MANDELA OK, INSULTED, SWINE FLU EMERGENCY, HEATH REFORM PROTESTS, Msgr Moore
October 30th, 2009 - by: danny
WASHINGTON POST: DOCUMENT ON CORRUPTION IN CONGRESS: Confidential House report reveals details of investigations into lawmakers, aides
House ethics investigators have scrutinized the activities of more than 30 lawmakers and several aides in inquiries about issues including defense lobbying and corporate influence peddling, according to a confidential House ethics committee report prepared in July. The report appears to have been inadvertently placed on a publicly accessible computer network, and was provided to The Washington Post by a source not connected to the congressional investigations.
SAYONARA SOUTH AFRICA
HEALTH CARE PROTESTS
THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE CRASH OF ’29
My visit to South Africa is coming to the end. I have had radio and a SABC TV interview here on the financial crisis and will be screening my new film tonight at 7PM at the House of Nsako in the Johannesburg community of Brixton. (When I lived in London years ago, I taught a class at a Brixton school for kids in the construction industry. My Bronx accent and their cockney inflections were words and worlds apart)
Big News Today: The Zuma Government is reversing the policies of his predecessor Thabo Mbeki on AIDS and will make fighting AIDS a top priority.
These seems be a lot of acrimony in the air here with critical comments on local policy be ing greeted with rhetorical putdowns and outrageous threats by ANC militants even the case of a former ANC Minister. The Union federation COSATU is to picket outside singer Patti Labelle’s Sun City concert this weekend over the playing of a CD there with lyrics insulting Nelson Mandela.
The Mail and Guardian reports: Cosatu has urged Sun City to ban the security firm Falcon Security, whose chief executive officer Ben Burger was arrested after the playing of the CD. Burger has already appeared in court over the matter.
Falcon Security has provided security at the international resort for the past 14 years.
The company announced earlier in the day that its operations manager Warren Alberts had been suspended over the CD incident.
The company said it was investigating the playing of the CD at a Sun International staff function on Saturday.
On Tuesday, police claimed that, during a competition, a CD was played “containing remixed lyrics of the national anthem” which called former president Nelson Mandela a “kaffir”.
Tehre was another Mandela incident too according to the STAR:: Oscar-winning South African-born actress Charlize Theron auctioned off a meeting with Nelson Mandela without getting permission from the Nelson Mandela Foundation, Beeld reported yesterday.
“A very strict process needs to be followed to get a meeting with Mandela,” the foundation’s chief executive, Achmat Dangor, told the newspaper.
“Not even the charity foundations Mandela himself established are allowed to auction off time with him,” he said.
Mail& Guardian: MANDELA WAS SAID TO BE VERY SICK–NOT TRUE SAYS GRANDSON
Rumours on Thursday that former South African president Nelson Mandela was gravely ill were laughed off by his grandson, who said he had breakfast with the beloved icon that morning.
Rumours have been circulating in media and political circles this week that Mandela was ill and possibly in hospital.
“I’ve been with my grandfather this morning,” Mandla Zwelivelile Mandela, told the Mail and Guardian Online on Thursday. “There is nothing wrong with him.”
“The old man is elderly now and has routine check-ups — and people get excited about it.”
It was understood that the family would release a statement soon that Mandela would withdraw entirely from public life.
But Mandla said his grandfather had effectively done so.
SOUTH AFRICAN JOURNALISTS BLASTS HER COLLEAGUES
A leading financial journalist here has blasted her colleagues for a failure to preduct the financial crisis—She attended and spoke at the conference at which I spoke on the media’s role
Nontyantyambo Petros writes in The Star’s Business Report:
It is tempting to believe that journalists from the US have most to answer for as the crisis originated in their country. But we indicted ourselves by swallowing hook, line and sinker the argument from the government and some economists late last year that South Africa would not go into a recession. This, we were told at the time, was because state spending on infrastructure ahead of the 2010 World Cup would cushion the effects of the financial crisis and prevent the economy from contracting.
Of course we now know that the country has been in recession since the first quarter of this year, resulting in hundreds of thousands of workers losing their jobs.
In a session I attended recently on the state of financial journalism, a participant rubbed salt into the wound when he complained that this genre of journalism was “a sham… unable to predict business and economic failures”. Another noted that company reporting was superficial and didn’t seem capable of interrogating the financial wizardry that is sometimes buried in financial statements.”
NOW TO THE OTHER NEWS
UN: Ahmadinejad supports international nuclear deal
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed victory in Iran’s negotiations with the UN, U.S., Russia and France, signaling his support for an international agreement that would give the International Atomic Energy Agency oversight of its uranium enrichment program. Though Iran recently said it would suggest amendments to the deal and though Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has the final say on any matters of state, Ahmadinejad’s comments suggest Iran will support the deal. Los Angeles Times (10/29) , The Guardian (London) (10/29)
Obama’s Iran Policy Will Fail: Stuck in Bush Mode in a Changed World By Dilip Hiro
While the tone of the Obama administration is different from that of its predecessor, and some of its foreign policies diverge from those of George W. Bush, at their core both administrations subscribe to the same doctrine: Whatever the White House perceives as a threat — whether it be Iran, North Korea, or the proliferation of long-range missiles — must be viewed as such by Moscow and Beijing.
In addition, by the evidence available, Barack Obama has not drawn the right conclusion from his predecessor’s failed Iran policy. A paradigm of sticks-and-carrots simply is not going to work in the case of the Islamic Republic. Here, a lesson is readily available, if only the Obama White House were willing to consider Iran’s recent history. It is unrealistic to expect that a regime which fought Saddam Hussein’s Iraq (then backed by the United States) to a standstill in a bloody eight-year war in the 1980s, unaided by any foreign power, and has for 30 years withstood the consequences of U.S.-imposed economic sanctions will be alarmed by Washington’s fresh threats of “crippling sanctions.”
NY GOVERNOR Paterson declares swine flu emergency
(AP) – Gov. David Paterson has declared a state of emergency because of the rise in swine flu cases.
The executive order means that far more health care professionals — including dentists — will be permitted to administer vaccines with only brief training. The order is needed to suspend provisions of state law.
State officials say the number of vaccine doses is also being increased. The federal government is ramping up availability of the vaccine, allowing the state to order twice as many doses as a week ago, a trend that’s expected
to continue.
The executive order says at least 75 deaths in the state have been attributed to the swine flu.
Students at 125 elementary schools got the swine flu vaccine today in the first phase of the city’s drive to make inoculation available to all school-age children.
School nurses administered the vaccine to students whose parents have signed consent forms. Officials do not
yet know what percentage of parents citywide have signed the forms.
Some children were getting shots instead of the nasal spray, depending on their medical conditions.
The city’s health commissioner, Dr. Thomas Farley, said there are 40,000 doses set aside for the first wave of schools.
City Parents Opting Out of Swine Flu Vaccine
By JENNIFER MEDINA
As people across the country clamor for the swine flu vaccine, fewer than half of New York City parents with children in elementary school have given permission for their children to receive the vaccine at school, reflecting some ambivalence about the need for the vaccine or concern about its effects.
Health officials said that while they did not have a citywide figure, 5 percent to 50 percent of parents had given consent for their children to receive the vaccine at schools that had it. At Public School 157 in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, where health officials opened the school vaccination effort on Wednesday, only a third of students had permission to receive it.
“The swine flu vaccine has not been out long enough for me to trust it,” said Sheena Ash, who has three children at the school. “They have never gotten a flu shot, and they’ve never gotten the flu.”
Faced with doubts about the vaccine, health officials nationwide have sought to assure the public that it is safe and advisable. But because vaccine production has lagged, few have had trouble giving their small supplies away, and some school districts have had to postpone immunization sessions.
In New York City, however, many parents appear to be passing on the vaccine. Besides questions about the vaccine itself, some may assume that if their children contracted swine flu in the spring, they were now immune, a belief supported by most flu experts
WASHINGTON – AP: US officials say China has agreed to lift ban on US swine imports imposed because of flu.
THE FIGHT FOR HEALTH CARE FOR ALL: 115 arrested so far in 18 cities to demand for health care for all
\Dr. Margaret Flowers, former pediatrician and mother of three teenagers: “I am planning to risk arrest,which may have serious consequences for me up to six months in jail. But it won’t be as serious as the suffering and needless deaths that too many face each day in this nation.I hope you will join me in our action. If you can’t risk arrest, at least you can stand in solidarity with us during the legal picket.”
MONICA SANCHEZ, Our Future..orgHealth Insurance Monopolies Are Legal
Health insurance companies are exempt from federal antitrust laws – laws that protect commerce from monopolies and unfair business practices in most other types of markets. As a result, health insurers have become highly concentrated and premiums have soared. There is movement on Capitol Hill to remove this exemption, but the best way to quickly infuse competition into health insurance markets across the country is with a strong, national public health insurance plan option.
FACING SOUTH, N.C. BLUE CROSS ASKS CUSTOMERS TO LOBBY AGAINST PUBLIC OPTION:
The insurance giant — which controls 96.8% of North Carolina’s market for individual health insurance — is using its customers to lobby against competition. (10/27/2009)
Robert Parry: On Public Option, MSM Gets It Wrong
The American mainstream media is in another snit, having misjudged the prospects for the public option on health care almost as completely as big-time journalists bungled the reporting on the Iraq War and a host of other important stories during George W. Bush’s presidency.
Indeed, if you had listened to all the supposedly knowledgeable journalists covering the health-care debate on Capitol Hill, you might have been shocked to learn Monday that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was putting a version of the public option in the bill that he is bringing to the Senate floor.
For instance, CNN’s Dana Bash has told listeners to her “no bias” news network that the only piece of legislation that mattered was the one emerging from the Senate Finance Committee, a position shared by nearly all the other “smart” journalists and pundits. That’s why, they said, they were devoting so much time to covering every twist and turn of the committee’s negotiations.
That devotion wasn’t shaken even by the strange legislative concoction that emerged from the Finance Committee. Since it didn’t include the public option, the insider thinking was that the idea was effectively dead, though a public option was included in the four other committee-approved bills, all three on the House side and one from the Senate Health and Labor Committee.
Still, Bash and her MSM colleagues told us that the Finance Committee bill would be the framework for final congressional action and the other four bills would be mostly cast aside. After all, the Finance Committee bill had the support of one Republican, Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine.
That conventional wisdom remained set in concrete despite many Democratic members of Congress indicating that the public option was alive and well – and despite opinion polls showing that the American people favored a public option by about a 2-to-1 margin.
UPDATE FROM PUBLIC CITIZEN
Last week – thanks to thousands of calls, emails, petition signatures and protests from Public Citizen activists like you – the Consumer Financial Protection Act passed out of a key committee. In the process, we even defeated Rep. Melissa Bean’s (D-Ill.) pro-Wall St. amendment and expanded whistleblower protections for financial sector employees.
This is a big step. But while the bill waits for a vote in the full House of Representatives, lobbyists for the banks are working every angle to weaken it and escape accountability.
GORBACHEV: 20 YEARS AFTER FALL OF WALL
FIORE: CREDIT CARD REFORMS–ANIMATED CARTOON
DEMOCRACY NOW: DRONES AND WAR CRIMES
Investigative reporter Jane Mayer of The New Yorker magazine revealed last week that the number of US drone strikes in Pakistan has risen dramatically under President Obama. During his first nine-and-a-half months in office, Obama authorized at least forty-one CIA missile strikes in Pakistan a rate of approximately one bombing a week. We speak to one of the most high-profile critics of the US drone program: Philip Alston, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions. Alston says the US government’s use of Predator drones may violate international law.
See the whole Post / →
ANNIVERSARY OF CRASH OF 1929, TAPPING 401Ks, LIVING IN CAGES, From House To Shelter
October 30th, 2009 - by: danny
REMEMBER THE 80TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE 1929 STOCK MARKET CRASH, OCTOBER 29, 1929
THE CONSEQUENCES OF A BULL MARKET FRAUD
THE AMERICAN DREAM: A HOME AND THEN A HOMELESS SHELTER
UNEMPLOYED CASHING OUT 401K’S TO SURVIVE
Market Ticker: WHERE DID OUR WEALTH GO? IS THE PRESS FINALLY WAKING UP?
THE FUTURE: LIVING IN CAGES?
Hong Kong, China (CNN) — If you have ever complained that your apartment is the size of a shoebox, consider the living space of Hong Kong resident Chung For Lau.
Chung lives in a 625 square foot (58.06 square meter) flat here with 18 strangers.
The place is sectioned into tiny cubicles made of wooden planks and wire mesh. Everything he has acquired over the years — clothes, dishes, figurines, a tired TV set — is squeezed into this tiny cube, a modernized version of what is known here as a cage home.
With all the buzz over Hong Kong’s exorbitant luxury property (like the recent record-breaking sale of a $57 million duplex), it may be hard to believe that people have been living in cage homes in this city for years.
But with Hong Kong home to some of the most densley-populated urban districts in the world, real estate has always come at a premium, no matter how small.
Chung’s cage is a newer yet less-desirable model, we are told. The wire mesh one, which resembles an over-sized rabbit hutch, is apparently more comfortable.
IN THESE TIMES: SLIDE SHOW ON PROTEST AGAINST BANKERS IN CHICAGO
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Protests Greet Daily Show Discussion of Palestine, The Verboten Subject, Bush Booed in Montreal
October 30th, 2009 - by: danny
JON STEWART CONFRONTS PALESTINE
Anna Baltzer writes: Last night Dr. Barghouti and I were on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart talking about Palestine.
The show was overwhelmed with angry emails and phone calls prior to the appearance, and up until the last minute it seemed like they might cancel. During the taping the show had it’s only heckler in 11 years.The entire staff were very nervous and may come to regret the monumental decision (and not make it again) as they will surely be inundated now that the show has aired.
That is why it is CRUCIAL that the show receive letters of support from anyone who appreciated the interview.
PLEASE take a moment to give a quick thank you to the Daily Show. I’m sure they will likely be affected by numbers rather than length, so it’s OK to make it short, but spread the word to others! Be sure to put”Thank you” in the subject, and maybe Dr. Barghouti & my names. Fill out the form here: ( http://www.comedycentral.com/help/questionsCC.jhtml )(make sure to choose The Daily Show with Jon Stewart as your topic). You can also try calling 212-468-1700.
Many of you who watched the show on TV noticed that everything of real substance that I said was edited out. The major issues cut out were (1) the US role in aiding Israel, (2) the lack of adequate coverage in mainstream US media, and (3) the Palestinian-led movement for Boycott / Divestment / Sanctions (BDS) to nonviolently pressure Israel to comply with international law.
The full, un-cut interview is available on the Daily Show homepage www.thedailyshow.com and will eventually be moved to:
Part I: ( http://www.thedailyshow.com/1)
Part II: ( http://www.thedailyshow.com/2 )
It’s worth watching and comparing with what they allowed said in the TV version.
Regardless of the cuts, this was a huge step for the movement(and Dr. Barghouti’s left-in parts were excellent, in my opinion). If you agree, do make your letters positive, even if you decide to mention the disappointing discrepancy between the full interview and what was aired. Again, please take a moment to fill out the form here: < http://www.comedycentral.com/help/questionsCC.jhtml> (make sure to choose The Daily Show with Jon Stewart as your topic).
I believe the interview wouldn’t have happened 3 years ago. Times are changing. Keep on keepin’ on…
LARRY BENSKY ON HOSTING NOAM CHOMSKY TALK
I came out of my semi-retirement from political type public appearances to host an appearance by Noam Chomsky earlier this month for the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco.
It’s now one of the most watched videos they’ve ever put on their =site (who knew I was such a draw? Or could it have been… him?). Ditto for views on FORA.tv, which does excerpts.
If you have an hour to wrap around Noam, here it is.
I was very proud to have been a part of it!”
IS FOX A LEGITIMATE NEWS ORGANIZATION?
Michael Burton’s take
GOLD SELLING IN DEPARTMENT STORE
LONDON — It’s a gift they’re sure to treasure.
Customers flocking to Britain’s most prestigious department store, Harrods, this holiday season will now be able to add gold bars to their basket while shopping for the perfect present.
This latest arrival to hit the shelves comes in a range of sizes, from just over two pounds to 27.5 pounds. There’s also a range of coins on offer, from British sovereigns to South African Krugerrands to American gold eagles.
NO WELCOME FOR BUSH IN MONTREAL: Montrealers Deliver a Fiery Message to Bush: You Are Persona Non Grata
Written by Charlotte Dennett, Photos by Robin Lloyd
Harvey Wasserman: Is Afghanistan Tom Friedman’s Cronkite Moment?
LETTERS
Richard Cooks sends this along on Michael Moore as a Catholic Hero:
Here is a very meaningful article on Michael Moore that places him, correctly I believe, within the framework of
the critically important Catholic social justice movement. My own view is that this movement has formed one of the
few real bulwarks against the horrors of modern finance capitalism.
COMMENT ON MY ARTICLE ON THE NIEMAN WATCHDOG SITE
A media failure compounds the financial failure
COMMENTARY | October 23, 2009
The press is still missing the story of fraud that has taken place, avoids reporting the ‘hollowing out’ of the middle class, and
pretty much has its eyes closed to the economic decline that almost certainly lies ahead, writes Danny Schechter.
Mark Robinowitz responds
It’s better for the media and the government to pretend to be
incompetents than to admit psychopathy. The smarter ones definitely
saw what’s coming, that’s why Congress changed the bankruptcy laws in
preparation for the crash.
from the ASPO-USA Peak Oil Notes, October 29, 2009
www.aspo-usa.org
Quote of the day: “(Steven Chu, US Secretary of Energy) was my boss. He knows all about
peak oil, but he can’t talk about it. If the government announced that
peak oil was threatening our economy, Wall Street would crash. He just
can’t say anything about it.
– David Fridley, scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory,
quoted in an article by Lionel Badal (see Peak Oil News, 10/28, item
#23)
“If anybody could have predicted this economic crisis, I would have
liked to have met them.”
– Ellen Weiss, senior vice president for news, National Public Radio
PBS News Hour December 11, 2008
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/media/july-dec08/npr_12-11.html
“I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees.”
– George W. Bush, September 1, 2005
“I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people would
take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another
one and slam it into the Pentagon, that they would try to use an
airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile.”
– Condoleeza Rice, May 16, 2002
www.oilempire.us
www.peakoilwars.org
Peak Oil Wars and
Global Permaculture Solutions
a political map to connect the dots
economy, energy, ecology
www.permatopia.com
www.globalpermaculture.org
a graceful end to cheap oil
local, bioregional, global solutions
permaculture for nine billion people
www.naftahighway.org
Peak Traffic: the Achilles Heel of highway expansion plans
Planning NAFTA Superhighways at the End of the Age of Oil
Troubled Bridges Over Water: time for transportation triage
I should be back NYC on Monday. Have a great weekend. Happy Halloween. Trick or Treat? Comments to dissector@mediachannel.org
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About Danny Schechter
Danny Schechter is an Emmy award winning journalist, television producer and independent filmmaker who also writes, blogs and speaks about media issues.
His latest film is PLUNDER The Crime Of Our Time.
Mr. Schechter is NOT the Godfather of Soul.
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