A neuro-imaging study shows that personal values that people refuse to disavow, even when offered cash to do so, are processed differently in the brain than those values that are willingly sold.”Our experiment found that the realm of the sacred — whether it’s a strong religious belief, a national identity or a code of ethics — is a distinct cognitive process,” says Gregory Berns, director of the Center for Neuropolicy at Emory University and lead author of the study. The results were published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

Sacred values prompt greater activation of an area of the brain associated with rules-based, right-or-wrong thought processes, the study showed, as opposed to the regions linked to processing of costs-versus-benefits.

Berns headed a team that included economists and information scientists from Emory University, a psychologist from the New School for Social Research and anthropologists from the Institute Jean Nicod in Paris, France. The research was funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the National Science Foundation.

“We’ve come up with a method to start answering scientific questions about how people make decisions involving sacred values, and that has major implications if you want to better understand what influences human behavior across countries and cultures,” Berns says. “We are seeing how fundamental cultural values are represented in the brain.” …

Read more here.

When 300 men and women climb onto a rooftop and threaten to commit suicide in protest over denied compensation, it is impossible not to wonder how a company could lead its employees into such desperation.

But Foxconn did.

A little over a week ago, 300 employees at Foxconn’s Technology Park in Wuhan, China threatened their own lives because they were denied a vital pay increase. Foxconn told them they could either keep their jobs without it, or they could quit and be compensated.

Many chose to quit, but the company terminated the agreement, and none of the former workers received the promised compensation.

Production at the company was temporarily halted. It was not until 9 pm the next day that the town’s mayor was able to talk the 300 down from the roof.

Foxconn has been at the center of some considerably uncomfortable controversy over the last two years, after its high suicide rates and poor working conditions came to light. In total, it is thought 14 workers committed suicide in 2010.

Although previously the company’s suicide rate was well below the country’s average, it’s hard to downplay those numbers now.

Foxconn installed suicide nets at their factory last year, and workers in Chengdu are required to sign a “no suicide” pact in their contracts.

These are just a few of the many small details that add up to a more worrying whole…

More on ZDnet

The presidential election is just one big job interview, so it makes sense that as long as we’re talking about hiring, we should talk about firing. Mitt Romney recently said: “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me. If someone doesn’t give me the good service I need, I’m going to go get somebody else to provide that service to me.” Horrifying, right? How on earth could any human being like firing anyone? Well, to be fair, he didn’t say he liked firing anyone. He said he liked being able to fire someone. And so do you. You do it all the time.

Read More: CBS News

Photo: Tawheed Manzoor (CC)

Vandana Shiva on Al Jazeera English explains how, as mega-chains venture into industrial farming, they have created an epidemic of hunger- and generated billions in profit.

New Delhi, India – In November 2011, when the UPA government announced that it had cleared the entry of big retail chains such as Walmart and Tesco into India through 51 per cent Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in multi-brand retail, it justified the decision saying that FDI in retail would boost food security and benefit farmers’ livelihoods.

But the assurance that FDI in retail would ease inflation did not resolve the political crisis the government was facing; it deepened it. Parliament was stalled for several days of the Winter Session, after which the government was forced to withdraw its decision.

The story of FDI in retail goes back to 2005, when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh signed an agriculture agreement with the US, along with the nuclear agreement. On the board of the US-India Knowledge Initiative in Agriculture, as it is called, sit Monsanto (the world’s leading producer of GM seeds), ConAgra (among the world’s biggest agribusinesses, along with Cargill) and Walmart (the world’s largest retail giant).

Protests had prevented Walmart’s entry into retail, but, in 2007, it did get a backdoor entry through a joint-venture with Bharti (their stores go by the names of Easyday and Best Price Modern Wholesale). No back-end infrastructure has been built so far, one of the other claims of the government about why we need retail giants.

Farmers’ suicides spike in India

The way the UPA government tried to ram through the decision on FDI in retail – without consulting the opposition parties, or even its allies – was clearly undemocratic. But the decision itself was also flawed. It illustrated a disconnect between an ideology based on market fundamentalism – which is the leaning of the present government – and the Indian reality of small farms and small retail…

Read the rest on Al Jazeera English

According to a new study conducted by the Pew Research Center, 49 percent of [people] age 18 to 29 view socialism in a favorable light, compared to 43 percent who view it unfavorably. What’s more, they like the sound of “socialism” slightly better than capitalism—46 percent have positive views of capitalism, and 47 percent have negative views. This is dramatically different from the country’s population overall: 60 percent say they have a negative view of socialism, versus just 31 percent who say they have a positive view. Young people are the only age group whose support for socialism outweighs that of capitalism.

It’s telling that the number of socialism-friendly young people is on the rise from just 20 months ago, when 43 percent of Millennials favored the word. Between now and then, Occupy Wall Street has swept the country and the headlines, and there are more unemployed teens and 20-somethings than ever. It’s not hard to figure out why our generation isn’t so gung-ho about capitalism—it has disappointed and, in some cases, straight-up failed us.

One thing we can be certain of is that capitalism will end. Maybe not soon, but probably before too long; humanity has never before managed to craft an eternal social system, after all, and capitalism is a notably more precarious and volatile order than most of those that preceded it.

The very existence of Occupy Wall Street suggests that the end of capitalism has become a bit easier to imagine of late. At first, this imagining took a mostly grim and dystopian form: at the height of the financial crisis, with the global economy seemingly in full collapse, the end of capitalism looked like it might be the beginning of a period of anarchic violence and misery. And still it might, with the Eurozone teetering on the edge of collapse as I write. But more recently, the spread of global protest from Cairo to Madrid to Madison to Wall Street has given the Left some reason to timidly raise its hopes for a better future after capitalism.

Rosa Luxemburg, reacting to the beginnings of World War I, cited a line from Engels: “Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.” In that spirit I offer a thought experiment, an attempt to make sense of our possible futures. These are a few of the socialisms we may reach if a resurgent Left is successful, and the barbarisms we may be consigned to if we fail …

Read the rest at Jacobin

The folks at io9.com do a great job of explaining how the map is not the territory in this collision of “realities.” As Meredith Woerner explains (and check out the Radiolab Podcast):

Mark this up as one more blow to human-mutant equality. Marvel lawyers are putting up a fight to prove the mutants aren’t the same as humans after all. Unleash the Sentinels!

This strange piece of news comes via the Radiolab Podcast, which uncovered a weird saga of legal wrangling and tariff shenanigans.

Toys manufactured in various countries and later imported to the US have to be taxed. And the taxes for each kind of toy vary, depending on the description. Specifically, “dolls” are toys that represent some sort of human, and “toys” are representations that are non-human, such as robots or animals. And it turns out, the non-human toys are taxed at a much lower rate than the human ones, 6.8 percent versus 12 percent. Hence, two Marvel lawyers are arguing that Mutant action figures are not actually human — and therefor shouldn’t be taxed as much. And thus unknowingly unleashing the age-old Mutant debate that has long been a part of the X-Men’s world.

Read More: Meredith Woerner on io9.com

The history of Christianity is like a treasure chest for anyone who is fond of contradictions. The Gospels bicker with each other by relating similar tales in very different ways. But even more obviously, Christianity has often so dramatically departed from the words attributed to Jesus as to make you wonder how these glaring contradictions can be justified. Jesus tells you to “Love your enemies” and “Turn the other cheek”? So let’s show how much we love Jesus by waging crusades, inquisitions, witch-hunts, and brutal campaigns of repression against anyone who doesn’t love Him as much as we do. Jesus’s pacifism has drowned in the hyper-violence that has characterized much of Christian history.

But—we may object—most Christians alive today seem to have lost the bloodthirsty enthusiasm of their ancestors, and are no longer inclined to exterminate non-Christians. Even though it is true enough that chopping the unbelievers’ heads off may no longer be a popular pastime, the vast majority of Christians still conveniently forget about another theme that was central to Jesus’s ideology, and structure their lives in direct opposition to it. Jesus, in fact, was one of the most anti-capitalist thinkers this side of Karl Marx. Yet, most Christians are capitalists. What gives?

The concept of capitalism may have not existed in its modern forms during Jesus’s times, but Jesus’s words about accumulation of wealth leave little to the imagination. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke all report Jesus saying: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God.”

Damn … does it get any blunter than this?

Just to make sure we are paying attention, Jesus hammers the same point over and over, repeating multiple times his condemnation of accumulation of wealth. We find him telling wannabe followers to sell all their possessions and give the money to the poor (in case you are wondering, this made some decide that following Jesus was not such a hot idea anymore). In another passage, he categorically states that you can’t serve God and wealth at the same time. Elsewhere he warns us to focus on spiritual wealth rather than material wealth, and not to “store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy …” In yet a different occasion, he tells “Woe to the rich for you have received your consolation.” And in a series of sentences that are as antithetical to spirit of capitalism as they come, he advises his followers not to make any plans about the future in regards to food and shelter, since God will take care of everyone’s basic needs.

Considering how insistent Jesus is on this topic, it is with little surprise that we find out in other parts of the New Testament how his early followers shared everything among each other, and nearly eliminated private property.

In the face of this ultra-radical stance about wealth by their founder, it would be easy to conclude that most Christians live by making vows of poverty and shunning wealth like the plague. But that’s not quite the way things play out. God may be cool—most modern Christians think—but so is gold. Why should we have to choose one over the other? Ever since the Protestant Reformation, any qualms any Christian may have had about chasing good, old-fashioned cash began to fade. Many Catholics had maintained a theology frowning on accumulation of wealth, but simply had chosen to ignore it in practice. Plenty of Protestants, instead, decided to feel better about the whole thing and banish hypocrisy by reinventing the economic ideology of Christianity. Step one was to conveniently skip the many, many passages mentioned above. Step two was to focus instead on the biblical passages (mostly in the Old Testament) approving of wealth. Step three was to argue that since nothing in the world happens without God willing it, economic success (or the lack of thereof) is a quantifiable way to judge how much God does or does not favor you.

Voilà! The tables are turned and suddenly the obsession for money making has been recycled as a perfectly acceptable Christian endeavor. In the theology endorsed by some Christians (particularly those espousing the quintessential American “gospel of prosperity”) accumulating wealth is not only justifiable but almost a Christian duty since material prosperity is God’s reward for His faithful followers. The obvious corollary is that if you are poor, instead, it is probably because God hates your guts.

What makes this hijacking of Jesus’s message even funnier are the ways in which the God & Gold enthusiasts have tried to claim that Jesus was himself wealthy. Only the rich—they reason—could afford to travel around like he did and not work. But my all time favorite is the argument that Roman soldiers gambled for the right to take Jesus’s underwear after he died suggesting he was so rich that even his underwear was made of very expensive materials.

Really? Is that what this theology hangs by? Jesus underwear? Memo to self: if I ever try to justify my beliefs by appealing to a divine pair of underwear, it’s time to admit defeat.

The Occupy Wall Street protests have come and mostly gone, and whether they continue to have an impact or not, they have brought an astounding fact to the public’s attention: a mere 1 percent of Americans own just under half of the country’s financial assets and other investments. America, it would seem, is less equitable than ever, thanks to our no-holds-barred capitalist system.

But at another level, something different has been quietly brewing in recent decades: more and more Americans are involved in co-ops, worker-owned companies and other alternatives to the traditional capitalist model. We may, in fact, be moving toward a hybrid system, something different from both traditional capitalism and socialism, without anyone even noticing.

Some 130 million Americans, for example, now participate in the ownership of co-op businesses and credit unions. More than 13 million Americans have become worker-owners of more than 11,000 employee-owned companies, six million more than belong to private-sector unions.

And worker-owned companies make a difference …

Read More: NY Times

More than 1,000 Occupy Wall Street protesters blocked cargo trucks at some of the West Coast’s busiest ports Monday, forcing terminals in Oakland, Calif., Portland, Ore., and Longview, Wash., to halt operations.

While the protests attracted far fewer people than the 10,000 who turned out Nov. 2 to shut down Oakland’s port, organizers declared victory and promised more demonstrations to come.

“The truckers are still here, but there’s nobody here to unload their stuff,” protest organizer Boots Riley said. “We shut down the Port of Oakland for the daytime shift and we’re coming back in the evening. Mission accomplished.”

Organizers called for the “Shutdown Wall Street on the Waterfront” protests, hoping the day of demonstrations would cut into the profits of the corporations that run the docks and send a message that their movement was not over.

More: CBS News

As tax revenues have fallen over the past three years of recession, and austerity became the default policy of local governments, the public sector has been steadily hemorrhaging employees and cutting back on services. This is kind of a shadow recession, its effects lagging behind the first and putting a drag on the recovery. Most of us get by on a patchwork of public and private services, with overlapping responsibilities: the fire department (paid for with tax revenues, usually) will put out the fire, while most homeowners have insurance to pay for the damages. These days, both the public and private ends of this arrangement are fraying badly, and gaps are opening up. As the story notes, this is the second time firefighters in South Fulton have let a house burn because the owner didn’t pay the $75 fee. (Seriously, if they insist on that $75, there ought to be some way to pay it on the spot. Equip every fire truck with a credit card scanner.)

But here’s the deeper problem. Look at Mayor Crocker’s rationale for letting homes burn: you pay, you get a service. Don’t pay, you get nothing. No free riders. This is straightforward and thus appealing. But it is also misguided: it puts abstract principle over the business of governing …

Read More: Forbes

Agence France-Presse, via MSN News

Large-scale strikes have hit China in recent weeks, as workers resentful about low salaries or lay-offs face off with employers juggling high costs and exports hit by lower demand from the debt-burdened West.

Politburo member Zhou Yongkang said authorities needed to improve their system of “social management”, including increasing “community-level” manpower.

“In the face of the negative impact of the market economy, we have not formed a complete system of social management,” Zhou said in a Friday speech to officials reported by the state Xinhua news agency at the weekend.

“It is urgent that we build a social management system with Chinese characteristics to match our socialist market economy.” China’s economy grew by 9.1 percent in the third quarter, down from 9.5 percent in the previous quarter.  Manufacturing — a key engine of growth — slumped to its lowest level in nearly three years last month, amid slowing demand from the European Union and the United States.

Beijing has started to implement measures to boost lending and spur growth in the world’s second largest economy.

Read More: Agence France-Presse, via MSN News

* A Further Observation from the Dystopia Diaries — a Glossa McGonagalica: What — you weren’t thinking you could run an export economy under an austerity-induced global demand slump, were you?

The gulf between the rich and the poor continues to grow exponentially and stands to “unravel the social contract in many countries,” according to a report released Monday by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. In 17 out of 22 countries the OECD measured, income inequality has risen steadily for more than three decades and now sits at the highest levels in recent history. The study found the average income of the richest 10% of a population is nine times that of the poorest 10%. The income gap in “traditionally egalitarian countries” like Demark and Sweden rose from 5 to 1 in the 80’s to 6 to 1 today, and in America, the income gap is a staggering 14 to 1.

Inequality in wages and salaries is the largest contributing factor to the rise in income disparity. Other factors include an increase in part time work and declining collective bargaining agreements between workers and employers; disparity between workers with higher technological skills and those without; and regulatory reforms that created mainly low wage jobs.

In the United States, the richest 1% bring home an average of $1.3 million after taxes. The poorest 20% take in just $17,700. During the same period of time (1980–2008), the income tax rate dropped from 70% to 35%. Redistribution of income by taxes and benefits offset less than 10% of market income inequality. While the hours of low wage workers increased by more than 20% over the past decades, overall earnings inequality still rose “moderately” due to the low level of the minimum wage.

Read the full post at Diatribe Media

“Seriously, do you expect a better opportunity to extract concessions from your enemies than when they lay begging, bleeding at your feet?” —Liam McGonagle

In case you were in the washroom when ‘Jersey Shore’ was interrupted with this late-breaking newstory:  Ben Bernancke just committed the U.S. to provide the European Central Bank (”ECB”) with an unlimited line of credit.

That’s right, a brand new bailout.  Structurally along the lines that Business Insider had warned us about in September, but much more ambitious; that article had postulated a trifling $1 trillion, not the bottomless pit we’re actually being presented with.

The basic deal is that we hand dollars over to the ECB in exchange for Euros, the value of which, has become highly dubious to say the least. The ECB will in turn invest those dollars in large corporate banks to bolster balance sheets they themselves ruined through reckless underwriting practices and constant pressures for tax holidays and austerity measures.

Boun Natale e felice anni nouvi, Mario!

This is being billed as a stopgap measure to compensate for the fact that the genius architects of the Eurozone couldn’t be bothered to implement a fiscal coordination authority in their new currency. Must have seemed reasonable at the time.  We’d seen the end of history, after all.  Just like American civil liberties after 9/11, all the rules had changed.  The new era of seamlessly integrated global markets had pushed the capitalism’s cycle of inevitable liquidity crises into the dustbin of history, right?

But is it really stopgap? While similarly available currency swap loans had been available for some time previous, the duration of the current arrangement (i.e., a 50% reduction in the interest rate) is through January 2013, and is unlimited in amount. Meaning that the commitment is bounded in no way by the current supply of U.S. dollars.  So, at least theoretically, the U.S. will end up printing the dollars it will be obligated to provide incompetent European bankers.

When the implications of this development had finally settled in, and I’d had a chance to change into a clean pair of trousers and shower up a bit, I settled to thinking. Two paradoxically conflicting corollaries floated to the surface:

1.  Nobody, I mean NOBODY, seems to have learned the lesson of the previous bailout regimes or Quantitative Easing programmes, namely that the size of the money supply in-and-of-itself is of distant, secondary importance to the circulation of currency.  Or, to put it in layman’s language: BANKERS DON’T DRIVE THE ECONOMY, CONSUMERS DO.

2.  The bizarre occurrence of one nation printing money to manage the fiscal problems of another demonstrates exactly the sort of international commitment and cooperation that would be necessary to curb the irresponsible corporate leeching that led to these problems in the first place.  You know what I’m talking about, that old mantra of the defeatist traitor:  “But if we try to regulate corporations effectively, they’ll just pull of stakes and move the show overseas!”

As this incident suggests, it is effective government that provides the necessary stability for corporations to exist. If so-called “populist” Tea Baggers in the House had the brains to realize this, they’d take this opportunity to make corporate elites pay their fair share of the burden:  i.e., more historically reasonable income tax rates and a tax on idle wealth. Seriously, do you expect a better opportunity to extract concessions from your enemies than when they lay begging, bleeding at your feet?

Sadly, neither of these realizations seems likely to amount to much. This is the era of greasy hacks like Newt Gingrich are seen as “transformational leaders” [1] and the worthless empty suit Obama tries to slide turds like this past us whilst simultaneously telling the American people that their “moment is NOW“. To date, the most vigorous response I’ve seen on this issue has been Ron Paul, condemning the Fed for taking this action unilaterally.

Which, quite frankly, whilst being a step in the right direction, is nowhere good enough. Paul was asleep at the wheel on this issue in September, wasting our time with penny-ante Solyndra b*llsh*t. And nowhere do I see him calling for greater international government cooperation to curb the unaccountable multinational banks who are the primary beneficiaries of these abuses.  No mention anywhere of any increased corporate oversight, or fair transaction or property tax on the parasitic financial sector that destroys 80 cents in GDP out of every $1 that we give them.  Overall, even after grading on a curve, I just can’t give Paul any grade higher than a “D-”.  Try harder.

Footnote
[1] Newt’s constant use of the word “transformational” is equal parts insult, comedy and tragedy. There’s one reason that dried up old carpet-bagging whore never got “born again” into the Evangelical movement he so lustily courts on the campaign trail:  He’d leave a toxic oil slick in the baptismal pool.  The only thing Gingrish ever transformed is my dinner into vomit.

Another heaping helping of Hades, from Dystopia Diaries

Strangely, Amazon has just issued a press release saying they support the bill, calling it “a win-win resolution,” according to one Kindle blog, though they may just be hoping to lobby for exemptions from each individual state.

“Instead of a national sales tax, these new taxes will only be imposed at the individual discretion of each separate state legislature, and that’s an area where multi-billion dollar companies like Amazon can still exert a lot of pressure.

Photo: DMKTirpitz (CC)

Ethan A. Huff writes on Natural News:

The use of pesticides and the presence of genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) are not the only major differentiating factors between conventional food and organic food. According to GreenMedInfo.com, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) allows the conventional food supply to be irradiated with nuclear waste at extremely high levels, and also treated with deadly bacteriophage virus “cocktails” in order to make it “safe” for consumers.

It is a dirty little secret of the factory food industry, and one that has remained largely veiled thanks to a lack of effective regulation concerning proper labeling. But everything from herbs and spices to vegetables and fruit is effectively murdered with Cobalt-60 gamma radiation derived from the waste of nuclear reactors before being sold to customers.

According to data listed on the FDA’s own website, fresh conventional foods are typically blasted with 1 kilogray (kGy) of gamma radiation, which is the equivalent of 16,700,000 chest X-rays, or 333 times the human lethal dose. Fresh poultry and red meat are subjected to 3 kGys and 4.5 kGys, respectively, with frozen red meat subjected to radiation blasts as high as 7 kGys.

The FDA has approved gamma radiation doses of 10 kGys for enzyme preparations, which include various food additives, solvents, preservatives, and antioxidants. And spices, herbs, and seasonings are permitted to be blasted with an astounding 30 kGys of gamma radiation, which is the equivalent of 500,000,000 chest X-rays, or 10,000 times the human lethal dose.

Read More: Natural News

Shopping is usually a collective act. Most of the time it is done in groups, in families or with friends. Much of our consumption is for other people; or we have other people in mind when we’re doing it. In the supermarket, we buy for our families. In the high street, teenagers buy the same clothes and music as their peer group. Consumption by children and adults is driven by a sense of what we need to keep our collective lives together; and by the way in which owning the same things as others gives us status amongst our peers.

In their effort to reformulate progressive politics, many on the left have called for the creation of a `post-consumer society’ in which more noble values than shopping lie at the centre of British life. Neil Lawson, Director of Compass, blames consumerism for most of the ills of modern capitalism, from the decline of democracy to climate change. A similar point is made in very different language on the right. Conservatives like Daily Mail columnist Quentin Letts suggest that our present `orgy of consumerism’ undermines common `Christian values’ and `sensible husbandry’. In public discourse the abstract concept of `consumerism’ almost always describes a bad thing. Consumerism is criticised as a debilitating condition that destroys the sources of solidarity and common life. The critique in each case is that consumption is driven by a selfish desire to infinitely accumulate.

Perhaps politicians and policy-makers don’t spend enough time shopping. But for whatever reason, the people who read journals like this seem to have forgotten that consumption is a social act. The individual act of handing over cash or card at the checkout or clicking `buy’ on our PC takes up a tiny fraction of our lives as consumers. Most of our time `consuming’ is spent on thinking about how the objects we want relate to the people we live around. Either we are directly buying things for other people (`will my husband like this for his tea?’) or thinking about how other people will relate to them (`what will my girlfriend think of these jeans?’).

After spending a year watching ordinary shoppers in north London, the anthropologist Daniel Miller concluded that everyday shopping for provisions is a ritual, performed largely by women, centring on `love and sacrifice’. Rather than being a pointless act of individual consumption, Miller found that most shopping was dominated by devotion to those who we care for, often to the point of self-denial. Thrift is essential. Shopping is a learnt skill, in which we try to save rather than spend profligately, as we compare prices, look for bargains and often simply refuse to buy when we think things are too dear. As Miller argues, shopping is an act that `objectifies certain values’. In other words, it expresses the things we hold dear. For some, of course, it does objectify an attachment to hedonism and excess. But for most of us, though, it expresses love, devotion and concern for people in the small communities, families, groups of friends and neighbourhoods that make up our lives. Rather than expressing rampant selfishness, shopping embodies the importance of small-scale solidarity and ethical responsibility. Much of the time, those who criticise consumerism are opposing an entirely artificial and unrealistic conception of how people relate to things.

Read the rest at New Left Project

Dennis Byrne of the Chicago Tribune attempts to dismiss poverty in America and criticize the Occupy movement by calling poverty an “overstated” problem. Using the typical conservative demon of welfare and government subsidies via research from the right wing Heritage Foundation, Byrne argues that the 46.2 million Americans the government defines as impoverished don’t have it rough enough, thanks to government aid. He asks “Do the numbers accurately reflect the perception most Americans have of an impoverished family living, if not on the streets, like starving squatters in rat-infested hovels?”

Well Dennis, sorry to burst your bubble, but poverty isn’t always rat infested hovels or bloated bellies that appear in commercials in late night television. Is that what the “great society” should truly use to measure how it cares for its vulnerable citizens? If two people in a household of four lose their jobs, go underwater on their mortgage after spending more than a year or two desperately trying to find a job that pays enough to keep their home and put food on the table, does that not count as poor? If a single mother with two children working two minimum wage jobs just to pay rent gets her power shut off because of constant cost increases, but no wage increase, is she just not poor enough? If an elderly man living in subsidized housing is spending the bulk of his income — even with medicaid — on prescription drugs to keep healthy, is his situation “overstated?”

Byrne gives credit that at least 4 percent of Americans that are from homeless or hungry households, saying “to them, destitution is real, not a statistic to be batted around or used for political purposes.” Unfortunately for the rest of struggling Americans, their situation just doesn’t measure up to what appears to be a longing for a new network of Hoovervilles. The idea that the majority of Americans classified as poor aren’t because they receive a form of government aid is one of the most overused conservative talking points during election season. The irony of Byrne’s statement seems to be lost on him.

More on Diatribe Media

Photo: Rafael Matsunaga (CCO

James W. Jones writing in Psychology Today, from September of last year:

I recently returned from Europe. I was at a European wide Forum that brought together people from a variety of fields: politics, economics, social science, technology as well as the arts and philosophy. They were there to discuss a variety of issues confronting Europe (and the world) today. Most focused on politics and economics.

In addition, of course, I spent a lot of time on airplanes and in airports reading the newspapers and magazines one finds there. These discussions, plus the newspapers and magazines I read there and on the plane, suggested to me that the vast majority of people in the West are convinced that the all the problems of the world are really economic. That economic “progress” is the only solution to the world’s problems and that anything that hinders the “progress” of the economy is to be immediately rejected without further consideration. I do wonder if that’s really true. Of course I recognize that I am in a slightly privileged position: I have a fairly secure job and I am paid quite well by university standards. The issue would look different if I was unemployed or trying to support a family working in a small convenience store. On the other hand, I am watching the public education system of the USA being dismantled around me. Still the single hegemony of the economic is very striking to me.

Economists, I gather, work from a model that assumes that everyone is “rational,” that is that everyone will act according to their “self-interest.” What sort of definition of rationality is that which equates the rational with self-interest? Self-interest is a value. Like any value it may be “rational” (in some sense) in some circumstances. But it is still a value; not a result of formal logic like the Pythagorean Theorem. It also seems quite clear that people don’t always act in an economically self-interested way…

More: Psychology Today

While many advocates say President Obama’s executive order to reduce a dire shortage of life-saving hospital medications is an essential step, others say the order is not enough to stop price gouging by some pharmaceutical companies.

Essential cancer drugs have arguably taken the hardest hit. Hospitals have reported the worst shortage in nearly a decade of chemotherapy agents like doxorubicin.

The new order instructs the Food and Drug Administration to broaden reporting of potential drug shortages, expedite regulatory reviews that can help prevent shortages, and examine whether potential shortages have led to price gouging. The drug shortage has compromised or delayed care for some patients and may have led to otherwise preventable deaths.

Christopher W. Hansen, president of the American Cancer Society’s Cancer Action Network, applauded today’s order, saying in a statement that it would “allow government, industry, providers and the public to more systematically analyze and understand the causes of specific drug shortages as they occur, and to develop real-time solutions that are also needed to address the acute problems that cancer patients live with daily.”

More on ABC News

The Vatican called on Monday for the establishment of a “global public authority” and a “central world bank” to rule over financial institutions that have become outdated and often ineffective in dealing fairly with crises. The document from the Vatican’s Justice and Peace department should please the “Occupy Wall Street” demonstrators and similar movements around the world who have protested against the economic downturn.

“Towards Reforming the International Financial and Monetary Systems in the Context of a Global Public Authority,” was at times very specific, calling, for example, for taxation measures on financial transactions. “The economic and financial crisis which the world is going through calls everyone, individuals and peoples, to examine in depth the principles and the cultural and moral values at the basis of social coexistence,” it said.

It condemned what it called “the idolatry of the market” as well as a “neo-liberal thinking” that it said looked exclusively at technical solutions to economic problems. “In fact, the crisis has revealed behaviours like selfishness, collective greed and hoarding of goods on a great scale,” it said, adding that world economics needed an “ethic of solidarity” among rich and poor nations.

More: Reuters

Source: New Scientist

New Scientist reveals the capitalist network that runs the world:

As protests against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters’ worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.

The study’s assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.

The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York’s Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere (see photo). But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world’s transnational corporations (TNCs).

“Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it’s conspiracy theories or free-market,” says James Glattfelder. “Our analysis is reality-based.”…

[continues at New Scientist]

Abby & Robbie Martin cover the Occupy Wall Street Movement: the divide and conquer tactics being used to discredit OWS, the different schools of thought and ideology within the movement and the original demands made by the U.S. Day of Rage; the Obama administration’s shocking crackdown on medical marijuana and new federal law banning medical marijuana card holders from owning firearms; Blackwater and the privatization of the armed forces: is the corporatization of the U.S. military preventing an anti-war rebellion similar to that seen in the ’60s?