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Sea Shepherd Founder Paul Watson Fights Extradition to Costa Rica for 2002 Shark Defense

Tue, 22 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman - May. 22 (News Report) - Captain Paul Watson, founder of the anti-whaling group Sea Shepherd, has been released on bail in Germany following his arrest for possible extradition to Costa Rica on decade-old charges stemming from a confrontation with shark fin poachers. Sea Shepherd continues to maintain that Watson's arrest was politically motivated and is calling on its supporters to come together in a day of action on Wednesday when the Costa Rican President Laura Chinchilla visits Germany. Watson joins us from Frankfurt. “We’ve never injured anybody,” Watson says. “The most powerful weapon in the world as far as I'm concerned is the camera, so we go into battle armed with cameras...Right now 19 million sharks a year are being destroyed to feed the shark fin industry in Asia. And that means the fins are cut off of these animals and they’re thrown back into the ocean, and this is what we filmed off of Guatemala and this is what we intervened against -- a highly illegal operation.” [Transcript to come. Check back soon.]

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Role Reversal: Why TV Is Replacing Movies As Elite Entertainment

Sun, 13 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

The Hollywood Economist - By Edward Jay Epstein - May. 13 (News Analysis) - Once upon a time, over a generation ago, The television set was commonly called the “boob tube” and looked down on by elites as a purveyors of mind-numbing entertainment. Movie theaters, on the other hand, were considered a venue for, if not art, more sophisticated dramas and comedies. Not any more. The multiplexes are now primarily a venue for comic-book inspired action and fantasy movies, whereas television, especially the pay and cable channels, is increasingly becoming a venue for character-driven adult programs, such as The Wire, Mad Men, and Boardwalk Empire. This role reversal, rather than a momentary fluke, proceeds directly from the new economic realities of the entertainment business. Consider what happened to Pay-TV. Back in the 1970s, HBO provided something home viewers could not get elsewhere: movies uninterrupted by commercials. It was, as a HBO executive put it, “the only game in town,” so its subscribers paid a monthly fee, no matter how little or often they watch it, to their local cable provider who in turn forked over a share to HBO. As the cable systems grew, so did HBO. By 2010, it had (including its Cinemax unit) over 40 million subscribers, and just the monthly fees produced cash flow of over $1.5 billion a year. Getting new movies was no problem. HBO simply licensed them from a few major studios for an exclusive period (which began a few months after they were released on video and DVD) in so-called “output deals.” To continue to harvest this immense bounty, HBO had merely to stop subscribers from ending their service.

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Foxconn Workers Protest, Threaten To Jump Off Roof

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - Apr. 27 (News Report) - Workers at a Chinese factory owned by Foxconn, Apple Inc's main manufacturer, threatened to jump off the roof of a building in a protest over wages just a month after the two firms announced a landmark agreement on improving working conditions. The protest happened in the central city of Wuhan at one of Foxconn's plants. The company employ some 1.2 million workers in China assembling iPhones and iPads, among other products. It involved some 200 workers, the Hong-Kong based activist group Information Centre for Human Rights said. A spokesman for Hon Hai Precision Industry, th

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The Greenlining Institute : Greenlining Report > Tech Untaxed Report

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700

greenlingin.org - Apr. 27 (Investigative Report) - Tax avoidance by wealthy high-tech firms is on the rise, a new report from The Greenlining Institute finds. Cash held overseas by tech firms rose 21 percent from 2010 to 2011. Apple’s 2011 tax rate of 9.8 percent was lower than that of American households making an average of $42,500 per year.

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Chinese Guest Workers Flee Living Hell in Jordan - Institute for Global Labour & Human Rights

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0700

globallabourrights.org - Mar. 31 (Investigative Report) - While young Chinese women guest workers are fleeing the grueling 93-hour workweek at the Rich Pine Factory, the Jordanian Ministry of Labor has rewarded Rich Pine its "Golden List" status, placing it among the very best export garment factories in Jordan.

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iTax Dodger

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0700

ctj.org - Mar. 22 (Special Report) - CTJ has estimated that Apple has paid a tax rate of just over three percent on this stash of “foreign” earnings, a clear indicator that much of this cash is likely parked in offshore tax havens and has never been taxed by any government. If Apple brought this cash back to the U.S., they’d likely pay something close to the 35 percent corporate tax rate that the law prescribes. The resulting $17 billion tax payment would be more than double the $8.3 billion in federal taxes that Apple has paid on its $83 billion in worldwide profits – over the last 11 years.

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4 important truths about Mike Daisey’s lies & the way ‘This American Life’ told them

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Poynter Institute - By Craig Silverman - Mar. 19 (News Analysis) - Fact checking is a real process, but what “This America Life” did wasn’t fact checking. The press release about the retraction show referenced the “fact checking before the broadcast of Daisey’s story” and the original show included this from Glass: This

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Not a Great Deal for Asia

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0700

American Prospect - By Kevin P. Gallagher - Mar. 13 (News Analysis) - The Trans-Pacific Partnership is best understood as President Barack Obama’s extension of the Bush-era doctrine of “competitive liberalization.” Frustrated with pushback at the World Trade Organization by nations like China, Brazil, India, and South Africa, the United States seeks a coalition of the willing to import a commercial framework that rewards private firms at the expense of the common good. That policy regime is ailing in the U.S. and gets worse when exported. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) certainly isn’t about raising standards of living. The most ambitious estimates of the gains from the TPP suggest that participating nations will gain a mere one-tenth of 1 percent of the gross domestic product. Sixty percent of the projected gains go to Vietnam and the United States, and the other 20 percent goes to Malaysia—largely because the U.S. already has trade pacts with the other proposed big players in the TPP. However, the proposed deal is far from popular in Asia. In ...

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Renewables Are a Reality: How We Can Ditch Fossil Fuels Without Any Help From Congress

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

AlterNet - By Fen Montaigne - Feb. 21 (Special Report) - In an interview with Yale Environment 360 senior editor Fen Montaigne, Lovins discusses how business and society can pull off this transformation even if the U.S. Congress keeps failing to act, why climate change need not even enter the discussion, and why the oil industry will ultimately forego fossil fuels and jump aboard the green bandwagon. “One system is dying and others are struggling to be born,” says Lovins. “It’s a very exciting time.”

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Will Chevron case take down trade pact investor-state system?

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

citizen.org - Feb. 17 (News Report) - After having lost on the merits in Ecuador and U.S. courts, Chevron has turned to an ad hoc “investor-state” tribunal of three private lawyers to help the company avoid paying to clean up horrific contamination in the Amazonian rainforest.

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EUROPE-DEVELOPMENT: The "Indignados" Still Have Wind in Their Sails

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Inter Press Service - By Cleo Fatoorehchi - Feb. 06 (News) - EUROPE-DEVELOPMENT By Cléo Fatoorehchi AIX-EN-PROVENCE, Feb 6, 2012 (IPS) - Months of protest across the European Union, sparked by indignant youth demanding an end to the brand of free market capitalism that has blighted the continent with an unemployme

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2012: The Year of the Cooperative

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

nationofchange.org - By Jessica Reeder - Feb. 02 (Special Report) - What do coffee growers in Ethiopia, hardware store owners in America, and Basque entrepreneurs have in common? For one thing, many of them belong to cooperatives. By pooling their money and resources, and voting democratically on how those resources will be used, they can compete in business and reinvest the benefits in their communities.

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6 Shocking Ways Capitalism Is Failing Working America

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

AlterNet - By Les Leopold - Feb. 01 (News Analysis) - Capitalism is coming apart at the seams and the middle-class is paying the price.

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300 Chinese Foxconn Workers 'Threaten Mass Suicide' At XBox Plant, Reports Claim

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

huffingtonpost.co.uk - By Michael Rundle - Jan. 11 (News Report) - Around 300 Chinese workers who manufacture XBox consoles took to a factory roof and threatened bosses with mass suicide over a dispute about pay, unconfirmed reports have claimed. The workers were employed at the Foxconn Technology Park in Wuhan in Hubei province. Foxconn is an independent, global manufacturing partner to companies including Apple, Microsoft and Sony.

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Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

thisamericanlife.org - By Ira Glass - Jan. 10 (Special Report) - Mike Daisey performs an excerpt that was adapted for radio from his one-man show "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs." A lifelong Apple superfan, Daisey sees some photos online from the inside of a factory that makes iPhones, starts to wonder about the people working there, and flies to China to meet them.

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U.S. Manufacturing Competitiveness in Global Trade

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Huffington Post - By Jared Bernstein: - Dec. 28 (News Analysis) - we're toward the low end of the advanced economies in terms of compensation costs. Second, in dollar terms, manufacturing compensation costs have increased much faster elsewhere over the past decade

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Oil Slick From Massive Spill in Nigeria Threatens Coastline, May Be Largest Spill in a Decade

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman - Dec. 27 (News Report) - Communities along Nigeria’s Niger Delta have been put on alert following a major oil spill from the oil giant, Shell. The massive oil slick is making its way to the Nigerian coast, threatening local wildlife and massive pollution along the shore. Much of the available information about the spill comes from the company responsible for it, Royal Dutch Shell, which says less than 40,000 barrels have leaked so far. But Nigeria’s National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency says the spill could be three times as large. It comes just four months after the United Nations said it would take 30 years and around $1 billion for a small section of the delta to recover from environmental damage caused by Shell and other companies.

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President Obama’s view of fraud “from 40,000 feet” (without an oxygen mask)

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

New Economic Perspectives - By William K. Black - Dec. 20 (Fact Check) - Hallucinations occur at high altitude when you become oxygen deprived. Let’s review the bidding on the Bush/Obama record in prosecuting the elite control frauds that drove the ongoing crisis. There are no convictions of the Wall Street elites that made, purchased, packaged, and sold millions of fraudulent liar’s loans. There are no federal prosecutions of the major banks that committed over 100,000 fraudulent foreclosures. There are a few settlements that sound like large dollar amounts, but are merely what even Obama concedes to be the (deeply inadequate) “cost of doing (fraudulent) business.” Fraud pays – it pays enormously and our elites now commit it with impunity as a means of becoming wealthy. We have just witnessed the travesty of Wachovia admitting to criminal conduct in their (grotesquely weak) settlement with the Department of Justice (which has a policy of no longer prosecuting large corporations that commit crimes) – and having the SEC refuse to require Wachovia to make similar admissions in its settlement. All this, the President implicitly or even explicitly concedes.

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Gingrich On Climate Change

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

FactCheck - By Brooks Jackson - Dec. 07 (Fact Check) - Newt Gingrich went too far when he claimed that “I’ve never favored cap-and-trade.” It’s true he’s never favored the approach taken by Democrats, but he said in 2007 that he would “strongly support” cap-and-trade if combined with “a tax-incentive program for investing in the solutions”.

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Richard Wolff: Eurozone Woes Result From Mating of Our "Dysfunctional" Political, Economic Systems

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Democracy Now - By Juan Gonzalez - Dec. 02 (News Analysis) - Richard Wolff: Eurozone Woes Result From Mating of Our "Dysfunctional" Political, Economic Systems European leaders are preparing to unveil their plans for addressing the sovereign debt crisis that’s threatened to tear apart the eurozone. Both France and Germany are expected to push for changes to the eurozone treaty, including centralized oversight of national budgets and tighter reins on debt

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Flipping Through DNC Playbook on Romney

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

FactCheck - By Eugene Kiely, Lori Robertson, Robert Farley, Brooks Jackson, D’Angelo Gore, Scott Blackburn, Lalita Clozel - Dec. 01 (Fact Check) - The Democratic National Committee casts Mitt Romney as an untrustworthy flip-flopper in a lengthy Web video, but pads a long list of examples with some falsehoods and distortions. It's true that Romney has changed or modified his position on some major issues -- including abortion, a federal assault weapons ban and Reaganomics, as the DNC says. But the video strains the truth ... More >>

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Newsvine - AP Impact: Right-to-know laws often ignored

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0800

NewsVine - By Martha Mendoza, AP National Writer,: Ravi Nessman from India, Charles Hutzler from China, Adriana Gomez Licon from Mexico. - Nov. 17 (Investigative Report) - In Mexico, the AP filed a query through a website and got all the information requested within two months. But in the U.S., the AP had to mail requests to six branches of the Justice and Homeland Security departments. After 10 months, 18 phone calls and 40 letters from the government, the AP ended up with two spreadsheets and a piece of paper with all names blanked out.

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Fact-check: South Carolina Debate

Sun, 13 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0800

FactCheck - By Brooks Jackson, Eugene Kiely, Lori Robertson, Robert Farley - Nov. 13 (Fact Check) - We found several exaggerations and misstatements in the latest Republican presidential candidates’ debate. Romney issued a hollow threat to take China’s currency manipulation to a world body that doesn’t actually deal with overvalued money, and he claimed federal spending consumes more of the nation’s economic output than it really does. … More >>

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Wall Street v. Greece: G20 Opens as Greek PM Pushes For Referendum on Bailout and Austerity Measures

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman - Nov. 03 (News Report) - World leaders are gathering in Cannes for the opening of the Group of 20 summit today. On the top of the agenda is the Greece bailout and the European debt crisis. On Monday, Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou angered many European leaders by announcing his support for a popular referendum — allowing the Greek people to decide if they want to accept the conditions of the $179 billion European Union bailout. After days of increasing criticism from European leaders, Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou is now facing calls from within his party to resign. The Greek debt scandal has also pitted U.S. banking interests against France, Germany and other European powers. "The Americans are putting immense pressure on Europe saying, 'We will wreck your economy if you don’t wreck Greece's economy,'" says economic analyst Michael Hudson. President Obama is “basically telling Europe, ‘Don't go the democratic route, support Wall Street.’” [Transcript to come. Check back soon.]

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Bad Accounting Killed the US Economy

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0700

populist.com - By Bob Burnett - Nov. 02 (News Analysis) - In each case Dell accepted the proposal because from a perspective of making money, it made sense: Dell’s revenues were unaffected and its profits improved significantly. However, the next time ASUSTeK came back, it wasn’t to talk to Dell. It was to talk to Best Buy and other retailers to tell them that they could offer them their own brand or any brand PC for 20% lower cost.”

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