Things are a Lot Worse Than They are Telling Us

BS From the BLS
By DAVE LINDORFF

Many Americans simply assume that the government and politicians lie when they are talking about things like cutting taxes, or eliminating waste. But somehow, we tend to believe official government reports about things like economic “growth” or unemployment rates, or even cost-of-living increases.

The truth, sadly, is that the government is lying about these things too.

Take jobs and unemployment. Right after the election, the Obama administration’s Bureau of Labor Statistics proudly trumpeted that the economy had added 151,000 new jobs in October. President Obama, about to head off to India, land, where many American jobs have moved for good, made it sound like maybe the American economy had finally turned a corner. The news led to a jump in the stock market and everyone breathed a sigh of relief, because finally, we had a number that was greater than the 100,000 new jobs that we have been repeatedly told are needed “just to keep pace with the new workers who join the labor force every month.”

Only the number is a fraud. It turns out that this job number is a fictional construct created by BLS statisticians who are using outdated estimates for the number of new small businesses supposedly created every month, and also outdated estimates for the number of small businesses that go bankrupt every month. The reality is that in this deep recession, few new businesses are being started. No surprise there. It takes capital to start a business, and banks aren’t lending these days, especially to risky new start-ups. The reality too is that existing small businesses are folding at a high rate. The pace of bankruptcies of small companies is down from the record 2009 level, but is still extremely high by historical standards.

The real story on employment is told by the BLS’s household survey, which is taken every month and looks at 60,000 randomly selected households. That survey shows that far from the US economy adding jobs, 330,000 jobs were lost in October.

Lying about unemployment has been going on for a long time. It started to get bad back in 1981, when the new Reagan White House got the BLS to change the methodology for calculating the figure. If we used the earlier methodology from 1980 to calculate today’s unemployment rate, which would mean including all those who have taken part-time jobs while looking for full-time work, and those who have given up trying to look because no jobs are available (those currently considered to be “out of the labor force), unemployment today would be 22.5%! That’s more than double the official 9.6% rate.

But it gets worse.

With very little real economic good news to talk about, the government and the Federal Reserve have liked to cite the stock market, which has now returned to pre-economic crisis levels. That should make us feel good, right?

Except that unmentioned is that insiders--the executives of America’s companies, who have to report any trading in their companies’ stock to the Securities & Exchange Commission -- have been selling their holdings at a record pace this year, and especially in the last few months. Bloomberg reports that in October, insiders sold an all-time record of $662 million in shares of their own companies, while buying only $1.6 million of stocks in their companies. That’s a sell:buy ratio of 423:1

Among the largest companies, executives were unloading their company shares at a ratio of 3177:1.

You have to ask: what do these insiders know about the future direction of their businesses, and of our economy, that we don’t know? My guess is they are all dutifully telling analysts and investors that things are just great, but you’ve gotta wonder: Why are they all getting out now?

Today’s Wall Street Journal notes that after pulling their money out of equities, and staying on the sidelines for over two years, small investors are finally starting to invest in the stock market again. The article’s headline, though, is: “‘Dumb Money’ Tests Bullish View of Stocks.” The article goes on to state that with what Wall Street experts mockingly refer to as the “dumb money” coming into the market, it “argues for caution.” The small investor, the article notes, is a “lagging indicator, reacting to past performance rather than predicting future gains.”

The other thing that they don’t talk about is that some 70 percent of the trading on Wall Street these days is now automated trading, with big investment banks like JP MorganChase and Goldman Sachs using big mainframe computers to buy and sell stocks, holding them literally for seconds or less. Take a look some time at a day’s trading graph. You will see almost every day a straight vertical line as millions of shares are bought or sold simultaneously at the opening of markets at 9:30 am Eastern Time, followed almost always by a reversal of direction as those whose computers made a collective, instant buy or sell decision take their profits and run. This is a new phenomenon, and hardly one that offers any predictive insights, or that bodes well for those who see the markets as an “efficient” way to allocate capital.

Moving to the cost of getting by, the Consumer Price Index, or CPI, has also been fatally tampered with because so many things are linked to it that end up costing companies or governments money. When the CPI goes up, workers naturally want their pay to go up accordingly, so their families can stay afloat. Social Security checks to the elderly and disabled, and to widows and orphaned children, are also raised when the CPI increases. Not surprisingly, back in the early 1980s, the Reagan administration, acting on the advice of a “blue-ribbon commission” on Social Security “reform” headed by future Federal Reserve Chairman and Ayn Rand acolyte Alan Greenspan, changed the way the CPI is calculated, making it much less reflective of reality--and much slower to rise. If you listen to the reports each month, you’ll often hear it noted that the figure doesn’t include energy costs, housing costs, or food costs, which the reporters blithely explain are “volatile”. Well yeah, but they are also a huge part of our all to real cost of living.

So we hear that inflation is “not a problem,” running officially at about 1.1% right now. That is comforting, but it isn’t an accurate reflection of what is happening in the supermarket or at the gas station. If we were to use the methodology that the was used prior to 1981, the CPI rate of increase right now would be coming in about about 8%. My guess is that, if you are one of those lucky four-in-five American workers who still has a real job, you have not gotten a raise anywhere near 8% this year or last. Am I right?

The other thing that is not getting much ink these days is what is happening to employment at the state and local level. Until the beginning of last summer, most states , local governments and school districts were managing to hold their own, thanks to federal government stimulus funding that allowed them to compensate for lower sales, income and property tax revenues. But now that federal money is all gone, and the recessionary shit is hitting the budget fan.

The result is that public jobs are being shed at a prodigious rate--but one which will only grow.

In the three months of May, June and July, 102,000 public jobs were lost at the state and local level--the highest rate of such layoffs since the 1981-82 recession. In September alone, 159,000 state and local jobs were lost. A total of 125,000 public school teachers have lost their jobs over the last two years, even as the number of students in public school has grown.

These are real jobs lost, not statistical estimates by analysts at the BLS (maybe they should start referring to the BLS as the BS).

A lot of this information can be found at an excellent website called Shadow Stats. It’s a site that should be visited daily by the hacks who write on business and economics for the corporate media, but if they are visiting it out of personal curiosity, they are sure not including its data when they slavishly report without comment the self-serving garbage coming out of official Washington.

With the tax-cuts-for-the-rich, budget-cuts-for-the-poor Republicans now about to take over the House of Representatives, and with gutless and shell-shocked Democrats in the Senate and the clueless Obama in the White House, we can expect even more dissembling from government statisticians, while unemployment continues to destroy any chance of an economic recovery, and average Americans who are still working find their paychecks buying less and less of what they need to get by.

Numbers don’t lie, but the people who compile them do.

Phantom Jobs

Big Lies, Little Lies
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

If we cannot trust what the government tells us about weapons of mass destruction, terrorist events, and the reasons for its wars and bailouts, can we trust the government’s statement last Friday that the US economy gained 151,000 payroll jobs during October?

Apparently not. After examining the government’s report, statistician John Williams (shadowstats.com) reported that the jobs were “phantom jobs” created by “concurrent seasonal factor adjustments.” In other words, the 151,000 jobs cannot be found in the unadjusted underlying data. The jobs were the product of seasonal adjustments concocted by the BLS.

As usual, the financial press did no investigation and simply reported the number handed to the media by the government.

The relevant information, the information that you need to know, is that the level of payroll employment today is below the level of 10 years ago. A smaller number of Americans are employed right now than were employed a decade ago.

Think about what that means. We have had a decade of work force growth from youngsters reaching working age and from immigration, legal and illegal, but there are fewer jobs available to accommodate a decade of work force entrants than before the decade began.

During two years from December 2007 - December 2009, the US economy lost 8,363,000 jobs, according to the payroll jobs data. As of October 2010, payroll jobs purportedly have increased by 874,000, an insufficient amount to keep up with labor force growth. However, John Williams reports that 874,000 is an overestimate of jobs as a result of the faulty “birth-death model,” which overestimates new business start-ups during recessions and underestimates business failures. Williams says that the next benchmark revision due out next February will show a reduction in current employment by almost 600,000 jobs. This assumes, of course, that the BLS does not gimmick the benchmark revision. If Williams is correct, it is more evidence that the hyped recovery is non-existent.

Discounting the war production shutdown at the end of World War II, which was not a recession in the usual sense, Williams reports that “the current annual decline [in employment] remains the worst since the Great Depression, and should deepen further.”

In short, there is no employment data, and none in the works, unless gimmicked, that supports the recovery myth. The US rate of unemployment, if measured according to the methodology used in 1980, is 22.5%. Even the government’s broader measure of unemployment stands at 17%. The 9.6% reported rate is a concocted measure that does not include discouraged workers who have been unable to find a job after 6 months and workers who who want full time jobs but can only find part-time work.

Another fact that is seldom, if ever, reported, is that the payroll jobs data reports the number of jobs, not the number of people with jobs. Some people hold two jobs; thus, the payroll report does not give the number of employed people.

The BLS household survey measures the number of people with jobs. The same October that reported 151,000 new payroll jobs reported, according to the household survey, a loss of 330,000 jobs.

The American working class has been destroyed. The American middle class is in its final stages of destruction. Soon the bottom rungs of the rich themselves will be destroyed.

The entire way through this process the government will lie and the media will lie.

The United States of America has become the country of the Big Lie. Those who facilitate government and corporate lies are well rewarded, but anyone who tells any truth or expresses an impermissible opinion is excoriated and driven away.

But we “have freedom and democracy.” We are the virtuous, indispensable nation, the salt of the earth, the light unto the world.

When Betrayed Voters Go to the Polls

The Democrats Squandered the Swing Vote
By RALPH NADER

The mid-term 2010 Congressional elections are over and the exaggerations are front and center. “A tidal wave,” “an earthquake,” “a tsunami,” cried the Republican victors and their media acolytes.

Wait a minute! No more than 7 percent of the actual voters switched sides to create a 14 point spread. This amounts to about 3 percent of all the eligible voters who produced this “tidal wave.” That is what happens in our winner-take-all system. So when it is said that “the people have spoken,” chalk it up to 7 percent or so switcheroos. The rest voted the way they did in the previous Presidential and Congressional election (and about 28 million voters stayed home.)

Such sweeping descriptions gave incoming House Speaker, John Boehner, even more leeway than usual to play with words when he declared, without further elaboration, that “the peoples priorities and agenda are our priorities.” Mr. Boehner is the consummate corporate logo-man masquerading as a Congressman. If someone drew the logos of all the big companies that have marinated his career and put them on his suit coat, they would run into each other.

How then did the Democrats lose against the most craven Republican party in modern history—a Party that opposes again and again the fair rights of workers, consumers, investors, savers and patients.

Regarding patients, Boehner’s oft-repeated view of the modest, non-single-payer health insurance changes by Congress and Obama—“it will kill jobs, destroy the best health care system in the world and bankrupt our country.” Reporters listen to Mr. Boehner say this repeatedly and do not ask him to explain his wild rhetoric.

So, in listing some of the ways the Democrats failed to defend the country against such Republicans, put near the top not rebutting the crisp lies and abstract assertions that Republican candidates uttered while campaigning or “debating” their Democratic opponents. Listening to debate after debate on C-Span radio, I was amazed at how infrequently the Democrats demanded examples from their Republican opponents each time the words “cut spending,” “cut taxes,” “reduce the deficit,” “deregulate” and “create jobs,” were uttered.

In elections, one side is on the offensive and the other is on the defensive. The offense creates momentum unless it is countered and driven back. Since the Democrats are furiously dialing for the same corporate campaign dollars, it is difficult for them to stand for the people. That is why the Democrats are wishy-washy, reticent and reluctant to put major subjects of abusive power on the table.

Rarely did one hear Democrats state their position on corporate crime law enforcement, huge fraud on the taxpayer (Medicare), anti-collective-bargaining laws for labor, the bloated military budgets, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the flood of corporate subsidies, handouts, giveaways and bailouts, or the grotesque tax escapes for the multinational corporations and the super-wealthy.

They did not want to talk about consumer rip-offs, or the hundreds of thousands of unprotected Americans who lose their lives every year from un-regulated workplace-related diseases/traumas, medical malpractice, air, water and food contamination, or having no health insurance.

Too many Democrats are cowering candidates. Speaker Nancy Pelosi told incumbent Democrats that they could criticize her if necessary to get elected and preserve their majority in the House. Since Republicans made a practice of assailing Pelosi in almost every debate or on every occasion, many Democrats did not rebut their Republican opponents. Some Democrats stated they would not vote for Pelosi as Speaker in 2012. Unrebutted political attacks often influence voters who wonder at mixed messages from members of a Party.

A key Democratic failure was not to keep on Howard Dean, as Chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Between 2005 and 2009, Dr. Dean, with his 50 state strategy, energized both the DNC and state Democratic Committees. He knew what it took to go on the offensive against Republicans. He produced victories in 2006 and 2008 before his bête noire, Obama’s Rahm Emmanuel, pushed him out.

Dr. Dean would have challenged the Tea Party and slowed its momentum. When the Democrats saw this self-styled conservative/libertarian rebellion receive the first of its vast mass media coverage (especially by Fox News and Fox Cable) in August, 2009 when Tea Partiers loudly showed up at town meetings of incumbent Congresspersons, there should have been a Democratic response. A “Coffee Party” of progressives and deprived workers rebelling against the corporate control that 75 percent of Americans believe is excessive might have caught on.

Instead, the Tea Partiers, in all their disparate strands and wealthy right-wingers trying to take them over, became the daily feature and news of the 2010 campaign year.

Obama came out of his 2008 victory with 13 million names of donors and supporters, along with great enthusiasm from young voters. The Democrats squandered this support. This astonishing blunder happened, in no small part, because Obama turned his back on his supporters and denied their leaders White House access that he so often afforded corporate CEOs—eg. from the health insurance giants, drug companies, and banking behemoths. That’s one reason so many of his 2008 supporters stayed home in 2010 and did not vote. They felt betrayed.

With 23 Democratic Senators up in 2012, as compared with 10 Republican Senators, the Democrats may lose both Houses of Congress. Voters shouldn’t only have the barren choice of voting for the least worst of the Two Parties. Here we go again. Or as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Now They're Coming After Your Social Security

Wall Street's TARP Gang Rides Again
By DEAN BAKER

Just over two years ago, the Wall Streeters were running around Congress and the media saying that if they didn't immediately get $700 billion the world would end. Since they own large chunks of both, they quickly got their money.

Even more important than the hundreds of billions of loans issued through the TARP was the trillions of dollars of loans and guarantees from the Fed and the FDIC. This money came with virtually no strings attached. It kept Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America and many others from collapsing. As a result, folks like Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein are again pocketing tens of millions a year in wages and bonuses, instead of walking the unemployment lines. Instead, 15 million ordinary workers are being told to just get used to being unemployed; it's the "new normal."

But wait, it gets worse. The thing about Wall Streeters is that no matter how much money you give them, they always want more. Now they are using their political power and control over the media to attack Social Security.

This effort is being led by billionaire investment banker Peter Peterson. Mr. Peterson has personally profited to the tune of tens of millions of dollars from the "fund managers' tax subsidy," an obscure provision of the tax code that allows billionaires to pay a lower tax rate than schoolteachers and firefighters. However, Peterson believes in giving back. He has committed $1 billion to an effort that is intended to take away the Social Security benefits that people have worked and paid for.

As part of this effort, Peterson set up a whole new foundation, the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. He and/or his foundation created a "news service," The Fiscal Times, which is intended to promote the view that we have no choice but to cut Social Security. The Fiscal Times has entered into agreements with the Washington Post and other credible newspapers to provide material.

Peterson is also funding the creation of a high school curriculum that is intended to tell our children that in the future the country will be too poor to finance Social Security. He funded a silly exercise called "America Speaks," which was supposed to convince an assembly of selected participants that we must cut Social Security after a day-long immersion in Peterson-style propaganda. (The people didn't buy it.) And now his crew is spending $20 million on an ad campaign to convince people the world will end if we don't cut Social Security.

Attacks on Social Security have been fended off in the past, and it is possible that this one will be too. It is an incredibly popular and successful program. It does exactly what it was supposed to do. It provides a modest income to the retired and disabled, and their families, to ensure that people who have spent their lives working will not fall into poverty. It is also extremely efficient, with administrative costs that are less than 1/20th as large as the costs of private insurers.

It also has very little fraud. We know this because earlier this year the Washington Post made a big point of hyping mistaken payments to federal employees than involved less than 0.01 percent of Social Security spending. If substantial fraud did exist, the Washington Post wouldn't have to hype small change to try to discredit the program.

The really incredible part of this story is that we should be talking about increasing Social Security benefits. Benefits are quite low by international standards. The portion of wage income replaced by Social Security is considerably lower than the retirement benefit provided by the systems in Australia, Canada, Germany and most other wealthy countries.

As a result, many of the retirees who are dependent almost entirely on Social Security have incomes that are only slightly above the poverty line. A modest increase in benefits could make a big difference in these people's standard of living.

In addition, the near retirees, the people directly in the gun sights of the Wall Street TARPers, have just seen most of their wealth destroyed by the collapse of the housing bubble. The Wall Streeters now want to kick them yet again, by taking away Social Security benefits that they have already paid for.

If Congress and the media worked for the public, we would be debating Wall Street speculation taxes right now. Insofar as we need to do something about the deficit in the longer term, taxing Wall Street speculation is a far more economically desirable route than taking away the Social Security benefits that ordinary workers have already paid for. We could easily raise more than $1.5 trillion over the next decade with a broadly based financial speculation tax than would have almost no impact on anyone except the Wall Street crew.

Even the IMF is now pushing higher taxes on the Wall Street types, recognizing the enormous waste and rents in the financial sector. But the media and Congress do not respond to economic reality, they respond to money. And Peter Peterson and the Wall Street crew are not paying for an honest discussion of the country's fiscal and economic problems. They are financing a rigged debate that is intended to result in even more money flowing to Wall Street and less to those who work for a living.

Independent News Site Fraudulently Blacklisted by Internet Explorer After Negative Bill Gates Article

Friday, November 5, 2010@Activist Post

Is the Internet Blacklist already being enforced via web browsers?  Microsoft's Internet Explorer recommended that visitors should not access Activist Post today, claiming the site contains threats to outside computers.  First, we want to assure all of our visitors that this is blatantly FALSE. Our site does not contain any viruses, malware, or data-harvesting capabilities.  We have a voluntary and confidential sign-up mechanism for our free weekly newsletter, which apparently now falls under the category of illegal data mining according to Microsoft.

Our website runs on a Google Blogger back-end which immediately declines any material that may be "malicious."  This back-end also makes it easy for us to scan our entire site for potential viruses or other problems.  This scan is, and always has been, 100% clean.  Furthermore, our technical team ran a check at Website Grader which tests various aspects of a site, including cleanliness Activist Post scored a 97% (FAR above the average).  Yet, Microsoft has taken an anonymous tip from a user as enough evidence to deter access to our site.  Meanwhile, other browsers such as Chrome, Safari, and Firefox have similar malware protection, yet none of them flagged Activist Post today.

What's interesting about the timing of this possible censorship is that it comes on a day when we posted an article that reflects negatively on Bill Gates.  It appears that his empire carries out vendettas by deterring access to websites not favorable to their overlord.  We did receive a complaint through our contact form from a reader listing the e-mail address: office@heavenaboveyourlife.com.  This email address is not valid and the domain is not currently registered.

All of the information about the cleanliness of our site, and the potential false tip, was easily obtained by our tech staff within minutes.  Why couldn't a behemoth like Microsoft do the same?

This appears to be the latest tactic the establishment will use to shut down access to alternative voices, making visitors believe that the site is "harmful" to their computer.  We have been informed by Microsoft that this is basically a guilty-until-proven-innocent situation, since we certainly weren't contacted to counter any claim in advance of the warning they posted. 

Internet Explorer users represent 42% of our visitors, while representing a similar overall market share.  For alternative sites that are 100% user-funded through visiting sponsors and donations, this can be a damaging blow that has the potential to force people out of business.  Welcome to the free market of ideas.

Our technical team is working hard on restoring our site to Internet Explorer users.  Presently, it is fully accessible and safe to view from Firefox, Google Chrome, and Safari.  In protest of such shenanigans, we hope that readers will drop IE and use a different browser, as this type of censorship is likely to continue from the Gates Gestapo.  One can also send a statement to Microsoft that our site has been clean in your experience.  Click HERE to submit.

UPDATE:  We're hearing reports that site accessibility with Internet Explorer has been returned.  If you continue to have problems accessing our site with that browser please do the following: In Internet Explorer go to the Tools menu, select "Smart Screen Filter" and choose to "Turn Off Smart Screen Filter."  After completing this, accessibility should be returned immediately.

Extended Unemployment Could Outlast Extended Unemployment Insurance

by Arthur Delaney Friday, November 5, 2010 by The Huffington Post

WASHINGTON -- The government announced Friday morning that the unemployment situation barely changed in October. The unemployment rate has been stuck above nine percent for a year and a half as nearly 15 million people are out of work. They will remain so for the foreseeable future, according to most estimates.

People who lost their jobs more recently may get less of a cushion than people laid off at the beginning of the recession. That's because Congress may lose its appetite for reauthorizing the extended unemployment insurance it created in 2008 and 2009.

According to the Labor Department, 6.2 million people -- 41.8 percent of all unemployed -- have been out of work for longer than six months. State governments provide jobless benefits for layoff victims for those first six months, and the federal government traditionally picks up the rest during recessions.

To fight the worst recession since the Great Depression, Congress has given the unemployed in hardest-hit states an unprecedented 73 weeks of additional benefits. During the second-worst recession in the early 1980s, Congress provided 55 weeks. It didn't begin to take them away until unemployment dropped to 7.2 percent.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told HuffPost on Thursday that reauthorizing the 73 weeks is her third priority in the upcoming lame duck session, after dealing with the expiring Bush tax cuts and providing a $250 cost-of-living benefit for Social Security recipients.

But once Congress reconvenes on Nov. 15, Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) will have just two weeks before the extended benefits expire at the end of the month. Republicans and conservative Democrats held up the previous reauthorization for nearly two months.

The progressive Economic Policy Institute estimates that keeping extended unemployment benefits through 2011 would create 723,000 jobs at a cost of $65 billion, or 1.7 percent of the White House's projected $3.8 trillion budget for that year. Most economists regard unemployment insurance as among the most economically stimulative fiscal policies.

It will be extremely difficult for lame-duck Democrats to get such a lengthy reauthorization. The previous four efforts each lasted for a few months at a time. If the next reauthorization is similarly short, that means it will come due on the watch of incoming House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), who will probably not be amenable to tens of billions in deficit spending specifically requested by President Obama. Congressional Democrats have refused to compromise on offsetting the cost of unemployment benefits, which are traditionally given an emergency designation.

"Congress doesn't have to be a lame duck -- it can make a huge impact now by renewing for another year the jobless benefit extensions that expire on November 30th," said Christine Owens, director of the National Employment Law Project, in a statement Friday. "If Congress fails to act, two million workers will be cut off next month alone -- in the heart of the holidays -- and any brief stopgaps will still put millions at risk of cut- offs next year. Congress simply cannot pull the plug on families and businesses if it has any realistic intention to turn things around."

There are lots of people who are still unemployed after 99 weeks of benefits (though nobody knows how many). It's unlikely they'll get any more help from Congress.

President Obama said Friday in light of the bleak employment situation that part of his strategy to create jobs includes "extending unemployment benefits to help those hardest hit by the downturn while generating more demand in the economy."

New Report Refutes Industry Argument that Genetically Modified Salmon will Feed Hungry World Populations

Thursday, November 4, 2010 by Food and Water Watch Europe

Brussels - Food & Water Europe released a report today outlining why the genetically engineered (GE) salmon currently being considered by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for approval as a human food will not alleviate global hunger.

GE Salmon Will Not Feed the World outlines several reasons why this transgenic fish is likely to be more expensive to produce than perceived, as well as problematic for the environment, fishing communities and consumers. The report was released a day after Scottish MP Rob Gibson motioned to petition the Scottish Government to monitor the FDA's approval process, noting that escapees are likely to occur through time and could easily reach the shores of Scotland, "altering forever the genetic integrity of wild Atlantic salmon and of quality Scottish farmed salmon."

"The company producing this experimental fish, AquaBounty, is the only one who will be profiting from it, despite misleading claims that this product could be a means to feed growing populations around the world," said Wenonah Hauter, Executive Director of Food & Water Europe.

Since GE salmon can require large amounts of food, display deformities and likely have higher oxygen demands, they can be costly to produce. These projected costs, combined with the various potential human health and ecological concerns associated with GE fish, will not likely add up to a more financially advantageous product for growers or consumers.

Furthermore, farmed salmon in general may not be as nutritious or safe as wild salmon. They contain on average 35 percent fewer omega-3 fatty acids - which are important for human health, but not produced by the body. Also, farmed salmon often contain higher levels of contaminants in their fat (which they can have more of than wild salmon), including 10 times the amount of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). GE salmon are also known to have higher levels of insulin-like growth factor 1, which has been associated with increased risk of certain types of cancer.

These worrying food safety issues are compounded by the environmental damage GE salmon would add to the already unsustainable salmon farming industry. The small, wild fish used in salmon feed are a major food source for marine mammals, birds and larger fish as well as low-income, food insecure populations around the world. In 2006, the aquaculture sector alone consumed nearly 90 percent of small prey fish captured worldwide. GE salmon may require about five times the amount of feed as a non-altered salmon to grow faster. This will further exacerbate the decline of available wild fish for marine wildlife and people in countries that need it most. If fish are not used in feed, it is entirely likely that the fish would be fed on industrial soya-which is associated with serious environmental and human rights impacts as well. Escapes of GE salmon into the wild could also threaten wild salmon, by competing for food, habitat and mates.

"GE salmon is an inefficient way to produce food that comes with more costs than benefits," says Hauter. "We should be concerned about protecting consumers and our wild fish populations rather than pushing forward to approve this potentially dangerous product."

Read the report - http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/world/europe/factsheets/ge-salmon-will-not-feed-the-world-europe/

Cheap Money Won’t Fix This Economy

by Robert Kuttner
Friday, November 5, 2010 by The Boston Globe

The Federal Reserve is responding to the stubborn economic slump by creating more money. The central bank will purchase $600 billion in Treasury bonds, in an attempt to drive interest rates even lower. Is this a good idea?

Alas, it's the only tool readily available. But even supporters of the strategy don't think it will accomplish much, and might cause some harm. The problem is that cheap money doesn't work very well in an economy such as this one.

The Dow rose 219 points yesterday, since falling interest rates invariably cause a temporary spike in stock prices. But that is hardly a test of effective policy.

The economy is in a self-reinforcing trap. Consumer purchasing power is down due to high unemployment and falling earnings. Businesses are reluctant to invest because they don't see customers. Risk-averse banks won't lend except to the most reliable borrowers. Depressed housing prices and a foreclosure epidemic are a drag both on household net worth and on bank balance sheets.

Still, cheaper money does produce a modest stimulus. Homeowners with good credit can refinance and lower their monthly payments. Consumers considering a new car can finance it for almost nothing. And the government gets to float its own deficit at low carrying costs.

But none of this is potent enough to get the economy out of its vicious circle of depressed consumption, high unemployment, damaged banks, reduced business investment, and slow growth. In the 1930s, when the same syndrome afflicted the economy, critics likened the aggressive use of cheap money to "pushing on a string.'' It was - and is - the wrong tool.

What's the right tool? The cure for the Great Depression was World War II - a massive fiscal and technological stimulus. Annual wartime deficits peaked at about 28 percent of Gross Domestic Product. The government went on a hiring binge, both for war production and via the military draft. The economy blasted out of depression.

Today, however, both parties are wringing their hands over much smaller deficits, projected this year at about 9 percent of GDP. Republicans just took back the House with a campaign against big government.

So there is no political appetite for the civilian equivalent of World War II - a public campaign to rebuild rotting bridges, roads, ports, water and sewer systems, and to invest in 21st century infrastructure such as a smart electric grid and clean energy technology that would make the economy more productive as well as creating millions of jobs.

The Republicans do speak of "fiscal stimulus,'' but they mean tax cuts. However, a recent report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office concludes that tax cuts are a far less efficient use of deficits than direct public investment.

President Obama signaled at his press conference Wednesday that he will likely compromise with the Republicans' demand to extend the expiring Bush tax cuts, not just for 98 percent of Americans as Obama has proposed, but for the most affluent 2 percent as well. These tax cuts will increase the deficit, provide a mild boost to the economy, but not change the underlying dynamics of stagnation.

So we are left with the Fed, as an unlikely champion of cheap money.

And there are some risks. Cheap money has invited a new wave of leveraged corporate buyouts, which enrich middlemen but don't help the broader economy. Low interest rates are driving down the value of the dollar and exporting inflation to other nations, which increases the risk of currency instability.

Financial traders are using low interest rates to speculate in commodities, raising the price of food and other raw materials. Cheap money with few rules is the best friend of speculators looking for some exotic action - exactly the dynamic that crashed the system in the first place.

Long ago, in an era of broad prosperity, former Fed Chairman William McChesney Martin famously said that the Fed's job was to take away the punchbowl just when the party was getting going. Today, however, the Fed is imploring people to have some more punch. But much of the public is too traumatized to drink, and the wrong people could get soused.

It Was the Banks

Friday, November 5, 2010 by CommonDreams.org
by James K. Galbraith

Bruce Bartlett says it was a failure to focus. Paul Krugman says it was a failure of nerve. Nancy Pelosi says it was the economy's failure. Barack Obama says it was his own failure - to explain that he was, in fact, focused on the economy.

As Krugman rightly stipulates, Monday-morning quarterbacks should say exactly what different play they would have called. Paul's answer is that the stimulus package should have been bigger. No disagreement: I was one voice calling for a much larger program back when. Yet this answer is not sufficient.

The original sin of Obama's presidency was to assign economic policy to a closed circle of bank-friendly economists and Bush carryovers. Larry Summers. Timothy Geithner. Ben Bernanke. These men had no personal commitment to the goal of an early recovery, no stake in the Democratic Party, no interest in the larger success of Barack Obama. Their primary goal, instead, was and remains to protect their own past decisions and their own professional futures.

Up to a point, one can defend the decisions taken in September-October 2008 under the stress of a rapidly collapsing financial system. The Bush administration was, by that time, nearly defunct. Panic was in the air, as was political blackmail - with the threat that the October through January months might be irreparably brutal. Stopgaps were needed, they were concocted, and they held the line.

But one cannot defend the actions of Team Obama on taking office. Law, policy and politics all pointed in one direction: turn the systemically dangerous banks over to Sheila Bair and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Insure the depositors, replace the management, fire the lobbyists, audit the books, prosecute the frauds, and restructure and downsize the institutions. The financial system would have been cleaned up. And the big bankers would have been beaten as a political force.

Team Obama did none of these things. Instead they announced "stress tests," plainly designed so as to obscure the banks' true condition. They pressured the Federal Accounting Standards Board to permit the banks to ignore the market value of their toxic assets. Management stayed in place. They prosecuted no one. The Fed cut the cost of funds to zero. The President justified all this by repeating, many times, that the goal of policy was "to get credit flowing again."

The banks threw a party. Reported profits soared, as did bonuses. With free funds, the banks could make money with no risk, by lending back to the Treasury. They could boom the stock market. They could make a mint on proprietary trading. Their losses on mortgages were concealed - until the fact came out that they'd so neglected basic mortgage paperwork, as to be unable to foreclose in many cases, without the help of forged documents and perjured affidavits.

But new loans? The big banks had given up on that. They no longer did real underwriting. And anyway, who could qualify? Businesses mostly had no investment plans. And homeowners were, to an increasing degree, upside- down on their mortgages and therefore unqualified to refinance.

These facts were obvious to everybody, fueling rage at "bailouts." They also underlie the economy's failure to create jobs. What usually happens (and did, for example, in 1994 - 2000) is that credit growth takes over from Keynesian fiscal expansion. Armed with credit, businesses expand, and with higher incomes, public deficits decline. This cannot happen if the financial sector isn't working.

Geithner, Summers and Bernanke should have known this. One can be fairly sure that they did know it. But Geithner and Bernanke had cast their lots, with continuity and coverup. And Summers, with his own record of deregulation, could hardly complain.

To counter calls for more action, Team Obama produced sunny forecasts. Their program was right-sized, because anyway unemployment would peak at 8 percent in 2009. So Larry Summers said. In making that forecast, the Obama White House took responsibility for the entire excess of joblessness above eight percent. They made it impossible to blame the ongoing disaster on George W. Bush. If this wasn't rank incompetence, it was sabotage.

This is why, in a crisis, you need new people. You must be able to attack past administrations, and override old decisions, without directly crossing those who made them.

President Obama didn't see this. Or perhaps, he didn't want to see it. His presidential campaign was, after all, from the beginning financed from Wall Street. He chose his team, knowing exactly who they were. And this tells us what we need to know about who he really is.

America, Land of the Free to Be Stupid

What people are angry about, if they only knew it, is that social mobility in the US is over and their economic future screwed
by Elizabeth Wurtzel - Saturday, November 6, 2010 by the Guardian/UK

There are some remarks that are so stupid that to be even vaguely aware of them is the intellectual equivalent of living next door to Chernobyl. This is what it's been like to live in the United States for the last year or two: it's the moronic influenza, as the irate among us find increasingly convoluted ways to say decreasingly less (as I just did).

Hard to say precisely what it is that people - "folks", as President Obama likes to call them - are so darn exercised about, but they say things that show that their command of any words with more than two syllables is completely questionable, like: "The president is a socialist", or "healthcare reform is unconstitutional". Of course, what they want to say, and what they should say, is something to the effect that they hate this man that those people elected president and they want to kill him - but only people like me, elitists with Ivy League degrees - people who actually have read Das Kapital and who have studied constitutional law - talk trash like that.

If you don't know better, apparently, you demand to see the president's birth certificate - suddenly, every American is on border patrol - and you start claiming that there is nothing about separation of church and state in the first amendment, even though the supreme court has ruled on the point more than 25 times since 1878.

Look, America is a very sad place right now, which is what the Tea Party movement and the midterm elections are about. I could analyze the particulars, but then I would be no better than the whole 24-hour media machine - which, given that unemployment is at 9.6%, is lucky that no one has noticed that they don't exactly do their job. If the news outlets were actually reporting, they would tell us the honest and awful truth: the United States is a post-industrial empire in decline, like England or Belgium or worse (is there worse?). There is no next. We are at next.

And truthfully, it would not be so bad, if we could only come to terms with who we are: we are an amazing country still, but not in the way we believe. We are, in fact, kind of nerdy. We decry elitism, and yet it is precisely the high-falutin' stuff that we are good at. We still have the best research universities on the planet - every world survey puts Harvard, Berkeley and Stanford at the top - and we still have companies like Apple and Google that no one else on earth can come up with. And, of course, our creative industries - movies and music - are still our biggest import, even if piracy is deflating their value.

What are we not good at? Dumb stuff, the things they can do in China for cheap, the things we think we're good at, like making cars and clothes.

So, here's the problem for President Obama, and now for all those shiny, happy Republicans who have just been elected: they don't need to speak truth to power; rather, they need to tell the truth to the weak. They need to tell "folks" that their future, maybe even their present, has been outsourced.

Yes, the United States is still the great meritocracy it's always been; but now, if you aren't brilliant or beautiful or both, there isn't much to do, because they can do it cheaper in Shanghai or Mumbai. The Tea Party people should enjoy their rallies, because the rest of it is, indeed, quite bleak.

For the first time in American history, then, social mobility has been replaced with class struggle. Europeans have always been mystified that poor people in this country don't rise up and throw potatoes at Donald Trump - instead, they make him a reality TV star. But that's because everyone here is sure they are going to be rich like him someday, too. Maybe tomorrow.

The American Dream, coupled with government subsidies of utilities and cheap consumer goods courtesy of slave labor somewhere else, has kept the poor huddled masses from rising up. But no more. They know better now. They are, so to speak, "tea-ed off".

To make matters worse, the current president, who is one of those beautiful and brilliant elite people that the world has not left behind, happens to be black. Ouch! This has got to really hurt. And so, all of a sudden, he's a socialist. The funny thing is, in the United States, there's really no such thing as socialism - instead, there are people here who will tell you, without embarrassment, that The Fountainhead is their favorite book ever. They don't think that it's pulp or that Ayn Rand is a nasty lady - they really think it's a good book, up there with Middlemarch and Moby Dick. Howard Roark is a hero and Objectivism is considered a form of human kindness. So, we just don't know socialism here. It's an absurd accusation.

As for anything being a violation of the constitution: the reason that document has survived over 230 years, while others belonging to other republics are replaced as often as one changes the oil in a car, is that its provisions are vague. The "necessary and proper clause" allows Congress to pass any legislation it deems necessary and proper. Kind of hard to define the contours of that one, right? I, for one, am going to trust the experts to figure out what these words mean, which is what we've been doing all along. There's a reason this society is so litigious and lawyers are so busy - it's because Sarah Palin can't be trusted to interpret the bill of rights for us.

So, you see, all this anger is misplaced. No point changing who is in Congress or who is in the Oval Office. Doesn't matter. Just moving deck chairs on the Titanic. Or switching parties in America, which was great while it lasted.

Obama’s Pathetic Post-Mortem Response

by Matthew Rothschild Saturday, November 6, 2010 by The Progressive

The President's post-mortem press conference underscores why he lost, and why progressives should no longer invest hope in him.

While he accepted responsibility for the defeat, and while he acknowledged that people were "frustrated" and wanted "their jobs to come back faster," he failed to even mention the massive housing crisis that he has so ineptly handled.

On top of that, he adopted the messaging of the Republicans. He talked about the need to reduce our deficit so we don't "leave our children a legacy of debt" and so we're not "racking up the credit card for the next generation."

Those lines could have come straight out of the mouth of Rand Paul!

And like Rand Paul, he saluted business and the free market: "The reason we've got an unparalleled standard of living in the history of the world is because we've got a free market that is dynamic and entrepreneurial and that free market has to be nurtured and cultivated."

Then he pitied big business.

"You just had a successive set of issues in which I think business took the message that, well, gosh, it seems like we may be always painted as the bad guy," he said. "And so I've got to take responsibility in terms of making sure that I make clear to the business community as well as to the country that the most important thing we can do is to boost and encourage our business sector."

Really??? That's "the most important thing" he has to do? Wow!

He also backpedaled fast on expanding the role of government, conceding without qualification that some people thought "government was getting much more intrusive into people's lives." Amazingly, he said, "I'm sympathetic to folks who looked at it and said this is looking like potential overreach."

Rather than represent an ideological alternative, he tried to blur the ideological lines. "None of the challenges we face lend themselves to simple solutions or bumper-sticker slogans," he said. "Nor are the answers found in any one particular philosophy or ideology."

And just as he did during his long waffle on health care, he said, "I'm eager to hear good ideas wherever they come from."

He repeatedly mentioned the need for "civility" and "consensus" at a time when it's more important than ever to slug out the ideological differences.

He also embraced some of the substance of the Republican Party agenda.

Sounding like John McCain, he endorsed the idea of cutting "earmarks" several times.

He said he wanted to "accelerate depreciation for business," which is about the least efficient way to jumpstart the economy.

He said he wanted to push natural gas.

And he even waved at restarting "our nuclear industry as a means of reducing our dependence on foreign oil and reducing greenhouse gases."

That's his vision?

This is pathetic.

Greedy Bankers Are Like Coke Fiends

It would be wonderful if the people responsible for the financial crisis learned lessons from the worldwide havoc and suffering they helped to prompt. Don't hold your breath...
By Tony Schwartz, AlterNet
Posted on  November 7, 2010

"We can't control our greed," the CEO acknowledged, in a rare moment of candor and insight. "You should regulate us more."

Greed is defined as an excessive desire for wealth or goods. At its most rapacious, greed trumps rationality, judgment, perspective, and any concern with the collateral damage it may cause.

As Michael Lewis has written, "It's more than a little nuts for a man who has a billion dollars to devote his life to making another billion, but that's what some of our most exalted citizens do, over and over again."

Greed begins in the neurochemistry of the brain. What fuels our greed is a neurotransmitter called dopamine. The higher the dopamine levels in the brain, the more pleasure we experience. Cocaine, for example, directly increases dopamine levels.

By using magnetic resonance imaging studies, the Harvard researcher Hans Breiter and his colleagues have found that the craving for money activates the same regions of the brain as the craving for cocaine, or sex, or any other instant and intense pleasure.

Dopamine is most reliably activated by novel stimuli -- meaning an experience we haven't had before. We crave recreating that experience. But here's the problem: If we snort the same amount of cocaine the next time, or earn the same sum of money, dopamine levels tend not to increase.

It wasn't money these architects of our demise were after, but rather the satisfaction and security they anticipated money would provide -- as it had after their first windfalls. When the rush began to diminish over time, the solution they landed on was to up the ante -- dramatically.

If the previous amount didn't do it, then maybe twice as much would -- or three times, or ten. It's a viciously seductive cycle: chasing the increasingly elusive high, forever seeking to recreate that initial rush of pleasure and well-being. When it becomes compulsive, we call it addiction.

Money, and the power and admiration it buys, is the drug. Addicts typically use drugs to avoid pain -- most often the pain of feeling insecure and unworthy. Money, like cocaine, gets mistaken for the route to relief.

In the absence of intimate connections to others, or deeply held values, or work devoted to a cause beyond themselves, accumulating wealth becomes the only way these bankers have to try to infuse their lives with meaning, significance and satisfaction.

It's a pattern that helps explain why Angelo Mozilo, then CEO of Countrywide, would allow his employees to write tens of thousands of home mortgages he knew were likely to default, while selling off his shares in the company as fast as he could, before their inevitable crash.

Or why Steven Rattner, the politically connected founder of the Quadrangle Group, who hoped to someday become Treasury Secretary, would trash his career by making kickbacks to public officials so that he could add a few more million dollars to the several hundred million he already had.

Or why top executives at so many banks were willing to turn a blind eye as long as the toxic and doomed financial products they were selling delivered big short-term profits that translated into huge personal bonuses.

The bankers and their paid enablers -- notably regulators and academic economists and equally Democrats and Republicans -- were all feeding at the same till. Greed makes for strange bedfellows. But as with any addiction, more and more eventually led to less and less.

Throughout Inside Job, bankers justify their greedy, dishonest, and destructive behaviors the same way all addicts do: by hemming and hawing, rationalizing and minimizing, denying and dissembling.

A cocaine addict plainly does damage to himself and to those closest to him. What's so frightening about those with an addiction to money (and skill at accumulating it) is that the cost can be so great to so many.

Few of us are immune to money's powerful seduction, but most of never get the opportunity to accumulate huge amounts of it. Count us fortunate. It would be wonderful to believe that those most responsible for the current financial crisis learned sobering lessons from the worldwide havoc and suffering they helped to prompt.

Don't hold your breath -- especially so long as we continue to revere our citizens based on their net worth, even as they've knocked down ours.

"We can't control our greed," the bank CEO at Hank Paulson's party tells the assembled guests. "Protect me from my own most primitive impulses," he was essentially saying. "And protect yourselves, too."

Basic Income in Times of Economic Crisis

The War Social and Working Rights
By RUBÉN M. LO VUOLO, DANIEL RAVENTÓS
and PABLO YANES

The economic crisis has not ended, but the consequences for broad sectors of the population have been evident for months: more poverty, higher unemployment, inferior working conditions, salary cuts and reduction of social security benefits. The IMF and ILO report published in September specifies that 30 million people have joined the ranks of the unemployed worldwide since the start of the crisis, almost 10% of whom are from the Kingdom of Spain. This crisis is the result of a previous growth period driven by the financialisation of capital and a marked regression in the distribution of income and wealth. In the European Union of the 15, for example, the income from labour now represents 56% of national income when just a few years ago it accounted for nearly 70%. In Latin America, even after a slight improvement in the growth of some countries over the last decade, the figures for participation in the total wage bill are well below these estimates, and the Gini indexes still show this to be the most unequal region of the planet. This rapidly growing inequality consolidates a tendency described in 2006 by one of the richest men in the world, Warren Buffet, in strikingly graphic detail:

“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” 

With the crisis that exploded in 2008, some rich individuals lost some money, but formal workers and informal and precarious workers, so legion in Latin America and whose numbers are growing in southern Europe, have seen their living and working conditions deteriorate even further. The financial rescue operations started by many governments have yet again favoured the wealthiest and those who are most responsible for the crisis.

In Latin America, the crisis brought an end to a growth cycle spurred on by improvement in the terms of exchange and major macroeconomic adjustments after the frustrating experience of the policies of opening up and economic liberalisation of the nineties. The economic recovery shown by some countries in the region in recent months (such as Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay) along with that of the so-called “emerging” economies (such as China and India) recreates in some the illusion of a new stage of growth and job creation and of a positive re-alignment of the global economy. However, it would be a grave mistake to let this engender confusion about the diagnosis. Beyond the different particular situations we are faced with a global crisis which, spawned in the very core of the capitalist powers, shows the thoroughgoing contradictions and non-viability of a regime of accumulation based on devaluing the work force, job instability, massive concentration of wealth, and the commodification of nature and all social relations. This regime of accumulation has led, on the global scale, to the profound incongruity of a model of global production operating without global consumption, and the incompatibility between the growth model hitherto applied and preservation of the environment and reproduction of life itself.

This is the first global overproduction crisis and the spectre of deflation is looming, along with the tendency for long-term stagnation. In the best of cases, sporadic bursts of recovery of economic growth will not be sufficient to generate employment in the quantity and quality required to guarantee the wellbeing of the majority of the population. In other words, we may be trapped in a long-lasting economic cycle dominated by hard crises and soft recoveries.

Responsibility for the crisis is clearly attributable to the capital – especially financial capital – bosses, including owners, administrators and government officials in charge of control and regulation. Yet, these selfsame guilty parties are launching a new offensive against work and social rights. Thus, in the bosom of the European Union, so-called “austerity measures” are being launched, measures that mean, in practical terms, adjusting consumption and loss of social and labour benefits for workers and the broad-based sectors.

These adjustment recipes were frequently applied in Latin America in recent decades, and their consequences have been damaging to the wellbeing of the most vulnerable population and for the stability of economic, political and social systems. Yet they are now being adopted in many European countries with the main objective of rescuing banks and patching up financial speculation mechanisms in the hope of re-launching a new cycle of growth spearheaded by finance. To paraphrase the clear depiction of the situation offered on 10 May by a British banker on 10 May at the latest meeting of the ECOFIN, the ECB and the IMF, it is easier to sell the plan saying it will save Greece, Spain and Portugal, than to confess that first of all it must save and help the banks. The budgetary austerity plans set underway to ease public deficits are, in effect, a wholesale attack on the living and working conditions of the working classes and a broadside against the Welfare State regimes that emerged after World War II. Hence, the very crisis brought about by the irresponsibility of the administrators of capital, becomes an additional pretext to justify policies that impose heavy adjustments on workers’ remuneration, affecting both direct wages derived from employment and social protection systems. The excuse of the urgent need to recover competitiveness and stimulate economic growth (or, in the European Union, the much-vaunted pretext of “saving the euro zone”) is wielded in the project of degrading the living conditions of the most vulnerable groups.

Faced with this situation, some assert that this is a temporary crisis arising from the supposed “imperfections” in financial markets and that it will be overcome with a few corrective regulatory tweaks (which are yet to appear in the required dimension). On the contrary, it is evident that this is an emergency of structural problems in the form of organisation of contemporary societies, which have been apparent for quite some time and that will foreseeably continue for a long time yet, although with short periods of recovery and economic growth. What is in crisis is the myth of permanent economic growth and quality job creation as a way of guaranteeing the economic and social integration of citizens as a whole. The current situation raises serious doubts about the ability of the regime of capitalist accumulation to offer, in any reasonable way, a horizon in which it might be materially and politically viable to expect development based on a scheme of full employment for men and women and, in consequence, that employment, or wage labour, would constitute the key, or only path of access to social rights, social mobility and the wellbeing of people.

A clear manifestation of these structural problems is that the apparent solution to the crisis is leading to a widening of the “gaps” between established rights, which citizens should enjoy in keeping with what is enshrined in constitutions and laws, and the rights they actually have. These gaps encourage hypocrisy, fear and sectarian attitudes of all kinds and are conducive to degeneration into resignation and impotence, which are then manipulable by far right groups. The democratic sovereignty of peoples is close to being definitively mocked by the interests of private groups that operate through “the market”, putting pressure on the inability of the political leadership to apply government programmes in which the public interest prevails, thereby ensuring that the rights of their constituents are effective. In the apposite words of US president Franklin D. Roosevelt, in his State of the Union address in 1935, “[…] Americans must forswear that conception of the acquisition of wealth which, through excessive profits, creates undue private power over private affairs and, to our misfortune, over public affairs as well.”

These and other elements should be reason enough to seek new organisational principles for contemporary societies. In this evermore imperative re-design of our societies, it is of paramount importance that access to social rights should cease to operate on a differentiated status to become general rights of citizenship, rights deriving from the mere fact of existing, which is to say that they should cease to be mediated, segmented, conditioned and pared-back rights, which are diminished, inter alia, by the volatile, transitory and unequal position of each person in the increasingly precarious labour market.

For all these and other reasons, we are advocates of what is known as Basic Income. This proposal, which has been championed in different geographies in recent years, already has well-organised supporters in Europe, America, Asia, Africa and Oceania. Its postulates are simple: all citizens and all people of recognised residence are entitled to a universal, unconditional monetary income integrated into a progressive taxation system. We believe that BI could be a sound basis for a structural reorganisation of public policy and are convinced that this is a good proposal in situations of economic prosperity, but even more necessary in times of economic crisis and of attacks on the living and working conditions of great sectors of the population, such as we are now witnessing. Among others, the following reasons stand out:

1) Involuntary loss of employment causes a situation of great economic and living uncertainty. Losing one's job but having a BI would make dealing with the situation less stressful. This obvious characteristic of BI is a plus in any economic situation. In a crisis, where unemployment is much more widespread and prolonged, having a BI takes on greater social importance and still more so with the growing weakness or outright non-existence of any broad and long-lasting unemployment insurance. It is worth noting that if labour relations were dominated for many years by prolonged employment and cyclical or frictional unemployment, what is transitory and unstable today is employment itself (and especially quality employment).

2) If within a framework where undermining of the organisational instruments and representation of the working class is proceeding apace, we add the negative impact of unemployment, the precariousness of work and the adjustments being made in Welfare States, the result is that there are more and more workers being left without union representation. BI could play an important role in re-creating collective interest within the working class and in the struggles of those who are trying to resist, both those with organised representation and those who are left to struggle alone. This would enable consolidation of the worker’s identity in a period of growing labour fragmentation, making possible new forms of association and representation for the increasingly divided interests of the working class. In these times of crisis one can see perfectly well that BI is not an alternative substituting for salary and neither does it weaken the defence of working class interests, but rather it is an instrument that strengthens the position of the entire workforce, both on the job itself and in the search for employment. BI would allow for unification of the working class around a universal right that would benefit a considerable number of citizens, regardless of their specific occupation, while at the same time offering greater leeway for resistance against adjustments to working conditions or to the level of employment itself. In addition, BI would become, in the case of strikes, a kind of unconditional resistance fund whose effects in offering leverage for workers are easy to gauge. The availability of BI would allow them to face the labour-related conflict in a much less insecure manner since, today, depending on the length of the strike, salaries can be reduced to unsustainable levels if, as is the case for most of the working class, no other resources are available.

3) BI would also lessen the risk for people who have undertaken self-employment ventures. In this regard, BI would be more efficient than micro-credits for stimulating the creation of micro-businesses and cooperatives, as it would mean a permanent, stable income that would not generate debt (or abusive interest). In a situation of economic crisis such as the current one, BI would also be an instrument that could facilitate self-employment tasks and even cooperative organisation of its beneficiaries, while also representing a better guarantee of being able to face, if only partially, failure of small businesses.

4) One of the most notable consequences of BI would be a substantial abatement of poverty. It could even realistically raise the possibility of its complete eradication. Not only would it make it possible to remove millions of people from situations of impoverishment, but it would also constitute an additional support to avoid relapse. For the first time, this would represent an active policy against poverty with a preventive dimension, which would thus go beyond the impotence of the conditional focused monetary transfer policies that are currently being applied in Latin America and other developing countries. Some claim that these programmes are a first step in the direction of BI. Not so. While they have a positive impact of alleviating the precarious situation of want of many families in the region, these programmes (Bolsa Familia in Brazil, Oportunidades in Mexico, Familias en Acción in Colombia, Juntos in Peru, Familias solidarias in El Salvador, Asignación Universal por Hijo, in Argentina, et cetera) are opposed to the basic principles and operating rules of BI. Instead of being universal, unconditional and integrated into a progressive taxation system, they are focused and means-tested, demanding conditions in which lack of compliance is punished with loss of the benefit, and they also represent minimal outlay in a profoundly regressive fiscal system. Hence, they reinforce the strategy of conditional, focused assistance that, for decades, has characterised social policy in the region under the patronage of international proponents of structural adjustments that are today being imported to European countries.

Not every project of monetary transfers works along the same lines as BI, because BI is not just another income transfer programme. Focused and conditional assistance programmes have a positive circumstantial impact on the income of some poor families but are ineffective when it comes to removing them from poverty, while they also reinforce client-based policies that work against the development of people’s autonomy. Neither do such programmes ensure that people will not relapse into poverty and homelessness, or prevent the formation of new impoverished groups. They do not cover all those in need and, by the time some groups are selected as beneficiaries (if, indeed, they really are), the crisis will have already unleashed its violence on all this vulnerable population causing irreparable damage. So far, the economic crisis alone has given rise to five million new poor in Mexico, half of all the new poor in Latin America, while the Oportunidades programme proposes expanding its reach by only 800,000 families over a period of two years. To this is added the steady undermining of people’s dignity and autonomy when they are constantly being called on to prove their condition of poverty so that some bureaucrat of the day will deem them “worthy” of assistance.

The economic crisis has demonstrated in the clearest possible way the need to reformulate cash transfer policies along the lines of a universal, unconditional BI. The “conditional” programmes that are now being exported even to the more developed countries are not enough to respond in time and in form to the needs of the most vulnerable groups whose income is in permanent oscillation. Such programmes select the beneficiaries, which means nurturing an expensive bureaucracy that is tasked with classifying (discriminating among) potential beneficiaries who may or may not “deserve” their assistance, and part of the job is permanently scrutinising and assessing their level and conditions of living, to the point of intruding into their private lives. This programmes generate typical “poverty trap” situations because they do not seek to help people overcome the problem but rather only aspire to manage it, thereby keeping the needy population under political control. BI not only saves on unnecessary bureaucratic costs, but delivers benefits based on rights that pertain to citizens, avoiding the kinds of intermediation that turn the needy population into a political clientele. Even ECLAC has singled out the example of the pension scheme for senior citizens in Mexico City, which is universal, non-contributive and unconditional, as one of the innovative measures in Latin America for “guaranteeing a basic level of income in a sustainable manner from the fiscal point of view, and fair from an intergenerational point of view”. It is therefore of tremendous importance that promoting BI was included as one of the objectives in the programmatic document, “Carta de la Ciudad de México” (Mexico City Charter for the Right to the City).

5) A much-debated subject regarding the crisis is the need to maintain consumption by families. In fact, in the boom years, many families were sustaining levels of consumption that were well above their means thanks to the inflated prices of financial assets and credits, especially mortgages, but also consumer credits. This debt-financed consumption by families in general has worked against the poorest groups. It not only eats up any extra income but, now, a reduced labour income must be used in part to pay off the accumulated debt. BI is unquestionably a consumption stabiliser that could be fundamental in maintaining consumption during times of crisis, especially for the more vulnerable groups and, in this manner, avoiding the widening of inequality gaps. In a world like the one today, where the accumulation of vast wealth coexists with crushing poverty, the freedom of hundreds of millions of people is severely limited by the need to find some means of survival. BI would be an institutional mechanism that could guarantee to the citizenship as a whole (including accredited residents) material existence on a basic level at the very least. It is evermore evident that in complex modern societies, if they are to be democratic and fair, one’s daily bread and dignified existence should not be rights “earned with the sweat of one's brow” but rather guaranteed as rights of citizenship so that, rather than the creative and productive capabilities of people being thus impaired, they given some space to develop.

In November 2007, within the framework of the Universal Forum of the Cultures held in the city of Monterrey (Mexico), the “Universal Declaration of Emergent Human Rights” was approved. This Declaration was in fact the continuation of the one that had already been declared in Barcelona three years previously, in September 2004, also within the framework of the Universal Forum of the Cultures. Article 1.3 enshrines:

The right to a basic income or universal citizen’s income that guarantees to every human being, independently of age, gender, sexual orientation, civil or employment status, the right to live in material conditions of dignity. To this end, a regular cash payment, financed by tax reforms and covered by the state budget, and sufficient to cover his or her basic needs, is recognised as a right of citizenship of every member-resident of the society, whatever his or her other sources of income may be.

In conclusion, if there are good reasons for upholding BI in situations of economic growth, falling unemployment and encouraging tendencies in the standard social indicators, there are even more cogent arguments in its favour in a situation of crisis and of attacks on social and labour rights. It might even be said, moreover, that the impact of this crisis will be exacerbated by the absence of a commitment to proposals such as BI in the times of economic prosperity. BI would not only be an important tool for combating poverty, closing the inequality gap and advancing towards providing the guarantee of a dignified life for all people, but it would also be a powerful instrument for social and political change that would permit a reordering of social relations in favour of freedom, autonomy, respect and recognition of men and women of all conditions. A society in which nobody lacks the basic necessities is good for everyone. It is the only society worth striving for.

Freeing men and women from the scourge of hunger and need, of fear on a daily basis, of lack of time, of insecurity over the present and uncertainty about the future, means building up citizenship, broadening the spaces for social and union organisation, strengthening the capacity for political struggle of the broad-based sectors, as well as creating better conditions for citizen participation and civil activism. BI is one of the badly-needed elements that should be taken into account as a driving force for a social transformation that guarantees the right to exist for all people and takes us closer to the longed-for objective of a freer, more equal and more fraternal society.

The Vaccination Profiteers

Ganging Up on Hannah Brusewitz at the Supreme Court

By EVELYN PRINGLE

The American Academy of Pediatrics announced the submission of an amicus brief to the US Supreme Court on July 30, 2010, “joined by 21 partnering health organizations,” in the vaccine injury case of Bruesewitz v Wyeth, to support the powerful vaccine maker against a lone family.

Oral arguments in the case took place on October 12, 2010, but a final decision won’t be known for months. The most recent drug injury preemption case decided by the Court was also against Wyeth and the ruling came down in favor of plaintiff, Diane Levine.

The Court took the Bruesewitz case to determine whether 18-year-old Hannah, disabled by injuries she received from Wyeth’s diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis (DPT) vaccine at 6-months-old in 1992, has the right to bring a lawsuit against Wyeth after the Vaccine Court, set up by the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, refused compensation even though she will require life-long care and her vaccine was traced to a lot that had 65 adverse reactions including two deaths, 39 emergency room visits, and 6 hospitalizations.

After compensation was denied, the family filed suit against Wyeth in Pennsylvania and argued that the vaccine Hannah received was defectively designed and had a known safer vaccine been used her injuries could have been avoided.

Wyeth filed for summary judgment and the lower court dismissed the case holding that the 1986 vaccine law preempted all design defect claims. In March 2009, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the ruling and the family filed a petition for review in the Supreme Court.

“Amici—all of whom support the routine vaccination of children against a host of vaccine-preventable infectious diseases—urge this Court to affirm the judgment of the Third Circuit below,” the brief filed by the 22 groups states.

The term “host” inadequately describes the number of “routine” shots kids get today, along with the increased risk of injury. Before 1986, children’s vaccines included diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, measles, mumps, rubella and inactivated poliovirus. Since the Vaccine Injury Act was passed, nine new vaccines have been added, including hepatitis B, rotavirus, haemophilus influenzae type b, pneumococcal, influenza, varicella, hepatitis A, meningococcal, human papillomavirus (for girls), or an additional 46 doses for girls and 43 for boys, the CDC’s 2009 Recommended Immunization Schedule shows.

Amici Anything But Impartial

JB Handley, co-founder of Generation Rescue, as well as co-founder and contributor to Age of Autism, says whenever he meets pediatricians he asks what percentage of their revenue comes from vaccine administration. “The number always astounds me,” he said on Age of Autism. “The answers I get are that anywhere from 50-80% of their revenue comes from giving vaccines.”

In addition to their individual income from giving shots, Wyeth is now owned by Pfizer and over the past few years, the grant reports of the two companies show millions of dollars pouring into the American Academy of Pediatrics and many of the “partnering health organizations” that signed off on the brief.

For instance, Pfizer 2009 report lists two grants to the Academy totaling $56,000 and Wyeth donated $630,000 to benefit the group in 2009. Wyeth also gave the Academy $345,919 in 2008. The group received $524,080 from Pfizer in the first two quarters of 2010 alone.

In 2009, the Academy presented the “President’s Certificate for Outstanding Service” award to Dr Paul Offit, whose least offensive nickname, of many, is “Dr Proffit.”

Offit was also called the “poster child” for the term “biostitute,” by Robert Kennedy Jr at a green vaccine rally in Washington in 2008, for making himself the spokesperson for the vaccine industry and pretending to be an independent scientist without disclosing his ties to and the millions of dollars he’s made off the vaccine industry.

“The AAP is honoring Dr. Offit in recognition of his ongoing commitment to promote immunization,” the Academy’s October 16, 2009 announcement stated, without mentioning the financial windfalls he received due to his “commitment to promote immunization.”

On December 9, 2009, a report on Offit was published on Age of Autism with the headline, “Counting Offit’s Millions: More on How Merck’s Rotateq Vaccine Made Paul Offit Wealthy,” by Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill, authors of the new book, “Age of Autism: Mercury Medicine and A Manmade Epidemic.”

The report points out that Paul Offit, “vaccine entrepreneur and public health spokesperson, has earned approximately $10 million in income from Rotateq® royalties through 2009 and stands to earn a total of between $13-35 million over the life of his rotavirus vaccine patents.”

The analysis by Blaxill and Olmsted found that Offit’s future royalty income is tied to the vaccine’s future sales in the US and international markets, which gives him a strong financial stake in both the specific success of the rotavirus vaccine category and the global reputation of vaccines in general.

The American Academy of Family Physicians also signed off on the amicus brief. This group, along with its state chapters and Foundation, received a combined total of more than $5 million from Pfizer in 2009, and another $856,772 from Wyeth. In the first half of 2010, Pfizer gave the Family Physician groups $1,334,165.

Another signer, the American Medical Association, received grants worth $751,500 from Pfizer and a $5,000 grant from Wyeth in 2009. The Association received $447,400 from Pfizer in the first two quarters of 2010.

Several other members of the group that ganged up on Hannah in the brief also received plenty from the vaccine makers. Pfizer gave $55,000 to the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases in 2009, and Wyeth gave $45,000. In 2008, the Foundation received $2,153,500 Wyeth, and Pfizer gave it $58,500 in the first half of 2010.

In 2009, the Infectious Diseases Society of America received $15,000 from Wyeth and $65,000 in 2008.

The American Public Health Association received three grants totaling $200,000 from Pfizer in 2009.

The March of Dimes and its Foundation combined got $4,500 from Wyeth in both 2008 and 2009. Pfizer gave the groups $14,500 in the first half of 2010.

In 2009, Wyeth gave the National Association of Pediatric Nurse Practitioners Foundation four grants totaling $175,150 and three worth $70,000 in 2008.

Parents of Kids with Infectious Diseases received $75,000 from Wyeth in 2009.

The Immunization Action Coalition was paid $95,000 by Wyeth in 2009 and $136,743 in 2008.

Every Child By Two received nearly a million dollars, or $950,000, from Wyeth in 2009, and $350,000 in 2008.

In the August 4, 2008 report, “Every Child By Two: A Front Group for Wyeth,” JB Handley points out that Craig Engesser, an employee of Wyeth with a title of Senior Director, Professional Affairs, was on the Board of Every Child By Two for as far back as he could track. In fact, Engesser had even served as the group’s treasurer.

Handley also noted that Paul Offit had recently joined the group’s Board.

For the year 2006, Handley found IRS filings showed Wyeth gave Every Child By Two $350,769 and page 23 of the filing read: “Wyeth Vaccine: Ensure all children from birth to Age 2 are fully immunized.”

The National Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies Coalition received $200,000 from Pfizer in 2009, and Wyeth gave the Georgia chapter $500 in 2008. Other corporate sponsors listed on the group’s website in 2009 included Merck, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson and Sanofi-Pasteur.

Amici for Hannah

Amicus briefs were also submitted in support of the Bruesewitz family in September 2009 and June 2010, by attorneys from the state of New York, Mary Holland and Robert Krakow, on behalf of the National Vaccine Information Center and its cofounders, parent advocates who helped draft the 1986 legislation, the New Jersey Coalition for Vaccine Choice, No Mercury, Truth About Gardasil, Age of Autism, National Autism Association, Autism One, SafeMinds, Autism United, US Autism and Asperger Association, Talk About Curing Autism, Generation Rescue, and the Elizabeth Birt Center for Autism Law and Advocacy.

It would require too much space to list every organization, but all together more than 25 signed off on the briefs - none of which receive money from vaccine makers. Basically the question to be answered by the Supreme Court is: Does § 22(b)(1) preclude all vaccine design-defect claims even if the vaccine’s side effects were avoidable?

“The legislative history suggests that all the stakeholders – Congress, parents, manufacturers and physicians – understood that victims preserved the right to take design defect claims to court,” the June brief says. “Respondent and its amici appear to be trying to achieve through the judiciary what they failed to obtain through Congress.”

In fact, the brief includes several statements made at the time the Act was passed that suggest that Congress recognized that victims, who duly filed for compensation in the Vaccine Program, could take design defect claims to court under Section 22(b).

For instance, when presenting the Act to the full House of Representatives for a vote, Rep Henry Waxman, the chief sponsor of the Act, stated that civil claims for “inadequately researched” vaccines would be preserved under Section 22. Waxman’s description of this claim, that a vaccine’s design did not take adequate account of avoidable safety risks, would likely be a design defect, the brief notes.

“Furthermore, the Committee explicitly rejected the opportunity to create a broad exemption for all design defect claims when it considered the Act,” it says. “Proposals were considered by the Committee that would have explicitly preempted all design defect claims, but the final version did not contain those provisions.”

“By rejecting language that would have barred all design defect claims,” the attorneys wrote, “Congress showed its intent to permit courts to decide on a case-by-case which side effects were genuinely ‘unavoidable.’”

“The Act and its legislative history simply do not make sense without the understanding that the tort system remains an available alternative for such cases,” the brief says. “And Congress’ intent to keep the courthouse doors open is even more important today than it was in 1986.”

“The significance of the Bruesewitz case relates to all vaccine injury – it goes to the heart of whether Vaccine Court is fulfilling the role Congress set for it, and whether it is possible to challenge the design safety of a vaccine in any court in the United States,” Holland explained in a March 10, 2010 commentary on Age of Autism.

“For the autism community, the case could not be more central,” she says, “it will determine whether the 5,000 petitioners in the Omnibus Autism Proceeding can continue their claims in state and federal courts if Vaccine Court ultimately dismisses their claims.”

Right about now, paranoia in the vaccine industry is no doubt running at an all time high since the announcement of the first award in a vaccine-autism case in September 2010 for another girl named Hannah, with $1.5 million to start and $500,000 a year for life to pay for her care. “Those familiar with the case believe the compensation could easily amount to $20 million over the child's lifetime,” CBS News reported on September 10, 2010.

Hannah was “described as normal, happy and precocious in her first 18 months,” until “she was vaccinated against nine diseases in one doctor's visit,” in July 2000, CBS said.

A government study titled, “The Prevalence of Parent-Reported Diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder among Children in the United States, 2007,” evaluated the number of children in the US who currently had an Autism Spectrum Disorder diagnosis in 2007, based on data from a national Survey of Children's Health, and found that 1 in 91 children between the ages of 3 and 17 carried an ASD diagnosis.

”Even more alarming, for the subset of children between ages 6 and 14 immunized during the 1990's the prevalence is actually 1 in 71 children with an autism diagnosis,” Age of Autism reported.

”This age group represents children in the U.S. with the highest exposure to thimerosal, the mercury preservative routinely used until CDC, AAP and industry recommended its removal “as soon as possible” from all childhood vaccines,” AoA explained.

It’s obvious that parents no longer trust claims by the government and drug companies about harmless vaccines. On October 17, 2010, in the Huffington Post, Kim Stagliano, managing editor of AoA and author of the new book, “All I Can Handle I’m No Mother Teresa,” reported that a new study from CS Mott Children’s Hospital found 89% of parents think vaccine safety is the most important topic in medical research today.

“That makes sense, since the American pediatric vaccine schedule now includes 48 vaccinations before the age of six,” Stagliano says. “Parents are facing vaccination choice issues at every pediatric visit.”

Fictional Fear Factors

In the brief filed by the groups with all the money from Wyeth and Pfizer, when warning that vaccine makers might flee the market if they have to face the threat of lawsuits and unpredictable litigation costs, they argue that the number of vaccine makers has not greatly increased since 1986 and refer to the “precarious state of the vaccine industry.”

“The preemption of all design defect claims is critical to Congress’s objective of stabilizing the vaccine market and safeguarding the Nation’s vaccine supply,” they claim.

First of all, the vaccine industry is not in dire financial straights, in fact far from it. On June 11, 2009, Kalorama Information issued a press release for the vaccine sales forecast in a market analysis report with the headline, “New Report Forecasts More Than Doubling of Vaccine Sales by 2013.”

“Few areas of pharmaceuticals have seen the fast-moving developments in the marketplace that the vaccine market has,” Kalorama noted. The press release described 2008 as another “stellar year for the world vaccine market,” in which sales “grew 21.5% since 2007 to reach $19.2 billion.”

A year earlier, Kalorama reported that stronger than anticipated revenues for flu vaccines and the “surprising commercial success” of Merck's Gardasil had led to $16.3 billion in vaccine sales in 2007, “an increase of 38% over 2006 sales of $11.7 billion.”

However: “Vaccine manufacturers face many challenges in bringing new vaccines to market,” the amicus brief points out, with a note to: “See Paul A. Offit, Why Are Pharmaceutical Companies Gradually Abandoning Vaccines?, 24 Health Affairs 622, 623-629 (2005).”

The brief goes on to complain about how much the cost of developing vaccines has increased. “Between 1991 and 2003, for instance, costs for research and development, post licensure clinical studies, and production process improvements grew from $231 million to $802 million,” it said, citing Stanley A Plotkin, et al, Vaccines 38 (5th ed 2008). Plotkin was a co-inventor with Offit on the Rotateq vaccine.

But in any event, the high prices charged for vaccines today wipe out those costs in record time. For instance, Rotateq runs close to $200 for a 3 dose series and when you multiply that by the CDC’s calculation of more than 4 million babies born each year in the US, annual sales come to over $800 million in this country alone. Wyeth’s pneumococcal vaccine “makes $2 billion a year in sales,” according to a July 25, 2008 report by CBS News.

About a year ago, Dr Proffit was shilling for vaccine makers in the October 18, 2009 Wall Street Journal, by claiming infants should get 2 regular flu and 2 swine flu vaccines, without mentioning that all 4 contained the mercury-based preservative, thimerosal. “Children ages six months to nine years who have never received a flu vaccine before are recommended to receive two doses of both the H1N1 and seasonal-flu vaccine about a month apart,” Offit said.

With the headline, “Most flu shots contain mercury, but few know it,” on November 13, 2007, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that when using the standards set for methyl mercury consumption, a 22-pound baby getting the flu shot “would get more than 25 times the amount of mercury considered safe.”

In the WSJ article, Offit was identified only as “chief of infectious disease” at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, when in fact he holds a “$1.5 million dollar research chair at Children's Hospital, funded by Merck,” according to CBS News.

That bit of advice from Offit in the WSJ could potentially drum up over 4,000,000 new customers every year for shot givers and vaccine makers in the US for flu vaccines alone. Last year, the September 14, 2009 Los Angeles Times reported that physician offices usually “charge about $25 to $75 for the seasonal shot, including administration fees.”

“If you are immunizing a child for the first time, the child may need two shots,” the Times said. “Ask the healthcare professional giving the shot if you will have to pay two fees.”

For the sake of simplicity, let’s say doctors threw in both seasonal flu shots for one fee of $75. The total amount made from vaccinating 4,000,000 babies would be $300 million.

The Times said the H1N1 shot would be free, although doctor's offices and clinics may charge an administrative fee. But the swine flu shots were in no way free. Tax payers paid vaccine makers a fortune as a result of the pig flu hoax. However, for the sake of non-argument, let’s say the shot givers only charged $10 per infant to give each of the two swine flu vaccines. They would still make $80 million.

Will Health Care Workers Revolt?


The fact that health care workers have an aversion to flu vaccines is likely the best testament to the lack of benefits and potential harms associated with vaccines including the inability to sue for compensation if injured. It only stands to reason that if vaccines worked so great this group would be the first in line to get them.

But a new policy statement by the American Academy of Pediatrics, in a paper in the October, 2010 issue of their official journal, Pediatrics, gives notice of plan to force health care workers to get flu vaccines with the heading, “Recommendation for Mandatory Influenza Immunization of All Health Care Personnel.”

The Academy claims that “despite the efforts of many organizations to improve influenza immunization rates with the use of voluntary campaigns, influenza coverage among health care personnel remains unacceptably low.”

Mandatory influenza immunization for all health care personnel is “ethically justified, necessary and long overdue to ensure patient safety,” the group said in a statement.

“The influenza vaccine is safe, effective, and cost-effective, so health care organizations must work to assuage common fears and misconceptions about the influenza virus and the vaccine,” the Academy claims.

Their paper reports that in January 2010, the CDC estimated the percentage of health care personnel who received vaccines was only 61.9% for seasonal flu, 37.1% for swine flu, and only 37.1% received both the seasonal and swine flu vaccines.

However, it’s not like the industry is suffering from a lack of flu shot customers even when health care workers refuse to get them. In 2009 alone, multi-national corporations took home profits of $2.8 billion in influenza vaccine sales, according to an October 2010 report by Barbara Loe Fisher, co-founder of the National Vaccine Information Center.

By comparison, since the Vaccine Injury Act was passed roughly 25 years ago, the vaccine court has paid out less than $2 billion. Of the more than 13,550 petitions filed covering all vaccines, compensation for injuries was only awarded in about 2,500 cases.

Of course the estimates in the paper, if true at all, would have come from the same CDC that was run for years by Julie Gerberding and has put out the trumped up claim year after year that 36,000 people in the US die of the flu annually, with the death number never changing even when vaccination rates greatly increase.

In a December 21, 2009 Pharmalot Blog, Ed Silverman reported that Gerberding, “who until this year was the director of the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention, was named president of Merck’s vaccine division.”

As the former “top dog” at the CDC, she “has plenty of experience overseeing the selection of recommended immunizations,” FiercePharma noted on December 22, 2009.

“Autism activists, particularly those who believe vaccines are a primary cause of regressive autism, are often derided for conspiratorial comments about the CDC and Big Pharma,” JB Handley pointed out on the Pharmalot blog.

“This one is making us look more sane every day,” he said.

On October 7, 2010, Barbara Loe Fisher reported that doctors at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (Dr Proffit’s Kingdom), are ordering all employees to get a flu shot every year or be sent home for two weeks without pay to “think about it.”

“Anyone, who still refuses to get a flu shot after that, is fired,” she wrote. And that goes for not just doctors and nurses, she says, but every person who has anything to do with the health care facility, including students, volunteers, and contract workers.

“An exception could be made if the doctors in charge approve a “medical exemption” to vaccination, which, today,” Fisher warns, “is about as hard to get as a job.”