Pope Francis on Wednesday condemned as “slave labour” the conditions for hundreds of workers killed in a factory collapse in Bangladesh and urged political leaders to fight unemployment in a sweeping critique of “selfish profit”.
The pope said he had been particularly struck by a headline saying workers at the factory near Dhaka were being paid just 38 euros ($50) a month.
“This is called slave labour!” the pope was quoted by Vatican radio as saying in his homily at a private mass in his residence to mark May Day.
More than 400 workers have been confirmed dead and scores are missing in the collapse, which occurred in a suburb of the capital Dhaka last week in the country's worst-ever industrial disaster.
“Today in the world this slavery is being committed against something beautiful that God has given us — the capacity to create, to work, to have dignity,” the pope said at the mass.
No direct knowledge, but this is starting to come out as worthy of investigation.
From an experienced mortgage attorney specializing in helping those being foreclosed:
I have friend that has been on electronic intel side most of his career (Army, then contractor to one of the agencies) and he told me how many 3 ltr agency employees couldn't afford to live near D.C. during the false boom years, and most had to fall for those 3yr “option ARM's” just to swing the payment every month. (payments way below P&I, negative amortization)
They were all told by the complicit Realtors “don't worry, real estate always goes up, when the note resets you can refinance….”
You probably already know they were the highest profit “loans” to sell. All those guys with security clearances can't afford to “strategically default” or even to question the purported “debt” after the ARM's reset since their clearance/ job would be at risk.
This friend said he knows a ton of them that are working insane hours just to keep up with the adjusted payments, otherwise risk their career.
It's despicable how they were set up to keep them in that bondage to keep them in line.
Phi Beta Iota: Our understanding is that the security clearance process has improved dramatically in the past decade, and that short sales and foreclosures are not fatal if the 360 whole person otherwise passes muster. Both the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and the adjudicating authorities appear to have risen to the challenge and are NOT holding well-intentioned individuals responsible for being victimized by mortgage fraud.
Here is more proof of the demise of the American democracy, and the vassal status of the Congress as the non-geographical corporate states become the dominate powers of the age.
Worst Congress Money Can Buy BILL MOYERS and MICHAEL WINSHIP, Editor-in-Chief and Senior Fellow – Salon/ Moyers & Company
This is the bitter truth of the economic policies that have dominated the U.S., and the world since Reagan, through Republican and Democratic administrations. The Sequester alone, I believe, we will discover killed thousands of people.
We are beginning to see the rise of contractor militias operating in the U.S., as this report makes clear. It is an extension of the same thinking that privatized large segments of the Iraq War. The growing relationship between the company that was formerly Blackwater and Monsanto is another example. This is an extraordinarily dangerous trend.
Others are beginning to recognize the great geopolitical shift that I have been writing about for almost 15 years — the rise of the non-geographical corporate states Here is an example.
If you have been reading SR for a while you know my views on the Great Schism Trend, and my belief that it was only a matter of time before social progressives woke up to the benefits of States Rights and to letting the Theocratic Right, as it constantly claims it wants to, take the Red value states and go its own way. It is happening, as this essay makes obvious, and I believe we will hear more and more about this.
In the attached essay, my very good friend Mike Lofgren raises the question of whether defense spending is good for the economy. This is a current issue because the threat of defense budget reduction is being countered by arguments asserting that these reductions will push the economy into recession. More generally, the political addiction to defense spending has been a major contributor to our nation's economic decline and our political stagnation — i.e., what I have called Americas Defense Dependency, the subject of an essay I wrote last November for Counterpunch. Mike comes at these issues from a different albeit complimentary and equally important angle.
Readers interested in learning more about this important subject will find the work of the late Professor Seymour Melman of Columbia University to be particularly edifying. In his prescient book, Profits Without Production (Knopf, 1983), Melman explained how the growing militarization of our economy was one of the central causes of the decline in America’s manufacturing competitiveness. This decline started in the 1970s, but Melman showed how it grew out of seeds planted by the permanent military mobilization of a huge defense industry in the 1950s.
The 1960s comedy show Laugh-In included an occasional sketch in which co-host Dan Rowan played a comic general whose tag-line was “war is good for business!” In an ironic echo of that skit, an April 27 Washington Post story delivers the same message: “A steep slowdown in defense spending tied to the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is undercutting the country's economic recovery, new government data released Friday revealed.” An 11.5-percent annual drop in Pentagon spending resulted in slower growth in the gross domestic product (GDP) during the first quarter of 2013 than economists expected.
So did the dozen years of war, with all the deaths, destruction, and expense they entailed, have the perverse silver lining of being good for the economy? Most mainstream economists — who, like cynics, know the price of everything and the value of nothing — would answer in the affirmative.
Gross domestic product, which they tend to treat as a surrogate for economic well-being, is only a tote board of all spending that occurs in an economy. Statistics like GDP are arbitrary, subject to incomplete data, and can mislead us about underlying economic conditions. A dollar spent on a cancer cure has the same worth to the GDP as a dollar spent to bribe an Afghan drug lord. This convention can reach absurd lengths, such as massive hurricane damage possibly increasing the GDP: money must be spent just to get conditions back to the way they were, but it counts it as “growth.”
Based on my almost three decades on Capitol Hill, most of them involved in defense budgeting, I can say authoritatively that military spending evokes an almost mystical reverence among many members of Congress. A $325-billion defense program like the F-35, however technically flawed, typically engenders less floor debate than relatively miniscule domestic programs such as the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
A hidden epidemic is poisoning America. The toxins are in the air we breathe and the water we drink, in the walls of our homes and the furniture within them. We can’t escape it in our cars. It’s in cities and suburbs. It afflicts rich and poor, young and old. And there’s a reason why you’ve never read about it in the newspaper or seen a report on the nightly news: it has no name—and no antidote.
The culprit behind this silent killer is lead. And vinyl. And formaldehyde. And asbestos. And Bisphenol A. And polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). And thousands more innovations brought to us by the industries that once promised “better living through chemistry,” but instead produced a toxic stew that has made every American a guinea pig and has turned the United States into one grand unnatural experiment.
Today, we are all unwitting subjects in the largest set of drug trials ever. Without our knowledge or consent, we are testing thousands of suspected toxic chemicals and compounds, as well as new substances whose safety is largely unproven and whose effects on human beings are all but unknown. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) itself has begun monitoring our bodies for 151 potentially dangerous chemicals, detailing the variety of pollutants we store in our bones, muscle, blood and fat. None of the companies introducing these new chemicals has even bothered to tell us we’re part of their experiment. None of them has asked us to sign consent forms or explained that they have little idea what the long-term side effects of the chemicals they’ve put in our environment—and so our bodies—could be. Nor do they have any clue as to what the synergistic effects of combining so many novel chemicals inside a human body in unknown quantities might produce.
Sorcha Faal is exaggerating again I think but the numbers are rising and the virus is spreading. It is a situation of great concern as the WHO has warned.I haven't heard a good explanation yet for the thousands of dead pigs floating in Chinese rivers.
Phi Beta Iota: Sorcha Fall (David Booth) is a known fabricator with a gift for connecting dots. We think of his stuff as good musical background to ethical evidence-based thinking.
A grim report prepared for President Putin by Health Minister Dr. Veronika Skvortsova on the growing pandemic in China is now warning that a “global mass death event” is currently underway as the spread of the H7N9 avian flu virus continues to grow and shows no signs of stopping anytime soon.
Will Smartglasses Replace Eyeglasses? PAUL MCDOUGALL – Salon
This is coming, it reminds me of when mobile phones began. A few early adapters had phones in their cars, and carried around 10 lb over the shoulder cases for walking around. I had one in Miami, where my ship Seaview was homeported when in American waters, a project to locate sunken ships on the Grand Bahama Banks using Remote Viewing. People thought I was a drug dealer, since they were notable early adapters.
The corporations that persist in making these toxic chemicals, like the tobacco industry are evil. They know that what they are doing is destructive and they don't care because it is so profitable. Their strategy is not to improve their products, but to corrupt the government, as they have done so effectively in the U.S. This is what they are up to in Europe.
Here is some good news about agriculture. Most socially progressive movements, such as this one, are very idealistic, and people work very hard to advance them, but to little effect. This one I think actually has a chance of being successful. Support it wherever you can. This report presents information about what you can do, and where to start.
