D. Aram Donabedian & John Carey - Pirates and Librarians: Big Media, Technology, and the Role of Liberal Education

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Fascism in AmericaBy Stephen Lendman |
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Bull Moose or Bull Shoot:
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How Corruption in the U.S. Puts Everyday Corruption in Africa to Shame
By Lawrence Weschler
A bit over an hour into the five-hour drive across the ferrous red plateau, heading south toward Uganda’s capital Kampala, suddenly, there’s the Nile, a boiling, roiling cataract at this time of year, rain-swollen and ropy and rabid below the bridge that vaults over it. If Niagara Falls surged horizontally and a rickety bridge arced, shudderingly, over the torrent below, it might feel like the Nile at Karuma.
Naturally, I take out my iPhone and begin snapping pics.
On the other side of the bridge, three soldiers standing in wait in the middle of the road, rifles slung over their shoulders, direct my Kampalan driver Godfrey and me to pull over.
“You were photographing the bridge,” one of them announces, coming up to my open window. “We saw you.”
“Taking photos of the bridge is expressly forbidden,” the second offers by way of clarification, as the first reaches in and grabs the iPhone out of my hand. “National security. Terrorists could use such photos to help in planning to blow up the bridge.”
“Do I look like a terrorist to you?” I ask. “And anyway,” I shout as Soldiers One and Two walk off with their prize, oblivious, “I wasn’t photographing the bridge. I was photographing the rapids. The bridge was precisely the one thing I wasn’t photographing!”
http://www.nationofchange.org/dispatches-field-prisoners-america-s-new-cash-crop-1319905137
A disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself. ~ Hannah Arendt
At the 2011 dedication ceremony for the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial, many speakers, including President Obama, quoted from King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech, in which King eloquently spoke out for freedom and justice. Yet almost fifty years later King’s son, Martin Luther King III, says his father’s dream has not been realized, that America has “lost its soul,” in part by “having more people of color in prison than in college.” He is not wrong. According to the Drug Policy Alliance, in the last decade nearly one in three African-American men aged 20-29 was under criminal-justice supervision, while more than two out of five had been incarcerated.
At his 1963 March on Washington Dr. King said, “We have come here today to dramatize an appalling condition.” And so we have. Because today, with for-profit prisons a burgeoning growth industry, the incarceration rate of people of color can be extrapolated to the population at large. Indeed, one out of every one hundred adults in America today is incarcerated, and one out of every thirty-two is somewhere in the system – either on probation, on parole, or behind bars. Put another way, the United States has five percent of the world’s population and twenty-five percent of the world’s prison population. And more than half of these arrests are for marijuana.
The FBI puts the number of marijuana arrests over the last decade alone at 7.9 million. This was not caused by the laws of supply-and-demand for weed. This was caused by the laws of supply-and-demand for prisoners and, hence, for profits. Since 1984, when privatization of prisons was made legal again, after having been stamped out in 1928 due to gross abuses against prisoners in the name of profit, the for-profit prison industry has moved quickly to expand into as many states as possible before enough resistance could be amassed to stop them. And with each new prison constructed, there is a need for more prisoners to fill it.
Published on Sunday, October 30, 2011 by New York Magazine
http://nymag.com/news/frank-rich/class-war-2011-10/
by Frank Rich
During the death throes of Herbert Hoover’s presidency in June 1932, desperate bands of men traveled to Washington and set up camp within view of the Capitol. The first contingent journeyed all the way from Portland, Oregon, but others soon converged from all over—alone, in groups, with families—until their main Hooverville on the Anacostia River’s fetid mudflats swelled to a population as high as 20,000. The men, World War I veterans who could not find jobs, became known as the Bonus Army—for the modest government bonus they were owed for their service. Under a law passed in 1924, they had been awarded roughly $1,000 each, to be collected in 1945 or at death, whichever came first. But they didn’t want to wait any longer for their pre–New Deal entitlement—especially given that Congress had bailed out big business with the creation of a Reconstruction Finance Corporation earlier in its session. Father Charles Coughlin, the populist “Radio Priest” who became a phenomenon for railing against “greedy bankers and financiers,” framed Washington’s double standard this way: “If the government can pay $2 billion to the bankers and the railroads, why cannot it pay the $2 billion to the soldiers?"
The echoes of our own Great Recession do not end there. Both parties were alarmed by this motley assemblage and its political rallies; the Secret Service infiltrated its ranks to root out radicals. But a good Communist was hard to find. The men were mostly middle-class, patriotic Americans. They kept their improvised hovels clean and maintained small gardens. Even so, good behavior by the Bonus Army did not prevent the U.S. Army’s hotheaded chief of staff, General Douglas MacArthur, from summoning an overwhelming force to evict it from Pennsylvania Avenue late that July. After assaulting the veterans and thousands of onlookers with tear gas, MacArthur’s troops crossed the bridge and burned down the encampment. The general had acted against Hoover’s wishes, but the president expressed satisfaction afterward that the government had dispatched “a mob”—albeit at the cost of killing two of the demonstrators. The public had another take. When graphic newsreels of the riotous mêlée fanned out to the nation’s movie theaters, audiences booed MacArthur and his troops, not the men down on their luck. Even the mining heiress Evalyn Walsh McLean, the owner of the Hope diamond and wife of the proprietor of the Washington Post, professed solidarity with the “mob” that had occupied the nation’s capital.
By Stephen M. Walt
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29521.htm
October 26, 2011 "The National Interest" -- THE UNITED States has been the dominant world power since 1945, and U.S. leaders have long sought to preserve that privileged position. They understood, as did most Americans, that primacy brought important benefits. It made other states less likely to threaten America or its vital interests directly. By dampening great-power competition and giving Washington the capacity to shape regional balances of power, primacy contributed to a more tranquil international environment. That tranquility fostered global prosperity; investors and traders operate with greater confidence when there is less danger of war. Primacy also gave the United States the ability to work for positive ends: promoting human rights and slowing the spread of weapons of mass destruction. It may be lonely at the top, but Americans have found the view compelling.
Public release date: 27-Oct-2011
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-10/iifa-7bp102711.php
International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis
As the global media speculate on the number of people likely to inhabit the planet on Oct. 31 an international team of population and development experts argue that it is not simply the number of people that matters but more so their distribution by age, education, health status and location that is most relevant to local and global sustainability.
Any realistic attempt to achieve sustainable development must focus primarily on the human wellbeing and be founded on an understanding of the inherent differences in people in terms of their differential impact on the environment and their vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities are often closely associated with age, gender, lack of education, and poverty.
These are some of the messages formulated by twenty of the world's leading experts in population, development and environment who met at IIASA in Austria in September 2011, with the objective of defining the critical elements of the interactions between the human population and sustainable development. The Laxenburg Declaration on Population and Development, as prepared by the Expert Panel, describes the following five actions as necessary to address sustainable development, achieve a 'green economy' and adapt to environmental change:
http://beta.finance.yahoo.com/news/york-metro-area-highest-inequality-162501626.html
It's probably no wonder that the "Occupy" movement began with Wall Street: the New York metropolitan area has the highest inequality in the country, according to a new report from the Census Bureau.
The report, by Daniel H. Weinberg, analyzed income data at various geographical levels and found that the region encompassing New York, northern New Jersey, Long Island and parts of Pennsylvania had the highest income inequality of any large metro area.
New York State also has the highest income inequality of all 50 states (although Washington, D.C., was worse).
Below is a map showing three measures of income inequality for each state: the Gini index (which ranges from 0.0, when all households have equal shares of income, to 1.0, when one household has all the income and the rest has none); a ratio of household income at the 90th percentile to that at the 10th percentile; and a ratio of household income at the 95th percentile to that at the 20th.
In all cases, a higher value means greater inequality.
After New York, Connecticut, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas have among the most unequal income distributions. At the low end are New Hampshire, Alaska and Utah, which is the most economically homogenous state in the nation.
Utah's capital, Salt Lake City, also has the lowest income inequality of any major American metro area. The most unequal, as mentioned above, is New York, followed by Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Pompano Beach, Fla.
Mr. Weinberg's report also has inequality measures down to the neighborhood level, which I recommend checking out. Remember, though, that fewer people are surveyed in such small places, so the margin of error is much greater.
TERRA DAILY
London (AFP) Oct 26, 2011
The world's population of seven billion is set to rise to at least 10 billion by 2100, but could top 15 billion if birth rates are just slightly higher than expected, the United Nations said on Wednesday.
In a report ahead of ceremonies on October 31 to mark the seven billionth human alive today, the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) warned demographic pressure posed mighty challenges for easing poverty and conserving the environment.
"This is a challenge and a call to action. The issue of population is a critical one for all humanity and for planetEarth," Babatunde Osotimehin, the UNFPA's executive director, said at the launch of the report in London.
But he said that the world should focus on how to make the world a better place to live instead of worrying only about numbers.
"This is not a matter of space, it's a matter of equity, opportunity and social justice," he told journalists.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Why-We-Shouldn-t-Be-Sellin-by-Robert-Reich-111024-82.html
October 24, 2011
By Robert Reich
America is having a fire sale. Why not sell wealthy foreigners the right to live here, too?
That's the notion behind a bill introduced last week by Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah and Democrat Senator Charles Schumer of New York: Stoke demand for American homes by allowing foreign nationals to buy them. In return, give foreigners the right to live here (although not work here).
The price? At least $500,000 cash. It could be one piece of real estate costing $500,000 or more, or several, of one would have to be worth at least $250,000.
Presumably, this would help homeowners by boosting demand. "This is a way to create more demand without costing the federal government a nickel," Schumer told the Wall Street Journal.
And it would help the Street. Rather than have the big banks carry all those non-performing mortgage loans on their books or be forced to write them down, we'll just goose the housing market by selling off the right to live in America.
And the measure wouldn't allow in the world's riff-raff, because buyers would have to be rich enough to pay cash, and live here six months a year without working.
Realtors love it. Says Glenn Kelman, CEO of Redfin, an online brokerage firm, "when property values sag and this is a desirable place to live, one of the simplest solutions is just to let more people in so they can buy the homes."
In Seattle, where Kelman lives, housing prices have slumped -- as they have all over America. But Vancouver, Canada -- just 140 miles to the north -- is enjoying a housing boom because Canada allows foreigners to buy their way into Canada, just as the Lee-Schumer bill would do here.
Published on Wednesday, October 26, 2011 by Inter Press Service
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/10/26
by Mantoe Phakathi
CHANGWON, South Korea - Civil society organisations are calling on governments in developing countries to stop leasing and selling out land to transnational corporations because it leads to land degradation and food insecurity.
Africa is one of the continents where corporations are flocking to lease or buy land for different projects such as mining, growing bio-fuel crops or construction – pushing rural poor communities off of their land.
"You find that the land is repossessed from poor people who are using it for farming to give way to bio-fuel crops or other projects that lead to land degradation," said Khadija-Catherine Razavi, executive director of the Centre for Sustainable Development (CENESTA), a non-profit organisation dedicated to promoting sustainable community- and culture-based development that mainly works in Iran and Southwest Asia.
Breitbart.com Oct 24 07:11 PM US/Eastern
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.a78af65cc128f522f558eaa64f38258c.3d1&show_article=1
Researchers in the United States said on Tuesday they had found a "shocking" association -- if only a statistical one -- between violence by teenagers and the amount of soda they drank.
High-school students in inner-city Boston who consumed more than five cans of non-diet, fizzy soft drinks every week were between nine and 15-percent likelier to engage in an aggressive act compared with counterparts who drank less.
"What we found was that there was a strong relationship between how many soft drinks that these inner-city kids consumed and how violent they were, not only in violence against peers but also violence in dating relationships, against siblings," said David Hemenway, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health.
"It was shocking to us when we saw how clear the relationship was," he told AFP in an interview.
But he stressed that only further work would confirm -- or disprove -- the key question whether higher consumption of sweet sodas caused violent behaviour.
Public release date: 25-Oct-2011
University of Michigan
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-10/uom-tgx101911.php
ANN ARBOR, Mich.---They've been stereotyped as a bunch of insecure, angst-ridden, underachievers. But most members of Generation X are leading active, balanced and happy lives, according to a long-term University of Michigan survey.
"They are not bowling alone," said political scientist Jon Miller, author of The Generation X Report. "They are active in their communities, mainly satisfied with their jobs, and able to balance work, family, and leisure."
Miller directs the Longitudinal Study of American Youth at the U-M Institute for Social Research. The study, funded by the National Science Foundation since 1986, now includes responses from approximately 4,000 Gen Xers---those born between 1961 and 1981.
"The 84 million Americans in this generation between the ages of 30 and 50 are the parents of today's school-aged children," Miller said. "And over the next two or three decades, members of Generation X will lead the nation in the White House and Congress. So it's important to understand their values, history, current challenges and future goals."
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 22 October 2011 17.07 ED
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/22/china-nation-cold-hearts
Shame on us Chinese! Last Thursday a two-year-old girl was run over twice, about 100 metres from her home in a hardware market district of Foshan, a prosperous city in southern China. As she lay on the ground, writhing in pain, before being hit by the second vehicle, 18 people, on their bicycles, in cars or on foot, passed by but chose to ignore her. Among them a young woman with her own child.
Finally, a 58-year-old female rubbish collector came to the girl's rescue, but it was too late. By the time she was brought to the hospital, the girl Yueyue, (whose name translates as Little Joy), was brain dead. She was declared dead early on Friday morning. She was a good girl, full of life, her mother said a few days ago in an interview. She said she had just brought Yueyue back from her kindergarten. She popped out to collect the dry clothes and returned to find Yueyue gone – probably trying to look for her elder brother.
It might have been a different story if one of the 18 people had lent Yueyue a hand. None even bothered to call for emergency services. Later, when interviewed by a journalist, one of the passersby, a middle-aged man riding a scooter, said with an uncomfortable smile on his face: "That wasn't my child. Why should I bother?"
Before giving himself up to the police, the driver of the second vehicle, a van, told the media why he had run away. "If she is dead, I may pay only about 20,000 yuan (£2,000). But if she is injured, it may cost me hundreds of thousands of yuan." What's wrong with these people? How could they be so cold-hearted? The horrific scene was caught by a surveillance camera and has been watched by millions of viewers since it was posted on Youku, China's equivalent of YouTube.
Published on Monday, October 24, 2011 by Al-Jazeera-English
Studies suggest as many as one in three female soldiers are raped during their US military service.
by Sarah Lazare
"My experience reporting military sexual assault was worse than the actual assault," says Jessica (a pseudonym for her protection), a former marine officer and Iraq veteran who left the military because of her command's poor handling of her assault charges. "The command has so much power over a victim of sexual assault. They are your judge, jury, executioner and mayor: they own the law. As I saw in my case, they are able to crush you for reporting an assault."
Jessica is joining a civil lawsuit bringing claims against former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, charging that under their watch the military failed to adequately and effectively investigate rapes and sexual assaults within the ranks.
The litigation, which was filed in Virginia district court in February of this year by the law office of Susan Burke, is set to go to trial in the coming months. The initial suit named 16 plaintiffs, all former or current military service members - but in recent months that number has swelled to more than 30, as more and more veterans come forward as survivors of sexual assault.
Published on Tuesday, October 18, 2011 by TomDispatch.com
Dear young man who died on the fourth day of this turbulent 2011, dear Mohammed Bouazizi,
I want to write you about an astonishing year -- with three months yet to run. I want to tell you about the power of despair and the margins of hope and the bonds of civil society.
I wish you could see the way that your small life and large death became a catalyst for the fall of so many dictators in what is known as the Arab Spring.
We are now in some sort of an American Fall. Civil society here has suddenly hit the ground running, and we are all headed toward a future no one imagined when you, a young Tunisian vegetable seller capable of giving so much, who instead had so much taken from you, burned yourself to death to protest your impoverished and humiliated state.
You lit yourself on fire on December 17, 2010, exactly nine months before Occupy Wall Street began. Your death two weeks later would be the beginning of so much. You lit yourself on fire because you were voiceless, powerless, and evidently without hope. And yet you must have had one small hope left: that your death would have an impact; that you, who had so few powers, even the power to make a decent living or protect your modest possessions or be treated fairly and decently by the police, had the power to protest. As it turned out, you had that power beyond your wildest dreams, and you had it because your hope, however diminished, was the dream of the many, the dream of what we now have started calling the 99%.
by: Nouriel Roubini, Project Syndicate [3] | Op-Ed
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/roubini43/English
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 of the expensive cars of “fat cats”; India’s movement against corruption; mounting unhappiness with corruption and inequality in China; and now the “Occupy Wall Street” movement in New York and across the United States.
While these protests have no unified theme, they express in different ways the serious concerns of the world’s working and middle classes about their prospects in the face of the growing concentration of power among economic, financial, and political elites. The causes of their concern are clear enough: high unemployment and underemployment in advanced and emerging economies; inadequate skills and education for young people and workers to compete in a globalized world; resentment against corruption, including legalized forms like lobbying; and a sharp rise in income and wealth inequality in advanced and fast-growing emerging-market economies.
Of course, the malaise that so many people feel cannot be reduced to one factor. For example, the rise in inequality has many causes: the addition of 2.3 billion Chinese and Indians to the global labor force, which is reducing the jobs and wages of unskilled blue-collar and off-shorable white-collar workers in advanced economies; skill-biased technological change; winner-take-all effects; early emergence of income and wealth disparities in rapidly growing, previously low-income economies; and less progressive taxation.
Published on Sunday, October 16, 2011 by Inter Press Service
According to her, "comprehensive" breast cancer test from Myriad for other breast cancer mutations costs 3,400 dollars and a supplementary test for the BRCA-1 and BRCA-2 genes, called the BART test, costs 700 dollars. Matloff said that 95 percent of patients she recommends for supplementary testing don't end up being tested because of its high cost.
"I know that we are missing mutations," Matloff told IPS, adding that the BRCA gene mutations are passed down maternally and paternally. "It is going to impact them, their children, their siblings their grandchildren, their nieces and nephews, and from a clinician's standpoint it is horrifying."
Gene patenting opponents also argue that in a new era in which full- genome sequencing is getting faster and cheaper, patents stand in the way of access to new knowledge about how certain genes are related to disease.
"The whole next phase of [research in] genetics and disease is to understand how genes work together," Hanson told IPS. "It is a huge task, and the patents just interfere with it."
Matloff expressed a similar concern that advanced knowledge about genes without access to that knowledge could create problems for patients and care providers.
"It is almost like saying, 'we have your genes right in front of us, it came out of your body, but we are not allowed to look at it, we're not allowed to interpret it, and we are not allowed to give the information back to you,'" Matloff said.
Miller-McCune, October 10, 2011
New research finds we’re more likely to believe a piece of false information conveyed in a television drama after two weeks have passed.
By Tom Jacobs
http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture/misinformation-in-tv-drama-can-gain-credibility-36845/# #
Our beliefs about the world are shaped by many factors. The courses we took in college. The lessons we learned from our families.
And, of course, the prime-time courtroom drama we watched a couple of weeks back.
Newly published research suggests nuggets of misinformation embedded in a fictional television program can seep into our brains and lodge there as perceived facts. What’s more, this troubling dynamic seems to occur even when our initial response is skepticism.
That’s the conclusion of a study published in the journal Human Communication Research. It asserts that, immediately after watching a show containing a questionable piece of information, we’re aware of where the assertion came from, and take it with an appropriate grain of salt. But this all-important skepticism diminishes over time, as our memory of where we heard the fact or falsehood in question dims.
by: Richard D. Wolff, MR Zine [3] | News Analysis
http://www.truth-out.org/capitalism-and-poverty/1318426007
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. Consider that the Bureau's poverty line in 2010 for a family of four was $22,314.
Families of four making more than that were not counted as poor. That poverty line works out to $15 per day per person for everything: food, clothing, housing, medical care, transportation, education, and so on. If you have more than $15 per day per person in your household to pay for everything each person needs, the Bureau does not count you as part of this country's poverty problem.
So the real number of US citizens living in poverty -- more reasonably defined -- is much larger today than the 46.2 million reported by the Census Bureau. It is thus much higher than the 15.1 per cent of our people the Bureau sees as poor. Conservatively estimated, about one in four Americans already lives in real poverty.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/10/111012124019.htm ScienceDaily (Oct. 12, 2011) — After excessively violent events, shoot 'em up games regularly come under scrutiny. In Norway, several first-person shooter games disappeared from the market for a while after the killings. Does intense fighting on a flat screen display also result in aggressive behavior in real life? Researchers from the University of Bonn found brain activity patterns in heavy gamers that differed from those of non-gamers. |
The study's results have just been published in the scientific journal Biological Psychology.
"First-person shooter" games have been discussed in connection with violence over and over. Participants take on the role of a shooter fighting opponents in a war-like situation using different weapons. The Norwegian killer is said to have participated in such worlds intensely before he killed dozens of people in Oslo's government district and on the vacation island of Utoya. And after the shooting sprees in Erfurt, Emsdetten and Winnenden, the debate whether violent games lower the inhibition threshold and result in violent behavior was revived again. Psychologists, epileptologists and neurologists from the University of Bonn studied the effect of shoot 'em up game images and other emotionally charged photos on the brain activity of heavy gamers. "Compared to people who abstain from first-person shooters, they show clear differences in how emotions are controlled," reported lead author Dr. Christian Montag from the Institute of Psychology at the University of Bonn.
Excessive first-person shooting of about 15 hours a week