THE BEAST FILE: GOOGLE from Hungry Beast on Vimeo.
Imagine you are one half of a young couple expecting your first child in a fast-growing, poor country. You are part of the new middle class; your income is rising; you want a small family. But traditional mores hold sway around you, most important in the preference for sons over daughters. Perhaps hard physical labour is still needed for the family to make its living. Perhaps only sons may inherit land. Perhaps a daughter is deemed to join another family on marriage and you want someone to care for you when you are old. Perhaps she needs a dowry.
Now imagine that you have had an ultrasound scan; it costs $12, but you can afford that. The scan says the unborn child is a girl. You yourself would prefer a boy; the rest of your family clamours for one. You would never dream of killing a baby daughter, as they do out in the villages. But an abortion seems different. What do you do?
Continue reading The War On Baby Girls - Gendercide
On this week’s Solari Report, I will be speaking with James R. (”Jim”) Norman, author of The Oil Card: Global Economic Warfare in the 21st Century, from his office in New York.
Jim is a veteran business journalist and energy reporter. He writes for McGraw-Hill’s Platts Oilgram News. He has been a senior editor at Forbesmagazine and was at BusinessWeek, where he served as Houston bureau chief. Prior to that, he won an AP award for investigative reporting (on an oil and gas scam) while a reporter for the Ann Arbor News in his home state of Michigan.
Jim’s knowledge of the energy markets is deep, representing years covering the big picture nationally and globally after mastering the local beat. Jim is one of those rare experts who can integrate the dots between billions in the futures markets in New York, with what that means to politics from Moscow and Beijing to London and Washington, and how that impacts you and me on Main Street.
This intelligence is invaluable as our businesses, households and savings are profoundly impacted by the availability and price of energy as dictated by global economic warfare rather than the “markets” taught in school and covered on the evening news. Global economic warfare means that commodities and financial markets serve vastly different aims than allocating assets and capital in the real economy. As the resulting volatility and uncertainty in commodities and financial markets rise, we hunger for an understanding of what is really happening - the kind that Jim can help us develop.
Jim and I will cover the fall of the Soviet Union, the subsequent “privatization” of Russian assets and the emergence of global competition with China and the “pipeline politics” that have inspired a long term U.S. military presence in the Middle East. We will talk about why we are skeptical of “peak oil” theories and what’s next in the competition for global strategic resources, including in Iran.
This will be a great one for helping you understand the trends driving U.S. imperial politics as well as a successful investment strategy for family and business. I will be covering current events in Money & Markets and responding to questions in Ask Catherine. Jim and I will be speaking for a full hour, so no movie this week.
If you are a subscriber to The Solari Report, you can post your questions at your private panel. Listen live on Thursday evening by phone, listen online, or by downloading the mp3 after it is posted on Friday.
If you would like to learn more about The Solari Report and subscribe, click here. Subscribers enjoy access to our complete MP3 archive.
This week’s Money and Markets charts will be posted at the blog on Thursday morning.
Syriana YouTube video
By Jason Leopold
Nearly a year after Democrats introduced legislation to reform the health care industry - first by flirting with the prospect of having a government-run program to compete with private insurers and then floating a proposal to expand Medicare to a younger demographic - House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Friday that Congress is ready to vote on a final bill as early as next week that doesn’t include either of those plans.
The legislation will expand health care coverage to 31 million uninsured Americans, but it also includes a mandate requiring Americans to purchase health insurance or face a penalty. The measure does not have the support of a single Republican, and in recent days some progressive and conservative Democrats have been on the fence about whether or not they will support the legislation when it comes up for a vote.
Continue reading Final Health Care Bill Vote Due As Early As Next Week
Related Reading:
Negatives for Pelosi Hit All-Time High; 53% Oppose Health Care Reform
Granny D … having raised more hell in her last decade than most people
do in their whole lives.
Doris “Granny D” Haddock, the woman best known for walking more than 3,200 miles across the country in 1999 to advocate for campaign finance reform, died Tuesday at the age of 100.
A fierce opponent of “soft money” political donations, Haddock spearheaded a petition for campaign finance reform, culminating in her decision to walk from Pasadena, Calif., to Washington. She arrived in the spring of 2000, where she was joined for the last few miles by dozens of members of Congress and more than 2,000 supporters.
Haddock penned two books about her experience, and in 2004, mounted a brief campaign for Senate against GOP incumbent Judd Gregg (N.H.). She received 34 percent of the vote.
On Wednesday, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) memorialized his fellow progressive, saying that Haddock, who legally changed her name to Granny D, had a “vision for an America in which every citizen has a voice in a government free of corporate control.”
Heart felt condolences to her family.
Read:
Doris “Granny D” Haddock (1910-2010): Remembering Legendary Campaign Finance Reform Activist
Democracy Now (11 March 10)
Doris “Granny D” Haddock
Wikipedia
Related article:
Granny D Dead At 100
Reader Supported News (11 March 10)
Remembering The Forgotten Triumph of ‘Granny D’
Aol News (11 March 10)
Read full article at BusinessInsider.com. . .
By Rachel Beck
The city of Los Angeles is putting banks it does business with on the spot.
The unanimous directive coming from the city council is that banks need to help Los Angeles slow the pace of foreclosures ravaging its neighborhoods and battle a local unemployment rate that far exceeds the national average.
If the banks don’t comply, they risk getting replaced by banks that do. The price for getting tossed: Lost access to nearly $30 billion in city savings and pension funds.
“We need to challenge the financing institutions that got us into this mess,” says Richard Alarcon, a Democrat who introduced the city council’s motion that passed 12-0 earlier this month. “Responsible local investments are critical for our economy.”
Continue reading Los Angeles Gets Tough on Banks
Two years after receiving its first deposits, a “doomsday” seed vault on an Arctic island has amassed half a million seed samples, making it the world’s most diverse repository of crop seeds, the vault’s operators announced Thursday.
Cary Fowler — who heads the trust that oversees the seed collection, which is 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) from the North Pole, said the facility now houses at least one-third of the world’s crop seeds.
“In my lifetime, I don’t think we’ll go over 1.5 million. I’d be rather surprised if we go over a million,” Fowler told The Associated Press. “At that point, we’d have all the diversity in the world … and the most secure samples.”
Located in Norway’s remote Svalbard archipelago, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is a safeguard against wars or natural disasters wiping out food crops around the globe. It was opened in 2008 as a master backup to the world’s other 1,400 seed banks, in case their deposits are lost.
Continue reading Norway Doomsday Seed Vault Hits 1/2 million Mark
GOP Wants Dodd To Slow Down On Financial Reform Legislation
By Brady Dennis
Republicans on the Senate banking committee said they remain open to finding a bipartisan agreement on legislation to overhaul financial regulation, but they warned the chairman, Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), against trying to push a bill through too quickly.
“While we remain open to finding commonground and to working diligently toward passage of bipartisan legislation, we believe a markup scheduled in haste would certainly prevent us from achieving that goal,” said a letter, signed by all 10 Republican committee members and obtained by The Washington Post.
Dodd, who has been in close negotiations for several weeks with freshman Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), announced Thursday that he would move forward with an updated version of a bill on Monday without Republican support. He also said he plans to start hashing out details of the bill in his committee the week of March 22, ahead of the legislative recess.
Continue reading GOP Wants Dodd To Slow Down On Financial Reform Legislation
Related article:
U.S., Europe At Odds Over Global Financial Reform
The Washington Post (12 March 10)