May Day 2011: Labor Day Celebrations Around The World

Posted on Sunday, May 1, 2011 by meganwilson

HUFFINGTON POST

May Day celebrations are going on today around the world, as workers march for better working conditions and often higher wages.

Also known as Labor Day or International Workers Day, people are holding protests from Los Angeles to South Korea today. In Turkey, 200,000 workers have amassed in Istanbul’s Taksim Square, in what may be the largest May Day protest since 1977. Massive rallies have also been staged in Taiwan and the Philippines.

In Cuba the parades have been touted by the nation’s official newspapers as the best way to ratify the newest economic plans that Raul Castro recently proposed, according to the AP.

Despite its socialist leanings, the day actually traces its roots back to the 1886 Haymarket Massacre in Chicago, when a workers protest turned violent after police attempted to disperse the crowds. Five years later the Second International, a socialist organization, established the day as a holiday.

Today May Day is recognized in about 80 countries, but is celebrated in many more.

You can see some magnificent images from today’s rallies below.

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Posted on Saturday, April 30, 2011 by meganwilson

Shankaboot – The first Arabic web series from the streets and rooftops of Beirut


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Obesity as lifestyle choice

Posted on Saturday, April 30, 2011 by meganwilson

Al Jazeera

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How Goldman Sachs Created the Food Crisis

Posted on Saturday, April 30, 2011 by meganwilson

By Frederick Kaufman
FOREIGN POLICY

Don’t blame American appetites, rising oil prices, or genetically modified crops for rising food prices. Wall Street’s at fault for the spiraling cost of food.

Demand and supply certainly matter. But there’s another reason why food across the world has become so expensive: Wall Street greed.

It took the brilliant minds of Goldman Sachs to realize the simple truth that nothing is more valuable than our daily bread. And where there’s value, there’s money to be made. In 1991, Goldman bankers, led by their prescient president Gary Cohn, came up with a new kind of investment product, a derivative that tracked 24 raw materials, from precious metals and energy to coffee, cocoa, cattle, corn, hogs, soy, and wheat. They weighted the investment value of each element, blended and commingled the parts into sums, then reduced what had been a complicated collection of real things into a mathematical formula that could be expressed as a single manifestation, to be known henceforth as the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index (GSCI).

For just under a decade, the GSCI remained a relatively static investment vehicle, as bankers remained more interested in risk and collateralized debt than in anything that could be literally sowed or reaped. Then, in 1999, the Commodities Futures Trading Commission deregulated futures markets. All of a sudden, bankers could take as large a position in grains as they liked, an opportunity that had, since the Great Depression, only been available to those who actually had something to do with the production of our food.

Change was coming to the great grain exchanges of Chicago, Minneapolis, and Kansas City — which for 150 years had helped to moderate the peaks and valleys of global food prices. Farming may seem bucolic, but it is an inherently volatile industry, subject to the vicissitudes of weather, disease, and disaster. The grain futures trading system pioneered after the American Civil War by the founders of Archer Daniels Midland, General Mills, and Pillsbury helped to establish America as a financial juggernaut to rival and eventually surpass Europe. The grain markets also insulated American farmers and millers from the inherent risks of their profession. The basic idea was the “forward contract,” an agreement between sellers and buyers of wheat for a reasonable bushel price — even before that bushel had been grown. Not only did a grain “future” help to keep the price of a loaf of bread at the bakery — or later, the supermarket — stable, but the market allowed farmers to hedge against lean times, and to invest in their farms and businesses. The result: Over the course of the 20th century, the real price of wheat decreased (despite a hiccup or two, particularly during the 1970s inflationary spiral), spurring the development of American agribusiness. After World War II, the United States was routinely producing a grain surplus, which became an essential element of its Cold War political, economic, and humanitarian strategies — not to mention the fact that American grain fed millions of hungry people across the world.

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A Palatable World: Three ways the way we eat can save the planet

Posted on Saturday, April 30, 2011 by meganwilson

By Benjamin Pauker
Foreign Policy

“On a personal level,” says Bittman, “people can move away from junk and processed foods and animal-central products. Even eating 10 percent less of these things could make an enormous change.”

Mark Bittman: Why We Need a Food Police

In more than 30 years of writing about food, Mark Bittman has influenced millions of home cooks with easy-to-replicate techniques and recipes that demystify and take the fear out of cooking, well, just about everything — to paraphrase the title of his most famous book. His credo is simplicity, exemplified during the more than a dozen years writing his New York Times column “The Minimalist.” But his big idea these days is surprisingly maximalist: We need to eat less meat, and governments should make us do it.

“You know, one good thing about being an authoritarian state,” says Bittman of China, “is that if you want to do something, well, you can just do it.” And with an estimated 350 million new people expected to join the Chinese middle class by 2030 putting strains on food production, Beijing just might have to. “The current state of meat production — and everyone wants to eat meat now, just like Americans — is unsustainable,” Bittman says. “It simply cannot last.”

“More than 50 percent of corn is fed to animals to produce beef, or turned into ethanol,” Bittman says. “It’s inefficient at best, and simply unsustainable at current levels of production. But you can make beef sustainable, as long as we agree that we’re going to eat less of it.”

So how do you get to that point? “You need the rule of law. If you want to prevent oil shocks, if you want to prevent destruction of the environment, if you want to slow global warming, then you have to move to a sustainable agriculture,” Bittman says. “If industrial agriculture and massively subsidized meat production is destroying the environment, why can’t there be laws preventing it? But today we have anarchy. We have a system of food production with no sense of the global public health in mind.”

It seems a somewhat incongruous argument for someone who’s made a career of educating readers on how to grill the perfect marinated flank steak or make a sublime roasted leg of lamb. But Bittman’s moved away from a meat-centric diet these past few years, authoring a follow-up book, How to Cook Everything Vegetarian.

“I’ve seen food get worse. When I grew up, things were much more local. Today, it’s all industrialized. It’s all agribusiness. $2.99 lamb or $1.29 pork is unbelievable. It represents nothing close to its real costs.” So what to do if governments won’t step up and enact laws to encourage more sustainable food production? “On a personal level,” says Bittman, “people can move away from junk and processed foods and animal-central products. Even eating 10 percent less of these things could make an enormous change.”

But Bittman avers that he’s no saint. “I was just driving recently and had to stop for gas. And I was so hungry. I only had a dollar in my pocket and I was starving so I bought some Cheetos. They were awesome.”
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Bernie Sanders Demands Action From Obama On Wall Street Oil ‘Gambling’

Posted on Friday, April 29, 2011 by meganwilson

By Zach Carter
HUFFINGTON POST

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) demanded on Thursday that regulators impose limits on oil speculation to help lower the price of gas in a letter sent to President Obama.

“There is mounting evidence that the skyrocketing price of gas and oil has nothing to do with the fundamentals of supply and demand, and has everything to do with Wall Street firms that are artificially jacking up the price of oil in the energy futures markets,” Sanders wrote. “In other words, the same Wall Street speculators that caused the worst financial crisis since the 1930s through their greed, recklessness, and illegal behavior are ripping off the American people again by gambling that the price of oil and gas will continue to go up.”

Last year’s financial reform bill required the Commodities Futures Trading Commission to crack down on commodities speculation by imposing “position limits” — a cap on the size of the bets that Wall Street traders can place. The agency was required to apply the new rules by January 22, but the CFTC has delayed the rules in order to collect data.

“What is particularly offensive is that this could and should have been prevented under current law,” Sanders wrote.

While at least part of the recent spike in oil prices is likely the result of unrest in the Middle East, the heavy volume of Wall Street speculation may be exaggerating the rise, if not driving it outright. The number of speculative bets on food and energy today is even higher than in 2008, when oil reached its highest price ever, sparking food riots across the globe. CFTC Commissioner Bart Chilton has been pushing to implement position limits soon, citing heated speculation and a March 21 research note from Goldman Sachs analyst David Greely that claimed Wall Street gambling in the futures markets is in fact driving up oil prices.

Obama announced a new inter-agency working group to combat fraud in the oil markets on April 21, but some economists and experts believe the effort will have a very limited impact on gas prices. Commodities speculation is perfectly legal, and traders do not have to break the law in order to drive up prices.

The full text of Sanders’ letter is below:

April 28, 2011

The Honorable Barack Obama
President of the United States
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20500

Dear Mr. President:

As you know, the skyrocketing cost of gasoline is causing severe economic pain to millions of Americans who have already suffered through the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

In Vermont, where it is not uncommon for people to commute 100 miles to work and back five days a week, the increased price of gas is taking a serious bite out of the paychecks of middle class families, many of whom are already working longer hours for lower wages. We have a responsibility to do everything we can to lower gas prices so that they reflect the fundamentals of supply and demand and bring needed relief to the American people at the gas pump.

Let’s be clear. There is mounting evidence that the skyrocketing price of gas and oil has nothing to do with the fundamentals of supply and demand, and has everything to do with Wall Street firms that are artificially jacking up the price of oil in the energy futures markets.

In other words, the same Wall Street speculators that caused the worst financial crisis since the 1930s through their greed, recklessness, and illegal behavior are ripping off the American people again by gambling that the price of oil and gas will continue to go up.

According to the Energy Information Administration, the supply of crude oil is higher today than it was last year when gas prices averaged $2.81 a gallon, while the demand for gasoline is lower today than it was last year. Based on supply and demand fundamentals, prices should be going down, not up. Instead, gas prices have gone up by over a dollar a gallon since last year.

According to Goldman Sachs, 20 percent of the price of crude oil is due to excessive speculation. Other experts believe that excessive speculation is driving up crude oil prices by 50 percent. This means that Americans are paying a Wall Street premium of between 70 cents and $1.63 a gallon every time they fill up their gas tanks.

This is simply unacceptable. What is particularly offensive is that this could and should have been prevented under current law.

The Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act that you signed into law last summer required the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) to impose strict position limits on the amount of oil that Wall Street speculators could trade in the energy futures market no later than January 22, 2011.

It is now April 28, 2011, and the CFTC has still not imposed speculation limits on oil trading in direct violation of both the letter and the spirit of the Wall Street reform law.

Since January 22, 2011, when these speculation limits were supposed to go into effect, until today the national average for a gallon of gas has gone up by more than 80 cents a gallon.

Instead of putting strong speculation limits in place in January of 2011 as required by law, the CFTC proposed a rule on position limits that wouldn’t go into effect until late January of next year. Adding insult to injury, these position limits are so ineffective that they would allow just one Wall Street firm to control 25% of the entire U.S. crude oil spot market or four firms to control 100% of this market without violating the regulations.

Three out of the five commissioners at the CFTC must vote to approve strong oil speculation limits before they can take effect. It is clear right now that there are only two commissioners who are willing and able to do what the law requires to significantly limit oil speculation and bring down gas prices at the pump.

I urge you to make it clear to the CFTC that they must obey the law and establish strong oil speculation limits as soon as possible. I would also urge you to ask for the immediate resignation of any CFTC commissioner who refuses to obey the law and nominate someone else who will.

We cannot allow Wall Street speculators to rip off the American people at the gas pump for one more day and the American people cannot wait another eight months to go by before any limits on Wall Street oil speculators go into effect.

Thank you for your attention to this important matter. I look forward to working with you on this issue.

 

Sincerely,

Bernard Sanders

United States Senator

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The Corporate State Wins Again

Posted on Friday, April 29, 2011 by cherylmeeker

The Corporate State Wins Again, by Chris Hedges, Published on Monday, April 25, 2011 by TruthDig.com

When did our democracy die? When did it irrevocably transform itself into a lifeless farce and absurd political theater? When did the press, labor, universities and the Democratic Party—which once made piecemeal and incremental reform possible—wither and atrophy? When did reform through electoral politics become a form of magical thinking? When did the dead hand of the corporate state become unassailable?

The body politic was mortally wounded during the long, slow strangulation of ideas and priorities during the Red Scare and the Cold War. Its bastard child, the war on terror, inherited the iconography and language of permanent war and fear. The battle against internal and external enemies became the excuse to funnel trillions in taxpayer funds and government resources to the war industry, curtail civil liberties and abandon social welfare. Skeptics, critics and dissenters were ridiculed and ignored. The FBI, Homeland Security and the CIA enforced ideological conformity. Debate over the expansion of empire became taboo. Secrecy, the anointing of specialized elites to run our affairs and the steady intrusion of the state into the private lives of citizens conditioned us to totalitarian practices. Sheldon Wolin points out in “Democracy Incorporated” that this configuration of corporate power, which he calls “inverted totalitarianism,” is not like “Mein Kampf” or “The Communist Manifesto,” the result of a premeditated plot. It grew, Wolin writes, from “a set of effects produced by actions or practices undertaken in ignorance of their lasting consequences.”

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Corporate capitalism—because it was trumpeted throughout the Cold War as a bulwark against communism—expanded with fewer and fewer government regulations and legal impediments. Capitalism was seen as an unalloyed good. It was not required to be socially responsible. Any impediment to its growth, whether in the form of trust-busting, union activity or regulation, was condemned as a step toward socialism and capitulation. Every corporation is a despotic fiefdom, a mini-dictatorship. And by the end Wal-Mart, Exxon Mobil and Goldman Sachs had grafted their totalitarian structures onto the state.

The Cold War also bequeathed to us the species of the neoliberal. The neoliberal enthusiastically embraces “national security” as the highest good.  The neoliberal—composed of the gullible and cynical careerists—parrots back the mantra of endless war and corporate capitalism as an inevitable form of human progress. Globalization, the neoliberal assures us, is the route to a worldwide utopia. Empire and war are vehicles for lofty human values. Greg Mortenson, the disgraced author of “Three Cups of Tea,” tapped into this formula. The deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents in Iraq or Afghanistan are ignored or dismissed as the cost of progress. We are bringing democracy to Iraq, liberating and educating the women of Afghanistan, defying the evil clerics in Iran, ridding the world of terrorists and protecting Israel. Those who oppose us do not have legitimate grievances. They need to be educated. It is a fantasy. But to name our own evil is to be banished.

We continue to talk about personalities—Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama—although the heads of state or elected officials in Congress have become largely irrelevant. Lobbyists write the bills. Lobbyists get them passed. Lobbyists make sure you get the money to be elected. And lobbyists employ you when you get out of office. Those who hold actual power are the tiny elite who manage the corporations. Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, in their book “Winner-Take-All Politics,” point out that the share of national income of the top 0.1 percent of Americans since 1974 has grown from 2.7 to 12.3 percent. One in six American workers may be without a job. Some 40 million Americans may live in poverty, with tens of millions more living in a category called “near poverty.” Six million people may be forced from their homes because of foreclosures and bank repossessions. But while the masses suffer, Goldman Sachs, one of the financial firms most responsible for the evaporation of $17 trillion in wages, savings and wealth of small investors and shareholders, is giddily handing out $17.5 billion in compensation to its managers, including $12.6 million to its CEO, Lloyd Blankfein.

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Swiped: Banks, Merchants And Why Washington Doesn’t Work For You

Posted on Thursday, April 28, 2011 by meganwilson

By Zach Carter and Ryan Grim
HUFFINGTON POST

In America today, over 13 million people are out of work and millions more are underemployed. One out of every seven is living on food stamps. One out of every five American children lives in poverty. Yet the most consuming issue in Washington — according to members of Congress, Hill staffers, lobbyists and Treasury officials — is determining how to slice up the $16 billion debit-card swipe fee pie for corporations.

WASHINGTON — Charlie Chung runs Cups & Co., a coffee and sandwich shop in the basement of the Russell Senate Office Building. Known on Capitol Hill simply as “Cups,” the shop — a rickety 20-second train ride away from the elevator to the Senate floor — is always swarmed with lobbyists, staffers and the occasional senator.

If customers flash an American Express card to buy a banana, Chung waves them off: “Just take the banana. Don’t give me the card.”

Chung has run Cups for about a decade and says that plastic has allowed him to better serve a hurried and harried clientele. But Chung is still routinely frustrated with the card networks — Visa, MasterCard and American Express — that dictate the fees storeowners like himself must pay to process credit and debit card transactions. Why charge for a banana when card fees make it a losing proposition?

Fees are annoying, Chung says, but not debilitating. “They’re just like a phone company,” he says. “Delivery surcharge. Paper charge. Equipment charge.” There’s an additional fee for using cards from banks outside his contract, but Chung says he has no way of knowing until he’s gotten his bill how much of that pricier plastic has been swiped.

The fees Chung pays are a tiny fraction of Wall Street’s swipe fee windfall; banks take in a combined $48 billion a year from these “interchange” fees on debit and credit cards, according to analysts at The Nilson Report. That money comes out of the pockets of consumers as well as merchants, as stores pass on whatever costs they can to their customers.

Major retailers — the Walmarts, Home Depots and the Targets of the world — complain that card fees are one of their biggest annual expenses, and they’ve entered into a Capitol Hill battle royale against card companies to roll back the lucrative fee regime. Last year’s financial reform bill ordered the Federal Reserve to crack down on debit card swipe fees, a $16 billion pool of money from which $8 billion flows to just 10 banks. As a concession to Wall Street, credit card fees were left unscathed.

But the clock never ticks down to zero in Washington: one year’s law is the next year’s repeal target. Politicians, showered with cash from card companies and giant retailers alike, have been moving back and forth between camps, paid handsomely for their shifting allegiances.

The swipe fee spat is generating huge business for K Street: A full 118 ex-government officials and aides are currently registered to lobby on behalf of banks in the fee fight, according to data compiled for this story by the Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan research group. Retailers have signed up at least 124 revolving-door lobbyists. And at least one lobbyist has switched sides during the melee. Republican Thomas Shipman of Cornerstone Government Affairs registered to lobby on the issue for the merchant’s leading player, Walmart, in 2010, only to move over to Visa in 2011.

“Oh man, this is unbelievable. You’ve got the banking community, the financial community, pitted against the retail community,” says Sen. Mike Johanns (R-Neb.). “They’ve both been in my office and I’m a clear yes vote on this … so you can only imagine those who are trying to figure this out or are still on the fence. They must be getting flooded.”

The flood fills the hallways with lobbyists and deluges the airwaves with ads. For weeks, Washington’s Metro system has been papered with pro-plastic ads on trains and station walls. It’s a way for card networks to flex their muscles, to put lawmakers and lobbyists on notice that they’re willing to spend big to win. “Where does Washington’s $12 billion gift to giant retailers come from? YOUR DEBIT CARD,’” blares one ad. This being Washington, a poster on the Metro was hacked by a swipe fee reform supporter, who crossed out “YOUR DEBIT CARD” and penned in “BANKS.”

A senior Senate Democratic Banking Committee aide, Peter Bondi, spotted the defaced ad and snapped a Twitpic. He sent it out on March 31, the day that a bill sponsored by Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) was coming up for a floor vote. The Tester bill called for a two-year delay on proposed debit card fee caps that Assistant Senate Majority Leader Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) had pushed through Congress last summer.
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Jon Stewart: Friends Without Benefits

Posted on Wednesday, April 27, 2011 by meganwilson
Posted in CAPITALISM, DEFENSE DEPARTMENT, GOVERNMENT, HOMELAND SECURITY, NATIONAL SECURITY, POLICY | Leave a comment

Soaring Costs Force Some Renters To Chose Between Shelter And Food

Posted on Tuesday, April 26, 2011 by meganwilson

By Yepoka Yeebo
HUFFINGTON POST

“Rental housing costs went up and up. There was a brief dip in 2009, now they’ve moved up again,” he told The Huffington Post. Affordability could become such a problem, Belsky said, that even financially secure Americans could start to struggle to make rent.

NEW YORK — Around 10 million American households — or one in every four families that rent their homes — could have to chose between paying rent, buying groceries or keeping current with bills, according to a report released Tuesday.

The number of households spending more than 50 percent of their income on rent and bills jumped by 2.6 million over the last decade, according to a Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies report. Economists generally consider “affordable” rent to cost about 30 percent of a tenant’s income.

When housing costs hit certain levels, many Americans are forced to choose between rent and food. “In real terms, it means more people have less money to spend on household necessities such as food, health care, or savings,” Eric Belsky, director of the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, said in the report. Households which spend 50 percent or more of their income on rent also spend almost 40 percent less on food and over 50 percent less on health care than households with more affordable rent.

“In the last decade, rental housing affordability problems went through the roof,” Belsky said in the report. “And these affordability problems are marching up the income scale,” he added.

Already, rising rents mean the household budgets of working-class and middle-class families are under strain. Growing numbers of middle-income, and lower-middle-income renters are spending between 30 percent and 50 percent of their incomes on rent. And the report found that rents could start to soar as the recovery takes hold.

Belsky said that after a boom, the rental market took a brief hit during the recession. “Rental housing costs went up and up. There was a brief dip in 2009, now they’ve moved up again,” he told The Huffington Post. Affordability could become such a problem, Belsky said, that even financially secure Americans could start to struggle to make rent.

Even before the recession, rent increases and growing bills outpaced many stagnant salaries. Now, with modest improvements in the job market, there is renewed upward pressure on rents. Many former homeowners who faced foreclosure are now looking to rent, and people who ordinarily would have bought homes are struggling with tighter mortgage lending, while others are waiting for home prices to sink even lower.

Mortgage lending for apartment buildings — the multifamily sector — was severely hit during the financial crisis, and financing for the sector has dropped by $40 billion, according to the report.

Since 2008, the only refinancing for loans on apartment buildings has come from federally-backed sources: Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Housing Administration.

And for Americans with lower incomes, the availability of federally protected affordable housing is shrinking. The report found 700,000 affordable rental units had either been removed from federal programs or demolished since the mid 1990s, with very little new housing being offered at the lower end of the rent scale.

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