Women Born Transsexual

From Nation of Change:  http://www.nationofchange.org/car-right-wing-can-t-kill-1333720827

By Froma Harrop
Friday 6 April 2012

Imagine that. Former Republican President George H.W. Bush recently bought his son Neil a Chevrolet Volt as a birthday present. This is the car that all right-thinking right-wingers demand we hate. In their political prism, the Volt has everything going against it: It’s beloved by environmentalists for getting 61 miles to the gallon. It’s assembled by unionized workers at General Motors’ Detroit-Hamtramck plant. It enjoys government subsidies intended to encourage the production of fuel-efficient cars (started actually by H.W.’s oldest son, former President George W. Bush).

To many, this resembles progress. But to “conservatives” wanting government-bailed-out Detroit to go down in flames, especially if the United Auto Workers union goes with it, this plug-in hybrid is the car that has to die.

Lo and behold, U.S. car sales were hot last month, with General Motors selling over 100,000 vehicles that get at least 30 miles to a gallon. And sales of its Chevy Volt more than doubled from the month before.

The irony is that GM has temporarily stopped production of the Volt following earlier weak sales. And here’s why the Volt wasn’t flying out of the lots: The right-wing media had launched an outrageous smear campaign against it. As former GM executive Bob Lutz sarcastically put it, the Volt had become “the poster child for President Obama’s socialist meddling in the free automotive market.”

Lutz responded with special anger to a recent Bill O’Reilly Fox News show in which the host condemned the Volt as “an unmitigated disaster.” Joshing over the disappointing Volt sales, O’Reilly’s guest Lou Dobbs said, “It doesn’t work.” Also, “It catches fire.”

None of this happens to be true. The European-market Volt worked well enough to be named the European Car of the Year. The “catching fire” claim is pure fiction, Lutz said, based on battery tests “under extremely destructive experimental conditions.” Two of the three batteries involved weren’t even in a car.

Continue reading at:  http://www.nationofchange.org/car-right-wing-can-t-kill-1333720827

From The Guardian UK:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/apr/10/european-stock-market-panic-selling

Investors demanding high premiums for holding Italian and Spanish bonds as fears of double-dip recession grow

Heather Stewart, Larry Elliott and Giles Tremlett in Madrid
The Guardian, Tuesday 10 April 2012

Europe‘s sovereign debt crisis exploded back into life on Tuesday, with markets across the continent rocked by a wave of panic selling amid renewed fears about the impact of savage austerity measures in Spain and Italy.

The mood of uneasy calm seen across Europe since the Greek bailout in February was shattered as financial markets took fright at evidence of a double-dip recession and growing popular opposition to welfare cuts and tax increases.

Italy and Spain, the eurozone’s third and fourth biggest economies, were at the centre of the market turmoil, with investors demanding an increasingly high premium for holding their bonds.

“Spain is right in the centre of a European storm,” admitted finance minister Luis de Guindos, who declined to rule out an eventual bailout but insisted it could be avoided.

In Italy, Mario Monti’s coalition government is facing growing hostility to reforms of its labour market, while the sheer size of the country’s public debt made it an obvious target for nervous traders. The prospect of Greek voters rejecting austerity and the French electorate denying Nicolas Sarkozy a second term as president was also weighing on the markets.

The Greek government said it would hold a general election on 6 May, with opinion polls showing support for the mainstream pro-austerity parties is too weak to allow them to form a government.

Continue reading at:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/apr/10/european-stock-market-panic-selling

From In These Times:  http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/12867/why_american_needs_the_left

The fight for true equality since 1776.

BY Eli Zaretsky
April 5, 2012

From the beginning of the American republic, most of the country’s thinkers and politicians have argued that our nation neither had nor needed a Left.

Historians of the so-called liberal consensus school argue that the United States has simply always enjoyed agreement on such matters as private property, individualism, popular sovereignty and natural rights. Others claim that the country never developed the leftist working class or peasantry seen in other nations, a claim often termed American exceptionalism. Still others say that the country doesn’t need a Left because it already believes in, or has even achieved, such goals as democracy and equality – a view held by Cold War liberals and neoconservatives.

But these are all false and misleading ways to understand America. The country has always needed, and typically has had, a powerful, independent, radical Left. While this Left has been marginalized (as it is today) and scapegoated (during periods of national emergency), the Left plays an indispensable role during the country’s periods of long-term identity crisis.

The United States has gone through three such crises: the slavery crisis culminating in the Civil War; the Great Depression precipitated by the rise of large-scale corporate capitalism, culminating in the New Deal; and the present crisis of “affluence” and global power, which began in the 1960s. Each crisis has generated a Left – first the abolitionists, then the socialists, and finally the New Left – and together, these movements constitute a tradition.

At the core of each of these Lefts is a challenge to the liberal understanding of equality – the formal equality of all citizens before the law. In the first case, the abolitionists, the issue was racial equality. In the second case, the socialists and communists, the issue was social equality, the insistence that democracy requires a minimum level of security in regard to basic necessities. In the third case, the New Left, the issue was equal participation in civil society, the public sphere, the family and personal life.

Indeed, more than the struggle between Left and Right, the struggle between the Left and liberalism over the meaning of equality is at the core of U.S. history. Without a Left, liberalism becomes spineless and vapid; without liberalism, the Left becomes sectarian, authoritarian and marginal. In contrast, the Right is merely a reaction to the Left.

Continue reading at:  http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/12867/why_american_needs_the_left

From Truth Out:   http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/8421-the-suicidal-state-and-the-war-on-youth

By Henry A Giroux
Tuesday, 10 April 2012

In spite of being discredited by the economic recession of 2008, market fundamentalism has once again assumed primacy as a dominant force for producing unprecedented inequalities in wealth and income, runaway environmental devastation, egregious amounts of human suffering and what Alex Honneth has called an “abyss of failed sociality.”(1) The Gilded Age is back with big profits for the ultra-rich and large financial institutions and increasing impoverishment and misery for the middle and working class. Political illiteracy and religious fundamentalism have cornered the market on populist rage providing support for a country in which, as Robert Reich points out, “the very richest people get all the economic gains [and] routinely bribe politicians” to cut their taxes and establish policies that eliminate public goods such as schools, social protections, health care and important infrastructures.(2)

It gets worse. Everywhere we look, the power of the rich and powerful operates to create a “suicidal state”(3) in which regulations meant to restrict their corrupting power are shredded; shamelessly and without apology, they use their unchecked power to lay off millions of workers while simultaneously cutting the benefits and rights of those on the job in order to dramatically increase corporate profits. As social protections are dismantled, public servants denigrated and public goods such as schools, bridges, health care services and public transportation deteriorate, the current neoliberal social order embraces the ruthless and punishing values of economic Darwinism and a survival-of-the-fittest ethic. In doing so, the major political parties now reward as its chief beneficiaries the mega banks, ultralarge financial industries, the defense establishment and big business.

Reinvigorated by the passing of tax cuts for the superrich, the right-wing dominated House of Representatives along with number of right-wing state governorships have launched an ongoing war on women’s rights, the welfare state, workers, students, and anyone who has the temerity to speak out against such attacks. The corporate-controlled media, especially Fox News and Clear Channel Communications, emulate the former Soviet Union’s version of Pravda, its once laughable propaganda rag. At the same time, the liberal media is as spineless as it is complicit with existing relations of power – more willing to compromise with right-wing ideology than exercising civic courage in searching for the truth and exposing the lies of normalizing power.

Hiding behind the mantle of balance and objectivism, the liberal media is incapable of a discriminating judgment and moral position and, increasingly, resembles a game show nervously repeating bad jokes, promoting sensationalist stories, emulating celebrity culture and garnering elevated ratings in order to lure in big money from advertisers.

Continue reading at:  http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/8421-the-suicidal-state-and-the-war-on-youth

Much of America’s real drug addiction problem is with drugs that Doctors prescribe.  Pot is not the problem.  The dangerous drugs are legal because huge corporations make a ton of money off of the dangerous narcotics they peddle.

Pot is a weed that can grow almost anywhere.  Including a person’s back yard.  Legalize it and the criminal profits disappear.  After all there isn’t a tomato based criminal empire.

From The Guardian UK:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/apr/09/america-prescription-drug-addiction

The growing taste for prescription opioids in the US is a concern. What is it about our way of life that necessitates such relief?

Victoria Bekiempis
guardian.co.uk, Monday 9 April 2012

We Americans really like to pop pills. The Associated Press has just reported that we’re increasingly strung out on prescription opioids, with sales ballooning from 2000 to 2010. In some parts of the US, receipts for oxycodone-based products – such as OxyContin, Percoset, and Percodan – surged sixteenfold; hydrocodone-based products such as Vicodin continue to gain solid ground in Appalachia and Middle America.

Indeed, insatiable demand for “hillbilly heroin” – sometimes doled out by doctors who want to legitimately treat pain, sometimes by physicians who want simply to shut up their patients – has prompted pharmacy robberies, and much worse. In fact, so many people have died from medication overdoses of late that they come to exceed car crashes as the US’s top cause of accidental death – a first since the government started tabulating such data in 1979, according to the LA Times. This equates to “more deaths than heroin and cocaine combined”.

Meanwhile, scripts for benzodiazepines – the class of anti-anxiety drugs including Xanax, Valium, Ativan, and Klonopin – have gone up 17% since 2006 to 94m annually, New York magazine notes. Generic Xanax, which goes by the name alprazolam, has become 23% more popular in that same timeframe “making it the most prescribed psycho-pharmaceutical drug and the 11th-most prescribed overall, with 46m prescriptions written in 2010”.

Let’s also not forget that one in four American women is on psychiatric medication. That’s right – 25% of US women undergo chemical treatment for depression, anxiety, ADHD or another mental disorder. While it’s clear that the US has a thing for drugs – which seems both dangerous and disconcerting – what is not immediately clear is why this is the case.

In the New York magazine article Listening to Xanax, author Lisa Miller ponders whether the demands of modern American life necessitate routine benzo use, quoting one expert as saying they “stop a gap that evolution has yet to fill. As humans try to control an exponentially growing number of inputs with which they are confronted, ‘our attention becomes less flexible, our minds become more chattering, and the next thing we know, we’re frantic’. Humans are ill-equipped to process or accommodate all these new signals.” The result? Perhaps “people need a bridge – a pill – between what life doles out and what people can realistically handle”.

Continue reading at:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/apr/09/america-prescription-drug-addiction