(I do not know of anyone that can write this good and say things so right!...Read and think about it...Part 2 is also posted but I will wait till tomorrow)
Crusade of Surge and Siege: Part One of Three
By Manuel Valenzuela
Homeland Born and Bred
Sojourn into the outer recesses of a nation bordering on madness, into a land deeply disturbed and emotionally bewildered, a world of anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism, of fanaticism and fundamentalism, entering a case study into fantasyland and escapism, taking a pilgrimage into realms both of purposeful ignorance and blindness, , of electing lifelong incompetents based on wanting to have a beer with them, walking through the dark valley of indifference, climbing the monolithic mountain of hubris, finally reaching the hallowed halls of smoke and mirrors, a place where only the blind lead the blind and where the deafening roars of death and destruction are easily suppressed in delusion and denial. Journey, if you will, into a nation that lost its moral compass inside the dungeons of fear and hatred.
Enter what fascists call the Homeland, what patriots used to call the United States of America, now named, simply, and appropriately, Amerika, a place where corporations enjoy more rights and protections than the People, where corporations – through their products and policies – help kill hundreds of thousands of human beings every year in the name of profit over people, making them mass murderers on a scale reserved only for humanity’s worst; a land controlled by the military-energy-industrial complex, with war the engine for unimaginable profits; a nation now without a Constitution, nor a moral standing; a country that has developed a thirst for human blood and an appetite for destruction; a land of Manifest Destiny leaving death, suffering and destruction in its wake; a sadist entity that develops and refines its crimes against humanity it inflicts upon the people of the world by first practicing them on its own citizenry.
LINK TO CON>
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Huge meat recall prods further reforms
From fast-food chains to Congress, moves are afoot to reduce animal suffering and ensure food safety
By Brad Knickerbocker | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
Ashland, Ore. - This week's recall of 143 million pounds of beef represents the confluence of two important trends in US agriculture: the push for more humane treatment of farm animals, and efforts to prevent the spread of disease.
Under pressure from consumers and animal rights groups, major restaurant and grocery chains from Burger King to Wolfgang Puck to Safeway are requiring that eggs and meat come from producers that reduce animal suffering.
A new bill in the US House of Representatives would require the federal government to do the same for food it buys for schools, prisons, and the armed forces.
"Just as they set standards for fuel efficiency or hiring practices [in government contracts], they can set standards for animal welfare," says Michael Markarian, executive vice president of the Humane Society of the United States [HSUS], which provided the secret video of animal abuse that led to the beef recall.
LINK TO CON>
From fast-food chains to Congress, moves are afoot to reduce animal suffering and ensure food safety
By Brad Knickerbocker | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
Ashland, Ore. - This week's recall of 143 million pounds of beef represents the confluence of two important trends in US agriculture: the push for more humane treatment of farm animals, and efforts to prevent the spread of disease.
Under pressure from consumers and animal rights groups, major restaurant and grocery chains from Burger King to Wolfgang Puck to Safeway are requiring that eggs and meat come from producers that reduce animal suffering.
A new bill in the US House of Representatives would require the federal government to do the same for food it buys for schools, prisons, and the armed forces.
"Just as they set standards for fuel efficiency or hiring practices [in government contracts], they can set standards for animal welfare," says Michael Markarian, executive vice president of the Humane Society of the United States [HSUS], which provided the secret video of animal abuse that led to the beef recall.
LINK TO CON>
Monday, February 18, 2008
(Sorry people if you disagree with this article, but it has my feelings about this whole election perfectly. Yes I agree that Obama (or Clinton) is a better canidate then Bush....no question! But, what will really change? I do not know, but I dont think much. At least give it a read and make up your own mind!!)
Beggars Collide: Thus I Refute Critics
by Ben Tripp
If there was a nickel for every leftie I've pissed off with the expression of my views, I would not be rifling pay phones for change. This suits me fine, as do dimes and half-dollars. I didn't start writing in hope that everyone would agree with me all the time; anybody that did agree with me all the time would have to be some kind of crank. Back in 1992 when precious few people were making even the littlest peep against the slimes and arrows of outrageous fortunates, ninety-nine out of a hundred of my irate readers were right-wingers; now they're all liberals. I guess this is because, what with Obamarama and all that, folks on the Left think their day is finally coming. On that, we agree. I just happen to think it's a different day. Maybe (certainly) I'm just a big party pooper, but in the name of Old Uncle Tom Cobleigh and all, knock off acting like 'hope' is something that has energy and can perform work. It doesn't and it can't. It's just an emotion. We're talking about an abstract noun. Hope is just an affective meaning we apply to future events, of no more substance than amusement, irritation, or tridecaphobia: a feeling, an idea, nothing more. The first thing the Left in this country has to do is abandon hope. Then maybe we can get something done.
Here's a sample of a typical correspondence from an irritated reader whose hope my prick deflated:....
LINK TO CON
Beggars Collide: Thus I Refute Critics
by Ben Tripp
If there was a nickel for every leftie I've pissed off with the expression of my views, I would not be rifling pay phones for change. This suits me fine, as do dimes and half-dollars. I didn't start writing in hope that everyone would agree with me all the time; anybody that did agree with me all the time would have to be some kind of crank. Back in 1992 when precious few people were making even the littlest peep against the slimes and arrows of outrageous fortunates, ninety-nine out of a hundred of my irate readers were right-wingers; now they're all liberals. I guess this is because, what with Obamarama and all that, folks on the Left think their day is finally coming. On that, we agree. I just happen to think it's a different day. Maybe (certainly) I'm just a big party pooper, but in the name of Old Uncle Tom Cobleigh and all, knock off acting like 'hope' is something that has energy and can perform work. It doesn't and it can't. It's just an emotion. We're talking about an abstract noun. Hope is just an affective meaning we apply to future events, of no more substance than amusement, irritation, or tridecaphobia: a feeling, an idea, nothing more. The first thing the Left in this country has to do is abandon hope. Then maybe we can get something done.
Here's a sample of a typical correspondence from an irritated reader whose hope my prick deflated:....
LINK TO CON
(This is a really good article about reasons for the shooting, read the whole thing!)
Illinois Shooting: Society in a State of Decay
by max blunt
A Culture of Desperation
On Thursday afternoon, a mass shooting took place at Northern Illinois University (NIU), in DeKalb, a small city located about one hour’s drive west of Chicago. At the time of writing, six have died, including the killer, and another fifteen remain wounded, some in critical condition.
At about 3 p.m. a gunman, later identified as Steven Kazmierczak, age 27, emerged dressed in black from behind a projection screen on the stage of a small lecture hall and opened fire in a seemingly random manner, before shooting himself.
He carried a pump-action shotgun, which he had smuggled onto campus in a guitar case, as well as three handguns.
A Sick Society
The usual explanations will go only so far. We can expect the media to sift through the details of Kazmierczak’s life.....
LINK TO CON>
Illinois Shooting: Society in a State of Decay
by max blunt
A Culture of Desperation
On Thursday afternoon, a mass shooting took place at Northern Illinois University (NIU), in DeKalb, a small city located about one hour’s drive west of Chicago. At the time of writing, six have died, including the killer, and another fifteen remain wounded, some in critical condition.
At about 3 p.m. a gunman, later identified as Steven Kazmierczak, age 27, emerged dressed in black from behind a projection screen on the stage of a small lecture hall and opened fire in a seemingly random manner, before shooting himself.
He carried a pump-action shotgun, which he had smuggled onto campus in a guitar case, as well as three handguns.
A Sick Society
The usual explanations will go only so far. We can expect the media to sift through the details of Kazmierczak’s life.....
LINK TO CON>
The subsidy tease, part III
A solar grand plan
Posted by Joseph Romm
A recent issue of Scientific American featured a "Solar Grand Plan." Its authors described a way for the United States to obtain nearly 100 percent of its electricity and 90 percent of its total energy, including transportation, from solar, wind, biomass, and geothermal resources by end-of-century. Electricity would cost a comfortable 5 cents per kilowatt hour.
U.S. carbon emissions would be reduced 62 percent from their 2005 levels. Some 600 coal and gas-fired power plants would be displaced. The federal investment would be $400 billion over the next 40 years ($10 billion a year) to deploy renewable technologies and suitable transmission infrastructure.
If that future seems too good to be true, then look at two other studies during the past 13 months that have reached similar conclusions: one sponsored by the American Solar Energy Society (PDF), the other by the Nuclear Policy Research Institute and the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. All three concur that energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies can satisfy the nation's demand for power without additional nuclear or fossil-fueled power plants.
LINK TO CON>
A solar grand plan
Posted by Joseph Romm
A recent issue of Scientific American featured a "Solar Grand Plan." Its authors described a way for the United States to obtain nearly 100 percent of its electricity and 90 percent of its total energy, including transportation, from solar, wind, biomass, and geothermal resources by end-of-century. Electricity would cost a comfortable 5 cents per kilowatt hour.
U.S. carbon emissions would be reduced 62 percent from their 2005 levels. Some 600 coal and gas-fired power plants would be displaced. The federal investment would be $400 billion over the next 40 years ($10 billion a year) to deploy renewable technologies and suitable transmission infrastructure.
If that future seems too good to be true, then look at two other studies during the past 13 months that have reached similar conclusions: one sponsored by the American Solar Energy Society (PDF), the other by the Nuclear Policy Research Institute and the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. All three concur that energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies can satisfy the nation's demand for power without additional nuclear or fossil-fueled power plants.
LINK TO CON>
By Inviting Bush We Are Dishonouring Ourselves
Hamza Mustafa Njozi (2008-02-12)
“To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men” – Abraham Lincoln
It would seem to me that there are certain moral limits beyond which no one can cross without forfeiting one’s honour and human dignity. Our seemingly voluntary decision to invite and to entertain a hated war criminal for four days in our beautiful land will probably go down in history as marking the darkest moment in our political history so far. I recall, not without pride, that in 2003 as members of the University of Dar es Salaam Academic Assembly [UDASA], we prevented the then U.S. Ambassador to Tanzania from visiting the Mlimani main campus. The university’s long-standing intellectual tradition was too noble to be soiled by a representative of a war criminal who was, and still is, butchering innocent people in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is as it should be. Intellectuals should keep the beacon of freedom and justice burning even during the darkest night of unbridled tyranny.
LINK TO CON.
Hamza Mustafa Njozi (2008-02-12)
“To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men” – Abraham Lincoln
It would seem to me that there are certain moral limits beyond which no one can cross without forfeiting one’s honour and human dignity. Our seemingly voluntary decision to invite and to entertain a hated war criminal for four days in our beautiful land will probably go down in history as marking the darkest moment in our political history so far. I recall, not without pride, that in 2003 as members of the University of Dar es Salaam Academic Assembly [UDASA], we prevented the then U.S. Ambassador to Tanzania from visiting the Mlimani main campus. The university’s long-standing intellectual tradition was too noble to be soiled by a representative of a war criminal who was, and still is, butchering innocent people in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is as it should be. Intellectuals should keep the beacon of freedom and justice burning even during the darkest night of unbridled tyranny.
LINK TO CON.
USDA Orders Nation's Largest Beef Recall
GREG RISLING
LOS ANGELES — The U.S. Department of Agriculture on Sunday ordered the recall of 143 million pounds of frozen beef from a California slaughterhouse, the subject of an animal-abuse investigation, that provided meat to school lunch programs.
Officials said it was the largest beef recall in the United States, surpassing a 1999 ban of 35 million pounds of ready-to-eat meats. No illnesses have been linked to the newly recalled meat, and officials said the health threat was likely small.
The recall will affect beef products dating to Feb. 1, 2006, that came from Chino-based Westland/Hallmark Meat Co., the federal agency said.
Secretary of Agriculture Ed Schafer said his department has evidence that Westland did not routinely contact its veterinarian when cattle became non-ambulatory after passing inspection, violating health regulations.
"Because the cattle did not receive complete and proper inspection, Food Safety and Inspection Service has determined them to be unfit for human food and the company is conducting a recall," Schafer said in a statement.
LINK to con.....
GREG RISLING
LOS ANGELES — The U.S. Department of Agriculture on Sunday ordered the recall of 143 million pounds of frozen beef from a California slaughterhouse, the subject of an animal-abuse investigation, that provided meat to school lunch programs.
Officials said it was the largest beef recall in the United States, surpassing a 1999 ban of 35 million pounds of ready-to-eat meats. No illnesses have been linked to the newly recalled meat, and officials said the health threat was likely small.
The recall will affect beef products dating to Feb. 1, 2006, that came from Chino-based Westland/Hallmark Meat Co., the federal agency said.
Secretary of Agriculture Ed Schafer said his department has evidence that Westland did not routinely contact its veterinarian when cattle became non-ambulatory after passing inspection, violating health regulations.
"Because the cattle did not receive complete and proper inspection, Food Safety and Inspection Service has determined them to be unfit for human food and the company is conducting a recall," Schafer said in a statement.
LINK to con.....
Friday, February 15, 2008
Monsanto U: Agribusiness's Takeover of Public Schools
By Nancy Scola, AlterNet.
I've startled a bug scientist. "Yeah, now I'm nervous," said Mike Hoffmann, a Cornell University entomologist and crop specialist who spends his days with cucumber beetles and small wasps. But he's also in charge of keeping the research funding flowing at Cornell's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. What have I done to alarm him? I've drawn his attention to the newly released FY 2009 Presidential Budget.
Like more than a hundred public institutions of higher learning, Cornell is what's known as a "land grant." Dotting the United States from Ithaca, N.Y., to Pullman, Wash., such schools were established by a Civil War-era act of Congress to provide universities centered around, "the agriculture and mechanic arts." Congress handed each U.S. state a chunk of federal land to be sold for start-up monies, and for the last 150 years, it has funded ground-breaking research on all things agriculture, from dirt to crops to cattle.
The land-grant system has been, in short, a high-yield investment. The scientific research that has come out of land-grant labs and fields have aided millions of farmers and fed millions of Americans. And the land-grant reach doesn't stop at ocean's edge. Oklahoma State, the Sooner State's land grant, says that the public funding of land-grant research "has benefited every man, woman and child in the United States and much of the world."
LINK to con.
By Nancy Scola, AlterNet.
I've startled a bug scientist. "Yeah, now I'm nervous," said Mike Hoffmann, a Cornell University entomologist and crop specialist who spends his days with cucumber beetles and small wasps. But he's also in charge of keeping the research funding flowing at Cornell's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. What have I done to alarm him? I've drawn his attention to the newly released FY 2009 Presidential Budget.
Like more than a hundred public institutions of higher learning, Cornell is what's known as a "land grant." Dotting the United States from Ithaca, N.Y., to Pullman, Wash., such schools were established by a Civil War-era act of Congress to provide universities centered around, "the agriculture and mechanic arts." Congress handed each U.S. state a chunk of federal land to be sold for start-up monies, and for the last 150 years, it has funded ground-breaking research on all things agriculture, from dirt to crops to cattle.
The land-grant system has been, in short, a high-yield investment. The scientific research that has come out of land-grant labs and fields have aided millions of farmers and fed millions of Americans. And the land-grant reach doesn't stop at ocean's edge. Oklahoma State, the Sooner State's land grant, says that the public funding of land-grant research "has benefited every man, woman and child in the United States and much of the world."
LINK to con.
Thursday, February 14, 2008
The Rising Mercenary Industry and AFRICOM
While African states are trying to put the culture of military rule behind them, the United States appears determined to demonstrate that most civilian activities in Africa should be undertaken by armed forces. -
Samuel Makinda
Under Bush/Cheney there has been unprecedented growth in the private military and intelligence corporations. Their purpose is to extract resources and control political behavior. You’ve heard the names, Blackwater, MPRI, DynCorp, Total Intel, Triple Canopy. The mercenaries are already in Africa, and are looking to Africa for their future contracts and future paychecks.
The US use of mercenaries has a long and ugly history in Africa:
[I]n 1978, former CIA agent John Stockwell provided for many their first peek into a deadly, ruthless U.S. foreign policy that destroyed what could have been a far more promising political and economic future for the continent.
LINK to con.
While African states are trying to put the culture of military rule behind them, the United States appears determined to demonstrate that most civilian activities in Africa should be undertaken by armed forces. -
Samuel Makinda
Under Bush/Cheney there has been unprecedented growth in the private military and intelligence corporations. Their purpose is to extract resources and control political behavior. You’ve heard the names, Blackwater, MPRI, DynCorp, Total Intel, Triple Canopy. The mercenaries are already in Africa, and are looking to Africa for their future contracts and future paychecks.
The US use of mercenaries has a long and ugly history in Africa:
[I]n 1978, former CIA agent John Stockwell provided for many their first peek into a deadly, ruthless U.S. foreign policy that destroyed what could have been a far more promising political and economic future for the continent.
LINK to con.
Obama Hope Beating Clinton Help By Joel Hirschhorn
As befits American culture, politics is all about slick selling to the masses. Hillary Clinton is selling Day-1 help to victims and sufferers. Barack Obama is selling effervescent hope to yes-we-can dreamers. This media hyped horse race is like a fight between diet Coke and diet Pepsi, artificially sweetened candidates devoid of real nourishment.
The least educated, least sophisticated and least wealthy along with Hispanics are sipping Clinton's fizzled-out drink. The most educated, most privileged, and most financially successful along with African-Americans are gulping down Obama's charismatic pick-me-up.
As to who is buying what, consider these data: Clinton won the non-college-educated voters by 22 points in California, 32 points in Massachusetts, 54 points in Arkansas, and 11 points in New Jersey. In a Pew Research national survey, Obama led among people with college degrees by 22 points. In Connecticut, Obama beat Clinton among college graduates by 17 points and in New Jersey by 11 points. And note this: 39 percent of Virginia and 41 percent of Maryland Democratic primary voters reported incomes of $100,000 or more - clearly well educated people that would favor Obama.
...LINK TO CON.
As befits American culture, politics is all about slick selling to the masses. Hillary Clinton is selling Day-1 help to victims and sufferers. Barack Obama is selling effervescent hope to yes-we-can dreamers. This media hyped horse race is like a fight between diet Coke and diet Pepsi, artificially sweetened candidates devoid of real nourishment.
The least educated, least sophisticated and least wealthy along with Hispanics are sipping Clinton's fizzled-out drink. The most educated, most privileged, and most financially successful along with African-Americans are gulping down Obama's charismatic pick-me-up.
As to who is buying what, consider these data: Clinton won the non-college-educated voters by 22 points in California, 32 points in Massachusetts, 54 points in Arkansas, and 11 points in New Jersey. In a Pew Research national survey, Obama led among people with college degrees by 22 points. In Connecticut, Obama beat Clinton among college graduates by 17 points and in New Jersey by 11 points. And note this: 39 percent of Virginia and 41 percent of Maryland Democratic primary voters reported incomes of $100,000 or more - clearly well educated people that would favor Obama.
...LINK TO CON.
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Symbols of Self-Restraint
Celebrating Wilderness
By RODERICK NASH
Wilderness preservation is an American invention -- a unique contribution of our nation to world civilization. The 40th anniversary of the Wilderness Act (September 3, l964) has come and gone, and Americans should renew their pride in and commitment to the National Wilderness Preservation System. It is one of the best ideas our country ever had.
One place to start the celebration is with the recognition that wilderness is the basic component of American culture. From the its raw materials we built a civilization. With the idea of wilderness we sought to give that civilization identity and meaning. Our early environmental history is inextricably tied to wild country. Hate it or love it, if you want to understand American history there is no escaping the need to come to terms with our wilderness past. From this perspective, designated Wilderness Areas are historical documents; destroying them is comparable to tearing pages from our books and laws. We can not teach our children what is special about our history on freeways or in shopping malls. As a professional historian I deeply believe that the present owes the future a chance to know its wilderness past. Protecting the remnants of wild country left today is an action that defines our nation. Take away wilderness and you diminish the opportunity to be American.
LINK TO CON.
Celebrating Wilderness
By RODERICK NASH
Wilderness preservation is an American invention -- a unique contribution of our nation to world civilization. The 40th anniversary of the Wilderness Act (September 3, l964) has come and gone, and Americans should renew their pride in and commitment to the National Wilderness Preservation System. It is one of the best ideas our country ever had.
One place to start the celebration is with the recognition that wilderness is the basic component of American culture. From the its raw materials we built a civilization. With the idea of wilderness we sought to give that civilization identity and meaning. Our early environmental history is inextricably tied to wild country. Hate it or love it, if you want to understand American history there is no escaping the need to come to terms with our wilderness past. From this perspective, designated Wilderness Areas are historical documents; destroying them is comparable to tearing pages from our books and laws. We can not teach our children what is special about our history on freeways or in shopping malls. As a professional historian I deeply believe that the present owes the future a chance to know its wilderness past. Protecting the remnants of wild country left today is an action that defines our nation. Take away wilderness and you diminish the opportunity to be American.
LINK TO CON.
(I hope he is right because, Dennis is about the only person with balls enough (a few others) in Congrss to stand up to this corporate machine)
Dick Feagler: We need to keep Dennis in our Congress, and we will
Dick FeaglerPlain Dealer Columnist
Im going to vote to send Den nis Kucinich back to Con gress. Lord knows we need somebody there who speaks his mind and doesn't suck up to the establishment. Dennis says what Dennis thinks. And a lot of what Dennis thinks is what I think. So he's got my vote.
I think this war is terrible. And so does Dennis. He told me that's why he ran.
"After the last election, the Democrats were elected to stop the war," he said. "After attending some Democratic meetings, I learned that the party wasn't going to stop it. They were going to keep funding it. That's why I decided to run."
LINK TO CON.
Dick Feagler: We need to keep Dennis in our Congress, and we will
Dick FeaglerPlain Dealer Columnist
Im going to vote to send Den nis Kucinich back to Con gress. Lord knows we need somebody there who speaks his mind and doesn't suck up to the establishment. Dennis says what Dennis thinks. And a lot of what Dennis thinks is what I think. So he's got my vote.
I think this war is terrible. And so does Dennis. He told me that's why he ran.
"After the last election, the Democrats were elected to stop the war," he said. "After attending some Democratic meetings, I learned that the party wasn't going to stop it. They were going to keep funding it. That's why I decided to run."
LINK TO CON.
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Asia-Pacific News (a bit of news I had heard nothing about.....for your information)
Report: East Timor President Ramos-Horta wounded in attack
Sydney - East Timor President Jose Ramos-Horta was wounded Monday in a pre-dawn attack on his home in the capital Dili, media reports from Dili said.
The extent of the injuries to the Nobel peace laureate and former prime minister of the world's newest nation were not known.
A guard was killed in the attack. Also reportedly dead in return fire was rebel leader Major Alfredo Reinado, who has been on the run since escaping from jail in 2006.....
LINK TO CON.
Report: East Timor President Ramos-Horta wounded in attack
Sydney - East Timor President Jose Ramos-Horta was wounded Monday in a pre-dawn attack on his home in the capital Dili, media reports from Dili said.
The extent of the injuries to the Nobel peace laureate and former prime minister of the world's newest nation were not known.
A guard was killed in the attack. Also reportedly dead in return fire was rebel leader Major Alfredo Reinado, who has been on the run since escaping from jail in 2006.....
LINK TO CON.
London tripling daily ‘gas guzzler’ fee to $49
Mayor cites CO2 emissions; move will affect 33,000 luxury cars
LONDON - Drivers of gas-guzzling cars will have to pay nearly $50 a day to enter central London, triple the current charge, while the most fuel-efficient vehicles will get a free ride, the mayor said Tuesday.
Mayor Ken Livingstone, who introduced the daily congestion charge on trucks and cars entering central London in 2003 to cut traffic and pollution, said the change is primarily aimed at the big cars owned by people in wealthy parts of the capital.
The mayor, who has the power to make the change without legislative approval, said it will go into effect Oct. 27.
The CO2 emissions from the most high-powered 4x4s and sports cars can be up to four times as great as the least polluting cars," he said, referring to carbon dioxide emissions, which are tied to global warming.
LINK to con.
Mayor cites CO2 emissions; move will affect 33,000 luxury cars
LONDON - Drivers of gas-guzzling cars will have to pay nearly $50 a day to enter central London, triple the current charge, while the most fuel-efficient vehicles will get a free ride, the mayor said Tuesday.
Mayor Ken Livingstone, who introduced the daily congestion charge on trucks and cars entering central London in 2003 to cut traffic and pollution, said the change is primarily aimed at the big cars owned by people in wealthy parts of the capital.
The mayor, who has the power to make the change without legislative approval, said it will go into effect Oct. 27.
The CO2 emissions from the most high-powered 4x4s and sports cars can be up to four times as great as the least polluting cars," he said, referring to carbon dioxide emissions, which are tied to global warming.
LINK to con.
Word From Above [The Media Message]: Keep the People Passive
by max blunt
US Military: Enforcers of Capitalism Around the World
America has always been united-in-captivity; a nation kept docile and truth- suppressed, as if the clear divide did not exist.
So the elite needs to put the lid on the simmering, at times boiling, pot and hypocritically give the salute: "God bless America."
So there is a chasm between whites and blacks, Hispanics and non-Hispanics, women and men, young and old; but we don't like to spread the "horrible" truth of un-American disunity.
Give me a break! Ours is a "United States" not a "United People"… and just as some have experienced that "American dream," many others have had to endure that well-hidden "American nightmare."
Problems need to surface, be confronted, tackled and, hopefully, solved; we are still many years away from becoming a "United People."
Our capitalist elite have always wanted to keep us non-rebellious, under the chimera that we are a united people.
That implanted idea is likely to receive, and soon, a major jolt as the economic recession proves to be not just a two-quarter adjustment in the economy, but a true consumption lifetime adjustment that will bare social, economic and political flaws in our predatory capitalist system.
Meantime the US military will continue to be kept as the overworked, underpaid police force of the US capitalist elite..... LINK to con.
by max blunt
US Military: Enforcers of Capitalism Around the World
America has always been united-in-captivity; a nation kept docile and truth- suppressed, as if the clear divide did not exist.
So the elite needs to put the lid on the simmering, at times boiling, pot and hypocritically give the salute: "God bless America."
So there is a chasm between whites and blacks, Hispanics and non-Hispanics, women and men, young and old; but we don't like to spread the "horrible" truth of un-American disunity.
Give me a break! Ours is a "United States" not a "United People"… and just as some have experienced that "American dream," many others have had to endure that well-hidden "American nightmare."
Problems need to surface, be confronted, tackled and, hopefully, solved; we are still many years away from becoming a "United People."
Our capitalist elite have always wanted to keep us non-rebellious, under the chimera that we are a united people.
That implanted idea is likely to receive, and soon, a major jolt as the economic recession proves to be not just a two-quarter adjustment in the economy, but a true consumption lifetime adjustment that will bare social, economic and political flaws in our predatory capitalist system.
Meantime the US military will continue to be kept as the overworked, underpaid police force of the US capitalist elite..... LINK to con.
Bush Calls on France for Help
War Without End
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
"We support the troops!" That's the excuse the Democrats have given for continuing to fund Bush's aggression against Iraq and Afghanistan. But, of course, war funding doesn't support the troops. War funding supports an evil machine that chews up and spits out the lives and well being of the troops, along with that of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan, men, women, and children. War funding supports Bush's aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan and his continuing efforts to occupy both countries in order to turn them into puppet states.
Polls show that a majority of the troops and their families do not support Bush's aggression. The fact that Ron Paul's campaign for the Republican presidential nomination received the lion's share of contributions from military families also underlines the great divide between the troops and those who would "support" them by keeping them in Iraq and Afghanistan. What all those ribbon decals on the back of SUVs, which proclaim "support the troops," really mean is support Bush's wars of aggression against Muslims.
According to the Washington Post (Feb. 9, 2008), Bush's $3.1 trillion federal budget provides no funding for his proposal in his State of the Union address to permit military members to transfer their unused education benefits to family members. Bush got applause for his nationally televised words, but the troops and their families got no money in his budget.
LINK To con.
War Without End
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
"We support the troops!" That's the excuse the Democrats have given for continuing to fund Bush's aggression against Iraq and Afghanistan. But, of course, war funding doesn't support the troops. War funding supports an evil machine that chews up and spits out the lives and well being of the troops, along with that of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan, men, women, and children. War funding supports Bush's aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan and his continuing efforts to occupy both countries in order to turn them into puppet states.
Polls show that a majority of the troops and their families do not support Bush's aggression. The fact that Ron Paul's campaign for the Republican presidential nomination received the lion's share of contributions from military families also underlines the great divide between the troops and those who would "support" them by keeping them in Iraq and Afghanistan. What all those ribbon decals on the back of SUVs, which proclaim "support the troops," really mean is support Bush's wars of aggression against Muslims.
According to the Washington Post (Feb. 9, 2008), Bush's $3.1 trillion federal budget provides no funding for his proposal in his State of the Union address to permit military members to transfer their unused education benefits to family members. Bush got applause for his nationally televised words, but the troops and their families got no money in his budget.
LINK To con.
Every Year Brings Us Closer to 1984
By Leonard Pitts Jr., Miami Herald.
In the beginning was the fingerprint.
It was in the 19th century that scientists realized the ridged whorls on the tip of the finger constituted a unique marker that could be used to tell one person from another. And eventually, the FBI built a massive database of fingerprints.
Then came DNA. In the 20th century, scientists learned to use the double helix nucleic acid molecule as a means of identification even more definitive than the fingerprint. And the FBI built a DNA database as well.
Now the feds are building yet another database. And it has some folks worried.
Maybe you missed it in the run-up to Super Duper Tuesday, but CNN and the Associated Press reported last week that the FBI will soon award a $1 billion, 10-year contract for construction of an electronic file that would store not just fingerprints and DNA, but a vast compendium of other physical characteristics. We're talking eye scans, facial shape, palm prints, scars, tattoos and other biometrics, all for the purpose of identifying and capturing bad guys.
LINK to con.
By Leonard Pitts Jr., Miami Herald.
In the beginning was the fingerprint.
It was in the 19th century that scientists realized the ridged whorls on the tip of the finger constituted a unique marker that could be used to tell one person from another. And eventually, the FBI built a massive database of fingerprints.
Then came DNA. In the 20th century, scientists learned to use the double helix nucleic acid molecule as a means of identification even more definitive than the fingerprint. And the FBI built a DNA database as well.
Now the feds are building yet another database. And it has some folks worried.
Maybe you missed it in the run-up to Super Duper Tuesday, but CNN and the Associated Press reported last week that the FBI will soon award a $1 billion, 10-year contract for construction of an electronic file that would store not just fingerprints and DNA, but a vast compendium of other physical characteristics. We're talking eye scans, facial shape, palm prints, scars, tattoos and other biometrics, all for the purpose of identifying and capturing bad guys.
LINK to con.
Monday, February 11, 2008
In Oil-Rich Mideast, Shades of the Ivy League By TAMAR LEWIN, NY Times
DOHA, Qatar — On a hot October evening, hundreds of families flocked to the sumptuous Ritz Carlton here in this Persian Gulf capital for an unusual college fair, the Education City roadshow.
Qataris, Bangladeshis, Syrians, Indians, Egyptians — in saris, in suits, in dishdashis, in jeans — came to hear what it takes to win admission to one of the five American universities that offer degrees at Education City, a 2,500-acre campus on the outskirts of Doha where oil and gas money pays for everything from adventurous architecture to professors’ salaries.
Education City, the largest enclave of American universities overseas, has fast become the elite of Qatari education, a sort of local Ivy League. But the five American schools have started small, with only about 300 slots among them for next year’s entering classes. So there is a slight buzz of anxiety at the fair, which starts with a nonalcoholic cocktail hour, with fruit juices passed on silver trays as families circulate among the booths.
LINK to con.
DOHA, Qatar — On a hot October evening, hundreds of families flocked to the sumptuous Ritz Carlton here in this Persian Gulf capital for an unusual college fair, the Education City roadshow.
Qataris, Bangladeshis, Syrians, Indians, Egyptians — in saris, in suits, in dishdashis, in jeans — came to hear what it takes to win admission to one of the five American universities that offer degrees at Education City, a 2,500-acre campus on the outskirts of Doha where oil and gas money pays for everything from adventurous architecture to professors’ salaries.
Education City, the largest enclave of American universities overseas, has fast become the elite of Qatari education, a sort of local Ivy League. But the five American schools have started small, with only about 300 slots among them for next year’s entering classes. So there is a slight buzz of anxiety at the fair, which starts with a nonalcoholic cocktail hour, with fruit juices passed on silver trays as families circulate among the booths.
LINK to con.
How Sticky Is Membership on Facebook? Just Try Breaking Free
By MARIA ASPAN, NY Times
Are you a member of Facebook.com? You may have a lifetime contract.
Some users have discovered that it is nearly impossible to remove themselves entirely from Facebook, setting off a fresh round of concern over the popular social network’s use of personal data.
While the Web site offers users the option to deactivate their accounts, Facebook servers keep copies of the information in those accounts indefinitely. Indeed, many users who have contacted Facebook to request that their accounts be deleted have not succeeded in erasing their records from the network.
“It’s like the Hotel California,” said Nipon Das, 34, a director at a biotechnology consulting firm in Manhattan, who tried unsuccessfully to delete his account this fall. “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”
LINK to con.
By MARIA ASPAN, NY Times
Are you a member of Facebook.com? You may have a lifetime contract.
Some users have discovered that it is nearly impossible to remove themselves entirely from Facebook, setting off a fresh round of concern over the popular social network’s use of personal data.
While the Web site offers users the option to deactivate their accounts, Facebook servers keep copies of the information in those accounts indefinitely. Indeed, many users who have contacted Facebook to request that their accounts be deleted have not succeeded in erasing their records from the network.
“It’s like the Hotel California,” said Nipon Das, 34, a director at a biotechnology consulting firm in Manhattan, who tried unsuccessfully to delete his account this fall. “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”
LINK to con.
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Suchitoto 13: El Salvador’s “American-made” Terrorism Act in Corporate Play
by Robert Weitzel and Meredith DeFrancesco
“Because we were struggling against the privatization of water. Now we have to struggle against the anti-terrorism law.”
- Vincente Vasquez-
In 2001 El Salvador replaced the colon with the U.S. dollar as its national currency. In 2006 its right-wing government replaced lawful dissent with U.S. inspired anti-terrorism legislation as its national policy. In return, the Salvadoran people are offering Americans an object lesson in the value of our Bill of Rights when dollar meets dissent.
On the morning of July 2, 2007, an estimated 400 Salvadorans who were waiting for buses to take them to the small town of Suchitoto to attend a public forum on the privatization of water utilities were accused of blocking the road and were attacked by riot police firing rubber bullets and tear gas. Two women and one man were arrested.
In Suchitoto’s central square, word of the attack and arrests spread through the crowds waiting for the motorcade and press caravan of President Antonio Saca, who was coming to Suchitoto to announce his administration’s new “"National Decentralization Policy,” a plan viewed by many Salvadorans as the first step in privatizing the country’s publicly-owned water resources.
LINK TO CON.
by Robert Weitzel and Meredith DeFrancesco
“Because we were struggling against the privatization of water. Now we have to struggle against the anti-terrorism law.”
- Vincente Vasquez-
In 2001 El Salvador replaced the colon with the U.S. dollar as its national currency. In 2006 its right-wing government replaced lawful dissent with U.S. inspired anti-terrorism legislation as its national policy. In return, the Salvadoran people are offering Americans an object lesson in the value of our Bill of Rights when dollar meets dissent.
On the morning of July 2, 2007, an estimated 400 Salvadorans who were waiting for buses to take them to the small town of Suchitoto to attend a public forum on the privatization of water utilities were accused of blocking the road and were attacked by riot police firing rubber bullets and tear gas. Two women and one man were arrested.
In Suchitoto’s central square, word of the attack and arrests spread through the crowds waiting for the motorcade and press caravan of President Antonio Saca, who was coming to Suchitoto to announce his administration’s new “"National Decentralization Policy,” a plan viewed by many Salvadorans as the first step in privatizing the country’s publicly-owned water resources.
LINK TO CON.
How Capitalism and Technology Created (a) NAFTA
By: Biodun
In the late-20th century and especially in this first decade of the 21st century, there have been impassioned and highly controversial debates about the merits and demerits of trade agreements like the World Trade Organization (WTO), North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA), and the Dominican Republic-Central American Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA)--which was simply called CAFTA before January 2004 and renamed after. Recent discussions about globalization and the asymmetries of these agreements can be found here, here, and here. And yet, as I'll show, these agreements simply formalized (or attempted to formalize) a sub-rosa globalization and a new international division of capital and labor that began to operate defacto since the mid-1970s. Capitalism and technology played a huge role in these developments, with both equally contributing to this enterprise.
Before the mid-1970s, there was a pact between capital and labor in general, and in particular, among labor, management, and the state: that is, with the cooperation of labor and management, the state regulated and arbitrated productivity, wages, and profits. The production of consumer products developed mass consumption--in other words, supply worked to create demand. Americans became consumers of their own products--pace Henry Ford: "Our workers shall also be our customers," a capitalist model commonly known as Fordism.
However, by the mid-1970s, the saturation of domestic markets for consumer products led to the expansion of capital into third-world countries for the production and increasing consumption of these products by a robust and cheap third-world urban labor force ready for work but disorganized. Capital then became extremely fluid, eroding to a certain extent the boundaries and functions of traditional nation-states: no restrictions on first-world investment and transfers of capital, as third-world governments lusted after first-world revenues, and as first-world global (transnational) corporations lusted after cheap and robust third-world labor. This was a truly symbiotic relationship indeed, which eventually led to two condominiums.
LINK to con.
By: Biodun
In the late-20th century and especially in this first decade of the 21st century, there have been impassioned and highly controversial debates about the merits and demerits of trade agreements like the World Trade Organization (WTO), North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA), and the Dominican Republic-Central American Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA)--which was simply called CAFTA before January 2004 and renamed after. Recent discussions about globalization and the asymmetries of these agreements can be found here, here, and here. And yet, as I'll show, these agreements simply formalized (or attempted to formalize) a sub-rosa globalization and a new international division of capital and labor that began to operate defacto since the mid-1970s. Capitalism and technology played a huge role in these developments, with both equally contributing to this enterprise.
Before the mid-1970s, there was a pact between capital and labor in general, and in particular, among labor, management, and the state: that is, with the cooperation of labor and management, the state regulated and arbitrated productivity, wages, and profits. The production of consumer products developed mass consumption--in other words, supply worked to create demand. Americans became consumers of their own products--pace Henry Ford: "Our workers shall also be our customers," a capitalist model commonly known as Fordism.
However, by the mid-1970s, the saturation of domestic markets for consumer products led to the expansion of capital into third-world countries for the production and increasing consumption of these products by a robust and cheap third-world urban labor force ready for work but disorganized. Capital then became extremely fluid, eroding to a certain extent the boundaries and functions of traditional nation-states: no restrictions on first-world investment and transfers of capital, as third-world governments lusted after first-world revenues, and as first-world global (transnational) corporations lusted after cheap and robust third-world labor. This was a truly symbiotic relationship indeed, which eventually led to two condominiums.
LINK to con.
Proposal in Texas for a Public-Private Toll Road System Raises an Outcry By RALPH BLUMENTHAL
ROBSTOWN, Tex. — Leon Little’s farm here near Corpus Christi would not be seized for Texas’s proposed $184-billion-plus superhighway project for 5 or 10 years, if ever.
But Mr. Little was alarmed enough to show up Wednesday night with hundreds of his South Texas coastal neighbors to do what the Texas Department of Transportation has been urging: “Go ahead, don’t hold back.”
Don’t worry. Texans have gotten the message, swamping hearings and town meetings across the state to grill and often excoriate agency officials about a colossal traffic makeover known as the Trans-Texas Corridor, a public-private partnership unrivaled in the state’s — or probably any state’s — history, that would stretch well into the century and, if completed in full, end up costing around $200 billion.
“Is your road more important than the foodstuffs we put together for you?” asked Mr. Little, glaring at transportation officials at the town meeting.
The plan envisions a 4,000-mile network of new toll roads, with car and truck lanes, rail lines, and pipeline and utilities zones, to bypass congested cities and speed freight to and from Mexico.
LINK to CON.
ROBSTOWN, Tex. — Leon Little’s farm here near Corpus Christi would not be seized for Texas’s proposed $184-billion-plus superhighway project for 5 or 10 years, if ever.
But Mr. Little was alarmed enough to show up Wednesday night with hundreds of his South Texas coastal neighbors to do what the Texas Department of Transportation has been urging: “Go ahead, don’t hold back.”
Don’t worry. Texans have gotten the message, swamping hearings and town meetings across the state to grill and often excoriate agency officials about a colossal traffic makeover known as the Trans-Texas Corridor, a public-private partnership unrivaled in the state’s — or probably any state’s — history, that would stretch well into the century and, if completed in full, end up costing around $200 billion.
“Is your road more important than the foodstuffs we put together for you?” asked Mr. Little, glaring at transportation officials at the town meeting.
The plan envisions a 4,000-mile network of new toll roads, with car and truck lanes, rail lines, and pipeline and utilities zones, to bypass congested cities and speed freight to and from Mexico.
LINK to CON.
Saturday, February 09, 2008
FBI Deputizes Private Contractors With Extraordinary Powers, Including 'Shoot to Kill'
By Matthew Rothschild, The Progressive.
Today, more than 23,000 representatives of private industry are working quietly with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. The members of this rapidly growing group, called InfraGard, receive secret warnings of terrorist threats before the public does -- and, at least on one occasion, before elected officials. In return, they provide information to the government, which alarms the ACLU. But there may be more to it than that. One business executive, who showed me his InfraGard card, told me they have permission to "shoot to kill" in the event of martial law. InfraGard is "a child of the FBI," says Michael Hershman, the chairman of the advisory board of the InfraGard National Members Alliance and CEO of the Fairfax Group, an international consulting firm.
InfraGard started in Cleveland back in 1996, when the private sector there cooperated with the FBI to investigate cyber threats.
"Then the FBI cloned it," says Phyllis Schneck, chairman of the board of directors of the InfraGard National Members Alliance, and the prime mover behind the growth of InfraGard over the last several years.
InfraGard itself is still an FBI operation, with FBI agents in each state overseeing the local InfraGard chapters. (There are now eighty-six of them.) The alliance is a nonprofit organization of private sector InfraGard members.
"We are the owners, operators, and experts of our critical infrastructure, from the CEO of a large company in agriculture or high finance to the guy who turns the valve at the water utility," says Schneck, who by day is the vice president of research integration at Secure Computing.
LINK to con.
By Matthew Rothschild, The Progressive.
Today, more than 23,000 representatives of private industry are working quietly with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. The members of this rapidly growing group, called InfraGard, receive secret warnings of terrorist threats before the public does -- and, at least on one occasion, before elected officials. In return, they provide information to the government, which alarms the ACLU. But there may be more to it than that. One business executive, who showed me his InfraGard card, told me they have permission to "shoot to kill" in the event of martial law. InfraGard is "a child of the FBI," says Michael Hershman, the chairman of the advisory board of the InfraGard National Members Alliance and CEO of the Fairfax Group, an international consulting firm.
InfraGard started in Cleveland back in 1996, when the private sector there cooperated with the FBI to investigate cyber threats.
"Then the FBI cloned it," says Phyllis Schneck, chairman of the board of directors of the InfraGard National Members Alliance, and the prime mover behind the growth of InfraGard over the last several years.
InfraGard itself is still an FBI operation, with FBI agents in each state overseeing the local InfraGard chapters. (There are now eighty-six of them.) The alliance is a nonprofit organization of private sector InfraGard members.
"We are the owners, operators, and experts of our critical infrastructure, from the CEO of a large company in agriculture or high finance to the guy who turns the valve at the water utility," says Schneck, who by day is the vice president of research integration at Secure Computing.
LINK to con.
Thursday, February 07, 2008
"Tribal Conflict" in Kenya by Alex Thurston
Among the many things that infuriate me about the lack of adequate international news coverage in America, the bullshit trope of "tribal conflict" in Africa ranks pretty high.
In the fantasy world of many journalists, as well as many Americans, foreign peoples - especially Africans and Middle Easterners - fight because they "always have." The only tragedy, in the eyes of these self-proclaimed experts, is that now tribal conflicts are played out with modern technologies of warfare.
But the tragedies that grip Kenya, Darfur, and Somalia, to name a few, aren't tribal conflicts transplanted into modern times, the only difference being that spears have been exchanged for AK-47s and machetes. Rather, the direct intervention of foreign governments in these countries, from the time of colonialism to the present, plays a major role in creating and exacerbating ethnic conflict, as do concrete economic and political conditions of poverty, inequality, and disenfranchisement.
Take this story about Somalia, published a year ago, which asserts that "clannism" is the major problem.....
LINK to con.
Among the many things that infuriate me about the lack of adequate international news coverage in America, the bullshit trope of "tribal conflict" in Africa ranks pretty high.
In the fantasy world of many journalists, as well as many Americans, foreign peoples - especially Africans and Middle Easterners - fight because they "always have." The only tragedy, in the eyes of these self-proclaimed experts, is that now tribal conflicts are played out with modern technologies of warfare.
But the tragedies that grip Kenya, Darfur, and Somalia, to name a few, aren't tribal conflicts transplanted into modern times, the only difference being that spears have been exchanged for AK-47s and machetes. Rather, the direct intervention of foreign governments in these countries, from the time of colonialism to the present, plays a major role in creating and exacerbating ethnic conflict, as do concrete economic and political conditions of poverty, inequality, and disenfranchisement.
Take this story about Somalia, published a year ago, which asserts that "clannism" is the major problem.....
LINK to con.
U.S. budget boosts coal and nuclear power
Bush's budget request Monday cut funding for renewable energy, but increased spending for science. By Brad Knickerbocker
A president's priorities become clearer at budget time, even if Congress eventually rearranges things entirely. And that's true about the place of energy and climate change in President Bush's spending plan for next year.
Coal and nuclear power see big boosts in the 2009 Energy Department budget request sent to Congress Monday, and Mr. Bush is again calling for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The budget favors nuclear and "clean coal" options over renewable power sources, McClatchy Newspapers noted.
LINK
Bush's budget request Monday cut funding for renewable energy, but increased spending for science. By Brad Knickerbocker
A president's priorities become clearer at budget time, even if Congress eventually rearranges things entirely. And that's true about the place of energy and climate change in President Bush's spending plan for next year.
Coal and nuclear power see big boosts in the 2009 Energy Department budget request sent to Congress Monday, and Mr. Bush is again calling for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The budget favors nuclear and "clean coal" options over renewable power sources, McClatchy Newspapers noted.
LINK
NATO’s Afghan Quagmire by Patrick Seale
NATO — the North Atlantic Treaty Organization — is the world’s most powerful military alliance. It has two million men under its command, a thousand helicopters and countless other military resources. Yet it is facing failure, if not actual defeat, in Afghanistan. Why?
The answer is simple. The Afghan war was misconceived from the very start. It was decided in rage and haste by Washington, without proper thought or planning, in response to al-Qaida’s 11 September 2001 attacks on the United States.
Instead of patiently tracking down al-Qaida’s leaders by police and counter-terrorist methods, the United Sates launched an all-out war against Afghanistan with the declared goal not only of smashing Al-Qaida, but also the Taliban regime which, willingly or unwillingly, was giving it sanctuary....
LINK TO CON.
NATO — the North Atlantic Treaty Organization — is the world’s most powerful military alliance. It has two million men under its command, a thousand helicopters and countless other military resources. Yet it is facing failure, if not actual defeat, in Afghanistan. Why?
The answer is simple. The Afghan war was misconceived from the very start. It was decided in rage and haste by Washington, without proper thought or planning, in response to al-Qaida’s 11 September 2001 attacks on the United States.
Instead of patiently tracking down al-Qaida’s leaders by police and counter-terrorist methods, the United Sates launched an all-out war against Afghanistan with the declared goal not only of smashing Al-Qaida, but also the Taliban regime which, willingly or unwillingly, was giving it sanctuary....
LINK TO CON.
Election theft 2008, the perfect crime: 300 million witnesses and nobody saw nuttin'
by Warren Pease
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." -- William Casey, former CIA director, at his first staff meeting in 1981.
The great election theft of 2008 began months ago as the "unelectable" candidates were identified, branded, demonized, ridiculed and eventually weeded out one by one. It ended on January 30 when John Edwards, resurgent neo-populist and the last remaining bane of status quo oligarchs, dropped out of the Democratic presidential race.
Only six states had a chance to make their selections known before Edwards ended his campaign; residents in the other 44 have no progressive alternative on the ballot. With "super Tuesday" coming up, millions of voters will be asked to choose among candidates from the moderate right, the corporate right, the religiously insane right or the Curtis LeMay right.
So, through deft manipulation of voter attitudes by mass media, status quo corporatists and oligarchs can't really lose. This outcome may not meet the standard for election theft, but the results speak for themselves. Our ruling aristocracy has hijacked another critical election cycle, and they didn't even need electronic vote switching, voter caging, voter roll purging, deceptive mailers, stolen or destroyed ballots, access to proprietary source code, hacking for the GOP or simple understaffing in progressive precincts. At least not yet.
Nope. This variation on election theft just required that people turn their televisions to any of the conventional mass media news outlets -- notably Fox, CNN or MSNBC -- find a political talk show or panel discussion or rant fest, and internalize the labels attached to some of this year's presidential candidates: "controversial," "unelectable," "unconventional," "goofy," "loser," "weird," "outside the American mainstream," "radical." The candidates not so labeled are, by definition, the serious contenders and therefore the only ones we need to watch.
LINK TO CON.
by Warren Pease
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." -- William Casey, former CIA director, at his first staff meeting in 1981.
The great election theft of 2008 began months ago as the "unelectable" candidates were identified, branded, demonized, ridiculed and eventually weeded out one by one. It ended on January 30 when John Edwards, resurgent neo-populist and the last remaining bane of status quo oligarchs, dropped out of the Democratic presidential race.
Only six states had a chance to make their selections known before Edwards ended his campaign; residents in the other 44 have no progressive alternative on the ballot. With "super Tuesday" coming up, millions of voters will be asked to choose among candidates from the moderate right, the corporate right, the religiously insane right or the Curtis LeMay right.
So, through deft manipulation of voter attitudes by mass media, status quo corporatists and oligarchs can't really lose. This outcome may not meet the standard for election theft, but the results speak for themselves. Our ruling aristocracy has hijacked another critical election cycle, and they didn't even need electronic vote switching, voter caging, voter roll purging, deceptive mailers, stolen or destroyed ballots, access to proprietary source code, hacking for the GOP or simple understaffing in progressive precincts. At least not yet.
Nope. This variation on election theft just required that people turn their televisions to any of the conventional mass media news outlets -- notably Fox, CNN or MSNBC -- find a political talk show or panel discussion or rant fest, and internalize the labels attached to some of this year's presidential candidates: "controversial," "unelectable," "unconventional," "goofy," "loser," "weird," "outside the American mainstream," "radical." The candidates not so labeled are, by definition, the serious contenders and therefore the only ones we need to watch.
LINK TO CON.
Wednesday, February 06, 2008
The Disturbing GreenScare Case of Briana Waters
By BEN ROSENFELD
Tacoma, Washington.
On February 11, trial begins in the federal government's case against Briana Waters. Ms. Waters is accused of conspiring to set fire to the University of Washington's Center for Urban Horticulture in 2001. Specifically, the government accuses Ms. Waters of acting as a lookout. The Earth Liberation Front claimed responsibility for the fire, along with another one the same day, at the Jefferson Poplar Farms in Clatskanie, Oregon, saying that the poplar research posed "an ecological nightmare" for the diversity of native forests. Ms. Waters, a violin teacher and 32-year-old mother of a little girl, steadfastly maintains her innocence. Federal sentences for arson, including those motivated by greed, insurance fraud, and even racial hatred, typically fall within the 5-7 year range. But if convicted of both counts, Ms. Waters faces a mandatory minimum 35 years behind bars (five on the arson charge, and 30 for conspiring to use a destructive device).
The government has no physical or even direct evidence against Ms. Waters. It's "case" rests entirely on the testimony of two informants, Jennifer Kolar and Lacey Phillabaum, who confessed to participating in the University of Washington arson, and who will receive leniency (most likely, 3-7 year sentences) in exchange for their testimony.
LINK
By BEN ROSENFELD
Tacoma, Washington.
On February 11, trial begins in the federal government's case against Briana Waters. Ms. Waters is accused of conspiring to set fire to the University of Washington's Center for Urban Horticulture in 2001. Specifically, the government accuses Ms. Waters of acting as a lookout. The Earth Liberation Front claimed responsibility for the fire, along with another one the same day, at the Jefferson Poplar Farms in Clatskanie, Oregon, saying that the poplar research posed "an ecological nightmare" for the diversity of native forests. Ms. Waters, a violin teacher and 32-year-old mother of a little girl, steadfastly maintains her innocence. Federal sentences for arson, including those motivated by greed, insurance fraud, and even racial hatred, typically fall within the 5-7 year range. But if convicted of both counts, Ms. Waters faces a mandatory minimum 35 years behind bars (five on the arson charge, and 30 for conspiring to use a destructive device).
The government has no physical or even direct evidence against Ms. Waters. It's "case" rests entirely on the testimony of two informants, Jennifer Kolar and Lacey Phillabaum, who confessed to participating in the University of Washington arson, and who will receive leniency (most likely, 3-7 year sentences) in exchange for their testimony.
LINK
Tuesday, February 05, 2008
The Year of Living Dangerously: Part Two of Two
by Manuel Valenzuela
Under constant manipulations, lies and propaganda, a nation of courage has become a nation of cowards. A nation that once questioned its leaders now falls lockstep behind them, blindly following criminality and corruption. A nation that once stood for protests, strikes, marches, sit-ins, challenging the government and seeking accountability now prefers sitting comfortably on couches or chairs, watching the world pass by through television sets or laptops, some becoming arm-chair activists, most simply rotting away their lives, preferring the life of a couch potato, passively ignoring the destruction of rights and freedoms, silently acquiescing to myriad number of crimes against humanity, and obediently shopping, purchasing and consuming according to the dictates of the corporatist world, their new god the Almighty Dollar commanding them to congregate at the Cathedrals of Consumerism, the Malls of Materialism, told to do their job and be good consumers, spending what little they have, even consuming with money that they do not have, and must therefore borrow.
What dreaded dark skinned bogeymen could never achieve Bush, the Congress and the mainstream media have succeeded marvelously at implementing. Under the constant threat of terror, we have failed to see the fusion of government and corporations, now more than ever, as well as the mutation of government into the instrument of profit, revenue and the bottom line. We have failed to see who, in fact, the true terrorist entities are, what the true threat to our way of life, our liberties and our rights is. We have become blinded to the political duopoly, the two-headed hydra, working in synergy and collusion, not in the interests of the people, but for the corporate world.
We fail to see that there is no choice, that elections are predetermined, and oftentimes orchestrated by the Ministry of Truth, that an opposition party is but a façade, that only the Corporatist Party exists, its two hands simply performing a juggling act, each taking its turn running the three ring circus we know as government. In our delusions of grandeur and exceptionalism we have become blinded to the reality that democracy is a sham, that real democracy is a threat to the corporatist element, that America has done more to destroy real democracy around the world than any nation on Earth.....
LINK
by Manuel Valenzuela
Under constant manipulations, lies and propaganda, a nation of courage has become a nation of cowards. A nation that once questioned its leaders now falls lockstep behind them, blindly following criminality and corruption. A nation that once stood for protests, strikes, marches, sit-ins, challenging the government and seeking accountability now prefers sitting comfortably on couches or chairs, watching the world pass by through television sets or laptops, some becoming arm-chair activists, most simply rotting away their lives, preferring the life of a couch potato, passively ignoring the destruction of rights and freedoms, silently acquiescing to myriad number of crimes against humanity, and obediently shopping, purchasing and consuming according to the dictates of the corporatist world, their new god the Almighty Dollar commanding them to congregate at the Cathedrals of Consumerism, the Malls of Materialism, told to do their job and be good consumers, spending what little they have, even consuming with money that they do not have, and must therefore borrow.
What dreaded dark skinned bogeymen could never achieve Bush, the Congress and the mainstream media have succeeded marvelously at implementing. Under the constant threat of terror, we have failed to see the fusion of government and corporations, now more than ever, as well as the mutation of government into the instrument of profit, revenue and the bottom line. We have failed to see who, in fact, the true terrorist entities are, what the true threat to our way of life, our liberties and our rights is. We have become blinded to the political duopoly, the two-headed hydra, working in synergy and collusion, not in the interests of the people, but for the corporate world.
We fail to see that there is no choice, that elections are predetermined, and oftentimes orchestrated by the Ministry of Truth, that an opposition party is but a façade, that only the Corporatist Party exists, its two hands simply performing a juggling act, each taking its turn running the three ring circus we know as government. In our delusions of grandeur and exceptionalism we have become blinded to the reality that democracy is a sham, that real democracy is a threat to the corporatist element, that America has done more to destroy real democracy around the world than any nation on Earth.....
LINK
Monday, February 04, 2008
High Treason And Felonie
By Ted Lang
The elephant that has been swept under the carpet to protect the Cheney-Bush regime could not go forever unnoticed by the American people. The unending laundry list of so-called “high crimes and misdemeanors” described in Section 4 of Article II, powers of the President, enumerates such treason that even the Founders and writers of the Constitution, in all likelihood, never had the capacity to either imagine or foresee. Section 4 states: “The President, Vice President and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” And Bush has gone on record as to what he thinks of the Constitution he swore to protect and uphold.
As former Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill pointed out, Bush was obsessed with invading Iraq and going after Saddam Hussein. We will probably never learn of the real reason behind his planned vendetta, but it seems that his need to do so can be summarized thus: Who will rid me of this meddlesome competitor?..... LINK
By Ted Lang
The elephant that has been swept under the carpet to protect the Cheney-Bush regime could not go forever unnoticed by the American people. The unending laundry list of so-called “high crimes and misdemeanors” described in Section 4 of Article II, powers of the President, enumerates such treason that even the Founders and writers of the Constitution, in all likelihood, never had the capacity to either imagine or foresee. Section 4 states: “The President, Vice President and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” And Bush has gone on record as to what he thinks of the Constitution he swore to protect and uphold.
As former Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill pointed out, Bush was obsessed with invading Iraq and going after Saddam Hussein. We will probably never learn of the real reason behind his planned vendetta, but it seems that his need to do so can be summarized thus: Who will rid me of this meddlesome competitor?..... LINK
A Grim Outlook for Afghanistan by Alex Thurston
Years of misguided strategy in Afghanistan may soon put us back at square one. As our NATO allies balk at the idea of increasing - or even maintaining - their current troop numbers, the Taliban are stepping up their attacks and inching closer to Kabul.
The US is pushing for greater troop commitments from European nations, but failing to obtain them. When Gates sent a "strongly worded letter" to Germany asking for more men, he received a "blunt response": no. At the same time, Canada has stated that unless other NATO members come through with more troops, they will withdraw their forces by the end of 2008. Given that Germany has 3,200 troops in Afghanistan, and Canada 2,500, the US' recent "mini-surge" of 3,200 marines looks like it isn't a surge at all, but rather a half-hearted attempt to reassure skeptical allies - and perhaps a way just to maintain, not increase, troop levels when our allies pull out.
LINK
Years of misguided strategy in Afghanistan may soon put us back at square one. As our NATO allies balk at the idea of increasing - or even maintaining - their current troop numbers, the Taliban are stepping up their attacks and inching closer to Kabul.
The US is pushing for greater troop commitments from European nations, but failing to obtain them. When Gates sent a "strongly worded letter" to Germany asking for more men, he received a "blunt response": no. At the same time, Canada has stated that unless other NATO members come through with more troops, they will withdraw their forces by the end of 2008. Given that Germany has 3,200 troops in Afghanistan, and Canada 2,500, the US' recent "mini-surge" of 3,200 marines looks like it isn't a surge at all, but rather a half-hearted attempt to reassure skeptical allies - and perhaps a way just to maintain, not increase, troop levels when our allies pull out.
LINK
The Year of Living Dangerously: Part One of Two
by Manuel Valenzuela
Manifestations of Intent
Can you smell the smoked fumes of a discombobulated economic engine that has ceased to function, its synergy spitting and sputtering, its many parts thrashed by the claws, and vices, of neoliberal capitalism? Can you feel the dismantling of the economic spark plug, the American consumer, as our livelihoods are sacrificed to the greed, and incompetence, of the establishment and as the value of our lives is further enslaved to the Almighty Dollar and its puppet masters?
Can you hear the roar of authoritarian Machiavelli-types, of which many exist, cheering as the Constitution is discarded like yesterday’s trash, its principles and foundations burned inside the incinerator of fascism? Can you hear the searing of one of the greatest documents of governance ever created by man as it goes up in flames thanks to the kerosene thrown at it by American corporatists in power, its ashes slowly scattering into the realm of nothingness?
Can you see, if not blinded by tele-trash and infotainment, by the propaganda we call news, by the lies and deceit and censorship of the corporate media, by the comforting glow of television, by the charade that is American democracy and by the myriad distractions of bread and circus, the approaching finality of American liberty and freedom, soon to be replaced by Big Brother, a surveillance society, a police state and full-fledged corporatism?
Can you sense the growing momentum of militarism and imperialism rampaging across the nation, and the globe, leaving nothing but hatred and animosity in its wake? Can you sense that imperialism and empire abroad and freedom and democracy at home are mutually exclusive, that to attain the former the latter must be sacrificed, and that inevitably the people must, for imperialism to function, be immersed in tyranny? Do you realize that we are one major shock, one major event away from catapulting our lives into the headwaters of an altogether different America?......
LINK
by Manuel Valenzuela
Manifestations of Intent
Can you smell the smoked fumes of a discombobulated economic engine that has ceased to function, its synergy spitting and sputtering, its many parts thrashed by the claws, and vices, of neoliberal capitalism? Can you feel the dismantling of the economic spark plug, the American consumer, as our livelihoods are sacrificed to the greed, and incompetence, of the establishment and as the value of our lives is further enslaved to the Almighty Dollar and its puppet masters?
Can you hear the roar of authoritarian Machiavelli-types, of which many exist, cheering as the Constitution is discarded like yesterday’s trash, its principles and foundations burned inside the incinerator of fascism? Can you hear the searing of one of the greatest documents of governance ever created by man as it goes up in flames thanks to the kerosene thrown at it by American corporatists in power, its ashes slowly scattering into the realm of nothingness?
Can you see, if not blinded by tele-trash and infotainment, by the propaganda we call news, by the lies and deceit and censorship of the corporate media, by the comforting glow of television, by the charade that is American democracy and by the myriad distractions of bread and circus, the approaching finality of American liberty and freedom, soon to be replaced by Big Brother, a surveillance society, a police state and full-fledged corporatism?
Can you sense the growing momentum of militarism and imperialism rampaging across the nation, and the globe, leaving nothing but hatred and animosity in its wake? Can you sense that imperialism and empire abroad and freedom and democracy at home are mutually exclusive, that to attain the former the latter must be sacrificed, and that inevitably the people must, for imperialism to function, be immersed in tyranny? Do you realize that we are one major shock, one major event away from catapulting our lives into the headwaters of an altogether different America?......
LINK
Saturday, February 02, 2008
Move-On Has Gone Mainstream by Supporting Obama
It seems with each passing day my Progressive world keeps getting smaller and smaller. We watched John Edwards drop out of the race days before “Super Tuesday” (and I’m suspicious about that), and today I asked Move-On to unsubscribe me from their mailing list which actually pained me because I was very involved with Move-On here in Greenville. I am going to miss working with some of the people I have met here, but I’m sure that we will see each other during other Progressive projects here.
The reason I can no longer support Move-On is for the endorsement that they handed to Senator Obama. I have a problem with Obama because of his campaign financing. I find it very difficult to believe that he is an “agent of change” when he openly takes money from the very industries and corporations that have been at the heart of this country’s change from a representative Republic to a corporate oligarchy. In Senator Obama’s list of donors is a line-up of the majority of corporations that make up the “military industrial complex”. This may not be an issue for many, but for me, it is a tragedy of great consequence. I don’t support and will not support another politician that is obligated to the same corporate boards that are supporting free trade alliances that promote outsourcing of American jobs overseas, fighting regulation by the Federal Government, and accepting subsidies from the Federal Government on each gallon of gas sold in America.
LINK
It seems with each passing day my Progressive world keeps getting smaller and smaller. We watched John Edwards drop out of the race days before “Super Tuesday” (and I’m suspicious about that), and today I asked Move-On to unsubscribe me from their mailing list which actually pained me because I was very involved with Move-On here in Greenville. I am going to miss working with some of the people I have met here, but I’m sure that we will see each other during other Progressive projects here.
The reason I can no longer support Move-On is for the endorsement that they handed to Senator Obama. I have a problem with Obama because of his campaign financing. I find it very difficult to believe that he is an “agent of change” when he openly takes money from the very industries and corporations that have been at the heart of this country’s change from a representative Republic to a corporate oligarchy. In Senator Obama’s list of donors is a line-up of the majority of corporations that make up the “military industrial complex”. This may not be an issue for many, but for me, it is a tragedy of great consequence. I don’t support and will not support another politician that is obligated to the same corporate boards that are supporting free trade alliances that promote outsourcing of American jobs overseas, fighting regulation by the Federal Government, and accepting subsidies from the Federal Government on each gallon of gas sold in America.
LINK
Christian Right Gets Its Way: "In God We Trust" Will Have Prominence on New Coin
Church and State.
Responding to complaints from the Religious Right, Congress has passed legislation mandating that the phrase "In God We Trust" be moved from the edge to the back or front of the new presidential dollar coins.
President George W. Bush signed the measure into law Dec. 26. It was tucked into a $555 billion domestic spending bill after having been pushed by U.S. Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.). Brownback and other Religious Right conservatives have been complaining about the new coins since the series started last year.
The U.S. Mint has been releasing gold-colored dollars honoring each non-living U.S. president. Four coins are released per year. The first four coins, honoring George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, were issued in 2007.
Under a mandate from Congress, the Mint was required to place the national mottos "In God We Trust" and "E Pluribus Unum" along the edge of the coins. The idea was to allow for more dramatic portraits on the obverses of the coins and better art elements on the reverses.
LINK
Church and State.
Responding to complaints from the Religious Right, Congress has passed legislation mandating that the phrase "In God We Trust" be moved from the edge to the back or front of the new presidential dollar coins.
President George W. Bush signed the measure into law Dec. 26. It was tucked into a $555 billion domestic spending bill after having been pushed by U.S. Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.). Brownback and other Religious Right conservatives have been complaining about the new coins since the series started last year.
The U.S. Mint has been releasing gold-colored dollars honoring each non-living U.S. president. Four coins are released per year. The first four coins, honoring George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, were issued in 2007.
Under a mandate from Congress, the Mint was required to place the national mottos "In God We Trust" and "E Pluribus Unum" along the edge of the coins. The idea was to allow for more dramatic portraits on the obverses of the coins and better art elements on the reverses.
LINK
Population growth is a threat. But it pales against the greed of the rich
by George Monbiot
It’s easy to blame the poor for growing pressure on the world’s resources. But still the wealthy west takes the lion’s share. I cannot avoid the subject any longer. Almost every day I receive a clutch of emails about it, asking the same question. A frightening new report has just pushed it up the political agenda: for the first time the World Food Programme is struggling to find the supplies it needs for emergency famine relief. So why, like most environmentalists, won’t I mention the p-word? According to its most vociferous proponents (Paul and Anne Ehrlich), population is “our number one environmental problem”. But most greens will not discuss it.
Is this sensitivity or is it cowardice? Perhaps a bit of both. Population growth has always been politically charged, and always the fault of someone else. Seldom has the complaint been heard that “people like us are breeding too fast”. For the prosperous clergyman Thomas Malthus, writing in 1798, the problem arose from the fecklessness of the labouring classes. Through the 19th and early 20th centuries, eugenicists warned that white people would be outbred. In rich nations in the 1970s the issue was over-emphasised, as it is the one environmental problem for which poor nations are largely to blame. But the question still needs to be answered. Is population really our number one environmental problem?
LINK
by George Monbiot
It’s easy to blame the poor for growing pressure on the world’s resources. But still the wealthy west takes the lion’s share. I cannot avoid the subject any longer. Almost every day I receive a clutch of emails about it, asking the same question. A frightening new report has just pushed it up the political agenda: for the first time the World Food Programme is struggling to find the supplies it needs for emergency famine relief. So why, like most environmentalists, won’t I mention the p-word? According to its most vociferous proponents (Paul and Anne Ehrlich), population is “our number one environmental problem”. But most greens will not discuss it.
Is this sensitivity or is it cowardice? Perhaps a bit of both. Population growth has always been politically charged, and always the fault of someone else. Seldom has the complaint been heard that “people like us are breeding too fast”. For the prosperous clergyman Thomas Malthus, writing in 1798, the problem arose from the fecklessness of the labouring classes. Through the 19th and early 20th centuries, eugenicists warned that white people would be outbred. In rich nations in the 1970s the issue was over-emphasised, as it is the one environmental problem for which poor nations are largely to blame. But the question still needs to be answered. Is population really our number one environmental problem?
LINK
(Very good but go to any African country and it is very differnt situation)
Motivated by a Tax, Irish Spurn Plastic Bags
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
DUBLIN — There is something missing from this otherwise typical bustling cityscape. There are taxis and buses. There are hip bars and pollution. Every other person is talking into a cellphone. But there are no plastic shopping bags, the ubiquitous symbol of urban life.
In 2002, Ireland passed a tax on plastic bags; customers who want them must now pay 33 cents per bag at the register. There was an advertising awareness campaign. And then something happened that was bigger than the sum of these parts.
Within weeks, plastic bag use dropped 94 percent. Within a year, nearly everyone had bought reusable cloth bags, keeping them in offices and in the backs of cars. Plastic bags were not outlawed, but carrying them became socially unacceptable — on a par with wearing a fur coat or not cleaning up after one’s dog.
“When my roommate brings one in the flat it annoys the hell out of me,” said Edel Egan, a photographer, carrying groceries last week in a red backpack.
Drowning in a sea of plastic bags, countries from China to Australia, cities from San Francisco to New York have in the past year adopted a flurry of laws and regulations to address the problem, so far with mixed success. The New York City Council, for example, in the face of stiff resistance from business interests, passed a measure requiring only that stores that hand out plastic bags take them back for recycling.
LINK
Motivated by a Tax, Irish Spurn Plastic Bags
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
DUBLIN — There is something missing from this otherwise typical bustling cityscape. There are taxis and buses. There are hip bars and pollution. Every other person is talking into a cellphone. But there are no plastic shopping bags, the ubiquitous symbol of urban life.
In 2002, Ireland passed a tax on plastic bags; customers who want them must now pay 33 cents per bag at the register. There was an advertising awareness campaign. And then something happened that was bigger than the sum of these parts.
Within weeks, plastic bag use dropped 94 percent. Within a year, nearly everyone had bought reusable cloth bags, keeping them in offices and in the backs of cars. Plastic bags were not outlawed, but carrying them became socially unacceptable — on a par with wearing a fur coat or not cleaning up after one’s dog.
“When my roommate brings one in the flat it annoys the hell out of me,” said Edel Egan, a photographer, carrying groceries last week in a red backpack.
Drowning in a sea of plastic bags, countries from China to Australia, cities from San Francisco to New York have in the past year adopted a flurry of laws and regulations to address the problem, so far with mixed success. The New York City Council, for example, in the face of stiff resistance from business interests, passed a measure requiring only that stores that hand out plastic bags take them back for recycling.
LINK
Friday, February 01, 2008
The Evolution of Evil
Plutocracy Controls Politics By Joel Hirschhorn
Activists and dissidents should understand that evil forces and tyrannical governments have evolved. Just as human knowledge and science expand, so do the strategies and instruments used by rulers, elites and plutocrats. By learning from history and using new technology they have smarter tools of tyranny. The best ones prevent uprisings, revolutions and political reforms. Rather than violently destroy rebellious movements, they let them survive as marginalized and ineffective efforts that divert and sap the energy of nonconformist and rebellious thinkers. Real revolution remains an energy-draining dream, as evil forces thrive.
Most corrupt and legally sanctioned forms of tyranny hide in plain sight as democracies with free elections. The toughest lesson is that ALL elections are distractions. Nothing conceals tyranny better than elections. Few Americans accept that their government has become a two-party plutocracy run by a rich and powerful ruling class. The steady erosion of the rule of law is masked by everyday consumer freedoms. Because people want to be happy and hopeful, we have an epidemic of denial, especially in the present presidential campaign. But to believe that any change-selling politician or shift in party control will overturn the ruling class is the epitome of self-delusion and false hope. In the end, such wishful thinking perpetuates plutocracy. Proof is that plutocracy has flourished despite repeated change agents, promises of reform and partisan shifts.
The tools of real rebellion are weak. Activists and dissidents look back and see successful rebellions and revolutions and think that when today's victims of tyranny experience enough pain and see enough political stink they too will revolt. This is wrong. They think that the Internet spreads information and inspiration to the masses, motivating them to revolt. This is wrong. They await catastrophic economic or environmental collapse to spur rebellion. This too is wrong........
LINK......
Plutocracy Controls Politics By Joel Hirschhorn
Activists and dissidents should understand that evil forces and tyrannical governments have evolved. Just as human knowledge and science expand, so do the strategies and instruments used by rulers, elites and plutocrats. By learning from history and using new technology they have smarter tools of tyranny. The best ones prevent uprisings, revolutions and political reforms. Rather than violently destroy rebellious movements, they let them survive as marginalized and ineffective efforts that divert and sap the energy of nonconformist and rebellious thinkers. Real revolution remains an energy-draining dream, as evil forces thrive.
Most corrupt and legally sanctioned forms of tyranny hide in plain sight as democracies with free elections. The toughest lesson is that ALL elections are distractions. Nothing conceals tyranny better than elections. Few Americans accept that their government has become a two-party plutocracy run by a rich and powerful ruling class. The steady erosion of the rule of law is masked by everyday consumer freedoms. Because people want to be happy and hopeful, we have an epidemic of denial, especially in the present presidential campaign. But to believe that any change-selling politician or shift in party control will overturn the ruling class is the epitome of self-delusion and false hope. In the end, such wishful thinking perpetuates plutocracy. Proof is that plutocracy has flourished despite repeated change agents, promises of reform and partisan shifts.
The tools of real rebellion are weak. Activists and dissidents look back and see successful rebellions and revolutions and think that when today's victims of tyranny experience enough pain and see enough political stink they too will revolt. This is wrong. They think that the Internet spreads information and inspiration to the masses, motivating them to revolt. This is wrong. They await catastrophic economic or environmental collapse to spur rebellion. This too is wrong........
LINK......
Is DDT Making a Comeback?
By Kim Larsen, OnEarth Magazine.
Only three of the 20-odd beds at Mbita District Hospital are occupied. This surprises me. After all, we are in the heart of an impoverished, malaria-ravaged region, on the shores of Lake Victoria along Kenya's remote western border. When I ask a medical assistant if it's unusual for the ward to be so sparsely populated, he laughs grimly. "In two or three weeks we will have several patients to a bed, with more on the floor," he explains. "We'll be turning people away." Here's why: malaria infections can occur any day of the year, but surge outbreaks are cyclical, the disease blooming lushly in the wake of a rainy season. It's late June now, and the winter rains are just about spent. Roads, fields, and footpaths are strewn with puddles large and small, ideal breeding sites for the Anopheles gambiae mosquito, malaria's endlessly regenerating delivery system.
Just beyond the hospital walls, battalions of Anopheles gambiae larvae were incubating in their warm, clear, sun-drenched baths. Upon maturity each mosquito, weighing in at a strapping 2.25 millionths of a pound, would fly off in search of sugar, the metabolic fuel provided by certain plants; and then, thus fortified, the female would move on to extract her blood meal, the protein feast that primes her to reproduce. In a matter of days, new malaria patients would begin streaming into the hospital, by foot or in wheelbarrows or splayed across the backs of donkeys, but mostly cradled in their mothers' arms. The immature immune systems of babies and toddlers are particularly vulnerable to the disease, and in this region cerebral malaria -- the deadliest variant, marked by seizures and coma -- is endemic.
Silver bullet, anyone? Vaccine, larvicide, insecticide, bed net, hex? Why should this disease, eradicated in the lucky zones of the world, continue to flourish elsewhere, in unlucky places like Mbita?
LINK.....
By Kim Larsen, OnEarth Magazine.
Only three of the 20-odd beds at Mbita District Hospital are occupied. This surprises me. After all, we are in the heart of an impoverished, malaria-ravaged region, on the shores of Lake Victoria along Kenya's remote western border. When I ask a medical assistant if it's unusual for the ward to be so sparsely populated, he laughs grimly. "In two or three weeks we will have several patients to a bed, with more on the floor," he explains. "We'll be turning people away." Here's why: malaria infections can occur any day of the year, but surge outbreaks are cyclical, the disease blooming lushly in the wake of a rainy season. It's late June now, and the winter rains are just about spent. Roads, fields, and footpaths are strewn with puddles large and small, ideal breeding sites for the Anopheles gambiae mosquito, malaria's endlessly regenerating delivery system.
Just beyond the hospital walls, battalions of Anopheles gambiae larvae were incubating in their warm, clear, sun-drenched baths. Upon maturity each mosquito, weighing in at a strapping 2.25 millionths of a pound, would fly off in search of sugar, the metabolic fuel provided by certain plants; and then, thus fortified, the female would move on to extract her blood meal, the protein feast that primes her to reproduce. In a matter of days, new malaria patients would begin streaming into the hospital, by foot or in wheelbarrows or splayed across the backs of donkeys, but mostly cradled in their mothers' arms. The immature immune systems of babies and toddlers are particularly vulnerable to the disease, and in this region cerebral malaria -- the deadliest variant, marked by seizures and coma -- is endemic.
Silver bullet, anyone? Vaccine, larvicide, insecticide, bed net, hex? Why should this disease, eradicated in the lucky zones of the world, continue to flourish elsewhere, in unlucky places like Mbita?
LINK.....
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Who's Afraid of John Edwards?
Media freezes out a threat to corporate owners
BY TED RALL
In 2004, Democrats were determined to pick the presidential nominee who had the best chance of defeating George W. Bush in the general election. That man was the feisty former governor of Vermont, Howard Dean. One could easily imagine him mercilessly flaying Bush in debates before trouncing Yale's least favorite son in November. Primary voters, mistakenly betting that blandness and moderation would be a better sell, chose John Kerry instead.
The party of Hubert Humphrey and Michael Dukakis seems poised to make the same mistake again, whether with Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. Polls show that two-thirds of Americans think the country is ready for a female or black president. But I'm a glass-third-full guy. When a third of the electorate tells you "we're" not ready for a woman or an African-American commander-in-chief, they really mean that they won't vote for one. John Edwards is more likely to beat Romney or McCain than either of his history-making rivals, just by showing up with pale skin and a Y chromosome.
But even aside from electability, Edwards ought to be the Democratic frontrunner. His populist campaign, bashing corporations and free-trade deals that have led to a decline in wages, seems perfectly timed for an economy everyone admits is in a recession. (In truth, the current downturn began with the 2000-2001 dot-com crash, but whatever.) His platform offers more red meat for the party's liberal base than Clinton's or Obama's: total withdrawal from Iraq in nine months, Euro-style health care, full financial aid for students admitted to public colleges and universities......
LINK.....
Media freezes out a threat to corporate owners
BY TED RALL
In 2004, Democrats were determined to pick the presidential nominee who had the best chance of defeating George W. Bush in the general election. That man was the feisty former governor of Vermont, Howard Dean. One could easily imagine him mercilessly flaying Bush in debates before trouncing Yale's least favorite son in November. Primary voters, mistakenly betting that blandness and moderation would be a better sell, chose John Kerry instead.
The party of Hubert Humphrey and Michael Dukakis seems poised to make the same mistake again, whether with Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. Polls show that two-thirds of Americans think the country is ready for a female or black president. But I'm a glass-third-full guy. When a third of the electorate tells you "we're" not ready for a woman or an African-American commander-in-chief, they really mean that they won't vote for one. John Edwards is more likely to beat Romney or McCain than either of his history-making rivals, just by showing up with pale skin and a Y chromosome.
But even aside from electability, Edwards ought to be the Democratic frontrunner. His populist campaign, bashing corporations and free-trade deals that have led to a decline in wages, seems perfectly timed for an economy everyone admits is in a recession. (In truth, the current downturn began with the 2000-2001 dot-com crash, but whatever.) His platform offers more red meat for the party's liberal base than Clinton's or Obama's: total withdrawal from Iraq in nine months, Euro-style health care, full financial aid for students admitted to public colleges and universities......
LINK.....
They did do nothing to deserve the name, "Americans". Stirling Newberry
Showing that he is untouched by self-reflection, intellectual honesty, or self-doubt, George W. Bush has delivered a hard partisan, nasty and crassly self-promoting state of the union to a Congress. He demanded total acquiescence to his economic, foreign policy and domestic agenda, and high handedly threatened that Congress repeatedly if they did not yield to his every demand. Piling on dog whistle after dog whistle to anti-government and anti-tax zealots, in direct contradiction to being the most free spending executive in post-war history, he threw in the face of that same Congress his own duplicity on the matter. Trillions for corruption, but a few spare pennies for everyone else.
Bush was never a uniter, he was never interested in bi-partisanship, and he was always interested only in imposing his will and vision on America. A series of Congresses, filled with the corrupt and the craven, not merely bent it's knee to the monarchial impulse, but eagerly participated in outrages against the Constitution that Bush now so gaily flaunts only the first three words of.......
LINK
Showing that he is untouched by self-reflection, intellectual honesty, or self-doubt, George W. Bush has delivered a hard partisan, nasty and crassly self-promoting state of the union to a Congress. He demanded total acquiescence to his economic, foreign policy and domestic agenda, and high handedly threatened that Congress repeatedly if they did not yield to his every demand. Piling on dog whistle after dog whistle to anti-government and anti-tax zealots, in direct contradiction to being the most free spending executive in post-war history, he threw in the face of that same Congress his own duplicity on the matter. Trillions for corruption, but a few spare pennies for everyone else.
Bush was never a uniter, he was never interested in bi-partisanship, and he was always interested only in imposing his will and vision on America. A series of Congresses, filled with the corrupt and the craven, not merely bent it's knee to the monarchial impulse, but eagerly participated in outrages against the Constitution that Bush now so gaily flaunts only the first three words of.......
LINK
The 935 lies of George W. Bush
Yes, you already knew. But now they're actually quantifiable. Like, say, stab wounds
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Oh sweet Jesus, someone actually counted.
Two independent nonprofit journalism groups apparently took enough laudanum and beat down whatever healthy sense of human decency they had in order to plunge straight into that quivering mountain of incompetence that is the official record of the Bush administration, all the false quotes and all the lie-strewn press conferences and all the squinty-eyed fabrications from Dubya, Colin Powell, Condi and Cheney and Rummy et al, that took place in the two years after September 11, 2001, and added them all up.
Is it helpful to know the exact number? Does it make a difference? After all, presidential lying isn't exactly a revelation. Pretty much a national pastime, really. Hell, Bill Clinton lied in a harmless civil lawsuit, and was even impeached for it. Of course, his little oral fixation didn't lead us into an unwinnable trillion-dollar war that will scar the nation for multiple generations and which has wasted 4,000 American lives and resulted in tens of thousands of wounded, crippled and brain-damaged U.S. soldiers. But that's just splitting hairs, really.
After all, it's common knowledge that, say, George Bush Sr. lied about Iran-Contra and "read my lips," Ronald Reagan lied like a nasty old rug about Iran and aiding the Contras, Lyndon Johnson lied about the Gulf of Tonkin to gain support for the Vietnam war, Harry Truman probably lied about Hiroshima and John F. Kennedy probably lied about the Bay of Pigs and, well, all presidents lie, really, to some degree or another and with varying degrees of success and historic consequence. Is it not sort of pointless to whine about it?
Fair enough. But there is something truly special about Bush 43. Something so unique, so poisonous and strange that historians are busy right this minute rewriting not only their books, but their entire way of thinking about how we measure and interpret political malfeasance........
LINK
Yes, you already knew. But now they're actually quantifiable. Like, say, stab wounds
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Oh sweet Jesus, someone actually counted.
Two independent nonprofit journalism groups apparently took enough laudanum and beat down whatever healthy sense of human decency they had in order to plunge straight into that quivering mountain of incompetence that is the official record of the Bush administration, all the false quotes and all the lie-strewn press conferences and all the squinty-eyed fabrications from Dubya, Colin Powell, Condi and Cheney and Rummy et al, that took place in the two years after September 11, 2001, and added them all up.
Is it helpful to know the exact number? Does it make a difference? After all, presidential lying isn't exactly a revelation. Pretty much a national pastime, really. Hell, Bill Clinton lied in a harmless civil lawsuit, and was even impeached for it. Of course, his little oral fixation didn't lead us into an unwinnable trillion-dollar war that will scar the nation for multiple generations and which has wasted 4,000 American lives and resulted in tens of thousands of wounded, crippled and brain-damaged U.S. soldiers. But that's just splitting hairs, really.
After all, it's common knowledge that, say, George Bush Sr. lied about Iran-Contra and "read my lips," Ronald Reagan lied like a nasty old rug about Iran and aiding the Contras, Lyndon Johnson lied about the Gulf of Tonkin to gain support for the Vietnam war, Harry Truman probably lied about Hiroshima and John F. Kennedy probably lied about the Bay of Pigs and, well, all presidents lie, really, to some degree or another and with varying degrees of success and historic consequence. Is it not sort of pointless to whine about it?
Fair enough. But there is something truly special about Bush 43. Something so unique, so poisonous and strange that historians are busy right this minute rewriting not only their books, but their entire way of thinking about how we measure and interpret political malfeasance........
LINK
The Threat of Population Growth Pales Beside the Greed of the Rich
By George Monbiot, Comment Is Free.
I cannot avoid the subject any longer. Almost every day I receive a clutch of emails about it, asking the same question. A frightening new report has just pushed it up the political agenda: for the first time the World Food Program is struggling to find the supplies it needs for emergency famine relief. So why, like most environmentalists, won't I mention the p-word? According to its most vociferous proponents (Paul and Anne Ehrlich), population is "our number one environmental problem." But most greens will not discuss it.
Is this sensitivity or is it cowardice? Perhaps a bit of both. Population growth has always been politically charged, and always the fault of someone else. Seldom has the complaint been heard that "people like us are breeding too fast". For the prosperous clergyman Thomas Malthus, writing in 1798, the problem arose from the fecklessness of the laboring classes. Through the 19th and early 20th centuries, eugenicists warned that white people would be outbred. In rich nations in the 1970s the issue was over-emphasized, as it is the one environmental problem for which poor nations are largely to blame. But the question still needs to be answered. Is population really our number one environmental problem?
The Optimum Population Trust (OPT) cites some shocking figures, produced by the UN. They show that if the global population keeps growing at its current rate, it will reach 134 trillion by 2300. But this is plainly absurd: no one expects it to happen. In 2005, the UN estimated that the world's population will more or less stabilize in 2200 at 10 billion. But a paper published in Nature last week suggests that there is an 88 percent chance that global population growth will end during this century......
LINK
By George Monbiot, Comment Is Free.
I cannot avoid the subject any longer. Almost every day I receive a clutch of emails about it, asking the same question. A frightening new report has just pushed it up the political agenda: for the first time the World Food Program is struggling to find the supplies it needs for emergency famine relief. So why, like most environmentalists, won't I mention the p-word? According to its most vociferous proponents (Paul and Anne Ehrlich), population is "our number one environmental problem." But most greens will not discuss it.
Is this sensitivity or is it cowardice? Perhaps a bit of both. Population growth has always been politically charged, and always the fault of someone else. Seldom has the complaint been heard that "people like us are breeding too fast". For the prosperous clergyman Thomas Malthus, writing in 1798, the problem arose from the fecklessness of the laboring classes. Through the 19th and early 20th centuries, eugenicists warned that white people would be outbred. In rich nations in the 1970s the issue was over-emphasized, as it is the one environmental problem for which poor nations are largely to blame. But the question still needs to be answered. Is population really our number one environmental problem?
The Optimum Population Trust (OPT) cites some shocking figures, produced by the UN. They show that if the global population keeps growing at its current rate, it will reach 134 trillion by 2300. But this is plainly absurd: no one expects it to happen. In 2005, the UN estimated that the world's population will more or less stabilize in 2200 at 10 billion. But a paper published in Nature last week suggests that there is an 88 percent chance that global population growth will end during this century......
LINK
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Hillary Clinton: The New Nixon?
By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com.
I'm in Las vegas, at yet another stiflingly full-of-shit Democratic debate, just breaking up now. The show tonight was a new low, with a suddenly cuddlesome troika of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards spending two hours giving each other friendly establishment back rubs while NBC played the Big Brother role, going to court to keep that meddling Dennis Kucinich off the stage. Afterward, the first flack to waddle into the spin cave is Mark Penn, Clinton's chief mouthpiece, one of Washington's most depraved and expensive lobbyist-whores.
Penn is the Democratic version of Karl Rove. He even looks like Rove, only he's fatter and more disgusting. Up close in a forum like this, his eyes bulge out of his fat, blood-flushed head; his neck spills out of his too-tight shirt collar; and he generally looks like Jabba the Hutt, his suit bursting at the seams, with only the bowl of snackable live toads suspended at arm's length missing from the picture.
After Obama's win in Iowa, everyone familiar with the Clintons and how they operate could have set their watches by the Hillary camp's inevitable decision to start reminding America of the dangers of electing a black teenager on coke. There is now a sudden sense on the campaign trail that the electoral chaos of the last year is a thing of the past, that this race is once again back in the hands of scaly Washington pros like Penn, the whole contest reduced to a series of empty PR ploys on the level of a staged crying fit and a series of back-channel character attacks. The Clintons are back, running things as they always have, with their back-stabbing, inside-baseball mastery, their fanatical, almost religious pursuit of the political fork in the road, their boundless faith in ruthless corporate bagmen of the Penn genus and other such faceless electoral point-shavers.
This all becomes punishingly obvious when Penn, smiling broadly, leans into the hive of spin-room microphones and announces with a straight face that Barack Obama's refusal to describe himself as a "chief operating officer" of the government bureaucracy marks a "critical distinction" in the race.
LINK to rest......
By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com.
I'm in Las vegas, at yet another stiflingly full-of-shit Democratic debate, just breaking up now. The show tonight was a new low, with a suddenly cuddlesome troika of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards spending two hours giving each other friendly establishment back rubs while NBC played the Big Brother role, going to court to keep that meddling Dennis Kucinich off the stage. Afterward, the first flack to waddle into the spin cave is Mark Penn, Clinton's chief mouthpiece, one of Washington's most depraved and expensive lobbyist-whores.
Penn is the Democratic version of Karl Rove. He even looks like Rove, only he's fatter and more disgusting. Up close in a forum like this, his eyes bulge out of his fat, blood-flushed head; his neck spills out of his too-tight shirt collar; and he generally looks like Jabba the Hutt, his suit bursting at the seams, with only the bowl of snackable live toads suspended at arm's length missing from the picture.
After Obama's win in Iowa, everyone familiar with the Clintons and how they operate could have set their watches by the Hillary camp's inevitable decision to start reminding America of the dangers of electing a black teenager on coke. There is now a sudden sense on the campaign trail that the electoral chaos of the last year is a thing of the past, that this race is once again back in the hands of scaly Washington pros like Penn, the whole contest reduced to a series of empty PR ploys on the level of a staged crying fit and a series of back-channel character attacks. The Clintons are back, running things as they always have, with their back-stabbing, inside-baseball mastery, their fanatical, almost religious pursuit of the political fork in the road, their boundless faith in ruthless corporate bagmen of the Penn genus and other such faceless electoral point-shavers.
This all becomes punishingly obvious when Penn, smiling broadly, leans into the hive of spin-room microphones and announces with a straight face that Barack Obama's refusal to describe himself as a "chief operating officer" of the government bureaucracy marks a "critical distinction" in the race.
LINK to rest......
(This article in no way means that I am supporting Obama, I just found it intersting...my vote is still a write in for Edwards or Kuchinich)
Barack in Butte, Montana: Defying Conventional Wisdom About Race and Politics
By Laura Flanders, TheNation.com.
If Barack Obama's South Carolina win was a "black" thing, it's awfully strange how it's going down in Butte. US towns don't come much whiter or more hope-resistant than this battered old Montana mining town. And yet organizers here resonate with his call, not because they think he'll change things here, but because they believe the movement he's inspiring will help them do that work.
It was mid-morning Sunday when I finally flipped open my laptop to watch Obama's South Carolina victory speech. The only other soul in the faded foyer of the once-grand Finlen Hotel was Debbie, the receptionist. Obama's words drew blue-eyed Debbie over. What do you think? I asked. Looking at the crowd, her smile revealed more than a few missing teeth. "That looks like everybody," she said. "That's good."
The Finlen is a lonely place; a 1920s relic perched on a snow-swept slope between stone-cold, closed Victorian banks and bars and the country's biggest toxic Super Fund site. Butte was once the copper capital of the world (and the most unionized town in the US) but the swag and smut of the 1880s is long gone and Butte's as broken now as the bones of its best-known 20th century export -- Evel Knievel. And even he is dead.
LINK to rest......
Barack in Butte, Montana: Defying Conventional Wisdom About Race and Politics
By Laura Flanders, TheNation.com.
If Barack Obama's South Carolina win was a "black" thing, it's awfully strange how it's going down in Butte. US towns don't come much whiter or more hope-resistant than this battered old Montana mining town. And yet organizers here resonate with his call, not because they think he'll change things here, but because they believe the movement he's inspiring will help them do that work.
It was mid-morning Sunday when I finally flipped open my laptop to watch Obama's South Carolina victory speech. The only other soul in the faded foyer of the once-grand Finlen Hotel was Debbie, the receptionist. Obama's words drew blue-eyed Debbie over. What do you think? I asked. Looking at the crowd, her smile revealed more than a few missing teeth. "That looks like everybody," she said. "That's good."
The Finlen is a lonely place; a 1920s relic perched on a snow-swept slope between stone-cold, closed Victorian banks and bars and the country's biggest toxic Super Fund site. Butte was once the copper capital of the world (and the most unionized town in the US) but the swag and smut of the 1880s is long gone and Butte's as broken now as the bones of its best-known 20th century export -- Evel Knievel. And even he is dead.
LINK to rest......
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
What's Happened to John Edwards by Plaid Adder
have not been around the primaries much because, as I said in my last post here, I find the whole thing depressing. I am particularly annoyed by the minute attention being paid by the media to the Clinton and Obama campaigns' interactions, and who said what about whom and who needs to apologize. If these people think that by dissecting a comment Bill Clinton made about Jesse Jackson for evidence of possible racial bias they are in any way furthering the cause of racial equality, they are more deluded than I thought they were. Racial inequality is perpetuated in this country by a number of bedrock economic injustices that neither Obama nor Clinton is talking about addressing, and although it would be nice if we could train everyone to be polite to each other, that by itself will never eradicate racial inequality.
Strangely, the only candidate coming at all close to addressing these issues is John Edwards--because he's taking on class, and not just race or gender. But since the MSM is really giving him no air time whatsoever, and since I no longer have the time to go digging through LBN like I used to, I really don't know too much about the specifics he's proposing. But let me tell you what, from my point of view, is really wrong with this country, the electorate, and in particular this primary race:
We can talk about race, we can talk about gender. But in general, as a society, we cannot talk about money or class. We do not have the vocabulary, the concepts, or--and here I'm talking about the Democratic party elite and their two front-runners--the courage.
The first problem you encounter when you try to talk about class is that most of the people you try to talk to will tell you it doesn't exist--at least not in America. The second problem is that to the extent that people know and use the term "class," it is to describe themselves as "middle class." If you listen to Americans on the subject you would get the idea that they live in a country that's 100% middle class, with no upper or lower. All politicians ever talk about is doing things for the middle class. The closest anyone ever gets to uttering the words "working class" is "working families," as if the work "worker" is so scary it cannot be uttered unless it is immediately domesticated by the word "family." And of course a lot of things are actually done to benefit the rich; but no politician ever admits in public that they work for "the rich." All this capital-gains stuff somehow benefits "the middle class," even though large chunks of "the middle class" have never come near a stock portfolio.
But class divisions in this country are deep, and they are harder to bridge than any other kind. Their causes are not obvious and their remedies are neither clear nor easy. But I'll tell you, when you start raising a kid for the first time, you start to notice these things a lot more.
LINK.....to rest of the article
have not been around the primaries much because, as I said in my last post here, I find the whole thing depressing. I am particularly annoyed by the minute attention being paid by the media to the Clinton and Obama campaigns' interactions, and who said what about whom and who needs to apologize. If these people think that by dissecting a comment Bill Clinton made about Jesse Jackson for evidence of possible racial bias they are in any way furthering the cause of racial equality, they are more deluded than I thought they were. Racial inequality is perpetuated in this country by a number of bedrock economic injustices that neither Obama nor Clinton is talking about addressing, and although it would be nice if we could train everyone to be polite to each other, that by itself will never eradicate racial inequality.
Strangely, the only candidate coming at all close to addressing these issues is John Edwards--because he's taking on class, and not just race or gender. But since the MSM is really giving him no air time whatsoever, and since I no longer have the time to go digging through LBN like I used to, I really don't know too much about the specifics he's proposing. But let me tell you what, from my point of view, is really wrong with this country, the electorate, and in particular this primary race:
We can talk about race, we can talk about gender. But in general, as a society, we cannot talk about money or class. We do not have the vocabulary, the concepts, or--and here I'm talking about the Democratic party elite and their two front-runners--the courage.
The first problem you encounter when you try to talk about class is that most of the people you try to talk to will tell you it doesn't exist--at least not in America. The second problem is that to the extent that people know and use the term "class," it is to describe themselves as "middle class." If you listen to Americans on the subject you would get the idea that they live in a country that's 100% middle class, with no upper or lower. All politicians ever talk about is doing things for the middle class. The closest anyone ever gets to uttering the words "working class" is "working families," as if the work "worker" is so scary it cannot be uttered unless it is immediately domesticated by the word "family." And of course a lot of things are actually done to benefit the rich; but no politician ever admits in public that they work for "the rich." All this capital-gains stuff somehow benefits "the middle class," even though large chunks of "the middle class" have never come near a stock portfolio.
But class divisions in this country are deep, and they are harder to bridge than any other kind. Their causes are not obvious and their remedies are neither clear nor easy. But I'll tell you, when you start raising a kid for the first time, you start to notice these things a lot more.
LINK.....to rest of the article
The Man Who Learned Too Little
In his final State of the Union, Bush makes more empty promises.
By Fred Kaplan
The sad thing about President George W. Bush's final State of the Union address is that he seems to have learned so little about the crises in which he's immersed his nation so deeply.
His first words on foreign policy in tonight's address reprised the theme of previous addresses: "We trust that people, when given the chance, will choose a future of freedom and peace." He cited, as "stirring" examples of this principle, the "images" of citizens demanding independence in Ukraine and Lebanon, of Afghans emerging from the Taliban's tyranny, of "jubilant Iraqis holding up ink-stained fingers" to celebrate free elections.
One waited for the president to invoke the lamentable flip side of these images, the retreats and retrenchments that followed (perhaps the "challenges" ahead?)—but he didn't. Is he still living in the dream world of the spring of 2004? It's a pleasant world, but it had gone up in smoke by that summer. If we were truly serious about promoting freedom, it would be useful to explore the lessons of those hopes as they were not only stirred but then crushed. As with his previous State of the Union addresses, this was not seen as a time to face reality.
LINK....
In his final State of the Union, Bush makes more empty promises.
By Fred Kaplan
The sad thing about President George W. Bush's final State of the Union address is that he seems to have learned so little about the crises in which he's immersed his nation so deeply.
His first words on foreign policy in tonight's address reprised the theme of previous addresses: "We trust that people, when given the chance, will choose a future of freedom and peace." He cited, as "stirring" examples of this principle, the "images" of citizens demanding independence in Ukraine and Lebanon, of Afghans emerging from the Taliban's tyranny, of "jubilant Iraqis holding up ink-stained fingers" to celebrate free elections.
One waited for the president to invoke the lamentable flip side of these images, the retreats and retrenchments that followed (perhaps the "challenges" ahead?)—but he didn't. Is he still living in the dream world of the spring of 2004? It's a pleasant world, but it had gone up in smoke by that summer. If we were truly serious about promoting freedom, it would be useful to explore the lessons of those hopes as they were not only stirred but then crushed. As with his previous State of the Union addresses, this was not seen as a time to face reality.
LINK....
$100 Billion and Counting: How Wall Street Blew Itself up
By Pam Martens, CounterPunch.
The massive losses by big Wall Street firms, now topping those of the Great Depression in relative terms, have yet to be adequately explained. Wall Street power players are obfuscating and Congress is too embarrassed or frightened to ask, preferring to just throw money at the problem and hope it goes away. But as job losses and foreclosures mount and pensions and 401(k)s shrink, public policy measures to address the economic stresses require a full set of unembellished facts.
The proof that Wall Street is giving mainstream media a stage-managed version of what went wrong begins with a strange revelation by Gary Crittenden, CFO of Citigroup, on the November 5, 2007 conference call where he discusses what have now become the largest losses in the firm's 196-year history. Mr. Crittenden is asked by an analyst why the firm didn't hedge its risk. Here's his response:
"I mean I think it is a very fair question ... we are the largest player in this [collateralized debt obligation; CDO] business and given that we are the largest player in the business, reducing the book by half and then putting on what at the time was three times more hedges than we had ever had at least in our recent history, seemed to be very aggressive actions given that we were a major manufacturer of this product ... once this [decline in values] process started ... the size was simply not there. The market is simply not there to do it in size in any way and it would have been uneconomic to do it."
What Mr. Crittenden really seems to be saying is that Wall Street, with Citigroup leading the pack, built a vast market of complex securities but neglected to put in place a liquid and efficient marketplace for hedging this risk. Say, for example, big, liquid, exchange traded indices and futures contracts that are routinely used to hedge everything from stocks to soy beans to crude oil by as diverse a group as Iowa farmers to Saudi princes.
LINK.....
By Pam Martens, CounterPunch.
The massive losses by big Wall Street firms, now topping those of the Great Depression in relative terms, have yet to be adequately explained. Wall Street power players are obfuscating and Congress is too embarrassed or frightened to ask, preferring to just throw money at the problem and hope it goes away. But as job losses and foreclosures mount and pensions and 401(k)s shrink, public policy measures to address the economic stresses require a full set of unembellished facts.
The proof that Wall Street is giving mainstream media a stage-managed version of what went wrong begins with a strange revelation by Gary Crittenden, CFO of Citigroup, on the November 5, 2007 conference call where he discusses what have now become the largest losses in the firm's 196-year history. Mr. Crittenden is asked by an analyst why the firm didn't hedge its risk. Here's his response:
"I mean I think it is a very fair question ... we are the largest player in this [collateralized debt obligation; CDO] business and given that we are the largest player in the business, reducing the book by half and then putting on what at the time was three times more hedges than we had ever had at least in our recent history, seemed to be very aggressive actions given that we were a major manufacturer of this product ... once this [decline in values] process started ... the size was simply not there. The market is simply not there to do it in size in any way and it would have been uneconomic to do it."
What Mr. Crittenden really seems to be saying is that Wall Street, with Citigroup leading the pack, built a vast market of complex securities but neglected to put in place a liquid and efficient marketplace for hedging this risk. Say, for example, big, liquid, exchange traded indices and futures contracts that are routinely used to hedge everything from stocks to soy beans to crude oil by as diverse a group as Iowa farmers to Saudi princes.
LINK.....
Monday, January 28, 2008
Saturday, January 26, 2008
Caught with a Bag of Weed? It Could Cost You More Than You Think
By Paul Armentano, AlterNet.
What's the current price for a bag of weed? According to the latest figures from the FBI, the human cost is roughly 739,000 a year.
That's the number of American citizens arrested in 2006 for possessing small amounts of pot. (Another 91,000 were charged with marijuana-related felonies.) The figure is the highest annual total ever recorded, and is nearly double the number of citizens busted for pot fifteen years ago.
Those arrested face a multitude of consequences, primarily determined by where they live. For example, most Californians charged with violating the state's pot possession laws face little more than a small fine. By contrast, getting busted with a pinch of weed in Ohio will cost you your driver's license for at least six months. Move to Texas -- well, now you're looking at a criminal record and up to 180 days in jail. Or if you happen to be a first-time offender, possibly a stint in court-mandated 'drug rehab' (one recent study reported that nearly 70 percent of all adults referred to Texas drug treatment programs for weed were referred by the courts), probation, and a hefty legal bill. And don't even think about getting busted in Oklahoma, where a first time conviction for minor pot possession can net you up to one year in jail, or up to ten years if you're found guilty of a second offense. Thinking of growing your own? That'll cost you a $20,000 fine, and -- oh yeah -- anywhere from two years to life in prison.
Yes, you read that right -- life in prison.
LINK
By Paul Armentano, AlterNet.
What's the current price for a bag of weed? According to the latest figures from the FBI, the human cost is roughly 739,000 a year.
That's the number of American citizens arrested in 2006 for possessing small amounts of pot. (Another 91,000 were charged with marijuana-related felonies.) The figure is the highest annual total ever recorded, and is nearly double the number of citizens busted for pot fifteen years ago.
Those arrested face a multitude of consequences, primarily determined by where they live. For example, most Californians charged with violating the state's pot possession laws face little more than a small fine. By contrast, getting busted with a pinch of weed in Ohio will cost you your driver's license for at least six months. Move to Texas -- well, now you're looking at a criminal record and up to 180 days in jail. Or if you happen to be a first-time offender, possibly a stint in court-mandated 'drug rehab' (one recent study reported that nearly 70 percent of all adults referred to Texas drug treatment programs for weed were referred by the courts), probation, and a hefty legal bill. And don't even think about getting busted in Oklahoma, where a first time conviction for minor pot possession can net you up to one year in jail, or up to ten years if you're found guilty of a second offense. Thinking of growing your own? That'll cost you a $20,000 fine, and -- oh yeah -- anywhere from two years to life in prison.
Yes, you read that right -- life in prison.
LINK
Friday, January 25, 2008
Give Them Death: Three Leading Democratic Candidates Support Capital Punishment
By Liliana Segura, AlterNet.
When Clinton, Obama and Edwards took the stage before a mostly African-American crowd in Myrtle Beach, S.C., on Monday night, they came brimming with concern for the plight of black America. From the disproportionate effects of the subprime loan crisis to the racially drawn pitfalls of U.S. healthcare, the black community, said Edwards, "is hurt worse by poverty than any community in America. And it's our responsibility, not just for the African-American community, but for America, as a nation, to take on this moral challenge."
Politicians like to see moral challenges when it's convenient. The candidates have labeled the war in Iraq, global warming and the economy "moral challenges" before various audiences in the past few months. But there's one topic the leading Dems systematically exclude from their morality crusade, one that begged to be addressed before an African-American audience in a Southern state: the death penalty.
It's not news that African-Americans are disproportionately represented on death row. While 12 percent of the country is African-American, more than 40 percent of the country's death row population is black -- and although blacks and whites are murder victims in nearly equal numbers, 80 percent of the prisoners executed since the death penalty was reinstated were convicted for murders in which the victim was white. Study upon study in states across the country have discovered racial bias at every stage of the death penalty process, including one that found that the more "stereotypically black" a defendant is perceived to be, the more likely that person is to be sentenced to death. Add to that the fact that over 20 percent of black defendants who have been executed were convicted by all-white juries, and the racial reality of the death penalty becomes impossible to ignore.
LINK
By Liliana Segura, AlterNet.
When Clinton, Obama and Edwards took the stage before a mostly African-American crowd in Myrtle Beach, S.C., on Monday night, they came brimming with concern for the plight of black America. From the disproportionate effects of the subprime loan crisis to the racially drawn pitfalls of U.S. healthcare, the black community, said Edwards, "is hurt worse by poverty than any community in America. And it's our responsibility, not just for the African-American community, but for America, as a nation, to take on this moral challenge."
Politicians like to see moral challenges when it's convenient. The candidates have labeled the war in Iraq, global warming and the economy "moral challenges" before various audiences in the past few months. But there's one topic the leading Dems systematically exclude from their morality crusade, one that begged to be addressed before an African-American audience in a Southern state: the death penalty.
It's not news that African-Americans are disproportionately represented on death row. While 12 percent of the country is African-American, more than 40 percent of the country's death row population is black -- and although blacks and whites are murder victims in nearly equal numbers, 80 percent of the prisoners executed since the death penalty was reinstated were convicted for murders in which the victim was white. Study upon study in states across the country have discovered racial bias at every stage of the death penalty process, including one that found that the more "stereotypically black" a defendant is perceived to be, the more likely that person is to be sentenced to death. Add to that the fact that over 20 percent of black defendants who have been executed were convicted by all-white juries, and the racial reality of the death penalty becomes impossible to ignore.
LINK
Why Bush Wants to Legalize the Nuke Trade with Turkey
Exonerating Neocon Criminals
by Joshua Frank / January 25th, 2008
According to FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds there is a vast black market for nukes, and certain U.S. officials have been supplying sensitive nuclear technology information to Turkish and Israeli interests through its conduits. It’s a scathing allegation which was first published by the London Times two weeks ago, and Edmonds’ charge seems to be on the verge of vindication.
In likely reaction to the London Times report, the Bush Administration quietly announced on January 22 that the president would like Congress to approve the sale of nuclear secrets to Turkey. As with most stories of this magnitude, the U.S. media has put on blinders, opting to not report either Edmonds’ story or Bush’s recent announcement.
LINK
Exonerating Neocon Criminals
by Joshua Frank / January 25th, 2008
According to FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds there is a vast black market for nukes, and certain U.S. officials have been supplying sensitive nuclear technology information to Turkish and Israeli interests through its conduits. It’s a scathing allegation which was first published by the London Times two weeks ago, and Edmonds’ charge seems to be on the verge of vindication.
In likely reaction to the London Times report, the Bush Administration quietly announced on January 22 that the president would like Congress to approve the sale of nuclear secrets to Turkey. As with most stories of this magnitude, the U.S. media has put on blinders, opting to not report either Edmonds’ story or Bush’s recent announcement.
LINK
UCS Position Paper: Pharmaceutical and Industrial Crops
Most of the genetically engineered (GE) crops currently on the market are food or feed crops that have been modified for agronomic purposes—to better repel pests or to be compatible with chemical pesticides. A new generation of crops is now being modified for different purposes—to produce medicines or industrial compounds such as plastics. Many of these substances are being produced in corn and other food crops visually indistinguishable from their non-industrial counterparts. Contamination of food crops with drugs or industrial chemicals could occur through seed mixing and cross-pollination. The potential contamination of food crops with the hundreds, if not thousands, of drugs or industrial compounds promised by this industry poses new and serious risks to the safety of the food system. Pharmaceutical and industrial compounds also pose potentially serious risks if released into the environment.
This paper details the position of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) regarding federal policy on crops genetically engineered to produce pharmaceutical and industrial compounds. After careful analysis, we have concluded that current U. S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) regulations governing such crops, although stronger than they have been in the past, are still insufficiently stringent to assure the complete protection of the food supply in the United States. Moreover, the routes of contamination in existing commodity crop production systems are so numerous that even very strong regulatory systems may not be sufficient to prevent the contamination of the food system with crops genetically engineered to produce pharmaceutical and industrial compounds. Although it may be theoretically possible to design an adequate regulatory system, we believe it would be too complex to be implemented effectively by the USDA, the federal agency with primary authority over GE pharmaceutical and industrial crops.
LINK
Most of the genetically engineered (GE) crops currently on the market are food or feed crops that have been modified for agronomic purposes—to better repel pests or to be compatible with chemical pesticides. A new generation of crops is now being modified for different purposes—to produce medicines or industrial compounds such as plastics. Many of these substances are being produced in corn and other food crops visually indistinguishable from their non-industrial counterparts. Contamination of food crops with drugs or industrial chemicals could occur through seed mixing and cross-pollination. The potential contamination of food crops with the hundreds, if not thousands, of drugs or industrial compounds promised by this industry poses new and serious risks to the safety of the food system. Pharmaceutical and industrial compounds also pose potentially serious risks if released into the environment.
This paper details the position of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) regarding federal policy on crops genetically engineered to produce pharmaceutical and industrial compounds. After careful analysis, we have concluded that current U. S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) regulations governing such crops, although stronger than they have been in the past, are still insufficiently stringent to assure the complete protection of the food supply in the United States. Moreover, the routes of contamination in existing commodity crop production systems are so numerous that even very strong regulatory systems may not be sufficient to prevent the contamination of the food system with crops genetically engineered to produce pharmaceutical and industrial compounds. Although it may be theoretically possible to design an adequate regulatory system, we believe it would be too complex to be implemented effectively by the USDA, the federal agency with primary authority over GE pharmaceutical and industrial crops.
LINK
Thursday, January 24, 2008
THE LAST MAN WHO COULD HAVE SAVED US!!!! I ve decided that I am still voting for Dennis as a write in.....what the hell, he is who I want and that who I am voting for....this is a democracy!!!
the Repuyblicans put 4 different people in to run against Dennis who
is up for reelection and he had to quit to save his seat in congress
the Repuyblicans put 4 different people in to run against Dennis who
is up for reelection and he had to quit to save his seat in congress
Kucinich Starts New Impeachment Drive
By David M. Herszenhorn
Representative Dennis J. Kucinich of Ohio may get excluded from Democratic presidential debates, as he has been recently, but no one can deny him the floor in the House.
And today Mr. Kucinich took to the floor to fire off his latest salvo at the Bush administration: his plans to introduce Articles of Impeachment against President Bush on Jan. 28 — the day of Mr. Bush’s State of the Union speech.
Accusing the administration of lying about the need for the war in Iraq, Mr. Kucinich said he did not need to hear the president’s
assessment. “We know the State of the Union,” he declared. “It’s a lie.”
He also fired a volley at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California
who has maintained that impeaching Mr. Bush is not on the table for Congressional Democrats. “If impeachment is off the table,” Mr. Kucinich said, “truth is off the table. If truth is off the table
then this body is living a lie.”
Mr. Kucinich introduced Articles of Impeachment against Vice
President Dick Cheney last April and in November, with the surprise help of Republicans seeking to embarrass the Democrats, he nearly succeeded in securing an hour of debate on the House floor. House Democratic leaders blocked that, however, by referring the impeachment effort back to the Judiciary Committee.
Anti-Bush groups have been urging Mr. Kucinich to undertake an
effort to impeach the president.
LINK
By David M. Herszenhorn
Representative Dennis J. Kucinich of Ohio may get excluded from Democratic presidential debates, as he has been recently, but no one can deny him the floor in the House.
And today Mr. Kucinich took to the floor to fire off his latest salvo at the Bush administration: his plans to introduce Articles of Impeachment against President Bush on Jan. 28 — the day of Mr. Bush’s State of the Union speech.
Accusing the administration of lying about the need for the war in Iraq, Mr. Kucinich said he did not need to hear the president’s
assessment. “We know the State of the Union,” he declared. “It’s a lie.”
He also fired a volley at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California
who has maintained that impeaching Mr. Bush is not on the table for Congressional Democrats. “If impeachment is off the table,” Mr. Kucinich said, “truth is off the table. If truth is off the table
then this body is living a lie.”
Mr. Kucinich introduced Articles of Impeachment against Vice
President Dick Cheney last April and in November, with the surprise help of Republicans seeking to embarrass the Democrats, he nearly succeeded in securing an hour of debate on the House floor. House Democratic leaders blocked that, however, by referring the impeachment effort back to the Judiciary Committee.
Anti-Bush groups have been urging Mr. Kucinich to undertake an
effort to impeach the president.
LINK
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
See at a glance where the presidential contenders stand on climate and energy issues
http://grist.org/candidate_chart_08.html
Notice that the only two remaining canidates that oppose Coal and Nuclear are Edwards and Kucinich!!! If only people voted on the issues that are important and not on who looks good, is a women, is black (green, brown, etc.), or a good speaker! All the Republicans are brain washed wack jobs....so a Democrat is better but......we need Dennis Kucinich or if not Edwards!
http://grist.org/candidate_chart_08.html
Notice that the only two remaining canidates that oppose Coal and Nuclear are Edwards and Kucinich!!! If only people voted on the issues that are important and not on who looks good, is a women, is black (green, brown, etc.), or a good speaker! All the Republicans are brain washed wack jobs....so a Democrat is better but......we need Dennis Kucinich or if not Edwards!
False Pretenses
Following 9/11, President Bush and seven top officials of his administration waged a carefully orchestrated campaign of misinformation about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
By Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith
President George W. Bush and seven of his administration's top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.
On at least 532 separate occasions (in speeches, briefings, interviews, testimony, and the like), Bush and these three key officials, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and White House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan, stated unequivocally that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (or was trying to produce or obtain them), links to Al Qaeda, or both. This concerted effort was the underpinning of the Bush administration's case for war.
LINK TO CON.
Following 9/11, President Bush and seven top officials of his administration waged a carefully orchestrated campaign of misinformation about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
By Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith
President George W. Bush and seven of his administration's top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.
On at least 532 separate occasions (in speeches, briefings, interviews, testimony, and the like), Bush and these three key officials, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and White House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan, stated unequivocally that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (or was trying to produce or obtain them), links to Al Qaeda, or both. This concerted effort was the underpinning of the Bush administration's case for war.
LINK TO CON.
On Martha’s Vineyard, Using Scallops as Currency
By JOAN NATHAN
Published: January 23, 2008
FOR year-round residents of this Martha’s Vineyard village, winter is time to relax. In summer, when the island’s population soars from 15,000 to 75,000, locals like Jan Buhrman have to make a year’s living in just a few short months. Ms. Buhrman, who is 50, caters weddings and dinner parties for the seasonal crowd. When winter comes, she tends a local school library, among other jobs, and she cooks.
Even in January, her hours in the kitchen have a purpose. Sitting in the bright oak post-and-beam room built by her husband, Richard Osnoss, a carpenter, Ms. Buhrman explained that she tries to eat only food raised on Martha’s Vineyard and to go down island to the grocery store in Vineyard Haven as little as possible.
Some of her groceries she grows herself. For much of the rest, she trades with her neighbors.
Following Ms. Buhrman for a day or two as she gathers ingredients is a lesson in how to eat locally, even in the coldest days of winter. Because she seems to know everybody on the island who raises, catches or forages for food, it is also a glimpse of an alternative economy of eating, one in which modern capitalism takes a back seat to a looser, island-grown style of bartering.
In summer, for instance, Ms. Buhrman hands out ice from her freezers to help the local fishermen keep their catch cold. In winter, they repay her with fish, oysters and bay scallops.
“It’s just the way we do it here,” she said.
“Swapping and borrowing isn’t institutionalized on the Vineyard,” said Carl Flanders, a fisherman in summer and a carpenter in winter. “If I catch some fish in summer, I’ll sell it to Larsen’s Fish Market but I’ll just give the rest away to friends. I don’t expect anything in return.”
LINK
By JOAN NATHAN
Published: January 23, 2008
FOR year-round residents of this Martha’s Vineyard village, winter is time to relax. In summer, when the island’s population soars from 15,000 to 75,000, locals like Jan Buhrman have to make a year’s living in just a few short months. Ms. Buhrman, who is 50, caters weddings and dinner parties for the seasonal crowd. When winter comes, she tends a local school library, among other jobs, and she cooks.
Even in January, her hours in the kitchen have a purpose. Sitting in the bright oak post-and-beam room built by her husband, Richard Osnoss, a carpenter, Ms. Buhrman explained that she tries to eat only food raised on Martha’s Vineyard and to go down island to the grocery store in Vineyard Haven as little as possible.
Some of her groceries she grows herself. For much of the rest, she trades with her neighbors.
Following Ms. Buhrman for a day or two as she gathers ingredients is a lesson in how to eat locally, even in the coldest days of winter. Because she seems to know everybody on the island who raises, catches or forages for food, it is also a glimpse of an alternative economy of eating, one in which modern capitalism takes a back seat to a looser, island-grown style of bartering.
In summer, for instance, Ms. Buhrman hands out ice from her freezers to help the local fishermen keep their catch cold. In winter, they repay her with fish, oysters and bay scallops.
“It’s just the way we do it here,” she said.
“Swapping and borrowing isn’t institutionalized on the Vineyard,” said Carl Flanders, a fisherman in summer and a carpenter in winter. “If I catch some fish in summer, I’ll sell it to Larsen’s Fish Market but I’ll just give the rest away to friends. I don’t expect anything in return.”
LINK
Who Will Take On the Banks?
By Robert Scheer
It was smart of the top Democrats to cut presidential candidate Rep. Dennis Kucinich out of that South Carolina debate, where they lamely attempted to deal with the dire consequences of the banking meltdown without confronting the banks. They made all the proper concerned noises about millions of folks losing their retirement savings and homes, but none was willing to say what Kucinich would have said: Bankers are crooks who will steal from the public unless the government holds them accountable.
How do I know Kucinich would have said that? Because I interviewed him for the Los Angeles Times back when he was mayor of Cleveland and the banks foreclosed on his city after he refused to sell the public power plant. Others can talk a populist line, but Kucinich lived it. He was forced out of office that time, but voters realized 10 years later that Kucinich had been right. Thanks to the public power alternative that Kucinich refused to sacrifice, Cleveland had cheap power, and he was elected to the Ohio Legislature and then to Congress as his reward.
LINK
By Robert Scheer
It was smart of the top Democrats to cut presidential candidate Rep. Dennis Kucinich out of that South Carolina debate, where they lamely attempted to deal with the dire consequences of the banking meltdown without confronting the banks. They made all the proper concerned noises about millions of folks losing their retirement savings and homes, but none was willing to say what Kucinich would have said: Bankers are crooks who will steal from the public unless the government holds them accountable.
How do I know Kucinich would have said that? Because I interviewed him for the Los Angeles Times back when he was mayor of Cleveland and the banks foreclosed on his city after he refused to sell the public power plant. Others can talk a populist line, but Kucinich lived it. He was forced out of office that time, but voters realized 10 years later that Kucinich had been right. Thanks to the public power alternative that Kucinich refused to sacrifice, Cleveland had cheap power, and he was elected to the Ohio Legislature and then to Congress as his reward.
LINK
Monday, January 21, 2008
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
the legacy remembered,
the message that should not be forgotten
The homage that Americans pay today to the inspiring life and lasting legacy of Dr. King is a fitting tribute to this leader who spoke so eloquently of peace, of social justice, and of equal rights under the law and under the moral covenant that established and guides this great nation. But, as we survey the grim realities of today, across this country and around the world, that rightful homage also has the somber ring of a faint and distant eulogy for a man and a message from another time.
That other time that we remember and honor was then. But, more than ever, it is also now.
In his speech at Riverside Church in New York City, on April 4, 1967, Dr. King spoke of one war that was destroying the aspirations of the people of two nations - the people of the United States and the people of Vietnam.
The Vietnam War resulted in the deaths of 4 million Vietnamese civilians in a nation of about 40 million - 10% of the total population of Vietnam. Americans lost 58,202 soldiers in that war. And in hard, cold numbers, the Vietnam War cost the United States the equivalent of $662 billion in today's dollars.
So far, today, this no-end-in-sight war against Iraq has resulted in the deaths of more than 1 million innocent Iraqis in a nation of 25 million. Four thousand of our best and bravest have died, and nearly 29,000 have been wounded. In hard, cold numbers, the Iraq War will cost the United States more than $2 trillion.
What would Dr. King say today? What would his message be to the President, to the U.S. Congress, and to the American people? It would be, I deeply believe, the same as it was more than 30 years ago: Iraq is a war that is destroying the aspirations of the people of two nations - the people of the United States and the people of Iraq.
And, it was only two years ago that the leadership of the Democratic Party, without invoking Dr. King but aligning itself with the powerful principles that he espoused, promised an end to the abuse of political power and an end to the war that was devastating the people of two nations. And Americans, believing that promise that we would “be free at last” from the policies that morally and economically enslaved this nation and unrepentantly took control of another, elected a new Democratic leadership in the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate.
Tragically, in the two years since, nothing has changed. The policies of this President persist and prevail. The Congress yields and subjugates itself time and time again. And the powerful, righteous, and universal message of Dr. King has been forgotten.
Dr. King's concluding remarks in his Riverside Church speech called for an end to the disintegration of humanity brought about by war: "Somehow this madness must end," he implored.
It is not in our power to bring Dr. King back, but it is within our power to resurrect his spirit in our daily lives and in the policies of the government that we elect to represent and lead us. He demonstrated throughout his entire life that social and economic justice are achieved not through compromising what we believe, but rather, committing to what we believe – whatever the odds.
In this crucial year for the future of our nation and the future of our world, today is the day to remember Dr. King's words, embrace his spirit, and fortify ourselves with the message that he left for us.
It is time, once again, to ask what we can do to forge ahead – in our votes, in our support, and in everything we do -- to reach that place where his words, his strength, and his optimism become more than a legacy. They become the policy and mission of this nation: "Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, I'm free at last."
Dennis Kucinich
the legacy remembered,
the message that should not be forgotten
The homage that Americans pay today to the inspiring life and lasting legacy of Dr. King is a fitting tribute to this leader who spoke so eloquently of peace, of social justice, and of equal rights under the law and under the moral covenant that established and guides this great nation. But, as we survey the grim realities of today, across this country and around the world, that rightful homage also has the somber ring of a faint and distant eulogy for a man and a message from another time.
That other time that we remember and honor was then. But, more than ever, it is also now.
In his speech at Riverside Church in New York City, on April 4, 1967, Dr. King spoke of one war that was destroying the aspirations of the people of two nations - the people of the United States and the people of Vietnam.
The Vietnam War resulted in the deaths of 4 million Vietnamese civilians in a nation of about 40 million - 10% of the total population of Vietnam. Americans lost 58,202 soldiers in that war. And in hard, cold numbers, the Vietnam War cost the United States the equivalent of $662 billion in today's dollars.
So far, today, this no-end-in-sight war against Iraq has resulted in the deaths of more than 1 million innocent Iraqis in a nation of 25 million. Four thousand of our best and bravest have died, and nearly 29,000 have been wounded. In hard, cold numbers, the Iraq War will cost the United States more than $2 trillion.
What would Dr. King say today? What would his message be to the President, to the U.S. Congress, and to the American people? It would be, I deeply believe, the same as it was more than 30 years ago: Iraq is a war that is destroying the aspirations of the people of two nations - the people of the United States and the people of Iraq.
And, it was only two years ago that the leadership of the Democratic Party, without invoking Dr. King but aligning itself with the powerful principles that he espoused, promised an end to the abuse of political power and an end to the war that was devastating the people of two nations. And Americans, believing that promise that we would “be free at last” from the policies that morally and economically enslaved this nation and unrepentantly took control of another, elected a new Democratic leadership in the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate.
Tragically, in the two years since, nothing has changed. The policies of this President persist and prevail. The Congress yields and subjugates itself time and time again. And the powerful, righteous, and universal message of Dr. King has been forgotten.
Dr. King's concluding remarks in his Riverside Church speech called for an end to the disintegration of humanity brought about by war: "Somehow this madness must end," he implored.
It is not in our power to bring Dr. King back, but it is within our power to resurrect his spirit in our daily lives and in the policies of the government that we elect to represent and lead us. He demonstrated throughout his entire life that social and economic justice are achieved not through compromising what we believe, but rather, committing to what we believe – whatever the odds.
In this crucial year for the future of our nation and the future of our world, today is the day to remember Dr. King's words, embrace his spirit, and fortify ourselves with the message that he left for us.
It is time, once again, to ask what we can do to forge ahead – in our votes, in our support, and in everything we do -- to reach that place where his words, his strength, and his optimism become more than a legacy. They become the policy and mission of this nation: "Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, I'm free at last."
Dennis Kucinich
Overseas Investors Buy Aggressively in U.S.
By PETER S. GOODMAN and LOUISE STORY
Last May, a Saudi Arabian conglomerate bought a Massachusetts plastics maker. In November, a French company established a new factory in Adrian, Mich., adding 189 automotive jobs to an area accustomed to layoffs. In December, a British company bought a New Jersey maker of cough syrup.
For much of the world, the United States is now on sale at discount prices. With credit tight, unemployment growing and worries mounting about a potential recession, American business and government leaders are courting foreign money to keep the economy growing. Foreign investors are buying aggressively, taking advantage of American duress and a weak dollar to snap up what many see as bargains, while making inroads to the world’s largest market.
Last year, foreign investors poured a record $414 billion into securing stakes in American companies, factories and other properties through private deals and purchases of publicly traded stock, according to Thomson Financial, a research firm. That was up 90 percent from the previous year and more than double the average for the last decade. It amounted to more than one-fourth of all announced deals for the year, Thomson said.
LINK
By PETER S. GOODMAN and LOUISE STORY
Last May, a Saudi Arabian conglomerate bought a Massachusetts plastics maker. In November, a French company established a new factory in Adrian, Mich., adding 189 automotive jobs to an area accustomed to layoffs. In December, a British company bought a New Jersey maker of cough syrup.
For much of the world, the United States is now on sale at discount prices. With credit tight, unemployment growing and worries mounting about a potential recession, American business and government leaders are courting foreign money to keep the economy growing. Foreign investors are buying aggressively, taking advantage of American duress and a weak dollar to snap up what many see as bargains, while making inroads to the world’s largest market.
Last year, foreign investors poured a record $414 billion into securing stakes in American companies, factories and other properties through private deals and purchases of publicly traded stock, according to Thomson Financial, a research firm. That was up 90 percent from the previous year and more than double the average for the last decade. It amounted to more than one-fourth of all announced deals for the year, Thomson said.
LINK
Red, White and Blue Tag Sale
By MAUREEN DOWD
When President Bush finished doing his sword dances and Arabian stallion inspections, when he finished making a speech in Abu Dhabi on the importance of freedom that fell flat, when he finished lounging in his fur-lined George of Arabia robe in the Saudi king’s tent, he came home.
Or he came to what was left of home.
A Washington Post cartoon by Tom Toles summed it up best: “Great to be home,” W. enthuses on Air Force One, heading toward the East Coast. “Anything interesting happen while I was gone?” Hanging on the skyline of New York is a sign reading: “U.S.A. Now a Wholly Owned Subsidiary of Foreign Investors.”
Wherever he went, W. seemed dazzled by the can-do spirit of the J. Pierrepont Finches of the new Middle East. “It’s important for the president to hear thoughts, hopes, dreams, aspirations, concerns from folks that are out making a living,” he told Saudi entrepreneurs.
In Dubai, he commended young Arab leaders, saying, “The entrepreneurial spirit is strong.”
In Abu Dhabi, he marveled at the royal family’s plans to build a city based entirely upon renewable energy. “Amazing, isn’t it?” W. said.
You know you’re in trouble when your Middle East oil pump is greener than you are.
LINK TO ARTICLE
By MAUREEN DOWD
When President Bush finished doing his sword dances and Arabian stallion inspections, when he finished making a speech in Abu Dhabi on the importance of freedom that fell flat, when he finished lounging in his fur-lined George of Arabia robe in the Saudi king’s tent, he came home.
Or he came to what was left of home.
A Washington Post cartoon by Tom Toles summed it up best: “Great to be home,” W. enthuses on Air Force One, heading toward the East Coast. “Anything interesting happen while I was gone?” Hanging on the skyline of New York is a sign reading: “U.S.A. Now a Wholly Owned Subsidiary of Foreign Investors.”
Wherever he went, W. seemed dazzled by the can-do spirit of the J. Pierrepont Finches of the new Middle East. “It’s important for the president to hear thoughts, hopes, dreams, aspirations, concerns from folks that are out making a living,” he told Saudi entrepreneurs.
In Dubai, he commended young Arab leaders, saying, “The entrepreneurial spirit is strong.”
In Abu Dhabi, he marveled at the royal family’s plans to build a city based entirely upon renewable energy. “Amazing, isn’t it?” W. said.
You know you’re in trouble when your Middle East oil pump is greener than you are.
LINK TO ARTICLE
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