August 31, 2014

Howard Zinn on the Ludlow Massacre

August 31, 2014

Howard Zinn: A reinvigorated labor movement needed for social upheaval

August 30, 2014

Great reader responses to a Guardian story about the UK terror threat level being raised

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/aug/29/uk-terror-threat-raised-severe



State of emergency: we need wider powers. Private property suspended, all property deeds transferred to the government with immediate effect.
Do not leave your homes except to work, citizen.
Show me your papers.

NucMed ReluctantDissident
29 August 2014 2:54pm


"Step up to red alert!"
"...Are you sure Sir? It does mean changing the bulb..."
To quote Red Dwarf.

bobnoxious BombNumber20
29 August 2014 3:00pm


To quote an episode from 'Futurama' - 'Beige Alert! Beige Alert!'

Saeid Alami BombNumber20
29 August 2014 3:06pm


Unless we're supposed to *do* something (dig a bunker, stock up on canned food) when the threat level is raised, isn't it all a bit meaningless?
If there is a genuine raised risk of a threat, then the security services should be attempting to foil it - as is their job.
Aside from attempted scaremongering (do you know anyone who is worried when this happens), I fail to see the objective.

Anothersmallcog lazerguided
29 August 2014 2:54pm


Classic distraction. Have they no shame - Lynton Crosby's fingerprints all over this. Do they - the establishment think we are really that thick?

NorthernLight
29 August 2014 2:49pm

It really is difficult to take this kind of thing seriously anymore. No recent government has any credibility on this score.

marukun NorthernLight
29 August 2014 2:59pm


Absolutely. This is total bullshit.
More people die falling down the stairs in the UK each year than ever from terrorist attacks.
Live you life normally but look both ways before crossing the road and don't run down the stairs.

Redtalk NorthernLight
29 August 2014 3:00pm


The message is just: Be scared, don't think analytically about the situation, just be scared


francoisP
29 August 2014 2:49pm

Citizens it is your duty to be afraid

Redtalk francoisP
29 August 2014 3:04pm


ISIS ARE LITERALLY LIVING NEXT DOOR TO YOU! You wonder how you lost your phone yesterday, IT WAS ISIS! They're on our streets so make sure you're constantly checking your back! I just think we should surrender our Human Rights to make sure ISIS can never hurt us!

August 30, 2014

Howard Zinn - Hidden History of The American Working Class

Published on Feb 24, 2013

Howard Zinn - Hidden History of The American Working Class - 58 min, 1992
In 1992, labor historian Howard Zinn made a presentation on
"The History Of The American Working Class". The presentation
took place in San Francisco at an educational forum sponsored
by the Labor Video Project.

August 29, 2014

'ISIS pose a greater threat to Britain than we have known before'

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2737724/Terror-attack-UK-highly-likely-warns-Home-Secretary-Theresa-May-threat-level-raised-severe.html


Wow, apparently even greater than Hitler's Luftwaffe.

The threat level is severe, which means an attack is likely, but UK officials say there's no evidence that an attack is imminent.


[font size="4"]Is anyone else's BS detector going off?[/font]

It's like the rerun of a bad movie.

August 29, 2014

Eliminating The Corporate Tax Has Got To Rank As One Of the Dumbest Ideas

from the Working Life blog:


Eliminating The Corporate Tax Has Got To Rank As One Of the Dumbest Ideas
Posted on 28 August 2014.


Politics is full of really asinine ideas–let’s see, the Iraq War counts as a good example. But, for perhaps the dumbest one going I’d offer up the mumbling, coming from even some Democrats, to eliminate the corporate tax. It is stupefyingly idiotic–in the midst of the greatest divide between rich and poor in 50 years, and corporate profits rising to record levels even as wage growth remain at its lowest level in half a century.

The folks at Citizens for Tax Justice have it nailed quite succinctly:

First, a corporation can hold onto its profits for years before paying them to shareholders. This means that if the personal income tax is the only tax on these profits, tax could be deferred indefinitely. It also means that people with large salaries could probably create shell corporations that would sell their services. Their income would then be transformed into corporate income and any tax would be deferred until they decide to spend the money, which could be decades later, if ever.Second, even when corporate profits are paid out as stock dividends to shareholders, under our current system about two-thirds of those stock dividends are paid to tax-exempt entitles, such as pensions and university endowments which are not subject to the personal income tax. In other words, a lot of corporate profits would never be taxed if there was no corporate income tax.

Third, our tax system overall is just barely progressive and it would be a lot less progressive if the corporate income tax were repealed. The corporate income tax is a progressive tax because it is mostly paid by the owners of capital — people who own corporate stocks (which pay smaller dividends because of the tax) and other business assets.

Some have tried to argue that the corporate tax is mostly borne by labor because it chases investment out of the United States, leaving working people with fewer jobs and/or lower wages. But corporate investment is not perfectly mobile and, as a result, the Treasury Department has concluded that 82 percent of the corporate income tax is paid by owners of capital, and consequently, 58 percent of the tax is paid by the richest 5 percent of Americans and 43 percent is paid by the richest one percent of Americans. Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation has reached similar conclusions.

Robert Reich, the same genius who was a passionate advocate FOR NAFTA, which arguably was a key component in the hammering down of wages over the past 20 years, is among those who have a dumb idea: eliminate the corporate tax and, then, tax dividends and capital gains as ordinary income and, then, as CTJ, says, “tax the gains on corporate stocks each year rather than only when they are realized when the stocks are sold. ..................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.workinglife.org/2014/08/28/eliminating-the-corporate-tax-has-got-to-rank-as-one-of-the-dumbest-ideas/#sthash.LdkzrV5G.dpuf

August 29, 2014

Why Wall Street and Consulting Firms Win at the Elite College Brain Drain Game

from Naked Capitalism:


Why Wall Street and Consulting Firms Win at the Elite College Brain Drain Game
Posted on August 27, 2014 by Yves Smith


The question of why graduates of prestigious undergraduate schools still wind up, in disproportionate numbers, at places like Goldman and McKinsey may seem so obvious as to be unworthy of notice. These schools are elite institutions, correct? Certainly this was all part of these students’ plans. They went to fancy academies to make sure they occupied a good position in society. The most obvious way to assure that is to get on a well-recognized fast-track career path. Even if things don’t work out as planned, these graduates will have accumulated more markers of their superior intelligence and work habits on their resumes, which surely will afford them better options later than other choices would have.

A new article in Washington Monthly describes why this conventional picture isn’t as tidy as it seems. Author Amy Binder and a small research team investigated recruitment processes at two campuses, Harvard and Stanford, and interviewed sixty undergraduates and recent grads who, seemingly by accident, wound up competing for and getting these highly-sought-after jobs. In fact, none of them had any interest in these careers before they encountered a systematic effort, in conjunct with the campus recruitment offices, to groom students for these plum positions. Consider: these firms still are magnets for new graduates:

In 2007, just before the global financial meltdown, almost 50 percent of Harvard seniors (58 percent of the men, 43 percent of the women) took jobs on Wall Street. That number contracted sharply during the Great Recession, but after 2009 it began rising again. Among this year’s graduating class at Harvard, 31 percent took jobs that will channel their energies into derivatives, mergers, and often destructive outsourcing. And many more tried out for such positions. According to a study by the sociologist Lauren Rivera, a full 70 percent of Harvard’s senior class submits résumés to Wall Street and consulting firms.

Meanwhile, among Harvard seniors who had secured employment last spring, a mere 3.5 percent were headed to government and politics, 5 percent to health-related fields, and 8.8 percent to any form of public service. Only high-tech fields captured the interest of graduating seniors at anywhere near the level of finance and consulting, and even this seemingly healthy countertrend has problems.

Yet perversely, the students aren’t keen about these jobs despite having competed fiercely to land them. As Binder writes:



It’s pretty much a given that way fewer than 6% will drop out. The compensation in these fields is well above those of other jobs that the employees can’t leave without taking a serious pay cut. And that pay gap widens further as they advance in these careers. That may not sound like a big sacrifice until you also realize that if someone has gotten married, or (worse from the perspective of mobility) had had kids, they have likely gotten themselves locked into overheads (houses, private schools, spousal expectations) that are very difficult to unwind. And these careers are so stressful (trust me on this one, despite the lofty pay and glamourous trappings, you have no right to say “no” to unreasonable tasks, time pressure, total hours, or travel demands) that buying yourself presents to reward yourself, aka “retail therapy,” becomes part of the coping mechanism. And that’s before you get to the fact that many of these firms are cult-like (Goldman and Bain are widely cited examples). The combination of routine boundary violations, limited contact with people outside the firm (family and friends go on the back burner) and elitism means that the employers strengthen their psychological hold over their staffers. For instance, even among those who had left Goldman to go to splashy jobs, virtually every one I spoke to said it took them two years to get over the idea that leaving Goldman was a major step down in life. ...................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/08/why-wall-street-and-consulting-firms-win-at-the-elite-college-brain-drain-game.html

August 28, 2014

With This Decade's Climate Policy, Expect More Warming Than if Nothing Was Done at All

With This Decade's Climate Policy, Expect More Warming Than if Nothing Was Done at All

Wednesday, 27 August 2014 12:13
By Bruce Melton, Truthout | News Analysis


The fundamental climate change policy question today is not how much we should reduce carbon dioxide emissions by when, but what will currently proposed carbon dioxide emissions reductions do to our climate in the near-term? In addition, what are the ramifications of short-lived climate pollutants that are discounted by the traditional long-term 100-year climate policy time frame?

Our current policy has changed little from the dawning of the Kyoto Protocol era. This era dates back to the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, and embodied the roots of current climate policy extending back to the first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report (IPCC) in 1988.

Currently proposed (June 2014) EPA regulations on carbon dioxide emissions reductions are only 13 percent more stringent than Kyoto's goals and do not address short-lived climate pollutants or the short-term climate time frame.

Since the inception of the Kyoto era, we have emitted as much carbon dioxide as was emitted in the prior 236 years. This rapid increase in greenhouse gas emissions is not the only thing that has changed. The science has changed dramatically as well. ..................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/25838-with-this-decades-climate-policy-expect-more-warming-than-if-nothing-was-done-at-all

August 28, 2014

Amy Goodman: The Guns of August

from truthdig:


The Guns of August

Posted on Aug 27, 2014
By Amy Goodman


In her epic, Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Guns of August,” historian Barbara Tuchman detailed how World War I began in 1914, and how the belligerence, vanity and poor policies of powerful leaders led millions to gory deaths in that four-year conflagration. Before people realized world wars had to be numbered, World War I was called “The Great War” or “The War to End All Wars,” which it wasn’t. It was the first modern war with massive, mechanized slaughter on land, sea and in the air. We can look at that war in retrospect, now 100 years after it started, as if through a distant mirror. The reflection, where we are today, is grim from within the greatest war-making nation in human history, the United States.

In the early years of the 20th century, the leaders of the nations of Europe had contrived a web of alliances, each treaty binding one country to join in the defense of another in the event of war. When the Austrian emperor’s son, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, visited Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, 19-year-old Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip assassinated him. As Barbara Tuchman writes in her book, published in 1962, Austria-Hungary attacked Serbia, which set off a chain reaction, involving Russia, France, Belgium and Great Britain in the war against Austria-Hungary, Germany and the Ottoman Empire.

After the war plans of the various powers failed, a period of brutal trench warfare began, with millions of lives lost under a relentless barrage of mortars, machine guns, mustard gas and newfangled airplanes outfitted with machine guns and bombs. By the war’s end, an estimated 9,700,000 soldiers would be dead, along with 6,800,000 civilians killed.

What, if anything, have we learned from the disaster of World War I? Look no farther than Gaza, or Ferguson, Mo. After nearly 50 days of the bombardment of Gaza with Israel’s intensely lethal, high-tech, U.S.-funded arsenal, Palestinian health officials put the number of Gazans killed at 2,139, of whom over 490 were children. Israel reported 64 soldiers killed as a result of its ground invasion of Gaza, with six civilians dead. The narrow Gaza Strip, one of the most densely populated places on Earth, suffering under an Israeli-imposed state of siege, is now a pile of rubble through which people pick, searching for the bodies of loved ones. ......................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_guns_of_august_20140827

August 27, 2014

Argentina plays hardball with the vultures

Colonization by Bankruptcy: The High-stakes Chess Match for Argentina

Posted on August 25, 2014
by Ellen Brown

If Argentina were in a high-stakes chess match, the country’s actions this week would be the equivalent of flipping over all the pieces on the board.
– David Dayen, Fiscal Times, August 22, 2014

Argentina is playing hardball with the vulture funds, which have been trying to force it into an involuntary bankruptcy. The vultures are demanding what amounts to a 600% return on bonds bought for pennies on the dollar, defeating a 2005 settlement in which 92% of creditors agreed to accept a 70% haircut on their bonds. A US court has backed the vulture funds; but last week, Argentina sidestepped its jurisdiction by transferring the trustee for payment from Bank of New York Mellon to its own central bank. That play, if approved by the Argentine Congress, will allow the country to continue making payments under its 2005 settlement, avoiding default on the majority of its bonds.

Argentina is already foreclosed from international capital markets, so it doesn’t have much to lose by thwarting the US court system. Similar bold moves by Ecuador and Iceland have left those countries in substantially better shape than Greece, which went along with the agendas of the international financiers.

The upside for Argentina was captured by President Fernandez in a nationwide speech on August 19th. Struggling to hold back tears, according to Bloomberg, she said:

When it comes to the sovereignty of our country and the conviction that we can no longer be extorted and that we can’t become burdened with debt again, we are emerging as Argentines.

. . . If I signed what they’re trying to make me sign, the bomb wouldn’t explode now but rather there would surely be applause, marvelous headlines in the papers. But we would enter into the infernal cycle of debt which we’ve been subject to for so long.

The Endgame: Patagonia in the Crosshairs

The deeper implications of that infernal debt cycle were explored by Argentine political analyst Adrian Salbuchi in an August 12th article titled “Sovereign Debt for Territory: A New Global Elite Swap Strategy.” Where territories were once captured by military might, he maintains that today they are being annexed by debt. The still-evolving plan is to drive destitute nations into an international bankruptcy court whose decisions would have the force of law throughout the world. The court could then do with whole countries what US bankruptcy courts do with businesses: sell off their assets, including their real estate. Sovereign territories could be acquired as the spoils of bankruptcy without a shot being fired. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://ellenbrown.com/2014/08/25/colonization-by-bankruptcy-the-high-stakes-chess-match-for-argentina/