Thursday, September 8th, 2011
, - Institute of Science in Society
Stephan: Four companies now control 90 of the seed market. All of human agriculture is based on seeds, which is to say all of human nutrition is now dependent on these companies. As this report makes clear -- and it is but one of a growing list of such reports -- the behavior of these corporations is no different than other corporate performance. Which is to say profit comes first and everything else comes a distant second.
I cannot urge you too strongly to begin to grow as much of your own food as you can, and to use unmanipulated traditional seed stocks, saving seeds from year to year. It is already getting difficult to get unmanipulated seeds. GMO is of a different order from the ancient practice of cross-breeding, because the manipulation is linked to specific patented pesticides and herbicides.
A team of independent scientists led by Gilles-Eric Séralini at Caen University in France carried out a meta-analysis combining the results of 19 previous studies [1], and their report concluded: ‘From the regulatory tests performed today, it is unacceptable to submit 500 million Europeans and several billions of consumers worldwide to the new pesticide GM-derived foods or feed, this being done without more controls (if any) than the only 3-month-long toxicological tests and using only one mammalian species, especially since there is growing evidence of concern.
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Wednesday, September 7th, 2011
ANNIE GOWEN, - Washington Post
Stephan: As in any failing empire if you can get close to the camp fire and know the songs you can make obscene amounts of money. All it takes is greed and situational morality. I know, I was there, and walked away. I couldn't do it, and live with myself.
Millions of dollars worth of federal contracts transformed Anita Talwar from a government accounting clerk into a wealthy woman - one who can afford a $2.8 million home in the Washington suburbs with its own elevator, wine cellar and Swarovski crystal chandeliers.
Talwar, a 59-year-old immigrant from India, had no idea that she and her husband would amass a small fortune when she launched a company providing tech support to the federal government in 1987. But she shrewdly took advantage of programs for minority-owned small businesses and rode a boom in federal contracting.
By the time Talwar sold Advanced Management Technology in 2004, it had grown from a one-woman shop to a company with more than 350 employees and $100 million in annual revenue - all of it from government contracts.
Talwar’s success - and that of hundreds of other contractors like her - is a key factor driving the explosion of the region’s wealth over the last two decades. It also has exacerbated the gap between high- and low-wage workers, which is wider in the D.C. area than almost anywhere else in the United States.
Washingtonians now enjoy the highest median household income of any metropolitan area in the country, and five of […]
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Wednesday, September 7th, 2011
OMAR VALDIMARSSON, - Reuters
Stephan: I think tiny Iceland is the most interesting country on the planet. Almost uniquely it is not buying into the policies which serve the interests of the corporatocracy.
REYKJAVIK — Iceland’s president accused European countries on Sunday of having bullied it into agreeing to guarantee repayment of the debts of a failed bank, reviving a dispute with Britain and the Netherlands whose citizens are owed billions.
When Iceland’s banking sector collapsed in the 2008 global financial crisis, accounts were frozen at the bank Landsbanki, which had accepted deposits from British and Dutch savers through online funds called Icesave.
Iceland says the estate of the failed bank will be enough to repay about $5 billion of debt to the British and the Dutch. The two countries had wanted the government in Reykjavik to give a state guarantee to the repayment.
In a referendum earlier this year, Icelanders rejected for a second time giving a guarantee.
‘People (in the government) bowed to the bullying of the Europeans …,’ President Olafur Ragnar Grimsson told RUV public radio. He said the British and Dutch demand that the government guarantee the debt had been ‘absurd.’
‘So, what is happening now is proving that if the issue had been handled sensibly here from the beginning, it would have been totally unnecessary to put the people of Iceland and our cooperation with Europe into this straightjacket,’ he said.
‘The EU should […]
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Wednesday, September 7th, 2011
Stephan: No one 50 years from now will be able to say we weren't warned. The Republican economic model is utterly bankrupt as anyone without blinders can plainly see. But such is the power of the corporatocracy, and its Rightwing vassals that nothing will happen because the policies that support a thriving middle class are in opposition to those that give corporations short-term benefits.
GENEVA — The pursuit of austerity measures and deficit cuts is pushing the world economy toward disaster in a misguided attempt to please global financial markets, the annual report of the United Nations economic thinktank UNCTAD said on Tuesday.
The report, entitled ‘Post-crisis policy challenges in the world economy,
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Wednesday, September 7th, 2011
CHRISTOPHER PALMERI, - Bloomberg
Stephan: California is the largest sub-economy in the U.S. and nearly half its work force is... out of work. There can be no recovery within this reality. Much of the reason this situation exists arises from putting corporate special interests first, and ordinary people, somewhere way back on the bus.
The percentage of working-age Californians with jobs has fallen to a record low, and employment may not return to pre-recession levels until the second half of the decade, according to a research group.
Just 55.4 percent of working-age Californians, defined as those 16 or older, had a job in July, down from 56.2 percent a year earlier and the lowest level since 1976, the Sacramento- based California Budget Project said in a report released late yesterday.
California’s 12 percent unemployment rate in July, the nation’s second-highest after Nevada, compared with 9.1 percent nationwide. The most-populous state lost 1.4 million jobs during the recession that began three years ago, and has gained back only 226,800, or about 17 percent, according to the report.
Alissa Anderson, deputy director of the research group, which concentrates on issues facing low- and middle-class Californians, said women have disproportionately trailed men in regaining jobs.
‘Women represent nearly half of the workforce,
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