General Electric announced that it will invest $1.2 billion in Indonesia to expand its business operations outside the island of Java. GE said the investment will go toward developing energy, infrastructure, health and transport on the island of Kalimantan.
In HBR and elsewhere, a number of authors have wrung their hands about the public legitimacy of business. To steal from Churchill's definition of democracy, business has become the least popular American institution, except for all the others.
We can best see where influence really lies with President Obama's new council on jobs and competitiveness. Its responsibility is the public imperative of our time, to promote employment in the aftermath of the Great Recession. How does this Democratic president expect the council to do this? By "investing in American businesses to encourage hiring, to educate and train our workers to compete globally."
[ :LINK: The Coming Age of Corporate Paternalism ]
Eric Schadt
Douglas Adesko
Published in our April issue, on sale soon
There may be another scientist in the world as smart as Eric Schadt. After all, scientists are a pretty smart lot, even though you'd be surprised at how few want to change the world, and how many of them have the trudging souls of brilliant, dutiful clerks. There may even be another scientist in the world as popular, as in demand as Eric Schadt, even though Eric works hard at everything he does, including his popularity, and is engaged, at any given time, in at least ten collaborations with other top scientists, not to mention the production — just last year — of a profligate thirty-five scientific papers, not to mention the delivery, year in and year out, of about forty talks and presentations after receiving invitations to deliver two or three hundred. (You'd also be surprised by how social a lot of scientists are, and how many parties they go to.) But if you're looking for a scientist whose great popularity rests in tirelessly writing papers and delivering speeches whose implicit and sometimes explicit message to the most eminent minds in his field is that they're wrong, that they've failed, and that the best way for them to stop wasting their lives is to follow him in a scientific revolution that he admits might not even work: Well, then you'd probably have to narrow your search a little bit. It takes a pretty smart guy to tell the smartest people in the world that all their success, all their hard-won knowledge has led them to a dead end ... that the approach they've taken has been a little, um, simplistic. It takes Eric Schadt to say that — and then to make the damned sale.
Gil Robbins, a singer, guitarist and songwriter with the folk group the Highwaymen and a fixture on the folk-music scene, died on Tuesday at his home in Esteban Cantú, Mexico. He was 80.
BEIJING — The police detained dozens of members of an underground Protestant church on Sunday morning, after the congregation tried to pray in a public plaza in the north of the capital.
A parishioner was ordered into a van by a plainclothes police officer in Beijing on Sunday.
The police corralled scores of parishioners into buses and blocked church leaders from leaving their homes. Among those detained was a photographer from The New York Times, who was later released.
Last week the church, Shouwang, was evicted from the space it had been renting after the government pressured the landlord not to renew the lease. The congregation, one of the largest so-called house churches in China, has been seeking legal recognition from the authorities since 2006 without success.
When a leader prays
"As I travel across the country folks often ask me what is it that I pray for. And like most of you, my prayers sometimes are general: Lord, give me the strength to meet the challenges of my office. Sometimes they're specific: Lord, give me patience as I watch Malia go to her first dance where there will be boys. Lord, have that skirt get longer as she travels to that dance.
But while I petition God for a whole range of things, there are a few common themes that do recur. The first category of prayer comes out of the urgency of the Old Testament prophets and the Gospel itself. I pray for my ability to help those who are struggling. Christian tradition teaches that one day the world will be turned right side up and everything will return as it should be. But until that day, we're called to work on behalf of a God that chose justice and mercy and compassion to the most vulnerable."
Barack Obama
Prayer Breakfast speech
Our true and full self
"What we hunger for perhaps more than anything else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we also fear more than anything else. It is important to tell at least from time to time the secret of who we truly and fully are . . . because otherwise we run the risk of losing track of who we truly and fully are and little by little come to accept instead the highly edited version which we put forth in hope that the world will find it more acceptable than the real thing."
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Daniel Ellsberg, Kevin Zeese, Margaret Flowers, David Swanson, Medea Benjamin, Mike Malloy and over a hundred others were arrested in front of the White House today to protest President Obama’s torture of Bradley Manning.
Picture: twolf1/Firedoglake
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Rep. Peter King is holding misguided hearings that scapegoat American Muslims in the name of national security.
What Rep. King is doing will make us less safe, by focusing on people, not threats; by alienating communities that the FBI and local police say are one part of any smart counter terrorism strategy; and by playing into the propaganda of Al Qaeda that America is indeed at war with Islam.
This needs to stop. Fight fear. Stand united.
Ask our Members of Congress to ensure that our national security experts are heard, and that we uphold American values.
[LINK: Ask our Members of Congress to ensure... ]
[LINK: In depth article Representative King’s hearing on “Muslim Radicalization” misguided and counterproductive
Here's the list of 17 small business tax cuts that President Obama has signed into law --
From the Recovery Act, HIRE Acts, and Affordable Care Act:
1. A New Small Business Health Care Tax Credit
2. A New Tax Credit for Hiring Unemployed Workers
3. Bonus Depreciation Tax Incentives to Support New Investment
4. 75% Exclusion of Small Business Capital Gains
5. Expansion of Limits on Small Business Expensing
6. Five-Year Carryback of Net Operating Losses
7. Reduction of the Built-In Gains Holding Period for Small Businesses from 10 to 7 Years to Allow Small Business Greater Flexibility in Their Investments
8. Temporary Small Business Estimated Tax Payment Relief to Allow Small Businesses to Keep Needed Cash on Hand
From the Small Business Jobs Act:
9. Zero Capital Gains Taxes on Key Investments in Small Businesses
10. The Highest Small Business Expensing Limit Ever– Up to $500,000
11. An Extension of 50% Bonus Depreciation
12. A New Deduction for Health Care Expenses for the Self-Employed
13. Tax Relief and Simplification for Cell Phone Deductions
14. An Increase in The Deduction for Entrepreneurs’ Start-Up Expenses
15. A Five-Year Carryback Of General Business Credits
16. Limitations on Penalties for Errors in Tax Reporting That Disproportionately Affect Small Business
And from the Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization and Job Creation Act:
17. 100 Percent Expensing
Prateedah the elephant plays the drum.Imagine building a xylophone for a 6,000-pound mammal. Columbia University neuroscientist slash experimental musicianDavid Soldier (aka David Sulzer) teamed up with elephant expert Richard Lair, and did just that. At the Thai Elephant Conservation Center (TECC), in Lampang, Thailand, the two men taught elephants to play oversized xylophones, drums, chimes, and even harmonicas. An American expat, Lair had worked with Ruby, an elephant that had famously learned how to paint pictures. He already knew that elephants loved music. After meeting Soldier, he asked him to join the Thai Elephant Orchestra project, an endeavor that, beyond science and art, was intended to draw attention to the elephants' plight.
[LINK: An Orchestra of Elephants ]
Bonus LINK: Thung Kwian Sunrise < The elephants improvise the music themselves.
First, it was South Dakota. Then Nebraska and Iowa. The similarly worded bills, which have quietly cropped up recently in state legislatures, share a common purpose: To expand justifiable homicide statutes to cover killings committed in the defense of an unborn child. Critics of the bills, including law enforcement officials, warn that these measures could invite violence against abortion providers and possibly provide legal cover to the perpetrators of such crimes.
That these measures have emerged simultaneously in a handful of states is no coincidence. It's part of a campaign orchestrated by a Washington-based anti-abortion group, which has lobbied state lawmakers to introduce legislation that it calls the "Pregnant Woman's Protection Act" [PDF]. Over the past two years, the group, Americans United for Life, has succeeded in passing versions of this bill in Missouri and Oklahoma. But there's a big difference between those bills and the measures floated recently in South Dakota, Nebraska, and Iowa.
The decentralized protest group "Anonymous" has a new target: no, it's not a middle eastern dictator, a major bank or even a bit player in the military-industrial complex.
It's none other than tea party financiers Charles and David Koch, who were being targeted, an open letter stated, for their attempts "to usurp American Democracy."
"Koch Industries, and oligarchs like them, have most recently started to manipulate the political agenda in Wisconsin," an announcement posted to anonnews.org declared.
[LINK: The Raw Story ]
Does the name Mark Williams ring a bell for you? He's the former Tea Party Express chairman who was ousted from the group last summer for publishing an unbelievably vile NAACP parody in the form of an "open letter" from Abraham Lincoln to the "coloreds," who wanted to "buy flat-screen TVs" with white people's money. (Happy President's Day!) Three weeks later, Williams was back in business at the helm of a new Tea Party group, the Citizens for Constitutional Liberty.
Now that you know what a class act this guy is, it will surely come as little surprise that this is the same Mark Williams who wrote a blog post over the weekend entreating his fellow Tea Partiers to infiltrate the union workers who are protesting in Wisconsin and elsewhere this week, with the goal of getting himself on TV so he can say embarrassing things to tarnish the movement.
In his own words:
Here is what I am doing in Sacramento, where they are holding a 5:30 PM event this coming Tuesday: (1) I signed up as an organizer (2) with any luck they will contact me and I will have an “in” (3) in or not I will be there and am asking as many other people as can get there to come with, all of us in SEIU shirts (those who don’t have them we can possibly buy some from vendors likely to be there) (4) we are going to target the many TV cameras and reporters looking for comments from the members there (5) we will approach the cameras to make good pictures… signs under our shirts that say things like “screw the taxpayer!” and “you OWE me!” to be pulled out for the camera (timing is important because the signs will be taken away from us) (6) we will echo those slogans in angry sounding tones to the cameras and the reporters. (7) if I do get the ‘in’ I am going to do my darnedest to get podium access and take the mic to do that rant from there…with any luck and if I can manage the moments to build up to it, I can probably get a cheer out of the crowd for something extreme.
Sacramento organizers, beware!
In fact, organizers all over the country, beware. Williams says he's been "flooded" with requests from Tea Partiers who want to participate in his ruse at protests in Iowa, Massachusetts, Colorado, and elsewhere. As he writes, "Chances are that because I am publishing this they’ll catch wind, but it is worth the chance if you take it upon yourself to act."
[LINK: AlterNet / By Lauren Kelley ]
Thank you 
