$38 Billion Budget Deal Reached to Avert Shutdown

Saturday 09 April 2011
$38 Billion Budget Deal Reached to Avert Shutdown
Carl Hulse, The New York Times News Service: "Congressional leaders and President Obama headed off a shutdown of the government with less than two hours to spare Friday night under a tentative budget deal that would cut $38 billion from federal spending this year. After days of tense negotiations and partisan quarrelling, House Republicans came to preliminary terms with the White House and Senate Democrats over financing the government for the next six months, resolving a stubborn impasse that had threatened to disrupt federal operations across the country and around the globe."
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House Passes Anti-Net Neutrality Resolution
Nadia Prupis, Truthout: "The Republican-controlled House of Representatives on Friday, with the support of a handful of Democrats, passed a joint resolution to repeal the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) net neutrality regulations that would enforce competitive behavior among Internet companies... One of the major backers of the anit-net neutrality resolution is Freedom Works, a right-wing nonprofit organization, that has received funding from Verizon and AT&T, who stand to benefit if the law is overturned, and the Koch Brothers family fountain."
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Hero of Egypt's Revolution, Military Faces Critics as Protests Resume
Mona El-Naggar and Michael Slackman, The New York Times News Service: "A blogger was jailed recently for 'insulting the military.' Human rights advocates say that thousands of people have been arrested and tried before military courts in the last two months. Protesters have been tortured and female activists subjected to so-called virginity tests. Fed up and angry with Egypt’s military rulers, tens of thousands of demonstrators turned out in Tahrir Square here for one of the largest demonstrations since the former president, Hosni Mubarak, stepped down on Feb. 11. The protest was being called the Friday of Warning."
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Offshored Production, Dysfunctional Diplomacy and Outsourced Policy: A Three-Part Analysis on America's Trade Decline
Ian Fletcher, Truthout: "America's manufacturing sector, despite record output, is actually in very deep trouble: record output doesn't prove the sector healthy when we are running a huge trade deficit in manufactured goods - that is, consuming more goods than we produce and plugging the gap with asset sales and debt. But this analysis of the problem only touches the quantitative surface of our ongoing industrial decline. Real industries are not abstract aggregates; they are complex ecosystems of suppliers and supply chains, skills and customer relationships, long-term investments and returns."
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US Healthcare System Unprepared for Major Nuclear Emergency
Sheri Fink, ProPublica: "U.S. officials say the nation's health system is ill-prepared to cope with a catastrophic release of radiation, despite years of focus on the possibility of a terrorist 'dirty bomb' or an improvised nuclear device attack. A blunt assessment circulating among American officials says 'Current capabilities can only handle a few radiation injuries at any one time.' That assessment, prepared by the Department of Homeland Security in 2010 and stamped 'for official use only,' says 'there is no strategy for notifying the public in real time of recommendations on shelter or evacuation priorities.'"
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The Clean Energy Revolution Won't be About Clean Energy
Keith Harrington, CommonDreams.org: "As the overlords of the current world order, fossil fuel companies do have a lot to fear from a powerful popular uprising. However, the Egyptian case also shows us that when such an uprising comes, it won't be fundamentally about the climate. The revolution against the fossil-fuel barons won't be a clean energy revolution. It will simply be a revolution. This is the first major lesson for environmental movement organizers: when people rise up they rise up because of unbearable socio-economic circumstances - oppressive, corrupt regimes, austerity measures, and aggressive assaults upon their economic and civil rights. They never have and very likely never will rise up en masse over bad environmental policies."
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Fracking Insiders Score Big in New Gas Bill, But Americans Not Told the True Costs of Massive Drilling Plan
Steve Horn, PR Watch: "Corporate insiders peddling the claim that drilling for methane gas will solve America's energy needs just scored big in Washington - and for these insiders fracking for gas is very lucrative business. House Resolution 1380, given the feel-good moniker of the 'New Alternative Transportation to Give Americans Solutions Act' or 'NAT GAS Act,' was announced on Wednesday, April 6, in the U. S. House of Representatives. The bill is 24-pages long and rewards the fracking industry with tax credits and products to help 'drive' consumption. The bigger the vehicle, the more tax credits given."
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Ryan Turns Knife on Medicare, Medicaid
Margaret Flowers, War Is A Crime.org: "Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the Republican chairman of the U.S. House Budget Committee, unveiled two proposals this week which if enacted would constitute a mortal threat to our nation’s health – particularly to the health of our seniors and our most vulnerable populations. The first proposal, Senate Joint Resolution 10, would amend the Constitution by imposing rigid and arbitrary restraints on federal spending. The second, his fiscal year 2012 federal budget resolution (misleadingly and eerily called 'The Path to Prosperity'), would essentially kill the Medicare program and gut Medicaid, among its other nasty effects."
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Book Review: "Academically Adrift"
Margaret Austin Smith, Truthout: "Bless your hearts, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, for calling on institutions of higher education to prioritize undergraduate learning. With "Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses," sociologists Arum and Roksa argue that undergraduate students seem to learn very little in college and that, in fact, they (Arum and Roksa) can show just how much those undergraduates are learning by bringing their own quantitative data set Determinants of College Learning (DCL) ... together with scores from the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), a standardized test that analyzes 'core outcomes espoused by all of higher education': critical thinking, problem solving and writing."
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BUZZFLASH DAILY HEADLINES

Is Milton Friedman, the father of modern anarchistic capitalism and the economic "shock doctrine" a "true hero of freedom"?
That's how George W. Bush praised Friedman in a White House ceremony a few years back. (Ronald Reagan bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom on the "Republican revolution" guru.)
I came across a clip of the event the other night, and it brought home how fervently this nation's political and financial elite have embraced an extremist notion. America's domestic and foreign policy now proceeds on the assumption that democracy can only flourish with the existence of unfettered, unregulated, predatory corporate activity.
The Milton Friedman "Chicago School" economic model equates democracy with the consolidation of capital and power.
This explains, as Naomi Klein has pointed out, everything from our overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile to our attempt to convert Iraq into a mini-American "free market." For Friedman adherents - such as Bush and a good portion of the DC political figures and consolidated mainstream media owners - democracy does not exist without the "freedom" for corporations to accumulate as much money and power as possible, without any laws that let the common good supersede the acquisition of unlimited profit and corporate/Wall Street control of the marketplace.
When large corporate and financial industry assets are so vast that they, in essence, determine federal government policy in so many important areas, freedom for the individual is diminished, not enhanced.
Milton Friedman (who died in 2006) was no "hero of freedom," unless you believe that the rights of people are secondary to the "rights" of corporations and banks.
Mark Karlin
Editor, BuzzFlash at Truthout
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