Concerned about Wall Street’s devastating impact on communities? Then invest in yourself – the most local investment of all. Americans’ long-term savings in stocks, bonds, pension, life insurance, and mutual funds total about $30 trillion. But not even 1 percent of these savings touches local small businesses, the source of half the economy’s jobs and [...]
Tokyo Electric Power Co. injected boric acid into a reactor at its crippled Fukushima nuclear plant to prevent an accidental chain reaction known as re- criticality after temperatures rose in the past week. The temperature of the No. 2 reactor was 70.1 degrees Celsius (158 degrees Fahrenheit) as of 6 a.m. today, according to preliminary [...]
When a financial crisis threatened the existence of Africa’s oldest community station, Bush Radio, an outpouring of sympathy and appeals went viral on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. In the end, it was this outspoken support that showed finanical backers that the station was worth saving. ‘It got the message out there to [...]
As the crimson sun slipped into the gray Pacific Ocean, a multibillion-dollar drug deal took shape. A group of board-certified doctors greeted each other in a private room at a luxury hotel in California. The oncologists were big buyers of an anti-anemia drug called Procrit, sold by Ortho Biotech, a Johnson & Johnson (J&J) division. [...]
Attempts to censor details of controversial influenza experiments that created a highly infectious form of bird-flu virus are unlikely to stop the information from leaking out, according to scientists familiar with the research. The US Government has asked the editors of two scientific journals to refrain from publishing key parts of research on the H5N1 [...]
Growth is needed in order to save the euro, not sermons and homilies, says Nobel Prize-winning economist. New York, New York – Just when it seemed that things couldn’t get worse, it appears that they have. Even some of the ostensibly “responsible” members of the eurozone are facing higher interest rates. Economists on both sides [...]
Americans observe two anniversaries this year, neither one of them wanted. March marked eight years of combat in Iraq, and October, 10 years of fighting in Afghanistan. These are America’s “long wars,” a seemingly endless grind of combat. These long wars invite comparison, and some recall the eight years of US war in Vietnam, but [...]
Nearly half of all Americans lack economic security, meaning they live above the federal poverty threshold but still do not have enough money to cover housing, food, healthcare and other basic expenses, according to a survey of government and industry data. The survey, released on Tuesday by the advocacy group Wider Opportunities for Women (WOW), [...]
There is a question from a gentleman in the fourth row. He introduces himself as Richard Rothschild. He tells the crowd that he ran for county commissioner in Maryland’s Carroll County because he had come to the conclusion that policies to combat global warming were actually “an attack on middle-class American capitalism.” His question for [...]
Water is the lifeblood of this planet, whose inhabitants are watching its accelerated spiral into crisis mode even as they struggle to address the issues and lifestyles that are stretching the earth’s resources thin. Outwardly, the global water crisis appears straightforward – people simply consume too much water. A key factor in this spiral is [...]
Before my Twitter case, in which the US Department of Justice has demanded that the social media site hands over personal informationabout my account which it deems necessary to its investigation of WikiLeaks, I didn’t think much about what rights I would be signing off when accepting user agreement in my computer. The text is usually lengthy, in [...]
Detailed records of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein’s private deliberations with his inner circle released by the Pentagon last week are raising serious questions about the right of the United States to seize Iraqi state documents and keep them under its control even after ending its eight years of occupation next month. For Iraqis, the [...]
It all sounded so promising. In the early morning hours on Oct. 27, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy emerged from a day of edge-of-their-seats negotiations and announced a historic plan to pull the continent’s economy back from the brink of disaster. The agreement, acceded to by European governments and the Institute [...]
The U.S. occupation of Iraq is reportedly set to come to an end, with most of the roughly 40,000 soldiers currently stationed there set to be removed by year’s end. But let’s make no mistake: contrary to what you’re likely to hear from the political and media establishment, the only thing worth celebrating is this [...]
The World Health Organizationsays the number of cholera cases in Haiti is expected to exceed 500,000 by the end of 2011. The U.N. health agency says some 470,000 cases and 6,600 deaths have so far been recorded. WHO cholera expert Claire-Lise Chaignat told reporters in Geneva on Friday that the disease was also likely to [...]
A ground-breaking investigation examines the most secret aspect of America’s shadowy drone wars and maps out a world of hidden bases dotting the globe. They increasingly dot the planet. There’s a facility outside Las Vegas where “pilots” work in climate-controlled trailers, another at a dusty camp in Africa formerly used by the French Foreign Legion, [...]
New York – This year has witnessed a global wave of social and political turmoil and instability, with masses of people pouring into the real and virtual streets: the Arab Spring; riots in London; Israel’s middle-class protests against high housing prices and an inflationary squeeze on living standards; protesting Chilean students; the destruction in Germany [...]
The US Census Bureau recently reported what most Americans already knew. Poverty is deepening. The gap between rich and poor is growing. Slippage soon into the ranks of the poor now confronts tens of millions of Americans who long thought of themselves as securely “middle class.” The reality is worse than the Census Bureau reports. [...]
Of all the Occupy Wall Street refrains, one of the most memorable is, “I refuse to believe that corporations are people until Texas executes one.” But, clever as it is, the quip looks to the wrong end of the life cycle: The only thing more corrupt than the legal concept of corporate personhood is the [...]
Occupy Wall Street (and nationwide) has three emerging objectives: Public recognition of the 1%’s crimes, centering on war and money. End war and money crimes that annually kill millions, injure billions, and loot trillions of our dollars. Build a brighter future for 100% of humanity, centering on full constructive employment and the creation of money that maximizes [...]
