Friday, May 7, 2010

Truthout 5/7

Was the Gulf Oil Spill an Act of War? You Betcha
Randall Amster J.D., Ph.D., Truthout: "Speculation has been running rampant among certain sectors of the web world lately about the true origins of the massive oil spill that has engulfed the Gulf and threatens marine, plant, animal and human health in a region already beset by natural disasters and toxic industries."
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Hundreds of Union Janitors Fired Under Pressure From ICE
David Bacon, Truthout: "Federal immigration authorities have pressured one of San Francisco's major building service companies, ABM, into firing hundreds of its own workers. Some 475 janitors have been told that unless they can show legal immigration status, they will lose their jobs in the near future. ABM has been a union company for decades, and many of the workers have been there for years."
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The (Almost) Crash of Wall Street
Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog: "Ninety minutes before the end of the trading day today, the U.S. stock market almost melted down The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped nearly 1,000 points. The market regained ground before the end, like a giant 747 narrowly averting a crash landing, but the questions of the day are: What happened? And what does it mean?"
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Gulf Oil Spill: Questions Unanswered, Residents Try Legal Action
Mark Guarino, The Christian Science Monitor: "In the wake of the Gulf oil spill, rig operator BP has produced apologies, jobs for local fishermen to aid in the recovery efforts, and a promise to pay for all cleanup costs. But what it hasn't yet produced are answers to why the explosion happened and how exactly it plans to compensate local fishermen - unanswered questions that, three weeks after the explosion, are frustrating all those affected by the disaster, including leaders of gulf coast states and fishing operators."
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Unemployment Rises to 9.9 Percent, Driven by Jump in Labor Force Participation
Dean Baker, Truthout: "Nominal wage growth has averaged just 1.1 percent over the last quarter. The Labor Department reported that the unemployment rate rose to 9.9 percent in April as 805,000 people entered the labor force. Even with the economy generating 290,000 new jobs according to the establishment survey, this was not sufficient to keep the unemployment rate from rising. The establishment data was revised up for March to show a gain of 230,000 for the month."
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What Britain Taught Us
E.J. Dionne Jr.: "Britain produced an electoral earthquake all right, but not the one so many expected. The real lessons have less to do with two-party systems than with how economic change has challenged old strategies on both the right and the left. The Conservatives under David Cameron came in first with the most votes and the most seats. The big Tory gains reflected Cameron's shrewd understanding that only a moderate and forward-looking conservatism stands any chance of victory."
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Undocumented Immigrants Pay More in Taxes Than They Receive in Benefits
Alberto Ponce de León, El Diario de El Paso (Translation: Ryan Croken): "During their working life, undocumented immigrants in the United States will pay, on average, approximately $80,000 more in taxes per capita than they use in government services, owing to the fact that they are not eligible to take advantage of almost all of the social service programs offered by the federal government, according to a study released by the National Council of La Raza."
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News in Brief: US Adds Jobs as Markets Look Unstable and More ...
Jobs numbers indicate 290,000 more jobs in April, but unemployment rate rose slightly to 9.9 percent; bailout situation in Greece part of reason stock markets around the globe are down; Britain faces a hung Parliament following elections.
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Pentagon Bans Reporters From Covering Guantanamo Military Commissions
Nancy Youssef, McClatchy Newspapers: "The Pentagon Thursday banned four reporters, including one from McClatchy Newspapers, from covering future military commissions at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, charging that they'd violated ground rules by publishing the name of a former Army interrogator who was a witness at a hearing there this week."
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Just Don't Call It "Defense"
John Lamperti, Truthout: "The Pentagon 'base budget' request for fiscal year 2011 (beginning on October 1) calls for about $549 billion, an increase of $18 billion over the appropriation for the current fiscal year. That's nowhere near the whole story. The administration is also requesting about $160 billion for 'Overseas Contingency Operations' (OCO) that goes to pay for wars and occupations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. There's also $25 billion or more in military spending outside the 'Department of Defense,' much of that for nuclear weapons included in the Department of Energy's budget. (This $25 billion could be much larger, depending on what is included.)"
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Our First Line of Defense
Eugene Robinson: "The system worked. Authorities responded to the attempted Times Square bombing about as well as anyone possibly could - proving, once again, that viewing terrorism exclusively in a military context is wrong. It's a police matter, too."
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Police Across Arizona See Dangers of New Law
Michelle Chen, ColorLines: "It's not every day in Arizona that the police are so eager not to do their job. Yet the state's latest anti-immigrant crack down has evoked protests from cops across the state, who fear that a new measure to criminalize undocumented immigrants will only make it harder to deal with local crime."
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Interrogator Says Guantanamo Detainee Omar Khadr Was Told He'd Likely Be Raped in US
Carol Rosenberg, Miami Herald: "To get teen terror suspect Omar Khadr to cooperate, a former U.S. Army interrogator testified Thursday, he told the wounded Canadian a 'fictitious' tale of an Afghan youth who was gang-raped in an American prison and died."
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Congress Backs Wall Street, Rejects Big Bank Break-Up
Zach Carter, The Campaign for America's Future: "Late last night, the U.S. Senate rejected the single most important element of Wall Street reform by a vote of 33 to 61. The SAFE Banking Act would have forced the break-up of the nation's six largest banks, and dramatically reduced the political clout of America's financial elite. The 61 votes against the measure are votes in favor of Wall Street's stranglehold on our economy. No matter what else is ultimately enacted in the name of Wall Street reform, Congress has decided that it will not confront the single greatest problem in the U.S. economy: Too Big To Fail."
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Who Was Slowest in Responding to BP Spill? The Right
Isaiah J. Poole, The Campaign for America's Future: "The current drumbeat of commentary on the right that the Obama administration was too slow in responding to the BP oil spill disaster in the Gulf raises two obvious questions."
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Strengthening the Link Between Pollution, Cancer
Valerie Brown, Miller-McCune: "Presidential advisory group moves to broaden focus of cancer research to precaution, prevention. A new report from a presidential advisory group represents a major advance in the struggle to protect people from exposure to carcinogenic chemicals."
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Blood or Treasure? Obama's Crucial Choice in the Middle East
Ira Chernus, TomDispatch.com: "Writing about U.S. Middle East policy used to be a boring job. You'd start out with 'The U.S. supports Israel's stand on ...' and then just fill in the details. No longer. Many pundits claim to smell the winds of policy change blowing from the White House. Every word about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the president or his advisors is now parsed by journalists like so many soothsayers studying oracle bones."
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Mystery Disease Linked to Missing Israeli Scientist
H.P. Albarelli Jr., Truthout: "Media outlets across the Northwest United States began reporting on April 24 that a strange, previously unknown strain of virulent airborne fungi that has already killed at least six people in Oregon, Washington and Idaho is spreading throughout the region. The fungus, according to expert microbiologists, who have expressed alarm about the emergence of the strain, is a new genotype of Cryptococcus gatti fungi."
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The Motto of Mad Men
David Sirota: "For most of us, conjuring concise and cogent catchphrases is nearly impossible. In fact, the skill can seem like the black magic of mystical mad men. During the 1960s, the most influential of these Svengalis were the executives working in Madison Avenue advertising firms."
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Globalization Is the Contagion: On the Idiocy of Interdependency
Kent Welton, Op-Ed News: "Were there no European union there would be no Greek crisis beyond Greece, Greece would have retained its currency and paid its price for budget problems in the value of its currency. But the stitching together of so many diverse countries and cultures into one unit, with one currency, has presented far more problems than it has solved and, worse, has removed national and cultural liberty, sovereignty, as well as necessary freedom for tariff-based re-balancing mechanisms."
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Flying Over the BP Oil Disaster (Video)
Hurricane creek keeper John Wathan took a flight over the Gulf of Mexico to document the BP oil disaster.
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