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Rare snowfall stuns residents of Johannesburg, South Africa (and the US is the new Sahara!!)(think the earth poles are shifting??)
Posted on August 9, 2012
http://theextinctionprotocol.wordpress.com/2012/08/09/rare-snowfall-stuns-residents-of-johannesburg-south-africa/
August 9, 2012 – JOHANNESBURG, SA — People slowly came outside despite the cold wind Tuesday across South Africa, pointed their mobile phone cameras to the sky and opened their mouths to taste a rare snowfall that fell on much of the country. The snow began Tuesday morning, part of an extreme cold snap now biting into a nation still in its winter months. By mid-afternoon, officials recorded snowfall across most of South Africa. However, forecasters acknowledged snow remains so unusual that they typically aren’t prepared to provide details about snowfall in the nation. The snow closed some roads and at least one high-altitude pass. The snowfall also closed several border posts in the country. As the snow fell, workers at offices in Johannesburg rushed outside. Some twirled and danced as the flakes fell. One man rushed to the top of a snow-covered hill and slid down, using a cardboard box as an improvised toboggan. Despite the cold and the snow, beggars who line traffic lights in the city continued to ask passing motorists for cash. The snow grew heavier in the afternoon in Johannesburg, covering rooftops and slicking roads. Snowflakes are a rare commodity in Johannesburg, even during winter. South African Weather Service records show it has snowed in Johannesburg on only 22 other days in the last 103 years. The last snow fell there in June 2007. In Pretoria, the country’s capital, flurries filled the sky during a visit by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. It was the first snowfall there since 1968, the weather service said. The cold weather is expected to last a few days. -HP
Alaska: FAIRBANKS - Heavy snow in the Brooks Range caused difficult conditions for travelers on the Dalton Highway today. The Alaska Department of Transportation issued a travel advisory for Atigun Pass at 243-245 Mile. Four to five inches of snow had fallen Tuesday morning and visibility was limited. Drivers are advised to use caution and keep their headlights on. –Fairbanks DN
Moderate earthquake: ANCHORAGE – A moderate earthquake in western Prince William Sound was felt by residents of Anchorage 95 miles to the northwest. Chris Popham (POP’-ham) of the West Coast and Alaska Tsunami Warning Center says the earthquake occurred at 8:43 a.m. Thursday and showed a preliminary magnitude of 5.2. The epicenter was 60 miles northeast of Seward. Popham says the center received a series of phone calls reporting the quake had been felt but no reports of damage. –ADN
Michael Hudson: Fictitious Capital
Video - Max Max Keiser interviews Michael Hudson
Fictitious capital; what it is? And who is pushing it?
Corporate Lobbyists Threaten Democracy
By Julio Godoy
August 08, 2012 "Information Clearing House" -- PARIS, Aug 8 2012 (IPS) - Over a month has passed since the United Nations summit on sustainable development concluded in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, but the world still appears to be unaware of one of the most important statements made during the conference that drew some 50,000 delegates from all over the world.
Louise Kantrow, permanent representative of the International Chamber of Commerce, received thunderous applause when she told her audience on Jun. 19 that “businesses are taking the lead” in global negotiations on climate change and sustainable development.
For many observers, Kantrow’s blunt words highlighted just how strong of a grip private multinational companies have upon supposedly democratic processes.
In a statement aptly titled ‘Reclaim the U.N. from corporate capture’, the environmental organisation Friends of the Earth (FoE) complained that, “There are … real concerns about the increasing influence of major corporations and business lobby groups within the U.N.”
The report went on to detail the extraordinary level of businesses’ influence over the positions of national governments in multilateral negotiations.
“Business representatives dominate certain U.N. discussion spaces and some U.N. bodies; business groups are given a privileged advisory role; U.N. officials move back and forth (from) the private sector; and – last but not least – U.N. agencies are increasingly financially dependent on the private sector.”
One blatant example of this “corporate capture” of the U.N. is the Anglo-Dutch oil giant Shell, which, thanks to senior executive representatives in several corporate lobbying groups, was omnipresent during the Rio+20 negotiations.
Shell sent delegates to the discussions and round tables of the above-mentioned International Chamber of Commerce, the International Petroleum Industry Environmental Conservation Association, the U.N. Global Compact, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, and the International Emissions Trading Association.
Yet, according to Paul de Clerck, campaign coordinator at FoE, “More than one year has passed since the U.N. presented its report on Shell’s pollution of Ogoniland (Nigeria). But we are still waiting for a comprehensive plan from Shell to clean up its mess.”
The first step recommended by the U.N. was the establishment of a one billion-dollar emergency fund to clean up the region.
“So far, Shell has committed to nothing, despite its participation in all kind of environmental and sustainable development debates,” Clerck told IPS.
“It is not acceptable that companies like Shell should be in the driving seat of processes for sustainable development,” Nnimmo Bassey, of FoE International, told IPS. “That is a recipe for disaster for our planet and peoples. Corporate polluters should not (be drafting) laws, they should face the laws.”
But the U.N. is not the only international institution threatened by the influence of multinational businesses.
Tightly woven groups of professional go-betweens and loyal supporters of multinationals who have passed through the revolving doors that link governments and private corporations are now facing growing scrutiny from civil society activists.
In Europe, the head of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, is facing a formal inquiry by the European Union (EU) ombudsman because of his membership in a well-known international banking lobby group.
On Jul. 24, the ombudsman’s office announced that it was launching the investigation following allegations that Draghi’s membership in the so-called Group of 30 “is incompatible with the independence, reputation and integrity of the ECB”.
The EU has been the subject of multiple complaints, because, according to civil society groups, many of its agencies allow a revolving door to admit and dispatch senior executives who bring corporate agendas to democratic fora.
One of the leading critics of this policy, the Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO), a multinational and public policy watchdog group, claims that many “senior European decision-makers leave office and go straight into lobby jobs, or (alternately) lobbyists join the EU institutions.”
In such cases, Olivier Hoedeman of CEO told IPS, “The risk of significant conflicts of interest is great, undermining democratic, public-interest decision making.”
According to Hoedeman, CEO “is working with the Alliance for Lobbying Transparency and Ethics Regulation to challenge the revolving door and to demand that it is effectively regulated”.
CEO was the first group to complain about Draghi’s membership in the Group of 30, whose members include heavy-hitters in the international banking sector like William C. Dudley, former managing director at Goldman Sachs and former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
European activists and analysts have been growing more anxious about the influence of private investment banks on public financial policies, especially as the European sovereign debt continues to spiral out of control.
As CEO put it, “Given the euro crisis, the huge bailout operations of big banks, and the on-going debate on how to regulate banks in the light of the financial crisis, it should be obvious that safeguards are needed to ensure that the President of the European Central Bank remains independent.”
CEO argues that Draghi’s participation “in a closed, club-like structure with representatives from big international private banks could damage the integrity and reputation of the ECB.”
Indeed, Goldman Sachs’ links to numerous present officials at ministries of finance and other state agencies in Europe are extraordinary and worrisome. In a recent debate in Berlin, sociologist Wolfgang Streeck, director of the prestigious Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, denounced what he called “the diarchy in financial capitalism.”
Streeck said that European democratic states are presently suffering under the dictatorship of the deregulated financial markets, controlled by corporations like Goldman Sachs, while at the same time, most of their institutions are led by former executives of those very same corporations.
A salient example of Streeck’s thesis is the current, non-elected Italian head of government Mario Monti, who was the international adviser to Goldman Sachs from 2005 until 2011. In Goldman Sachs’ own words, Monti’s mission was to provide advice “on European business and major public policy initiatives worldwide.”
Given that Goldman Sachs and similar investment banks are pivotal in managing the sovereign debt of numerous European countries, it seems almost absurd that they are simultaneously preparing speculation schemes against the solvency of those very same states.
Following the announcement that the EU ombudsman had launched an official investigation into Draghi’s professional past, CEO has urged him to step down as president of the ECB.
In a letter addressed to Draghi, the group wrote, “Any president of the ECB has to make it absolutely clear that he or she is not under the influence of the financial lobby at any time. In particular at this dramatic point in the history of the EU, with the euro crisis and an ailing banking sector – recipient of trillions of euros in aid – it is completely unacceptable if doubt can be cast on the independence of the Bank’s president from the financial lobby.”
This article was originally published at IPS
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article32119.htm
<< America’s 10 Largest Corporations Paid 9 Percent Average Tax Rate Last Year
By Travis Waldron
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article32118.htm
August 08, 2012 "Information Clearing House" -- America’s 10 most profitable corporations paid an average corporate income tax rate of just 9 percent in 2011, according to a study from financial site NerdWallet reported by the Huffington Post. The 10 companies include Wall Street banks like Wells Fargo and JP Morgan Chase, oil companies like ExxonMobil and Chevron, and tech companies like Apple, IBM, and Microsoft.
The two companies with the lowest tax rates were both oil companies. ExxonMobil paid $1.5 billion in taxes on $73.3 billion in earnings, a tax rate of 2 percent. Chevron’s tax rate was just 4 percent. None of the companies paid anywhere near the 35 percent top corporate tax rate, providing more evidence to debunk claims that America’s corporate tax rate is stunting economic growth and job creation (Despite the high marginal rate, American corporations pay one of the lowest effective corporate tax rates in the world).
The study also calculated the overall amount the companies owed in both domestic and foreign taxes. This includes deferred taxes that will, theoretically, be paid in the future, once the companies bring foreign profits back to the United States. Apple, for instance, avoided $2.4 billion in American taxes last year by utilizing offshore tax havens.
If Republicans have their way, however, those deferred taxes may never be paid. Switching to a territorial tax system, a policy leading Republicans have considered, would allow corporations to repatriate foreign profits back to the United States nearly free of taxation, costing the country billions of dollars and thousands of jobs.
This article was originally published at Think Progress
The Dispossessed Majority
By Paul Craig Roberts
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article32122.htm
August 08, 2012 "Information Clearing House" -- The bumper sticker on the beat-up pickup truck read: “Friends don’t let friends vote Democrat.”
The driver was obviously not affluent. Yet, despite all the news about mega-trillion dollar bankster bailouts, mega-million dollar bonuses for financial crooks, and unimaginable compensation packages for corporate CEOs who have moved middle class jobs out of America, something made the down-and-out pickup truck driver associate with the political party of the super-rich.
As I wondered at this strange alliance of the dirt poor with the mega-rich, I remembered that in 2004 Thomas Frank wondered about how the Republicans had managed to convince the poor to vote against their best interests. Frank’s answer, or part of his answer, is that the Republicans use “social issues,” such as gay marriage and Janet Jackson’s exposed nipple to work up indignation over the threat to moral values posed by liberal Democrats.
The working poor have been convinced by Republican propaganda that voting Democrat means giving the working poor’s tax dollars to the non-working poor, to providing medical care and schooling for illegal aliens, and being soft on terrorism.
To the pick-up truck driver, standing up for America means standing up for bankster bailouts and the military/security complex’s multi-trillion dollar wars.
The Karl Rove Dirty Tricks Team has honed the Republican propaganda. Republicans send each other via email an endless number of nonsense stories about Obama being a Muslim, about Obama being a Marxist, about Obama being a Manchurian Candidate turning America over to the New World Order or the United Nations, or to some other dastardly plotting organization. But never is Obama accused of turning the US over to Wall Street, the military/security complex, or Israel.
There is never any citation or source for the accusations in the emails. None are needed, because the words are what the Republicans want to hear. Ask them why Obama would be killing Muslims in seven countries if he was a Muslim, or why Wall Street and the military/security complex would put a Marxist in the White House, and they turn purple with rage. Just by asking the obvious questions instead of joining in the denunciations, a person confirms the propaganda that America is threatened by Obama dupes who won’t stand up for the country.
The non-affluent who rage about welfare, medicaid, Obamacare, and public schools can’t seem to put two and two together. The $750 billion TARP bankster bailout, a small part of the total and ongoing bailout, would have sufficed to cover any holes in these budgets for a long time.. Instead, the money went to reward those who caused the financial crisis and threw millions of Americans out of their homes. As far as I know, the pickup truck driver is one of the dispossessed.
The same brainwashed Americans who rage against Obamacare and are lined up to vote for Romney are oblivious to the fact that Romney, while governor of the eastern liberal Democratic state of Massachusetts, had his version of Obamacare enacted at the state level.
The greatest irony about Obamacare is that it was written by the private insurance companies and diverts Medicaid and Medicare funds to their profits. It is socialized medicine alright, but it is socialism for the private insurance companies.
All it took to convince Red staters to go along with the military/security complex squandering $6 trillion on the Iraq and Afghan wars was yellow ribbon decals and a slogan, “support the troops.”
Obama, Republicans claim, won’t stand up to Syria, or against Iran, or for Israel. But Republicans are proud when Romney goes to Israel to slither on his belly pandering to the crazed, blood-thirsty Israeli prime minister Netanyahu, who called Israeli top generals “pussies” for warning against attacking Iran. Romney told Netanyahu, just tell me what to do, and I’ll do it; I am loyal to Israel. Apparently, flag-waving Republican patriots are not bothered when their presidential candidate announces that as soon as he is in office he will turn over US foreign policy to Netanyahu and send more americans to death and bankruptcy for Netanyahu.
Karl Rove didn’t have any trouble at all in brainwashing red staters to support their own demise. The pickup truck driver could just as well have sported a bumper sticker that read: “Don’t support a Democrat. He might do something for you.”
Yes, I know. It is almost as easy to beat up on Democrats. Bush and Cheney and their neocon hoodlums destroyed the Constitution and, thereby, America. But the Democrats let them. It was Nancy Pelosi, who as Speaker of the House stridently declared Bush’s impeachment to be “off the table.”
Bush and Cheney unquestionably violated both US and international laws and the Constitution. Nancy Pelosi’s refusal to hold them accountable established the precedent that the executive branch is no longer accountable to law or to the Constitution. In effect, the executive branch now comprises a dictatorship. It acts outside of law and constitutional restraints. On some issues it still has to consult with Congress or the courts, but as the executive branch’s power and audacity grows, consultation will become a formality and then drop away. Congress will have no more influence than the Roman senate under the empire, and courts will become stages for show trials.
Americans elected Obama president expecting that he would restore the rule of law. Instead, he codified the Bush regime’s transgressions and added some of his own. No one of my generation could have imagined the president of the US sitting in the Oval Office signing off on lists of American citizens to be murdered without evidence or due process of law.
So which do you want? The Republican panderer to the rich and Israel whose foreign policy is war or the Democrat panderer to the rich and Israel whose foreign policy is war? As Gerald Celente wrote in the July issue of the Trends Journal, americans “argue among themselves why their freak is better than the other freak. They will get angry with you if you call their freak a freak. They will actually fight and die to defend their freaks.”
It is extraordinary that millions of americans actually believe fervently that it matters whether Romney freak or Obama freak gets elected. If americans had any sense, they would stay home and not vote. The 1% control the country, and the 99% had just as well own up to it and stay at home. Nothing is going to change because of the ballot box.
What do you suppose the Ron Paul supporters will do? Will they see Romney as the less socialist of the two and vote for the Republicans who stole the nomination from Ron Paul? (Jaret Glenn, “How the GOP Establishment Stole the Nomination from Ron Paul,” published on August 6 on the OpEdNews website.
The US is ruled by a private oligarchy. The government is merely their front. The country’s resources are diverted to the pockets of Wall Street, the military/security complex, and to the service of greater Israel. The oil, mining, timber, and agribusiness companies control the Environmental Protection Agency and the Forestry Service, which is why regulation only pertains to the small individual, while fracking, mountaintop removal mining, and pollution of air, water, and soil run wild.
The oligarchs have succeeded in making americans a dispossessed majority in their own country. In November americans will again give their approval to one of the oligarchy’s two candidates.
The War Party
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8581.htm
Panorama investigates the "neo-conservatives", the small and unelected group of right-wingers, who critics claim have hijacked the White House.
They brought us war against Iraq - what do the hawks in Washington have in store for us now?
The War Party was broadcast on Sunday, 18 May 2003 at 22:15 BST on BBC One.
E-mails about clean-energy loans provide new details on White House involvement
By Carol D. Leonnig and Joe Stephens, Published: August 8 | Updated: Thursday, August 9, 10:23 AMThe Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/energy-dept-e-mails-on-solyndra-provide-new-details-on-white-house-involvement/2012/08/08/668dc042-e162-11e1-a25e-15067bb31849_story.html
Alex Brandon/AP - President Obama, with Solyndra chief executive Chris Gronet, toured the solar panel company in 2010. The start-up collapsed the next summer after receiving a half-billion-dollar federal loan.
President Obama’s staff arranged for him to be personally briefed last summer on a loan program to help clean-energy companies, two months before the program was thrust into headlines by the collapse of its flagship, the solar company Solyndra, records show.
About the same time, then-White House Chief of Staff William Daley resolved a dispute among administration officials over another project in the program, clearing the way for a $1.4 billion loan, according to documents and sources familiar with the situation.
The documents, a series of e-mails among Energy Department staff members involved in managing the program, provide new details about the level of White House involvement in the controversial initiative. White House officials have said in the past that final decisions about which companies would receive the loan guarantees were made by career staff members at the Energy Department, not political appointees.
Administration officials said Wednesday that the e-mails show that the White House involvement was appropriate and that there was no pressure on agency officials.
That loan program, a signature piece of the Obama administration’s effort to stimulate the economy, has become a major issue in this year’s presidential campaign. Republicans have charged that the program wasted critical stimulus money meant to create jobs, spending it instead on ill-advised projects that benefited Democratic fundraisers.
The documents, provided to The Washington Post by Republican investigators for the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, show that White House aides asked Energy Secretary Steven Chu to deliver a June 27, 2011, presentation to the president on the status of the loan program. The interest in a presidential briefing came as other senior administration figures were challenging parts of the program and debating whether the Energy Department was cutting deals that gave “unjust enrichment” to private companies.
An Energy staffer explained that the president “wants to know its status” so he could be prepared when the loan program came up “at official events and political events where he interacts with [the] business community and Congressional members.” The e-mail from the department’s chief of staff, Brandon Hurlbut, went on to say that many people attending such gatherings “have some affiliation or interest in the numerous applications received that involve substantial funds.”
The documents do not indicate whether the presidential briefing took place as scheduled and, if so, whether Obama offered guidance on the program’s future.
‘A right to know’
On Wednesday, Rep. Darrell Issa (Calif.) and other Republican members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee wrote to Obama requesting a “full and complete” explanation of his involvement in the issue and seeking additional internal documents, including a list of all private individuals with whom the president met to discuss loan projects.
“The American people have a right to know the level of involvement you and other senior White House officials had in the loan guarantee program,” the committee members wrote. “Your interactions with business leaders at political events affected decisions to give billions of taxpayer dollars in loan guarantees to green energy companies.”
NYPD Unveils Crime- And Terror-Fighting ‘Domain Awareness System’
Mayor: State-Of-The-Art Venture With Microsoft Puts Police 'In The Next Century'
August 8, 2012 11:00 PM
http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2012/08/08/nypd-unveils-crime-and-terror-fighting-domain-awareness-system/
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) – A dramatic new way to track criminals and potential terrorists was unveiled Wednesday by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly.
It melds cameras, computers and data bases capable of nabbing bad guys before they even know they’re under suspicion.
If a suspicious package is left at a location by a terrorist the NYPD will now be able to instantly tap into video feeds to look back in time to see who left it there, and that’s just one of the many things the NYPD’s new high-tech “Domain Awareness System” can do, CBS 2's Marcia Kramer reported
“We are not your mom and pop police department anymore. We are in the next century. We are leading the pack,” Bloomberg said.
The new crime-fighting apparatus was built by the NYPD and Microsoft, developed by police officers for police officers. Officials said it represents a sea change for the NYPD.
“When I came back to the Police Department in 2002 I found that the Department was still a very big user of white out and carbon paper,” Kelly said. “The technical revolution had bypassed the Police Department.”
The system uses 3,000 cameras positioned in Lower Manhattan south of Canal Street, river to river, and between 30th and 60th streets, river to river. It links up to license plate readers, 911 calls and other NYPD data records.
It will enable investigators to do things like:
* Identify whether a radiation alarm was set off by actual radiation, a weapon, or a harmless medical isotope
* Track where a suspect’s car is located, and where it has been in the past few days, weeks or months
* Instantly see a suspect’s arrest record, and 911 calls related to the crime
“It’s a tool that meets the needs of the Department, one that will help protect New Yorkers and keep us safe from crime and terrorism for years to come,” Kelly told reporters, including WCBS 880’s Marla Diamond. “[The system will help] to generate and refine leads, to identify patterns, and to optimally deploy manpower.”
“The bad guys have everything that we do, too. And if you really want to worry about security and freedoms, that’s the first thing,” Bloomberg added.
Because the system was co-developed by the city the NYPD will get 30 percent of the revenue that comes from selling it to other localities.
The system also has mapping features that allow cops to develop crime patterns in a particular neighborhood or borough.
Boats armed with machine guns to patrol RNC
Republican convention starts Aug. 27 in Tampa
Published On: Aug 08 2012 07:51:08 AM EDT Updated On: Aug 09 2012 06:13:32 AM EDT
http://www.clickorlando.com/news/Boats-armed-with-machine-guns-to-patrol-RNC/-/1637132/16012084/-/olivp1/-/index.html
TAMPA, Fla. -
Law enforcement agencies are planning to boost their patrols of Tampa's waterways during the Republican National Convention.
The RNC will be held later this month on the city's waterfront. Federal and local law enforcement agencies say they'll saturate the waterway with armed boat patrols.
The Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office says machine guns and infrared technology that can pick up body heat are among the new tools being mounted onto boats for the patrols.
U.S. Coast Guard spokeswoman Judy Silverstein says the marine units are prepared for "everything that could possibly happen."
Tampa Police Cpl. James Reiser says anyone swimming or paddling in security zones will be detained and probably arrested.
Recreational boaters should expect security checkpoints and channel closures throughout the Aug. 27-30 convention.
Just read this, too...
Massive, absoluely massive PUT options on US and EU markets...nearly exact pattern as prior to 9/11 and 7/7
So, heads up...the puts in 2001 were made 5 days ahead of event...which may mean 8-12. -- a source
I think it was a tongue in cheek statement. I like your quiz and will share it LOL. You sure Bush and Palin didn't do a couple of those :)
Strategerize.... Yeah, that was Bush.
George Carlin: Execute the Bankers
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article31492.htm
George Carlin talks about the death penalty and who should be executed.
US Government Lets Bank Off The Hook
Wachovia Bank reached a $160 million settlement with the Justice Department over allegations that a failure in bank controls enabled drug traffickers to launder drug money by transferring money from Mexican currency-exchange houses to the bank.
Prosecutors said the bank processed $420 billion in transactions without using proper money-laundering detection.
From his 'Back in Town' special in 1996
Posted June 02, 2012
On Drugs and Democracy
By Inge Fryklund
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article32114.htm
August 07, 2012 "Information Clearing House" -- The UN Office of Drug Control (UNODC) has thoroughly documented the violence, crime, and corruption linked with the worldwide heroin and opium trade. The U.S. news media report every day on the mayhem and corruption of government officials caused by the drug wars in Mexico, Colombia, and other points south of our border. In Afghanistan, the Taliban tax the opium trade and protect poppy farmers from eradication, fueling the insurgency and our 11-year war.
However, these problems are all consequences of drug prohibition, not of the drugs themselves. In legal terms, drugs are malum prohibitum (wrong because prohibited by law) rather than malum in se (inherently wrong, such as theft or murder). During the U.S. experiment with Prohibition (1920-1933), alcohol was malum prohibitum; as soon as it was legalized, it again became a normal regulated, traded, and taxed consumer product.
We need to rethink our prohibition of drugs. What problem are we trying to solve by making drugs illegal? Have we chosen the most effective and affordable solution? Are the collateral consequences worth it?
We should start with the premise that neither demand for drugs nor the drugs themselves can be eliminated. UNODC estimates the ultimate street value of drugs originating in southern Afghanistan, primarily Helmand and Kandahar, as $68 billion. Where there is demand, there will be supply. If Afghan supplies were reduced, production would simply move elsewhere—as it did when it moved into Afghanistan in the 1980s after being pushed out of Southeast Asia’s Golden Triangle.
Prohibition of Alcohol
The American experience of Prohibition is instructive.
The U.S. ban on alcohol served primarily to corrupt public officials and endanger the public. Supplying the unabated demand for alcohol required traffickers to pay bribes to police and politicians. As prices increased as a result, cutting quality was one way to keep the retail price down, which resulted in deaths from adulterated products. Moreover, the rise of violent, organized crime during this period—required to move the product and handle disputes within the trade—created criminal organizations that endure to this day.
The Prohibition experiment was relatively short-lived. Part of the impetus for repeal was that Prohibition was not having the intended effect of cutting either alcohol use or the social problems resulting from its abuse (the potential for alcohol tax revenues in the midst of the Great Depression was another factor). Whatever successes the experiment had were outweighed by the costs in corruption and violence, not to mention widespread public cynicism and hypocrisy.
Most importantly, the substantial and unanticipated costs of Prohibition were borne almost entirely by the United States. It was our own police and elected officials who were corrupted. It was our own cities afflicted by the criminal patronage networks battling over turf. We never attempted to force other countries to make the trade in alcohol illegal or participate in our war on alcohol.
The day after Prohibition was repealed, beer distributors no longer had to turn to the Mafia for enforcement of their franchise agreements. They took their disputes to court. The collateral violence largely stopped, and corrupt politicians and police suddenly lost a source of income. Product quality could be standardized. States could make individual decisions about regulating and taxing alcohol.
Of course, the social problems—particularly family violence—that were the ostensible reason for Prohibition continued, as they do to this day. My own experience as a prosecutor in Domestic Violence Court in Chicago in the 1980s is illustrative. If it hadn’t been for alcohol-related crimes, the court could have been closed. Alcohol had adverse effects on families that many other drugs did not have.
But by 1933, we had come to the realization that prohibition was an ineffective way to address abuse and indeed sidelined attempts to address alcoholism and family violence. There is still no simple solution to these problems, but we understood then that any response must directly address the problem. We as a society have come to terms with the inescapable downsides of a product that the public insists on having but that is subject to abuse. We have struck a balance since realizing that criminalizing the trade in alcohol only made everything worse.
Exporting the Problem
Federal statute criminalized narcotics beginning in 1914. There was no nationwide public advocacy campaign as there was leading up to Prohibition. Legislation seems to have been driven primarily by racial fears—of “cocaine-crazed Negroes” raping white women and “Chinamen” in California both using opium and seducing white women into becoming opium addicts. Perhaps there was political value in coming out against the evil of drug use by disfavored groups when it seemed costless to do so.
But we now know a great deal about the worldwide costs in violence, crime, and corruption of making drugs illegal. If the downsides of our drug policy are now so clear, why haven’t drugs (opium and heroin as well as marijuana) been legalized? Why is the calculation different from that made vis a vis ending Prohibition?
After spending more than four years in Afghanistan and seeing first-hand the impact of our drug policies—consequences most Americans never see—I have come to the conclusion that we persist on this course primarily because the costs of our drug policies are borne by other countries, not by us. In contrast with our experience under Prohibition, the corruption of American police and politicians by the drug trade is a relatively minor problem. Demand within the United States is just not high enough to necessitate much bribery.
The serious corruption is instead all on the production end, and this we have succeeded in outsourcing to foreign countries. Our war on drugs is fought on the territories of countries such as Colombia, Honduras, and Mexico. The headless bodies in Mexico barely make the inside pages of American newspapers (imagine if dozens of mutilated bodies were dumped in suburban Maryland). We have requisitioned foreign turf for our war on drugs. Citizens of these countries have no voice in the matter. Their leaders’ acquiescence to U.S. policies undercuts electoral accountability, and corruption of their police and courts undermines the rule of law. We have compromised democracy in our own hemisphere.
In Afghanistan, we have failed to connect the dots between drugs and corruption. At the July 2012 donors’ conference in Tokyo, donor after donor urged President Karzai to combat corruption. However, as long as we insist on the illegality of poppy, we are making a demand that cannot possibly be met.
A country that supplies 80-90 percent of the world’s demand for poppy products must necessarily be corrupt. To move the heroin, opium, and marijuana from field to market, officials and police can demand payment to look the other way (or engage in the trade themselves). The import of chemicals for processing requires the cooperation of customs and border police. Even the poppy eradication process itself has been corrupted, as officials target the fields of rivals while protecting their own. And any eradication in one area inevitably pushes production to another, simply pushing a bubble around in a balloon.
Afghan citizens are well aware of the suitcases full of dollars that leave Kabul Airport every day for Dubai. While kickbacks from development and military contracts are undoubtedly involved, drug profits in particular have to be moved out of the country. In Helmand Province, district chief of police positions are reportedly purchased for sums as high as $150,000 (and that is only the initial payment, not the yearly “rent”), and the chief expects to recoup his investment. District governors, appointed by the president, are merely shifted in musical-chairs fashion around the province when citizens or the U.S. military complains about corruption.
The Karzai government has also chosen not to implement those provisions of the 2004 Afghan constitution that call for the election of mayors and district and city councils. Instead, these councils do not exist, and all local officials report to the president. One can only imagine that all these officials are in place for a reason. For example, the mayor of Kandahar, a city of 800,000, is a presidential appointee, not answerable to local citizens. As a result, prior to his assassination in 2011, the president’s brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, had a free hand in managing affairs in Kandahar province. As in Latin America, democratic accountability is the loser. The money at stake is so overwhelming that honest and accountable government cannot be implemented without changing the drug nexus. The incentives are just too strong.
The “L” Word
If opium and heroin (as well as marijuana) were legalized, what would happen? Corrupt Afghan officials would suddenly lose a source of income, as poppy is illegal in Afghanistan primarily at U.S. insistence. The Taliban would be unable to extract protection money from farmers, or tax the drug trade. The war might wind down to a speedy conclusion, and Afghanistan could fund its own development and security forces out of sales of a legal commodity. Latin American democracy too would undoubtedly be strengthened and violence would decrease.
The U.S. government could save all the money it now spends on the DEA, interdiction, and drug prosecutions. States could make their own decisions about drugs. Local police and sheriffs could quit chasing after pot growers (who could now standardize and advertise product quality and potency), and devote scarce public safety budgets to the crimes that the average citizen prioritizes. State prisons that are overwhelmed with drug offenders could downsize. Of course, the entire anti-drug enterprise of U.S. officials and government contractors, greased by U.S. security assistance to drug producer nations, would drastically downsize too—and so the anti-drug lobby seeking to preserve its livelihood would undoubtedly be a political force in opposition. Likewise the manufacturers of medicinal morphine who have a monopoly on licensed poppy from India.
On the demand side of the equation, prices might well drop as the costs of paying protection were eliminated. It’s possible that usage would increase, but users don’t seem to have much difficulty obtaining supplies right now. With all the resources freed from fighting an unwinnable war against drugs, we could attend to the social problems that facilitate certain kinds of drug use (heroin use being primarily a lower-class phenomenon) and result from substance abuse. There are many options to explore once the problem is defined honestly and resources are available for experimentation.
Even if the middle class doesn’t care what happens to the lower class, the costs of prosecution and incarceration are a direct drain on the public purse, and an indirect drain as imprisonment itself causes family disruption and disintegration. Under a legalization regime, we would no longer have so many poorly educated young men with drug convictions rendered ineligible for future legitimate employment. Curtailed voting rights for those with felony convictions also means that individuals affected by drug laws have had no voice in changing them—a fundamental requirement of a democracy. Citizens in the 1930s could vote their interest in repealing Prohibition. These rights must be restored.
The immediate response to potential drug legalization is usually, “Why do you want our children hooked on drugs?!” (The rationales of 1914 are no longer mentioned.) Remember, however, that those campaigning for repeal of Prohibition did not say, “We’re in favor of alcohol-induced family violence.” Or, “Let’s have more alcohol-related carnage on the highways.” People were quite aware of the problems—which continued during Prohibition as before and since. We as a society concluded in 1933, however, that prohibition was an ineffective way of dealing with this particular societal ill, and that illegality created second- and third-order effects that were far worse than the evil that Prohibition was supposed to address.
As with alcohol, we need to be honest with ourselves about the costs and benefits of our social policies and recognize that not all problems have comprehensive or entirely satisfactory solutions. We can only do our best to make decisions that take into consideration all of the costs and benefits of our choices and not pretend that moral crusades are costless. We need to address honestly the morality of foisting upon other countries the violence, corruption, and damage to democracy caused by U.S. drug policies and driven by U.S. demand.
Legalization is the only solution to the problem of Afghan and Latin American violence and corruption—and the less obvious but more insidious problems of poverty, over-incarceration, and the misallocation of public resources within the United States. Only legalization can change the worldwide nexus of drugs and criminality.
Foreign Policy In Focus contributor Inge Fryklund was a Chicago prosecutor during the 1980s. From 2004 to 2012, she spent more than four years in Afghanistan, working with the legal system and with national, provincial, and municipal governments. She is recently returned from Helmand Province, the heart of opium poppy production.
© 2012 Foreign Policy In Focus
"Mitt Romney Catastrophe: Barack Obama Disaster"
Inside Story US2012, with presenter Shihab Rattansi, takes a critical analysis of his achievements with guests: Cornel West, a professor emeritus of Princeton University, activist and author of The Rich & the Rest of Us - A Poverty Manifesto, and Paul Street, a journalist and author of Barack Obama and the future of American Politics.
"It's very odd how for some progressives and liberals in this country wars, secret detentions and bailouts and violations of habeas corpus, that were heinous and terrible and hideous when an inarticulate white Republican from West Texas does it, becomes curiously okay when a sophisticated black lawyer does it." - Paul Street, a journalist and author
August 07, 2012
go here for video
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article32109.htm
Obama Won’t Call It “Terrorism”
Obama More Sympathetic to Israelis Killed in Bulgaria than to Sikh Americans Murdered in Wisconsin
By Ali Abunimah
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article32113.htm
August 07, 2012 "Information Clearing House" -- As soon as news came of a bomb attack that killed Israeli tourists in Bulgaria on 18 July, US President Barack Obama condemned it in the most strident terms – even though, then, as now, the perpetrator and his motive remain unknown.
Obama’s statement left no room for ambiguity:
I strongly condemn today’s barbaric terrorist attack on Israelis in Bulgaria. My thoughts and prayers are with the families of those killed and injured, and with the people of Israel, Bulgaria, and any other nation whose citizens were harmed in this awful event. These attacks against innocent civilians, including children, are completely outrageous. The United States will stand with our allies, and provide whatever assistance is necessary to identify and bring to justice the perpetrators of this attack. As Israel has tragically once more been a target of terrorism, the United States reaffirms our unshakeable commitment to Israel’s security, and our deep friendship and solidarity with the Israeli people.
Such sentiments at the killing of innocent people are understandable. But why has Obama so far refused to condemn in equally strong terms Wade Michael Page’s murderous rampage that killed six people at the Sikh Temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin yesterday?
Obama won’t call it “terrorism”
In one White House statement yesterday, Obama called the Wisconsin massacre “a senseless act of violence.” In another, he called it “a tragic shooting.”
It has since been confirmed that the FBI is treating the attack as “domestic terrorism” and it has now become clear that the killer has a long history of white supremacist views and activism.
Yet in further comments today, Obama treated the attack as just another (all too awful) mass shooting as happened in Aurora, Colorado on 20 July.
As ABC reports:
President Obama said today that he is “heartbroken” by the deadly shooting at the Sikh religious center in Wisconsin and renewed his call to reduce violence across the country.
“I think all of us recognize that these kinds of terrible tragic events are happening with too much regularity for us not to do some soul searching and to examine additional ways that we can reduce violence,” the president told reporters in the Oval Office when asked about the gunman who killed six people in Oak Creek Sunday.
The president made similar remarks after the deadly shooting in Aurora, Colo., last month, but is not proposing any additional gun controls. “What I want to do is bring together law enforcement, community leaders, faith leaders, elected officials at every level to see how we can make continued progress,” he said today.
Obama reluctant to point to racism
Obama continued, according to ABC:
“We don’t yet know fully what motivated this individual to carry out this terrible act. If it turns out, as some early reports indicated, that it may have been motivated in some way by the ethnicity of those who were attending the temple, I think the American people immediately recoil against those kinds of attitudes,” the president said. “It will be very important for us to reaffirm once again that in this country, regardless of what we look like, where we come from, who we worship, we are all one people and we look after one other and we respect one another.
The president’s comments came as he signed the “Honoring America’s Veterans and Caring for Camp Lejeune Families Act” at the White House.
Page was a veteran of the United States Army.
Silence in the face of racist incitement
Obama’s shameful timidity in forthrightly condemning what happened in Wisconsin is hardly surprising. After all, this is a president with a “kill list” for Muslims including Americans.
But even for show, could he really not muster the kind of outrage he did for Israelis, for his own fellow citizens?
Is it appropriate that Obama condemned what happened to Israelis in Bulgaria as “barbaric terrorism” while he is merely “heartbroken” at the slaughter in Wisconsin, as if he is a mere bystander and not the president of the United States?
When Obama declares that “we are all one people” who must look after one another regardless of what we look like, it is he who needs to practice what he preaches.
Obama has been consistent in his refusal to confront the racism unleashed by his candidacy and subsequent election that came atop post-9/11 Muslim-bashing and dehumanization of people of color inherent in warmongering abroad.
His reponse to accusations that he’s Muslim is never ‘so what if I were?’ but always along the lines of ‘no, no I’m a Christian like you.’
Two summers ago, right-wing activists invented the fake “Ground Zero mosque” controversy to generate fear and hatred in the run-up to the 2010 mid-term elections. What I always found more frightening than the noise from Islamophobic clowns was the silence of elected officials, especially Democrats who purport to uphold liberal and inclusive values.
With their silence, they gave consent, and the crescendo of racist fearmongering – that targets more than just Muslims – has continued to rise.
Neither Sikhs nor Muslims are collectively guilty
Sikhs were among the first victims of the racist backlash after 9/11. It is common to say they are mistaken for Muslims who are the real targets of such attacks. This is wrong. Muslims are no more collectively guilty than Sikhs or any other group. But more importantly violent racists are not interested in distinctions.
In 2010, when he traveled to India, Obama refused to visit the main shrine of Sikhism, the Golden Temple in Amritsar, because he did not want to be photographed wearing a Sikh headcovering and be confused for a Muslim by illiterate Americans back home.
Obama was pandering to racists then, as he is despicably doing now. The difference now is that blood has been spilled in Wisconsin, and the time for this kind of cowardice ought to have passed.
This article was originally published at Electronic Intifada
© 2000-2011 electronicIntifada.net
Unrestrained Savagery
In Yemen, Al Qaeda bombs a funeral of someone it killed days earlier. How can Terrorist monsters do this?
By Glenn Greenwald
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article32106.htm
August 07, 2012 "Salon" ---- Every American national security official will tell you that the most dangerous and savage Al Qaeda branch is the one in Yemen, and that group certainly supplied evidence for this claim with this heinous act over the weekend:
The death toll from a suicide bombing in southern Yemen rose to 45 on Sunday, officials said, in the latest attack against militias allied with the army.
The bomber, suspected of being a member of Al Qaeda, struck late Saturday during a funeral service attended by members of civilian militias that helped the Yemeni Army in a campaign to recapture the town of Jaar from Qaeda militants in June. . . . Yemen’s state news service, Saba, said [] most of the victims were members of the civilian militias allied with the army.
AP noted that this underscores why “the United States considers the Yemeni branch of Al Qaeda to be the most dangerous in the terrorist network,” while Reuters said that the funeral attack “highlighted the enduring threat of Islamist militancy in Yemen and may alarm the United States and Saudi Arabia.” The provincial Yemeni governor denounced the funeral bombing as “a cowardly, criminal, terrorist attack.”
Indeed, it’s difficult even to fathom the depth of the cold-blooded savagery — the total disregard for all minimal concepts of humanity — needed for Terrorist monsters to bomb funerals. Al Qaeda has used this same tactic in Iraq; in September of last year, “a car bomb exploded near the Prophet Ayoub Mosque, where a funeral service was being held, killing 25 and injuring 37 others,” and “provincial officials accused al-Qaeda of carrying out the attack. ‘Al-Qaeda carried out one of the ugliest terrorist attacks in the province, killing civilians and children without any reason,’ said Maj. Gen. Fadhil Raddad.” The Assad regime this year has also has employed this Terror tactic against Syrian rebels:
At least 85 people were killed when a car bomb exploded during a funeral procession Saturday evening in the Syrian town of Zamalka, activists and human rights groups said.
People had gathered to honor a resident of the town near Damascus who had been killed earlier in the day, said Abu Omar, an activist in Zamalka who attended the funeral. The resident, Abdul Hadi Halabi, had been killed by gunfire when government forces briefly entered the town from their checkpoints . . . . The antigovernment Local Coordination Committees put the number of dead at 85. . . .Though protests and funeral processions have been attacked with gunfire and shelling, activists said it was the first time they could recall a bomb targeting such a gathering.
When the Obama DOJ last year announced its indictment on Terror charges of the domestic Hutaree militia (an indictment that was ultimately dismissed), this was one of the plots they highlighted to convey just how evil and menacing this group is:
“Captain Hutaree,” his wife and two sons planned with other militia members to kill a law enforcement official to draw the officer’s colleagues to the funeral, authorities say. Then, according to an indictment unsealed Monday, the militia planned to attack the funeral procession to kick off its war against the U.S. government.
Really: what kind of Terrorist monsters are willing to bomb funerals of their victims in order to advance their aims?
The CIA’s drone campaign in Pakistan has killed dozens of civilians who had gone to help rescue victims or were attending funerals, an investigation by the Bureau for the Sunday Times has revealed.
The findings are published just days after President Obama claimed that the drone campaign in Pakistan was a “targeted, focused effort” that “has not caused a huge number of civilian casualties”. . . .
A three month investigation including eye witness reports has found evidence that at least 50 civilians were killed in follow-up strikes when they had gone to help victims. More than 20 civilians have also been attacked in deliberate strikes on funerals and mourners. The tactics have been condemned by leading legal experts.
With almost no public notice taken, The New York Times, on June 23, 2009, described one illustrative incident in Pakistan:
An airstrike believed to have been carried out by a United States drone killed at least 60 people at a funeral for a Taliban fighter in South Waziristan on Tuesday, residents of the area and local news reports said.
Details of the attack, which occurred in Makeen, remained unclear, but the reported death toll was exceptionally high.
The “exceptionally high” death toll for those funeral attendees included “as many as 45 were civilians, among them reportedly ten children and four tribal leaders.” This year, on a three-day weekend in late June, the U.S. launched a series of drone attacks in Pakistan — one on each day — and the second strike targeted mourners gathered to grieve those killed in the first strike (“At the time of the attack, suspected militants had gathered to offer condolences to the brother of a militant commander killed during another US unmanned drone attack on Saturday”).
Whatever one thinks of all this, I hope that nobody will even think about comparing, let alone equating, these acts. Such a comparison would be disgusting. As Rudy Giuliani taught us when asked during his 2008 presidential bid whether waterboarding was torture: “It depends on the circumstances. It depends on who does it.”
Regardless of where one falls on the ideological spectrum, we must all join together to condemn the sin of moral relativism: therefore, the same act that is the hallmark of repulsive savagery when done by Al Qaeda, Assad, and the Hutaree militia is transformed into a moral and noble act when done by the Government of the United States of America. As U.S. political discourse has long taught, the crime of “moral relativism” is committed by holding everyone to the same standards – that’s “moral relativism.” One can avoid that pitfall only by exempting oneself and one’s own country from the moral dictates one imposes on everyone else.
* * * * *
On a different note: the author and former CIA officer Barry Eisler wrote an amazingly interesting and insightful analysis in reaction to my interview last week with Chris Hayes. I don’t agree with all of the points he makes (at least not entirely as he applies them to Hayes), but it’s a very provocative and smart assessment of the process of cooption and is well worth reading.
UPDATE: Evidently undeterred by last year’s Supreme Court ruling that the First Amendment guarantees the right of the Westboro Baptist Church to protest at funerals, President Obama yesterday signed a new law “enacting new restrictions on protests of service member funerals,” hailing his own act as the fulfillment of a “moral sacred duty.” Apparently, holding a protest outside of a funeral is a moral atrocity, but bombing a funeral and killing the mourners in attendance is a noble act in defending freedom.
Update
GlennGreenwald
Tuesday, Aug 7, 2012 05:40 AM PDT
this article seems to paint a monochromatic view of whats going on in Syria. From what i have read, the rebels are by far committing the greater atrocities with the west's material and moral support.
I did not say or imply anything about that at all. I simply referred to a single incident where it seems the Assad regime used the tactic of bombing a funeral. My pointing to that incident says nothing whatsoever about the behavior of the rebels or which side is committing the most/worst atrocities.
Copyright © 2012 Salon Media Group, Inc
Awesome!!!! I watched a video that showed a prepper putting mylar bags on an open shelf and I said oh noooooooooo
the rest of us would like some of your buckets Bert, lol
Iran and Everything Else
By Michael Parenti
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article32104.htm
August 07, 2012 "Information Clearing House" -- Occasionally individuals complain that I fail to address one subject or another. One Berkeley denizen got in my face and announced: "You leftists ought to become aware of the ecological crisis." In fact, I had written a number of things about the ecological crisis, including one called "Eco-Apocalypse." His lack of familiarity with my work did not get in the way of his presumption.
Years ago when I spoke before the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom in New York, the moderator announced that she could not understand why I had "remained silent" about the attempt to defund UNESCO. Whatever else I might have been struggling with, she was convinced I should have joined with her in trying to save UNESCO (which itself really was a worthy cause).
People give me marching orders all the time. Among the most furiously insistent are those fixed on 9/11. Why haven’t I said anything about 9/11? Why am I "a 9/11 denier." In fact, I have written about 9/11 and even spoke at two 9/11 conferences (Santa Cruz and New York), raising questions of my own.
Other people have been "disappointed" or "astonished" or "puzzled" that I have failed to pronounce on whatever is the issue du jour. No attention is given by such complainers to my many books, articles, talks, and interviews that treat hundreds of subjects pertaining to political economy, culture, ideology, media, fascism, communism, capitalism, imperialism, media, ecology, political protest, history, religion, race, gender, homophobia, and other topics far too numerous to list. (For starters, visit my website: www.michaelparenti.org)
But one’s own energy, no matter how substantial, is always finite. One must allow for a division of labor and cannot hope to fight every fight.
Recently someone asked when was I going to "pay some attention" to Iran. Actually I have spoken about Iran in a number of interviews and talks---not to satisfy demands made by others but because I myself was moved to do so. In the last decade, over a five year period, I was repeatedly interviewed by English Radio Tehran. My concern about Iran goes back many years. Just the other day, while clearing out some old files, I came across a letter I had published over 33 years ago in the New York Times (10 May 1979), reproduced here exactly as it appeared in the Times:
To the Editor of the New York Times:
For 25 years the Shah of Iran tortured and murdered many thousands of dissident workers, students, peasants and intellectuals. For the most part, the U.S. press ignored these dreadful happenings and portrayed the Shah as a citadel of stability and an enlightened modernizer.
Thousands more were killed by the Shah’s police and military during the popular uprisings of this past year. Yet these casualties received only passing mention even though Iran was front-page news for several months. And from 1953 to 1978 millions of other Iranians suffered the silent oppression of poverty and malnutrition while the Shah, his family, and his generals grew ever richer.
Now the furies of revolution have lashed back, thus far executing about 200 of the Shah’s henchmen—less than what the Savak would arrest and torture on a slow weekend. And now the U.S. press has suddenly become acutely concerned, keeping a careful account of the "victims," printing photos of firing squads and making repeated references to the "repulsion" and "outrage" felt by anonymous "middle-class" Iranians who apparently are endowed with finer sensibilities than the mass of ordinary people will bore the brunt of the Shah’s repression. At the same time, American commentators are quick to observe that the new regime is merely replacing one repression with another.
So it has always been with the recording of revolutions: the mass of nameless innocents victimized by the ancien régime go uncounted and unnoticed, but when the not-so-innocent murderers are brought to revolutionary justice, the business-owned press is suddenly filled with references to "brutality" and "cruelty."
That anyone could equate the horrors of the Shah’s regime with the ferment, change and struggle that is going on in Iran today is a tribute to the biases of the U.S. press, a press that has learned to treat the atrocities of the U.S.-supported right-wing regimes with benign neglect while casting a stern self-righteous eye on the popular revolutions that challenge such regimes.
Michael Parenti
Washington, D.C.
There is one glaring omission in this missive: I focused only on the press without mentioning how the White House and leading members of Congress repeatedly had hailed the Shah as America’s sturdy ally---while U.S. oil companies merrily plundered Iran’s oil (with a good slice of the spoils going to the Shah and his henchmen).
A few years before the 1979 upheaval, I was teaching a graduate course at Cornell University. There I met several Iranian graduate students who spoke with utter rage about the Shah and his U.S.-supported Savak secret police. They told of friends being tortured and disappeared. They could not find enough damning words to vent their fury. These students came from the kind of well-off Persian families one would have expected to support the Shah. (You don’t make it from Tehran to Cornell graduate school without some money in the family.)
All I knew about the Shah at that time came from the U.S. mainstream media. But after listening to these students I began to think that this Shah fellow was not the admirably benign leader and modernizer everyone was portraying in the news.
The Shah’s subsequent overthrow in the 1979 revolution was something to celebrate. Unfortunately the revolution soon was betrayed by the theocratic militants who took hold of events and created their Islamic Republic of Iran. These religious reactionaries set about to torture and eradicate thousands of young Iranian radicals. They made war upon secular leftists and "decadent" Western lifestyles, as they set about establishing a grim and corrupt theocracy.
U.S. leaders and media had no critical words about the slaughter of leftist revolutionaries in Iran. If anything, they were quietly pleased. However, they remained hostile toward the Islamic regime. Why so? Regimes that kill revolutionaries and egalitarian reformists do not usually incite displeasure from the White House. If anything, the CIA and the Pentagon and the other imperial operatives who make the world safe for the Fortune 500 look most approvingly upon those who torture and murder Marxists and other leftists. Indeed, such counterrevolutionaries swiftly become the recipients of generous amounts of U.S. aid.
Why then did U.S. leaders denounce and threaten Iran and continue to do so to this day? The answer is: Iran’s Islamic Republic has other features that did not sit well with the western imperialists. Iran was-—and still is---a "dangerously" independent nation, unwilling to become a satellite to the U.S. global empire, unlike more compliant countries. Like Iraq under Saddam Hussein, Iran, with boundless audacity, gave every impression of wanting to use its land, labor, markets, and capital as it saw fit. Like Iraq---and Libya and Syria---Iran was committing the sin of economic nationalism. And like Iraq, Iran remained unwilling to establish cozy relations with Israel.
But this isn’t what we ordinary Americans are told. When talking to us, a different tact is taken by U.S. opinion-makers and policymakers. To strike enough fear into the public, our leaders tell us that, like Iraq, Iran "might" develop weapons of mass destruction. And like Iraq, Iran is lead by people who hate America and want to destroy us and Israel. And like Iraq, Iran "might" develop into a regional power leading other nations in the Middle East down the "Hate America" path. So our leaders conclude for us: it might be necessary to destroy Iran in an all-out aerial war.
It was President George W. Bush who in January 2002 cited Iraq, Iran, and North Korea as an "axis of evil." Iran exports terrorism and "pursues" weapons of mass destruction. Sooner or later this axis would have to be dealt with in the severest way, Bush insisted.
These official threats and jeremiads are intended to leave us with the impression that Iran is not ruled by "good Muslims." The "good Muslims"---as defined by the White House and the State Department---are the reactionary extremists and feudal tyrants who ride high in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, United Arab Emirate, Bahrain, and other countries that provide the United States with military bases, buy large shipments of U.S. arms, vote as Washington wants in the United Nations, enter free trade agreements with the Western capitalist nations, and propagate a wide-open deregulated free-market economy.
The "good Muslims" invite the IMF and the western corporations to come in and help themselves to the country’s land, labor, markets, industry, natural resources and anything else the international plutocracy might desire.
Unlike the "good Muslims," the "bad Muslims" of Iran take an anti-imperialist stance. They try to get out from under the clutches of the U.S. global imperium. For this, Iran may yet pay a heavy price. Think of what has been happening to Iraq, Libya, and now Syria. For its unwillingness to throw itself open to Western corporate pillage, Iran is already being subjected to heavy sanctions imposed by the United States and its allies. Sanctions hurt the ordinary population most of all. Unemployment and poverty increase. The government is unable to maintain human services. The public infrastructure begins to deteriorate and evaporate: privatization by attrition.
Iran has pursued an enriched uranium program, same as any nation has the right to do. The enrichment has been low-level for peaceful use, not the kind necessary for nuclear bombs. Iranian leaders, both secular and theocratic have been explicit about the useless horrors of nuclear weaponry and nuclear war.
Appearing on the Charlie Rose show when he was visiting the USA, Iranian president Ahmadinejad pointed out that nuclear weapons have never saved anyone. The Soviet Union had nuclear weapons; was it saved? he asked. India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons; have they found peace and security? Israel has nuclear weapons: has it found peace and security? And the United States itself has nuclear weapons and nuclear fleets patrolling the world and it seems obsessively preoccupied with being targeted by real or imagined enemies. Ahmadinejad, the wicked one, sounded so much more rational and humane than Hillary Clinton snarling her tough-guy threats at this or that noncompliant nation.
(Parenthetically, we should note that the Iranians possibly might try to develop a nuclear strike force---not to engage in a nuclear war that would destroy Iran but to develop a deterrent against aerial destruction from the west. The Iranians, like the North Koreans, know that the western nuclear powers have never attacked any country that is armed with nuclear weapons.)
I once heard some Russian commentators say that Iran is twice as large as Iraq, both in geography and in population; it would take hundreds of thousands of NATO troops and great cost in casualties and enormous sums of money to invade and try to subdue such a large country, an impossible task and certain disaster for the United States.
But the plan is not to invade, just to destroy the country and its infrastructure through aerial warfare. The U.S. Air Force eagerly announced that it has 10,000 targets in Iran pinpointed for attack and destruction. Yugoslavia is cited as an example of a nation that was destroyed by unanswerable aerial attacks, without the loss of a single U.S. soldier. I saw the destruction in Serbia shortly after the NATO bombings stopped: bridges, utilities, rail depots, factories, schools, television and radio stations, government-built hotels, hospitals, and housing projects---a destruction carried out with utter impunity, all this against a social democracy that refused to submit to a free-market capitalist takeover.
The message is clear. It has already been delivered to Yugoslavia, Libya, Syria, and many other countries around the world: overthrow your reform-minded, independent, communitarian government; become a satellite to the global corporate free-market system, or we will pound you to death and reduce you to a severe level of privatization and poverty.
Not all the U.S. military is of one mind regarding war with Iran. While the Air Force can hardly contain itself, the Army and Navy seem lukewarm. Former Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, actually denounced the idea of waging destruction upon "80 million Iranians, all different individuals."
The future does not look good for Iran. That country is slated for an attack of serious dimensions, supposedly in the name of democracy, "humanitarian war," the struggle against terrorism, and the need to protect America and Israel from some future nuclear threat.
Sometimes it seems as if U.S. ruling interests perpetrate crimes and deceptions of all sorts with a frequency greater than we can document and expose. So if I don’t write or speak about one or another issue, keep in mind, it may be because I am occupied with other things, or I simply have neither the energy nor the resources. Sometimes too, I think, it is because I get too heavy of heart.
Michael Parenti is an internationally known award-winning author and lecturer. He is one of the nation’s leading progressive political analysts. His highly informative and entertaining books and talks have reached a wide range of audiences in North America and abroad. http://www.michaelparenti.org/
Those are not rodent-proof so be careful with storage:)
Obama fights ban on indefinite detention of American
(thx sherm)
http://rt.com/usa/news/obama-indefinite-detention-forrest-070/
The White House has filed an appeal in hopes of reversing a federal judge’s ruling that bans the indefinite military detention of Americans because attorneys for the president say they are justified to imprison alleged terrorists without charge.
Manhattan federal court Judge Katherine Forrest ruled in May that the indefinite detention provisions signed into law late last year by US President Barack Obama failed to “pass constitutional muster” and ordered a temporary injunction to keep the military from locking up any person, American or other, over allegations of terrorist ties. On Monday, however, federal prosecutors representing President Obama and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta filed a claim with the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals in hopes of eliminating that ban.
The plaintiffs "cannot point to a single example of the military's detaining anyone for engaging in conduct even remotely similar to the type of expressive activities they allege could lead to detention," Obama’s attorneys insist. With that, the White House is arguing that as long as the indefinite detention law hasn’t be enforced yet, there is no reason for a judge to invalidate it.
Reuters reports this week that the government believes they are justified to have the authorization to lock alleged belligerents up indefinitely because cases involving militants directly aligned against the good of the US government warrants such punishment. Separate from Judge Forrest’s injunction, nine states have attempted to, at least in part, remove themselves from the indefinite detention provisions of included in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012, or NDAA.
In section 1021 of the NDAA, the president’s authority to hold a terrorism suspect “without trial, until the end of the hostilities” is reaffirmed by Congress. Despite an accompanying signing statement voicing his opposition to that provision, President Obama quietly inked his name to the NDAA on December 31, 2011. In May, however, a group of plaintiffs including notable journalists and civil liberty proponents challenged section 1021 in court, leading to Just Forrest to find it unconstitutional one month later.
"There is a strong public interest in protecting rights guaranteed by the First Amendment," Forrest wrote in her 68-page ruling. "There is also a strong public interest in ensuring that due process rights guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment are protected by ensuring that ordinary citizens are able to understand the scope of conduct that could subject them to indefinite military detention."
At the time Just Forrest made her injunction, attorney Carl Mayer told RT on behalf of the plaintiffs that, although he expected the White House to appeal, “It may not be in their best interest.”
“[T]here are so many people from all sides of the political spectrum opposed to this law that they ought to just say, 'We're not going to appeal,’” Mayer said. "The NDAA cannot be used to pick up Americans in a proverbial black van or in any other way that the administration might decide to try to get people into the military justice system. It means that the government is foreclosed now from engaging in this type of action against the civil liberties of Americans."
The original plaintiffs, who include Pulitzer Prize-winner Chris Hedges, have asked Just Forrest to make her injunction permanent. Oral arguments in the case are expected to begin this week.
Mount Tongariro eruption takes New Zealanders by surprise: volcanic lesson will be repeated many more times in the future
Posted on August 7, 2012
http://theextinctionprotocol.wordpress.com/2012/08/07/mount-tongariro-eruption-takes-new-zealanders-by-surprise-volcanic-lesson-will-be-repeated-many-more-times-in-the-future/
August 7, 2012 – NEW ZEALAND – Ash from New Zealand’s Mount Tongariro covers houses and farmland in this still image taken from video, August 7. A New Zealand volcano dormant for more than a century has spewed boulders and spread an ash cloud over the center of the country, disrupting air traffic but causing no other damage or injuries. A volcano quiet for more than a century erupted in a New Zealand national park, spreading thick ash for several miles and causing some residents to evacuate their homes. Some domestic flights were canceled Tuesday. Mount Tongariro spewed ash and rocks for about 30 minutes late Monday night after a few weeks of increased seismic activity. It didn’t cause any injuries or damage in the sparsely populated central North Island region. Tongariro National Park has three active volcanos, is a popular tourist destination and was the backdrop for many scenes in the ‘Lord of the Rings’ movies. Some residents left their homes as a precaution, and authorities temporarily closed roads. National carrier Air New Zealand canceled or delayed domestic flights to towns near the mountain, though by Tuesday afternoon, it said it was resuming service to locations where the ash cloud had cleared. No international flights were affected. Police said a witness to the eruption described flashes and explosions followed by a cloud of ash coming from a hole in the north face of the mountain. The Department of Conservation said three hikers were staying in a hut on the opposite slope of Mount Tongariro when it erupted but they walked out of the area safely. Steve Sherburn, a volcanologist at the government agency GNS Science, said the eruption spread a layer of ash one or two inches thick for several miles. He said he’d heard reports of ash traveling on wind currents to coastal towns 60 miles away. He said the eruption was likely caused by steam pressure building within the mountain. The nation’s civil defense ministry said eruption activity was subsiding though it still urged caution for people who were in the vicinity of the volcano. The park has closed hiking trails and sleeping huts on the mountain for now. -CSM
Chevron owed $19 billion to Ecuador or go into default-due on 8/6-the day of the fire http://ens-newswire.com/??p=47609
‘Super volcano’ could kill millions near site of Pompeii
By Eric Pfeiffer, Yahoo! News | The Sideshow – 14 hrs ago.
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/super-volcano-could-kill-millions-near-pompeii-232723952.html
The eruption of Mount Vesuvius near Naples, Italy, in 79 A.D. killed thousands of Pompeii residents and remains one of the most famous volcanic explosions in history. But scientists say a hidden "super volcano" in the same area has the potential to kill millions.
"These areas can give rise to the only eruptions that can have global catastrophic effects comparable to major meteorite impacts," Giuseppe De Natale, head of a project to drill deep under the earth to monitor the molten caldera, told Reuters.
A caldera, or cauldron, is formed by collapsed land after a volcanic eruption. It can be just as dangerous as volcanic domes, sending magma and ash shooting into the air. A caldera is located in Campi Flegrei. The regional park, which is named after the Greek word for burning, is a major tourist attraction, and the surrounding area is home to more than 3 million residents.
"That is why the Campi Flegrei absolutely must be studied and monitored," De Natale said. "I wouldn't say like others, but much more than the others exactly because of the danger given that millions of people live in the volcano."
Scientists funded by the International Continental Scientific Drilling Programme have been given clearance to drill 2.2 miles underground into the center of the caldera, home to a giant chamber of molten rock. Once they've reached the chamber, they plan to install a monitoring system that would give advanced warning of any potentially dangerous eruptions.
"[S]ome of these areas, in particular the Campi Flegrei, are densely populated and therefore even small eruptions, which are the most probable, fortunately, can pose risks for the population," said De Natale, from the Vesuvius observatory at Italy's National Institute for Geophysics and Volcanology.
The initial stages of drilling have already turned up some scientific evidence, including samples of volcanic rock from a major eruption that occurred some 15,000 years ago.
Italian PM warns of the break-up of the Eurozone and the European Union
Posted on August 6, 2012
http://theextinctionprotocol.wordpress.com/2012/08/06/italian-pm-warns-of-the-break-up-of-the-eurozone-and-the-european-union/
August 6, 2012 – ROME - The big news this morning is coming from an interview Italy’s Mario Monti gave to German magazine Der Spiegel, in which he warned that growing Italian resentment against Germany risks the break-up of not just the eurozone but the European Union itself. He said the eurozone tensions “bear the traits of a psychological dissolution of Europe,” adding that Europe “must work hard to contain it.” Asked about a strengthening in resentment between the allegedly profligate southern European nations and the bloc’s thrifty northern members, Monti told Der Spiegel “it is very alarming, and we have to fight against it. Yes, there is a front line in this area between north and south, there are reciprocal prejudices,” according to AP’s report of the interview. In the meantime, tensions between Germany and Italy appear to be on the rise. The news comes after an Italian newspaper splashed its front page on a photo of Angela Merkel with her arm raised and the headline “Quarto Reich.” Meanwhile, in an op-ed in Germany’s Bild Romano Prodi, a former Italian prime minister and president of the EU Commission, urged Germany to show “true leadership” in steering the continent through the crisis, saying the bloc’s biggest economy has the duty “to lead Europe toward a better future.” If Germany fails to lead through the crisis, it “would be the political end, for Europe and for Germany,” he insisted, urging Berlin to present a “clear action plan to achieve a democratic, federally structured Europe.” It is important to note that il Giornale is owned by Berlusconi. –Guardian
60 (currently active volcanos): Mount Tongariro erupts in New Zealand- loud explosions, lightning, plumes of smoke; first activity in 100 years
Posted on August 6, 2012
http://theextinctionprotocol.wordpress.com/2012/08/06/mount-tongariro-erupts-in-new-zealand-loud-explosions-lightning-plumes-of-smoke-first-activity-in-100-years/
August 6, 2012 – NEW ZEALAND – The volcanic alert level for Mt. Tongariro has risen from 1 to 2 after the central North Island volcano erupted for the first time in more than a century late last night. GNS science is reporting that at approximately 11:50 pm on Monday night ash fall began to be reported in the volcano’s vicinity – it has since been reported as far east as SH5 near Te Haroto and in Napier. GNS duty volcanologist Michael Rosenberg told Radio New Zealand that some people are reported to have left their houses on the southern shores of Lake Rotoaira, though no formal notices of evacuation have been issued so far by Civil Defense. He said residents in the area have told GNS of hearing several loud explosions, lightning and plumes of smoke and police have been told by an onlooker that “a new hole in the side of the mountain” had formed. They have also reported bright red rocks flying out of the mountain. The eruption reportedly happened at the Te Mari Craters, which are close to the Ketetahi Hot Springs on the northern side of the mountain. Civil Defence says the volcanic activity could pose a threat to the Waikato, Hawkes Bay, Gisborne, Manawatu-Wanganui, Bay of Plenty and Taranaki regions. A warning was also issued at 1.45am to people in these affected areas saying residents should stay indoors since volcanic ash is a health hazard. –NZ Herald
Greece rounds up thousands of immigrants in weekend sweep as economic woes worsen
Posted on August 6, 2012
http://theextinctionprotocol.wordpress.com/2012/08/06/greece-rounds-up-thousands-of-immigrants-in-weekend-sweep-as-economic-woes-worsen/
August 6, 2012 – GREECE – Greek police arrested more than 1,000 immigrants and detained thousands more in a massive weekend sweep that comes as the strapped nation has increasingly soured on hosting foreigners. The vast roundup in Athens was jarringly named Xenios Zeus — after the Greek god known as the patron of hospitality. Police stopped and detained 6,000 immigrants, out of whom 1,600 were arrested for illegally entering Greece and sent to holding centers, according to the Associated Press. Greek media reported that similar sweeps are in the works for other cities. Leftist political parties slammed the crackdown as an assault on human rights that had fostered fear and racism, while the extreme right Golden Dawn party accused the government of not actually sending anyone back to a home country, merely holding a “badly organized PR stunt,” Athens News reported. Public Order and Citizens’ Protection Minister Nikos Dendias defended the roundups as necessary to keep Greece from unraveling, arguing that the country faced the biggest “invasion” since the influx of the ancient Dorians thousands of years ago. Dendias had earlier claimed that “unbelievably high” numbers of immigrants were involved in crime, according to Greek news reports. As for naming a roundup after the god of hospitality, Dendias reportedly told Greek media that the name was fitting because immigrants were living in miserable conditions, crammed into decrepit apartments after being conned by smugglers into thinking that they would be able to get jobs. “Now they will return to their home countries….It’s the best thing that could happen to them,” Dendias was quoted by the Kathimerininewspaper. Greece is believed to host nearly 1 million illegal immigrants, according to the International Organization for Migration. They come from countries such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Morocco and Iraq, often hoping to hopscotch to other European countries but ending up broke and stranded in Greece instead. Anti-immigrant sentiment has been on the rise in Greece as it aches with economic woes and soaring unemployment. Gangs dressed in black have beaten immigrants, shouting at them to leave. A surge in xenophobic attacks has left immigrants afraid to walk the streets, Human Rights Watch said in a report last month. –LA Times
Fire at Chevron refinery produces health hazard emergency over San Francisco Bay area
Posted on August 7, 2012
August 7, 2012 – CALIFORNIA – Officials fearing toxic smoke told residents to remain indoors late Monday as a fire at a Chevron refinery released black plumes over the plant in the San Francisco Bay Area. The fire broke out at 6:15 p.m., with flames visible at the top of two refinery stacks. Thick black smoke spewed from the Richmond plant, covering the city and San Pablo, about 10 miles northeast of San Francisco. The fire was contained by 10:30 p.m., but it was not known when the flames would be extinguished, said Chevron spokeswoman Heather Kulp. Smoke continued to pour from the facility late Monday. The blaze started at the refinery’s No. 4 Crude Unit after an inspection crew discovered a diesel leak in a line in the unit, Nigel Hearne, manager of the refinery, told The San Francisco Chronicle. Shortly after the crew evacuated the area, the diesel ignited, Hearne said. One employee suffered a minor injury and was receiving first aid, Chevron officials said. Residents of Richmond, San Pablo and the unincorporated community of North Richmond were advised by Contra Costa County health officials through automated calls to ‘shelter in place,’ meaning they should not only stay inside, but should also turn off heaters, air conditioners and fans, and to cover cracks around doors with tape or damp towels. “Any kind of smoke can be toxic,” said Randy Sawyer, the chief environmental and hazardous materials officer for the county’s health services agency. “In this smoke, there can also be all kind of byproducts that can be toxic,” he said. The agency had four teams of inspectors in the field taking readings of the air quality, Sawyer said. Daniela Rodriguez told the Contra Costa Times that she heard a ‘big boom’ about the time the fire started. The 23-year-old resident said about an hour passed before she received a call to shelter in place. “I was feeling kind of nauseous and light-headed (from the smell),” she told the newspaper. –Google
Governors aside, feds building health care markets
Published: August 6, 2012
Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2012/08/06/2287452/governors-aside-feds-building.html#storylink=cpy
By RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR — Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Don't look now: The feds may be gaining on GOP governors who've balked at carrying out a key part of President Barack Obama's health care overhaul law.
Opponents of the law say they won't set up new private health insurance markets called exchanges. But increasingly it's looking like Washington will just do it for them.
That means federal officials could be calling the shots on some insurance issues that states traditionally manage, from handling consumer complaints to regulating plans that will serve many citizens.
Unless Mitt Romney wins in November, that could turn into a political debacle for those dug in to fight what they denounce as "Obamacare."
"You're kind of rolling the dice if you think (Obama's health care law) will go away," said Kansas Insurance Commissioner Sandy Praeger, a Republican. If Romney can't make good on his vow to repeal the overhaul, "you are just giving up a lot of authority."
The law envisioned that states would run the new markets, or exchanges, with federal control as a fallback only. But the fallback now looks as if it will become the standard option in about half the states - at least initially.
It would happen through something called the federal exchange, humming along largely under wraps on a tight development schedule overseen by the Health and Human Services Department in Washington.
Exchanges are online markets in which individual consumers and small businesses will shop for health insurance among competing private plans. The Supreme Court's health care decision left both state exchanges and the federal option in place.
The exchanges are supposed to demystify the process of buying health insurance, allowing consumers to make apples-to-apples comparisons. Consumers will also be able to find out whether they're eligible for new federal subsidies to help pay premiums, or whether they qualify for expanded Medicaid.
It's all supposed to work in real time, or close to it, like online travel services. Open enrollment would start a little over a year from now, on Oct. 1, 2013, with coverage kicking in the following Jan. 1.
Eventually more than 25 million people are expected to get coverage through exchanges, including many who were previously uninsured. As exchanges get more customers, competition among insurance plans could help keep costs in check.
But only 14 states and Washington, D.C., have adopted plans for their own exchanges: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Utah, Vermont, Washington and West Virginia. Some could still backtrack.
Kentucky and Minnesota are pushing forward with their own exchanges, and others may be able to partner with the federal government. States face a Jan. 1, 2013, deadline for Washington to sign off on their plans.
Meanwhile, the federal exchange is advancing.
HHS contractors are working feverishly to design and test computer systems that would make the federal exchange come alive. It's a top priority for the Obama administration, which is guarding the details closely. Estimated price tag: at least $860 million.
The government is "on track in moving aggressively to set up this market structure," Mike Hash, the HHS official overseeing the effort, told industry representatives, state officials and public policy experts at a recent Bipartisan Policy Center conference. "We're on track ... to go live in the fall of 2013."
"I think the pressure is on them to deliver, and I fully expect they will," said Jon Kingsdale, who was the founding director of the nation's first health insurance exchange, created under then-Gov. Romney's health care overhaul in Massachusetts.
Now a consultant to states, Kingsdale says he expects the federal exchange to look very much like the one already operating in his home state.
There will be a website, and you'll be able to put in your ZIP code and get a list of available health plans. There will be a section where you can find out whether you qualify for subsidies, or whether you might need to look at Medicaid. There will be cost calculators to allow you to compare different levels of coverage: platinum, gold, silver and bronze. There will be tools that allow you to see whether your doctor or hospital is with a particular plan.
In an interview, HHS official Hash said the government is undaunted by the prospect of running exchanges in half the states or more.
"What we are talking about building here is a system that is really using 21st century technology, and it's not dependent like in the past on bricks and mortar or how many (federal employees) you have," said Hash. "Information technology produces the opportunity for efficiency. It's much more easily scalable if you need to do it for a larger number of individuals."
Paper applications also will be accepted. And Hash expects people will have plenty of help to navigate the system, from volunteers to insurers advertising to reach new customers.
The government has awarded two big technology contracts for exchanges.
HHS rejected an Associated Press request to interview the contractors.
Virginia-based CGI Federal Inc. is building the federal exchange. Maryland-based Quality Software Services Inc. is building what's called the federal data services hub, an electronic back office that will be used by the federal exchange and state exchanges to verify identity, income, citizenship and legal residence.
Running the data hub will involve securely checking sensitive personal information held by agencies such as the Social Security Administration, Internal Revenue Service and Homeland Security Department.
The administration says consumers should not notice any difference between the federal exchange and marketplaces run by the states. State regulators disagree.
"I think we would be giving up something," said Praeger, the Kansas insurance commissioner. "It would have much more of a federal flavor than a Kansas flavor."
Praeger wants Kansas to have a state-run exchange, but GOP Gov. Sam Brownback and Republican state legislators are opposed. If opponents prevail, the state will have a federal exchange.
But conservatives are raising yet another argument in hopes of shutting down federal exchanges.
Led by Cato Institute economist Michael Cannon, several opponents say the letter of the complex law precludes the government from subsidizing coverage through the federal exchange. They say the law allows only tax credits to help consumers pay premiums in state exchanges, not the federal exchange, and that's the way Congress intended it. If states don't set up exchanges, that would starve the health care overhaul of money and cause it to unravel, they contend.
But the IRS and two nonpartisan congressional units - the Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation - conducted their own analyses and concluded that subsidies are available in both types of exchanges, federal and state-run. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., one of the law's principal authors, says that's exactly how Congress intended it.
At the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, spokesman Scott Holeman says, "At this time, we don't have any reason to question the federal government's interpretation of the statute."
The dispute may wind up in court but probably wouldn't get resolved until after the exchanges are up and running.
'End of Capitalism': Bolivia to Expel Coca-Cola
By RT
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article32061.htm
August 02, 2012 "RT" -- In a symbolic rejection of US capitalism, Bolivia announced it will expel the Coca-Cola Company from the country at the end of the Mayan calendar. This will mark the end of capitalism and usher in a new era of equality, the Bolivian govt says.
“December 21 of 2012 will be the end of egoism and division. December 21 should be the end of Coca-Cola,” Bolivian foreign minister David Choquehuanca decreed, with bombast worthy of a viral marketing campaign.
The coming ‘end’ of the Mayan lunar calendar on December 21 of this year has sparked widespread doomsaying of an impending apocalypse. But Choquehuanca argued differently, claiming it will be the end of days for capitalism, not the planet.
“The planets will align for the first time in 26,000 years and this is the end of capitalism and the beginning of communitarianism,” said Choquehuanca as quoted by Venezuelan newspaper El Periodiquito.
The minister encouraged the people of Bolivia to drink Mocochinche, a peach-flavored soft drink, as an alternative to Coca-Cola. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez followed suit, encouraging his country to ditch the American beverage for fruit juice produced in Venezuela.
McFailure
Last year, Bolivia became the second Latin American country not to have a single McDonald’s. The fast food giant finally gave up on Bolivia after being unable to turn a profit in the country for over a decade.
Following this failure, the monolithic multinational released a documentary titled ‘Why McDonald’s failed in Bolivia.’ Referencing surveys, sociologists, nutritionists and historians, the company came to the conclusion it was not their food that was the issue, but a culturally driven boycott.
Bolivian President Evo Morales has a reputation for controversial policies similar to the Coca-Cola ban. Morales pledged last month to legalize the consumption of coca leaves, one of the main ingredients of cocaine.
“Neither the US nor capitalist countries have a good reason to maintain the ban on coca leaf consumption,” said Morales.
The coca leaf was declared an illegal narcotic by the UN in 1961, along with cocaine, opium and morphine. The consumption of coca leaves is a centuries-old tradition in Bolivia, strongly rooted in the beliefs of various indigenous groups.
Mali Becoming the Afghanistan of Africa
Why is Mali Spiraling out of Control?
By Ramzy Baroud
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article32062.htm
August 02, 2012 "Information Clearing House" -- 'We don't even know who to be afraid of anymore,' said Hama Ould Mohammad Bashir, a refugee from Mali (New York Times, July 18). 'There are a lot of armed people, coming and going all the time.'
Northern Mali promises to be the graveyard of scores of innocent people if African countries don’t collectively challenge Western influence in the region.
Mali is fast becoming the Afghanistan of Africa.
The tragic reality is that Mali—a large but sparsely populated country, with around 15.5 million inhabitants—was until a few months ago paraded as a model of stability and fledgling democracy in west Africa.
What happened to make it a hotbed for terrorism, ethnic cleansing and a civil war which could destabilize the entire region?
On March 22 US-trained army captain Amadou Sanogo led a coup against the now-exiled president Amadou Toumani Toure, accusing him of not doing enough to challenge separatist threats in the country’s north.
There was widespread condemnation of Sanogo’s coup, though the US was more forgiving than African media, most of which saw the takeover as a violent end to two decades of democratization. US-owned news outlets claimed the coup was “a surprise to Sanogo himself” and even termed it “accidental,” an inane assessment that flies in the face of the evidence.
Whatever Sanogo’s motives the coup did nothing to halt the separatists—quite the opposite. The Tuaregs’ National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) used the political vacuum to declare independence in the north just two weeks later.
The declaration followed a succession of quick military victories which included the capture of Gao and other major towns.
These developments emboldened Islamist and other militant groups to seize cities across the country. A power struggle soon erupted, in which the Islamist Ansar Dine (“protectors of the faith”) gained the upper hand, ousting the MNLA from a number of areas including the historic city of Timbuktu.
These militants alleged that the Islamic history of the city was not consistent with their interpretation of the religion and immediately set about dismantling buildings, burning Islamic manuscripts, and essentially destroying a Unesco world heritage site.
Another group soon moved in, thickening the plot. Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (Aqim) has been used by Washington to rationalize the establishment of the United States Africa Command (Africom), set up in 2008 with a brief covering the whole continent with the exception of Egypt. The US State Department claims that Africom “will play a supportive role as Africans build democratic institutions and establish good governance across the continent.”
It doesn’t explain how this process will be helped by Africom’s own Special Operations Command.
Media leaks and authoritative analysts have been linking Africom to the mess in Mali. The security vacuum in this strategically located country could be the exact opening the US has been seeking to establish a lasting military presence in Africa. This, of course, is part and parcel of the US’s recent reassessment of its military priorities across the world.
Not only did Africom have a notable presence in Mali—providing several training tours to Sanogo himself—its head General Carter Ham is now talking the talk we have heard so often in other conflict zones.
“We—the international community, the Malian government—missed an opportunity to deal with Aqim when it was weak. Now the situation is much more difficult and it will take greater effort by the international community and certainly by a new Malian government,” he told reporters in Senegal just last week.
The nature of this “great effort” is unknown, but both the US and France—the former colonial power which still has great influence and massive economic interests in Mali—have floated military options.
Knowing that Western interventions often achieve the opposite of their declared purpose some west African countries have been scrambling to prevent potentially grim scenarios.
On July 5 the UN Security Council endorsed the efforts of west African countries to end the unrest and—despite pressure—didn’t back military action.
The African Union, which has had little success in past conflicts, looks likely to cede leadership on the issue to the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas). But its members are heavily dependent on foreign aid, and thus very susceptible to outside pressure.
Despite hyped Western media coverage, al-Qaida is not the biggest concern in northern Mali. Even by General Ham’s estimate foreign fighters in the north number only in “the dozens and perhaps the low hundreds.”
The real crisis is humanitarian and political. According to the UN office for the co-ordination of humanitarian affairs 420,000 people have been made refugees in a region that is harsh even on those who aren’t forced to flee across open deserts.
But the US has already started discussions on the use of unmanned killer drones in the area. US media is fomenting fear over the situation, perhaps in preparation for a military campaign.
“Extremist Islamists have wrested control of a region the size of France in northern Mali and proclaimed an Islamist state,” ABC news reported on July 23.
Much less has been said about the causes of all this—not least that it was Western intervention in Libya last year that has saturated a poor region with a massive amount of weapons that are now being intercepted throughout Africa.
Mali is now ripe for another violent episode, the scope and nature of which are yet to be revealed. While Western powers and their regional allies are calculating their next move, hundreds of thousands of impoverished people are roaming the Sahara, seeking water in one of the world’s most unforgiving terrains.
The most tragic part of the story is that Mali’s real hardships are only just beginning.
Ramzy Baroud is an internationally-syndicated columnist and the editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is "My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story" (Pluto Press, London), now available on Amazon.com. Read more articles by Ramzy Baroud. http://www.ramzybaroud.net
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Romney, Netanyahu, and George Washington's Warning
By David Bromwich
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article32058.htm
August 02, 2012 "Huffington Post" -- Mitt Romney's campaign stop in Jerusalem has been criticized for the grossness of the subservience that the candidate exhibited toward Israel. This reaction was surely factored in by his handlers. Liberals, internationalists, human rights advocates might demur, but Romney's intended audience was none of these people. Nor was it the Arab world, nor was it American voters, with a possible exception for the state of Florida. Romney was aiming to reach two distinct but related target groups: first, a small set of extremely wealthy donors, and second, a group composed of one person, Benjamin Netanyahu. Both have long been potent players in American elections. Both were already helping Romney. It was necessary and useful at this time to cement the alliance in public.
Judged in the light of that purpose, Romney's visit must be counted a success. And it was a success in one other respect. The billionaires and the prime minister wanted Romney to bring the United States closer to supporting a war with Iran. Romney obliged, and we are now closer to war. He recognized, he said, the "right" of Israel to defend itself. Who ever denied that right? He meant: the righteousness of a preventive attack on Iran. This left open the question, Does Iran have the right to defend itself? A question that Americans and Israelis, as effectively propagandized as we have been, can be trusted not even to ask. So Romney's intervention in Jerusalem amounted to approval of war -- and a war before November if Netanyahu happens to find that desirable. As a candidate in an election season, Romney gave the green light to a power whose engagement in war would involve the United States.
Nothing like this has ever happened before in American politics. But then, there has never been anything in history remotely like the present relationship between the United States and Israel. President Obama, who is thought to be lukewarm by Romney's supporters, in March described our alliance with Israel as "sacrosanct." A month earlier, he had assured Israel and its warmest American partisans that his administration was marching in "lockstep" with Israel in our approach to Iran. All this Obama said and did in deference to Benjamin Netanyahu and without regard to American interests. For he had been told by the CIA that Iran is not working at present on a nuclear weapon, and he was warned by the Pentagon that a war with Iran would be a regional disaster for the United States. Even so, he gave Netanyahu in effect a yellow light: proceed with caution. And to sweeten the transaction, he promised to issue no traffic ticket if Israel speeds up. It was the same at this year's AIPAC convention where Obama again assured Netanyahu: "I have Israel's back."
A corny line from the playbook of the younger Bush, suggesting a false analogy between a gunfight and a world war, but Obama at the start of an election year knew very well what the script called for.
It has been said by members of the Israel lobby that Obama's actions speak louder than his words, and that his actions have hurt Israel. Let us recall some of the actions. In response to the onslaught on Gaza in December-January 2008-2009, in which 1,300 Palestinians were killed and 13 Israelis, Obama observed a silence which he has never broken. When, in November 2010, Netanyahu balked at the proposal of a 90-day partial extension of the freeze on West Bank settlement expansion, Obama offered twenty F-35 fighter jets if he would change his mind; Netanyahu refused, and Obama gave him the jets anyway. Only a week ago, the president donated another $70 million, on top of U.S. assistance already given, to build up the Israeli "Iron Dome" defense against rockets. Yet it is felt that Obama's love of Israel has been insufficiently demonstrative. The reason is simple but it is seldom mentioned quite candidly.
Twice, in the last four years, this president lapsed from the post-1992 American protocol toward Israel of undiluted flattery and largesse. In June 2009 he called for a settlement freeze, and in May 2011 he spoke of the 1967 lines as the starting point for the creation of an independent Palestine. Now, the de facto policy of the Netanyahu government is annexation of the West Bank. These diplomatic hints and reminders from the president were therefore as unwelcome as they were unexpected.
As for Iran, Israelis themselves (except Netanyahu and those in his immediate circle) are a good deal more cautious than their American neoconservative supporters. At a public meeting in April, in the Israeli city of Kfar Saba, Yuval Diskin, who in 2011 retired as head of Shin Bet (the Israeli FBI), said that he had "no faith" in Netanyahu's policy or his instincts on Iran. Two days later the former chief of Mossad, Meir Dagan, emphatically concurred and praised Diskin for his honesty.
What does it mean for an American like Romney, unskilled in international politics and innocent of the complexities of the Middle East, to back the pressure now being exerted by Netanyahu against the advice of the American president and against the advice of high-ranking intelligence and military officers in Israel? It means that Romney is not a friend of Israel so much as he is a friend of Netanyahu. Or rather, for Romney, as for the billionaires he had in tow, the personal is political. For them, Netanyahu is Israel. A point to which we shall return.
Joe Biden and Leon Panetta in recent months have taken care to issue statements along the lines of Obama himself, implying American avoidance of any war short of necessity, but adding that Israel is a sovereign nation and America does not pretend to control it. And yet we give Israel fighter jets, Iron Dome technology, and more than three billion dollars a year in foreign aid. If there is ever again an American president capable of deciding to concern himself more with the soundness of policy than with his chances in the next election, that president will have considerable control over Israel. Obama, however, works slowly and he starts worrying about the next election a year ahead. That does not leave much margin for inventive policy or persuasion. On the Middle East, his boldness in theory and timidity in practice seems to have roused the adventurism of Romney's neoconservative advisers. But Obama does occasionally offer convincing signs of not wanting the war with Iran that the Pentagon says would be a disaster. Romney, by contrast, with his quarterback-audible in Jerusalem, signaled that a war would be fine with him.
What are the actual stakes for Israel? Netanyahu has called the possession of a nuclear weapon by Iran an "existential threat," but nobody known for sanity, including his own defense minister Ehud Barak, has agreed with him about this. An existential threat conjures an image of war-loving Iran poised on the brink of exterminating the Jews of Israel. The evidence for that intention is a statement by the anti-Semitic president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who did indeed say that history would wipe the "Zionist entity" off the map. What only readers who follow politics are likely to know is that Ahmadinejad is not the most powerful figure in Iran and that after the next election he may be out of a job. The cost to the mullahs of bombing Israel, with a weapon they are not yet close to possessing, would be massive retaliation by Israel, whose nuclear arsenal is estimated between 200 and 300 weapons. That picture is so improbable that Netanyahu has been forced to adopt a different stratagem.
On the argument that he now presses, even low-enrichment uranium is a danger in the hands of Iran. Obama and the European capitals, in the October 2009 negotiations, had offered Iran an agreement allowing 5% enrichment, and at the time Netanyahu raised no public objection. He now says he will not settle for any enrichment at all by Iran. He is lowering the threshold to justify an attack. And Romney last week in Jerusalem, with the support of his war party advisers, fell into step in with the Netanyahu ultimatum. Nothing less than zero enrichment will satisfy Mitt Romney.
Still, if Iran is not an existential threat, why is the wish to attack Iran so strong in Netanyahu and his right-wing coalition? The reason is fear of Iran as a regional competitor. An Iran with any sort of serious armed force could not equal Israel or thoroughly deter Israel, but it would doubtless inhibit Israeli military ventures in the Arab world. That, for an advocate of Greater Israel, is intolerable. Israeli designs must go forward unhindered. So Netanyahu is asking for American support against Iran for much the same reason that his predecessor Yitzhak Shamir wanted America to go to war with Iraq in 1991. Iraq, like Iran, was not then, and it did not later become, a nuclear threat, but in 1991 Iraq had a formidable army. Israel wanted that army destroyed. Some after-effects of the elimination of Iraq as a military power are now a familiar part of the regional landscape: the air, land, and sea blockade on Gaza, and the annexation by Israel of the West Bank, which proceeds with fresh evictions every day.
Romney was asked by a reporter at the Western Wall if he endorsed the annexation of the West Bank by Israel. The question was put to him three times, and three times Romney ignored it. The channeling to the settlers of West Bank aquifers, the uprooting of Palestinian olive groves, the expulsion of Bedouin shepherds from their grazing lands all are done under the ostensible explanation of military necessity by Israel. Anyone who recalls the Jim Crow society of the American South in the 1950s knows the real purpose of such actions: to assert and make visible by force the superiority of one caste of people over another, and to drive the inferior people from places of value.
At the King David Hotel, Romney addressed campaign donors from America who had traveled thousands of miles to another country to affirm their loyalty. But loyalty to what and whom? Are the United States and Israel the same country? This was one of the weirdest exhibitions of transnational financial muscle in recorded history. It probably has no precedent. Will it have a sequel? Let us try a thought experiment. Imagine the American reaction to an American presidential candidate who calls a meeting of wealthy Italian-Americans in Vatican City in order to declare their unconditional fidelity to the Pope. The United States was once the country of protestant nonconformity. What is happening to us?
The ad-lib comments that Romney spoke on this occasion have received plenty of notice, but they cannot be quoted too often. They display with a fine economy the good-natured insolence of Romney himself alongside the conventional racism of the Republican Party and its roots in Social Darwinism. "As you come here," he said,
and you see the GDP per capita, for instance, in Israel which is about $21,000 dollars, and compare that with the GDP per capita just across the areas managed by the Palestinian Authority, which is more like $10,000 per capita, you notice such a dramatically stark difference in economic vitality.
Such was his revelation for the self-made party donors, as well as the heir and heiress billionaires. But there was more: "As I come here and I look out over this city and consider the accomplishments of the people of this nation, I recognize the power of at least culture and a few other things." Among the other things of course was "the hand of providence," the non-denominational shorthand notation for Tetragrammaton or Jesus Yahweh Smith. But the key word here was culture. There is a good culture, we know, of self-respect and commercial success and technology. And that culture looks a lot like Israel. Then there is a culture of poverty and inertia and resentment, and it looks like the West Bank. The occupation has nothing to do with the difference. For the slow-of-wit, Romney clarified his idea by adding that a similar disparity exists between other neighboring countries like Mexico and the United States.
Note that this division between the deserving and less deserving peoples scarcely departs from the old anti-Semitism. It uses the same clichés: the despised people are crafty but sullen, lacking in Western energy, discipline, and refinement. The prejudice has now been turned against another Semitic tribe, the Palestinians. The Jews of Israel, by contrast, are praised for their adaptation to the ways of commerce, and are treated as honorary Christians.
Pass from Romney to his audience. These people, as reported by the New York Times, were high net worth individuals whose total holdings may well have approached half a trillion. We will never know, since they have multiple accounts in the Cayman Islands, where some of them also have alternate private residences. But it is worth following up a few details of the Times story by Jodi Rudoren and Ashley Parker. "Sheldon Adelson...wore a pin that said 'Romney' in Hebrew letters," yet Adleson is troubled, these days, by an investigation of the links between his casino holdings in Las Vegas and Macau.
"Much of Mr. Adelson's casino profits that go to him come from his casino in Macau," John McCain pointed out in a recent interview. "Maybe," McCain speculated, "in a roundabout way, foreign money is coming into an American political campaign." Also not so roundabout. The money coming from the crowd at the King David Hotel evidently came from Americans and was going back into an American campaign. What, then, was the symbolic importance of having it routed through an event in Israel timed to begin at the end of the religious day of mourning Tisha B'Av?
Other members of the Romney-Netanyahu billionaire entourage were touched on briefly in the Times account. Cheryl Halpern, a New Jersey Republican and big party donor, was named by George W. Bush the successor to Kenneth Tomlinson as chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and served in that office during the years 2005-07. She disciplined NPR for political bias and, along with Tomlinson, succeeded in bending the tone and content of NPR toward the platitudes and human interest by which it is mainly known today. John Miller, the chief executive of the National Beef Packing Company, helped Tagg Romney and Spencer Zwick to find the $244 million they needed for the startup of a private equity fund, Solamere Capital, which in its early days shared an address with the Romney campaign headquarters.
Paul Singer, founder of the $20 billion hedge fund Elliott Associates and its affiliate Elliott Management, operates a "vulture fund" that specializes in buying up third-world debt. Elliott trawls for assets that have drastically fallen in value, and then sues countries for full value, with a legal threat if they refuse. It goes after vulnerable nations like Panama, Peru, Argentina, and Congo, offering rigor-mortis prices to the panicked holders of collapsing bonds, before it compels the sinking governments to buy them back at a swollen price or suffer international disgrace and an utter loss of autonomy at the hands of financiers. The ingenuity and detective work that goes into Elliott is perhaps another clue to what Romney means by culture. But where Romney's Bain bought, gutted, repackaged and sold factories and store chains, and held in thrall occasionally the happiness of a town or a pension plan, Elliott transfixes the life holdings of large tracts of the world, including tribes and peoples whose names its officers will not have known how to pronounce until they began to reduce them to finance fodder. Will the vulture funds take out a second mortgage on the Parthenon? "Elliott hasn't [yet] built up a hold-out position in Greek debt, according to an individual close to the firm. Last year it profited instead by trading Greek credit default swaps."
These people, so important because of their money, are united in their belief that Israel stands in grave peril because of the neglect or hostility of Barack Obama. Yet Obama's actions toward Israel -- the gifts of weapons and security systems, the reflex vetoes on U.N. resolutions -- have been dangerous if anything by their one-sided solicitousness on behalf of Israel. Obama has conducted himself toward Israel, in fact, as he has acted toward establishments like the American military and the Wall Street banks and brokerage houses. He mentions his power of refusal chiefly in order to show that, in some technical sense, that power does exist. But his use of the power has been, in all of these contexts, nominal and decorative. Again and again he has said he could bring results and has not brought them: tougher bank regulations, faster withdrawal from Afghanistan, "hands-on" presidential engagement in negotiations to create a Palestinian state and achieve peace with Iran. In all of these settings, Obama's practice has been hands-off, no matter what he may have pledged. Still, it is true that Romney would be a distinct improvement from the point of view of Netanyahu. Rhetorically, as well as in fact, he would be hands-on in Israel's favor at all times.
Because the Tisha B'Av spectacle was so bizarre, almost grotesque, one cannot help asking again: why were those American donors going to Israel to cheer an American candidate in an American election? Is being an American no longer good enough? In a speech in Israel in 2010, Sheldon Adelson regretted that "the uniform that I wore in the military unfortunately was not an Israeli uniform, it was an American uniform." Such an attitude of abasement or self-subordination toward Israel, often accompanied by a peculiar vicarious nostalgia, is not confined to American Jews or billionaires. On arriving in Jerusalem in March 2010, Joe Biden said "It's good to be home." What was he thinking?
As Netanyahu looks at these postures of genuflection, it is no wonder that he feels himself entitled to criticize an American president in front of the American Congress, or to "vet" Republican vice-presidential hopefuls such as Chris Christie and Rob Portman. If Netanyahu is now the most effective bundler in the Republican Party, why should he not have a say in the party's choice of a vice-president?
George Washington thought that being Americans should be enough for us. In his great Farewell Address, he also gave some reasons why attachment to a foreign power, no matter how sentimental the affection, could only impair American liberty and independence and serve to draw the country into unnecessary wars. "Nothing," said Washington,
is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated. The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest. . . .Hence, frequent collisions, obstinate, envenomed, and bloody contests. The nation, prompted by ill-will and resentment, sometimes impels to war the government, contrary to the best calculations of policy. . . .The peace often, sometimes perhaps the liberty, of nations, has been the victim.
So likewise, a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification. It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions; by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained, and by exciting jealousy, ill-will, and a disposition to retaliate, in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld. And it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens (who devote themselves to the favorite nation), facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country, without odium, sometimes even with popularity.
Can there be any doubt what George Washington would have made of the scene of Mitt Romney and his high-rolling backers at the King David Hotel?
Washington summed up his criticism of such attachments in these climactic words of warning:
Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow-citizens) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government. . . .Excessive partiality for one foreign nation and excessive dislike of another cause those whom they actuate to see danger only on one side, and serve to veil and even second the arts of influence on the other.
A contrary understanding has become so familiar in our politics that it is hard to recall when anyone last worried about excessive partiality for one nation.
We should expect no compunction, no reservation, no self-consciousness regarding the "passionate attachment" to a "favorite nation" by Romney and his foreign policy team. Part of the reason lies in the composition of the team itself. They are, to a man, alumni of the Cheney circle and the post-2001 Patriot Act security establishment, and close affiliates of the Israel lobby. But another reason for the partiality goes far back in Romney's own life. He has been a friend of Netanyahu since their younger American corporate years together; the two have gone to each other for advice ever since, as Michael Barbaro disclosed in an April 8 story in the New York Times: they consult casually and with implicit trust, in every walk of political practice, from discussing the right strategy against Iran to canvassing the sharpest method for cutting state pensions. They share, said Barbaro (with less irony than he needed), "the same profoundly analytical view of the world."
To readers who know this personal history, it may seem that Romney went to Jerusalem to confirm one detail of Barbaro's story: "Mr. Romney has suggested that he would not make any significant policy decisions about Israel without consulting Mr. Netanyahu -- a level of deference that could raise eyebrows given Mr. Netanyahu's polarizing reputation, even as it appeals to the neoconservatives and evangelical Christians who are fiercely protective of Israel." Romney could not fail to consult his personal friend who happens to lead a foreign power, since he has pledged to do so without exception, in all decisions affecting that power. It is exactly the situation that George Washington described and warned against; but Romney seems unaware of any conflict of duties or even a possible tension. During a December primary debate, Barbaro notes,
Mr. Romney criticized Mr. Gingrich for making a disparaging remark about Palestinians, declaring: "Before I made a statement of that nature, I'd get on the phone to my friend Bibi Netanyahu and say: 'Would it help if I say this? What would you like me to do?'"
"What would you like me to do." Those are the words of our intendant decider, and he means to address them, with an implied vow of fidelity, to the leader of another country. Can we read Washington's words of 1796 addressed "to the people of the United States," and compare Romney's words addressed to his donors in Jerusalem, and not feel a deep disturbance? What would you like me to do?
David Bromwich - Professor of Literature at Yale
Scientists probe link between magnetic polarity reversal and heat in planet’s interior
Posted on August 3, 2012
http://theextinctionprotocol.wordpress.com/2012/08/03/scientists-probe-link-between-magnetic-polarity-reversal-and-heat-in-planets-interior/
August 3, 2012 – EARTH - Scientists at the University of Liverpool have discovered that variations in the long-term reversal rate of the Earth’s magnetic field may be caused by changes in heat flow from the Earth’s core into the base of the overlying mantle. The Earth is made up of a solid inner core, surrounded by a liquid outer core, in turn covered by a thicker or more viscous mantle, and ultimately by the solid crust beneath our feet. The magnetic field is generated by the motions of the liquid iron alloy in the outer core, approximately 3,000 km beneath the Earth’s crust. These motions occur because the core is losing heat to the overlying solid mantle that extends up to the crust on which we live. The mantle itself is also in motion but at much slower speeds of millimetres per year as opposed to millimetres per second in the core. This mantle motion is responsible for the drifting of the continents at the surface as well as earthquakes, volcanoes, and changes in the climate over millions of years. At intervals of hundreds of thousands of years, the North and South magnetic poles reverse and scientists can tell from rock formations precisely at what periods in the past this took place. The most recent reversal happened 780,000 years ago. Magnetic field variations happen on timescales of months to millions of years. Much of the magnetic field’s variation is thought to be sporadic but new research, led by Liverpool scientists, has found that over long timescales, this variability may be related to the changing pattern of heat loss across the core-mantle boundary occurring over millions of years. The team performed a detailed synthesis based on latest findings from a number of different areas including the ancient geomagnetic field and its record in rocks, motions in the mantle caused by motions of the continents and the process responsible for generating the magnetic field in the core. Dr Andrew Biggin, from the University’s School of Environmental Sciences, said: “The magnetic field has undergone big changes in its behavior that might be due to the mantle’s controlling influence on the core. In particular, we focused on the time interval between around 200 and 80 million years ago – when dinosaurs were still around – when the magnetic field initially started reversing its polarity very frequently. During this period the polarity was reversing up to 10 times every million years; however 50 million years later, it stopped reversing altogether for nearly 40 million years. “When these changes in the magnetic field were taking place, the whole of the Earth’s crust and mantle, including all of the continents, were undergoing a big rotation with respect to the geographic and time-averaged geomagnetic poles – the points defining the Earth’s axis of rotation. We suspect that this process, called True Polar Wander and caused by the changing density distribution in the mantle, will have changed the pattern of heat flowing out of the core in such a manner as to cause the magnetic field to first become less stable, with lots of reversals, and then become much more stable – and stop reversing.” –Terra Earth
Book quote: “The decline in Earth’s magnetic field and the global planetary warming trends could be rooted in the same causitive process. Gradient temeprature flucuations within the planet’s interior and rotational speed flucuations within the inner planetary core dynamo could be one of the causes for the rapid disporpotionate heating of the planet- something that has mistakenly been attributed to anthropogenic global warming…dynamo faltering from rapid changes in interior planetary temperatures, is likely accelerating magnetic field reversal and tectonic plate movements.” -The Extinction Protocol (2009), pp. 181, 475
Scientists probe link between magnetic polarity reversal and heat in planet’s interior
Posted on August 3, 2012
http://theextinctionprotocol.wordpress.com/2012/08/03/scientists-probe-link-between-magnetic-polarity-reversal-and-heat-in-planets-interior/
August 3, 2012 – EARTH - Scientists at the University of Liverpool have discovered that variations in the long-term reversal rate of the Earth’s magnetic field may be caused by changes in heat flow from the Earth’s core into the base of the overlying mantle. The Earth is made up of a solid inner core, surrounded by a liquid outer core, in turn covered by a thicker or more viscous mantle, and ultimately by the solid crust beneath our feet. The magnetic field is generated by the motions of the liquid iron alloy in the outer core, approximately 3,000 km beneath the Earth’s crust. These motions occur because the core is losing heat to the overlying solid mantle that extends up to the crust on which we live. The mantle itself is also in motion but at much slower speeds of millimetres per year as opposed to millimetres per second in the core. This mantle motion is responsible for the drifting of the continents at the surface as well as earthquakes, volcanoes, and changes in the climate over millions of years. At intervals of hundreds of thousands of years, the North and South magnetic poles reverse and scientists can tell from rock formations precisely at what periods in the past this took place. The most recent reversal happened 780,000 years ago. Magnetic field variations happen on timescales of months to millions of years. Much of the magnetic field’s variation is thought to be sporadic but new research, led by Liverpool scientists, has found that over long timescales, this variability may be related to the changing pattern of heat loss across the core-mantle boundary occurring over millions of years. The team performed a detailed synthesis based on latest findings from a number of different areas including the ancient geomagnetic field and its record in rocks, motions in the mantle caused by motions of the continents and the process responsible for generating the magnetic field in the core. Dr Andrew Biggin, from the University’s School of Environmental Sciences, said: “The magnetic field has undergone big changes in its behavior that might be due to the mantle’s controlling influence on the core. In particular, we focused on the time interval between around 200 and 80 million years ago – when dinosaurs were still around – when the magnetic field initially started reversing its polarity very frequently. During this period the polarity was reversing up to 10 times every million years; however 50 million years later, it stopped reversing altogether for nearly 40 million years. “When these changes in the magnetic field were taking place, the whole of the Earth’s crust and mantle, including all of the continents, were undergoing a big rotation with respect to the geographic and time-averaged geomagnetic poles – the points defining the Earth’s axis of rotation. We suspect that this process, called True Polar Wander and caused by the changing density distribution in the mantle, will have changed the pattern of heat flowing out of the core in such a manner as to cause the magnetic field to first become less stable, with lots of reversals, and then become much more stable – and stop reversing.” –Terra Earth
Book quote: “The decline in Earth’s magnetic field and the global planetary warming trends could be rooted in the same causitive process. Gradient temeprature flucuations within the planet’s interior and rotational speed flucuations within the inner planetary core dynamo could be one of the causes for the rapid disporpotionate heating of the planet- something that has mistakenly been attributed to anthropogenic global warming…dynamo faltering from rapid changes in interior planetary temperatures, is likely accelerating magnetic field reversal and tectonic plate movements.” -The Extinction Protocol (2009), pp. 181, 475
LIBOR scandal & Aurora Shooter James Holmes are linked
Robert Holmes' Summary
My educational background is in Mathematics and Statistics. My experience over the last 10 years at HNC and FICO has been in develping predictive models for financial services; credit & fraud risk models,first and third party application fraud models and internet/online banking fraud models.
Management Experience: I am currently managing a team building Falcon Fraud Manager Credit card fraud models. I have also managed teams in the Telco and Identity Theft fraud areas.
http://www.connectingdots1.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=56
2nd "Joker" Gas Mask Found at Far Corner of Colorado Theater
This picture clearly shows the gas mask near the back door of THEATER not near his car. Funny how the police say they approached him sitting in his car with the gas mask some early reports said still attached to his face. “Also found with Holmes was a throat protector, groin protector, gas mask, black tactical gloves and other personal armor protection equipment”. If he was caught with it, why was it on the ground in back of the theater near the back door along with most of his other gear strewn across the whole dam parking lot?
Gore Vidal Dies Aged 86
"Never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television," Vidal said. He didn't.
By George Eaton
August 01, 2012"New Statesman" - Like most of you, I woke to the sad news that Gore Vidal has died at the age of 86. The New Statesman was fortunate enough to publish one of his final British interviews, conducted by Melvyn Bragg as part of his guest editorship of the magazine.
Among Vidal's bon mots was his advice to "never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television". With that in mind, here's footage of some of his most notable TV appearances, including his famous duel with William F. Buckley Jr at the 1968 Democratic convention.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article32046.htm
Gore Vidal: ‘We’ll Have a Dictatorship Soon in the US’
The grand old man of letters Gore Vidal claims America is ‘rotting away’ — and don’t expect Barack Obama to save it
An Interview With Gore Vidal
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23595.htm
September 30, 2009 "The Times" -- A conversation with Gore Vidal unfolds at his pace. He answers questions imperiously, occasionally playfully, with a piercing, lethal dryness. He is 83 and in a wheelchair (a result of hypothermia suffered in the war, his left knee is made of titanium). But he can walk (“Of course I can”) and after a recent performance of Mother Courage at London’s National Theatre he stood to deliver an anti-war speech to the audience.
How was his friend Fiona Shaw in the title role? “Very good.” Where did they meet? Silence. The US? “Well, it wasn’t Russia.” What’s he writing at the moment? “It’s a little boring to talk about. Most writers seem to do little else but talk about themselves and their work, in majestic terms.” He means self-glorifying? “You’ve stumbled on the phrase,” he says, regally enough. “Continue to use it.”
Vidal is sitting in the Connaught Hotel in Mayfair, where he has been coming to stay for 60 years. He is wearing a brown suit jacket, brown jumper, tracksuit bottoms; his white hair twirled into a Tintin-esque quiff and with his hooded eyes, delicate yet craggy features and arch expression, he looks like Quentin Crisp, but accessorised with a low, lugubrious growl rather than camp lisp.
He points to an apartment opposite the hotel where Churchill stayed during the Second World War, as Downing Street was “getting hammered by the Nazis. The crowds would cheer him from the street, he knew great PR.” In a flash, this memory reminds you of the swathe of history Vidal has experienced with great intimacy: he was friends with JFK, fought in the war, his father Gene, an Olympic decathlete and aeronautics teacher, founded TWA among other airlines and had a relationship with Amelia Earhart. (Vidal first flew and landed a plane when he was 10.) He was a screenwriter for MGM in the dying days of the studio system, toyed with being a politician, he has written 24 novels and is hailed as one of the world’s greatest essayists.
He has crossed every boundary, I say. “Crashed many barriers,” he corrects me.
Last year he famously switched allegiance from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama during the Democratic nomination process for president. Now, he reveals, he regrets his change of heart. How’s Obama doing? “Dreadfully. I was hopeful. He was the most intelligent person we’ve had in that position for a long time. But he’s inexperienced. He has a total inability to understand military matters. He’s acting as if Afghanistan is the magic talisman: solve that and you solve terrorism.” America should leave Afghanistan, he says. “We’ve failed in every other aspect of our effort of conquering the Middle East or whatever you want to call it.” The “War on Terror” was “made up”, Vidal says. “The whole thing was PR, just like ‘weapons of mass destruction’. It has wrecked the airline business, which my father founded in the 1930s. He’d be cutting his wrists. Now when you fly you’re both scared to death and bored to death, a most disagreeable combination.”
His voice strengthens. “One thing I have hated all my life are LIARS [he says that with bristling anger] and I live in a nation of them. It was not always the case. I don’t demand honour, that can be lies too. I don’t say there was a golden age, but there was an age of general intelligence. We had a watchdog, the media.” The media is too supine? “Would that it was. They’re busy preparing us for an Iranian war.” He retains some optimism about Obama “because he doesn’t lie. We know the fool from Arizona [as he calls John McCain] is a liar. We never got the real story of how McCain crashed his plane [in 1967 near Hanoi, North Vietnam] and was held captive.”
Vidal originally became pro-Obama because he grew up in “a black city” (meaning Washington), as well as being impressed by Obama’s intelligence. “But he believes the generals. Even Bush knew the way to win a general was to give him another star. Obama believes the Republican Party is a party when in fact it’s a mindset, like Hitler Youth, based on hatred — religious hatred, racial hatred. When you foreigners hear the word ‘conservative’ you think of kindly old men hunting foxes. They’re not, they’re fascists.”
Another notable Obama mis-step has been on healthcare reform. “He f***ed it up. I don’t know how because the country wanted it. We’ll never see it happen.” As for his wider vision: “Maybe he doesn’t have one, not to imply he is a fraud. He loves quoting Lincoln and there’s a great Lincoln quote from a letter he wrote to one of his generals in the South after the Civil War. ‘I am President of the United States. I have full overall power and never forget it, because I will exercise it’. That’s what Obama needs — a bit of Lincoln’s chill.” Has he met Obama? “No,” he says quietly, “I’ve had my time with presidents.” Vidal raises his fingers to signify a gun and mutters: “Bang bang.” He is referring to the possibility of Obama being assassinated. “Just a mysterious lone gunman lurking in the shadows of the capital,” he says in a wry, dreamy way.
Vidal now believes, as he did originally, Clinton would be the better president. “Hillary knows more about the world and what to do with the generals. History has proven when the girls get involved, they’re good at it. Elizabeth I knew Raleigh would be a good man to give a ship to.”The Republicans will win the next election, Vidal believes; though for him there is little difference between the parties. “Remember the coup d’etat of 2000 when the Supreme Court fixed the selection, not election, of the stupidest man in the country, Mr Bush.”
Vidal says forcefully that he wished he’d never moved back to the US to live in Hollywood, from his clifftop home in Ravello, Italy, in 2000. His partner of 53 years, Howard Austen, who died in 2003, collated a lifetime’s-span of pictures of Vidal, for a new book out this autumn, Gore Vidal: Snapshots in History’s Glare (an oddly clunky title). The cover shows what a beautiful young man Vidal was, although his stare is as hawkish as it is today.
He observes presidential office-holders balefully. “The only one I knew well was Kennedy, but he didn’t impress me as a good president. It’s like asking, ‘What do I think of my brother?’ It’s complicated. I’d known him all my life and I liked him to the end, but he wrecked his chances with the Bay of Pigs and Suez crises, and because everyone was so keen to elect Bobby once Jack had gone, lies started to be told about him — that he was the greatest and the King of Camelot.”
Today religious mania has infected the political bloodstream and America has become corrosively isolationist, he says. “Ask an American what they know about Sweden and they’d say ‘They live well but they’re all alcoholics’. In fact a Scandinavian system could have benefited us many times over.” Instead, America has “no intellectual class” and is “rotting away at a funereal pace. We’ll have a military dictatorship fairly soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together. Obama would have been better off focusing on educating the American people. His problem is being over-educated. He doesn’t realise how dim-witted and ignorant his audience is. Benjamin Franklin said that the system would fail because of the corruption of the people and that happened under Bush.”
Vidal adds menacingly: “Don’t ever make the mistake with people like me thinking we are looking for heroes. There aren’t any and if there were, they would be killed immediately. I’m never surprised by bad behaviour. I expect it.”
While materially comfortable, Vidal’s was not a happy childhood. Of his actress and socialite mother Nina, he says: “Give her a glass of vodka and she was as tame as could be. Growing up is going to be difficult if the one person you hate is your mother. I felt trapped. I was close to my grandparents and my father was a saint.” His parents’ many remarriages means that even today he hasn’t met all his step-siblings.
He wrote his first novel, Williwaw, at 19. In 1948, he was blacklisted by the media after writing The City and the Pillar, one of the earliest novels to deal graphically with homosexual desire. “You’ll be amazed to know it is still going strong,” he says. The “JT” it is dedicated to is James “Jimmy” Trimble, Vidal’s first love and, he once said, the love of his life. “That was a slight exaggeration. I said it because there wasn’t any other. In the new book there are wonderful pictures of him from our schooldays. He was a great athlete.” Here his voice softens, and he looks emotional, briefly. “We were both abandoned in our dormitory at St Alban’s [boarding school]. He was killed at the Battle of Iwo Jima [in 1945] because of bad G2 [intelligence].”
Vidal says Trimble’s death didn’t affect him. “No, I was in danger of dying too. A dead man can’t grieve a dead man.” Has love been important to him? “Don’t make the error that schoolteacher idiots make by thinking that gay men’s relationships are like heterosexual ones. They’re not.” He “wouldn’t begin to comment” on how they are different.
In 1956 he was hired by MGM, collaborated on the screenplay for Ben Hur and continued to write novels, most notoriously Myra Breckenridge about a transsexual. It is his satires, essays and memoirs — Live From Golgotha, Palimpsest and most recently, Point to Point Navigation — which have fully rounded our vision of this thorny contrarian, whose originality springs simply, and naturally, from having deliberately unfixed allegiances and an enduring belief in an American republic and railing sadness at how that ideal has been corrupted.
Vidal became a supportive correspondent of Timothy McVeigh, who blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 killing 168 people. The huge loss of life, indeed McVeigh’s act of mass murder, goes unmentioned by Vidal. “He was a true patriot, a Constitution man,” Vidal claims. “And I was torn, my grandfather [the Democrat Senator Thomas Gore] had bought Oklahoma into the Union.” McVeigh claimed he had done it as a protest against tyrannical government. The writer Edmund White took the correspondence as the basis for a play, Terre Haute (the jail McVeigh was incarcerated in before he was executed in 2001), imagining an encounter between the bomber and Vidal charged with desire.
“He’s a filthy, low writer,” Vidal says of White. “He likes to attack his betters, which means he has a big field to go after.” Had he wanted to meet McVeigh? “I am not in the business of meeting people,” Vidal says. “That play implies I am madly in love with McVeigh. I looked at his [White’s] writing and all he writes about is being a fag and how it’s the greatest thing on Earth. He thinks I’m another queen and I’m not. I’m more interested in the Constitution and McVeigh than the loving tryst he saw. It was vulgar fag-ism.”
Vidal says that he hates labels and has said he believes in homosexual acts rather than homosexual people. He claims his relationship with Austen was platonic (though they reputedly met at a legendary New York bath-house). He was once quoted as saying that he’d had sex with a 1,000 men by the time he was 25. It must have been a little strange for Austen, Vidal’s life companion, to source those pictures of Trimble, his first, perhaps only, love.
Vidal puts on a scornful, campy voice. “People ask [of he and Austen], ‘How did you live together so long?’ The only rule was no sex. They can’t believe that. That was when I realised I was dealing with a public too stupid by half. They can’t tell the difference between ‘The Sun rose in the East’ and ‘The Sun is made of yeast’.” Was sex important to Vidal? “It must have been yes.”
He is single now. “I’m not into partnerships,” he says dismissively. I don’t even know what it means.” He “couldn’t care less” about gay marriage. “Does anyone care what Americans think? They’re the worst-educated people in the First World. They don’t have any thoughts, they have emotional responses, which good advertisers know how to provoke.” You could have been the first gay president, I say. “No, I would have married and had nine children,” he replies quickly and seriously. “I don’t believe in these exclusive terms.”
Impaired mobility doesn’t bother him — he “rose like a miracle” on stage at the National — and he doesn’t dwell on mortality either. “Either you accept there is such a thing or you’re so dumb that you can’t grasp it.” Is he in good health? “No, of course not. I’m diabetic. It’s odd, I’ve never been fat and I don’t like candy, which most Americans are hooked on.”
There is a trace of thwarted ambition about him. “I would have liked to have been president, but I never had the money. I was a friend of the throne. The only time I envied Jack was when Joe [Kennedy, JFK’s father] was buying him his Senate seat, then the presidency. He didn’t know how lucky he was. Here’s a story I’ve never told. In 1960, after he had spent so much on the presidential campaign, Joe took all nine children to Palm Beach to lecture them. He was really angry. He said, ‘All you read about the Kennedy fortune is untrue. It’s non-existent. We’ve spent so much getting Jack elected and not one of you is living within your income’. They all sat there, shame-faced. Jack was whistling. He used to tap his teeth: they were big teeth, like a xylophone. Joe turned to Jack and he says, ‘Mr President, what’s the solution?’ Jack said, ‘The solution is simple. You all gotta work harder’.” Vidal guffaws heartily.
Hollywood living proved less fun. “If there was a social whirl, you can be sure I would not be part of it.” He does a fabulous impression of Katharine Hepburn complaining about playing the matriarch in Suddenly Last Summer, which he wrote. “I hate this script,” he recalls Hepburn saying . “I’m far too healthy a person to know people like this.” Vidal snorts. “She had Parkinson’s. She shook like a leper in the wind.”
I ask what he wants to do next. “My usual answer to ‘What am I proudest of?’ is my novels, but really I am most proud that, despite enormous temptation, I have never killed anybody and you don’t know how tempted I have been.”
That wasn’t my question, I say. “Well, given that I’m proudest that I haven’t killed anybody, I might be saving something up for someone.” A perfect line: we both laugh.
Is he happy? “What a question,” he sighs and then smiles mischievously. “I’ll respond with a quote from Aeschylus: ‘Call no man happy till he is dead’.”
Facebook admits millions of accounts are fake
By MYFOX NEW YORK STAFF
Facebook's share price dipped below $20 on Thursday after reporting slowing growth and an admission of an alarming number of fake accounts.
In a quarterly filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the social media company said that as many as 83 million of its accounts are fake.
It also reported that as many as five percent of its active users have duplicate accounts.
Facebook members grew to 955 million this year.
It says 1.5 percent of its accounts are likely spam or accounts set up for other malicious activity. The fake accounts are concentrated in developing markets, according to the filing.
It also blames people who set up accounts for non-human entities, such as pets.
There are "inherent challenges" in measuring usage," the social network said.
"We are continually seeking to improve our ability to identify duplicate or false accounts and estimate the total number of such accounts, and such estimates may be affected by improvements or changes in our methodology," the filing continued.
The number of real users is important for Facebook as it seeks to sell advertising.
Facebook shares are down almost 50 percent from its $38 May IPO.
Read more: http://www.myfoxny.com/story/19180366/facebook-admits-millions-of-accounts-are-fake#ixzz22PfR3jI0
Our GOV is owned by said bankers. :(
Our DOJ has a different agenda altogether it seems...