Thursday, August 30th, 2012
Larry Elliott, Economics Editor - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: I confess this article caught me by surprise. Yet it is well documented, and its conclusions have to be taken seriously. That said I find it interesting that corporate people, and people who live on invested money, are overwhelmingly Republican. Once again it shows the power of prejudice over actual facts.
It also raises questions as to why the American financial media hasn't already published this; why it took an English publication to dig this out.
As ever, the economy will be the key issue in the US presidential race. Mitt Romney’s aim will be to brand Barack Obama a failure for his stewardship and to argue that Americans would be better off electing a Republican who knows something about business.
The team at CMC Markets set out to test this assumption by analysing stock market returns under every president since 1900. A YouTube presentation of the report shows that as far as Wall Street is concerned, it is better to vote Democrat. The average monthly return on the stock market has been 0.73% under Democrat presidents, almost double the 0.38% under Republicans.
Returns were highest under Calvin Coolidge, a Republican president during the Roaring 20s, when the stock market boomed ahead of the Wall Street Crash. But the next two presidents in the league table were Democrats – Bill Clinton and Franklin Roosevelt. Obama’s performance, using this yardstick of economic health, has been above average – only slightly below that of Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.
Normally higher stock market returns would be associated with higher levels of risk. But when adjusted for volatility, Democrat presidents still come out comfortably on top.
The […]
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Thursday, August 30th, 2012
THOM SHANKER, - truthout.org/New York Times News Service
Stephan: Throughout the modern era the U.S. has always been one of the world's major death merchants. It makes people very uncomfortable to talk about this and, when pressed, they quickly shift the conversation to how many jobs it creates -- apparently not recognizing the irony. One wonders how many jobs could have been created if we had truly embraced alternative energy. But, now, our presence in the weapons market closely resembles monopoly. Are you happy that your country sells most of the weapons used to kill people in humanity's various wars and warlets?
Washington – Weapons sales by the United States tripled in 2011 to a record high, driven by major arms sales to Persian Gulf allies concerned about Iran’s regional ambitions, according to a new study for Congress.
Overseas weapons sales by the United States totaled $66.3 billion last year, or more than three-quarters of the global arms market, valued at $85.3 billion in 2011. Russia was a distant second, with $4.8 billion in deals.
The American weapons sales total was an ‘extraordinary increase’ over the $21.4 billion in deals for 2010, the study found, and was the largest single-year sales total in the history of United States arms exports. The previous high was in fiscal year 2009, when American weapons sales overseas totaled nearly $31 billion.
A worldwide economic decline had suppressed arms sales over recent years. But increasing tensions with Iran drove a set of Persian Gulf nations – Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Oman – to purchase American weapons at record levels.
These Gulf states do not share a border with Iran, and their arms purchases focused on expensive warplanes and complex missile defense systems.
The report was prepared by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, a division of the Library of Congress. […]
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Thursday, August 30th, 2012
LAURA BEIL, - The Daily Beast
Stephan: This is the sad truth about the Illness Profit System and cancer. If you, or someone in your family, or one of your friends has cancer it will be all too familiar.
In his more than 35 years of practice, Dr. Lowell Schnipper has seen a lot of women die from breast cancer. A patient’s options start to dwindle by the time tumor cells set up outposts in the bones, lungs, and other organs, defying all attempts to keep them under control. But in June, when the government approved Perjeta, Schnipper had something new to offer. The drug is one of an innovative class of drugs known as ‘targeted therapies.
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Thursday, August 30th, 2012
DAVID MORRIS, - Nation of Change
Stephan: In my conversations with people in their 20s and 30s, here at Omega, I have been very struck by their complete cynicism about the American government. It is not a healthy sign for a democracy when bright, caring, young adults think the whole game is rigged. Yet, in truth, I have to admit that it is and they are correct, as this report points out.
Almost daily we read about another apparently stiff financial penalty meted out for corporate malfeasance. This year corporations are on track to pay as much as $8 billion to resolve charges of defrauding the government, a record sum, according to the Department of Justice. Last year big business paid the Securities and Exchange Commission $2.8 billion to settle disputes.
Sounds like an awful lot of money. And it is, for you and me. But is it a lot of money for corporate lawbreakers? The best way to determine that is to see whether the penalties have deterred them from further wrongdoing.
The empirical evidence argues they don’t. A 2011 New York Times analysis of enforcement actions during the last 15 years found at least 51 cases in which 19 Wall Street firms had broken anti fraud laws they had agreed never to breach.
Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, among others, have settled fraud cases by stipulating they would never again violate an anti fraud law, only to do so again and again and again. Bank of America’s securities unit has agreed four times since 2005 not to violate a major anti fraud statute, and another four times not […]
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Thursday, August 30th, 2012
Larry Dossey, MD, Executive Editor - Explore
Stephan:
There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: First Series1
When developmental psychologist Joseph Chilton Pearce was in his early thirties, teaching humanities in a college, he was engrossed in theology and the psychology of Carl Jung. Pearce describes himself as ‘obsessed
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