CEOs Earned More Than Companies’ Tax Bills
By Andrew Zajac – Aug 31, 2011

Twenty-five of the best-paid chief executive officers in the U.S. earned more in salary and other compensation in 2010 than their companies’ federal income tax expenses as disclosed in public filings, according to a reportby the Institute for Policy Studies.

The Washington-based nonprofit group’s report, released today, examined 100 publicly traded U.S. corporations with the highest-paid CEOs. It found that companies whose CEOs’compensation exceeded reported tax expense in 2010 had average global profits of $1.9 billion.

Companies in this group, according to the report, included Cablevision Systems Corp., EBay Inc., Verizon Communications Inc., Boeing Co. and Dow Chemical Co.

Read more.

U.S. newborn death rate tied with Qatar
South Korea, Cuba, Malaysia, Lithuania, Poland and Israel all outrank the U.S.
By Rachael Rettner
updated 8/30/2011 5:31:59 PM ET

Babies in the United States have a higher risk of dying during their first month of life than do babies born in 40 other countries, according to a new report.

Some of the countries that outrank the United States in terms of newborn death risk are South Korea, Cuba, Malaysia, Lithuania, Poland and Israel, according to the study.

Researchers at the World Health Organization estimated the number of newborn deaths and newborn mortality rates of more than 200 countries over the last 20 years.

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Feds Sue to Block AT&T/T-Mobile Merger
by Associated Press | Aug 31, 2011 10:54 AM ET

WASHINGTON — The federal goverment is suing to block AT&T’s planned merger with T-Mobile, according to a report on Bloomberg News.

Saying the deal would “substantially lessen competition” among wireless providers, the Department of Justice is trying to block AT&T’s proposed $39 billion acquisition of T-Mobile USA on antitrust grounds.

“AT&T’s elimination of T-Mobile as an independent, low- priced rival would remove a significant competitive force from the market,” the U.S. said in its filing.

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Cooperstown Brewer Fights N.Y. Fracking Sought by EOG Resources
By Jim Efstathiou Jr. – Aug 22, 2011

Brewery Ommegang says Belgian ale and natural gas don’t mix.

That statement of the obvious matters, the maker of Aphrodite Ale and Hennepin Farmhouse Saison says, because the water it draws from aquifers beneath Cooperstown, New York, is at risk of pollution from hydraulic fracturing.

“Even our strongest beer is 90 percent water, and all of our water comes off the property,” Larry Bennett, a spokesman for the brewery about 170 miles (274 kilometers) northwest of Times Square, said in an interview. “If you contaminate an aquifer, it’s done. There’s nothing you can do about it.”

Ommegang, an Otsego County tourist attraction along with the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, has joined a growing grass-roots campaign in New York state to ban the technology that has transformed U.S. gas production, Bloomberg Government reported. The brewery, a unit of Belgium-based Duvel Moortgat NV, says it would face a “material threat” from a leak of fluid used in hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, to free natural gas from shale.

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From Liz Rich:

A friend of mine visiting her daughter in Midland, Texas (an oil capital) heard some Texas oil men (big Perry supporters) bragging about buying lots of land in upstate NY to lease to fracking companies. Good bye unpolluted water in NY State.

Someone tell Robert Kennedy, Jr.

Anything we can do about it? Seems to me Cuomo has already been bought off.

U.S. Can Try to End New York Fracking Lawsuit, Judge Rules | Verdant World News
August 16, 2011

U.S. District Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis ruled that the U.S. government can try to throw out
a New York lawsuit over natural gas leases in New York State filed by Eric T. Schneiderman, New York Attorney General, on the grounds that the state cannot prove injury. The suit was filed on the grounds that the regulations allowing hydraulic fracturing without a full environmental review proposed by the Delaware River Basin Commission would affect the drinking water of 9 million New Yorkers. According to court papers filed by trade groups representing oil and gas companies with natural gas leases in New York State, the lawsuit could shut down gas development in the Marcellus Shale, one of the largest natural gas reservoirs in the world,
“for many years to come.”

If the lawsuit goes through, regulations would be halted until a full environmental review of
all health and safety risks is completed, in compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act. In the lawsuit, Schneiderman notes that New York City has spent $1.5 billion buying land to serve as a pollutant buffer, upgrading sewage plants, and regulating human activity in an effort to protect drinking water resources. He also points out that in Pennsylvania drilling of over 2,000 natural gas wells has resulted in “hundreds of violations of water pollution laws.” Several similar but separate suits will be consolidated with the New York State case.

Source: Bloomberg Businessweek

http://verdantworldnews.org/?p=594

It’s not as if they’ve never dealt with e-voting manipulation:

MCM

Election Crimes and the FBI

Federal Election Crimes

In democratic societies like the United States, the voting process is a means by which citizens hold their government accountable, conflicts are channeled into resolutions, and power transfers peacefully. Our system of representative government works only when honest ballots are not diluted by fraudulent ballots. When elections become corrupted, democracy becomes threatened.

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Why the Fukushima disaster is worse than Chernobyl
Japan has been slow to admit the scale of the meltdown. But now the truth is coming out. David McNeill reports from Soma City
Monday, 29 August 2011

Some scientists say Fukushima is worse than the 1986 Chernobyl accident, with which it shares a maximum level-7 rating on the sliding scale of nuclear disasters.

Yoshio Ichida is recalling the worst day of his 53 years: 11 March, when the sea swallowed up his home and killed his friends. The Fukushima fisherman was in the bath when the huge quake hit and barely made it to the open sea in his boat in the 40 minutes before the 15-metre tsunami that followed. When he got back to port, his neighbourhood and nearly everything else was gone. “Nobody can remember anything like this,” he says.

Now living in a refugee centre in the ruined coastal city of Soma, Mr Ichida has mourned the 100 local fishermen killed in the disaster and is trying to rebuild his life with his colleagues. Every morning, they arrive at the ruined fisheries co-operative building in Soma port and prepare for work. Then they stare out at the irradiated sea, and wait. “Some day we know we’ll be allowed to fish again. We all want to believe that.”

This nation has recovered from worse natural – and manmade – catastrophes. But it is the triple meltdown and its aftermath at the Fukushima nuclear power plant 40km down the coast from Soma that has elevated Japan into unknown, and unknowable, terrain. Across the northeast, millions of people are living with its consequences and searching for a consensus on a safe radiation level that does not exist. Experts give bewilderingly different assessments of its dangers.

Read more.

Michael Prysner is a veteran of the war in Iraq and an anti-war activist
August 30th, 2011 1:25 AM
Demand justice for SSG Jared Hagemann
By Michael Prysner

Staff Sergeant Jared Hagemann, an Army Ranger in the 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment at Ft. Lewis, Wash., was found on June 28 at a training area on base with a gunshot wound to the head. He was suffering from severe Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and had been trying desperately to avoid a pending deployment to Afghanistan—what would be his 9th combat tour. He was 26-years-old, with a wife and two young children.

In 2005, SSG Hagemann came home from his first combat tour with both psychological trauma and reservations about the war he had just been a part of.

His wife, Ashley Joppa-Hagemann, said that when he returned from that first tour: “He was quiet, and wouldn’t look people in the eye. He wanted to remain hidden; he didn’t want to be around people.”

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In Unsettled Times, Media Can Be a Call to Action, or a Distraction
By NOAM COHEN
Published: August 28, 2011

THE mass media, including interactive social-networking tools, make you passive, can sap your initiative, leave you content to watch the spectacle of life from your couch or smartphone.

Apparently even during a revolution.

That is the provocative thesis of a new paper by Navid Hassanpour, a political science graduate student at Yale, titled “Media Disruption Exacerbates Revolutionary Unrest.”

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First Federal Reserve Audit Reveals Trillions in Secret Bailouts
Monday, 29 August 2011 06:55
Matthew Cardinale

ATLANTA, Aug 28 (IPS) – The first-ever audit of the U.S. Federal Reserve has revealed 16 trillion dollars in secret bank bailouts and has raised more questions about the quasi-private
agency’s opaque operations.

“This is a clear case of socialism for the rich and rugged, you’re-on-your-own individualism for everyone else,” U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, an Independent from Vermont, said in a statement.

The majority of loans were issues by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (FRBNY).

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