September 11, 2012

Meggy Scissorhands

SAN FRANCISCO — Hewlett-Packard Co. is planning to cut about 2,000 more jobs than it had previously announced as CEO Meg Whitman tries to turn the company around.

In a regulatory filing Monday, the computer and printer maker said it will eliminate 29,000 jobs by October 2014, up from the 27,000 cuts it announced in May when HP employed about 350,000 people.

The company, which is based in Palo Alto, Calif., didn't explain why it had raised the number. The revision comes amid signs that the already slumping personal computer market may weaken even further as an increasing number of sleek smartphones and tablet computers win over consumers.

The shift to mobile devices has hurt HP, the world's largest maker of PCs. HP is preparing to release a new line of tablets this fall and has been trying to diversify into more profitable lines of technology, such as business software and consulting, but Whitman has cautioned it will take several years for the company to bounce back from a litany of problems, including a lack of innovation and acquisitions that haven't panned out. ...............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://xfinity.comcast.net/articles/finance/20120910/US.Hewlett.Packard.Job.Cuts/

September 10, 2012

Chris Hedges: Growth Is the Problem

from truthdig:



Growth Is the Problem

Posted on Sep 10, 2012
By Chris Hedges


The ceaseless expansion of economic exploitation, the engine of global capitalism, has come to an end. The futile and myopic effort to resurrect this expansion—a fallacy embraced by most economists—means that we respond to illusion rather than reality. We invest our efforts into bringing back what is gone forever. This strange twilight moment, in which our experts and systems managers squander resources in attempting to re-create an expanding economic system that is moribund, will inevitably lead to systems collapse. The steady depletion of natural resources, especially fossil fuels, along with the accelerated pace of climate change, will combine with crippling levels of personal and national debt to thrust us into a global depression that will dwarf any in the history of capitalism. And very few of us are prepared.

“Our solution is our problem,” Richard Heinberg, the author of “The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality,” told me when I reached him by phone in California. “Its name is growth. But growth has become uneconomic. We are worse off because of growth. To achieve growth now means mounting debt, more pollution, an accelerated loss of biodiversity and the continued destabilization of the climate. But we are addicted to growth. If there is no growth there are insufficient tax revenues and jobs. If there is no growth existing debt levels become unsustainable. The elites see the current economic crisis as a temporary impediment. They are desperately trying to fix it. But this crisis signals an irreversible change for civilization itself. We cannot prevent it. We can only decide whether we will adapt to it or not.”

Heinberg, a senior fellow at the Post Carbon Institute, argues that we cannot grasp the real state of the global economy by the usual metrics—GDP, unemployment, housing, durable goods, national deficits, personal income and consumer spending—although even these measures point to severe and chronic problems. Rather, he says, we have to examine the structural flaws that sit like time bombs embedded within the economic edifice. U.S. household debt enabled the expansion of consumer spending during the boom years, he says, but consumer debt cannot continue to grow as house prices decline to realistic levels. Toxic assets litter the portfolios of the major banks, presaging another global financial meltdown. The Earth’s natural resources are being exhausted. And climate change, with its extreme weather conditions, is beginning to exact a heavy economic toll on countries, including the United States, through the destruction brought about by droughts, floods, wildfires and loss of crop yields.

Heinberg also highlights what he calls “the highly dysfunctional U.S. political system,” which is paralyzed and hostage to corporate power. It is unable to respond rationally to the crisis or solve “even the most trivial of problems. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/growth_is_the_problem_20120910/

September 10, 2012

Robert Scheer: The Great Deregulator

from truthdig:



The Great Deregulator

Posted on Sep 10, 2012
By Robert Scheer


Bill Clinton bears as much responsibility as any politician for the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and the wild applause for his disingenuous speech at the Democratic National Convention last week is a sure sign of the poverty of what passes for progressive politics.

Do those convention delegates, and the fawning media that were wowed by the former president’s rhetorical seductions, not recall that just before he left office Clinton signed off on the game-changing legislation that ended the sensible rules imposed on Wall Street during the Great Depression? It was Clinton who cooperated with the Republicans in reversing the legacy of FDR’s New Deal, opening the floodgates of unfettered avarice that almost drowned the world’s economy during the reign of George W. Bush.

How convenient to ignore the Financial Services Modernization Act, which Clinton signed into law to summarily end the Glass-Steagall barrier against the commingling of investment and commercial banking. Do the Democrats not remember that Citigroup, the first too-big-to-fail bank made legal by the law Clinton signed, became the $15 million employer of Robert Rubin, the Clinton treasury secretary who led the fight for the law that legalized the creation of Citigroup? Or that Citigroup—led by Sanford Weill, to whom Clinton gave one of the souvenir pens he used to approve that onerous legislation—went on to be a major player in the subprime mortgage swindles and had to be bailed out with more than $50 billion of taxpayer funds?

Those scams were based on bundling suspect mortgages into collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), backed by the phony insurance of credit default swaps (CDSs), all of which were given “legal certainty,” to quote Lawrence Summers, who replaced Rubin as Clinton’s treasury secretary. It was Summers who encouraged Clinton to sign the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which declared CDOs and CDSs immune to any existing regulatory law and the purview of any regulatory agency. ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_great_deregulator_20120910/?ln

September 10, 2012

Chris Hedges: Growth Is the Problem

from truthdig:




Growth Is the Problem

Posted on Sep 10, 2012
By Chris Hedges

The ceaseless expansion of economic exploitation, the engine of global capitalism, has come to an end. The futile and myopic effort to resurrect this expansion—a fallacy embraced by most economists—means that we respond to illusion rather than reality. We invest our efforts into bringing back what is gone forever. This strange twilight moment, in which our experts and systems managers squander resources in attempting to re-create an expanding economic system that is moribund, will inevitably lead to systems collapse. The steady depletion of natural resources, especially fossil fuels, along with the accelerated pace of climate change, will combine with crippling levels of personal and national debt to thrust us into a global depression that will dwarf any in the history of capitalism. And very few of us are prepared.

“Our solution is our problem,” Richard Heinberg, the author of “The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality,” told me when I reached him by phone in California. “Its name is growth. But growth has become uneconomic. We are worse off because of growth. To achieve growth now means mounting debt, more pollution, an accelerated loss of biodiversity and the continued destabilization of the climate. But we are addicted to growth. If there is no growth there are insufficient tax revenues and jobs. If there is no growth existing debt levels become unsustainable. The elites see the current economic crisis as a temporary impediment. They are desperately trying to fix it. But this crisis signals an irreversible change for civilization itself. We cannot prevent it. We can only decide whether we will adapt to it or not.”

Heinberg, a senior fellow at the Post Carbon Institute, argues that we cannot grasp the real state of the global economy by the usual metrics—GDP, unemployment, housing, durable goods, national deficits, personal income and consumer spending—although even these measures point to severe and chronic problems. Rather, he says, we have to examine the structural flaws that sit like time bombs embedded within the economic edifice. U.S. household debt enabled the expansion of consumer spending during the boom years, he says, but consumer debt cannot continue to grow as house prices decline to realistic levels. Toxic assets litter the portfolios of the major banks, presaging another global financial meltdown. The Earth’s natural resources are being exhausted. And climate change, with its extreme weather conditions, is beginning to exact a heavy economic toll on countries, including the United States, through the destruction brought about by droughts, floods, wildfires and loss of crop yields.

Heinberg also highlights what he calls “the highly dysfunctional U.S. political system,” which is paralyzed and hostage to corporate power. It is unable to respond rationally to the crisis or solve “even the most trivial of problems. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/growth_is_the_problem_20120910/

September 10, 2012

Juan Cole: A Rebuke to the American-Israeli Economic War on Iran

from truthdig:



A Rebuke to the American-Israeli Economic War on Iran

Posted on Sep 9, 2012
By Juan Cole


In his acceptance speech in Charlotte, N.C., President Barack Obama said, “The Iranian government must face a world that stays united against its nuclear ambitions.” It wasn’t much noted in the Western press, but in fact the recent Non-Aligned Movement meeting in Tehran last month delivered a slap in the face to the Israeli-American financial and commercial war on Iran over its nuclear enrichment program. The 120 countries of the movement, representing some two-thirds of United Nations member states and 55 percent of the world’s population, refused to boycott Iran. More, they upheld Iran’s right to pursue nuclear-powered electricity. But given that the U.S. and Europe constitute half of the world’s gross domestic product and maintain its most powerful standing armies, does the meeting’s symbolic gesture really matter?

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon defied severe pressure from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and attended the Tehran summit. Some reports suggested that Ban went because he was annoyed by the vehemence of the Israeli government. India Prime Minister Manmohan Singh not only insisted on attending but brought a big delegation of businessmen with him looking for deals with Iran. For the first time since 1979, an Egyptian president, Mohamed Morsi, flew to Tehran, signaling an end to Cairo’s decades of obsequiousness toward the U.S.

The final communiqué upheld Iran’s right to pursue the enrichment of uranium for energy purposes and rejected the United States’ boycotts and sanctions on Iran. It further warned that any attack on nuclear facilities would be illegal under international law and a violation of basic human rights. It stressed Palestinian rights, including the right of Palestinian refugees to return home to what is now Israel. In other words, the Non-Aligned Movement document contained the opposite of everything Netanyahu and Hillary Clinton say on each of these points. ...............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/a_rebuke_to_the_american-israeli_economic_war_on_iran_20120909/

September 9, 2012

Detroit Free Press: How nuns have become soldiers in the battle for the White House

By Patricia Montemurri
Detroit Free Press Staff Writer


Their black-and-white habits stood out in the backdrop of faces seated behind Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan when the Republican presidential ticket campaigned in suburban Detroit recently. The three Catholic nuns, members of an Ann Arbor-based conservative congregation, could be seen on video applauding Romney.

It was a Catholic nun in modern dress who roused Democratic National Convention delegates Wednesday, describing the struggling Americans she encountered during a Nuns on the Bus tour that opposed GOP plans to cut federal aid to poor people. Sister Simone Campbell, who leads the Catholic social justice lobby NETWORK, defended President Barack Obama's health care plan, too.

As the Nov. 6 election looms, these nuns have come to represent the divide among American Catholics, both in the pews and in the voting booth. Both Obama and Romney are battling for the Catholic vote, a crucial slice of the electorate that represents about 1 out of 4 voters nationwide.

"The Obama campaign is going after Catholics who love nuns, who are social justice Catholics, who are concerned about the poor," said the Rev. Thomas Reese, a Georgetown University Jesuit priest and Catholic commentator, referring to Campbell's appearance. .................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.freep.com/article/20120909/NEWS15/309090102/How-nuns-have-become-soldiers-in-the-battle-for-the-White-House?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|FRONTPAGE

September 9, 2012

The illusory promise of free-market health care miracles

September 8th, 2012 11:48 AM

The illusory promise of free-market health care miracles
Republican rhetoric aside, the answers lie elsewhere

By Wendell Potter


While listening to the promises to repeal ObamaCare during the Republican National Convention, I was reminded of what those of us in the health insurance industry said when our friends in Congress were able to block passage of President Clinton’s health care reform legislation 18 years ago.

Like the politicians in Tampa, we insisted then that a big government program not only wasn’t needed, but would be harmful — that what the government really needed to do was get out of the way and let the free market work.

Insurance company spokesmen like me assured the public that our then-novel managed care plans, coupled with the invisible hand of the market, would do the trick. Leave it to us, we said, and we’ll get medical costs under control and enroll every American in a good HMO.

The proponents of a pure free-market health care system hope that Americans have amnesia and can be persuaded to blame President Obama for the problems that grew almost immeasurably worse between the demise of the Clinton plan and the passage of the Affordable Care Act. They want us to believe, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that health insurers and the largely unfettered, loosely regulated marketplace can somehow turn things around. And that we should reward insurers for their failure by turning the Medicare program over to them. ..................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/mike-friends-blog/illusory-promise-free-market-health-care-miracles

September 9, 2012

Unfortunate billboard placement

September 8, 2012

Arctic ice melting at 'amazing' speed, scientists find

BBC:



Scientists in the Arctic are warning that this summer's record-breaking melt is part of an accelerating trend with profound implications.

Norwegian researchers report that the sea ice is becoming significantly thinner and more vulnerable.

Last month, the annual thaw of the region's floating ice reached the lowest level since satellite monitoring began, more than 30 years ago.

It is thought the scale of the decline may even affect Europe's weather.

The melt is set to continue for at least another week - the peak is usually reached in mid-September - while temperatures here remain above freezing. ....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-19508906

September 7, 2012

Mitt Romney and the 12 million jobs fantasy

Mitt Romney and the 12 million jobs fantasy
Commentary: Republican proposal doesn’t add up

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — Last week at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla., Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney made a bold statement.

“I am running for president to help create a better future, a future where everyone who wants a job can find one, he said, “and unlike the president, I have a plan to create 12 million new jobs.”

The plan was put together by four leading economists — Kevin Hassett, Glenn Hubbard, Greg Mankiw and John Taylor — three of whom (not Hassett) served in the administration of George W. Bush.

So far, it has gotten the backing of more than 600 economists, including six Nobel laureates, as well as conservative luminaries like Martin Feldstein, Michael Boskin, Dick Armey and Phil Gramm (although the statement the economists signed does not mention 12 million jobs). ....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/mitt-romney-and-the-fantasy-of-12-million-jobs-2012-09-07?dist=beforebell