Detroit water workers denounce demands for concessions

By Kevin Martinez
30 July 2014
Workers from the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD) voted on a contract Tuesday that would open the door to privatization and mass layoffs as well as the elimination of basic job protections and benefits. The attack on DWSD workers occurs as tens of thousands of working class and poor households are facing the shut off of water service.
The attacks on workers are part of the overall plan to bankrupt the city of Detroit under unelected manager Kevyn Orr on behalf of the banks and corporations. Orr has the direct support of Republican Governor Rick Snyder and Democratic President Barack Obama who insist that workers pay with their pensions, health benefits, and jobs for the bankruptcy that they did not create. It is estimated that 81 percent of the workers at the DWSD will lose their jobs under the current schemes.

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/07/30/detr-j30.html

Brazil Farmers Say GMO Corn No Longer Resistant to Bugs

Brazilian farmers say their GMO corn is no longer resistant to pests, Reuters reported Monday.

The Association of Soybean and Corn Producers of the Mato Grosso region said farmers first noticed in March that their genetically modified corn crops were less resistant to the destructive caterpillars that "Bt corn" — which has been genetically modified to produce a toxin that repels certain pests — is supposed to protect against. In turn, farmers have been forced to apply extra coats of insecticides, racking up additional environmental and financial costs.

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2014/07/29/brazil-farmers-say-gmo-corn-no-longer-resistant-bugs

Sad cat diary (four letter word warning). Humor.

EVE

How much can you play before you have to get exposed to PvP?
I like the feel of it.

Capitalism's Deeper Problem by Richard Wolff

Recent press reports refer to troubling price increases for such assets as real estate, government bonds, companies targeted for acquisition and artwork. A New York Times front-page headline read “The Everything Boom, or Maybe the Everything Bubble.”

Western Europe, North America and Japan are stuck in a longer, deeper crisis than almost anyone expected. Millions have left the labor force. Wages, benefits and job security are declining; the so-called “middle classes” are evaporating.
Yet while asset prices soar, the production of goods and services, employment and workers’ incomes are not recovering and resuming growth. Instead, Western Europe, North America and Japan are stuck in a longer, deeper crisis than almost anyone expected. Millions have left the labor force. Wages, benefits and job security are declining; the so-called “middle classes” are evaporating. Having promised “recoveries,” desperate governments inject massive new quantities of money into their economies. What they accomplish most are fast-rising asset prices.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/07/16-3

Why Big Business Loves Desperate Workers

And how a strong social safety net can make us all more free
by Stephen Pimpare

We don’t think enough about the economic functions of social welfare policy, or about the relationship between the safety net and labor markets, and this hinders our ability to make sense of why some people fight so hard against programs that aid poor and low-income people: We mistake them for anti-welfare ideologues, and dismiss them as cruel or ignorant, but there’s an economic logic to their activism, one that’s revealed if we look at the relationship between welfare and work from both the employee’s and the employer’s perspective. Let me explain.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/07/17-2


Basically he is saying the only way capitalism works is with lots of patches. I couldn't agree more.

Stephanie Miller eviscerates GOPer: Your medieval history degree is ‘handy’ defending Republicans

Source: The Raw Story

Liberal radio host Stephanie Miller on Sunday explained to former Republican U.S. Senate candidate Carly Fiorina that her study of medieval history would “come in handy” after the Supreme Court ruled that corporations like Hobby Lobby could deny birth control coverage to women for religious reasons.

“A lot women including me are sick of the ‘war on women’, and we saw it in spades on Monday after the Hobby Lobby case,” Fiorina told a CNN panel. “Somehow this is the long arm of business and the Republican Party reaching into the body of women. It’s ridiculous.”

“The war on women is shameless, baseless propaganda, there’s no fact to it, and it’s worked because it’s scared women to death,” she insisted. “Enough. Enough.”

Read more: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/07/06/stephanie-miller-eviscerates-goper-your-medieval-history-degree-is-handy-defending-republicans/

What really happened at Tiananmen Square?

The truth is that no government will allow a protest to go on endlessly to the extent that it begins to destabilise the country and economy.

– Wei Ling Chua, Tiananmen Square “Massacre”?: The Power of Words vs. Silent Evidence, 100.

Last Sunday, I was with an American gentleman in downtown Chengdu, Sichuan, and during our conversation he mentioned that his Chinese wife had never heard of the Tiananmen Square massacre. I proposed that it is because it never happened, that it is a western media campaign of disinformation, and why should the Chinese media permit the dissemination of lies. In fact, hearing about any massacre at Tiananmen Square will surprise the vast majority of Chinese people, including those who live near Beijing and who participated in the demonstrations.

You can get a copy of the book for free. Interesting to hear another viewpoint.

http://dissidentvoice.org/2014/06/massacre-what-massacre/

On This Fourth of July, Meet Your Unpatriotic Corporations

Years ago, I noticed that America’s major drugstore chains tend to utilize the same corporate color scheme. Walgreens, CVS, Rite Aid—all patriotic in red, white, and blue. Even regional chains take their identity cues from Old Glory. But this July 4, American corporations—including one drugstore chain, in one recent example—are using tax loopholes to act in the most unpatriotic of ways.

Walgreens, The New York Times reported, is looking to relocate from Illinois to Switzerland, in the process merging with a Swiss corporation and reincorporating itself as a foreign entity. It is, bluntly, an old-fashioned tax dodge, aimed at trimming eleven percentage points off the company’s corporate tax rate. Americans for Tax Fairness estimates that the move will cost US taxpayers more than $4 billion over the next five years. Using a procedure called “inversion,” an American company can reincorporate itself overseas as long as its domestic (US) owners retain no more than 80 percent of its stock. Walgreens, after merging with European drugstore chain Alliance Boots (itself a loophole-exploiter, having moved from the UK to Switzerland itself in order to lower its tax bill), will meet the criteria and legally become a Swiss corporation.

http://www.thenation.com/blog/180521/how-americas-largest-drug-retail-chain-plans-take-4-billion-your-pockets

Do Public School Teachers Have Any Friends in the Obama Administration?

We are living in an era when the very idea of public education is under attack, as are teachers' unions and the teaching profession. Let's be clear: these attacks and the power amassed behind them are unprecedented in American history. Sure, there have always been critics of public schools, of teachers, and of unions. But never before has there been a serious and sustained effort to defund public education, to turn public money over to unaccountable private hands, and to weaken and eliminate collective bargaining wherever it still exists. And this effort is not only well-coordinated but funded by billionaires who have grown wealthy in a free market and can't see any need for regulation or unions or public schools.

In the past, Democratic administrations and Democratic members of Congress could be counted on to support public education and to fight privatization. In the past, Democrats supported unions, which they saw as a dependable and significant part of their base.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/07/02