Obama Adviser Denies Trade Remarks
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/030308C.shtml
Nedra Pickler, reporting for The Associated Press, writes, "Barack Obama's senior economic policy adviser said Sunday that Canadian government officials wrote an inaccurate portrayal of his private discussion on the campaign's trade policy in a memo obtained by The Associated Press." 

Robert B. Reich | Does Labor Need More Clout?
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/030308E.shtml
Robert B. Reich, writing for The San Francisco Chronicle, says: "We're finally reaping the whirlwind of widening inequality. A recession looms because most consumers are at the end of their ropes and can't buy more. Median hourly wages, adjusted for inflation, are no higher than what they were three decades ago. Since then, most of what's been earned in America has gone to the richest 5 percent. But the rich won't buy much more because they already have most of what they want - after all, that's what it means to be rich."  

Dean Baker | The Low-Income Homeowner Tax
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/030308F.shtml
Dean Baker, writing for Truthout, says: "Forget about trying to get more kids health care insurance by expanding SCHIP or increasing government funding for child care. The new way the politicians plan to help moderate-income families is to have them pay a special 18 percent income tax to live in a home in which they have no equity." 

Buffett: US Essentially in Recession
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/030308G.shtml
Josh Funk, reporting for The Associated Press, writes, "Billionaire Warren Buffett said Monday 'I would say, by any commonsense definition, we are in a recession.'" 

Harold Meyerson: The Middle Is Falling Out of the Economy
http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/021508LA.shtml
Harold Meyerson for The American Prospect delivered testimony to the Labor Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee on the long-term state of the economy, rising inequality, the dearth of good jobs in the middle of the economy and America's changing role in the world economy.

Best US Factory Jobs In Rising Jeopardy
http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/021508LB.shtml
Mark Trumbull, The Christian Science Monitor, says, "A new round of cutbacks by Detroit's automakers carries a larger message that America's manufacturing workers are under new pressure in jobs where labor unions had once been able to command middle-class wages for assembly-line jobs."

Sara Robinson | Debunking the Free Marketeers
http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/021508HA.shtml
Sara Robinson for OurFuture.org addresses "the larger assumptions that Americans make about health care that are contradicted by the Canadian example."

Kelpie Wilson | Improving Our Green Job Prospects
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/021508J.shtml
Truthout's Environmental Editor Kelpie Wilson writes: "On the one hand we have a deepening economic recession, a mortgage and debt crisis, and rising unemployment. On the other hand is the growing energy and climate crisis, shadowed by the specters of peak oil and planetary meltdown. Rising prices for energy, food and health care are hitting the poor and middle class hard. We have ourselves in quite a mess. No one has all the answers to these problems, but there is one answer that everyone with any sense embraces as a necessary first step toward a permanent solution: we must create green jobs in the renewable energy and energy efficiency industries. But despite that clear path forward, somehow the political will is not there yet and our prospects for a green jobs program in 2008 do not look very good."

Kelpie Wilson | Improving Our Green Job Prospects
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/021508J.shtml
Truthout's Environmental Editor Kelpie Wilson writes: "On the one hand we have a deepening economic recession, a mortgage and debt crisis, and rising unemployment. On the other hand is the growing energy and climate crisis, shadowed by the specters of peak oil and planetary meltdown. Rising prices for energy, food and health care are hitting the poor and middle class hard. We have ourselves in quite a mess. No one has all the answers to these problems, but there is one answer that everyone with any sense embraces as a necessary first step toward a permanent solution: we must create green jobs in the renewable energy and energy efficiency industries. But despite that clear path forward, somehow the political will is not there yet and our prospects for a green jobs program in 2008 do not look very good."

David Carr | Who Won the Writers Strike?
http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/021208LA.shtml
In The New York Times, David Carr writes, "When the Writers Guild of America held its annual awards ceremony Saturday night in Manhattan, it felt more like a victory celebration. So after a long and bitter strike, the writers won, right?"

Feds to Unveil New Mortgage-Help Plan
http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/021208LB.shtml
Marcy Gordon, The Associated Press, reports: "At-risk borrowers with all types of mortgages, not just high-cost subprime loans, could be eligible for help under a new plan involving six big home lenders."

Halliburton Accused of Silencing Gang-Rape Victims
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/021208S.shtml
ABC News' Maddy Sauer writes: "A Houston, Texas woman, who says she was gang-raped by her co-workers at a Halliburton/KBR camp in Baghdad, says 38 women have come forward through her foundation to report their own tragic stories to her, but that many cannot speak publicly due to arbitration agreements in their employment contracts." 

GM Seeks Buyout for 74,000 Hourly Workers
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/021208B.shtml
The Associated Press reports, "General Motors Corp. reported a $38.7 billion loss for 2007 today, the largest annual loss ever for an automotive company, and said it is making a new round of buyout offers to US hourly workers in hopes of replacing some of them with lower-paid help."


Charles R. Morris | The Consumer End of a Stumbling Economy
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/021208H.shtml
Charles R. Morris, writing for The Washington Independent, says: "One can pity Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke. No other federal reserve chairman ever cut interest rates by a full 1.25% within just eight days, as Bernanke has done. But the monetary skies remain as leaden and thunder-clouded as ever. The stock market keeps quivering downward, crowds thin at the malls, jobless queues grow. Wal-Mart reports that customers are using their Christmas gift cards for groceries."

Battles Over Nurse Staffing Ratios Spread Across Nation
http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/021108LA.shtml
Writing for Labor Notes, Mischa Gaus says, "After a patient quietly died in registered nurse Danielle Magana's hospital hallway, she decided she'd had enough. Although an autopsy later said the woman had died of natural causes, Magana said the incident was waiting to happen at her chronically short-staffed San Antonio hospital."

More Employees Join Labor Unions
http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/021108LB.shtml
Betty Beard, The Arizona Republic, writes: "Union membership grew last year across the country, and for the first time since 1983, unions nationwide saw their share of members increase."

Business leaders are deeply unhappy at the online initiative of the AFL-CIO workers' federation, accusing union bosses of taking a cheap shot when complex issues are at stake.

But the AFL-CIO affiliate behind the site, Working America, says there is nothing cheap about the pay packages on offer to the favoured few while millions of blue-collar Americans fret about losing their jobs and benefits.

"The public should be able to question the outrageous pay of CEOs at a time when jobs are being outsourced every day and their health and safety is endangered every day," Working America deputy director Robert Fox told AFP.

The site at www.workingamerica.org has information on more than 60,000 US companies, detailing their violations of health and safety legislation, their outsourcing of jobs overseas and the pay deals for chief executives.

The group says it had to fight hard to prise health and safety data out of the government, resorting to the Freedom of Information Act only to find the data was kept on reel-to-reel computer tapes or decades-old IBM cartridges.

"It's been virtually impossible for normal people to gain access to this kind of information, certainly not on an easily accessible site like this," Fox said.

Full story:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
11/21/05

CONTACT: Thomas W. Smith, (608) 263-7426, twsmith@wisc.edu

INDUSTRY FORUM TO EXPLORE IMPACT OF GLOBALIZATION ON ENGINEERING

MADISON - Increasingly, U.S. companies are looking overseas for the deployment and development of engineering resources. The globalization of the engineering enterprise affects all aspects of engineering, from information systems through product design, manufacturing and plant and facilities.

Sales support and service functions are seeing significant impacts from global resources, and even the most conservative areas of engineering, such as construction and utilities, are not immune.

On Thursday and Friday, Dec. 1-2, engineering executives, chief technology officers, global product managers and others will gather at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Fluno Center for Executive Education to look at how a wide variety of engineering functions have already changed and will continue to change as a result of globalization.

The forum is called "Beyond Offshoring: Globalization of the Engineering Enterprise" and will feature a variety of industry experts with first-hand knowledge of how globalization is changing the practice of engineering. The program will begin on Thursday, Dec. 1 at 10 a.m.

For more information, contact Program Director Thomas W. Smith at (608) 263-7426, twsmith@wisc.edu, or visit the Web site at http://epdweb.engr.wisc.edu/webH212.
###



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Phone: (608) 262-3571
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by Rob Kall

http://www.opednews.com

It's well known that GM has been dealing with a cost of over $1500 per car in employee health insurance alone.

We know that the Bush administration has been offering tax incentives to encourage production and sales of big, gas guzzling SUVs. Unfortunately, Bush administration incompetence in appointing FEMA management, and Republican failure to institute long term plans to free the US from dependence upon oil as the primary energy resource have made SUVs less and less attractive, even with tax incentives. So GM has built itself into a pickle-- with too many factories designed for making gas guzzling unwanted SUVs, manned by workers receiving prohibitively costly health insurance.

If the right wing republican leadership in the congress and whitehouse had seen the writing on the wall, which was very visible, they might have bit the bullet and taken the approach every other major industrialized nation has already taken, and moved the country to nationalize health care. That would have eased the burden on our country's strongest industries. Currently, they are at a huge disadvantage, since all those other nations subsidize the cost of health coverage for workers. And the World trade organization allows this form of subsidy. They failed to take these absolutely necessary, inevitable steps because they owe too much to the Pharmaceutical and health insurance industries. You can start by looking at Bill Frist and his dirty, corrupt investment dealings and conflicts of interest.

If the right wing republican leadership in the congress and whitehouse had taken a different approach to SUVs, encouraging the discontinuation of their use, by giving tax breaks for energy efficient cars, hybrids, etcetera, gas prices might not have hit GM so hard. If they'd taken steps starting in 2000 to free the US from dependence upon oil, foreign oil in particular, they screwups in the gulf, in response to Katrina, might not have had as severe an impact on gas prices.

Now, 30,000 American workers will lose their jobs. Those jobs will go to workers in other countries. GM will cut its US manufacturing ability by one million vehicles ad part of their seven billion dollar budget cut. They're doing this "to deal with global competitors."

GM stock hit a fourteen year low last week. One segment of the Republican party will rejoice at this news. The wealthy tax dodging parasites, as I call them will buy the stock and wait, while GM outsources its manufacturing to other countries. Thirty thousand working people and their families will pay the price for the profits that these wealthy folk will gain.

Thirty thousand people will have to go out and find lower paying jobs, probably without health insurance. And the U.S. moves a little closer to third world status.

Let's face it. Bush's poll numbers are down to 28% approval now. For over ten years, I've observed that that number-- 26-28% is generally the statistic that represents the fundamentalist base of the republican party. COnnecting the dots, right wing extremist fundamentalist Christians are providing the political base that has enabled the Republicans to gut the USA of its most valued industries. They have empowered the republican extremists running the white house and congress to hobble our energy policy, to keep working an archaic model that is now punishing all of us, with higher gasoline and home heating costs.

They are supporting the people who are taking away money from the poor, money for food. They are supporting the right wing extremists, led by the Vice President for Torture, Cheney, in making the use of torture an official policy of the USA.

This is not about religion. THere are millions of Christians of all faiths who have not drunk the Koolaid, who still see that the right wing has rejected the principles and teachings of Christianity.

These extremist evangelicals go to churches that now receive billions in funding from the federal government, thanks to the Bush administration's erasure of separation of church and state. These evangelicals are regularly exhorted by their ministers, fattened with US funding, to support the right wing republicans who fatten them. They use abortion, homophobia and the "rapture" as the issues which galvanize them. But be assured, these people are selling out America. With total hypocrisy, they allow the poor to hungry and to die from lack of medical care. They allow the extremists controlling congress to pass laws that weaken environmental protections, that allow increasing pollution of the environment that is already causing increased deaths among children (already born) and adults.

These extremist hypocrites allow the continuation of a war that was started based on distortions and lies of omission-- a war that has killed tens of thousands of innocent civilians, a war in which the US has used chemical weapons of mass destruction.

It is time to stop treating these people as just another political persuasion. They are hypocrites, led by corrupted religious leaders-- corrupted by money and power. THey are misled, but that is no longer enough of a reason to tolerate them. THey are endangering the stability and economic future of the United states.

They money the churches have been receiving must be cut off. It is time to end the tax exemption for the megachurches they have been building with the US funds the ministers are whoring for, by invoking their flocks to support right wing politicians. A megachurch has little in common with the churches most Americans are familiar with. They do not add strength and integrity to a community. They are insular institutions which sow division and separation from the community. They are a threat to the American way.

As we watch GM begin to dissolve as a major US company, we should keep in mind that it will not disappear. We can expect to see it be acquired by some international conglomerate, just as Chrysler was. We can expect to see GM shifting its manufacturing to outsourcing nations where cheap labor is readily available.

It is time the US finds an alternative to the WTO, which is a bad solution to globalization. Yes we are in a globalized world. But the WTO's open borders policy is not working. It is killing us. Put it together with the damage the right wing is doing to other aspects of this country and the GM plant closings are frightening harbingers of what the right wing will do to the US in the years to come, with Bush in the white house for three more years.

Rob Kall is editor of OpEdNews.com, President of Futurehealth, Inc, and organizer of several conferences, including StoryCon, the Summit Meeting on the Art, Science and Application of Story and The Winter Brain Meeting on neurofeedback, biofeedback, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology.

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---------------------------------
November 21, 2005

Seeking Clean Fuel for a Nation, and a Rebirth for Small-Town Montana By TIMOTHY EGAN

HELENA, Mont., Nov. 15 - If the vast, empty plain of eastern Montana is the Saudi Arabia of coal, then Gov. Brian Schweitzer, a prairie populist with a bolo tie and an advanced degree in soil science, may be its Lawrence.

Rarely a day goes by that he does not lash out against the "sheiks, dictators, rats and crooks" who control the world oil supply or the people he calls their political handmaidens, "the best Congress that Big Oil can buy."

Governor Schweitzer, a Democrat, has a two-fisted idea for energy independence that he carries around with him. In one fist is a shank of Montana coal, black and hard. In the other fist is a vial of nearly odorless clear liquid - a synthetic fuel that came from the coal and could run cars, jets and trucks or heat homes without contributing to global warming or setting off a major fight with environmental groups, he said.

"Smell that," Mr. Schweitzer said, thrusting his vial of fuel under the noses of interested observers here in the capital, where he works in jeans with a border collie underfoot. "You hardly smell anything. This is a clean fuel, converted from coal by a chemical process. We can produce enough of this in Montana to power every American car for decades."

Coal-to-fuel conversion, which was practiced out of necessity by pariah nations like Nazi Germany and South Africa under apartheid, has been around for more than 80 years. It is called the Fischer-Tropsch process. What is new is the technology that removes and stores the pollutants during and after the making of synthetic fuel; add to that high oil prices, which have suddenly made this form of energy alchemy feasible. The coal could be converted into gasoline or diesel, which would run cars, or into other types of fuel.

With coal reserves of about 120 billion tons, Montana has one-third of the nation's total and a tenth of the global amount. Most of it is just under the prairie grass in the depopulated ranch country of eastern Montana. Mr. Schweitzer wants to plant coal-to-fuel factories in towns that have one foot in the grave. It may not provide enough fuel to wean the West off imported oil, but it may be enough to show the rest of the country that there is another way, he said.

"This country has no energy plan, no vision for the future," said Mr. Schweitzer, who spent seven years in Saudi Arabia on irrigation projects. "We give more tax breaks and money for oil, and what do we get? Three-dollar gas and wars in the Middle East. If you want to control the destiny of this country, it's going to be with synthetic fuels."

For now, the governor's ideas are just speculative. Although several energy companies have expressed interest in building coal-to-fuel plants, no sites have been chosen or projects announced. Because it would be such a novel, financially risky undertaking, companies have been hesitant to go the next step. But Mr. Schweitzer hopes for a breakthrough, with several plants up and running within 10 years, and he says he does not need legislative approval to give the go-ahead if companies commit.

The governor has met with the president of Shell Oil, the chairman of General Electric and other captains of big energy, as well as with smaller companies that develop synthetic fuels.

"This is not a pipe dream," said Jack Holmes, the president and chief executive of Syntroleum, an Oklahoma company that has a small synthetic fuels plant and wants to build something bigger. "What's exciting about this process is you don't have to drill any wells and you don't have to build any infrastructure, and you'd be putting these plants in the heartland of America, where you really need the jobs."

Certainly jobs are a big motivating factor. Montana is a poor state and ranks last in average wages. Mr. Schweitzer, whose approval rating is near 70 percent, says thousands of good-wage jobs can be gained in towns that are dying.

He is also promoting wind energy and the use of biofuels, using oil from crops like soybeans as a blend. The governor signed a measure this year that requires Montana to get 10 percent of its energy from wind power by 2010, a goal he said would be reached within a few years. Still, the Big Sky State, with a population under a million, has fewer people than the average metro area of a midsize American city, and its influence is limited. The governor acknowledged as much.

"I'm just a soil scientist trying to get people in Washington, D.C., to take the cotton out of their ears," Mr. Schweitzer said with somewhat practiced modesty. "But if we can change the world in Montana, why not try it?"

By some estimates, the United States has enough coal to take care of its energy needs for 800 years. The new, cleaner technology stores the pollutants in the ground or processes them for other uses.

The United States imports about 13 million barrels of oil a day. To replace that oil would be a monumental undertaking, with hundreds of coal-to-fuel plants. But Mr. Schweitzer points to South Africa, where a single 50-year-old plant provides 28 percent of the nation's supplies of diesel, petrol and kerosene. But the South African plant uses old technology that does not remove the pollutants.

In this country there is a small factory in North Dakota that converts coal to natural gas. And Pennsylvania is moving forward on a plan to produce diesel from coal. Neither of these plants would come close to the scale of the plants Mr. Schweitzer is envisioning in Montana, where it would cost upward of $7 billion to build a plant that could turn out 150,000 barrels of synthetic fuel a day, for about $35 a barrel.

One surprising thing, thus far, is that many people in the environmental community have not rejected the coal-to-fuel idea out of hand. Environmentalists like the process for producing clean fuels from coal. They say the technology is there and it can be done in coal-rich empty quarters of eastern Montana, North Dakota or Wyoming.

Still, they worry about strip mining the ranch country and about whether there will be a global commitment to make synthetic fuels the clean way rather than in a dirtier way along the lines of a plan in China, where the government has joined with major global oil companies to build about a dozen coal-to-fuel plants.

"It's a very interesting moment in energy history," said Ralph Cavanagh, an energy policy expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of the nation's most powerful environmental groups. "Certainly this process can be done. This is a promising direction. The question is, Are we going to do it clean?"

Because there is no federal mandate to process coal in a way that reduces the emissions that can cause global warming, Mr. Cavanagh says he fears that any new coal operations will simply add new pollutants to the atmosphere. Coal plants without the cleaning technology are the biggest source of man-made carbon dioxide, a gas that is considered a central contributor to the warming of the earth, according to many studies.

There is another problem as well. Some Montana ranchers and environmentalists who fought big coal-mining proposals in the 1970's are worried about what new mining will do to the grasslands.

"The governor's idea is a big one," said Helen Waller, a farmer who is active with the Northern Plains Resource Council, a Montana environmental group. "I'm not sure it's the best one. I don't think there's any such thing as clean coal. And even if there were, it would require a lot of productive ranchland to be ripped up."

Mr. Schweitzer said the mining could be done in a way that restored the land afterward. "I call it deep farming," he said. "You take away the top eight inches of soil, remove the seam of coal, and then put the topsoil back in."

But given Montana's history of abuse by mining companies - the giant open-pit mine in Butte is the most visible legacy of a bygone era - some Montanans remain skeptical.

Forwarded by:

BigArt Hambach
now blogging at http://bigart.blogspot.com
The world cannot continue to wage war like physical giants and to seek peace like intellectual pygmies."
WE HAVE TO STOP KILLING AND MAIMING ONE ANOTHER

"I just think there's a better way that doesn't involve tearing up productive ranchland," Ms. Waller said.