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| Taking a Closer Look at the Stories Ignored by the Corporate Media |
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Archive for the Month of October, 2005.
Viewing Economics NEWS articles 1 through 45 of 45.
- Oil prices on the international markets would shoot up to $400 a barrel if an attack were to be carried out on Iran, a senior Revolutionary Guards commander warned, Persian-language websites reported on Thursday.
- Since 2000, America's billionaire club has gained 76 more members while the typical household has lost income and the poverty count has grown by more than 5 million people.
- The spin and cover-up of the larger Peak Oil reality continues. - Four decades after a U.S. president declared war on poverty, more than 37 million people in the world's richest country are officially classified as poor and their number has been on the rise for years.
- Call it the outsourcing of food. Following in the footsteps of blue-collar workers and, more recently, white-collar employees, the U.S.'s two million farmers face the prospect of being offshored as well. - Two weeks before a new, more restrictive national bankruptcy law goes into effect, financially strapped Americans are rushing to file for protection from their creditors, with filings climbing to an unprecedented average of 13,000 a day last week. - The federal Coalition government has announced plans to allow employers to further exploit young workers and apprentices, just as SA Unions released a report showing many young workers on individual contracts already receive shoddy pay, conditions and treatment in the workplace. - The Big One isn't the long-predicted California earthquake or even a hurricane named Katrina. The genuine big one will arrive with a deafening pop, the sound of the real estate bubble bursting.
- To rescue Delphi Corp. from imminent bankruptcy, the auto parts giant's 24,000 United Auto Workers members are supposed to take massive wage cuts, benefit givebacks and myriad concessions that self-respecting union leaders would never accept, much less ask their members to ratify.
- ...rapidly increasing in importance is control of Iraq to facilitate military control of the world's only remaining source of cheap, conventional oil in the coming peak oil endgame. - Free Trade stands for almost everything wrong on the planet. As the Free Trade noose tightens, more revolutionary activity will occur until the strangling grip is broken completely or until the despotism of obscenely wealthy and criminal oligarchs feeding off an increasingly destitute and dehumanized world population wins its final triumph.
- A group of Peruvian indigenous farmers have prepared an extensively researched counter to a Canadian move to revive 'terminator' seeds.
- The number of personal bankruptcy filings is soaring as the effective date nears for a new law making it harder for consumers to seek protection from debtors. - The report said gender equality and better reproductive health could save the lives of two million women and 30 million children over the next decade - and help lift millions around the world out of poverty.
- ...Bush wants to rape the poor and middle class further, with his new tax plans that have been overseen by Connie Mack, a non-intellect, but a bootlicker of the lowest sort.
- While President George W. Bush continues to assert that Americans would be better off with Social Security in private hands, a new study shows that privatization of the country's 70-year-old benefit program would drive millions of people into poverty. - To fight poverty the government will have to switch from attacking workers to siding with them.
- "This winter a significantly larger number of applicants are expected than last year to request assistance in paying their energy bills, but President Bush has proposed cutting assistance programs from $2.2 billion to $2.0 billion. These programs that assist in paying energy bills are particularly critical for the elderly, disabled, and children." - "Water is a fundamental human right and must be made universally available to all people. Unlike the public water delivery, the market system distributes on the basis of the ability to pay -- those who have the ability to pay have access to quality water, those who are unable to pay go without."
- At least 80 percent of low-income Americans who need civil legal assistance do not receive any, in part because legal aid offices in this country are so stretched that they routinely turn away qualified prospective clients, a new study shows.
- French oil giant Total SA, amid rising oil and natural-gas prices, is considering building a nuclear power plant to extract ultraheavy oil from the vast oil-sand fields of western Canada.
- Those with the highest incomes and the most expensive homes (including second homes) get the largest subsidy.
- It is an axiomatic principle that if you don't have a Middle Class, you can't have a genuine democracy! The Middle Class, like the fractious U.S. Labor Movement, is fading fast from the scene, thanks to our insane "Free Trade" policies, which only benefit a select and greedy few.
- On Wednesday, the US Senate rejected a proposal to raise the national minimum wage from its current level of $5.15 per hour. As a result, it is unlikely that the minimum wage will be raised this year, making 2005 the eighth straight year in which the wage has remained unchanged.
- The assumption, clearly, is that America will be a happily car-crazed society forever and that nothing might interfere with that.
- The PayPal user agreement makes clear you’ve signed your privacy away when you become a PayPal user. You’ve also given PayPal the right to determine which of your e-commerce transactions are acceptable or unacceptable, as defined by PayPal. - The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. set forth the goal. Civil rights and union membership were to be intertwined. The labor movement, Dr. King wrote in 1958, "must concentrate its powerful forces on bringing economic emancipation to white and Negro by organizing them together in social equality." - Workers across BC were walking off the job in solidarity with their fellow HEU workers. A general strike was looming on the labor horizon. As the pressure was rising on the government, the HEU leaders reached a suspect backroom deal that effectively stalled a labor showdown with the BC government. - The degeneration of the American trade unions has long been a repugnant spectacle with tragic consequences for the working class. But the events of the last week in Detroit have underscored a basic rule of thumb: never underestimate how low the labor bureaucracy can descend in its services to corporate America. - How Chapter 11 Is Demolishing Employee Expectations
- Wal-Mart's Walton family now has 771,287 times more money than the median U.S. household. What gives? - Raw capitalism’s solution to our present situation is being enacted in front of us: grab everything you can before it’s gone. If it doesn’t result in the physical destruction of our planet, it’s going to be the end of the middle class, and of anything worthy of being called civilization. - In the United States, the land of the seersucker suit, or milk and honey,... you are now free to earn less money, get poorer, work longer hours and die younger.
- As important as the Supreme Court, a cornerstone of the bourgeois state, is for the US ruling elite, the Federal Reserve Board is regarded with even more deference within the upper echelons of the corporate and financial establishment. - Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp., BP PLC, ConocoPhillips Co., and Royal Dutch Shell PLC are expected to report a $9 billion, or 46 percent, increase in their combined third-quarter profits, according to analysts’ estimates...
- It's all about oil. - Deer hunting season is just starting up in much of the northern United States. But the Bush administration has already declared open season on 43 million Americans who depend on Medicare, as the drug and insurance industries join the Medicare prescription drug gold rush. - "Traditionally in the Latin market, I would say players sign for about 5 to 10 cents on the dollar compared to their US counterparts." - Fastest Decline in Real Wages on Record - How much longer can the imbalances in the world economy continue to grow before they give rise to a major crisis?
- American workers expect and deserve fair pay for hard work and clean noses, not pay for pulse, pretenses, or pilfering. If workers performed as badly as CEOs, they’d be fired or "outsourced"—not enticed with stock options, country club memberships, and cash bonuses just to grace the executive suite with their presence. - The House Agriculture Committee approved budget cuts Friday that would take food stamps away from an estimated 300,000 people and could cut off school lunches and breakfasts for 40,000 children - The Senate decided yesterday the money was not there for a substantial spending boost for the federal home heating program, deflecting arguments that soaring energy prices could force the poor to choose between heat and food this winter. - U.S. senators -- who draw salaries of $162,100 a year and enjoy a raft of perks -- have rejected a minimum wage hike from $5.15 an hour to $6.25 for blue-collar workers.
- They don't know about it yet, but they'll soon find out!
Pages for October, 2005
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