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In Iraq, a human life is worth $2,500; in Manhattan, $1.8 million
2007-05-20, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2007/05/20/...

What is the value of a human life? This came to mind recently, thanks to U.S. Marines, who, in early March, went on a killing rampage near Jalalabad in Afghanistan. A platoon of elite Marine Special Operations troops was ambushed by a suicide bomber in a minivan and one was wounded. Initially, it was reported that as many as 10 Afghans were killed and 34 wounded as the platoon fled the site. Later, it was admitted that the Marines had wielded "excessive force" after the ambush had ended. The Marines were reported to have murdered "12 people -- including a 4-year-old girl, a 1-year-old boy and three elderly villagers.'' According to a report by Carlotta Gall of the New York Times, a "16-year-old newly married girl was cut down while she was carrying a bundle of grass to her family's farmhouse." After much protest in Afghanistan, Col. John Nicholson met with the families of the Afghans who had been killed and wounded by the Marines. He offered this official apology: "I stand before you today, deeply, deeply ashamed and terribly sorry that Americans have killed and wounded innocent Afghan people." And then he paid about $2,000 per death to family members. The military calls these "condolence payments." We also know something about how the U.S. government evaluated the worth of the lives of slaughtered American innocents after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The family or spouse of a loved one murdered that day was also given a monetary value -- $1.8 million. The U.S. government has indeed offered the world an evaluation of what price slaughter should exact in the deaths of innocents: The value of a civilian slaughtered ... on Sept. 11: $1.8 million. The value of a civilian slaughtered by U.S. Marines near Jalalabad, Afghanistan: $2,000.

Note: For more astonishing information on how the military mishandles your tax dollars, click here.

Exxon pay limits rejected
2006-06-01, Baltimore Sun
http://www.baltimoresun.com/business/bal-bz.exxon01jun01,0,1510751.story

Shareholders of Exxon Mobil Corp., whose departing chief executive got a $357 million retirement package, overwhelmingly rejected resolutions to rein in compensation at the company's annual meeting yesterday. Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Rex W. Tillerson said predecessor Lee Raymond deserved a $357 million retirement package that he received in January because he delivered record profits.

Note: So price gouging at the gas pumps brings record oil profits and one of the CEO's responsible gets hundreds of millions of dollars as a retirement gift. What kind of message does that send? Why didn't other major newspapers pick up this little "detail."

Third World Scenes
2005-09-05, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/04/AR20050904009...

Mullen has a schoolteacher's kindly demeanor, so it was jarring to hear him say he suspected that the levee breaks had somehow been engineered to keep the wealthy French Quarter and Garden District dry at the expense of poor black neighborhoods...a suspicion I heard from many other black survivors. And it was surprising to hear Mullen's gentle voice turn bitter as he described the scene at the convention center, when helicopters bringing food didn't even land and the soldiers "just pushed the food out like we were in the Third World." I literally stumbled into the Rev. Jesse Jackson. He looked genuinely shaken, [saying] "this looks like the hold of a slave ship."

The Rise of the Super-Rich
2006-07-19, New York Times
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/07/19/opinion/19talkingpoints.html

Income inequality used to be about rich versus poor, but now it's increasingly a matter of the ultra rich and everyone else. New figures show that from 2003 to 2004, the latest year for which there is data, the richest Americans pulled far ahead of everyone else. In the space of that one year, real average income for the top 1 percent of households...grew by nearly 17 percent. For the remaining 99 percent, the average gain was less than 3 percent, and that probably makes things look better than they really are, since other data...indicate that the average is bolstered by large gains among the top 20 percent of households. The top 1 percent of households enjoyed 36 percent of all income gains in 2004, on top of an already stunning 30 percent in 2003. A recent study done for the Business Roundtable(pdf)...shows that median executive pay at 350 large public companies was $6.8 million in 2005. According to the Wall Street Journal, that's 179 times the pay of the average American worker. The study's calculation of executive pay is widely criticized as an understatement. In 2003, the latest year for which figures are available, the top 1 percent of households owned 57.5 percent of corporate wealth. The top 10 percent of households had 46 percent of the nation's income. The top 1 percent of households had 19.5 percent. [For] the bottom 60 percent, average income grew by [a total of] less than 20 percent from 1979 to 2004, with virtually all of those gains occurring from the mid- to late 1990's. Before and since, real incomes for that group have basically flatlined.

Note: For a related New York Times article on how the current administration is planning to eliminate the jobs of nearly half of the lawyers at the Internal Revenue Service who audit tax returns of some of the wealthiest Americans, click here.

Who says America can't make anything?
2007-10-21, McClatchy News
http://www.ohio.com/editorial/commentary/10624967.html

When it comes to producing billionaires, America is doing great. Until 2005, multimillionaires could still make the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans. In 2006, the Forbes 400 went billionaires only. This year, you'd need a Forbes 482 to fit all the billionaires. A billion dollars is a lot of dough. Queen Elizabeth II, British monarch for five decades, would have to add $400 million to her $600 million fortune to reach $1 billion. And she'd need another $300 million to reach the Forbes 400 minimum of $1.3 billion. The average Forbes 400 member has $3.8 billion. When the Forbes 400 began in 1982, it was dominated by oil and manufacturing fortunes. Today, says Forbes, "Wall Street is king." Nearly half the 45 new members, says Forbes, "made their fortunes in hedge funds and private equity. Money manager John Paulson joins the list after pocketing more than $1 billion short-selling subprime credit this summer." The 25th anniversary of the Forbes 400 isn't party time for America. We have a record 482 billionaires — and record foreclosures. We have a record 482 billionaires — and a record 47 million people without any health insurance. Since 2000, we have added 184 billionaires — and 5 million more people living below the poverty line. The official poverty threshold for one person was a ridiculously low $10,294 in 2006. That won't get you two pounds of caviar ($9,800) and 25 cigars ($730) on the Forbes Cost of Living Extremely Well Index. The $20,614 family-of-four poverty threshold is lower than the cost of three months of home flower arrangements ($24,525). Wealth is being redistributed from poorer to richer. Between 1983 and 2004, the average wealth of the top 1 percent of households grew by 78 percent, reports Edward Wolff, professor of economics at New York University. The bottom 40 percent lost 59 percent. Inequality has roared back to 1920s levels. It was bad for our nation then. It's bad for our nation now.

Note: For further reports on worsening income inequality, click here.

Millions for Millions
2006-10-20, The New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/061030fa_fact1

This year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner and some high-tech entrepreneurs are competing to provide credit to the world’s poor. In November, 2004, [eBay founder Pierre Omidyar,] Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the co-founders of Google, and other leaders of the high-tech community gathered at the San Francisco home of the venture capitalist John Doerr for a weekend session with Muhammad Yunus, who is considered the godfather of microcredit. Yunus...is a highly gifted interlocutor between the extremely poor in the developing world and the West. This December, he will go to Oslo to receive [the Nobel Peace Prize]. During the famine of 1974 in Bangladesh...Yunus, an economics professor at Chittagong University, found the theories he was teaching maddeningly irrelevant; so he went into a neighboring village and began talking to the poor. He lent twenty-seven dollars to a group of forty-two villagers. Before long he became convinced that he had a remedy for their condition: providing very small individual loans to the impoverished to start activities ranging from making bamboo stools to buying a dairy cow. In 1976, after local banks refused his entreaties to make the loans...he founded the Grameen Bank. In early May, representatives from eight microfinance institutions around the world were invited to a three-day event at the Gates Foundation’s headquarters, in Seattle. At one point, the group met with Melinda and Bill Gates, and with Warren Buffett, too.

Note: If you want to be inspired by the amazing microfinance movement, which is transforming the face of poverty in our world, read this highly engaging, informative article. To be a part of this exciting global transformation, see http://www.WantToKnow.info/051023microcredit

Forbes reports billionaire boom
2006-03-10, BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4791848.stm

A worldwide economic boom has yielded a record number of dollar billionaires in the past year, according to Forbes. Their number rose by 15%. Microsoft's Bill Gates tops the list for the 12th year running, with a net worth of $50bn (£29bn). The combined net worth of the 793 is $2.6 trillion and US billionaires account for just under half the amount. The figures were conservative estimates for different reasons. While New York has the highest number of resident billionaires with 40, Moscow is second with 25, and London comes third with 23. Steve Forbes, Forbes' chief executive and editor-in-chief, attributed the global rise in the number of billionaires to an economic boom.

Note: Yet a recent New York Times article shows that the income of 90% of citizens is basically stagnant or even decreasing. See http://www.WantToKnow.info/060306newsarticles#1

The true story of how multinational drug companies took liberties with African lives
2005-09-26, The Independent (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers)
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/article315125.ece

The pharmaceutical industry is bracing itself for criticism when the film 'The Constant Gardener' opens next month. Away from the Hollywood script is a true story of how multinational drug companies took liberties with African lives with devastating consequences. Directed by Fernando Meirelles, of City of God fame, it is a thriller, a love story and a blistering attack on the drugs industry and the way it carelessly expends the lives of innocent citizens in the Third World in the quest for billion-dollar medicines to sell to the first world. After the credits roll, a note from John Le Carré appears on screen that reads: "As my journey through the pharmaceutical jungle progressed, I came to realise that, by comparison with the reality, my story was as tame as a holiday postcard." The film features two brutal killings, a savage beating, a campaign of harassment, intimidation and threats. The crimes of the pharmaceutical industry - from the price protection of Aids drugs which have denied life-saving medicines to millions, to the cover up of lethal side effects to protect profits - are well documented. The companies are not obliged to disclose a lot of information about how they test or make their drugs. There's big, big money involved. Editors of medical journals including The Lancet and The Journal of the American Medical Association had come under pressure not to publish data or to change it. The bigger scandal...lies in the rapacious pricing of the pharmaceutical industry that puts lifesaving drugs out of reach of individuals, hospitals and even nations.

Powered by the sun's rays
2006-08-22, Sacramento Bee (leading newspaper of the capital city of California)
http://www.sacbee.com/content/news/story/14304274p-15182191c.html

Sacramento's Solar Cookers International, will take the global stage Friday in Florence, Italy. The nongovernmental organization, which is dedicated to saving the world with solar power, will receive an award from the World Renewable Energy Congress. The secret of the group's success is the "CooKit," a 3-by-4-foot piece of cardboard lined with aluminum foil that harnesses the sun's rays to cook food and pasteurize water. About 90,000 "CooKits" are heating up in Africa, where they are being manufactured and sold for $8 or $9. The group has helped introduce 500,000 solar cookers to 25 nations where people spend half their $1-a-day wages to buy firewood to cook their meals, said Bob Metcalf, a microbiologist who co-founded the group in 1987. Solar cookers allow them to spend that money on food instead of firewood, said Metcalf, who teaches at California State University, Sacramento. Metcalf says he hopes the award will get him 30 minutes with Bill Gates or some other investor to spread the gospel of the CooKit, which could be used by "2.5 billion people today" who rely on wood, charcoal or animal dung to cook meals. Metcalf also invented the Water Pasteurization Indicator -- a reusable sealed test tube with wax that melts when food or water has been pasteurized at 149 degrees Fahrenheit. "It takes about 90 minutes in the sun," he said. For more information, go to www.solarcookers.org.

Note: For how to easily help several families a year pull out of poverty in third world countries, see http://www.WantToKnow.info/051023microcredit

Rich countries 'blocking cheap drugs for developing world'
2006-11-14, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/medicine/story/0,,1946998,00.html

Poor people are needlessly dying because drug companies and the governments of rich countries are blocking the developing world from obtaining affordable medicines. Five years to the day after the Doha declaration - a groundbreaking deal to give poor countries access to cheap drugs - was signed at the World Trade Organisation, Oxfam says things are worse. The charity accuses the US, which champions the interests of its giant pharmaceutical companies, of bullying developing countries into not using the measures in the Doha declaration and the EU of standing by and doing nothing. Doha technically allows poor countries to buy cheap copies of desperately needed drugs, but the US is accused of trying to prevent countries such as Thailand and India, which have manufacturing capacity, [from] making and selling cheap generic versions so as to preserve the monopolies of the drug giants. "Rich countries have broken the spirit of the Doha declaration," said Celine Charveriat, head of Oxfam's Make Trade Fair campaign. "The declaration said the right things but needed political action to work and that hasn't happened. In fact, we've actually gone backwards. Many people are dying or suffering needlessly." The US has pursued its own free trade agreements with developing countries, tying them into much tighter observance of patent rights than anticipated at Doha. "The USA has also pressured countries for greater patent protection through threats of trade sanctions," the report says.

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