Clippings for 10 May 2009

This Mother's Day Lets Promise Her Equal Pay
Heidi Hartmann and Ariane Hegewisch comment for New America Media: "Instead of flowers, this Mother’s Day, let’s celebrate the women who keep families together by giving them pay equal to men’s. Women had to work almost four extra months to earn what men did in 2008. For full-time workers, women earn just $78 per week compared to $100 for all men. The difference is even greater for some women. African-American women earn only $62.20 and Hispanic women earn just $53.40 for every $100 earned by white men, who are the top earners."

Buying Brand Obama
Chris Hedges writes for Truthdig: "Barack Obama is a brand. And the Obama brand is designed to make us feel good about our government while corporate overlords loot the Treasury, our elected officials continue to have their palms greased by armies of corporate lobbyists, our corporate media diverts us with gossip and trivia and our imperial wars expand in the Middle East. Brand Obama is about being happy consumers. We are entertained. We feel hopeful. We like our president. We believe he is like us. But like all branded products spun out from the manipulative world of corporate advertising, we are being duped into doing and supporting a lot of things that are not in our interest."

Rate of Job Loss Slows Moderately, Unemployment Rate Rises to 8.9 Percent
Dean Baker writes for Truthout: "The economy lost another 539,000 jobs in April, down from an average of 680,000 over the prior five months. The unemployment rate rose to 8.9 percent, in spite of the fact that the household survey actually showed an increase in employment of 120,000. On an age-adjusted basis, the current unemployment rate would be equivalent to about 10.5 percent in 1982, almost the same as the peak level hit in that year."

Search Lobbying Reports on the Stimulus
David Epstein reports for ProPublica: "Given that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (aka the stimulus) is the biggest spending bill in U.S. history, we at ProPublica have been trying to follow the stimulus money. And so have thousands of lobbyists. Over 2,500 associations, cities, counties and corporations have already shelled out for lobbyists to talk stimulus with the feds."

Corruption Is Dangerous to Your Health
Robert Borosage writes for The Campaign For America's Future: "This isn't about America being a 'center-right country,' the myth that pundits still peddle about the American people. This is about Congress being bought and sold, pure and simple. Each night, Washington slurps on political fund-raisers. Each day, the deals get cut; the favors get done. Now with Republicans lining up lemming-like to obstruct anything Obama, Congress can be bought on the cheap. The lobbies have only to enlist (suborn, bribe, seduce, finance) a few of what the press insists on describing as 'moderate Democrats' in the Senate to stop any reform they don't like."

Short Sales: Banks Blocking Way Out of Foreclosure Crisis
Arthur Delaney and Ryan Grim report for the Huffington Post: "In a time of collapsing real estate values, where one in five homes are now under water, a short sale is increasingly the only option before foreclosure. It is less damaging to credit scores and spares the homeowner the shame of foreclosure."

Recommended Audio: Naomi Klein - Is the bail-out the greatest heist in history?


A Secret E-Mail Argument Among Psychologists About Torture
Sheri Fink reports for ProPublica: "Earlier this week we published a story examining [1] the psychology profession's tortured relationship with the Bush Administration's War on Terror. We found that psychologists warned officials as early as 2002 against using potentially ineffective and dangerous interrogation techniques on detainees, according to a recently-released Senate Armed Services Committee report. However, what had been little noticed was that the same psychologists helped develop the harsh interrogation policies and practices they warned against."

Government Could Destroy Records in Hundreds of Guantanamo Cases
Chisun Lee reports for ProPublica: "A stockpile of documents about hundreds of Guantanamo Bay detainees, some authored by the prisoners themselves, could be destroyed under a little-known provision of a federal court order the Bush administration obtained in 2004."

Muslims Disproportionate Victims of Flawed Terrorist Watch List
Parvez Ahmed reports for the Huffington Post: "The Justice Department has now found that the FBI's terrorist watch list is flawed. Not only does the list consist of a mind-boggling 1.1 million names of 400,000 people, the Justice Department has also found that the FBI was "sometimes dangerously slow to add suspects to the nation's terrorist watch list, and even slower to remove those cleared of suspicion." As many as 24,000 people have been incorrectly kept on that list. "

Women Migrants Describe Abuse in County Jails
Valeria Fernandez reports for Inter Press Service: "Broken arms, dislocated jaws, intimidation and vulgarities are part of the daily routine immigrant women experience in Arizona's Maricopa County Sheriff's Office (MCSO) jails, human and civil rights organizations charge. MCSO is currently under investigation by the U.S. Justice Department over alleged abuses of a section of immigration law known as 287(g) that allows the federal government to deputise local police to enforce immigration law."

Censored in 1981: Burying America in Radioactive Waste
Carl Jensen writes for Daily Censored: "Radioactive waste is building daily throughout the United States and the government doesn’t seem to know what to do with it. The failure of the media to fully address this issue, based on the following five censored nominations, combined to make this the #3 censored story of 1981."

The Subprime Court
Rob Larson comments for Z Magazine: "By now everyone knows the new Supreme Court tilts to the right. Bush's nominees Justice Alito and Chief Justice Roberts lead a conservative five-justice bloc, where reproductive health rights have been cut back and the President's Office of Faith-Based Initiatives keeps getting public money. What's less known is the court's newly expanded function as an institution of corporate power."

Listen Up: UN Must Hear Women on Violence
Charlotte Bunch writes for On the Issues Magazine: "Violence against women is an issue that has come onto the global agenda from the grassroots level of the women's movement, that is, from women's lives and feminist organizing. No issue better illustrates how the women's movement can and has moved a concern from local women's spaces to the tables of power."

Obama Budget Would Kill Abstinence-Only Funding
Jonathan Allen reports for the Congressional Quarterly: "President Obama plans to eliminate funding for abstinence-only sex education programs and replace it with money for more inclusive forms of teen pregnancy prevention. The predictable and potentially controversial reversal of Bush administration policy on abstinence was announced with little fanfare in the 1,380-page budget appendix released by the White House on Thursday morning."

Flordia's GOP Governor Outed in Explosive Documentary
John Byrne, Raw Story, and reported on AlterNet: "The Republican governor of Florida, Charlie Crist, who is strongly considering a run for Senate, was outed in a independent film released on Friday. The film, Outrage, tracks the outings of prominent gay political figures, such as Crist and former Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman. It's being produced by Magnolia Pictures and will appear in Landmark Theaters across the country."



Fox Nation’s Inflammatory And Inaccurate Headline Foments Anti Islamic Bigotry
Priscilla at News Hounds writes: "Not only is the headline “Queen’s Medal of Honor Scrapped To Appease Muslims,” inaccurate; but it provides the good “Christians” at Fox Nation (which, like the mythical America that Fox Nation has seceded from, is a “Christian Nation") a chance to spew some rather un-Christian hatred and bigotry. If the Fox Nation is a place for the American Dream, then this American Dream is one in which hatred is a “family value.” As such, the Fox writers know their demographic quite well and certainly seem to be pandering to it. The Notre Dame "controversy" provides lot of opportunity for the “nation” to talk about Obama as a “baby killer” and even the anti-Christ. The Miss California threads are chock full of homophobia. But this latest thread has brought out some really nasty bigotry and paranoia. If the writers of the Fox Nation deliberately pick these stories, knowing the response, they truly have no shame."

Conservatives Are Foaming at the Bench
Karl Frisch writes for Media Matters: "As news that Supreme Court Justice David Souter will be stepping down at the end of this term thus providing President Obama with his first Supreme Court appointment continued to burn up the airwaves this week, Media Matters released an extensive report documenting and correcting common myths and falsehood propagated by the media on the subject -- an essential primer for anyone following or covering the story."

Hate Speech, Media Activism and the First Amendment
Candice O'Grady writes in Extra: "In just over a month last winter, two Latino men were beaten to death in New York state while their attackers shouted racial slurs and epithets (Philadelphia Inquirer, 1/25/09). Such hate crimes, motivated by anti-immigrant prejudice and other bigotries, have spurred a media justice campaign to reveal the potential human costs of hate speech."