Truthout - 26 January 2012

Truthout - 26 January 2012

Gulf Reopens for Drilling as Obama Administration Accused of Low-Balling Effects of Spill
Yana Kunichoff, Truthout: "As the Obama administration announces the launch of its Blueprint for a Secure Energy Future ... a scientific integrity complaint alleges that officials 'manipulated' scientific data about the effects of the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil leak. Nearly two years after the March 2010 spill, the administration's new policy plans to open 38 million acres offshore of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama to possible development in June 2012. The area will be available to deepwater drilling."
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Five Missouri Democrats Discover Crosshairs Outside Their Capitol Offices
Adam Peck, ThinkProgress: "Five Democratic State Senators in Missouri discovered large, orange crosshair stickers over their office nameplates on Tuesday in the Capitol Building in Jefferson.... The Senate on Tuesday was debating a Republican-sponsored bill that would seek to block the implementation of the health care reform that President Obama and congressional Democrats passed in 2010. The controversy in Missouri comes in the same week that US Representative Gabrielle Giffords formally resigned from Congress."
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Paul Krugman | Romney's Anti-Obama Rhetoric: A Demonstration of Moral Cowardice
Paul Krugman, Krugman & Co.: "What the story of Mr. Romney and the auto bailout actually shows is something we already knew from health care: He's a smart guy who is also a moral coward. His original proposal for the auto industry, like his health-care reform law in Massachusetts, bore considerable resemblance to what Mr. Obama actually did. But when the deed took place, Mr. Romney ... joined the rest of his party in whining and denouncing the plan."
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The War on a Woman's Right to Choose, 2012 Edition
Tanya Somanader, ThinkProgress: "2011 was a banner year for anti-choice activists who succeeded in pushing through a record number of abortion restrictions. But it's a new year, and it appears the GOP is dead set on outdoing itself. Republicans in Congress and across the country are introducing a variety pack of extreme anti-abortion bills - including personhood initiatives, heartbeat bills, and fetal pain bills - that saw some success last year."
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Military Sexual Abuse: A Greater Menace Than Combat
H. Patricia Hynes, Truthout: "'A woman who signs up to protect her country is more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire,' stated former California Democratic Rep. Jane Harman in testimony before a July 2008 House panel investigating the military's handling of sexual assault reports. The Congresswoman added that her 'jaw dropped' when she learned from military doctors that four of ten women in a local veterans hospital had been raped by fellow soldiers."
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Defender of the Capitalist System: Department of Defense Worst in Competitive Contracts
Dina Rasor, Truthout: "The Department of Defense (DoD) came in the lowest in the government on competing their procurement contracts.... In the DoD, unlike the past, once a company makes a weapon, it almost always gets the follow-on contract. Some of these weapons ... go through generations of technical changes and use of totally difference technology, but because it was originally competed up to decades earlier, these follow-on contracts can be considered 'competitive.'"
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Immigration: Global Economy Has Forced Migration
David Bacon, The Americas Program: "The root problem with migration in the global economy is that it's forced migration. A coalition for reform should fight for the right of people to choose when and how to migrate. Freedom of movement is a human right. Even in a more just world, migration will continue, because families and communities are now connected over thousands of miles and many borders. Immigration policy should therefore make movement easier."
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"Fantastic" Drone Technology Comes to Rescue on the Border
Tom Barry, Truthout: "Over the past few years, Texas Republicans ... have been the among the leading high-profile proponents of drones for border security. Democratic Party politicians also generally share the mounting enthusiasm in Congress for this high-tech fix for border security. Neither the high price tag for the Predator and Reaper drones - $20 million apiece - nor the inability of [Customs and Border Protection] to offer any substantive documentation of their successful deployment, deters Congressional drone boosters."
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On the News With Thom Hartmann: Two Critical Pieces of Legislation Will Be Introduced in Congress This Week, and More
In today's On the News segment: Two critical pieces of legislation will be introduced in Congress this week, Adbusters calls for the occupation of the G8 and NATO summits in Chicago this spring, the US ranks 47th in the world when it comes to press freedom, and more.
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Why Climate Change Will Make You Love Big Government: A Secret History of Free Enterprise and the Government That Made It Possible
Christian Parenti, TomDispatch: "During natural disasters, society regularly turns to the state for help, which means such immediate crises are a much-needed reminder of just how important a functional big government turns out to be to our survival.... Can an individual, a town, a city, even a state really 'go it alone' when the weather turns genuinely threatening?"
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The Revolution Will Be Edible: Occupy Wall Street; the Arab Spring, No Bread, No Peace
Liam Hysjulien, As It Ought to Be: "Since 2008, the geopolitics of food, both on the production and consumption side, has become a growing crisis on the one hand, and a call for social revolution on the other.... Out of the Arab Spring revolutions, the importance of food has not only lent credence to realities of inequality, corruption, and desperation, but has also provided an emblematic demarcation for what kinds of abuse people will no longer endure."
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Education Reform: An Order-of-Magnitude Improvement
Marion Brady, Truthout: "Imagine the present corporately promoted education reform effort as a truck, its tires nearly flat from the weight of the many unexamined assumptions it carries.... If all the reformers' flawed assumptions are corrected, but the traditional math-science-language-arts-social-studies 'core curriculum' remains the main organizer of knowledge ... it won't take the young where they need to go if we care about societal survival. The mess from this generation's political paralysis and refusal to address looming problems can't be cleaned up using the same education that helped create it."
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Bill Moyers | How Power and Influence Helped Big Banks Rewrite the Rules
Bill Moyers, Truthout | Program Announcement: This weekend on Moyers & Company, Bill Moyers talks with former Citigroup Chairman John Reed and former Sen. Byron Dorgan to explore a momentous instance: how the mid-90's merger of Citicorp and Travelers Group - and a friendly presidential pen - brought down the Glass-Steagall Act, a crucial firewall between banks and investment firms which had protected consumers from financial calamity since the aftermath of the Great Depression. In effect, says Moyers, they put the watchdog to sleep.
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BUZZFLASH DAILY HEADLINES

Why do the Republicans and some Democrats in Congress enable the loss of jobs in America?

Perhaps it is because, as BuzzFlash at Truthout has noted many times, many of their corporate paymasters are now global corporations that don't really give a hoot about creating jobs in the US. As BuzzFlash has noted, the goal of a corporation - by its very capitalistic structure - is to increase profits, not increase jobs in America.

So, this is how it goes down. A company such as Wal-Mart expands overseas and creates jobs in other nations in two ways. It offshores its manufacturing to the lowest cost nations, where workers are often treated harshly for, at best, subsistence pay. Then it brings those goods back to the US where they are sold to Americans who economically can only afford items made overseas. The Wal-Mart customer may have lost his or her job because what he or she is buying is now made in China, for instance.

Meanwhile, Wal-Mart hires workers in the US at the lowest possible wages, many of them forced to go on Medicaid and food stamps to survive - in short, the government subsidizes the low-wage labor practices of Wal-Mart in the US. Wal-Mart isn't increasing exports from the US; it is increasing US reliance on imports.

Wal-Mart then also expands its stores, via free trade agreements, around the world, where goods are sold not generally from America, but from other low-wage nations. It creates jobs globally that don't benefit US workers to any great degree, just the stockholders of Wal-Mart.

The Wal-Mart heirs are among the richest persons in the world. Naturally, they give generously to politicians who support multinational corporations whose main job generation is in other nations. This completes the circle of what BuzzFlash has called the self-cannibalization of the workforce in America: working-class Americans economically forced to buy goods made by slave-wage earners in nations with few labor standards.

This is not just Wal-Mart. Progressives who love their Apple products and the Apple "brand" image of innovation contribute to this destructive cycle. There have been a number of recent stories on how Apple is a lead corporation in using overseas contractors who engage in exploitative labor practices - and all indications are that Apple, instead of improving working conditions, actually squeezes the manufacturers and assemblers harder each year by lowering payments or moving to even lower-cost and more abusive settings.

Indeed, even The New York Times has written two investigative stories on Apple's harsh working conditions in China. Reuters notes of the revelatory carefully-researched articles:

The New York Times published on Wednesday its second bombshell of a story on inhumane working conditions at Apple's Chinese manufacturers. So how will the world's most valuable company, notorious for its secrecy, respond?

So far, with silence.

You see, Apple is coming off of one of the most profitable quarters in corporate history, according to the Times.

And that is all the Republicans and many Democrats in Congress are interested in. Higher profits mean the rich (shareholders and executives) get richer and the politicians get bigger campaign contributions.

In his State of the Union Address, President Obama posed this challenge to Congress:

We should start with our tax code. Right now, companies get tax breaks for moving jobs and profits overseas. Meanwhile, companies that choose to stay in America get hit with one of the highest tax rates in the world. It makes no sense, and everyone knows it.

So let's change it. First, if you're a business that wants to outsource jobs, you shouldn't get a tax deduction for doing it....

Second, no American company should be able to avoid paying its fair share of taxes by moving jobs and profits overseas.

From now on, every multinational company should have to pay a basic minimum tax. And every penny should go towards lowering taxes for companies that choose to stay here and hire here in America.

Third, if you're an American manufacturer, you should get a bigger tax cut. If you're a high-tech manufacturer, we should double the tax deduction you get for making your products here. And if you want to relocate in a community that was hit hard when a factory left town, you should get help financing a new plant, equipment, or training for new workers....

My message is simple. It is time to stop rewarding businesses that ship jobs overseas and start rewarding companies that create jobs right here in America. Send me these tax reforms, and I will sign them right away.

The president shouldn't spend too much time waiting for such a piece of legislation. There's no profit in it for the wealthy or politicians in DC.

Mark Karlin
Editor, BuzzFlash at Truthout

Congress Doesn't Want to Give Up Its Insider Trading Privileges
Read the Article at The Atlantic

When Is Opinion Just Disrespect?
Read the Article at BuzzFlash

Why the GOP Race Could Be Irrelevant
Read the Article at Salon

The Pathology of Inequality in the US: Our National Dementia About Work and Wealth
Read the Article at BuzzFlash

Tom DeLay: Newt Gingrich Was "Erratic, Undisciplined"
Read the Article at ThinkProgress

The Ten Most Racist Moments of the GOP Primary (So Far)
Read the Article at AlterNet

Connecticut Mayor's Crude Plan for Better GOP Relations With Latinos: "Have Tacos"
Read the Article at The New York Daily News

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