OntheWilderSide

China and Russia have decided to renounce the US dollar and resort to using their own currencies for bilateral trade, Premier Wen Jiabao and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin announced late on Tuesday.

via China, Russia quit dollar.

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Homeland Securitys ability to shut down sites without a court order evidently comes from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a Clinton-era law that allows Web sites to be closed on the basis of a copyright complaint. Critics have long assailed the DMCA for being too broad, as complainants dont need to prove copyright infringement before a site can be taken down.

via Homeland Security shuts down dozens of Web sites without court order | Raw Story.

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http://twitter.com/#!/revbillytalen/status/8406996470472704

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Nectali Rodezno Izaguirre is the Coordinator of the Honduran National Lawyers' Front Against the Coup.  As a human rights lawyer and nonviolent activist, Nectali recruits lawyers from across Honduras, helping them to provide pro bono representation to those who have been illegally detained, charged, or tortured by Honduras’ de facto government. Witness for Peace has coordinated a series of speaking engagements, where Nectali addresses audiences i … Read More

via Peace and Justice Online

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Rethinking the Global Economy: The Case for Sharing by Rajesh Makwana and Adam Parsons / November 26th, 2010 As the 21st Century unfolds, humanity is faced with a stark reality. Following the world stock market crash in 2008, people everywhere are questioning the unbridled greed, selfishness and competition that has driven the dominant economic model for decades. The old obsession with protecting national interests, the drive to maximise profits … Read More

via Bear Market News

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With unemployment insurance  about to run out for millions of people and the Congress and the President set to reduce our parsimonious social welfare system in the name of free enterprise, it is well to recall those dark days of the Great Depression when, on Thanksgiving Day 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt proclaimed the following: May we recall the courage of those who settled a wilderness, the vision of those who founded the Nation, the steadfa … Read More

via Unsilent Generation

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http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/ lauraflanders | November 24, 2010 Eating less meat might be better for the world, but it can definitely be delicious. Buckwheat is actually a fruit, a grain substitute that can be excellent for those with gluten sensitivities, or just a nice alternative to the usual. GRITtv's Danya Abt and Zac Halberd took a trip up to Ithac … Read More

via Dandelion Salad

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IW: This the Portugal cuts sound like Governor-elect Cuomo’s “austerity” budget based on his axiom that the “Rich are already paying too many taxes”  so everyone else will have to pay for them.  Will NY Union wake up and protest Cuomo’s new budget?

In Portugal, a general strike against budget cuts and tax hikes has stopped trains and buses, grounded planes and halted services from healthcare to banking. Labor unions organized the day of action, Portugal’s first general strike since 1988, to protest a raft of austerity measures including plans to cut wages for civil servants by 5 percent and freeze pensions. Graciete Cruz is a Portuguese trade unionist.

Graciete Cruz: “The workers, the men and women, will certainly flight against it because we cannot accept that kind of policy which is the policy that has been followed ever since. Always, it has always been the workers paying for a crisis form which they are not responsible for.”

via Democracy Now! | Headlines for November 24, 2010.

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One long-standing — and justifiable — progressive grievance is that whenever ordinary Americans allow their personal plight to enter the public sphere in a way that advances a liberal political goal, they are gratuitously probed and personally smeared by the Right. The most illustrative example is the Frost family, who allowed their 12-year-old son Graeme to deliver a moving radio address explaining the benefits he received from the CHIP program when he was in a serious car accident, only to be promptly stalked and smeared by Michelle Malkin, among others. Today, The Nation — a magazine which generally offers very good journalism — subjects John Tyner to similar treatment, with such a shoddy, fact-free, and reckless hit piece (by Mark Ames and Yasha Levine) that I’m genuinely surprised its editors published it. Beyond the inherent benefit of correcting the record, this particular article is suffused with all sorts of toxic though common premises that make it worth examining in detail.

via Anatomy of a journalistic smear job – Salon.com Mobile.

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Even with a possible cool end to the year, 2010 is expected to be no lower than third in a record where 1998 and 2005 are warmest. The UN panel of climate scientists says higher temperatures mean more floods, heatwaves and rising sea levels.”I think it’s too close to call. Based on these numbers it’ll be second, but it depends on how warm November and December are,” said Dr Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit CRU, at the University of East Anglia, which says 1998 was the record year so far.By contrast, scientists at Nasa say surface temperatures through October were above the previous record year, which it says was 2005. Differences between years are only a few hundredths of a degree.”I would not be surprised if most or all groups found that 2010 was tied for the warmest year,” said Nasa’s Dr James Hansen.

via 2010 on course to be joint hottest year since 1850 | Environment | guardian.co.uk.

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http://twitter.com/#!/drvandanashiva/status/8172961873797120

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That’s what Cancun should be about – surveying the startling scientific evidence, and developing an urgent plan to change course. The Antarctic – which locks of 90 percent of the world’s ice – has now seen eight of its ice shelves fully or partially collapse. The world’s most distinguished climate scientists, after recording like this, say we will face a three to six feet rise in sea level this century. That means the drowning of London, Bangkok, Venice, Cairo and Shanghai, and entire countries like Bangladesh and the Maldives.And that’s just one effect of the way we are altering the chemical composition of the atmosphere.

Perhaps the most startling news story of the year passed almost unnoticed. Plant plankton are tiny creatures that live in the oceans and carry out a job you and I depend on to stay alive. They produce half the world’s oxygen, and suck up planet-warming carbon dioxide. Yet this year, one of the world’s most distinguished scientific journals, Nature, revealed that 40 per cent of them have been killed by the warming of the oceans since 1950. Professor Boris Worm, who co-authored the study, said in shock: “I’ve been trying to think of a biological change that’s bigger than this and I can’t think of one.” That has been the result of less than one degree of warming. Now we are on course for at least three degrees this century. What will happen?

via Johann Hari: There won’t be a bailout for the earth – Johann Hari, Commentators – The Independent.

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In “What Good Is Wall Street?” a long, thoughtfully argued piece in the New Yorker, John Cassidy makes the case that “Much of what investment bankers do is socially worthless” — it doesn’t “provide liquidity” or “price risk,” it merely extracts farcical rents for the relatively utilitarian task of moving money around:

via Much of what investment bankers do is socially worthless – Boing Boing.

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