Published on Friday, November 26, 2010 by Salon.com
The US of A breaks the Soviet Record
by Glenn Greenwald
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/11/26-4
Even for the humble among us who try to avoid jingoistic outbursts, some national achievements are so grand that they merit a moment of pride and celebration:
US presence in Afghanistan as long as Soviet slog
The Soviet Union couldn’t win in Afghanistan, and now the United States is about to have something in common with that futile campaign: nine years, 50 days.
On Friday, the U.S.-led coalition will have been fighting in this South Asian country for as long as the Soviets did in their humbling attempt to build up a socialist state.
Published on Friday, November 26, 2010 by Inter Press Service
Economic Boom Worsened De-industrialisation of LDCs
by Isolda Agazzi
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/11/26
GENEVA – Least developed countries (LDCs) in Africa did not use the commodity export boom of the mid-2000s to diversify their economies from commodity dependence to manufacturing value-added products. Significantly, the agricultural sector has also not benefited, with the result that LDC reliance on imported food has become even worse.
Ads to the Brain
Bombing the Senses
By SAUL LANDAU
http://www.counterpunch.org/landau11262010.html
The long recession has reduced consumption, so how does the “business community” – an oxymoron since businesses try to destroy their competitors – sell its crap to people it laid off? The potential buyers. Advertisers — the avant garde of the “sales community – must somehow get these consumers without money or credit (suckers) back into “the market.”
Doctors say Medicare cuts force painful decision about elderly patients
By N.C. Aizenman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 26, 2010; 12:02 AM
Want an appointment with kidney specialist Adam Weinstein of Easton,
Md.? If you’re a senior covered by Medicare, the wait is eight weeks.
How about a checkup from geriatric specialist Michael Trahos? Expect to
see him every six months: The Alexandria-based doctor has been limiting
most of his Medicare patients to twice yearly rather than the quarterly
checkups he considers ideal for the elderly. Still, at least he’ll see
you. Top-ranked primary care doctor Linda Yau is one of three physicians
with the District’s Foxhall Internists group who recently announced they
will no longer be accepting Medicare patients.
“It’s not easy. But you realize you either do this or you don’t stay in
business,” she said.
Doctors across the country describe similar decisions, complaining that
they’ve been forced to shift away from Medicare toward higher-paying,
privately insured or self-paying patients in response to years of
penny-pinching by Congress.
From the New York Times: “The nation’s workers may be struggling, but
American companies just had their best quarter ever. American businesses
earned profits at an annual rate of $1.659 trillion in the third quarter,
according to a Commerce Department report released Tuesday. That is the
highest figure recorded since the government began keeping track over 60
years ago, at least in nominal or noninflation-adjusted terms … Corporate
profits have been doing extremely well for a while. Since their cyclical low
in the fourth quarter of 2008, profits have grown for seven consecutive
quarters, at some of the fastest rates in history. As a share of gross
domestic product, corporate profits also have been increasing, and they now
represent 11.2 percent of total output. … This breakneck pace can be
partly attributed to strong productivity growth – which means companies have
been able to make more with less – as well as the fact that some of the
profits of American companies come from abroad.”
What the New York Times doesn’t explain is that the struggles of the
“nation’s workers” bear a direct relationship to high corporate profits.
Strong productivity growth here basically means an increase in the rate of
exploitation. As the Daily Finance explains: “That productivity boost came
as workers spent more hours working, and getting paid less to do it.
Specifically, between the third quarter of 2009 and the same period on 2010,
productivity was up 2.5% as output rose 4.1%, hours worked increased 1.6%,
and unit labor costs fell 1.9%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The profits of U.S. corporations are growing much faster than their
revenues. S&P’s Howard Silverblatt estimated that corporate profits in
2010′s third quarter would rise 18% from 2009, while sales would be up a
mere 5.5%. ”
Since domestic demand remains relatively weak in the US, despite some boost
from the stimulus and despite some weak wages recovery, corporate investors
are also using the cheap money made available by quantitative easing to
invest in their overseas operations. And as the NYT acknowledges, much of
the increase in profits is coming from abroad. Thus, US capital has used two
key advantages to revive profitability. First, it has used its overwhelming
strength – political, economic, institutional – over workers to extract more
labour from a smaller workforce. The flip-side of high profits are more
gruelling work, tighter work discipline, more people unemployed, lower
wages, longer lines at the soup kitchens, and so on. Second, it has used its
overwhelming international dominance, which we might call imperialism, to
extract more value from emerging markets, which remain dependent on and
subordinate to the US. The obverse of this increased yield is, of course,
violent territorial struggle in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as violent
subversion in Honduras and Haiti.
These, aspects of an increasingly brutal, exploitative and repressive
capitalist system, are among the reasons why Obamamania has bitten the dust.
Obama’s electoral coalition was built around the promise of amelioration, a
better deal for workers and peace abroad, and neither has been delivered.
Obama has been far more completely Wall Street’s president than anyone
expected. This also helps explain why the corporate media has felt it
necessary to act as a mouthpiece and booster for a layer of corporate-funded
middle class Poujadists. It is to pre-emptively colonise a political space
that might otherwise be filled by the millions of working class Americans
who are angry over wages, unemployment, the banks, repossessions, and the
endless war. It is to drown out the rational concerns of more popular
political constituencies with pageantry, noise and fury, irrational howling,
and home-made bigotry. It is to stage the fight that capital wants to see -
between ostensibly liberal, cosmopolitan, internationally-oriented,
capital-intensive industry, and a parochial, nationalist, bigoted populace,
often small business owners working in labour-intensive industries. And the
viewer’s role is to pick a side, and forget that neither represents their
interests.
RG mail
by Ron Forthofer
Countercurrents.org (November 18 2010)
I’m afraid we’ve almost reached a point of no return on the road to total
domination by a small number of wealthy and powerful people. Throughout
our history, ‘we the people’ have struggled to protect our rights and
interests against attacks from a few elite. Read the rest of this entry »
Permanent Emergency Leading To Dictatorship?
November 26th, 2010
Permanent state of emergency. That rings of a historical truth. During the late
Roman Republic it was torn with sectarian violence that led to civil war, first
between the forces of Marius and Sulla, and later between the forces of Caesar
and Pompey. After the assassination of Caesar there was initiated a dictatorship Read the rest of this entry »
The idea of the Green Tea Party is reminder of the orphan status of most us in this current political situation. To lose Obama is the last straw, so some new perspective: so maybe the idea is useful as a gedanken experiment.
When I say ‘orphan’, I mean it. The conservatives are whacko, the liberals are being Obama-fried, and the left left is brain dead with Stalinist hangovers.
Perhaps by tommorrow we can pursue the idea further as a useful abstraction.
Spice of Life: Variety Is Also Good for HaresScienceDaily (Nov. 22, 2010) — Since 1871, when Charles Darwin wrote The Descent of Man, it has been widely accepted that “Variability is the necessary basis for the action of selection.”
Los Angeles Times
November 24, 2010
Editorial First Thanksgiving got it right As xenophobia
sweeps over the U.S., it’s a good time to remember what the holiday is
supposed to mean. Read the rest of this entry »
Archbishop and Marxist challenge Dawkins et al’s ‘off-the-peg enlightenment’. Matthew Reisz writes
The “new atheism” promoted by academics and writers such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens came under fire at a debate in Cambridge.
Terry Eagleton, distinguished professor of English literature at Lancaster University, opened the discussion, titled Responses to the New Atheism. He said that the last time he had spoken at the University of Cambridge’s Great St Mary’s Church was in 1968, during a debate on student radicalism – something, he noted, that we are likely to see a good deal more of.
“Why is God back centre stage again?” he asked. “Just when grand narratives seemed to be over, He’s back in the spotlight.”
Stem Cells from Amniotic Fluid: Reprogrammed Amniotic Fluid Cells Can Generate All Types of Body Cells
ScienceDaily (Nov. 19, 2010) — Reprogrammed amniotic fluid cells can generate all types of body cells. High hopes rest on stem cells: one day, they may be used to treat many diseases. To date, embryos are the main source of these cells, but this raises ethical problems. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin have now managed to convert amniotic fluid cells into pluripotent stem cells. These amniotic fluid-derived iPS cells are hardly distinguishable from embryonic stem cells. However, they “remember” where they came from.
Going Hungry in the Richest Nation on Earth
by Matthew O. Berger
WASHINGTON – While many U.S. residents prepare for their annual Thanksgiving feast Thursday, one in six are at risk of hunger – including a quarter of all children in the country.
Globally, 925 million people, or a little less than 15 percent of the world population, is undernourished. Ironically, Washington’s efforts to alleviate hunger abroad may be more successful than at home, analysts say.
The Endless Thanksgiving
Next Up: a “Flat Tax” for the Rich
By MICHAEL HUDSON
http://www.counterpunch.org/hudson11252010.html
The danger the United States faces today is that the government debt crisis scheduled to hit Congress next spring (when Republicans are threatening to vote against raising the federal debt limit as the government deficit soars) will provide an opportunity for the wealthy to give a coup de grace on what is left of progressive taxation in this country. A flat tax on wage income and consumer sales would “free” the rentiers from taxes on their property.
In These Times November 24, 2010
Firms See Long-Sought Goal in Sight: Major Pay Cuts Through Two Tiers
Big business is essentially trying to take back the hard-won gains of
working people won over generations.**
Global Research November 23, 2010
The National Security State and the Assassination of JFK*
The CIA, the Pentagon, and the `Peace President’*
By Andrew Gavin Marshall
Just 47 years ago, on November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was
assassinated in Dallas, Texas. This marked the turning of the American
National Security State apparatus against its own leadership. After having
overthrown, assassinated leaders, and orchestrated coups around the world,
the moment its growing power was threatened by the civilian leadership in
America, the apparatus of empire came home to roost. Read the rest of this entry »
The Shock Doctrine Push to Gut Social Security and Middle Class*
By Dave Johnson
This post originally appeared at Campaign for America’s
Future(CAF) at their Blog
for OurFuture . I am a Fellow with CAF.*
November 24, 2010 “Huffington Post” Nov, 22, 2010 — – -Today’s* **Washington
Post *was punch two of a one-two punch. Punch one was the Simpson/Bowles
“plan” to cut Social Security, cut middle-class tax breaks and programs (and
dramatically cut taxes on the rich.) Punch two is pushing this plan
*hard*with headlines claiming this solution is actually popular, while
shutting
out voices who explain why we shouldn’t do this. This is full-on Shock
Doctrine: Wait for an emergency like the terrible recession so people are in
shock and want solutions, and then change everything so fast they can’t
respond while telling them how this is good for them.
