Friday, April 23, 2010

Truthout 4/23

Do the Right Thing
William Rivers Pitt, Truthout: "For a number of years, the running joke about me among my friends was that, because I write for a living, I'm a bum. They didn't really mean it, and there was definitely a tinge of envy in their voices when they cracked on me about it - after all, my commute to work is the 15 feet from my bed to my desk, and wearing pants is entirely optional in my 'office' - but there it is."
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Former Bush Appointee to Plead Guilty to Contempt of Congress
Jason Leopold, Truthout: "A former Bush administration official who headed an obscure office within the White House that protects whistleblowers and enforces anti-discrimination laws was charged Thursday with criminal contempt of Congress."
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Marijuana, Boom and Bust
Alexander Cockburn, Truthout: "Marijuana was by no means the first boom crop to delight my home county of Humboldt, here in Northern California, five-hours' drive from San Francisco up Route 101. Leaving aside the boom of appropriating land from the Indians, there was the timber boom, which crested in the 1950's when Douglas fir in the Mattole Valley went south to frame the housing tracts of Los Angeles."
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Pro-Israel, Pro-Peace: The J Street Balancing Act
Yana Kunichoff, Truthout: "On the alphabetically named streets of Washington, DC, there is no J Street; the naming jumps from I to K. Legend has it that this is the result of a personal spat the architect of the city, Pierre Charles L'Enfant, had with someone whose name started with J. However, for the past two years, the presence of a J Street on Capitol Hill has been shaking up the landscape many had written off as fixed. A political action group, named J Street, has been working to redress a balance in the nation's capital: the lack of a pro-peace and pro-Israel lobbying voice."
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James Kwak and Simon Johnson: Banks Are an Oligarchy
Bill Moyers Journal: "Moyers and economists James Kwak and Simon Johnson wonder whether the financial powers are more profitable, and more resistant to regulation than ever. How did Big Finance grow so powerful that its hijinks nearly brought down the global economy - and what hope is there for real reform with Washington politicians on Wall Street's payroll?"
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"Imagine": A Simple Plan for World Peace
Eleanor J. Bader, Truthout: "The first time I heard John Lennon's 'Imagine,' I was a high school kid with little sense that the world could be different. The song stopped me in my tracks. Tears streamed down my cheeks as Lennon's visionary prayer for a world without religious or nationalistic swagger set my heart and mind racing."
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Cheating US Workers
Dick Meister, Truthout: "Hundreds of thousands of workers are being cheated by US employers who blatantly violate the laws that are supposed to guarantee those workers decent wages, hours and working conditions."
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What the Doomsayers Haven't Been Telling You About Greece
Steven Hill, Truthout: "The recent battle over health care reform in the United States, in which the Obama administration was barely able to pass weak reform, is just further proof of how far the US has fallen behind Europe. Yet all the media has been able to obsess over for the last couple of months is - The Greek Debt Crisis!"
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Ciudad Juarez: The Global Economy's New Killing Fields (Audio)
Rose Aguilar, Your Call: "How is the so-called 'war on drugs' and NAFTA affecting Mexico? On the next Your Call, we'll have a conversation with journalist Charles Bowden, author of 'Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields.' In 2009, 23,000 people were killed in drug-related violence in Mexico, 4,300 of them in Ciudad Juarez alone. What explains the rise in drug violence?"
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Why Sharks Should Not Own Sport
John Pilger, Truthout: "As Tiger Woods returns to golf, not all his affairs are salacious headlines. In Dubai, the Tiger Woods Golf Course in Dubai is costing $100 million to build. Dubai relies on cheap third world labor, as do certain consumer brands that have helped make Woods a billionaire. Nike workers in Thailand wrote to Woods, expressing their 'utmost respect for your skill and perseverance as an athlete' but pointing out that they would need to work 72,000 years 'to receive what you will earn from [your Nike] contract.'"
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Titan Over Wall Street
Eugene Robinson: "The politics of financial regulatory reform are simple. After the meltdown and the bailout, many Americans - perhaps most Americans - are inclined to see Wall Street as predatory and all-devouring. Striding into the lion's den and calling the beast to heel, as President Obama did Thursday, was a move without a downside."
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Obama's Warnings About a Looming Financial Crisis Come Back to Haunt Bernanke
Jason Leopold, Truthout: "For those accustomed at looking into the memory hole, President Barack Obama's pitch to Wall Street bankers Thursday on backing a tough financial reform package currently winding its way through Congress shouldn't come as a surprise."
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Senator Specter Takes On Wall Street Bankers
Greg Gordon, McClatchy Newspapers: "Sen. Arlen Specter said Thursday that he'd hold a hearing next month to examine Wall Street firms' potential conflicts of interest when they secretly bet against products similar to those they sold, and into whether investment banks were being penalized too lightly for their roles in wrecking the economy."
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Corporate Reform Is Long Overdue: Am I Missing Something Here?
Jack Lohman, Truthout: "Perhaps I'm biased. I bought $25,000 of stock in a corporation that I thought had a good idea. Little did I know that the CEO also had a second idea: to drain the shareholder value through high salaries and bonuses, and then put the company belly up. My money went down the tubes, as did many others, though the CEO and executives made out very well."
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The Pill 50 Years Later - The Fight for Coverage Continues
Catherine Epstein, The Women's Media Center: "An article published today in Time magazine explores that little medication with which so many of us are intimately familiar: the pill. The piece is a cover story, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the FDA's approval of the pill for contraceptive use. But the fact that we celebrate the 50th anniversary of approval, rather than invention, kind of says it all."
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I'm Not Shedding Any Tears for Daryl Gates
Dave Lindorff, Truthout: "The former Los Angeles police chief, Daryl Gates, who died last Friday of cancer at his home in California, is being widely credited in mostly laudatory newspaper obituaries as the man who developed the idea of Special Weapons And Tactics (SWAT) units - those paramilitary police teams so loved by Hollywood filmmakers - who bring the art and weaponry of modern warfare into communities, breaking into houses with faces covered in ski masks, and carrying assault weapons in order to make arrests for often minor offenses, or blowing away people - often innocent people - in what the modern military calls 'force escalation incidents.'"
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Clinton's Contrition
David Sirota, Truthout: "In 1992, I was in 10th grade. Hence, I didn't care about much more than the girls I could never get, the Philadelphia 76ers' playoff chances and the shortcomings of my own unimpressive basketball career (in that order) - and I certainly didn't care about politics. So when my teacher assigned me to represent a Southerner I'd never heard of in a mock presidential debate, I was, um, not psyched."
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