, the company executives would be arrested for the fraudulent ratings that they gave to the junk that Wall Street peddled to the rest of the world. The companies would be destroyed and their ratings discredited. The US government will never default on its bonds, because the bonds, unlike those of Greece, Spain, and Ireland, are payable in its own currency. Regardless of whether the debt ceiling is raised, the Federal Reserve will continue to purchase the Treasury’s debt. If Goldman Sachs is too big to fail, then so is the US government.
There is no budget focus on the illegal wars and military occupations that the US government has underway in at least six countries or the 66-year old US occupations of Japan and Germany and the ring […]
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