Researcher: Rachel Dzuck, St. Cloud State University Faculty Evaluator: Julie Andrzejewski The IDB (Inter-American Development Bank) is celebrating its 51st anniversary this month and governors are expecting a big birthday present – millions of dollars into their hands in recognition of their solutions to the global economic crisis in many regions of Latin America including, [...]
California’s most powerful business interests have positioned themselves to pull off the most brazen water heist in American history, seizing control over much of Northern California’s water supplies and turn water into a private asset. Westlands Water District is trying to control the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta by selling the public on an aqueduct system called the [...]
Some of the largest and most respected environmental organizations not only have substantially weakened their advocacy for the environment, but have in some cases have actually opposed policies which must be enacted to prevent runaway global warming because of partnerships and financial support from the very corporations causing the worst damage to the planet. The [...]
John Moores University located in Liverpool, England will be using fifty college students as human guinea pigs to test the adverse effects of the popular drug Mephedrone. Mephedrone can be snorted or dabbed on the tongue and its users experience a high much like the one experienced with cocaine, or ecstasy. The public health department at JMU won “ethical approval” [...]
The largest U.S subsidies to fossil fuels are attributed to tax breaks that aid foreign oil production, according to research done by the Environmental Law Institute in partnership with the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. The study, which reviewed fossil fuel and energy subsidies for Fiscal Years 2002-2008, reveals that the lion’s share of energy [...]
The CIA is offering operatives a chance to peddle their expertise to private companies on the side — a policy that gives financial firms and hedge funds access to the nation’s top-level intelligence talent. In one case, these active-duty officers moonlighted at a hedge-fund consulting firm that wanted to tap their expertise in “deception detection,” the highly [...]
Defense agreed to pay the megacontractor KBR $5 million a year to repair tactical vehicles, from Humvees to big rigs, at Joint Base Balad a large airfield and supply center north of Baghdad. Yet according to a new Pentagon report, what the military got was as many as 144 civilian mechanics, each doing as little as 43 minutes of work a month, [...]
Over Twenty African countries are selling or leasing land for intensive agriculture in what may be the greatest change of ownership since the colonial era. Ethiopia is one of the hungriest countries in the world with more than 13-million people needing food aid, but paradoxically the government is offering at least 7.5 million acres of its most [...]
President Barack Obama signed Executive Order 13528 on January 11. The Executive Order (EO) established a Council of Governors chosen by the President that will rubber-stamp long-sought-after Pentagon contingency plans to seize control of state National Guard forces in the event of a “national emergency.” The ten member, bipartisan Council was created “to strengthen further the partnership [...]
AIG’s bailout permitted the company’s use of $25 billion in government money to buy back toxic securities from Wall Street’s big banks. AIG was the world’s top player in the trade of credit default swaps - exotic instruments blamed for fueling the cascade of financial disasters in 2007 and 2008. The company ultimately received four separate federal bailouts [...]
