As the campaigns of President Obama and Mitt Romney trade attacks while claiming each is a friend to workers, a secretive trade deal of the type backed by both campaigns is emerging in international talks. Romney claims he is representing “job creators” whose dealings will benefit society as a whole while Obama claims that his…

ANNE PETERMANN, anne at globaljusticeecology.org Petermann is executive director of the Global Justice Ecology Project and coordinator of the STOP Genetically Engineered Trees Campaign. She said today: “The first six months of 2012 were the hottest ever recorded. Thousands of weather records were broken — with nearly 4,000 in June alone. “These impacts have long…

STEPHANY GRIFFITH JONES, sgj2108 at columbia.edu, Stephany Griffith Jones is Financial Markets Program Director at the Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia University. With José Antonio Ocampo and Joseph E. Stiglitz she co-edited Time for a Visible Hand: Lessons from the 2008 World Financial Crisis. She was recently featured on the IPA news release “Barclays…

MIKE ELK, mike at inthesetimes.com, @mikeelk A reporter for In These Times magazine, Elk recently wrote the piece, “Is Union Busting to Blame for Power Outages in D.C.?,” which states: “International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 1900 members claim the failure to restore power outages is due to chronic understaffing and Pepco’s shift from…

NOEL ORTEGA, noel at ips-dc.org Coordinator of the New Economy Working Group, Ortega is a contributor to the report “JOBS: A Main Street Fix for Wall Street’s Failure,” which states: “The current U.S. jobs debate is largely limited to arguing the relative merits of stimulating the economy by increasing government spending or by granting more…

While some media outlets are claiming that Institutional Revolutionary Party candidate Enrique Peña Nieto has been confirmed the winner of the Mexican election, experts on the ground note that this betrays a lack of appreciation for the rules in Mexican elections. For example, a Reuters headline reads “Final Mexican Results Confirming Pena Nieto Win” and…

Bloomberg BusinessWeek is reporting: “The Fukushima nuclear disaster was the result of ‘man-made’ failures before and after last year’s earthquake, according to a report from an independent parliamentary investigation.” ARNIE GUNDERSEN, arnie at fairewinds.org Gundersen is a former nuclear industry insider and now an independent consultant, chief engineer with Fairewinds Consulting. He said today: “I…

NEIL deMAUSE, neil at demause.net, @neildemause Neil deMause is a Brooklyn-based journalist who has written extensively about climate change coverage for FAIR’s magazine Extra! — including the article “The Fires This Time: In coverage of extreme weather, media downplay climate change.” He said today: “Despite overwhelming evidence that climate change is causing dramatic changes in…

STEPHANY GRIFFITH JONES, sgj2108 at columbia.edu Stephany Griffith Jones is Financial Markets Program Director at the Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia University. With José Antonio Ocampo, and Joseph E. Stiglitz she co-edited Time for a Visible Hand: Lessons from the 2008 World Financial Crisis. Available for a limited number of interviews, she said today:…

JOHN MILL ACKERMAN, johnmill.ackerman at gmail.com Professor at the Institute for Legal Research at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Ackerman said today: “Mexico apparently has decided to turn back the clock. Widespread frustration with twelve years of uneven political progress and stunted economic growth under the right-wing PAN [Party of National Action], has led…