Two videos from www.therealnews.com October 15, 2010 and October 23, 2010 VIDEO: “Conversations with Terrorists” – www.therealnews.com October 23, 2010
Reese Ehrlich: “All violence against the U.S. is being defined as “terrorism.”
http://www.therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=5701 VIDEO: U.S. Media and Afghan War = www.therealnews.com October 15, 2010
Reese Ehrlich: Military downplaying biggest surge of the war
http://www.therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=5700 Reese Erlich is a best-selling book author and freelance journalist who writes regularly for the Dallas Morning News, Canadian Broadcasting Corp. Radio and National Public Radio. He has won numerous journalism awards, including the prestigious Peabody (shared with others). He is the author of several books, and is currently touring across the country promoting his most recent one called: Conversations with Terrorists: Middle East Leaders on Politics, Violence and Empire, published in September 2010. You can find Reese’s tour dates on his website www.reeseerlich.com. RELATED LINKS:
www.warcrimestimes.org
http://rethinkafghanistan.com

Maude Barlow gave this stirring plenary speech, full of hope even in the face of ecological disasters, to the Environmental Grantmakers Association annual retreat in Pacific Grove, California. Barlow, a former UN Senior Water Advisor, is National Chairperson of the Council of Canadians and founder of the Blue Planet Project

Robert Polin from the Political Economy Research Institute is interviewed. The five-part interview published October 6, 2010 can be accessed at www.truth-out.org.

"The emergence of vast inequalities between the wealthy and the rest of us may be the biggest change in American society over the last fifty years. And it’s hardly a change that we should welcome…
In a late-August summary paper published by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, economist Giovanni Peri concluded that “immigrants expand the economy’s productive capacity by stimulating investment and promoting specialization. This produces efficiency gains and boosts income per worker. At the same time, evidence is scant that immigrants diminish the employment opportunities of U.S.-born workers.” I spoke to Peri recently, and he emphasized that there is some academic debate about whether new immigrants might have a small negative effect on the wages of those in the lowest-paid 10 percent of the economy. But there is broad consensus that, for the economy as a whole, immigration has had a positive impact on productivity, wages, and employment…"

"Obama himself had eschewed economic populism in his campaign (making an exception in midwestern primaries such as Wisconsin [8] where he needed more working-class support in order to win), in keeping with his carefully cultivated media image of post-partisan conciliator. But the economy did the job for him, and for the Democratic party."
"It is not so hard to make this appeal: millions of people are losing their homes and their jobs, while the Wall Street gang [11] who sank the economy are once again raking in billions – and only because they have been rescued and subsidised with hundred of billions of our taxpayer dollars. If enough Democrats campaign on these kinds of themes and offer a populist alternative, they could keep both houses of congress."

The bomb changed everything except the way we think, Albert Einstein lamented. Nuclear weapons are destabilizing, not stabilizing. Security cannot only be defined militarily. If neoliberalism depends on militarism and destroys countries to save them, are there alternatives?

"Undocumented immigrants streaming into this country from south of the border drive down wages and steal jobs that could otherwise go to out-of-work Americans. Right?
Wrong. As it turns out, immigrant workers play an important role in building our economy and bolstering institutions such as social security. In other words, they’re raising your wages and paying for your retirement. So this Labor Day might be a good opportunity to show a little gratitude.
Just in time for the holiday weekend, the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco released a research summary entitled, “The Effect of Immigrants on U.S. Employment and Productivity.” Its conclusion was not what most people (or at least most people who attend Glenn Beck rallies) expect."

"The “Great Transition” is meant to echo the phrase used by Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, the title of Polanyi’s important 1944 book describing the shift from the world of the commons to that of the total market order. Polanyi argued that the coming of the market order swept aside all sorts of social arrangements that had prevailed for millennia of human history: the role of family, kinship, community and religion, the importance of moral order and other non-market principles…"