Excerpts from newspapers that may be of use for our readers. Abbreviations: NYT=New York Times, GW=Guardian Weekly, LAT=Los Angeles Times

US profits: 40% money-juggling

NYT, 4/26 — …The finance sector’s share of domestic corporate profits, never higher than 16 percent until 1986, hit 41 percent in the last decade….

Something is fundamentally amiss in a financial culture that thrives on “products” that create nothing and produce nothing except new ways to make bigger bets and stack the deck in favor of the house. “At least in an actual casino, the damage is contained to gamblers,” wrote the financial journalist Roger Lowenstein in The Times Magazine last month. This catastrophe cost the economy eight million jobs.

US imports oil, exports spills

NYT, 5/2 — Whether this spill turns out to be the result of a freakish accident or a cascade of negligence, the likely political outcome will be a moratorium on offshore drilling….

Moratoriums have a moral problem, though. All oil comes from someone’s backyard, and… we end up getting people to drill for us in Kazakhstan, Angola and Nigeria….

Nigeria [for one] has suffered spills equivalent to that of the Exxon Valdez every year since 1969….

Effectively, we’ve been importing oil and exporting spills to villages and waterways all over the world.

NY firing thousands but no cops

NYT, 5/6 — Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, anticipating deep financial cuts from Albany, plans to cut the number of city teachers by 6,700….

Mr. Bloomberg also intends… to reduce the city’s work force by about 5,000 other workers…. And he is prepared, officials say, to take the budget knife to a host of programs that many residents have come to treasure, closing as many as 75 senior centers, as well as day care centers and programs for children.

One area… will be spared, however… Mr. Bloomberg has decided that the police force… cannot absorb any more cuts.

Can they regulate their regulator?

NYT, 4/24 — To the editor:…. Every American should understand that the challenge we’re dealing with in the Senate is not whether Congress can regulate Wall Street, but to what degree Wall Street regulates Congress.

TV stuffs bad food into kids

NYT, 4/20 — Children ages 2 to 7 see an average of 12 televised food ads a day, or 4,400 a year, and children 8 to 12 see an average of 21 a day — more than 7,600 a year. For teenagers, the numbers are 17 a day, or more than 6,000 a year. Fully half of all ad time on children’s shows is for food…. There were no ads for fruits or vegetables….

Researchers found that for each additional hour of television viewing, the children consumed an additional 167 calories, especially the calorie-dense, low-nutrient foods frequently advertised on television.

Bosses love the power to deport

NYT, 4/22 — Many American workers know how a bad economy can chain them to a bad job or a bad boss. But what if you’re an immigrant guest worker and that boss holds your visa and can get rid of you with one phone call to the feds? What if he just threatened to call? Which would you choose — to be exploited or deported? To suffer silently here or in destitution back home?

There are laws to prevent such exploitation, but they often fail in the real world, which is rife with examples of abuses….

For too long the deck has been stacked against non-citizen workers. While the country has drastically ramped up the arrest, prosecution and deportation of tens of thousands of undocumented workers, it has done little to deal with unscrupulous employers who like their work force cheap, easily intimidated and disposable.

When one group of workers is powerless, all workers suffer.

Slave trade led to Africa poverty

Harvard Magazine, Feb. — In a chapter that assesses the impact of the slave trade on modern Africa, Harvard assistant professor of economics Nathan Nunn…. Concludes that the contemporary nations that, historically, lost the highest proportion of their populations to slavery are economically the worst off today. In fact, he computes that per-capita annual income in Africa — $1,834, on average — would be between $2,679 and $5,158 if the slave trade had never occurred.