World Scrap Book
G.M. Draws Another $4 Billion From Treasury
DETROIT — General Motors, facing the almost certain prospect of a bankruptcy filing, said Friday that it had drawn another $4 billion from the Treasury Department, raising its total from the government to $19.4 billion.
G.M. gave the Treasury a note for $266.8 million as security against the additional money that it borrowed on Friday. The financing does not appear to be the last that G.M. will draw, according to the filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
It says that by June 1, it expects to have borrowed a total of $21.4 billion from the Treasury. In its original request to Congress last fall, G.M. asked for $18 billion in loans to keep it afloat while it restructured. With its latest injection from Treasury, it has surpassed that request.
New York Times
By BILL VLASIC and IAN AUSTENPublished: May 22, 2009http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/23/business/global/23auto.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
FCC claims the right to enter your home without a warrant at any time if you have wireless technology
- By Ryan Singel
- May 21, 2009
You may not know it, but if you have a wireless router, a cordless phone, remote car-door opener, baby monitor or cellphone in your house, the FCC claims the right to enter your home without a warrant at any time of the day or night in order to inspect it.
Full Article:http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/05/fcc-raid/
“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”
“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” - Karl Marx
“Marx was a whole lot more sympathetic to religious faith than most people give him credit for. He saw religion as a source of solace that should be abolished only until the sources of people’s pain – an unfair economic system – had been eradicated.”
“The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.”
Gregory Rodriguez: Asking the right god question:
Full Article: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/points/stories/DN-rodriguez_12edi.ART.State.Edition1.4ad094f.html
black colleges and universities are being hit hard as they try to stave off foreclosures
During this time of economic uncertainty, some historically black colleges and universities are being hit hard as they try to stave off foreclosures, layoffs and dwindling enrollments.
Chinese Exports Fall 22.6% in April
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/13/business/global/13yuan.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
Marx: Capitalism “…brings into the world the material means of its own destruction…”
PAUL D’AMATO
Original Article: http://socialistworker.org/2009/05/11/the-point-is-to-change-it
IMPLICIT IN all of Marx’s economic analysis is the idea that capitalism creates the conditions for its own abolition; in his words, “it brings into the world the material means of its own destruction.”
In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels praise the way in which capitalism has unleashed the power of human productivity:
The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground—what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor?
Why praise capitalism in a pamphlet proposing its overthrow? Because for Marx and Engels, this development of the productive forces brought about by capitalism created the material conditions to abolish class divisions and inequality. There is now absolutely no reason for there to be poverty in the world.
According to Engels:
[The] industrial revolution…has raised the productive power of human labor to such a high level that—for the first time in the history of humanity—the possibility exists, given a rational division of labor among all, to produce not only enough for the plentiful consumption of all members of society and for an abundant reserve fund, but also to leave each individual sufficient leisure so that what is really worth preserving in historically inherited culture—science, art, human relations is not only preserved, but converted from a monopoly of the ruling class into the common property of the whole of society, and further developed.
As soon as capitalism creates these conditions of abundance, Engels writes:
[E]very excuse disappears for the existence of a ruling class. Was not the final reason with which class differences were defended always: there must be a class which need not plague itself with the production of its daily subsistence, in order that it may have time to look after the intellectual work of society? This talk, which up to now had its great historical justification, has been cut off at the root once and for all by the industrial revolution of the last hundred years.”
That is why those who are serious about changing the world must move beyond superficial praise of Marx, and toward a real understanding of his ideas.
Rising Crime: In-house fraud cases surge
Fraud committed against companies by their own employees has surged this year, new data suggest, providing fresh evidence that the recession is fuelling a rise in crime.
Whistleblower hotlines operated by The Network, a US group that provides compliance services to some of the world’s biggest companies – includingAviva, the UK insurer, Cisco and Yahoo, the US tech companies, and Delta, the US airline – have received a deluge of tip-offs about fraud in recent months.
By Robert Cookson in London Financial Times
Published: May 10 2009 23:30 | Last updated: May 10 2009 23:30
Poverty grows in America
Schools, agencies seeing big increase in homeless families
For years, homelessness has been depicted as that of an individual man or woman living on the street and begging for money. But with the perfect storm of the foreclosure crisis and the faltering economy, more and more families are becoming homeless. According to a recent count by the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, the number of homeless families in the Washington region alone has jumped 15 percent since last year.
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/05/02/homeless.families/index.html
Peter Schiff: Why College Tuitions Are So Expensive
