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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 February, 2006.
Viewing Economics NEWS articles 1 through 29 of 29.
- While big business racks up historic profits, workplace life is becoming more unbearable for the people who make the products and services. - Speak out too loudly against the drug war, and you might be targeted. Peter McWilliams had AIDS and cancer and was dependent on marijuana to stay alive. But the federal government wouldn’t let McWilliams, a vocal anti-prohibition activist, have his medicine. They threatened to take his mother’s house away if he used the substance that was keeping him alive. He was found dead in his home in June 2000. The drug war killed him directly. - Pensions were once considered one of the central features of the American Dream. That was the dream, but U.S. workers are waking up to a different reality today--that pensions are fast becoming a thing of the past.
- Our economic system is unsustainable by its very nature. The only response to climate chaos and peak oil is major social change. - Like earlier civilizations that got into environmental trouble, we can decide to stay with business as usual and watch our global economy decline and eventually collapse. One way or another, the decision will be made by our generation. Of that there is little doubt. But it will affect life on earth for all generations to come.
- In the wake of George W. Bush’s State of the Union address, the White House and the Republican-led Congress have moved swiftly to implement a series of budget measures that will slash funding for health care and education while allocating vast new sums for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and tax cuts for America’s wealthy elite.
- Beyond the massive amounts of money involved, such a mind-numbing event as the Super Bowl serves to divert the population—reeling from economic blows and witness to the carryings-on of a ruling elite that has lost its head—from everyday life and all the unresolved problems in American society. The shrillness of the media hype about everything trivial increases as the list of major disasters lengthens...A bewildered population is urged to ignore all this and concentrate on the appropriate menu for three (or four!) hours of television viewing. It’s untenable and absurd. - The Internal Revenue Service’s taxpayer advocate recently revealed that the agency froze tax refunds owed to hundreds of thousands of poor Americans, labeling them fraudulent. Refunds were withheld by the IRS without notifying taxpayers that their claims were under review, thereby eliminating any opportunity to respond to the agency.
- When you can believe the LYING media, instead. - "A celebration of concentrated wealth."
- At least 46 million Americas are now without health insurance. And most earn too little to put much money toward a high-deductible health insurance policy. With rising inflation the working poor and middle class are lucky enough to be able to save $100 toward the cost of their health care, let alone $10,500. The president’s proposal to "strengthen health savings accounts" is nothing more than an attempt to increase tax shelters for the rich.
- At least street crackheads just steal radar detectors out of cars - not $2,770,000,000,000 out of the next three generations' pockets.
- The United States will always rely on foreign imports of oil to feed its energy needs and should stop trying to become energy independent, a top Exxon Mobil Corp...executive said on Tuesday.
- No Escape from Scarcity
- Global experience teaches us that a system based upon the ownership of and access to wealth and capital of a few cannot satisfy the needs of the majority people particularly in the post-colonial world, mainly because that was the essential and dominant system in the first place through stages of slavery, indentureship and colonial capitalism that had failed miserably. - Forget Iran, Americans Should be Hysterical About This
- A review of only a sampling of the programs included on the list indicates the human cost of the proposed cuts...they include cuts in such basic necessities as food subsidies for the elderly and poor, educational programs for low-income students, literacy programs, and arts education. They also threaten basic infrastructure and the environment. - Symptomatic of the underlying tendency in capitalist society toward ever greater levels of social inequality is the phenomenal growth in the remuneration paid to the chief executive officers (CEOs) of leading corporations.
- The already enormous gap between rich and poor in America has become a Grand Canyon. In every part of their lives, U.S. workers are having a harder time making ends meet--while the fantastic wealth of a tiny few grows even more obscene.
- A long-predicted tsunami is heading toward the shores of America, a wave of incredible proportions, gathering momentum with each passing day. America has had many, many warnings of how this giant wave would develop, but these warnings have been totally ignored. Very soon our American society will experience an extremely painful awakening to the dark specter of "Peak Oil" as it looms on our horizon and then comes crashing down upon our nation.
- Kenneth Deffeyes of Princeton was a colleague of M. King Hubbert. Using Hubbert's formula that predicted Peak Oil in the U.S., Deffeyes says the world has now Peaked - Consumers deeper in debt and fresh from their first negative savings rate since the Great Depression show high consumer confidence. It is as if the entire country is on an acid trip or a cocaine trip or whatever it is that lets people create realities for themselves that bear no relation to real reality.
- Americans have always believed that hard work will bring rewards, but vast numbers now cannot meet their bills even with two or three jobs. More than one in 10 citizens live below the poverty line, and the gap between the haves and have-nots is widening - Under George W. Bush’s $2.77 trillion budget for fiscal 2007, federal spending would top revenue by $354 billion, following a six-year string of staggering deficits -- 2005’s was $429 billion. And that’s just for openers. Step right up, it’s the greatest rip on earth!
- A week's vacation in Cancun does not make one a member of the leisure class. Likewise, owning a few shares of stock is no ticket into anything Wall Street would remotely regard as the investing class. But the Bush administration would like to convince working folk that they are in the club. - Four out of five filers felt forced to seek bankruptcy protection because of a job loss, catastrophic medical expenses, or the death of a spouse... - March 20 to 26, 2006: Iran-USA, beginning of a major world crisis, or "the End of the Western World we have known since 1945".
- Bushonomics has been the most destructive set of economic policies to hit Americans since Herbert Hoover. No, wait. That understates the problem.
- How an archaic measurement keeps millions of poor Americans from being counted
Pages for February, 2006
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