Titanic Post

It’s not just that world events are ignored in favour of celebrity gossip. News anchors skew the facts to provoke debate.

Kieren McCarthy
guardian.co.uk
Thursday August 07 2008

For years it has been a joke that news in the United States is terrible: obsessed with trivia and celebrity; fronted by Botox bimbos; forever interviewing citizens about some artefact of small-town life when a major news story is breaking elsewhere.

Well, the truth is that it’s far, far worse than that. There are a multitude of news channels - CNN, MSNBC, CBS, NBC, PBS, Fox. But after an hour of flipping between them during lunchtime last week, this was the sum total of information gleaned: there are two US presidential candidates; they have produced campaign ads; people have made video parodies and posted them on the internet; a US TV news host appeared on a US TV chatshow last night; and someone said something controversial (read ignorant) on a different TV show the day before.

In the meantime, one of the most sought-after war criminals (more…)

It amazes me to hear what I assume to be working class people working hard for their money calling other working class people “whiners” when they speak up in outrage over getting the shaft from giant corporations who can’t cover their losses for high-rate loans they made to low income people caught up in our tanking economy.

Fanny May and Freddie Mac are sub-prime lenders of money to high-risk people who would not otherwise be able to qualify for a loan to buy a house. They were originally funded by the government so that they could cover eventual losses due to the fluctuating market and to the risk involved. This is called “welfare,” corporate welfare. I also think it was a good idea to give poor families the opportunity to buy a home and to start accumulating wealth.

Now Fanny May and Freddie Mac are whining to the government to bail them out, because they were too shortsighted to put enough money aside, even with the high interest rates they charged their customers. Instead they pocketed the profits and underfunded their coverage.

If the government is brash enough to bail them out, as they invariably do with bank and oil companies that are in trouble, the profits are privatized by the rich corporations and the losses are socialized and handed down to the taxpayer.

Instead of complaining about poor people who are rightly complaining about their crappy situation, you should all be outraged at our government for screwing us all to the benefit of the rich. Karl Rove is an evil man and a criminal who should be imprisoned.

Nicholson

While the U.S. oil industry wants access to more federal lands to help reduce reliance on foreign suppliers, U.S.-based companies are shipping record amounts of gasoline and diesel fuel to other countries.

A record 1.6 million barrels a day in U.S. refined petroleum products were exported during the first four months of this year, up 33 percent from 1.2 million barrels a day over the same period in 2007. Shipments this February topped 1.8 million barrels a day for the first time during any month, according to final numbers from the Energy Department.

The surge in exports appears to contradict the pleas from the U.S. oil industry and the Bush administration for Congress to open more offshore waters and Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling.

(more…)

by Ken Nicholson

I think its time to take a closer look at why Mexicans are coming here. I doubt they come because they like it here, but rather because they couldn’t otherwise support their families in Mexico. The reason for that being that NAFTA, IMF, and international agra-business has eliminated traditional farming practices and industries that hire poor people.

For example: Mexico imports corn and tortillas from the US eliminating hundreds of thousands of jobs. The immigrants previously could earn maybe $5 a day when they can earn say $5 an hour here. What would you do in their position? How far would you go to feed yourself and your family?

I don’t think it’s healthy to have this many undocumented people here either, but I do think the change has to be applied at the source of the problem rather than depriving anyone from making a living. This problem was created by corporate america with the greedy support of both parties. This situation needs to be fixed pretty soon now. And Thats Why Immigrants Imigrate!

Happy Easter,
Nicholson

Russell Mokhiber, editor of Corporate Crime Reporter to the Taming the Giant Corporation conference in Washington, D.C., June 9, 2007.Whether in bodies or injuries or dollars lost, corporate crime and violence wins by a landslide.

The FBI estimates, for example, that burglary and robbery — street crimes — costs the nation $3.8 billion a year.

The losses from a handful of major corporate frauds — Tyco, Adelphia, Worldcom, Enron — swamp the losses from all street robberies and burglaries combined.

Health care fraud alone costs Americans $100 billion to $400 billion a year. (more…)

Thoughts on the struggle between corporate and human values

By Cedron Jones
Published November 4, 2007

“The chief business of the American people is business.”
– President Calvin Coolidge, 1925.

The sentiment expressed by Coolidge remains prominent today. During the past regular session of the Montana Legislature, an assertion by members of the big-business lobby that a certain bill was “bad for business” often was sufficient to kill it.

But wait a minute. Our economy is the world’s largest, and our society arguably is the richest in history. One might think so much wealth would permit consideration and pursuit of other values and goals, like stronger families and communities and a more healthful environment. So how is it that “bad for business” can trump “good for workers,” “good for the environment,” or “good for democracy?” (more…)