Excerpts from newspapers that may be of use for our readers.

World ignores big oil Nigeria crimes

NYT, 6/17 — Nigeria — Big oil spills are no longer news in this vast, tropical land. The Niger Delta, where the wealth underground is out of all proportion with the poverty on the surface, has endured the equivalent of the Exxon Valdez spill every year for 50 years… The oil pours out nearly every week…. leaving residents here astonished at the nonstop attention paid to the gusher half a world away in the Gulf of Mexico. It was only a few weeks ago… that a burst pipe belonging to Royal Dutch Shell… was finally shut after flowing for two months: now nothing living moves in a black-and-brown world once teeming with shrimp and crab…. The fishermen curse their oil-blackened nets, doubly useless in a barren sea…. Soldiers guarding an Exxon Mobil site beat women who were demonstrating last month….

“The pipeline failure rate in Nigeria is many times that found elsewhere in the world”… even Shell acknowledged…. On the beach at Ibeno, the fishermen were glum… “We don’t have an international media to cover us… Whatever cry we cry is not heard outside of here.”

BP ordered workers: lie, drill

Otherwords.org, 5/15 — Corporations can get away with murder… and make billions doing it…. Those financial penalties are so minor that BP routinely scrimps on safety, says oil worker safety advocate Chuck Hamel. In Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, BP oil workers have told Hamel they are expected to routinely falsify drilling rigs’ safety tests.

The reason? Because conducting a safety test… means shutting down the rig. And shutting down means oil doesn’t flow for a few minutes. So, says Hamel, in order to make more money for BP, the world’s fourth-biggest corporation, these workers were told to routinely falsify their own safety reports and carry on drilling.

Hunger is caused by profit system

GW, 6/4 — The conditions that create hunger and famine around the world have followed a pattern for centuries – and still do today…. During the great hunger around 1 million Irish people died and a further 1 million were forced into emigration for want of food. Yet, throughout the period, 1845-52, Ireland exported large amounts of food to England….

The root cause of hunger and famine is rarely crop failure alone. It is about who controls and benefits from the land and its resources. About 1 billion people, or one in six of the global population, go hungry, even though more food is being produced than ever… We have, in other words, a food system that is failing…. Water… is increasingly scarce, and… soil… is being eroded and degraded….

And… the value of the food chain has been captured at each point, from seed to field to factory to shop, by powerful transnational corporations…. Meanwhile, all but the most intensive and large-scale farmers are being driven off the land, many of the poorest forced into migration.

‘Economy up’: jobless in despair

NYT, 6/8 — Unemployment is crushing families and stifling the prospects of young people. Given that reality, President Obama’s take on the May numbers seemed oddly out of touch. “This report,” he said, “is a sign that our economy is getting stronger by the day.”

The economy is sick, and all efforts to revive it that do not directly confront the staggering levels of joblessness are doomed…. Entire communities are going under. A remarkable article in The Times last week detailed what has happened in Memphis, where a majority of the residents are black. It said the city epitomizes “how rising unemployment and growing foreclosures in the recession have combined to destroy black wealth and income and erase two decades of slow progress.”…. Inner-city neighborhoods, where joblessness is off the charts, are becoming islands of despair.

China working class stirs, strikes

NYT, 6/15 — Workers who returned to their jobs on Sunday and Monday at a Honda auto parts factory here in southern China were threatening to go back on strike this week if the company did not improve its offer of wage increases.

The threat… suggested that labor unrest at the factory was not over and that workers would not easily yield to pressure…. The threat of another walkout indicated that labor unrest continued to stir in China despite… government efforts to censor reports of strikes and protests….

Honda has had at least three strikes in the last month, at times crippling its production in China. It has responded by offering higher salaries, but those concessions seem to have emboldened workers at other factories.

Elite schools train top U.S. elitists

Otherwords.org, 6/1 – I don’t think President Obama should have nominated Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court…. I’m against her because she went to Harvard.

Do you realize that if she is confirmed, everybody on the Supreme Court will be a product of either Harvard or Yale? All nine of them.

That’s ridiculous. I know, they’re both supposed to be really good schools but, really, they’re not that good. To those who think they are I have but two words: George Bush. He graduated from Yale and got an MBA from Harvard…. Obama went to Harvard and the three presidents before him all went to Yale. They think you shouldn’t… (get a leading position) unless you know the secret Yale-Harvard handshake.

Democracy in action: 40-year lie

NYT, 6/14 – Nearly 40 years after British troops opened fire on protestors in Northern Ireland—sparking decades of bitter sectarian violence—a British government inquiry has finally rendered a credible verdict… Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain announced: “What happened on ‘Bloody Sunday’ was both unjustified and unjustifiable.”…. The inquiry determined that… the 14 people killed and 13 people wounded were unarmed.

That should discredit once and for all an earlier whitewash investigation that, weeks after ‘Bloody Sunday,’ exonerated the soldiers, saying they were fired upon first…. The findings are understandably drudging up raw emotions on all sides. With the 1998 Good Friday agreement, Northern Ireland has come a long way on a very difficult path toward peace. The hard truth of this inquiry and Mr. Cameron’s ringing apology should help move that process and the cause of peace forward.

Crisis reveals poisons of capitalism

GW, 6/4 – For the last two years we have been living through the third great capitalist crisis of modern times; and it is not over yet... Markets, we have discovered (or rediscovered), do not always know better than governments. Private greed does not procure public benefits. The lords of creation in the hedge funds and investment banks are not wealth creators. They are wealth destroyers.

The self-regulating market of neoliberal economic theory is a phantom, whose pursuit led to a shameful increase in inequality and eventually to a catastrophic fall in employment and output. The untamed capitalism of the last 30 years has not been driven by “rational economic actors”: the rational economic actor is another phantom. It has been driven by stampeding herds of electronic gamblers. It is not only monstrously unjust, it is also unsustainable….

Yet… in Washington, London, and the capitals of the eurozone, the hunt is on for a tarted up version of business as usual, radical enough to seem new, but conservative enough to keep the old show on the road. Tougher regulation, banking reforms, quantitative easing and even bank nationalizations have been the order of the day; some still are.

The one certainty is that the human race can’t continue indefinitely on our present path. Sooner or later the crisis-haunted capitalist merry-go-round will have to stop…. Tinkering is not enough.

Who will get Afghan mineral $?

NYT 6/16 – To the Editor: Re “U.S. Identifies Mineral Riches in Afghanistan” (front page, June 14): Beware of claims that newfound mineral riches will be a quick fix for Afghanistan’s problems. Oil-producing countries are famously afflicted by the “resource curse” of authoritarianism, corruption, and impoverished underclasses….

(Foreign) corporate resource grabs in developing counties have led to civil conflict, coups and appalling exploitation. Afghanistan is already notoriously corrupt… Abundant minerals could simply throw fuel on the fire.

‘Free-market’ book a bit careless

NYT, 6/13 – Matt Ridley’s new book, “The Rational Optimist,”… argues for markets as the dominant source of human progress…. He has the disturbing tic of using the word “even” when he mentions Africa. Gains from exchange, he writes, “will enable the Chinese and the Indians and even the Africans to live as prosperously as Americans now do.” And “even Nigerians are twice as rich” as they were 50 years ago, thanks to global progress….

Nor does Ridley grapple with why so many people doubt market-based progress… Ridley is tone-deaf to the 20th century traumas that were huge setbacks for the gospel of progress. “Despite the wars,” he writes, “in the half-century to 1950, the longevity, wealth and health of Europeans improved faster than ever before” – a true statement that surely misses the point.

Ridley also fails to really address inequality and uncertainty. The free market… gave Richard Fuld of Lehman Brothers $60,000 a day (in 2007)… while one billion other people survived on a dollar a day.

Many stressed out by electronics

NYT, 6/7 – While most Americans say devices like smartphones, cellphones and personal computers have made their lives better and their jobs easier, some say they have been intrusive, increased their levels of stress and made it difficult to concentrate, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll.

Younger people are particularly affected: almost 30 percent of those under 45 said the use of these devices made it harder to focus while less than 10 percent of older users agreed…. While mobile devices and PCs have eased stress for some, just about as many said the devices had heightened the amounts of stress they felt….

People seem to find it hard to shut down after work…. The people who are most computer-dependent tend to be better educated and more affluent.

New career: Setting up muslims

NYT, 6/16 – Four Muslim converts from Newburgh, NY, were charged last year with planning to bomb Bronx synagogues and shoot down military planes…. On Monday, the trial of the men was indefinitely postponed…. An investigator’s report suggested that the men… were incapable of carrying out a co0mplex attack without the informer, a fast-talker who was on the government payroll…. The men were so ill-equipped to plan an attack that none had a driver’s license or a car.

Infiltrators—civilian informers and government agents—have played a part in more than 30 terrorism investigations since… Sept. 11, 2001…. Defense lawyers in the Newburgh case refer to the informant… as an agent provocateur who earned his keep by scouring mosques for easy targets… He attended to every detail, they said, including assembling weapons when the defendants should not follow his instructions.

The prosecutors… said the investigation was “exemplary law enforcement work”…. Still civil liberties lawyers say… information has emerged in court cases about informants who have flattered and deceived Muslim men in one community after another.

Polls know how to shape answers

NYT, 6/9 – National surveys released during the last eight months have been interpreted as showing that fewer and fewer Americans believe that climate change is real, human-caused and threatening to people.

But a closer look at these polls and a new survey by my Political Psychology Research Group show just the opposite: huge majorities of Americans still believe the earth has been gradually warming as the result of human activity and want the government to institute regulations to stop it.

In one survey… respondents were asked if they thought that the earth’s temperature probably had been heating up over the last 100 years, 74 percent answered affirmatively. And 75 percent of respondents said that human behavior was substantially responsible for any warming that has occurred….

Questions in other polls that sought to tap respondents’ personal beliefs about the existence and causes of warming violated two of the cardinal rules of good survey question design: ask about only one thing at a time, and choose language that makes it easy for respondents to understand and answer each question…. When survey other than ours has asked simple and direct questions, they have produced results similar to ours.