­por David Bacon

A strike of over 500 workers in one of the largest foundries on the west coast brought production to a halt at Pacific Steel Castings. (PHOTO BY DAVID BACON)

Berkeley, California – Astrike of over 450 workers inone of the largest foundries on the west coast brought production to a halt Sunday night, at Pacific Steel Castings. The work stoppage, which began at midnight, has continued with round the clock picketing at the factory gates in west Berkeley.

Local 164B of the Glass, Molders, Pottery, Plastics and Allied Workers International Union (GMP) has been negotiating a new labor agreement at Pacific Steel for several months. The old agreement expired on Sunday night. The strike was caused by demands from the company’s owners for concessions and takeaway proposals in contract negotiations.

Those include:

– requiring workers to pay at least 20 percent of the cost of their medical insurance, amounting to about $300 per month per employee.

– a wage freeze for the first two years of the agreement, and tiny raises after that.

– eliminating the ability of workers to use their seniority to bid for overtime, allowing criteria including speedup, discrimination and favoritism. “All eight other foundries in the Bay Area have agreed to a fair contract,” said Ignacio De La Fuente, GMP international vicepresident.

“Workers at Pacific Steel haven’t had a raise in the last two years, in  order to help the company pay for increases in health plan costs. Pacifi c Steel is now alone among the rest in trying to make its workers give back $300 a month.”

The $300/month would mean an approximately 10 percent cut in wages for most workers at the foundry. Joel Soto, a member of the union’s negotiating committee, has worked eight years at Pacifi c Steel, and has a wife, 2-year-old child and another on the way. Soto said, “We’ve been trying to save money for a house. If we have to give up $300 a month, we’ll have to continue renting. My wife and I both support our parents, and that $300 cut is what we’re able to give them now that they’re old. And with my wife pregnant, we can’t do without that medical care.”

Benito Navarro has ten years at the foundry, and a wife and son. “That $300 is what I pay for my car to get to work. I’m the only one in my family working, so if we don’t have that money, I’ll have to give up the car. But I’d rather eat than drive.”

On both Monday and Tuesday dozens of Berkeley police, with helmets and face shields, shoved and hit strikers as they attempted to help the company bring trucks full of castings out of its struck facility. On Tuesday, one striker, Norma Garcia, who is seven months pregnant, was struck in the abdomen and taken to a hospital.

“It is inexcusable that Berkeley is spending precious municipal resources on providing protection for this business, and opening the city to liability through these unprovoked actions by police against strikers,” said De La Fuente.

“That violence isn’t necessary,” added Soto. “We’re just struggling for our rights. I wouldn’t be so surprised to see this in other cities, but Berkeley?” Another worker showed the swelling on his arm he said was caused by a blow from a police baton.

Workers feel additionally betrayed by the company because they and their union testifi ed before the Berkeley City Council three years ago. They urged the city to draft environmental regulations that would allow the foundry to continue operating while installing needed pollution control equipment.

Pacific Steel Casting Co. is a privately held corporation, the third-largest steel foundry in the United States. Its large corporate customers include vehicle manufacturers, like Petebilt Corp., and big oil companies, including BARCO. ­The company has been very productive in recent years, despite the recession. It chose not to comment.

by Mike Adams Natural News

I’ve seen a lot of lousy, inaccurate reporting from the mainstream media over the years, but some of the reporting we’re seeing now on the Fukushima catastrophe is just astonishing in its ignorance of basic physics. Today, the Boston Globe published a story containing this whopper: Nuclear safety spokesman Hidehiko Nishiyama says the air above the leak contains 1,000 millisiverts of radioactivity.

For starters, even the unit is spelled incorrectly. It’s not “millisiverts” but rather “millisieverts.” But that’s a small issue compared to the bigger one.

Millisieverts describe a measured dose of received radiation. Exposure to millisieverts only makes sense in the context of this nuclear catastrophe when it is measured over time. In other words, it makes no sense to say “the air has 500 millisieverts of radiation.”

That’s a complete nonsense sentence. The correct statement is that a person standing in that area would be exposed to “500 millisieverts of radiation PER HOUR.” Without the unit of time, the sentence makes no sense.

This writer of this article, it seems, must have flunked high school physics. Do they also describe the speed of their car as “55 miles?” Do they describe their gas mileage as “20 miles?” When they buy bulk foods at the grocery store, do they understand what it means to pay dollars per ounce? Or is that just too complicated for these people?

Millisieverts are emitted overtime

Furthermore, the air does not “contain” a fi xed quantity of millisieverts. The radioactive particles in the air are EMITTING radiation at a certain rate (millisieverts per unit of time). If the air only “contained” 1000 millisieverts, as explained by the Boston Globe, then once it emitted those 1000 millisieverts, there would be no more radiation, right?

But in reality, the radiation being emitted by the particles in the air can continue to emit that radiation for weeks, months, years or even millennia, depending on the half life of the radioactive isotopes contained in the air.

The half-life of iodine-131, for example, is much shorter than the half-life of cesium-137. The half life of cesium-137 is roughly thirty years, meaning that air contaminated with cesium-137 that’s releasing 1000 millisieverts of radiation per hour right now would still be emitting 500 millisieverts of radiation per hour 30 years from now. And then 250 millisieverts of radiation per hour 60 years from now.

The story was actually written by the Associated Press

Now, here’s something else may truly shock you: This story published by the Boston Globe wasn’t even written by the Boston Globe. It was written by the Associated Press (AP).

The AP, of course, is the centralized news agency that writes a lot of the news that all the other newspapers just copy and paste onto their own websites. You know how Google says it penalizes websites for copying and pasting identical content onto their own websites?

The mainstream media does it every single day, and they get no penalty from Google. In fact, the mainstream media is the largest “news copying” operation in existence today, and Google News strongly favors them by removing smaller, truly independent news sources from its index. And most of these mainstream media news sites just take news written by the AP and slap it onto their own sites, regardless of its accuracy.

ABC News gets it right

ABC News is one of the few mainstream media sources that actually got this story right. They said, “The air above the radioactive water in the pit is measuring 1,000 millisieverts of radiation per hour, according to Nishiyama.”

That is the correct description of it, showing that ABC News has writers who are a lot better educated about the laws of physics than the Associated Press writers (who would no doubt fl unk high school Physics).

So if the Associated Press doesn’t understand radiation, and they’re the news source feeding “canned news” to most of the mainstream media websites that are heavily favored by Google News, did you ever wonder why the masses are so misinformed? It’s obvious: Most of the mainstream news is canned, copied and wildly inaccurate, written by poorly educated people who don’t understand the laws of physics, or economics, or even cause and effect for that matter. So where can you get news that’s truly intelligent?

The answer, of course, is the alternative media. Sites like NaturalNews.com, InfoWars. com, Rense.com and many others. This is where you get real news from people who are, by the way, far more telligent than your typical AP ­writer. Not only do we understand radiation a lot better than these AP writers, we also understand how dangerous it can be. That’s why we’re all warning you to get prepared while you still can, just in case the media is lying to you about the true status of the Fukushima facility.

­by the El Reportero’s news services

Felipe Calderón

As we have argued before, most recently in January, we agree with President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa that Mexico is not a failed state. In an interview with Spain’s El País published on March 17 he argued, strongly, that the US was wrong to categorise Mexico as a failing state. Calderón pointed out that the economy is working normally in Mexico, children go to school and most parts of everyday life go on as usual.

After spreading southward, cocaine production enters Central America

The recent discovery of a cocaine-processing lab in Honduras — the first of its kind — points to a new twist in the trend towards the development of a production capacity in countries until recently seen only as transit routes for drugs on their way to markets in the US and Europe. This trend is already quite evident in several South American countries, as confirmed in recently released US and UN reports.

Too much of a good thing ?

Latin America’s economies have started 2011 unusually by producing pleasant surprises almost across the board. The most important surprise, probably, is that domestic demand in Mexico is picking up strongly. This means that the economy should have a much better 2011 than most economists had expected. It may also mean that the violence will diminish. There are already signs that the murder rate has stopped increasing and may even be falling.

Peru marred by protests ahead of election

On March 30, Keiko Fujimori, a former congresswoman and the daughter of former (and imprisoned) president Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000), was the fi rst presidential candidate to face serious protests. Political protests are making electoral waves in the regions.

If hard evidence of Keiko Fujimori’s countervote was needed, this was it. The protests in Iquitos, in the Amazonian department of Loreto, which borders Ecuador, were so large and violent that they had to be dispersed by tear gas.

Besides the overtly political protests in Loreto, there are environmental protests in southern Peru, which may swell support for the left-wing Ollanta Humala’s congressional candidates in Arequipa. Humala’s Gana Perú’s congressional candidates are part of a 3,000 strong protest, entering its eighth day, against an open cast copper project mine.

A new opinion poll on March 30 by a marketing company, IMA, put the former president Alejandro Toledo (2001-2006) back in front but had Humala consolidating his second place.

Humala is holding strong, with 21.9 percent to Toledo’s 23.9 percent, whilst Keiko Fujimori dipped, for the fi rst time in the past six weeks, to 17.6 percent. Toledo’s former fi nance minister, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, is snapping at Keiko’s heels, but remains in fourth place on 16.9 percent. The first round is on April 10. The top two go through to a run-off on June 5.

Mexican Organized Crime Among Largest armies in the world

Mexico, Mar 31 (Prensa Latina) Every year organized crime in Mexico gets USD $40 billion from the United States, the equivalent of senadora, Patty Murray, y cuando la funcionaria prometió resolver el problema. Hasta ahorita, la “resolución” ha sido entregarle una solicitud para que pida la ciudadanía, y avisarle que como es veterano de guerra, no le costará nada.

Para que las cosas fuera parejas, una de dos. O deportan a Leeland a su nativo Canadá, o regresan a Emily Samantha a Estados Unidos. O de tres. Podrían poner a Leeland en adopción, y Guatemala podría deportar a Emily Samantha de regreso a Estados Unidos. O de cuatro. Podrían arreglar la estúpida y absurda ley de inmigración que no sirve para nada, y ninguno de los dos absurdos anteriores volvería a repetirse. mexicodelnorte@yahoo.c­om.mx

by Charles Wallace

The era of free checking accounts is coming to an end. Many consumers will face an extra $144 a year in account fees, plus higher annual dues for their debit cars, and increased ATM charges may be on the way.

J.P. Morgan Chase (JPM), which has has 27 million checking accounts, has announced it will impose fees ranging from $10 to $12 per month on those accounts — though the fees can be avoided if you maintain a minimum daily balance of $1,500 or set up a direct deposit of $500 or more each month into your account.

“Honestly, we are looking at the pricing of all of our products and our revenue streams based on some of the changes that are going on right now,” says Christine Holevas, spokeswoman for Chase.

Meanwhile, Bank of America (BAC), which has 57 million consumer and small business customers, has started a pilot program to charge new customers in Arizona, Georgia and Massachusetts for checking accounts, says spokeswoman Anne Pace. The four account options on offer have fees ranging from $6 to $25 a month, but customers maintaining a minimum daily balance of $5,000 won’t have to pay the fees.

When the results of the test programs are clear, Pace says, the bank will decide whether it will impose the fees nationwide.

A push back against f i n a n c i a l r e f o r m s

Brian Foran, a banking analyst at Nomura Securities  International In NewYork, says the rising fees are part of an effort by the banks to recoup some of the income they lost from two recent regulatory changes.

Thanks to last year’s passage of the consumerprotecting Credit CARD Act, the Federal Reserve has changed the rules so that banks can no longer automatically charge overdraft fees on debit card purchases. Customers must actively opt into allowing their account to be overdrawn, or their charges will simply be rejected when their account balance is insufficient.

The larger portion of banks’ lost income comes from a reduction in the interchange fees paid on the use of debit cards. Merchants typically paid 2 percent of a transaction to the banks and credit card companies, but that has been reduced. Under new rules adopted under the Durbin Amendment — passed as part of last year’s fi nancial reform law — banks can only charge 12 cents per transaction, a decline of about 70 percent from what they previously earned. Foran says he estimates banks made $8.7 billion in interchange fees before the new regulations, but will now make only $1.4 billion, a loss of $7.3 billion in revenue.

“J.P. Morgan has a secondary motivation of trying to send a pretty clear message to Washington that if you regulate prices, we have to charge more somewhere else,” Foran says.

Looking for cover to recoup their lost billions

While big institutions like Chase and Bank of America are the fi rst movers in this trend, smaller banks are preparing to take similar steps. U.S. Bancorp (USB) said on its recent investor conference call that it will likely be forced to implement some kind of fee structure. “In general, the smaller banks are looking to the bigger banks to lead the way because that will give them air cover,” Foran says.

Nomura estimates big banks may make up as much as 40 percent of their lost revenues through checking account fees, $1 billion to $2 billion more via annual fees for debit cards, and $500 million to $1 billion by reducing   their rewards program benefits for debit transactions. “Every bank knows that Durbin killed free checking, and every bank knows they need to raise fees, but no bank is terribly excited about being the fi rst bank to raise fees because when you do, a bunch of customers are going to leave the bank and go to some other bank across the street,” Foran says.

Lower income customers will leave

In an investor’s day presentation last month, Chase estimated that 15 percent of its customers will no longer be able to qualify for free checking.

“Based on current attrition rates, we expect 50 percent to 60 percent of these customers to leave Chase within the next year,” the bank said.

The bank expects to lose many of the lower-income customers it acquired when J.P. Morgan took over Washington Mutual in September 2008 after it was seized by bank supervisors in the largest bank failure in U.S. financial history.

Under the new Chase pricing plan, most customers will be charged $12 a month for their accounts unless they meet the requirements for avoiding the fees. But former WaMu customers in California, Oregon and Washington state will only be charged $10 a month, Holevas says. In addition to its new checking account charges, ­Chase has also started a pilot program to boost the fees it charges non-customer for withdrawals from its ATM machines in Texas and Illinois. The fee will be $5 in Illinois and $4 in Texas, up from the current nationwide withdrawal fee of $3. TD Bank Financial Group (TD) and PNC Financial Services (PNC) are also raising their ATM fees.

“You never make tons of money on ATM fees to non-customers, but the idea is you really don’t care if you piss off someone else’s customer,” Foran says. “But it’s never going to come close to offsetting the lost revenue from the Durbin Amendment.”