1142 QuickLinks

Saturday, May 30, 2009
Opposition to NAIS Dominates Listening Sessions
USDA has held five listening sessions so far, and all of them have been dominated by individuals and organizations opposed to NAIS! Pro-NAIS speakers have been few and far between, and almost entirely from a small handful of industrial agriculture organizations. Is USDA really listening?

Saturday, May 30, 2009
PREAMBLE: NEW ECONOMY, SUSTAINING ECONOMY
America's open-ended commitment to aggregate economic growth is consuming environmental and social capital, both now severely diminished. At the same time, it is abundantly clear that American society and many others do need growth along many dimensions that increase human welfare, now and in the future: growth in good jobs and in the incomes of the poor; growth in availability of health care and the efficiency of its delivery

Saturday, May 30, 2009
Review of Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation
Polanyi wrote The Great Transformation during World War II. With depression and war, the previous two decades had been a cataclysmic time for the planet. His central thesis was, "The origins of the cataclysm lay in the utopian endeavor of economic liberalism to set up a self-regulating market system." The book decisively pooh-poohs many of the myths of our ruling economic doctrine. Most importantly, he eviscerates the idea of

Saturday, May 30, 2009
Spannos- Participatory Society: Urban Space & Freedom
The urban center is not only defined by relations to rural or suburban peripheries-by space, place, territory or geography-but also by a set of social and material relations that embody all societies. Every society has defining institutions which embody interpersonal roles and relations. Societies where people have very little decision-making capacity, where people have little or no say over when and where they work or live,

Friday, May 29, 2009
Vet Voice: Petraeus Says U.S. Violated Geneva Conventions -- What Will Cheney and Rush Say?
(2 comments) I recently chronicled the quickening departure of some big military names from the Republican party, those concerned about the party moving even farther to the right a number of issues, including torture. What struck me at the time is that General David Petraeus came out against torture and for closing Guantanamo. I was stunned, however, when he admitted today that the United States has violated the Geneva Conventions

Thursday, May 28, 2009
Administrative Waste Consumes 31 Percent of Health Spending
(3 comments) A definitive study of the administrative costs of the U.S. health system in the August 21, 2003 edition of the New England Journal of Medicine. After analyzing the costs of insurers, employers, doctors, hospitals, nursing homes and home-care agencies in both the U.S. and Canada, they found that administration consumes 31.0 percent of U.S. health spending. $350 billion per year savings is possible.

Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Resource Boom in Peru's Amazon Threatens Indigenous Peoples' Livelihoods and Their Rainforest Homes
Tens of thousands of indigenous people are bravely protesting Peru government's give-away of their rainforest homes to oil, mining and logging industry without their approval. Indigenous communities in the Peruvian Amazon are protesting investment laws passed under a free-trade pact with the US and against concessions granted to foreign energy companies. The focus for Amazonian development must be upon benefiting

Monday, May 25, 2009
Europe's Uprising Against GMOs and Patents on Life
(4 comments) The recent call for a moratorium on GMOs in Europe reflects an unstoppable groundswell of opposition to GMOs from both European citizens and governments. In April Germany became the sixth EU country to introduce a provisional ban on the GM maize, after France, Austria, Hungary, Luxembourg and Greece. Meanwhile, more than a thousand farmers demonstrated against patents on animals and plants

Friday, May 22, 2009
Just Say No To GMOs
(3 comments) The American Academy of Environmental Medicine says: "several animal studies indicate serious health risks associated with GM food consumption including infertility, immune dysregulation, accelerated aging, dysregulation of genes associated with cholesterol synthesis, insulin regulation, cell signaling, and protein formation, and changes in the liver, kidney, spleen and gastrointestinal system. ..."

Friday, May 22, 2009
Landmark study finds Israeli control in occupied territories 'a breach of the prohibition of apartheid'
(1 comments) An international report concludes that Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories "has become a colonial enterprise which implements a system of apartheid" and "The Wall and its infrastructure of gates and permanent checkpoints suggest a policy permanently to divide the West Bank into racial cantons."

Friday, May 22, 2009
FCC's Warrantless Household Searches Alarm Experts
(1 comments) You may not know it, but if you have a wireless router, a cordless phone, remote car-door opener, baby monitor or cellphone in your house, the FCC claims the right to enter your home without a warrant at any time of the day or night in order to inspect it.

Thursday, May 21, 2009
Another State Rejects Real ID
This week Minnesota became the 23rd state to reject the Real ID Act of 2005 which seeks to turn state drivers licenses into national identification cards by imposing federal standards for the issuance of all state drivers licenses. The costs of implemetation remain unknown and groups from both the right and the left challenge the legislation on Constitutional grounds.

Thursday, May 21, 2009
Industrial Local?
The New York Times published an article on May 12th titled When 'Local' Makes It Big, that outlines the latest attempt by Big Food to cash in on the growing sustainable food and farming movement. This time, they've gone after "local." Clearly, the term "local" can be easily misappropriated. Consumers still need to buy local AND organic

Thursday, May 21, 2009
Smart Jitney Transportation in the Coming Era of Fuel Scarcity
The Smart Jitney is a system of efficient and convenient ride sharing that addresses the problem of transportation in a post-peak oil world. The system utilizes the existing infrastructure of private automobiles and roads due to the time, expense, and difficulty of building a new transportation infrastructure amongst such a dispersed population. The goal of the system is to insure that each private car carries several people

Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Activists want probe of health insurers
Health Care for America Now asks the Justice Department to crack down on industry practices that allegedly infringe on the doctor-patient relationship, and to re-examine whether dozens of insurance company mergers in recent years have undermined competition. Antitrust lawyer David Balto, who also signed the letter to the DOJ, said it would be a mistake for the Obama administration to allow private insurers to assume a leading

Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Israeli Settlements and U.S. Policy
(5 comments) The Obama Administration's support of an Israeli settlement freeze echoes three decades of U.S. policy against Israeli settlements and must be linked to credible monitoring, accounting and enforcement mechanisms if his administration is to succeed where previous ones have failed.

Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Israel Dumps Hazardous Waste in West Bank
(3 comments) "Israel has been dumping waste, including hazardous and toxic waste, into the West Bank for years as a cheaper and easier alternative to processing it properly in Israel at appropriate hazardous waste management sites," Palestinian Environmental Authority (PEA) deputy director Jamil Mtoor told IPS. Israel exerts complete control over more than 40 percent of the West Bank.

Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Gaza Reality- video
(2 comments) We're not hearing enough about real life in Gaza. Not on television, not in the newspapers and not in the speeches of politicians in Washington. The "Gaza Reality" series of videos, fully produced in Gaza, gives an intimate, monthly close-up of what life is really like there today.

Tuesday, May 19, 2009
On Bisphenol-A Policy, the Lobbyists Are in Charge
When it comes to bisphenol-A (BPA), a ubiquitous and likely dangerous chemical found in hard plastic products like water bottles, there seem to be three repeating story lines: state and local governments continue to take action, new studies continue to prove frightening, and evidence continues to surface showing that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has no interest in protecting American consumers.

Monday, May 18, 2009
William Black audio: The Role of Fraud in the Financial Crisis
William Black, in a lecture in Iceland, discusses how the role of fraud in the financial crisis has been virtually ignored when he contends it was a major factor, and is also overlooked in the regulation of financial institutions.

Monday, May 18, 2009
Feudalism With A Smiling Face
The rich and powerful live in a different world from average men. They consider themselves privileged. Entitled. Untouchable. Better than the rest of us. Rules are for commoners, not royals. Welcome to feudalism with a smiling face.

Thursday, May 14, 2009
Global Farm Grab vs. Our Native Need for Food
(1 comments) In a disquieting rush to secure food supplies, financial speculators around the world are gobbling up farmland in developing nations and causing land prices to soar. Some call it the new colonialism, but most just call it an old-fashioned land grab. Land grabbing and food speculation are not just overseas phenomena; they are also happening in North America.

Thursday, May 14, 2009
Tamiflu Developer: Swine Flu May Have Been Released From A Lab
(5 comments) One of the first scientists to properly analyze the genetic makeup of the so-called swine flu virus that emerged three weeks ago in Mexico and led to fears of a global pandemic states that the virus may have escaped from a laboratory. Adrian Gibbs, 75, who collaborated on research that led to the development of Roche Holding AG's Tamiflu drug, said in an interview that one of the simplest explanations is that it's a laboratory

Thursday, May 14, 2009
Reich: The Truth Behind the Social Security and Medicare Alarm Bells
(2 comments) Social Security is a tiny problem. Medicare is a terrible one, but the problem is not really Medicare; it's quickly rising health-care costs. Look more closely and the real problem isn't even health-care costs; it's a system that pushes up costs by rewarding inefficiency, causing unbelievable waste, pushing over-medication, providing inadequate prevention, over-using emergency rooms, and spending billions on advertising

Thursday, May 14, 2009
War crimes against children - new Gaza report
(13 comments) A new report released today reveals the true extent of child killings by Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip during its 23 day offensive. War Crimes Against Children exposes the abject failure of Israeli authorities to uphold international humanitarian law, which provides protection for children in armed conflict and the lack of adequate precautions taken to distinguish between civilians and military targets.

Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Health Care Reform Turning Into Health Insurance Bailout
(4 comments) Mandatory purchases of private insurance policies without offering a public alternative to the private market is nothing other than a bailout for HMOs - whose greed, waste and indifference to our health have created the current mess.

Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Secretary of Ag Vilsack pledges to promote Big Biotech
(2 comments) While the Obama Administration has supported organics with several notable actions during its first 100 days of office, Secretary of Agriculture Vilsack pledged to promote Big Biotech abroad as part of President Obama's foreign policy. Tell him this is a bad idea. We want a sustainable agri. policy!

Tuesday, May 12, 2009
PsySR: Questions for APA about Torture
Psychologists for Social Responsibility (PsySR) has called for an independent national commission to fully investigate U.S. torture and prisoner abuse under the Bush Administration and call for the commission to determine whether the American Psychological Association (APA) knowingly cooperated with the Department of Defense and the CIA in helping to plan and facilitate torture.

Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Army's Prescription to Combat Solider Suicides: Christianity
A recent edition of the U.S. Army's suicide prevention manual advises military chaplains to promote "religiosity," specifically Christianity, as a way to deter distraught soldiers from committing suicide, which in recent months, according to one veterans advocacy group, has reached epidemic proportions.

Tuesday, May 12, 2009
The Neo-Liberal Debacle: More than Banking Needs to Change
The first priority of governments is to get the economy moving again and people back into work. Now that the myth of the market has been so obviously demolished, however, they should ignore what Soros calls the "market fundamentalists" and put in place measures designed to stop it going wrong again. And rich nations should stop imposing the neo-liberal model that has been thoroughly discredited on the rest of the world.

Monday, May 11, 2009
Wisconsin court upholds GPS tracking by police
Wisconsin police can attach GPS to cars to secretly track anybody's movements without obtaining search warrants, an appeals court ruled Thursday. However, the District 4 Court of Appeals said it was "more than a little troubled" by that conclusion and asked Wisconsin lawmakers to regulate GPS use to protect against abuse by police and private individuals.

Sunday, May 10, 2009
Press Buries the GAO's Damning Report on the SEC
A General Accountability Office report on the SEC this week reported that former chairman Christopher Cox "created an atmosphere in which enforcement attorneys believed their ability to bring actions against corporate wrongdoers had been weakened" and the staff lacked in-house expertise on pretty much all the fancy financial instruments without which we would not have this crisis.

Saturday, May 9, 2009
Durban Review Conference, Racism, And the Clash of Civilizations
(3 comments) As European Jews for a Just Peace chair Dror Feiler asks, "Is it really such a scandal to describe Israel as a racist country? what else can we call a nation whose policies make crucial differences between people, based on religion and ethnicity? What should we call a state under whose laws everyone is not equal? What should we call the practice of granting exclusive land-leasing rights to Jewish citizens?"

Saturday, May 9, 2009
Digby: Exceptional Dissonance
The moral dissonance on torture is so extreme that it's no wonder everyone wants it to just go away. If we confront what's really happened then we have to admit that what this country did (is doing?) was no different than the North Vietnamese and the Chinese and the Soviets and the North Koreans. If that truth is ever accepted and the myth of American exceptionalism is finally retired, I'm not sure how the right goes on.

Saturday, May 9, 2009
Friday Movie Night - Slave Economics Edition
One of the things so often overlooked in America today is not too long ago, the ultimate productive labor unit was the enslaved one. Below is a documentary on China labor and two American slave history documentaries with a focus on slavery economics.

Friday, May 8, 2009
The Subprime Court
By now everyone knows the new Supreme Court tilts to the right. What's less known is the court's newly expanded function as an institution of corporate power. Since Bush's appointments, the court has begun hearing far more business cases and, in case after case, has "pushed the law in a direction favored by business," as the Wall Street Journal reports.

Friday, May 8, 2009
Obama's Violin: Populist rage and the uncertain containment of change
The standard historic pattern of Democratic Party co-optation and surrender is currently trying to repeat itself amidst epic economic crisis and imperial disruption. David Rothkopf, a former Clinton administration official, commented on the president's corporatist and militarist transition team and cabinet with a musical analogy- "the violin model: you hold power with the left hand and you play the music with the right"

Friday, May 8, 2009
Concerned Scientists Offer Online Column on the Science of Agriculture
A new online UCS column, "The Real Scoop," will offer a science-based perspective on industrial-style agriculture. Written by Doug Gurian-Sherman, senior scientist and author of the report Failure to Yield, the column will cover genetic engineering, CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations), and other food production methods that have enormous impacts on human health, the environment, and society.

Friday, May 8, 2009
Genetically engineered crops banned from national wildlife refuge
A federal court has ordered the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to stop planting genetically engineered (GE) crops on its Prime Hook National Wildlife Refuge in Delaware. While the ruling is limited to Prime Hook, the lawsuit may serve as a model for similar litigation at more than 80 other national wildlife refuges now growing GE crops across the country.

Friday, May 8, 2009
4 Reasons Why 'Modern' Agriculture Is Bad For You
Here are four of the negative effects of industrial agriculture on the well-being of people and the ecosystems we depend on: Genital feminization of male humans and animals caused by ag chemicals. Herbicides linked to cancer, neurological disorders. Antibiotics fed to livestock have created antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Plants absorb antibiotics from soil amendments.

Thursday, May 7, 2009
Argentine Herbicide Lawsuit Alarms GM Soy Farmers
(9 comments) An environmental group filed suit in April before the Supreme Court, seeking a ban on glyphosate, a weed killer used with genetically modified soybeans that has helped fuel Argentina's soy boom by dramatically boosting yields. The lawsuit cited potential health dangers of the herbicide signaled in an unpublished study by Andres Carrasco, embryology professor at the University of Buenos Aires and researcher at the National Scie

Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Cashing in on 'Government Sachs'
The fact that the chairman of the New York Federal Reserve Bank made millions off his secret purchase of Goldman Sachs stock, "in violation of Federal Reserve policy," as the WSJ put it, at a time when the New York Fed was ostensibly overseeing the antics of the Wall Street firm, has barely registered a blip of outrage. And it was facilitated by Geithner. These jackals belong in jail.

Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Gaza Environment Emerges as a Major Casualty
Countless fruit groves across the Gaza Strip are now gone, entire farms bulldozed. The remains of thousands of destroyed homes emit toxic asbestos, while dilapidated infrastructure dumps raw sewage into the Mediterranean Sea. An already deepening environmental crisis in the besieged Gaza Strip has been further compounded by the recent war. Over 20,000 buildings and 5,000 homes were destroyed, rubble has yet to be cleared as a

Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Hedges: Buying Brand Obama
Barack Obama is a brand. And the Obama brand is designed to make us feel good about our government while corporate overlords loot the Treasury, our elected officials have their palms greased by armies of corporate lobbyists, our corporate media diverts us with gossip and trivia and our imperial wars expand in the Middle East. It's about being happy consumers, being lulled into supporting a lot of things not in our interest.

Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Can the Neocons Jump to the Dems?
(1 comments) Like the parasite that eventually kills its host, the Republican Party's virtual collapse, in large part because of the failed nation-building adventure in Iraq, has left neoconservatives discredited and facing policy extinction. Unfortunately, neoconservatism will probably live on by changing hosts and infecting the Democrats. Many Clintonians share the neoconservatives' passion for armed social work and nation-building.

Monday, May 4, 2009
New Stress Trial Balloon Floated
Tthere might be method in the seeming madness of changing dates and shifting sneak previews via favored members of the press as to what the stress tests might entail. Tire out the critics, numb the casual followers, and leave the boosters in firm control of share of mind. Let's face it, the fact that the authorities are allowing banks to negotiate the findings is a very very bad sign.

Sunday, May 3, 2009
GM Fails To Boost Crop Yields
(17 comments) An important new report from Dr Doug Gurian-Sherman, a former biotech specialist with the EPA who is now with the Union of Concerned Scientists, shows that "despite 20 years of research and 13 years of commercialization, genetic engineering has failed to significantly increase US crop yields." Recent studies have shown that organic and similar farming methods can more than double crop yields at little cost to poor farmers

Sunday, May 3, 2009
First genetic analysis of swine flu
The first genetic analysis of how well this virus transmits from person to person concludes that it spreads barely well enough to keep itself going. But it may be too early for celebrations. The 1918 flu pandemic, caused by another H1N1 virus, started with a mild, early wave in spring and early summer and the virus began its lethal second wave the following autumn.

Sunday, May 3, 2009
Swine Flu Ancestor Born on U.S. Factory Farms
Scientists have traced the genetic lineage of the new H1N1 swine flu to a strain that emerged in 1998 in U.S. factory farms, where it spread and mutated at an alarming rate. Experts warned then that a pocket of the virus would someday evolve to infect humans, perhaps setting off a global pandemic. The new findings challenge recent protests by pork industry leaders that industrial farms shouldn't be implicated

Saturday, May 2, 2009
I can call someone Hitler or a Nazi, but you can't.
(1 comments) Fresh from witnessing a neoconservative Hudson Institute-sponsored Alan Dershowitz/Jon Voight et al tirade smearing everyone from Hamas and Hezbollah to Ahmadinejad and, well, most Palestinians, as Nazis and Hitlers, it should come as no surprise that a {Jewish] professor is now actually being investigated by the Anti-Defamation League and his employers for suggesting a comparison between Gaza and the Warsaw Ghetto.

Saturday, May 2, 2009
Are Your Tax Dollars Being Used to Fund Human Rights Abuses in Gaza?
The US government is planning to pour more money- billions of dollars- to continue this madness. Tell them what happened in Gaza and ask them to investigate. Gaza's streets are littered with "made-in-the-US" ammunitions; Gaza's schools with "made-in-the-US" phosphorus.

Friday, May 1, 2009
Why Congress Won't Investigate Wall Street
Republicans and Democrats would find themselves in the hot seat: understanding our problems, this time around, would require our political leaders to examine themselves. The crisis today is not solely one of bank misbehavior. This is also about the failure of the regulators -- the Wall Street policemen who dozed peacefully as the crime of the century went off beneath the window.

Friday, May 1, 2009
Gagging on Google
(1 comments) Google is to privacy and respect for intellectual property rights what the Taliban are to women's rights and civil liberties: a daunting threat that must be fought relentlessly by all those who value privacy and the right to exercise, within the limits of the law, control over the uses made by others of their intellectual property. The internet search engine company should be regulated rigorously, defanged, broken up

Friday, May 1, 2009
Are the Markets Too Complacent About Swine Flu?
Perhaps because so few market players studied science, or have a current link to science, they seem not to realize that the world's virologists and flu experts are in a state of nail-biting, ashen-faced, fear.

Friday, May 1, 2009
Massachusetts--Martial Law Bill S18
(2 comments) In response to the recent Swine flu outbreak, MA Bill- S18 gives the Governor power to authorize the deployment and use of force to distribute supplies and materials, and gives local authorities the permission to enter private residences for investigation and to quarantine individuals. Basically during an "emergency" our state can and will declare martial law; you lose your Constitutional rights.

Thursday, April 30, 2009
The "Jewish Conspiracy" behind the Durban Review Conference
It's no secret who was behind the effort to discredit the 2009 Durban Review Conference in Geneva. For nearly a year before the anti-racism confab, Jewish and pro-Israel groups lobbied hard to get Western countries to boycott the gathering, and actually did conspire, albeit openly, to sabotage the conference. Organizers and participants did not want to point the finger at them for fear of being labled anti-Semites.

Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Golden Rice and Hazards of GMOs
(19 comments) Last year it was revealed that Tufts University in Boston has been carrying out 'clinical trials' of Golden Rice on children. More than 30 senior scientists and academics signed an open letter condemning the work. The Golden Rice in the trials (GR2) was not one identifiable variety but was an experimental collection of transgenic events still in the laboratory, not tested pre-clinically on animals, or subjected to any safety

Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Swine Flu: Twitter's Power To Misinform :
Who knew that swine flu could also infect Twitter? Unlike basic internet search - which has been already been nicely used by Google to track emerging flu epidemics - Twitter seems to have introduced too much noise into the process, the "swine flu" Twitter-scare has once again proved the importance of context - and how badly most Twitter conversations are hurt by the lack of it.

Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Swine Flu: The Guardian explores the Smithfield connection Bonnie's Sustainable Blog: All about sustainable farming
(1 comments) The U.S. media is ignoring the possible factory farm link to Swine Flu. A 2008 study commissioned by the Pew Foundation underscores how factory farms are putting public health at risk by serving as a breeding ground for diseases that can afflict people as well as pigs. No one is safe when the same problems that plagued our financial system were allowed to infect our food supply as well. Rules were written to benefit the corpor

Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Bacevich: Farewell, the American Century
(1 comments) The central theme of the American Century has been one of righteousness overcoming evil. The persistence of this self-congratulatory account deprives Americans of self-awareness, hindering our efforts to navigate the treacherous waters in which the country finds itself at present. Bluntly, we are perpetuating a mythic version of the past that never even approximated reality and today has become downright malignant.

Saturday, April 25, 2009
Swine Flu Is Deadly Mix Of Never-Before-Seen Viruses
(4 comments) Swine flu panic is spreading in Mexico and soldiers are patrolling the streets after it was confirmed that human to human transmission is occurring and that the virus is a brand new strain which is seemingly affecting young, healthy people the worst, and that the bug is a never-before-seen mixture of human, avian and pig viruses from America, Europe and Asia. Clues that the virus may be a synthetic creation are already manifes

Saturday, April 25, 2009
CDC - Key Facts about Swine Influenza (Swine Flu)
In the past, CDC received reports of approximately one human swine influenza virus infection every one to two years in the U.S., but from December 2005 through February 2009, 12 cases of human infection with swine influenza have been reported. The symptoms of swine flu in people are expected to be similar to the symptoms of regular human seasonal influenza and include fever, lethargy, lack of appetite and coughing.

Friday, April 24, 2009
UK government's moral compass shattered beyond repair (Don't trust the Democrats to do any better)
This is what happens when governments lose the plot and they become accident-prone. Things fall apart. The centre does not hold. The Number 10 director of strategy, Damian McBride, was caught proposing to smear opposition MPs with crude sexual innuendo. Headline writers were amused when it emerged that the Tory immigration spokesman had been threatened with life imprisonment for leaking an embarrassing memo.

Friday, April 24, 2009
UK government's moral compass shattered beyond repair (Don't trust the Democrats to do any better)
This is what happens when governments lose the plot and they become accident-prone. Things fall apart. The centre does not hold. The Number 10 director of strategy, Damian McBride, was caught proposing to smear opposition MPs with crude sexual innuendo. Headline writers were amused when it emerged that the Tory immigration spokesman had been threatened with life imprisonment for leaking an embarrassing memo.

Friday, April 24, 2009
Richard Cook- A Meditation on Our Monetary System: State of Permanent Siege
(1 comments) THE LEVEL OF PUBLIC IGNORANCE on the topic of the U.S. and world monetary system is astonishing. This is part of the plan, of course, because the monetary elite control not only the financial system but also the news media, the publishing industry, and the educational system. The blueprint for control was put together over a century ago by Cecil Rhodes and his friends. In a state of permanent siege we would trade all our libe

Thursday, April 23, 2009
'Israelis Prepared for Violations'
(2 comments) After the internal investigation into the misconduct of Israeli soldiers in the course of the Gaza assault was closed suspiciously fast, a brief overview of publications by army officials, published months before the start of the war, suggests the reported misconduct was policy and not coincidence. "The operations were part of the military strategy called the 'Dahiyah policy', being that of indiscriminate killing and the use o

Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Sleep Scientists: Research Twisted to Justify Torture (Updated)
A 2005 memo from the Bush administration argued that it was okay for CIA interrogators to keep terror suspects awake for seven and a half days straight -- because "even very extended sleep deprivation does not cause physical pain," backed up by citing the work of a number of leading university researchers on sleep. Now, those professors are saying that their work was horribly misused.

Saturday, April 18, 2009
Big Food, Bigger Lies
(2 comments) The food industry is as bad as the tobacco industry for lying about the health effects of their products. In a New York Times article that ran this past weekend, James E. McWilliams said that locavores are ruining food. His proposed alternative, the concentrated animal feeding operations of industrial agriculture, are themselves a health hazard to their workers and neighbors.

Thursday, April 16, 2009
Is Geithner's Hedge-Fund Bailout Illegal?
Much of Geithner's new $100 billion program to help Wall Street hedge funds purchase "toxic assets" from banks-and which could put us on the hook for up to $500 billion-doesn't involve subprime mortgages at all. Instead, about half of that money goes to a Legacy Loans Program to help hedge funds purchase relatively conventional loans.

Thursday, April 16, 2009
CBS TV's "60 Minutes" this Sunday: "Cold Fusion Is Hot Again"
Low-energy nuclear reactions, historically known as "cold fusion," will get their 12 minutes of fame on CBS TV's "60 Minutes" Sunday at 7 p.m. Eastern Standard Time in a program titled "Cold Fusion Is Hot Again." Three weeks ago, researchers from Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR) Pacific made headlines with unambiguous evidence of nuclear particle emissions from their LENR experiments.

Monday, April 13, 2009
The Politics of Starvation
(3 comments) "They're always shooting at us. Every day they shoot at us," says Alaa Samour (19), pulling aside his shirt to show a scar on his shoulder. These are the most fertile and productive agricultural areas, the 'food basket' areas. At the end of Israel's three weeks of attacks on Gaza December-January which left more than 1,450 dead, Israeli authorities declared an expansion of the 'buffer zone' into what they dubbed a no-go zone

Saturday, April 11, 2009
Your Favorite 'Natural' Brands May Not Be What They Seem
(4 comments) Many of the products you may trust and respect for their independence and social responsibility are now owned by big corporations that are going out of their way to hide their link to the small, socially responsible brands. Links for "where to find locally harvested organic foods" and a "list of sustainable agriculture options" are included in article comments.

Friday, April 10, 2009
Socialism has failed. Now capitalism is bankrupt. So what comes next?
(8 comments) We have not yet learned to live in the 21st century, or at least to think in a way that fits it. The future, like the present and the past, belongs to mixed economies in which public and private are braided together in one way or another. But how? The test of a progressive policy is not private but public, not just rising income and consumption for individuals, but widening opportunities

Friday, April 10, 2009
Coal Ash On Our Fields
You've heard about Zero Waste models for industry? Instead of bothering with the expense and hassle of proper disposal, many toxin-producing industries sell their waste as fertilizer. Waste gets transformed into saleable product. Fertilizer and other agricultural chemicals only have to report their N-P-K (nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium) content so we have no idea what's been put on the fields where our food is grown.

Thursday, April 9, 2009
State Secrets Claims Test Democrats' Commitment to Oversight
(2 comments) Caroline Frederickson, director of the Washington office of the American Civil Liberties Union, said the Justice Department's latest use of the claim "makes it even more clear that we need a statutory framework, because we can't trust any administration to judge what's an appropriate claim of secrecy."

Thursday, April 9, 2009
Climate Change Comes to Your Backyard
USDA revises its plant hardiness map, bringing climate change down to earth for millions of households across the country. The guide, last updated in 1990, shows where various species can be expected to thrive. Experts who have helped with the revision expect the new map to extend plants' northern ranges and paint a sharp picture of the continent's gradual warming over the past few decades.

Wednesday, April 8, 2009
Willem Buiter: "Non-Negligible" Risk of Default by US and UK
Willem Buiter takes no prisoners. In his latest post, "The green shoots are weeds growing through the rubble in the ruins of the global economy", he dispatches the idea that recovery is around the corner. He also says that Simon Johnsom may be correct in his view that the government is captured by the finance sector, not merely by subscribing to their world view, as he has argued before, but in the mercenary sense.

Wednesday, April 8, 2009
Corporate Monopoly of Science
(3 comments) Corporations are aiming for an absolute stranglehold on scientific research and the flow of scientific information; that's why patents on GM crops should be abolished. In advance of two meetings on GM crops the EPA was holding earlier this year, twenty six scientists submitted a statement protesting "technology/stewardship agreements" which inhibit them from doing research for the public good.

Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Greenwald: The Virtues of Public Anger
(1 comments) The anti-anger consensus among our political elites is exactly wrong. The public rage we're finally seeing is long,long overdue, and appears to be the only force with both the ability and will to impose meaningful checks on continued kleptocratic pillaging and deep-seated corruption in virtually every branch of our establishment institutions. What we have is a political class and financial elite that is rotted to the core

Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Declass Board Tells Obama Openness is "At Risk"
In a new letter to President Obama, the Public Interest Declassification Board warned that reliable public access to government information, the very foundation of representative democracy, may be in jeopardy. "Future historians may find that the paper records of early American history provide a more reliable historical account than the inchoate mass of digital communications of the current era."

Monday, March 23, 2009
"The Market Is Not a Deity And We Are Not At Its Mercy"
The World Alliance of Reformed Churches is challenging neoliberal beliefs that ''unrestrained competition, consumerism and the unlimited economic growth and accumulation of wealth are the best for the whole world'' and for ''claiming to be without alternative, demanding an endless flow of sacrifices from the poor and creation...and demanding total allegiance which amounts to idolatry.''

Monday, March 23, 2009
New Green Deal or Not: Industrial Capitalism Is Assured Death
A New Green Deal must do more than provide continued employment in the speculative, industrial growth machine that is consuming the Earth's ecosystems. I am against green jobs, if the emphasis upon jobs includes more economic growth on the back of ecosystem harm. Nothing grows forever. And certainly not industrial and speculative capitalism which kills all it encounters through explosive growth.

Sunday, March 22, 2009
Joe O'Sullivan: my day with antonia
I've been a cop almost 20 years. I don't have any doubt that I'm a coarser person now than I was 20 years ago. An average cop, assuming that he's not working in some urban hellhole or high-crime area, does not spend all that much time dealing with actual criminals. We spend most of our time dealing with people who've ended up with us because some other, every other, system or safety net has broken.

Saturday, March 21, 2009
MATT TAIBBI: The Big Takeover
The global economic crisis isn't about money - it's about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution. So it's time to admit it: We're fools, protagonists in a kind of gruesome comedy about the marriage of greed and stupidity.

Friday, March 20, 2009
Hasbara Handbook: How to pretend to debate while smashing your opponent
(7 comments) There really is a Hasbara Handbook. You can download your very own copy right now - this one, by the World Union of Jewish Students, is from 2002 and aims to help students make the case for Israel. You could, the book suggests, try one of two methods. You could engage in real debate or you could "point score." As it says on page 9 under the title "How to score points whilst avoiding debate", and no I did not make this up:

Friday, March 20, 2009
Alan Nasser: A Real-World Stimulus Plan
(3 comments) The financial crisis was initiated by defaults on fraudulently inflated mortgage obligations. A direct approach would engage the problem of negative equity by acknowledging the disparity between the real value of the house and the size of the mortgage. This means writing down the mortgages to correspond to the real value of the house and the ability of the homeowner to pay.

Friday, March 20, 2009
Further accounts of Gaza killings released
(3 comments) In the two months since Israel ended its military assault on Gaza, Palestinians and international rights groups have accused it of excessive force and wanton killing. Now testimony is emerging from within the ranks of soldiers and officers alleging a permissive attitude toward the killing of civilians and reckless destruction of property that is sure to inflame the debate about the army's conduct in Gaza.

Monday, March 16, 2009
Monsanto's assault on agriculture
Monsanto is a corporation reviled for its genetic tampering and attempts to seize control of agriculture around the world. While trying to change its public persona into one of benevolence towards the public, the history of Monsanto is littered with continuous efforts to not only seize control of food production, but also supply. Monsanto's history also includes lives destroyed either financially and/or physically

Monday, March 16, 2009
American critically injured after being shot in the head by Israeli forces
(3 comments) Tristan Anderson from California has been critically injured in the village of Ni'lin after Israeli forces shot him in the head with a tear-gas canister. The gas canister does not make a noise when fired or emit a smoke tail and has a propeller to accelerate the weapon mid-air. A combination of the canister's high velocity and silence is extremely dangerous. Tristan Anderson was shot as Israeli forces attacked unarmed demonstr

Monday, March 16, 2009
A Plea for Help for a Great Local Farm
(1 comments) and Local Harvest CSA farmer Susan Jutz. Please lend her all the support you can... "As many of you know, last fall I canceled my annual farm tour and harvest event activities at my farm because Johnson County Planning and Zoning decided my "harvest event" was not an acceptable use of my land as a farmer and therefore required me to have a "special event" permit. (The Cost: $250 per event, a lengthy and complicated application

Monday, March 16, 2009
The Freeman Affair: Is the Israel Lobby Running Scared?
(1 comments) Judging by the outcome of the Charles W. Freeman affair this week, it might seem as if the Israeli lobby is fearsome indeed. Seen more broadly, however, the controversy over Freeman could be the Israel lobby's Waterloo. On March 10th, Freeman bowed out, but not with a whimper. In a letter to friends and colleagues, he launched a defiant, departing counterstrike that may have helped to change the very nature of Washington polit

Saturday, March 14, 2009
The success of drug decriminalization in Portugal
In 2001, Portugal became the only EU-member state to decriminalize drugs. Evaluating the policy strictly from an empirical perspective, decriminalization has been an unquestionable success, leading to improvements in virtually every relevant category and enabling Portugal to manage drug-related problems (and drug usage rates) far better than most Western nations that continue to treat adult drug use as a criminal offense.

Friday, March 13, 2009
Google Begins Behavioral Targeting Ad Program
Google launched its behavioral targeting ad program, which it calls "interest-based advertising." this week. EFF is concerned about behavioral targeting, because it means that information about how you use the web is collected, stored and associated with a cookie on your browser, which can track you across different websites and online services. We worked with Google to seek a new solution, an opt-out plug in.

Friday, March 13, 2009
The Human Cost of Cheap Food
Chances are that if you've eaten a domestic tomato this winter, you've eaten a fruit picked by the hand of a modern-day slave. As the logistics of industrial food systems often require, exploitation is a key ingredient in feeding our desire for out-of-season produce. Workers are paid only 45 cents for every 32-pound basket of tomatoes they pick, which almost ensures a cycle of endemic poverty.

Friday, March 13, 2009
Global Warming Deniers, Delayers Gather for Unreality Check
(12 comments) The world's largest gathering of climate change deniers convened in New York City this week for its annual confusion of climate and weather, science fact and fiction, and criticism of Al Gore. Global Warming blogger Ed Humes covers the group's wackier claims, including -- of course -- a mention of Adolf Hitler. It wouldn't be conspiracy without some Nazi comparisons!

Thursday, March 12, 2009
Vaccines as Biological Weapons? Live Avian Flu Virus Placed in Baxter Vaccine Materials Sent to 18 Countries
(6 comments) Deerfield, Illinois-based pharmaceutical company Baxter International Inc. has just been caught shipping live avian flu viruses mixed with vaccine material to medical distributors in 18 countries. The "mistake" (if you can call it that, see below...) was discovered by the National Microbiology Laboratory in Canada. The World Health Organization was alerted and panic spread throughout the vaccine community

Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Charles Freeman's statement on shameful smear campaign
Chas Freeman says: "I do not believe the National Intelligence Council could function effectively while its chair was under constant attack by unscrupulous people with a passionate attachment to the views of a political faction in a foreign country....It is apparent that we Americans cannot any longer conduct a serious public discussion or exercise independent judgment about matters of great importance to our country

Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Bishop supports rapist over child who was raped- because she had an abortion
Archbishop Don Jose Cardoso Sobrinho of Recife excommunicated the doctor, the child's mother and the medical team involved in the procedure. However, the stepfather was not excommunicated, with Sobrinho telling Globo TV that, "A graver act than (rape) is abortion, to eliminate an innocent life." ...more than 1 million women undergo illegal abortions in Brazil each year.

Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Should the Government Protect People's Health or Insurance Companies' Profits?
It's time for the government to prioritize the wellbeing of people over the wellbeing of insurance companies.

Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Quote For The Day
(2 comments) "In the U.S., you can advocate torture, illegal spying, and completely optional though murderous wars and be appointed to the highest positions. But you can't, apparently, criticize Israeli actions too much or question whether America's blind support for Israel should be re-examined," - Glenn Greenwald.

Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Too Many Overseas Bases
In the midst of an economic crisis that's getting scarier by the day, it's time to ask whether the nation can really afford some 1,000 military bases overseas. For those unfamiliar with the issue, you read that number correctly. One thousand. One thousand U.S. military bases outside the 50 states and Washington, DC, representing the largest collection of bases in world history. Even the Bush administration saw the wastefulness

Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Talking Economic Accountability with Economist James Galbraith
Economist James Galbraith has been calling this financial mess like he sees it. From September, 2008: "Further, anti-fraud provisions requiring that firms investigate fraud and make criminal referrals (or SARS) as appropriate, and agree to assist DOJ in the investigation and prosecution of frauds, could be implemented by regulation -- as is already required of insured institutions. What problem does $700 billion solve?

Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Industry Secrecy Still Hindering Protection from Toxics
The excessive use of confidential business information claims is a major factor preventing the government from safe, effective management of thousands of industrial chemicals, according to several experts before a congressional panel. The witnesses asserted that when information about potentially dangerous chemicals is labeled as trade secrets, government agencies and the public are denied opportunity to evaluate the risks

Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Obama and US commander discuss military intervention in Mexico
Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Michael Mullen briefed President Barack Obama over the weekend on the so-called drug war in Mexico and the prospect of increased US military involvement in the conflict south of the border. With US backing, Mexican President Felipe Calderon has increasingly militarized the country, deploying tens of thousands of troops in areas ranging from Matamoros and Reynosa in the east to Tijuana, Gu

Monday, March 9, 2009
FDA approves first engineered animal-without public input
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved the first commercialization both of a drug from a genetically engineered (GE) animal and of the animal itself. Although the agency previously assured the public that it would offer opportunities for public input into decisions to approve GE animals, the FDA made the approval without requesting input either from the public or an FDA advisory committee.

Monday, March 9, 2009
Inspired ready-built homes
(Video) Innovation in home building: Can two people build a beautiful, functional home with a rubber mallet, a glue gun and a crow bar? Yes they can. This is what happens when computer science meets architecture.

Monday, March 9, 2009
Acceptance of GM Crops Exaggerated
The acceptance of GM crops is exaggerated, says a report released by environmental group Friends of the Earth International (FoE) in February 2009, which criticises the industry-funded International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA) for inflating statistics on GM crops grown in the world, and promising greater yields when there has not been a single one.

Monday, March 9, 2009
Britt: 'Rush Lemmingbaugh' runs the GOP off a cliff
cartoon

Monday, March 9, 2009
Why AHIP Is Fighting Real Healthcare Reform
AHIP (America's Health Insurance Plans) is a national trade association that represents the special interests of the health insurance industry in government and in the media, and with individuals and employers. AHIP members are insurance companies profiting from the status quo. The top 7 "for profit" health insurers made a combined $12.6 billion in 2007- an increase of 170.2% from 2003.

Sunday, March 8, 2009
Bank Rescue Programs: Setting the Stage for More Looting?
An economic underground can come to life if firms have an incentive to go broke for profit at society's expense (to loot) instead of to go for broke (to gamble on success). Bankruptcy for profit will occur if poor accounting, lax regulation, or low penalties for abuse give owners an incentive to pay themselves more than their firms are worth and then default on their debt obligations.

Sunday, March 8, 2009
Obama's economic saviour savaged as Keating lets rip
(3 comments) Who vetted Geithner? Former Australian prime minister Paul Keating blames Geithner for mishandling the IMF program for Indonesia in 1997-98, and causing the Chinese to build massive reserves. Geithner was responsible for the build-up of tremendous imbalance in the world financial system. This imbalance, in turn, according to Keating, contributed to the global financial crisis which has since devastated the world economy.

Saturday, March 7, 2009
Scholes Advises 'Blow Up' Over-the-Counter Contracts
Myron Scholes, the Nobel prize- winning economist who helped invent a model for pricing options, said regulators need to "blow up or burn" over-the-counter derivative trading markets to help solve the financial crisis. "Let us start over," he said, referring to credit-default swaps and other complex securities that are traded off exchanges. "One way to do that, is to try to close all contracts at mid-market prices."

Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Science Nominees Blocked by Multiple Holds
Multiple senators anonymously blocked the nominations of two top science advisers intended to play a major role in the Obama administration's climate change policy, delaying their confirmation. John P. Holdren, nominated to lead the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Jane Lubchenco, picked for undersecretary of Commerce for oceans and atmosphere, had been expected to receive a quick floor vote.

Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Judged by the company you keep
(1 comments) Judged by the company the Republican Party is keeping these days, they are going to hell. They are going straight to hell. They are not passing go and they will not collect $200. Case in point: Rush Limbaugh, the self-styled "leader" of the conservative movement, the drug-crazed blowhard who rants, raves and screams while saying nothing.

Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Naomi Wolf: John Yoo's Legal Groundwork for Subverting the Republic
(1 comments) The US narrowly averted a carefully planned but thorough and unmistakable conspiracy to subvert the rule of law and the process of democracy from 2001-2008. One memo asserts that Bush can deploy the military within the United States. Another memo would give the power to Bush- at his discretion- to close down or censor newspapers, radio and the Internet

Wednesday, March 4, 2009
George W. Bush's Disposable Constitution
(1 comments) The Obama Admin released a series of nine previously secret legal opinions crafted by the Office of Legal Counsel to enhance the presidential powers of George W. Bush. Perhaps the most astonishing of these memos was one crafted by UC Berkeley law professor John Yoo. He concluded that in wartime, the President was freed from the constraints of the Bill of Rights with respect to anything he chose to label as a counterterrorism

Wednesday, March 4, 2009
"The Ultimate Aim is the Transfer of Arab-Israelis": Ethnic Cleansing and Israel
(5 comments) One of the more disturbing developments in the Middle East is a growing consensus among Israelis that it would acceptable to expel-in the words of advocates "transfer"-its Arab citizens to either a yet as unformed Palestinian state or the neighboring countries of Jordan and Egypt. "Transfer" is no longer the exclusive policy of extremists, as it has increasingly become a part of mainstream political dialogue.

Monday, March 2, 2009
The Exorcism of Voo-Doo Economics
(1 comments) Every shift of government spending that puts more money in poor people's pockets will also bring more money back in as taxes. It will have a higher multiplier, and in addition a higher bang-for-the buck. This is the exact opposite of what supply-side trickle-down/voo-doo economics tells us. And it will only become more and more important over time for all of us to understand it.

Sunday, March 1, 2009
On Downward Mobility
Some who are comparatively fortunate to have found new work are troubled because the work is low status. These individuals are mourning the loss of their former lives. That loss is compounded by the fact that the US is so stratified along income and class lines. A loss of a job tests one's friendships.

Saturday, February 28, 2009
Food Democracy Now! Meets with Secretary Vilsack
On Tuesday, February 24, Food Democracy Now! met with Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack in his office at the U.S. Department of Agriculture to present a petition signed by more than 87,000 Americans calling for sustainable change at the USDA. Members of the group were encouraged with the recent news that President Obama had selected sustainable food policy expert Kathleen Merrigan as the next Deputy Secretary of Agriculture

Saturday, February 28, 2009
Selective divestment at Hampshire College: Dershowitz attacks
(3 comments) Recently the Students for a Justice in Palestine (SJP) at Hampshire college were instrumental in getting the board of trustees to disinvest in the State Street mutual fund as part of a campaign to divest from companies that benefit from Israel's 40-plus year occupation of Palestinian Territories. Not surprisingly, right-wing defender of Israel's occupation, Alan Dershowitz, immediately threatened destruction

Friday, February 27, 2009
Focus on Fusion Centers: Secrecy News
The Department of Homeland Security has produced a new "Concept of Operations" (pdf) to define how the Department will support and oversee the network of dozens of "fusion centers" that have been established around the country. The fusion centers are intended to promote a collaborative approach among federal, state and local authorities to combating terrorism and criminal activity.

Friday, February 27, 2009
Buchanan: Return of the War Party  
Neither the United States nor the IAEA has conclusive evidence that Iran either has the fissile material for a bomb or an active program to build a bomb. It has never tested a nuclear device and has never demonstrated a capacity to weaponize a nuclear device, if it had one. Why, then, the hype, the hysteria, the clamor for "Action This Day!"? It is to divert America from her true national interests and stampede her into embrac

Friday, February 27, 2009
Israeli Officials Claim Unelected Former General "Running The Country"
(1 comments) Mr Gilad's fingerprints are to be found on most of the hawkish policies approved by the political leadership since the start of the intifada in 2000, including the emasculation of the Palestinian Authority, the "disengagement" from Gaza, and the promotion of civil war between Hamas and Fatah.

Thursday, February 26, 2009
Yes, A Massive Ideological Shift Has Happened
(1 comments) When polling firms stop asking Americans abstract questions about what vague ideological term they call themselves, and start asking Americans about what they actually believe, an enormous ideological shift is apparent. For example, last month the Harris poll found a huge popular shift in favor of government programs over the last three years

Thursday, February 26, 2009
End the Israeli Occupation:  Israeli Apartheid Week: March 1-8
(5 comments) Educate your community about the apartheid conditions in Israel/Palestine and come together to take action for justice.

Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Simple elixir called a 'miracle liquid'
It's a kitchen degreaser. It's a window cleaner. It kills athlete's foot. Oh, and you can drink it. It is a simple mixture of table salt and tap water whose ions have been scrambled with an electric current. Researchers have dubbed it electrolyzed water -- a substance that scientists say is powerful enough to kill anthrax spores without harming people or the environment.

Monday, February 23, 2009
U.S. Gov't Prepares for Collapse and Disruption
"U.S. Military Preparing for Domestic Disturbances" The report from the War College's Strategic Studies Institute warns that the U.S. military must prepare for a "violent, strategic dislocation inside the United States" that could be provoked by "unforeseen economic collapse" or "loss of functioning political and legal order." "Congress Seeks To Authorize & Legalize FEMA Camp Facilities":

Monday, February 23, 2009
Should Bailed Out Companies Be Able To Lobby?
Senators, California Democrat Dianne Feinstein and Maine Republican Olympia J. Snowe, have introduced legislation that would prohibit companies from using their relief program funds to lobby.

Monday, February 23, 2009
Army charity rakes in millions, does little to help veterans
Between 2003 and 2007 - as many military families dealt with long war deployments and increased numbers of home foreclosures - Army Emergency Relief grew into a $345 million behemoth. During those years, the charity packed away $117 million into its own reserves while spending just $64 million on direct aid, according to an AP analysis of its tax records.

Sunday, February 22, 2009
Ramzi Kysia: The Team Obama Should Have Picked
(1 comments) Obama is as close to a complete outsider as has ever been elected to the White House. With all these advantages, if Obama can't find it in him to name even one person from the so-called "Democratic wing" of the Democratic Party, then it isn't because he's a coward, and it isn't because he's reaching out to conservatives - it's because he doesn't want to.

Saturday, February 21, 2009
Cumulative Impacts: Death Knell for Cost-Benefit Analysis
The impacts of human activities are now adding up to a damaged world- a world in which Earth's natural capacity for self-renewal has been exceeded and permanent degradation is evident. Our legal and regulatory systems were never intended to limit the accumulation of small impacts. Instead, U.S. law relies on cost-benefit analysis to justify individual impacts- a practice that is now obsolete because it is destroying the planet

Saturday, February 21, 2009
Big Pharma Quietly Hikes Drug Prices 100 Percent or More
(2 comments) Without any fanfare, pharmaceutical companies have been raising the prices of many of their drugs by 100 percent or more, according to a study conducted by researchers from the University of Minnesota. The practice seems to be getting more common. In 2004, only 15 drugs had their prices so drastically increased. By only the first half of 2008, however, already the prices of 17 drugs had at least doubled.

Friday, February 20, 2009
Camera, Microphone in Magnavox Digital Conversion Box
I have a friend who is kind of a conspiracy theorist. He was trying to convince me that the many of the digital TV convert boxes that our coming out have microphones and cameras built into them. Knowing a bit about electronics I bought one of these devices opened it up fully intending on proving him wrong. To my surprise was right. This device has both a miniature camera lens and what looks like a microphone. (video)

Friday, February 20, 2009
Saudi King Appoints First Woman to Council of Ministers
(1 comments) King Abdullah appointed the first woman to the council of ministers as a part of a council reshuffling. The new Deputy Minister of Women's Education, Noor Al-Fayez, was appointed to the new position within the council. The king also replaced the head of the nation's religious police and dismissed a cleric who supported killing the heads of TV networks

Friday, February 20, 2009
YouTube John Dash and Apprentices - Live "Cold Fusion" (LENR) Demo at MIT
(2 comments) Professor John Dash is boldly teaching this heretical new field to young scientists. While orthodox scientists argue that "cold fusion is impossible," similar to the arguments against heliocentricism centuries ago, high school and graduate students in the U.S., Italy and China are generating small, but historic excess energy from metal hydrides by using low energy nuclear reactions.

Thursday, February 19, 2009
Dissent, Suppression and Violence in Gaza and Egypt
On top of the destruction visited upon Gaza by Israel (with full US support), Gaza residents also have to contend with another terrible burden of occupation – internecine warfare resulting from divide and conquer policies. The Israeli military, Hamas and Fatah are all using arbitrary detentions and torture. Making matters even worse for the people of Gaza, Egypt is also cracking down on those who show support for the Palestini

Thursday, February 19, 2009
Nation's Blacks Creeped Out By All The People Smiling At Them - The Onion
First witnessed shortly after President Obama's historic victory, the open and cheerful smiling has only continued in recent months, leaving members of the black community completely unnerved.

Wednesday, February 18, 2009
DirecTV Censors US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation's Gaza TV ad.
The US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation produced this commercial on Gaza. After extensive discussion with DirecTV the company declined the ad. This is not an atypical action for corporate US media, but it does demand a response. This blatant act of censorship is preventing millions from learning the truth about our government's crucial role in enabling Israel's war on and siege of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Would you like chips with that? (video)
VeriChip is the first FDA-approved human-implantable radio-frequency identification (RFID) microchip.IBM, which provided the Nazis with the punch card system which allowed their slave labor camps to operate smoothly, is one of the primary funders of Verichip.

Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Transgenes are escaping into the wild
NOW it's official: genes from genetically modified corn have escaped into wild varieties in rural Mexico. A new study resolves a long-running controversy over the spread of GM genes and suggests that detecting such escapes may be tougher than previously thought.

Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Genetically Engineered Crops Creating More Pesticide Addiction in U.S.
(1 comments) A Dec. 08 global summary from the Worldwatch Institute reports widespread planting in the US of crops genetically engineered to resist specific pesticides (allowing farmers to apply more pesticides to their crops) that has created 15 new species of plants known as "superweeds" and this production has already led to a $60 million annual increase in pesticide use in the U.S. Most $ goes to the same companies that developed the

Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Social Collapse Best Practices
In the comparative theory of superpower collapse, currently being quite thoroughly tested, the US and the Soviet Union will have collapsed for the same reasons, namely: a severe and chronic shortfall in the production of crude oil (that magic addictive elixir of industrial economies), a severe and worsening foreign trade deficit, a runaway military budget, and ballooning foreign debt.

Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Leslie Miles, Curator of Virtual Visual Curiosities
No words. Just images. Each post is a theme. The beauty is in the simplicity of the visual inspiration.

Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Bank insolvency: tips & tricks
So, your banking sector is basically insolvent, and your economy is teetering on the brink. No question, that's a rough situation. Never fear, Interfluidity is here. With the help of this uncredentialed blogger, you can turn your banking system around, save civilization as we know it, and still have time to do the laundry.

Monday, February 16, 2009
Congress, FDA part of food regulatory problem
With Georgia's peanut industry taking such a serious hit in this salmonella tragedy, state legislators and other officials are of course clamoring for reform and trying to fix blame. The FDA farmed out its responsibility to an agency that it knew or should have known was incapable of performing adequately. It too was less interested in protecting human health than in creating the illusion of such protection.

Monday, February 16, 2009
Musical Prophecy: 27 years ago, poet Gil Scott-Heron nailed it
"B Movie" video. He's talking about the Reagan era from within the Reagan era, but his comments could not be more accurate if they'd been recorded yesterday.

Sunday, February 15, 2009
Radical surgery is required to save this patient
The US sub-prime mortgage crisis of August 2007 could easily have been cured if regulators, governments and central banks had taken decisive action a year ago, when it was already obvious that this was a problem that private financial markets could not resolve. But instead of taking action- guaranteeing and recapitalising banks, buying-up distressed mortgages and slashing interest rates to zero - governments all over the world

Saturday, February 14, 2009
FDA Approves Depressant Drug For The Annoyingly Cheerful
The battle against perkiness (satire)

Friday, February 13, 2009
Looting Social Security
(2 comments) Governing elites in Washington and Wall Street have devised a fiendishly clever "grand bargain" they want President Obama to embrace in the name of "fiscal responsibility." The government, they argue, having spent billions on bailing out the banks, can recover its costs by looting the Social Security system. They are also targeting Medicare and Medicaid. The pitch sounds preposterous but an impressive armada is lined up to pus

Thursday, February 12, 2009
Tell the ADL to stop defending Avigdor Lieberman!
Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League is defending one of Israel's most powerful far-right extremists and his plan to strip "unfaithful" citizens, mostly Arab Israelis, of their citizenship. The Anti-Defamation League is supposed to "secure justice and fair treatment to all." Instead, they are supporting a dangerous ideology that calls for taking citizenship away from Israelis for exercising their right to free speech.

Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Hidden cost of unemployment benefits
(2 comments) Steve Lippe is a calm, cool sort. After getting sacked, he had the presence of mind to read the fine print about the fees associated with his new Pennsylvania unemployment debit card. Yes, fees. Fees to withdraw unemployment benefits. Fees to transfer. Fees to learn that besides being out of work, you're broke. "Who," he asked, "is making all this money off the unemployed?"

Tuesday, February 10, 2009
The Bridge at the Edge of the World
(2 comments) As Economic Anxiety Fuels the American Obsession with Growth, A Dissenting Voice Calls for Radical Change. No matter how hard environmentalists work, the current of destruction against which they are swimming is simply too swift. In order to preserve a livable planet for future generations the current itself must be altered. And the current is that untouchable edifice, American-style consumer capitalism.

Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Asia: The coming fury
As goods pile up in wharves from Bangkok to Shanghai, and workers are laid off in record numbers, people in East Asia are beginning to realize they aren't only experiencing an economic downturn but living through the end of an era. For over 40 years, the cutting edge of the region's economy has been export-oriented industrialization (EOI). But now the US credit economy has imploded, Asia's export economies have been marooned.

Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Catastrophic Fall in 2009 Global Food Production
(1 comments) The countries that make up two thirds of the world's agricultural output are experiencing drought conditions. Whether you watch a video of the drought in China, Australia, Africa, South America, or the US , the scene will be the same: misery, ruined crop, and dying cattle. A lack of credit for farmers curbed their ability to buy seeds and fertilizers in 2008/2009 and will limit production around the world.

Monday, February 9, 2009
A primer on Israeli elections
As many have said, the difference between Right and Left in Israel has nothing to do with the usual meaning of the terms. Both support the worst human rights abuse and both show absolutely no interest in peace or compromise. But that does not mean Israeli politics don't matter. To understand what is really in play we need to have a picture of the Israeli electorate. Israeli voters can be divided into five blocks or sectors.

Sunday, February 8, 2009
Fundamentalist Consumerism and an Insane Society
While people can resist the cheap-stuff propaganda and not worship at Wal-Mart, Ikea, and other big-box cathedrals-and stay out of the path of a mob of fundamentalist consumers-it is difficult to protect oneself from the slow death caused by consumer culture. Human beings are every day and in numerous ways psychologically, socially, and spiritually assaulted

Sunday, February 8, 2009
A "New" Bailout Plan? Hardly.
(1 comments) The sad truth is this: his plan will fail. Why? Excessive complexity. For a plan of this magnitude to work, it needs to be straight-forward, easy to understand, clearly communicated, brutally transparent, and ruthlessly executed. The chance of the Treasury and Congress arriving at a plan that meets these criterion appears to be approaching zero.

Sunday, February 8, 2009
Naomi Klein: Public Revolt Builds Against Rip-off Rescue Plans
Governments that respond to a crisis created by free-market ideology with the same bad ideas will not survive to tell the tale. Watching the crowds in Iceland banging pots and pans until their government fell reminded me of a chant popular in anti-capitalist circles in 2002: "You are Enron. We are Argentina." The people of Argentina, in the midst of an economic crisis like our own, shouted "All of them must go!"

Thursday, February 5, 2009
High-Level CIA Officer: It Is Time to Re-Open the 9/11 Investigation
(3 comments) A decorated 20-year CIA veteran whose astounding career formed the script for the Academy Award winning motion picture Syriana (Robert Baer) said "the evidence points at" 9/11 having had aspects of being an inside job. He's said: There are enough discrepancies and unanswered questions in the 9/11 Commission Report that under a friendly administration, the 9/11 investigation should be re-opened.

Wednesday, February 4, 2009
The Guernsey Experiment
A long-forgotten alternative to unfettered credit creation...After the Napoleonic Wars the introduction of the gold standard led to economic gridlock as labor and materials were abundant, but much-needed projects could not be funded for want of cash. So Guernsey States issued their own notes to fund projects, rather than borrowing from an English bank, and so paid no interest on the debt.

Wednesday, February 4, 2009
"BerkShares" Currency Helps Keep Up Local Western Mass. Economy
Banks in Western Massachusetts' Berkshires region are helping gear money toward local businesses by way of BerkShares, a currency that offers customers 10 percent off purchases. Since its inception about two years ago, more than $2 million in BerkShares has gone through the region. The currency's price, 100 BerkShares to $90, offers customers a 10 percent discount and gives them impetus to shop at participating businesses.

Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Blum : Change (in rhetoric) we can believe in
Whatever good changes might occur in non-foreign policy issues, such as the environment and abortion, the Obama administration will not produce any significantly worthwhile change in US foreign policy. I wish I could be an Obamaniac. I envy their enthusiasm. Here,in the form of an open letter to President Obama, are some of the "changes we can believe in" in foreign policy that would have to occur to win over the non-believer

Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Dalrymple: Pakistan in Peril
The relative calm in Iraq in recent months, combined with the drama of the US elections, has managed to distract attention from the catastrophe that is rapidly overwhelming Western interests in the part of the world that should have been the focus of America's response to September 11: the al-Qaeda and Taliban heartlands on either side of the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan. The situation here could hardly be more grim.

Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Americans are Clueless
Comparing many Americans to teary-eyed Idol contestants ridiculed by Simon Cowell, Cassandra sees similar bewilderment over the causes of the current crisis, and economic state which they collectively find themselves.

Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Chalmers Johnson: Economic Death Spiral at the Pentagon
A crisis exists when it comes to the military-industrial complex. That crisis has its roots in the corrupt and deceitful practices that have long characterized the high command of the Armed Forces, civilian executives of the armaments industries, and Congressional opportunists and criminals looking for pork-barrel projects, defense installations for their districts, or even bribes for votes.

Monday, February 2, 2009
The Daschles: feeding at the Beltway trough
In picking Daschle- who as an adviser to the K Street law firm Alston and Bird has spent the last four years burning up the sheets with the nation's fattest insurance and pharmaceutical interests- Obama is essentially announcing that he has no intention of seriously reforming the health care industry. Daschle embodies everything that is sleazy, sickly, and soul-less about Washington.

Monday, February 2, 2009
Water Pushed to the Limit
(1 comments) When it comes to water, "humanity does not have the full awareness of the danger it is facing and will only act under extreme circumstances. The bad news is that those extremes are drawing near," Manuel Baquedano, president of the Chilean non-governmental Institute of Political Ecology. I don't see policies for conservation, for prevention, for storing water: millions of human beings will be left without this resource

Monday, February 2, 2009
Saving the Climate Dangerously
(3 comments) Geoengineering experiments can lead to big disasters if things go wrong, which is why it must be strictly regulated. The German Governments decision to proceed with its ocean fertilisation experiment violates the recommendations of the Convention on Biological Diversity, but there is no law against it. Scientists disagree about how much extra carbon can be sequestered in this way and how long it would remain at the sea bottom.

Monday, February 2, 2009
USDA Gives Preliminary Approval to New Pesticide-Promoting GE Corn Variety
USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) has given preliminary approval to the first of a new generation of pesticide-promoting, genetically engineered crops designed to survive spraying with multiple herbicides. This latest petition to deregulate a new, untested, and complex GE crop poses food safety, environmental, and agronomic concerns that were not adequately evaluated. Link to comment

Sunday, February 1, 2009
Will the FDA Finally Get Out of Bed With Big Pharma?
A test case for the new government will be how it deals with the pharmaceutical industry, which rivals the gun manufacturers and tobacco companies for the position of most amoral industry in America. Democrats have long been promising to stand up to Big Pharma on issues like Medicare drug pricing and importing drugs from Canada, they'll need to also completely overhaul the Food and Drug Administration

Saturday, January 31, 2009
Public letter calling for new era in US policy toward Palestine
For too many years, Americans have seen narrowly-focused, but highly-effective, special interest groups help forge a misleading American discourse about Palestine and an inequitable U.S. policy toward Israel and Palestine that has tragically and dramatically failed the peoples of the United States, Israel, Palestine and beyond.

Friday, January 30, 2009
Hiding the Homeless: Super Bowl Edition
With the country abuzz about this weekend's Super Bowl, Tampa Bay is busy cleaning up the streets to host out-of-towners for the big game. That is, by conducting homeless sweeps and "aggressively" jailing unhoused people. The sheriff's office, of course, vehemently denies the targeting of homeless people. And the mayor backs him up. But advocates on the ground have seen an increase in arrests of homeless people for petty crime

Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Media Circus: Bill Moyers, 60 Minutes' Bob Simon and the backlash
Most journalists don't cover Israel-Palestine every day, and so they are unaccustomed to the inevitable tsunami of hyperbolic nastiness sure to come their way should they dare to touch the topic.

Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Take a break: Jennifer Steinkamp's virtual reality
New-media artist entrances viewers. A visual artist who crafts computer-animated projections for site-specific spaces, Jennifer Steinkamp uses her work to explore new means of producing and experiencing art.

Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Much High Fructose Corn Syrup Contaminated With Mercury
Mercury was found in nearly 50 percent of tested samples of commercial high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), according to the scientific journal, Environmental Health. A separate study by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) detected mercury in nearly one-third of 55 popular brandname foods and beverages where HFCS is the 1st or 2nd highest labeled ingredient-including products by Quaker, Hershey's, Kraft and Smuck

Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Groups Launch Bailout Watch to Oversee Government Bailout Actions
OMB Watch and five other nonprofit organizations have collaborated to form a project called Bailout Watch. The project will research, investigate, and analyze the federal government's bailout activities and publish resources and data for policymakers, the media, and interested citizens. The goal of the project is to identify specific data that should be disclosed (and made available in an online, indexed, searchable format)

Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Corruption And The Global Financial Crisis
One neglected dimension of political corruption is "state capture," or just "capture." In this scenario, powerful companies (or individuals) bend the regulatory, policy and legal institutions of the nation for their private benefit. This is typically done through high-level bribery, lobbying or influence peddling. The cost to society of bribing a bureaucrat to obtain a permit to operate a small firm pales in comparison with,

Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Did Israel commit war crimes in Gaza?
(1 comments) United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who visited the Gaza Strip last week, called for a "full investigation," Amnesty International is accusing Israel of "war crimes," and Louis Michel, the EU's commissioner for aid to developing countries, says: "It is evident that Israel does not respect international humanitarian law." Officially, Israel vehemently denies such accusations, but its leadership is getting nervous.

Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Bolivia sets new global high mark for indigenous rights
"Bolivia's successful referendum process is precedent-setting with respect to indigenous empowerment worldwide," says Robert Albro, an expert on social and indigenous movements in Latin America at American University in Washington. Exit polls show that almost 60 percent of Bolivians voted in favor of a new magna carta that recognizes 36 different indigenous groups and secures a place for them in Congress.

Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Road to Ruin: Twenty-Five People at the Heart of the Meltdown
The worst economic turmoil since the Great Depression is not a natural phenomenon but a man-made disaster. In the second part of a week-long series looking behind the slump, Guardian City editor Julia Finch picks out the individuals who have led us into the current crisis.

Tuesday, January 27, 2009
A banking dream team: some got it right so why are they being ignored?
Neither the old or new administration has inspired much confidence with its picks for top jobs. They are flawed candidates, each with a history that requires the public to grit its teeth, hold its nose and hope for the best. What follows is an admittedly incomplete list. But if I can come up with these people off the top of my head, why can't anyone in Washington find these guys?

Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Robert Fisk: The US military and its cult of cruelty
(1 comments) The change of military creed under the Bush administration -from that of "soldier" to that of "warrior"- is encouraging American troops to commit atrocities. From Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo to Bagram, to the battlefields of Iraq and to the "black" prisons of the CIA, humiliation and beatings, rape, anal rape and murder have now become so commonplace that each new outrage is creeping into the inside pages of our newspapers.

Monday, January 26, 2009
NYT'sFrank Rich: Obama is right "the people are to blame"
New York Times columnist Frank Rich, taking his cue from Obama's inauguration speech, asserts that the American people share the blame for the financial crisis. But in reality, the American working class has suffered a protracted, decades-long decline in its social position, while the very rich have engorged themselves on the nation's wealth, much of it by semi-criminal means, opening up a vast social chasm.

Monday, January 26, 2009
Riots in Iceland, Latvia and Bulgaria are a sign of things to come
The financial meltdown has become part of the real economy and is now beginning to shape real politics. More and more citizens on the edge of the global crisis are taking to the streets. Bulgaria has been gripped this month by its worst riots since 1997, Icelanders all but stormed their Parliament last night (today their gov't fell), Ukraine could be the next to go.

Monday, January 26, 2009
Trillions for the banks, austerity for the people
(1 comments) No one objected from either party when Geithner, in his opening statement, indicated that the Obama administration intends to deal with ballooning budget deficits resulting from government handouts to the banks by slashing bedrock social programs such as Social Security and Medicare.

Monday, January 26, 2009
Robert Reich: How America Embraced Lemon Socialism
Taxpayers are on the hook for this Fed bailout money of course. We have to pay the interest on the ever-growing debt used to make these payments or guarantees and loans. It's called Lemon Socialism. Taxpayers support the lemons. Capitalism is reserved for the winners.

Sunday, January 25, 2009
Price Watergate
(3 comments) The chairman of one of India's largest technology companies,Satyam Computer Services Ltd, said he concocted key financial results, including a fictitious cash balance of more than $1 billion, sending shock waves across India. If this scandal proves anything to transnational investors and corporations it would be that doing business in India may be less risky than doing so in the more criminal friendly USA.

Saturday, January 24, 2009
Guest Post "Lessons From India"
The chairman of Satyam resigned and admitted that the company inflated its earnings for several years and engaged in accounting fraud to the tune of $1.4 bil. Within a week he, his brother, and Satyam's CFO have been arrested and are currently in jail awaiting trial on criminal charges of conspiracy, cheating and falsification of records and the SEBI has announced that it will conduct a "peer review" of the financial statement

Friday, January 23, 2009
Lawmakers Say GAO's Urgent Call for Food Safety Must Wait
Amid a recall of peanut butter products already blamed for at least six deaths, the Government Accountability Office has ranked food safety oversight among the biggest "high-risk" challenges facing the federal government. It's the third straight year that food safety made the GAO list, but a Congress wrestling with economic crisis and two wars doesn't seem to share the urgency.

Friday, January 23, 2009
NSA Domestic Surveillance Began 7 Months Before 9/11, Convicted Qwest CEO Claims
(2 comments) Nacchio attempted to defend himself by arguing that he actually expected Qwest's 2001 earnings to be higher because of secret NSA contracts, which, he contends, were denied by the NSA after he declined in a February 27, 2001 meeting to give the NSA customer calling records, court documents released this week show. AT&T, Verizon and Bellsouth all agreed to turn over call records to an NSA database

Friday, January 23, 2009
Wall Street's Sick Psychology of Entitlement
The news that Merrill Lynch paid out $15 billion in bonuses is sure to ignite new questions about the wisdom of bailing out Wall Street. Merrill Lynch took $10 billion from the TARP, allegedly to fill holes in its balance sheet. But instead of using that to repair its financial health, it simply put the money into the pockets of its employees. There is no way to defend this disgusting payout.

Thursday, January 22, 2009
Send in the Sustainable Dozen!
It's time to get serious about sustainable change at the USDA. As a result, here at Food Democracy Now! we've come up with a list of twelve candidates for Under Secretary positions at the USDA. And we're calling them the Sustainable Dozen. NOW is the time to become the Sustainable Voice for change that our nation so desperately needs. These individual's backgrounds represent the type of candidates that we expect to be appo

Thursday, January 22, 2009
Algeria: Return of Black Death?
(3 comments) An al-Qaeda affiliate abandoned a training camp in Algeria after 40 men died from being exposed to the plague during a biological weapons test, per the British tabloid The Sun. Pneumonic plague is the less common but more deadly form. It is spread, like the flu, by airborne bacteria. The US media is SILENT.

Thursday, January 22, 2009
Israel accused of executing parents in front of children in Gaza
Israel has refuted allegations of war atrocities in Gaza after Palestinian children described how their parents had been "executed" by Israeli troops. One nine-year-old boy said his father had been shot dead in front of him despite surrendering to Israeli soldiers with his hands in the air. Another youngster described witnessing the deaths of his mother, three brothers and uncle after the house they were in was shelled.

Thursday, January 22, 2009
Yitzhak Laor: We've been here before
Israel is engaged in a long war of annihilation against Palestinian society. The objective is to destroy the Palestinian nation and drive it back into pre-modern groupings based on the tribe, the clan and the enclave. This is the last phase of the Zionist colonial mission. The extent of the cruelty, the lack of shame and the refusal of self-restraint are striking, both in anthropological terms and historically.

Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Food Safety: New Year, New Administration
Food & Water Watch has been asking the incoming Obama administration to bring a new determination for the food safety agencies that we look to for protection to actually do what is required of them. The FDA is both underfunded and understaffed–and the results have been glaringly evident, with their belated and inadequate import alert on Chinese dairy products being just one of many examples.

Monday, January 19, 2009
Obama Should Heed Kennedy's Cuba Lessons When Thinking About Iran
On Jan. 19, 1961, President-elect John F. Kennedy sat down at the White House with the man he would replace the next day, to talk about Cuba. President Dwight D. Eisenhower wanted to talk with his young successor about the CIA's covert campaign of sabotage and subversion against the Fidel Castro regime. The eventual Bay of Pigs invasion was a disaster, of course

Monday, January 19, 2009
Neo-Colonialists Begin Campaign Against Obama's Fair Trade Agenda
(1 comments) Nicholas Kristof's latest New York Times column makes the case that corporate colonialism and human exploitation aren't just not bad, but actually a great virtue that will save the developing world - and that those working to stop such colonialism and exploitation are the root cause of global poverty. I kid you not:

Monday, January 19, 2009
COLOMBIA: Secret Documents Show US Aware of Army Killings in 1990s
Declassified U.S. documents show that the CIA and former U.S. ambassadors were fully aware, as far back as 1990, that the military in Colombia -- the third largest recipient of U.S. aid after Israel and Egypt -- were committing extrajudicial killings as part of "death squad tactics." They also knew that senior Colombian officers encouraged a "body count" mentality leading to extrajudicial executions and collaboration with para

Monday, January 19, 2009
Israel says: Hamas kills their own children
(4 comments) An Israeli government spokesman says Hamas has been killing Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip to make the Israeli army look bad. Mark Regev, the spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, said in a BBC interview that it is not clear how many of the children killed in Israel's military offensive on Gaza "were killed by Israeli forces, how many were killed by Hamas forces."

Monday, January 19, 2009
California controller to suspend tax refunds, welfare checks, student grants
John Chiang announces that his office will suspend $3.7 billion in payments owed to Californians starting Feb. 1, because with no budget in place the state lacks sufficient cash to pay its bills. Chiang said he had no choice but to stop making some $3.7 billion in payments in the absence of action by the governor and lawmakers to close the state's nearly $42-billion budget deficit. More than half of those payments are tax refu

Monday, January 19, 2009
New RFID Technology Allows You to be Tracked WITHOUT Your Knowledge
I recently visited a remote facility in northern Virginia to see a demonstration of NOX – a new Intelligent Perimeter Defense system deployed by the FBI that uses covert Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) technology to track people and assets without their knowledge. What makes the NOX system I saw different from traditional security systems is that it uses RFID for clandestine surveillance: RFID readers are hidden inside w

Saturday, January 17, 2009
Obama to Bush: all is forgiven (now that he's joined the club)
(1 comments) Obama says he always thought Bush was a 'good guy'. Obama also said he thought Bush made "the best decisions that he could at times under some very difficult circumstances." (The Founders must be rolling!)

Saturday, January 17, 2009
How to Sell "Ethical Warfare"
Claim moral superiority, intimidate enemies and crush dissent – Israel's media management is not just impressive, it's terrifying. Ultimately, the moral claims the Israeli government uses to support its actions during this war are empty. They actually reveal Israel's unwillingness to confront the original source of the current violence, which is not Hamas, but rather the occupation

Friday, January 16, 2009
Salon.com | The real reason Bill Clinton pardoned Marc Rich
During Eric Holder's confirmation hearing, Arlen Specter scolded the attorney general-designate, but no one mentioned Israeli pressure. Winning the pardon was a top priority for Israeli officials because Rich had long been a financial and intelligence asset of the Jewish state, carrying out missions in many hostile countries where he did business.

Friday, January 16, 2009
FISA ruling: a case study in 8 years of lying and ignorance
Is it really that hard -- especially for people who pretend to be experts in this controversy -- to tell the difference between (a) whether the President had the authority to eavesdrop on Americans in violation of a Congressional statute and (b) whether the Congress is constitutionally permitted to enact a statute authorizing warrantless eavesdropping?

Thursday, January 15, 2009
Israel in No Mood to Brook Dissent
The war on Gaza is widening- on the battleground inside Gaza and inside Israeli society. In the Israeli parliament, the Central Election Committee voted Monday to ban two of the three main Arab political parties from running in the Feb. 10 general elections. There is a distinct unwillingness to know what exactly is happening in the war: most of TV coverage Israelis see is from their own side.

Thursday, January 15, 2009
Olmert's Claims Revive Spectre of "Israel Lobby"
Monday, Olmert claimed that he demanded and received an immediate conversation with President Bush, and convinced the president to overrule the wishes of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and abstain from a United Nations resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. The U.S. State Department fiercely denied these claims about his influence over President Bush, and stirred up old debates about the "Israel lobby"

Thursday, January 15, 2009
Noted Israeli Peace activist and commentator banned from speaking
(2 comments) It comes as no surprise that a mainstream Canadian Jewish group effectively censored a scheduled talk by Israeli peace activist and Nobel Peace Prize nominee Jeff Halper with no reason except the seeming fear of hearing an alternative viewpoint.

Thursday, January 15, 2009
Autism epidemic not caused by shifts in diagnoses; environmental factors likely
California's sevenfold increase in autism cannot be explained by changes in doctors' diagnoses and most likely is due to environmental exposures, University of California scientists reported Thursday. The scientists advocate a nationwide shift in autism research to focus on potential factors in the environment that babies and fetuses are exposed to, including pesticides, viruses and chemicals in household products.

Thursday, January 15, 2009
We're not doomed, but we're in danger
(2 comments) The first and most important impact of global warming will be an acute and permanent crisis of food supply. In that situation, wars become probable. "Countries that are unable to feed themselves are unlikely to be reasonable about it.... There is a probability of wars, even nuclear wars, if the temperature rises more than two to three degrees Celsius [4 to 5 degees Fahrenheit]."

Thursday, January 15, 2009
Obama-Gaza: No Surprise
(1 comments) In the last week of 2008, Palestinian children in Gaza were blown apart by Israeli bombs and missiles. The air machinery used to kill those children - including American-made F-16s and Blackhawk helicopters - was supplied by the United States. President Elect Barack Obama had "no comment" on the carnage in Gaza. Still, his media handler and spokesman David Axlerod essentially endorsed the murders of the Balousha children

Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Medicinal Plants on Verge of Extinction
THE health of millions could be at risk because medicinal plants used to make traditional remedies, including drugs to combat cancer and malaria, are being overexploited. "The loss of medicinal plant diversity is a quiet disaster," says Sara Oldfield, secretary general of the NGO Botanic Gardens Conservation International. Commercial over-harvesting does the most harm, though pollution, competition from invasive species and

Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Top Censored Press Stories of 2008
(1 comments) Project Censored specializes in covering the top stories which were subjected to press censorship either by being ignored or downplayed by the mainstream media each year.

Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Wheatcroft: How Israel gets away with murder
(3 comments) Although Israel is sometimes described as an American client state, which receives huge financial subsidy from Washington, she is unique as a client state: she can do exactly as she likes in the knowledge that she will never be seriously restrained by her sponsor. Even when the White House is privately irritated by Israeli actions, Congress is absolutely reliable, never knowingly outbid in its unswerving loyalty.

Sunday, January 11, 2009
Ann Jones: The Afghan Reconstruction Boondoggle
If there has been any progress in Afghanistan, especially in and around Kabul, it's largely been because two-thirds of the reconstruction aid to Afghanistan comes from other (mostly European) countries that do a better job, and partly because the country's druglords spend big on palatial homes and services in the capital. But the one-third of internat'l aid that is supposed to come from the U.S., falls into the wrong pockets.

Saturday, January 10, 2009
What Am I Bid for the American Wild?
Tim DeChristopher, a 27-year-old environmental activist and economics major at the University of Utah, was protesting the auction outside a government office building in Salt Lake City and decided to see what would happen if he went inside. Instead of being immediately hustled out, he was asked by a clerk, "Are you here to bid?"

Saturday, January 10, 2009
Naomi Klein: Enough. It's time for a boycott
The best way to end the bloody occupation is to target Israel with the kind of movement that ended apartheid in South Africa. Economic sanctions are the most effective tool in the non-violent arsenal: surrendering them verges on active complicity. Here are the top four objections to the BDS strategy, followed by counter-arguments.

Friday, January 9, 2009
The CIA's Handling of The Washington Post
(2 comments) On Jan. 7, the Washington Post published a front-page lead article and an oped on the nomination of Leon Panetta as CIA director; both articles exaggerated the extent of opposition to the Panetta appointment and demonstrated the weakness of mainstream media coverage of the intelligence community, particularly the CIA. It is particularly ironic that senior writers would rely on the views of clandestine officers who manipulate

Friday, January 9, 2009
Gazing at Gaza's Destruction: Israelis Sip Pepsi, US Progressives See 'Silver Lining'
(1 comments) Here we see Israelis in Sderot– the chief target of the homemade bombs which we are told are the cause of the current ravaging of Gaza. They are so threatening that some of the Israelis in this picture drove down to Sderot from Jerusalem to sit out in the open air– on a hilltop– in plain sight of the Gaza village from which many of the rockets have been launched, and calmly sip Pepsi as they watch the military action 2 miles a

Friday, January 9, 2009
What Humanitarian Crisis? - Livni's Big Lie
(6 comments) In 1925, Adolf Hitler, writing in Mein Kampf, defined 'The Big Lie'. He called it a lie so enormous that people "...would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously." By now it should be obvious that Livni and other Israeli officials have decided to do just that; utilizing the same technique to justify the atrocities taking place in Gaza, they simultaneously claim they do not exist.

Thursday, January 8, 2009
Red Cross Reports Grisly Find in Gaza: Israel Accused of Blocking Aid to Wounded
The International Committee of the Red Cross said Thursday that it had found at least 15 bodies and several children -- emaciated but alive -- in a row of shattered houses in the Gaza Strip and accused the Israeli military of preventing ambulances from reaching the site for four days. Red Cross officials said rescue crews had received specific reports of casualties in the houses and had been trying since Saturday to send ambul

Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Regulate untested and unlabeled nano-silver pesticide products!
(2 comments) at least 300 products containing nano-silver are on market shelves, ranging from household appliances and cleaners to clothing, cutlery, and children's toys, to personal care products, packaging and coated electronics. Yet scientists agree that nanoparticles are fundamentally different substances and that nanomaterials can create new and unique health and environmental risks that need new forms of safety testing.

Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Brits Want Private Firm To Monitor Super Database Of Every Person In Britain
(2 comments) A super database containing the identities and location of every person in Britain is under consideration. It would be run by one or a number of private companies and would track every citizen's Internet usage, every phone call, every text message, as well as many other transactions.

Tuesday, January 6, 2009
If This Thread Doesn't Open You're Eyes,Then Nothing Will
(1 comments) Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves...politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves...The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country. -- David Ben Gurion, from a 1938 speech.

Tuesday, January 6, 2009
B'Tselem : The siege on the Gaza Strip
(2 comments) The foreign trade of Gaza is conducted almost solely with Israel or via Israeli ports. Israel controls the air space and territorial waters of Gaza, and does not allow Palestinians to build an airport or seaport. Rafah Crossing has a terminal for the crossing of goods. However, even when the terminal is open, goods are not allowed to pass through.

Tuesday, January 6, 2009
The Real Estate War in Gaza
(4 comments) The History and "Morals" of Ethnic Cleansing: I arrived in Israel 40 years ago. It took me many years to understand that the very existence of my country, as it is today, is based on an ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. The project started many years ago. Its seed can be traced to the basic fallacy of the Zionist movement to establish a Jewish-national state in a location already inhabited by another nation.

Monday, January 5, 2009
Richardson, Clinton and me: It's just got to stop
Lines have become blurred between the blatant pay-for-play corruption of a "Rod" Blagojevic and the business as usual of thousands of elected office holders at every level of government. I'd like to see lobbyist donations be made illegal.

Monday, January 5, 2009
New Book Probes the Bush "Family of Secrets"
What does it say about the American political system that someone like George W. Bush was able to ascend to the highest office in the land, despite his meager and ambiguous record? "Family of Secrets" postulates a network of politically and financially powerful individuals working behind the scenes to advance their interests at the expense of the nation.

Monday, January 5, 2009
Israeli press reports cluster bombs being used in Gaza
The ground invasion was preceded by large-scale artillery shelling from around 4 P.M., intended to "soften" the targets as artillery batteries deployed along the Strip in recent days began bombarding Hamas targets and open areas near the border. Hundreds of shells were fired, including cluster bombs aimed at open areas.

Monday, January 5, 2009
Obama's Bay of Pigs
A counter-terrorist operation involving US military materiel and foreign troops is taking place before the inauguration of the next president, and there are some striking similarities between the Bay of Pigs and the Gaza War for the origins of both stem from the secret chambers of the previous administration.

Monday, January 5, 2009
The U.S. Army speaks up for Hamas
The Army War College chose this week to release a report that has some surprisingly kind words for Israel's foes in the Gaza Strip: "HAMAS' political and strategic development has been both ignored and misreported in Israeli and Western sources which villainize the group, much as the PLO was once characterized as an anti-Semitic terrorist group," and "Israel and the United States need to abandon their policies of non-negotiati

Sunday, January 4, 2009
Metals Pollute Waters Near US Coal Ash Spill
Preliminary water tests from rivers near a huge coal ash spill in Tennessee show elevated levels of pollutants such as mercury and lead, a environmental group said on Friday. "We're concerned that the water poses a greater risk to residents in the area than has been revealed so far," said Matt Wasson, a program director at Appalachian Voices. An earthen dike collapsed on December 22 at the TVA's coal-fired power plant

Saturday, January 3, 2009
Is the real target Hamas rule?
(1 comments) As Israel's tanks and troops poured into Gaza on Saturday, the next phase in its fierce attempt to end rocket attacks, a question hung over the operation: can the rockets really be stopped for any length of time while Hamas remains in power in Gaza? And if the answer is determined to be no, then is the real aim of the operation to remove Hamas entirely, no matter the cost?

Friday, January 2, 2009
The Gaza Bombshell- some useful background
How President Bush, Condoleezza Rice, and Deputy National-Security Adviser Elliott Abrams backed an armed force under Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan, touching off a bloody civil war in Gaza and leaving Hamas stronger than ever.

Friday, January 2, 2009
Alberto Gonzales, Victim (not)
Can't Gonzales see that if, in fact, he were just a bystander to all this, a little piece of flotsam bobbing along in the ocean of the DoJ, if the most important things that happened in his department somehow had nothing to do with him, that fact in itself would be shameful? Doesn't he see that no one with any self-respect would want to admit publicly to being such a passive nothing of a person?

Thursday, January 1, 2009
Israel's Constant Crisis- Justin Raimondo
(3 comments) From the day of its birth, Israel has been a Western project, a unique creation of European ideologues whose vision of a Jewish state was rooted in myth, custom, and remembrance, rather than blood and soil. A constant stream of pro-Israel propaganda must be directed at the American people in order to justify the high levels of financial and military aid that keep Israel afloat.

Thursday, January 1, 2009
"Biohackers" tinkering with the very foundations of life on Earth
(1 comments) As we enter the new year, an astonishing new social phenomenon has emerged: amateur genetic engineers are working at home to "improve" various forms of life via genetic engineering. They call themselves "biohackers" and they acknowledge the danger of unleashing a genetically altered Frankenstein's monster on the public or terrorists could be inspired by amateur genetic tinkering to launch a devastating bioattack on America.

Thursday, January 1, 2009
Did KBR expose troops to toxic chemicals?
The giant military contractor, KBR, stands accused of causing lung cancer in American troops in Iraq by knowingly exposing them to cancer-causing hexavalent chromium. Today James Gentry is dying from rare form of lung cancer. The result, he believes, of months of inhaling hexavalent chromium -- an orange dust that's part of a toxic chemical found all over the water plant where KBR knowingly put lives at risk

Thursday, January 1, 2009
Is Sustainable Capitalism an Oxymoron?
(1 comments) Perpetual growth of the human economy on a finite planet is impossible. We need to develop a steady-state economy -- one in which the use of energy and materials is constant (or declining), not continually growing. One such proposal has been described by David Schweickart of Loyola University in Chicago.

Wednesday, December 31, 2008
The IAF, bullies of the clear blue skies - Haaretz
They set out to bomb the graduation ceremony for young police officers who had found that rare Gaza commodity, a job, massacring them by the dozen. They bombed a mosque, killing five sisters of the Balousha family, the youngest of whom was 4. They bombed a police station, hitting a doctor nearby; she lies in a vegetative state in Shifa Hospital, which is bursting with wounded and dead.

Friday, December 26, 2008
Disingenuous New York Times Story on Global Imbalances
Fed-governor Ben Bernanke's depiction of so-called global imbalances stated not that Americans spend too much, but that foreigners save too much. This was rationalization of a clearly unstable and unsustainable pattern. But rather than try to find a way out, or at least keep it from becoming more pronounced, Bernanke recommended doing nothing.

Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Did Foreclosures Change The Presidential Election?
Seven of the top 10 foreclosure states voted Republican in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, while three states went Democratic. This time around the Democrats captured eight of the top 10 foreclosure states.

Tuesday, December 23, 2008
EPA faces eleventh-hour shake-up
The EPA Office of Research and Development (ORD), home to most of the agency's scientists, may be facing a significant reorganization just one month before President-elect Barack Obama takes office. The move is seen by many scientists not as sensible streamlining, but rather as an attempt to push through Bush administration objectives before the keys to the White House are passed to Obama.

Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Flood of sludge breaks TVA dike
(1 comments) Millions of yards of ashy sludge broke through a dike at TVA's Kingston coal-fired plant Monday, covering hundreds of acres, knocking one home off its foundation and putting environmentalists on edge about toxic chemicals that may be seeping into the ground and flowing downriver. One neighboring family said the disaster was no surprise because they have watched the 1960s-era ash pond's mini-blowouts off and on for years.

Monday, December 22, 2008
How 'Suspicious' Plane Crashes and Assassinations Benefit the Right Wing
(2 comments) My advice to anyone daring to dissent in this country is this: DON'T FLY! This is no 'conspiracy theory', it's the mathematically calculable odds. In Vegas, the 'odds' are always with the house and that is by design. No 'conspiracy theory' is required. The GOP has placed its bet that you are too stupid to figure out that the odds against so many strange deaths happening by accident are astronomical

Sunday, December 21, 2008
The Grinning Skull: The Homicides You Didn't Hear About in Hurricane Katrina
(4 comments) During Hurricane Katrina, a group of white men went on a shooting spree across the river. Their criminal acts were no secret but they never became part of the official story. The media demonized the city's black population for crimes that turned out not to have happened, and the retractions were, as always, too little too late. The media never paid attention to the real rampage that took place though there were corpses lying

Saturday, December 20, 2008
If criminal penalties are removed, what will deter lawbreaking by political officials?
(1 comments) The consensus view of establishment Washington is that political elites are exempt from the rule of law. Punishment for lawbreaking is precisely how we try to ensure that crimes "never happen again."

Friday, December 19, 2008
Death rates in U.S. children near nuclear reactors rose sharply
A new study finds that the death rate from leukemia has risen during the past 2 decades among children living near nuclear power plants in the U.S. Similar findings have been reported previously from Europe. The study updates an analysis conducted in the late 80s by the National Cancer Institute (NCI). That analysis, mandated by Sen Edward M. Kennedy (D-MA), is the only attempt federal officials have made to examine cancer rat

Wednesday, December 17, 2008
David Cox : Will You Go Quietly?
(2 comments) Can we cut the crap here? Can we look dispassionately at the issue before us? This is a class struggle; it has always been a class struggle and it is always going to be a class struggle. We can cloak the issue of globalization in the mantle of altruism, that this is good for all concerned, but that is just not so. Globalism is good for the investment class and the ownership class and the banking class.

Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Stop Vilsack's Confirmation as Secretary of Agriculture
Despite a massive public outcry, including over 20,000 emails from the Organic Consumers Association, President-Elect Obama has chosen former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack to be the next Secretary of Agriculture. His overall record is one of aiding and abetting Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) or factory farms and promoting genetically engineered crops and animal cloning.

Tuesday, December 16, 2008
More on consequences to Israel lobby of Madoff collapse
Two years ago the state of Israel began selling a national bank, Leumi, to private investors. One of those investors was Ezra Merkin. A Merkin fund called Ascot gave all $1.8 billion that Merkin had raised from investors to Bernard Madoff.

Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Regaining our moral compass - Haaretz
There is no one who will preach morality to us on behalf of the Palestinians, Israel's Arabs, the handicapped, the poor and all the "others." The latest report by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel shows crystal clear that we have already exacerbated all the damage we can do to them. The drama is turning into a real social and political tragedy

Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Reporters Help CIA Torture the Truth
"There is a fierce battle going on over what kind of a CIA director Barack Obama should appoint, when he should close the prison camp at Guantanamo, and whether there should be a full scale investigation (and possible prosecution) of the torture advocates in the Bush administration," notes Charles Kaiser in the Columbia Journalism Review. Reporting on this issue has been flagrantly one-sided

Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Gingrich Bites the Hand that Fed Him
Newt Gingrich went on Fox News to decry how Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had so 'many politicians beholden to them'. But, as it turns out, Freddie Mac paid Gingrich $300,000 in 2006, "to push back against tough, new regulations of the mortgage company at a time the Bush administration was concerned about how big the two government-backed mortgage giants had become."

Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Senate report links Bush to detainee homicides; media yawns
(2 comments) How can it possibly be justified that the low-level Army personnel carrying out these policies at Abu Ghraib have been charged, convicted and imprisoned, while the high-level political officials and lawyers who directed and authorized these same policies remain free of any risk of prosecution? The culpability which the Report assigns for these war crimes is vast in scope and unambiguous

Tuesday, December 16, 2008
The Most Important Number on Earth
For most of the period we call human civilization, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere hovered at about 275 parts per million. In the late 18th century, we started burning fossil fuel, and that number started to rise. The first time we actually measured it, in the late 1950s, it was already about 315. Now it's at 385, and growing by more than 2 parts per million annually- well past the tipping point.

Thursday, December 11, 2008
It's official: Men really are the weaker sex
(5 comments) Evolution is being distorted by pollution, which damages genitals and the ability to father offspring, says new study. The research shows that a host of common chemicals is feminising males of every class of vertebrate animals, from fish to mammals, including people.

Wednesday, December 10, 2008
FDA retracts ban on poultry antibiotics
(2 comments) The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will continue to allow the widespread use of a class of powerful antibiotics in food-producing animals, including chickens and other poultry. This come in a last-minute reversal since calling the practice a public-health risk in July.

Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Fearing Backlash, Industry Urges Nanotech Safety - Planet Ark
Fearing the emerging new field of nanotechnology will engender fears like those surrounding genetically modified foods in Europe, companies are pushing government agencies for a more coordinated effort to ensure the tiny nanomaterials are safe and environmentally friendly. As this technology becomes more popular there are lots of questions in the minds of consumers and consumer advocates about just how safe these materials are

Tuesday, December 9, 2008
News, Propaganda: What's the Difference?
The U.S. general heading NATO forces in Afghanistan wants to merge the office that provides NATO information to reporters with the office that carries out "information operations" against enemy forces. Reportedly U.S. military had established a group in Kabul, Afghanistan called "Theaterwide Interagency Effects," to "synchronize public affairs, IO, and psyops" in 2006.

Tuesday, December 9, 2008
Stiglitz: Capitalist Fools
What were the critical decisions that led to the crisis? Mistakes were made at every fork in the road-we had what engineers call a "system failure," when not a single decision but a cascade of decisions produce a tragic result. Let's look at five key moments.

Tuesday, December 9, 2008
We All Failed Gary Webb
Gary Webb was a kind of canary in the mine shaft, whose fate represented a warning about the dangers that can befall a nation whose journalists care more about their salaries and status than the truth and the public's right to know.

Sunday, December 7, 2008
Virus clue to cause of Alzheimer's
(2 comments) The virus that causes cold sores may be one of the main causes of Alzheimer's disease, according to research that suggests that existing drugs could be used to treat the most common form of dementia. Compelling new evidence found by British scientists has implicated the cold sore virus, known as herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV1), in up to 60 per cent of Alzheimer's cases.

Saturday, December 6, 2008
Neoliberalism and Bottom-Line Morality
With the steady increase in business's economic and political power over the past 30 years and the parallel decline of organized labor, neoliberal (market-can-do-it-all) ideology has become even more firmly entrenched in establishment thought and practice. They are all a throwback to 17th and 18th century mercantilists who held that wages should be kept at the level of the cost of physical subsistence.

Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Holding a Zionist funeral for Teitelbaum, who was a Satmar Hasid, would desecrate the dead man's honor
The State has decided to recognize the Israelis murdered in the Mumbai terror attacks as victims of terrorism and pay for their funerals, but not all are happy with this decision. The family of slain Hasid Aryeh Leib Teitelbaum has informed the government that it would like the State not to intervene with his funeral. The family demanded no government rep at the funeral and that the casket not be covered with the Israeli flag.

Monday, December 1, 2008
One Man's Military-Industrial-Media Complex
In the spring of 2007 a tiny military contractor with a slender track record went shopping for a precious Beltway commodity. The company signed Barry R. McCaffrey, a retired four-star Army general and military analyst for NBC News, to a consulting contract starting June 15, 2007. Four days later the general swung into action. He sent a personal note and 15-page briefing packet to David H. Petraeus

Monday, December 1, 2008
MIDEAST: Settlers Stay, Or It's Civil War
Thousands of Israeli Defence Force (IDF) soldiers were put on high alert over the weekend as 20,000 Israeli settlers from across the West Bank descended on Hebron. The settlers were there to mark an annual Jewish pilgrimage and lend their support to a group of fellow settlers threatened with eviction by an Israeli court ruling. The Israeli government feared an outbreak of rioting.

Saturday, November 29, 2008
Rubin Takedown by the Wall Street Journal!
What is interesting about the spotlight on Citigroup consigliere and board member Robert Rubin is that, unlike Greenspan, the reassessment is starting while he would still appear to have his hands on the reins of power. After all, he is still on Citi's board; his protege Timothy Geithner is slotted to become Treasury Secretary, his buddy Larry Summer is head of the "National Economic Council in waiting."

Saturday, November 29, 2008
Greenwald: Mumbai, the NYT's revisionism, and lessons not learned
What happened in the U.S. over the last eight years is about much, much more than what "the Bush administration" did. It begins there, but responsibility in the post 9/11-era is much more diffuse and collective than that. Shoveling it all off on the administration that is leaving, while exonerating our culpable media and political institutions that remain, isn't merely historically inaccurate and unfair

Friday, November 28, 2008
Mumbai: the nihilism that dare not speak its name
(1 comments) As the awful assaults on Mumbai seem to be coming to an end, with at least 130 people dead, the two questions everyone is asking is 'who did this?' and 'why?' It seems pretty clear that the attackers – like the Bali, Madrid and 9/11 groups before them – were influenced in some way by the same sense of disillusionment with progress and modernity that is rampant in contemporary society.

Thursday, November 27, 2008
NASA scientist cites 'global-warming emergency'
(2 comments) NASA physicist says public awareness lags about the 'hundreds of millions' of people worldwide will sufffer from lack of water, rising seas. Atmospheric carbon dioxide is already at 385 parts per million, well over the 350 parts per million, or less, that is considered "safe," Hansen said. And more warming is already in the pipeline because of inertia in the climate system.

Thursday, November 27, 2008
The Team Obama Should Have Picked
(2 comments) There's not a progressive among them. Not even one. If Obama was vague about his personal politics during the primaries and general election it was for a reason: he doesn't have any. Our nation is lost, and the problem with the team Obama is putting together isn't simply that they've generally supported or acquiesced to the Bush agenda for the last eight years- it's that they have no vision, and they leave us with no direction

Wednesday, November 26, 2008
False Progressive vs. Pragmatist Divide
The division of the Democratic policy world between progressives and pragmatists inherently portrays progressives as naïve idealists whose goals are unattainable. Rather than contrasting progressives with a competing ideological term, such as progressives versus centrists or progressives versus conservatives, progressivism is substituted for "idealism," in a pragmatic vs. idealist binary: progressivism is dismissed as nice but

Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Transporting pountry spreads bacteria to humans
There is evidence of human exposure to antibiotic-resistant bacteria from intensively raised poultry - driving behind trucks transporting broiler chickens from farm to slaughterhouse. The strains of bacteria collected were found to be resistant to 3 antimicrobial drugs widely used to treat bacterial infections in people.

Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Legalize Localization: Post-Meltdown Thoughts (Part I)
As the global financial system destroys decades' worth of Americans' savings, the relative calm and stability surrounding community-based financial institutions is striking. Roughly half of the U.S. economy resides in small, local businesses, and yet it's almost impossible to find an American who places any retirement or pension monies into them.

Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Taxes and Christina Romer
Last year Christina and David Romer wrote a paper that attempted to quantify the effect of tax changes on economic growth. They calculate the effect of tax changes on economic growth without confounding factors, and their conclusion is that a tax increase of 1% of GDP reduces output three years later by nearly 3%. Can it really be true? European countries tend to have total tax rates that are upwards of 15% higher than ours

Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Colossal Financial Collapse: The Truth behind the Citigroup Bank "Nationalization"
(2 comments) On Friday November 21, the world came within a hair's breadth of the most colossal financial collapse in history according to bankers on the inside of events. Citigroup and the government have identified a pool of about $306 billion in troubled assets. Citigroup will absorb the first $29 billion in losses. After that, remaining losses will be split between Citigroup and the government. It is only the beginning.

Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Why Should We Be Surprised? (Treasury Conduct Edition)
The NYT reports that the General Accounting Office is readying to issue a report that will criticize how Treasury has handled its spending under the $700 billion TARP program. The main shortcomings are failure to track how the money is actually being used and inadequate controls to prevent conflicts of interest. Also note that the DOD has been unable to account for trillions of spending, so the Treasury has plenty of company.

Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Obama, Rush Limbaugh and Fox News: A Look at Media in 2009
The real problem is not the media favoring one candidate over another, but rather its utter failure to practice critical journalism. Turn on your television or radio, and it's 24/7 horserace political coverage, partisan shouting matches, and salacious crap. There is no effort to tell voters the difference between the candidates' rhetoric and reality, and what their policy proposals would actually do.

Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Health Insurance Companies Agree to Cover Everyone "If"
Two insurance industry trade groups announced that their members are willing to do away with their long-standing practice of denying coverage to people with pre-existing medical conditions. They will do so long as they- the insurance companies- are allowed to continue to set the terms of coverage and the price and everyone is forced to buy one of their policies. Sound familiar?

Sunday, November 23, 2008
Making the World's Poor Pay: The Economic Crisis and the Global South
There is little doubt that this crisis is already having a devastating impact on heavily-indebted American households. But one of the striking characteristics of analysis to date -- by both the left and the mainstream media -- is the almost exclusive focus on the wealthy countries of North America, Europe and East Asia. The pattern of capitalist crisis over the last fifty years should alert us to the dangers of this approach.

Sunday, November 23, 2008
Lawrence Summers Flashback: Africa Is 'Under-Polluted'
On December 12, 1991, while serving as chief economist for the World Bank, Lawrence Summers authored a private memo arguing that the bank should actively encourage the dumping of toxic waste in developing countries, particularly "under populated countries in Africa," which Summers described as "UNDER-polluted."

Sunday, November 23, 2008
'Toxic waste' behind Somali piracy
Somali pirates have accused European firms of dumping toxic waste off the Somali coast and are demanding an $8m ransom for the return of a Ukranian ship they captured, saying the money will go towards cleaning up the waste. Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy for Somalia confirmed the world body has "reliable information" that European and Asian companies are dumping toxic waste, including nuclear waste, off the Somali coast

Sunday, November 23, 2008
Rural America To Obama: Remember Us
Fifty million Americans live in the nation's smallest and most remote places. Most of those who voted on Election Day chose Republican presidential candidate John McCain, who won rural counties by near-landslide proportions. That has some wondering whether President-elect Barack Obama will pay much attention to rural issues.

Friday, November 21, 2008
Now, at last, we know the truth about Georgia
(1 comments) The myth of a plucky republic being 'ethnically cleansed' by an evil Russian regime was just that: a myth. With a few exceptions, the war in Georgia was presented in the British and American media as a simple tale of good and evil; a story of the cunning Russian bear smashing the noble and Western-looking Georgia. We now know for certain that 'Brave Georgia vs Evil Russia' was simply a made-up story

Friday, November 21, 2008
No Way. No How. No Brennan.
(8 comments) Republican, former chief-of-staff for George Tenet (who authorized war crimes as CIA head), admirer of Dick Cheney, CEO of the company one of whose contract employees improperly accessed Obama's and McCain's passports, and defender of renditions and "enhanced interrogations" is still Obama's front-runner pick to head the CIA. No, I'm not making this up.

Thursday, November 20, 2008
Debt Man Walking
Economists know the fatal flaw in our system--but they can't agree how to fix it. For decades, the United States has relied on a tortuous financial arrangement that knits together its economy with those of China and Japan. This informal system has allowed Asian countries to run huge export surpluses with the United States, while allowing the United States to run huge budget deficits without raising interest rates or taxes.

Thursday, November 20, 2008
Emergency Managers Make It Official: They Want FEMA Out of DHS
(1 comments) A prominent association of emergency mangers is recommending that the Obama administration pull the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) out of the Homeland Security Department and restore its leader to cabinet level status. IAEM has been generally unhappy with the way FEMA has operated within DHS, and removing it would allow the agency to "get its act together"

Thursday, November 20, 2008
GM Maize Disturbs Immune System of Young and Old Mice
The Italian government's National Institute of Research on Food and Nutrition has just published a report online in the Journal of Agricultural Food Chemistry documenting significant disturbances in the immune system of young and old mice that have been fed the GM maize MON 810

Thursday, November 20, 2008
Mandate Watch: "Team of Rivals" Or Rival Team?
"Team of Rivals" is now being used to justify Obama administration appointments and congressional Democratic moves that appear - at least aesthetically - to be somewhat at odds with all "change we can believe in" rhetoric. Does "Team of Rivals"-ism mean appointing, say, neoconservatives warmongers? What about free trade zealots from Bob Rubin's extended political family?

Thursday, November 20, 2008
New friendly fire coverup: Army shreds files on dead soldiers
Hours after Salon revealed evidence that two Americans were killed by a U.S. tank, not enemy fire, military officials destroyed papers on the men. Salon's investigation, which included graphic battle video and eyewitness testimony, indicated that their deaths were likely due to friendly fire. After Salon published Benjamin's Oct. 14 report, the Army ordered soldiers to shred documents about the men. A soldier saved some shreds

Wednesday, November 19, 2008
On Top of Humanitarian Disaster, A News Blackout in Gaza
Israel has imposed a virtual news blackout on the Gaza Strip. For the last ten days no foreign journalists have been able to enter the besieged territory to report on the escalating humanitarian crisis caused by Israel's complete closure of Gaza's borders for the last two weeks. There have been no deliveries of fuel and basic humanitarian assistance, and sewage had to be pumped into the ocean due to a lack of fuel.

Wednesday, November 19, 2008
The Real Goal of Israel's Blockade
The latest tightening of Israel's chokehold on Gaza – ending all supplies into the Strip for more than a week – has produced immediate and shocking consequences for Gaza's 1.5 million inhabitants. Israel's long-term goal is to force an exodus to Egypt once the controls along its short border with the Strip are relaxed,thus ethnically cleansing Gaza

Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Scientists self-censor after political attack
Scientists whose work came under scrutiny during a political debate about work funded by the US National Institutes of Health, censored their own later work, a new study has found. A sociologist at Rutgers University has surveyed and interviewed many of the principal investigators whose grants came under scrutiny. She has found that many of them subsequently used less-controversial language or changed the focus of their work.

Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Juan Cole: Afghan article says US Bin-Ladin hunt phoney
An article from the Persian Afghan press alleges that French troops were at one point close to capturing Usamah Bin Ladin in Afghanistan, but that American forces stopped them from doing so. It says that a forthcoming French documentary containing interviews with the French soldiers provides proof for the allegation. The argument is that the Bush administration needed Bin Ladin in order to justify its military expansionism.

Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Justifying Israeli Colonialism
Why have the western media accepted the term "settlers"? There is a precise description of what these people are, they are colonists.

Wednesday, November 19, 2008
New Study Confirms Genetically Engineered Food Damages Fertility
In a new Austrian study that will send shock waves through the corridors of power in the EU, and through the offices of the GM corporations, it has been discovered that GM corn has a damaging effect upon the reproductive system. The Monsanto maize line MON863 has already been shown -- in the company's own experiments designed to mask health effects -- to damage the internal organs of animals in feeding trials.

Monday, November 17, 2008
Depression 2009: What would it look like?
Lines at the ER, a television boom, emptying suburbs. A catastrophic economic downturn would feel nothing like the last one. By looking at what we know about how society and commerce would slow down, and how people respond, it's possible to envision what we might face.

Sunday, November 16, 2008
Barack Obama as a Ruling Class Candidate
It is a welcome democratic development for people who previously felt disenfranchised to become engaged in the political process. But the predominantly white U.S. business and political establishment still makes sure that nobody who questions dominant domestic and imperial hierarchies and doctrines can make a serious ("viable") run for higher office - the presidency, above all.

Friday, November 14, 2008
Student protests paralyse Rome
Thousands of university and high school students from across Italy joined a national protest in Rome against government cuts in the higher education sector on Friday. Students are protesting over planned government spending cuts of 1.5 billion euros in the sector as well as a raft of cost-reducing reforms which are tipped to include a reduction in the number of courses offered and the closure of some outlying university branch

Friday, November 14, 2008
Robert Reich: The Real Difference Between Bankruptcy and Bailout
Why is the Treasury substituting government bailouts for chapter 11? Even if you assume Wall Street's major banks and insurance giant AIG are so important to the national and global economy that they can't be allowed to fail, that doesn't mean they have to be bailed out. They could be reorganized under bankruptcy protection. Their creditors, shareholders, and execs would take bigger hits- but they took that risk.

Thursday, November 13, 2008
Low Energy Nuclear Reactions for Green Energy
(1 comments) Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENRs), which emerged from 'cold fusion' are a revolutionary new primary energy source. If successfully commercialized, LENRs could potentially herald in a new age of affordable and clean energy. Unlike power generation by current nuclear fission technologies, LENRs are safe and green.

Thursday, November 13, 2008
Organic Consumers & Companies Harassed by Drug Agents & Police
False results put drug tests under microscope. Problems are surfacing with law enforcement drug testing kits. The kits are showing false positives in the field, causing innocent people to be arrested. According to USA Today, "Legal products and plants are testing positive: chocolate for hashish; rosemary for marijuana; and natural soaps for the "date-rape drug" GHB."

Thursday, November 13, 2008
Prescription Drugs Can Deliver High Doses of Phthalates
Every day for three months, the patient took a prescription drug called Asacol to treat his inflamed colon. Unbeknownst to him, every pill he swallowed also delivered a dose of a hormone-altering, industrial chemical. Phthalates have been linked to abnormal reproductive tracts, sperm damage and reduced testosterone in animal tests as well as some human studies. They are also suspect in men's reproductive disorders.

Wednesday, November 12, 2008
21st Century Right to Know: Transition Recommendations
Dozens of public interest organizations concerned with access to government information have collaborated to develop actionable recommendations for the new administration to promote open, accountable government. The process, convened and led by OMB Watch, produced a 112-page volume (pdf) that addresses transparency, access, national security secrecy, freedom of information policy, and related topics.

Wednesday, November 12, 2008
'Bush ruined prospect of Iran-US talks': Scowcroft
The former US Air Force official said that the Bush administration's Iran policy has been inspired by a neoconservative worldview, which has been counterproductive for American interests. Scrowcroft criticized the Bush administration for ignoring the Islamic Republic's diplomatic efforts, including a 2003 overture that could have paved the way for Tehran and Washington to thaw frozen ties after nearly 30 years.

Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Olmert: Arabs Suffer 'Intolerable' Discrimination
"For sixty years there has been discrimination against Arabs in Israel. The discrimination is built-in and intolerable," Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said on Wednesday at a session of the Knesset committee that is investigating why Arab citizens have not been incorporated into the public service.

Wednesday, November 12, 2008
One third of homes sold for a loss
Nearly one out of three homes sold in the last year was sold at a loss, and an estimated one in seven U.S. homeowners were "upside down" on their loans at the end of September, according an analysis of public records in 163 markets by Zillow. Zillow estimates that the percentage of borrowers upside down (owing more on their mortgage than their home was worth) was even higher among those who bought in the last five years- 29+%

Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Culture Change - Technology Traps
We won't hear it from the mainstream media, but the technologies we have come to depend on are actively distorting our sense of reality and are rapidly rendering the planet unlivable. In our blind pursuit of immediate gratifications from our countless gadgets, we have run headlong into a number of "technology traps" that are destroying human potential and the prospects for sustainable cultures.

Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Attorney General contender carries 9/11 related baggage
(3 comments) On December 16th, 1994, agents in the FBI's San Francisco office made an extraordinary seizure. Mohammed Jamal Khalifa (MJK) Osama bin Laden's brother-in-law and former roommate, was captured at a Holiday Inn Morgan Hills, California. From 1983 to 1991 he had been a trusted al Qaeda operative in the Phillipines. Khalifa was motivated to talk but Jamie Gorelick, then acting AG sent an "expedite" letter to deport him.

Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Tiny but toxic: Nanoparticles with asbestos-like properties found in everyday goods
Tiny particles used to make common goods have similar properties to asbestos and could be highly dangerous, experts are warning. Other nanoparticles are more toxic than bleach and have the potential to cripple the country's waterways and threaten the health of the nation unless stricter regulations are imposed.

Monday, November 10, 2008
Obama faced with security problem at outset of transition process
Prospective Barack Obama White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel has an active FBI counter-intelligence file maintained on him. Emanuel's rise to the Chief of Staff position may pose a significant security problem for President-elect Obama. Questions about Emanuel's links to the Israeli intelligence service, the Mossad, were allegedly so great that President Bill Clinton was forced to dismiss Emanuel from the White House staff

Sunday, November 9, 2008
Is This AFS Trinity 150 MPG SUV Being Suppressed By The Auto Industry?
AFS Trinity Power Corporation today announced it pulled its 150 MPG plug-in hybrid SUV prototypes out of the LA Auto Show but will independently exhibit and demonstrate the super fuel-efficient vehicles on their own elsewhere in downtown LA during the show. The only space that show management offered AFS Trinity was the Kentia Hall basement.

Sunday, November 9, 2008
Sub-Prime Mortgage Derivatives: What are they?
(Video) Are you curious about what blew up the global financial system? This is a pretty good explanation of what a sub-prime mortgage derivative is. This video was posted BEFORE July 4th in 2007. It's hard to believe that any financial professional can claim with a straight face to be surprised by the melt down in the fall of 2008.

Saturday, November 8, 2008
Number of kids on medication jumps alarmingly
(1 comments) The number of children who take medication for chronic diseases has jumped dramatically, another troubling sign that many of the youngest Americans are struggling with obesity, doctors say. Most of the increase in drugs for diabetes, attention deficit/hyperactivity and depression was seen in girls. The gender gap was most striking in diabetes: While the number of boys on medication grew by 39%, the number of girls grew 147%

Saturday, November 8, 2008
The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy: Day Three of Waiting for Jimmy Carter's Second Term to Begin
I am really hoping that Obama is a man of his word but just in case I am right and Obama I is really just Carter II, I am getting ready. I am bustin' out my bell bottoms, taking my AMC Pacer out of storage and getting ready for the misery index to make a comeback. (comedy is the best medicine)

Friday, November 7, 2008
Looking Under the Hood of an Obama Administration
Celebrating the end of the ugly Bush era is one thing. Celebrating the continuation of their policies with a different administration in the White House is quite another. With these prospective appointments, Obama seems to be moving backwards to Clintontime. This may be sufficient change for some, but it far from a progressive push toward social, economic, and environmental justice.

Monday, November 3, 2008
Financing Poverty
Taxpayer's money is being misused in the global financial crisis rescuing those that have grown super-rich by draining the real economy, creating poverty, and fuelling the destruction of the earth. Time to replace the dominant model with a circular eco-economy that mimics nature. We need a proper plan to rid Wall Street of its predatory elements and create a new system accountable to the needs of the real economy.

Monday, November 3, 2008
The single worst expression in American politics
"Commander in chief" is a military term, which reflects the core military dynamic: superiors issue orders which subordinates obey. That isn't supposed to be the relationship between the U.S. President and civilian American citizens. This is also a crucial aspect of the still broader trend of vesting more and more unchecked, centralized power in the White House.

Monday, November 3, 2008
They've squandered lives, fortunes and our sacred honor
Here's to the American people, the electorate: the Republican revolution and all it's wrought - an economic meltdown, two endless wars, class warfare that's enriched the very rich and beggared everyone else and a treasury bulging only with IOU's - will be crushed. (Now we have to keep the Democrats honest).

Friday, October 31, 2008
ARE YOU LIVING IN THE CONSTITUTION FREE ZONE?
(1 comments) Nearly 2/3 of the entire US population (197.4 million people) live within 100 miles of the US land and coastal borders. The government is assuming extraordinary powers to stop and search individuals within this zone. This is not just about the border: This " Constitution-Free Zone" includes most of the nation's largest metropolitan areas.

Friday, October 31, 2008
Concentrating the Wealth
We have reached a point of realization that government by the wealthy, for the wealthy, and of the rest of us doesn't work. And that means we've reached a point of possibly considering that "government of the people, by the people, and for the people" isn't "government taking care of us." It's us, taking care of our communities, our families and one another.

Friday, October 31, 2008
Boy Babies Birth Defects Double in 30 Years
As more genital birth defects are seen in boys, attention turns to phthalates, chemicals found in a variety of consumer products. At Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, surgeon Howard Snyder says he and his colleagues repair the genitalia of roughly 300 baby boys every year -- about double what they did when he started his practice 30 years ago.

Friday, October 31, 2008
Georgia accused of targeting civilians
The BBC has discovered evidence that Georgia may have committed war crimes in its attack on its breakaway region of South Ossetia in August. Eyewitnesses have described how its tanks fired directly into an apartment block, and how civilians were shot at as they tried to escape the fighting.

Sunday, October 26, 2008
Frank Schaeffer: Palin- America's Lipstick Fascist
Palin and the Republican Fascists believe that we are so right, so great and so powerful that we no longer need to obey our own laws or even -- in the case of global warming -- the laws of nature. We can start wars for no reason and then claim "victory". We can torture in the name of Jesus.

Saturday, October 25, 2008
Final Text of Iraq Pact Reveals a U.S. Debacle
The final draft of the U.S.-Iraq Status of Forces agreement on the U.S. military presence represents an even more crushing defeat for the policy of the George W. Bush administration than previously thought, the final text reveals. Furthermore, Shiite opposition to the pact as a violation of Iraqi sovereignty makes the prospects for passage of even this agreement by the Iraqi parliament doubtful.

Friday, October 24, 2008
Police Prepare for Election Unrest
Police departments in cities across the country are beefing up their ranks for Election Day, preparing for possible civil unrest and riots after the historic presidential contest. Public safety officials said in interviews with The Hill that the election, which will end with either the nation's first black president or its first female vice president, demanded a stronger police presence.

Friday, October 24, 2008
Iraq Vets Tell of War Crimes
"We Have to Share This Pain" Veterans from the U.S. occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, along with Iraqis, Afghanis, Vietnam veterans, and family members of U.S. military personnel converged over the weekend to share stories of atrocities being committed daily in Iraq. "War changes people. You do not come out of a combat zone the same," Iraq war veteran Chanan Suarez Diaz told the audience.

Friday, October 24, 2008
Pakistan stares into the abyss
A spiralling conflict, economic collapse and blackouts threaten anarchy. Pakistan was locked in crisis last night, with the government pressed by Washington to deepen its conflict with Islamic militants in the lawless regions on the Afghan border, and obliged to call in the IMF to stave off financial catastrophe. A major military offensive to root out Taliban militants has created a flood of 200,000 refugees in a near civil wa

Thursday, October 23, 2008
The Plastics Industry Wrote FDA Report Claiming Bisphenol A is Safe
A report by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration claiming that bisphenol A is safe, was written largely by the plastics industry and others with a financial stake in the controversial chemical. Although the FDA will not reveal who prepared its draft, the agency's own documents show that the work was done primarily by those with the most to gain by downplaying concerns about the safety of the chemical.

Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Maybe the rich are the problem
(2 comments) Conservatives have disparaged the notion of "spreading the wealth," relegating such economic populism to the margins of public debate. The vast pools of wealth at the top have been off-limits as a political issue. The focus has been mostly on the misbehaviour of "fat cats," and the need for tighter market regulations. But a more profound question lurks beneath the surface: Is extreme inequality itself part of the problem?

Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Verizon and AT&T Provided Free Cell Towers for McCain Ranch
Verizon delivered a portable tower known as a "cell site on wheels" - free of charge - to the McCain property in June. In July, AT&T followed suit, wheeling in a portable tower for free to match Verizon's offer. McCain is a senior member of the Senate commerce committee, which oversees the Federal Communications Commission and the telecom industry.

Monday, October 13, 2008
U.S Imperial Forces Pay Homage to George Orwell, As It Were
Suppose you are the publicity officer for a U.S. imperial legion in some God-forsaken hellhole, where your job is to tell the world what the forces have been doing there lately. What they've actually been doing, of course, is killing people, with little regard for who they are, and destroying a lot of property, with equal disregard for who owns it. Just "doing our job," as the soldiers say.

Saturday, October 11, 2008
McCain's attacks fuel dangerous hatred
From fellow conservative Frank Schaeffer: John McCain- If your campaign does not stop equating Sen. Barack Obama with terrorism, questioning his patriotism and portraying Mr. Obama as "not one of us," I accuse you of deliberately feeding the most unhinged elements of our society the red meat of hate, and therefore of potentially instigating violence.

Thursday, October 9, 2008
Senate Slips Huge $488 Billion Pentagon War Funding Bill in Under The Radar
(1 comments) The Senate has caved to the Bush Administration yet again. US Senators donned their Harry Potter invisibility cloaks and under the cover of darkness late Saturday night, with the smoke and mirrors distraction of the Wall Street bailout, quietly voted on and passed a huge, outrageous spending bill that gives an additional $488 Billion dollars to the Bush Administration and The Pentagon.

Thursday, October 9, 2008
Green Building & Co-Housing Movement Starting to Take Off
Entire neighborhoods decide to go "green". There are 113 cohousing communities around the country, and about 90 more in the works, said Craig Ragland, executive director of the Cohousing Association of the United States.

Thursday, October 9, 2008
Michael Pollan vs Monsanto interview panel
(Video) Michael Pollan did a good job of keeping his cool, considering he was discussing the future of food with the head of Monsanto - a company that is directly threatening the world's food supplies as we speak. The supposed motive behind GM food is an altruistic one - to alleviate hunger, poverty and malnutrition worldwide -- the reality is that GM crops are intended to pad corporate bank accounts more than anything else

Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Deceiving Images: Propaganda in America
In November of last year, a panel of scholars met at the New York Public Library to mark the 60th anniversary of George Orwell's landmark essay, "Politics and the English Language," and to discuss the current state of propaganda in American politics. A video from that panel is now available on the internet.

Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Medical Error: Where Editors and Reporters Get It Wrong
According to a survey/study that appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association, reporters for print and online media outlets failed 42 percent of the time to report that drug companies funded research that appeared in prominent medical journals and led to stories in their publications, and about two-thirds of the nearly 300 stories mentioned the brand names of the drugs.

Tuesday, October 7, 2008
McCain linked to Iran-Contra group
(1 comments) John McCain has past connections to a private group that supplied aid to guerrillas seeking to overthrow the leftist government of Nicaragua in the Iran-Contra affair. The U.S. Council for World Freedom was part of an international organization linked to former Nazi collaborators and ultra-right-wing death squads in Central America. The group was dedicated to stamping out communism around the globe.

Tuesday, October 7, 2008
KEATING ECONOMICS: John McCain & The Making of a Financial Crisis (video)
The history of betrayal.

Monday, October 6, 2008
Economists with Guns
In 1965, following a coup by General Suharto, the Indonesian military massacred upwards of 800,000 people and imprisoned an estimated million more in an attempt to liquidate the Communist Party (PKI). The United States government gave both moral encouragement and logistical support to the mass killings. Challenging the romanticized views of the Kennedy administration pervading popular culture and in the Obama campaign,

Sunday, October 5, 2008
Noonan Says Palin's Type Of Populism Is Bad For Country
Appearing on NBC's Meet the Press, conservative columnist Peggy Noonan said that the "populist" tactics being deployed by Sarah Palin was "not helpful to the country" and painted her candidacy as built on class warfare. Populism as a strategy, 'we're the good guys, you're the bad guys,' is not good. And if that's the road they are going, that's not a good road to be on. It is not helpful to the country."

Saturday, October 4, 2008
Walden Bello, "A Primer on Wall Street Meltdown"
The Wall Street meltdown is due not only to greed and the lack of government regulation of a hyperactive sector. It stems ultimately from the crisis of overproduction that has plagued global capitalism since the mid-1970s. Financialization of investment activity has been one of the escape routes from stagnation, the other two being neoliberal restructuring and globalization. But this has proven to be a dangerous road

Friday, October 3, 2008
The right's two-pronged religion of rage and self-pity
(2 comments) The Right in this country -- meaning the faction that followed George Bush for the last eight years -- long ago ceased being a movement of political ideas and is driven by two, and only two, extreme emotions: (1) intense, aggressive rage towards their revolving door of enemies, and (2) bottomless self-pity over how unfairly they're being treated.

Friday, October 3, 2008
The Crisis Explained - Really
Analogies are never perfect, but here's one using horse racing.

Friday, October 3, 2008
FDR's Response to the Plot to Overthrow Him
In 1934 a special Congressional committee was appointed to conduct an investigation of a possible planned coup intended to topple the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and replace it with a government modelled on the policies of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. Some of the foremost members of the economic elite had indeed hatched a detailed and massively funded plot to effect a fascist coup in America.

Thursday, October 2, 2008
Capital Crisis Will Wreck Both Parties
In their role as mercenaries in service of finance capital, three-fifths of Democrats joined one-third of Republicans in a (temporarily) failed heist of $700 billion of the people's funds - a nest-egg the public needs to hold onto to weather the unfolding collapse of the Lords of Capital. Never has Republican-Democratic co-subservience to finance capital been on such naked display.

Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Gas: America's Crack (video)
Have you seen the cozy little ads on TV by The American Petroleum Institute, the lobbying arm of Big Oil? Americans should feel downright lucky to be financially raped by, say, ExxonMobil, a company that squeaked through the gas crisis by making $4,635,845.00/hour in profit last year!

Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Bailout alternative offered by House Dems
(2 comments) Rep. Peter DeFazio, an Oregon Democrat, took the ideas of William Isaac, who served as Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. chairman during the Reagan Administration and created legislation to help the listing financial markets right themselves. DeFazio, a vociferous opponent of the Bush Administration's $700 billion Wall Street bailout, calls his legislation the "No BAILOUTS Act." Article includes details of bill.

Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Mussolini-Style Corporatism in Action: Treasury Conference Call on Bailout Bill to Analysts
This is simply scandalous. To have a group of interested parties get a privileged briefing by government officials on a matter of keen public interest flies in the face of what a democracy is supposed to be about. The tap dancing in public is because they don't want it to get out that they'll be giving a sweetheart deal and ridiculously overpriced asset sales can be hidden in the details

Monday, September 29, 2008
The Blackmailing of a Nation
(1 comments) "Mr. Speaker I understand we are under Martial Law as declared by the speaker last night," Rep. Burgess, (R-TX) A process known as "martial law" allows bills to be brought to the floor very shortly after negotiations are completed, so Members of the House have little time to examine them before they vote.

Sunday, September 28, 2008
'Car sleepers' the new US homeless
(3 comments) In Santa Brabara, a sun-washed haven of wealth, many live far from the American dream. In a car park across the street from luxury mansions, the evening brings a strange sight. A few cars arrive and take up spaces in different corners. In each car, a woman, perhaps a few pets, bags of possessions and bedding.

Sunday, September 28, 2008
New IMF Study of Banking Crises Contradicts Bailout Bill Premise and Details
The IMF just released a study that analyzed 124 banking crises: "Existing empirical research has shown that providing assistance to banks and their borrowers can be counterproductive, resulting in increased losses to banks, which often abuse forbearance to take unproductive risks at government expense."

Friday, September 26, 2008
Sweden's Model Approach to Financial Disaster
As the debate sharpens in the U.S. Congress over Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's proposed $700 billion bailout package, Washington policymakers would be wise to lift their gaze beyond the Beltway and take a look at Sweden. The idea is "to get some ownership (in return), and eventually be able to get some revenue back." By taking a stake in its enfeebled banks, Sweden minimized the taxpayers' burden in the long run.

Friday, September 26, 2008
German Minister: US Over as Financial Superpower
(2 comments) The unravelling that started with the Freddie and Fannie conservatorship has exacted a toll not just on dollar-denominated paper but on financial assets around the world. As they have fallen, so too has the standing of the US, which zealously promoted liberalized capital markets and saw US firms establish dominant positions when those rules were adopted. America already had few friends and our reputataion is testing new lows.

Thursday, September 25, 2008
DailyKos (and others) get free trip to Israel, but won't touch Israel-Palestine
Back in April the Israeli Foreign Ministry organized an all-expenses-paid trip to Israel for progressive American leaders and bloggers, led by the director of the National Jewish Democratic Council. Participants went to Sderot to see the devastation wrought by Qassam rockets but the group didn't bother to head to the West Bank or Gaza: shocking ease with which left bloggers allowed themselves to be purchased with a free trip.

Thursday, September 25, 2008
Bomb attack on Israeli academic
A well-known Israeli critic of Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank, Zeev Sternhell, has been slightly wounded in a bomb attack. Professor Sternhall has also strongly opposed the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip, describing it as immoral and ineffective. Mr Sternhell, a Holocaust survivor, is best known for his work on the history of fascism.

Thursday, September 25, 2008
Army deploys combat unit in US for possible civil unrest
(1 comments) For the first time ever, the US military is deploying an active duty regular Army combat unit for full-time use inside the United States to deal with emergencies, including potential civil unrest. The unit known as the "Raiders" is among the Army's most blooded. It has spent nearly three out of the last five years deployed in Iraq, leading the assault on Baghdad in 2003 and carrying out house-to-house combat

Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Censored: Bush's Real Problem with Eliot Spitzer
(2 comments) NY State Governor Eliot Spitzer's tryst with a luxury call girl had little to do with the Bush administration's high moral standards for public servants. A Feb 08 editorial by Spitzer: "When history tells the story of the sub-prime lending crisis and recounts its devastating effects on the lives of so many innocent homeowners, the Bush administration will not be judged favorably...judged as a willing accomplice..

Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Commentary: On Bailouts, Congress Should Move with Great Care
The pace at which Congress is considering the largest intervention into financial markets in the history of the United States is shocking. The Bush administration proposed legislation that would grant it the authority to buy up toxic financial assets in an amount equal to five percent of gross domestic product (GDP). The magnitude of the funds requisitioned is matched only by the requested level of unchecked power and opacity

Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Ralph Nader: Economic Domino Theory
The worst top management of giant corporations in American history is also by far the most hugely paid. That contradiction applies as well to the Boards of Directors of these global companies. The bosses of General Motors (GM) have presided over the worst decline of GM shares in the last fifty years yet top GM executives are still in place and still receiving much more pay than their successful counterparts at Toyota.

Friday, September 19, 2008
A letter to America: you cannot be serious
(1 comments) According to those around Mr John McCain, your presidential contest is "not about the issues". Come again? Have you run out of things to talk about, America? I can see that Mr McCain might have a long list of things he would rather not discuss, most of them involving the incumbent with whom he shares a party. But do you truly intend to suspend all disbelief because of a well-groomed moose-killer?

Friday, September 19, 2008
Scientists Race to Develop Political BS Detector
New Scientist today is summarzing the world of political spin detection software-behavioral scientist Paul Ekman claims he can analyze a speech's text for words that indicate untruths and deception. Others look to analyze the tenor of the voice, and facial recognition to spot lies is becoming more of a reality. But unfortunately, much of the bullshit detector tech here seems like it may be drowning a bit in the selfsame goo.

Thursday, September 18, 2008
Steve Clemons: Previously Unknown Hagel Letter Warns Rice of Russia Collision
In February 2008, Senator Chuck Hagel wrote to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, copied to Defense Secretary Robert Gates and National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, warning that our policies with Kosovo, Serbia, and elsewhere in Europe could be brewing up a storm with Russia.

Thursday, September 18, 2008
Modern history's greatest regulatory failure
(1 comments) The degree of leverage that these institutions took on is indefensible. The average large securities firm was leveraged 27 to one in mid-2007. They were not regulated by any prudential supervisor. In effect, they regulated themselves. The lack of transparency was stunning. Many big lenders did not disclose off-balance-sheet risks. In some cases, they did not understand these risks themselves.

Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Country-of-origin labels to be required on meats
Starting Sept. 30, food manufacturers and grocery stores in the US have to comply with a new federal law that requires "Country of Origin Labelling," or COOL, on beef, pork, chicken and lamb. The new labels will tell consumers whether their food came from animals raised in the US or another country, which will allow consumers to stick to American-grown food, if that is their preference.

Wednesday, September 17, 2008
IRAQ: "We Blew Her to Pieces"
Aside from the Iraqi people, nobody knows what the U.S. military is doing in Iraq better than the soldiers themselves. A new book gives readers vivid and detailed accounts of the devastation the U.S. occupation has brought to Iraq, in the soldiers' own words.

Monday, September 15, 2008
Intel Council Warned Bush Against Raids in Pakistan
(2 comments) The National Intelligence Council, the U.S. intelligence community's focal point for estimating future developments, warned the Bush administration last month that a decision to launch commando raids by U.S. troops against al Qaeda-related targets in Pakistan's North-West Frontier region would carry a high risk of further destabilising the Pakistani military and government, according to sources

Sunday, September 14, 2008
Big Oil in sex, gift scandal
Government brokers responsible for collecting billions of dollars in federal oil royalties operated in a "culture of substance abuse and promiscuity" that included having sex with energy company employees, accepting lavish gifts and rigging contracts to favored firms, investigators said Wednesday.

Sunday, September 14, 2008
Frida Berrigan: Military Industrial Complex 2.0
Cubicle Mercenaries, Subcontracting Warriors, and Other Phenomena of a Privatizing Pentagon. The Pentagon is embroiled in two big wars, a potentially explosive war of words with Tehran, and numerous smaller conflicts – and it is leaning ever more heavily on private military contractors to get by.

Friday, September 12, 2008
Confessions of Crimes Against the State
(2 comments) I confess that I have traveled into enemy territory. I admit I have not killed my enemies; I have not hated my enemies; I do not wish my enemies were dead, like most patriotic Americans do, as the state orders. I not only like them, I love them, as Jesus commanded. I know I shouldn't, but I am called by a Higher Power to love them. I just can't help myself. I'm so sorry.

Friday, September 12, 2008
Palin's Awful Wolf-Killing Record on Television
(Video at site) As governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin has championed aerial gunning of wolves and bears. She proposed paying a $150 bounty for the left foreleg of each dead wolf; approved a $400,000 state-funded propaganda campaign to promote aerial hunting; introduced legislation to make it even easier to use aircraft to hunt wolves and bears.

Friday, September 12, 2008
CA Budget Crisis While GOP Plans Golf & Lobster Fest
Amid a record-setting budget impasse, California's legislative Republican leaders are scheduled to pack their bags and cross state lines for a two-day, lobster-and-golf campaign fundraiser at the "Republican Leadership Invitational" early next week, a Nevada golf tournament where big donors will be asked to fork over up to $15,000 to the California Republican Party. The budget is nearly three months past the June 15 deadline

Thursday, September 11, 2008
Revelations of an Abu Ghraib Interrogator
Few people have thought as much about the morality of the U.S. occupation of Iraq than Joshua Casteel, a former U.S. Army interrogator who served at Abu Ghraib prison in the wake of the detainee abuse scandal there. It wasn't the kind of abuse shown in the famous graphic images that made him feel morally compelled to leave the military -that had ceased by 2004- it was speaking to the detainees in their own language.

Thursday, September 11, 2008
RNC protesters charged as "terrorists"
(1 comments) Political dissent as terrorism: "Minnesota Patriot Act" charges filed against RNC Eight. The charges of terrorism leveled against the eight youths who sought to protest at the Republican Convention sound an alarm that political dissent in the US is on its way toward being criminalized.

Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Palin running state business out of Yahoo
Gov. Sarah Palin is being asked by a local Republican activist to release more than 1,100 e-mails she withheld from a public records request, including 40 that were copied to her husband, Todd. Palin also routinely does government business from a Yahoo address, gov.sarah@yahoo.com, rather than from her secure official state e-mail address, according to documents already made public.

Tuesday, September 9, 2008
Bush's Last-Minute Rush to Dismantle Public Protections
In May, White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten issued a memo that set deadlines for agency regulations during the remaining months of the Bush administration. HHS proposed a rule that could have far-reaching impacts on women and family planning decisions. The Department of Interior proposal would allow officials to approve development projects that could impact endangered species without consulting wildlife scientists.

Tuesday, September 9, 2008
Border Wall Devastation- video
As the Bush Administration barrels ahead with construction of the controversial U.S./Mexico border wall, a new video documents the ecosystems threatened by the project.

Tuesday, September 9, 2008
FDA Fighting Mounting Evidence on BPA
(1 comments) The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) continues to claim there is insufficient evidence about the health effects of BPA, a chemical widely used in consumer products, to justify regulating the substance. Evidence is mounting from a variety of other sources, however, that bisphenol-A (BPA) may affect human development and mental health. BPA is a common chemical found in certain hard plastics and the linings of food cans.

Monday, September 8, 2008
Leaks About Track Palin's Deployment Endanger Troops
In the past few days, important classified details about the deployment of Track Palin, son of Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin, have found their way into the media. The details of when and where Track will be in Iraq have been reported. This isn't just a violation of Operational Security (OPSEC), it puts the lives of every troop around him in danger.

Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Did Palin lie about 'bridge to nowhere?'
During her first speech Palin said she had told Congress "'thanks but no thanks' on that bridge to nowhere." In the city Ketchikan, the planned site of the so-called "Bridge to Nowhere," political leaders of both parties said the claim was false and a betrayal of their community, because she had supported the bridge and the earmark for it secured by Alaska's Congressional delegation during her run for governor.

Monday, September 1, 2008
Why our presidential candidates are always such crap
What happens to independent candidates: Assassination by media ridicule...or Harder methods (by any means necessary). Scary stuff- videos at site.

Monday, September 1, 2008
Kwiatkowski: It doesn't matter who is elected
(1 comments) The tenor of the fake Washington whine about "free trade and market access" will stay the same. The annoying Washington complaints and military threats over how some foreign country isn't treating its people the way we think they ought will continue. Waste, fraud and abuse –native to all governments, will continue at a Bushian pace and expect a continued, even accelerated erosion of freedom and liberties

Saturday, August 30, 2008
'Stealing America': Voting-fraud documentary
$3.8 billion: The initial Help America Vote Act allocation that California Secretary of State Deborah Bowen said "pushed many counties into buying electronic systems that were not properly reviewed or tested." Fadiman's no-frills documentary touches on voters being purged from rolls in Florida in 2000 (the single greatest threat to the 2008 election) and suspiciously insufficient distribution of voting machines in Ohio in '04.

Friday, August 29, 2008
Obama's Limits: An Interview With Andrew Bacevich
"We have presidential elections as a substitute for serious democratic politics"– that's what Andrew Bacevich says. We shouldn't blame George Bush for the underlying assumptions of the global war on terror, Bacevich argues. "Really it was Bill Clinton who more than anybody else made armed intervention a routine aspect of American political life."

Friday, August 29, 2008
Wake-Up Call
Massive market manipulation: That such obscenities are allowed to continue – UNREPORTED by the mainstream financial press – is, in itself, a condemnation of not only how warped, twisted and connived our capital markets are, but how COMPLETELY BROKEN and complicit our system of free speech and irresponsible our media have become.

Friday, August 29, 2008
The Land of the Silent and the Home of the Fearful | CommonDreams.org
(1 comments) There is a remarkable and palpable fear abroad in this land- not a fear of terrorism, but a fear of speaking up, a fear of being labeled as "different" or as a "troublemaker." People will lean over and whisper their opinions, if they think they are anti-Establishment, as though someone might be listening. It's time for all of us to put a stop to this creeping usurpation of our liberties.

Friday, August 29, 2008
A nonprofit lobbying organization- with a First Strike Agenda
A nonprofit lobbying organization aimed at strengthening Israel's image in the media quietly ran ads during the Democratic National Convention in which Boulder, Colorado launches missile attacks on Denver, in an attempt to bolster support for Israeli action against Iran. Israel remains the top recipient of US foreign aid.

Thursday, August 28, 2008
McCain's Plan to Privatise Veterans' Health Care
McCain argues that giving veterans a VA card that they can use at private doctors would shorten the long wait times many veterans face in seeing government doctors, who are nearly universally viewed as among the best in the world. Virtually all veterans groups oppose McCain's plan. The Veterans of Foreign Wars' national legislative director has said the VA card would "undermine the entire system".

Thursday, August 28, 2008
Pax Americana?
(1 comments) "Rebuilding America's Defenses" puts the entire world on notice. America will get what it wants, from any country on earth, by any means necessary. We reserve the right to strike preemptively with or without the support of another country. This manifesto was written in early 2001. The American people weren't notified- but now we see the disasterous consequences.

Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Bayer on defensive in bee deaths
Bayer CropScience is facing legal scrutiny in Germany because of the effect one of its best-selling pesticides has had on honeybees. On the other side of the Atlantic, the Natural Resources Defense Council is pressing for research information on clothianidin. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency approved the pesticide in 2003 and has been accused of hiding honeybee data.

Tuesday, August 26, 2008
USDA Gift to Monsanto
(2 comments) The US Department of Agriculture's give-away insurance rates for GM crops risk bankrupting the public coffers. The Federal Crop Insurance Corporation has approved a program that will reduce crop insurance costs between 20 and 70% for those growing (GM) maize. The program was crafted by the Monsanto Corporation and its first beneficiary is limited to its GM maize. The rest of the farming community may feel especially aggrieved

Monday, August 25, 2008
THE DELUSION REVOLUTION: ON THE ROAD TO EXTINCTION AND IN DENIAL
(8 comments) We're in trouble, on all fronts, and the trouble is wider and deeper than most of us have been willing to acknowledge. We should struggle to build a road on which we can walk through those troubles -- if such a road is possible -- but I doubt it's going to look like any path we had previously envisioned, nor is it likely to lead anywhere close to where most of us thought we were going.

Monday, August 25, 2008
America's Truth Deficit
(2 comments) As the Soviet economic system slowly unraveled, internal reform was impossible because highly placed officials who recognized the systemic disorders could not talk about them honestly. The United States is now in an equivalent predicament. Its weakening position in the global trading system is obvious and ominous, yet leaders in politics, business, finance and the news media are not willing to discuss candidly what is happenin

Friday, August 22, 2008
Internet Abuzz: Avian Flu Weaponized?
"Our best intelligence estimate is that pandemic Avian Flu has already been created through genetic engineering. The evidence shows the Avian Flu has been turned into a viral threat through bioengineering in the United States, fusing the deadly genome of the 1918 Pandemic, misnamed the "Spanish Flu," with the DNA of the innocuous H5N1 virus in a growth medium of human kidney cells, according to the National Institutes of Healt

Friday, August 22, 2008
Why Not Simply Abolish NATO?
[NATO's goal is] "to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down." Lord Ismay, first NATO Secretary-General. Since 1991, the Soviet empire no longer exists and Russia has been cooperating economically with Western European countries, supplying them with gas and oil, and all types of commodities. This has increased European economic interdependence and thus greatly reduced the need for NATO.

Thursday, August 21, 2008
Made Man: How Cindy Hensley invented John McCain
McCain was a relative nobody when he married Cindy Hensley--a middle-aged divorcé working a mid-level job in a far-off bureaucracy. It was the Hensleys who would breathe life into his prospects and provide a springboard for his ascent. Their ambitions burned every bit as brightly as his did. Except that, unlike McCain, they'd long since hidden their motives from public view.

Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Senior House Democrat Wants Ban on U.S. Oil Exports
The head of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming is calling on the White House to halt all exports of U.S. oil. "Sending America's vital energy resources overseas during our time of need should stop," wrote Edward J. Markey , D-Mass., to President Bush on Tuesday. The US exported 1.806 million barrels a day in May.

Tuesday, August 19, 2008
John McCain aide's dual roles intersect
Randy Scheunemann operated for years deep inside Republican foreign policy circles, a burly, bearded lobbyist with powerful patrons, neoconservative credentials and little public profile. Georgia's pro-Western government in Tbilisi has paid $830,000 to Scheunemann's two-member lobbying firm, Orion Strategies, since 2004, according to records at the Justice Department's foreign agents registration office.

Monday, August 18, 2008
City defends 'secret jail' built for DNC
DENVER - Activist groups say the converted warehouse poses a threat to civil liberties. The city maintains the facility is needed in case of mass arrests during the Democratic National Convention. The makeshift holding center, dubbed "Gitmo on the Platte" by activists, is located on city-owned property near Steele Street and 38th Ave. New security cameras guard the exterior, chain-link fences and barbed wire form cells inside.

Monday, August 18, 2008
Six Questions about the Anthrax Case
The anthrax in those envelopes was from our own military bio-weapons labs. Why did the administration, the FBI, and the media assume that only a single individual was responsible?

Monday, August 18, 2008
McCain: No Net Neutrality
While many of McCain's proposals mirror his Democratic opponent Barack Obama's technology policy, a McCain presidency would sharply differ from an Obama presidency on the issue of network neutrality, which would mandate that broadband service providers treat all network traffic in a nondiscriminatory manner. "John McCain does not believe in prescriptive regulation like net neutrality," the policy statement declared.

Monday, August 18, 2008
Social Origins of the American Corporate Predator State
(2 comments) The predatory nature of contemporary US governance is linked to corporations, and it is also a uniquely American phenomenon. It's origins clearly trace back to the military–industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned about in his final televised address to the nation on January 17, 1961. That complex has captured politics and corrupted the business of government, including of course the conduct of national security

Monday, August 18, 2008
Israel to treat Gaza peace boats 'like pirates'
Peace activists planning to land two boats on Gaza's shores are no better than "pirates" and will be turned back by the Israeli navy, officials have warned. On board are about 40 protesters campaigning against Israel's economic sanctions on the Palestinian territory, including an 84-year-old Holocaust survivor and Lauren Booth, sister-in-law of Tony Blair, who is the international special envoy to the Middle East.

Monday, August 18, 2008
It's starting in Canada (video)
(5 comments) After 10,000 plus years of safe, effective, affordable botanical medicine, the federal governments of various countries have decided, with the "encouragement" of the white collar criminals in the pharmaceutical industry and government, to "protect" the Canadian public from herbs and food supplements. 70% of currently available natural health products will be removed from the market.

Friday, August 15, 2008
Under the Abbaya: Female Producers in Saudi Arabia
Amy Teuteberg just got back from her first "No Reservations" road trip, and the number one question from friends, family and co-workers isn't about the food, the shoot, or how it was to work with Tony. "It's about what I had to wear. Of course, the question is less about the garment, than how far I had to go to conform."

Friday, August 15, 2008
Blowback From Bear-Baiting
Reveling in his status as an intimate of George Bush, Dick Cheney and John McCain, and America's lone democratic ally in the Caucasus, Saakashvili thought he could get away with a lightning coup and present the world with a fait accompli. Georgia started this fight -- Russia finished it. People who start wars don't get to decide how and when they end.

Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Investigating the Pentagon's pundits
In April the New York Times reported on the Pentagon military analyst program, a concerted effort by the U.S. DOD to cultivate retired military officers as "message force multipliers" or "surrogates" spouting Bush administration talking points on Iraq and other hot-button issues. The Pentagon publicly posted the documents and the Center for Media and Democracy has converted them so that they can be searched by keyword.

Monday, August 11, 2008
Where, oh where, are the issues?
(2 comments) As the two political party conventions approach and the never ending 2008 Presidential campaign drones on and on, both candidates for the top job in the land continue to avoid dealing with any of the real issues that face America. More than anything, the choices we face is November highlight a failure in the system. The political system that controls the electoral process in America does more damage than good. It has failed us

Monday, August 11, 2008
Did McCain Plagiarize His Speech on the Georgia Crisis?
A Wikipedia editor emailed Political Wire to point out some similarities between Sen. John McCain's speech today on the crisis in Georgia and the Wikipedia article on the country Georgia. Given the closeness of the words and sentence structure, most would consider parts of McCain's speech to be derived directly from Wikipedia.

Monday, August 11, 2008
Ron Paul Affirms: Iran Attack Plan Has 'Green Light'
(3 comments) Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.) has warned millions of radio listeners that the United States is heading into an illegal attack on Iran, stating his amazement at members of Congress who have openly voiced support for a criminal nuclear strike. "That is my sense because the Democratic leaders in the House are proposing no resistance whatsoever, Paul said.

Sunday, August 10, 2008
The day before 9/11
(6 comments) 25%+ of all Pentagon money is unaccounted for. The Pentagon receives the lion's share of the US tax payer's dollars. 36% goes to current military expenses. 18% goes to what's called "past military" which includes veteran's pensions and medical benefits. At least 25% - and some estimates are much higher - goes down a rat hole unaccounted for and never to been seen again.

Saturday, August 9, 2008
A race between education and disaster
(1 comments) Orwell feared those who would ban books. Huxley feared that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would drown in a sea of irrelevancy.

Saturday, August 9, 2008
Tape: Top CIA official confesses order to forge Iraq-9/11 letter came on White House stationery
A forged letter linking Saddam Hussein to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks was ordered on White House stationery and probably came from the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, according to a new transcript of a conversation with the Central Intelligence Agency's former Deputy Chief of Clandestine Operations Robert Richer.

Friday, August 8, 2008
Why Climate Activists Welcome Peak Oil
Peak oil kicks the discussion into overdrive and adds more economic weight to the necessity of addressing Climate Change. Consider future supply scenarios for coal: if, as studies indicate, world coal production will start falling within two decades, this means coal will soon become much more expensive and new coal power plants become a bad bet for financial reasons. And renewable energy sources and conservation look much more

Thursday, August 7, 2008
Air Force Wants to Bail Out the Coal Industry
Careful deliberation and thoughtful debate have been cast aside as the Air Force has set itself on a fast-track mission to bail out the coal industry. Coal producers have been unsuccessful in prior efforts to cultivate such a market. Climate change worries prompted Congress last year to turn back an attempt to mandate the use of coal-based synthetic fuels. The Air Force is trying to steer the nation's energy policy toward coal

Thursday, August 7, 2008
McCain's Deep Involvement Shipping 8600 Ohio Jobs Overseas- video
McCain and his campaign manager helped make a deal that gave control of DHL jobs to a foreign corporation.

Wednesday, August 6, 2008
'Fakeproof' e-passport is cloned in minutes
New microchipped passports designed to be foolproof against identity theft can be cloned and manipulated in minutes and accepted as genuine by the computer software recommended for use at international airports. Tests for The Times exposed security flaws in the microchips introduced to protect against terrorism and organised crime.

Wednesday, August 6, 2008
Hiroshima Day reality check- video
Take a minute to reflect on just how absurd it is for America to maintain 10,000 nuclear bombs. Defense experts say that many simply aren't needed, and by reducing the nuclear arsenal our country could save $14 billion dollars -- more than enough to save the lives of six million kids who die of starvation in impoverished nations each year.

Wednesday, August 6, 2008
The Audacity of Contempt
Take gas prices, the most pressing issue on the minds of Americans. Offer a blatant ploy that in fact won't help - but will profit Big Oil. Pocket over a million in contributions from oil executives and use the money to put up an ad promising to take on Big Oil. Call it the audacity of contempt. Sen. John McCain seems intent on proving that it is possible to scorn Americans into voting for him.

Wednesday, August 6, 2008
McCain's questionable contributions
This list of McCain's questionable donors continues to rise: Alice Rocchio, a Hess office manager, and Pasquale Rocchio, an Amtrak train foreman, together donated $57,000 to the RNC. How did so many donors with everyday jobs manage to be able to fork over contributions of $2300-$4600, in a time when the economy is in a recession, and people are trying to find ways to save as much as they can?

Wednesday, August 6, 2008
Neocon Flap Highlights Jewish Divide
(1 comments) A mushrooming media controversy pitting neocons against a prominent Jewish-American political commentator could mark a new stage in the growing battle over who speaks for the U.S. Jewish community on foreign policy issues, particularly regarding the Middle East. TIME columnist Joe Klein's accusations that Jewish neocons, who played a visible role in the drive to war in Iraq and have since pushed for a military attack on Iran

Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Anthrax Attack on U.S. Congress Covered Up by FBI, Expert Says
from Dec 2006: Although only a "handful" of scientists had the ability to perpetrate the crime, the culprit, or culprits, among them may never be identified as the FBI ordered the destruction of the anthrax culture collection at Ames, Ia., from which the Ft. Detrick lab got its pathogens, the authority said. This action made it impossible "to pin-point precisely where, when, and from whom these bio-agents had originated."

Monday, August 4, 2008
Jean C. Duley... tell us again...
More background on the anthrax case, many do-not-computes, and comments from a doctor friend of Ivins. This whole thing smells.

Sunday, August 3, 2008
Karadzic protected by US until he broke 'deal'
Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic was protected by the United States until a CIA phone bug caught him breaking the terms of his "deal", the Serb newspaper Blic reported Saturday, quoting a US intelligence source. "Karadzic, indicted for genocide and war crimes, was under US protection until 2000, when the CIA intercepted his telephone conversation that proved he chaired a meeting of his old political party."

Sunday, August 3, 2008
Israel fears scathing U.S. report on its West Bank policies
The United States security coordinator for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, retired general James Jones, is preparing an extremely critical report of Israel's policies in the territories and its attitude toward the Palestinian Authority's security services. The harsh criticisms in the executive summary are reportedly upsetting the Bush administration with some senior U.S. officials demanding that it not be published.

Sunday, August 3, 2008
CIA Veteran Rips Agency, Tests Limits of Right to Publish
(1 comments) A 25-year veteran of the CIA's clandestine service has written a scathing -and unauthorized- account of the spy agency's management. Jones presents a withering portrait of the CIA as suffering from a timid, self-serving bureaucracy that has stifled initiative and failed to recruit meaningful spies. The CIA has also misled Congress on its spending, he maintains, diverting billions $$ to expansion of offices inside the US.

Friday, August 1, 2008
Dr. Bryant Welch: Torture, Political Manipulation and the American Psych. Assn.
(2 comments) How did the APA form such an obviously close connection to the military? And why did the APA governance-the Board of Directors and the Council of Representatives-go along with the military interests? Since the early 1980's APA has had a unique relationship with Hawaii Senator Daniel Inouye, for much of that time Chair of the Subcommittee on Defense for the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Friday, August 1, 2008
Mukasey Calls On Congress to Subvert Constitution
(6 comments) In an enormous executive branch power grab, Attorney General Michael Mukasey called on Congress today to authorize indefinite detention through a new declaration of armed conflict. Mukasey also proposed that Congress subvert the right of habeas corpus with procedures that will hide the Bush admin's past wrongdoing - an action that would undermine the constitutional guarantee of due process and conceal systematic torture

Friday, August 1, 2008
No Justice at Bush's Justice Dept.
The forced resignation of 12 U.S. attorneys last year was so heavy handed and obviously White House engineered that it brought screams of protest from congressional Democrats and even Republicans and ultimately was the leading cause of Alberto Gonzales' resignation as attorney general. Even more important, the furor over the U.S. attorneys also has resulted in continuing allegations about the politicization of the entire DOJ

Friday, August 1, 2008
When Extremists Attack - by Joe Klein
I have now been called antisemitic and intellectually unstable and other silly things by the folks over at the Commentary blog. They want Time Magazine to fire or silence me. This is happening because I said something that is palpably true, but unspoken in polite society: There is a small group of Jewish neoconservatives who unsuccessfully tried to get Netanyahu to attack Saddam Hussein in the 1990s, and then got Bush to do it

Thursday, July 31, 2008
US oil firms seek drilling access, but exports soar
While the U.S. oil industry want access to more federal lands to help reduce reliance on foreign suppliers, American-based companies are shipping record amounts of gasoline and diesel fuel to other countries. A record 1.6 million barrels a day in U.S. refined petroleum products were exported during the first four months of this year, up 33 percent from 1.2 million barrels a day over the same period in 2007.

Thursday, July 31, 2008
Pakistani General Who Wired $100,000 to Atta Met with a "Senior Representative from the Joint Chiefs of Staff" Right Bef
(2 comments) In response to a Freedom of Information Act Request, the government has disclosed documents confirming that Pakistani ISI General Ahmed -the guy who wired $100,000 to lead hijacker Atta -met with a "Senior Representative from the Joint Chiefs of Staff", Centcom Commander General Tommy Franks, the Director of the DIA, and others in the week before 9/11. We're not supposed to think this means anything.

Thursday, July 31, 2008
McCain refuses to fire molester aide
For weeks, John McCain has resisted calls to dump one of his leading religious representatives who critics say is an inappropriate surrogate because of links to allegations of sexual impropriety with a teenage student.

Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Librarians want to turn us all into privacy fiends
(Fine by me!) "Law enforcement agencies at every level are exploiting fears about terrorism and child safety to encourage lawmakers to strip away statutory privacy protections for library records," says the ALA. People have all sorts of behaviors for which they want "privacy," even if these behaviors aren't "secret." When someone heads off to the bathroom, for instance, and closes the door, their behavior isn't a "secret"

Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Most Bank Sites Insecure, Says Recent Study
Online banking makes life easier, at least for those of us comfortable with the idea of transacting money from the home or office. A University of Michigan study released last week suggests that, of 214 financial institutions' websites, every one had design flaws and over three-quarters contained at least one flaw that could potentially put customers at risk.

Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Let's give "Blue Dogs" the boot- Greenwald
Few positions generate overwhelming agreement across the ideological spectrum. One notable exception to this rule is the issue of whether the current U.S. Congress is doing a poor job. That question produces a remarkable consensus that is close to unanimous. The Democratic-led Congress is actually more unpopular among Democrats than among Republicans

Thursday, July 24, 2008
The U.S. Economy Is Socialism for the Rich
Free market capitalism in the United States is by no means "free." It's time we recognize this and move past the destructive neoliberal agenda. The hyper-consumerist culture of the United States has led to predatory lending and credit schemes that have put millions of people on the brink of bankruptcy.

Thursday, July 24, 2008
Attack of the Global Pirate Bankers
In the last thirty years, fueled by the globalization of financial services, lousy lending, capital flight and mind-boggling corruption, a relatively small number of major banks, law firms, accounting firms, asset managers, insurance companies and hedge funds have come to launder and conceal at least $10 trillion to $15 trillion of private untaxed anonymous cross-border wealth.

Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Energy Speculation Bill on Hold
Democrats and Republicans traded salvos over the blame for high gasoline prices Tuesday, but substantive progress on energy legislation eluded lawmakers as a bill to curb oil speculation stalled in the Senate. The GOP wants to drill, the Dems want to conserve- and nobody talks about all the oil we EXPORT!

Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Half a Million Plastic Coffins?
You don't buy 500,000 plastic coffins "just in case something happens," you buy them because you know something is going to happen. These air tight seal containers would be perfect to bury victims of plague or biological warfare in, wouldn't they? Apparently the Government is expecting a half million people to die relatively soon.

Monday, July 21, 2008
Drilling for Export
Faulty assumption: Oil produced here stays here. A record 1.6 million barrels a day in U.S. refined petroleum products were EXPORTED during the first four months of this year, up 33 percent from 1.2 million barrels a day over the same period in 2007. Shipments this February topped 1.8 million barrels a day for the first time during any month. And President Clinton lifted the ban on export of ANWR Alaskan oil in 1995.

Sunday, July 20, 2008
William Astore: Generation Warfighters
In WWI and WWII, the Germans were the best soldiers because they had trained and fought the most, because their societies were geared, mentally and in most other ways, for war, because they celebrated and valued feats of arms above all other contributions one could make to society and culture. Leaders always expected them to prevail. The mentality was: "We're number one. How can we possibly lose? (sound familiar?)

Saturday, July 19, 2008
More Evidence Madrid Bombing was a False Flag Op
(3 comments) It is revealed that the man accused of supplying the dynamite used in the March 2004 Madrid train bombings was an informant who had the private telephone number of the head of Spain's Civil Guard bomb squad. Emilio Suarez Trashorras, a miner with access to explosives, as well as an associate named Rafa Zouhier both regularly informed for the Spanish police, telling them about drug shipments.

Saturday, July 19, 2008
Political harmony v. the rule of law: an easy choice for the political establishment
(1 comments) Former Congressman Harold Ford argued that Bush officials shouldn't be held accountable for crimes they committed while in office, and then insisted that Democrats shouldn't be expected to defend civil liberties and Constitutional rights because -- as one observer summarized Ford's point -- "the Constitution doesn't poll very well."

Friday, July 18, 2008
Dr. Judith Rodin: The Post-Social Contract Generation
Almost half of America's youngest workers believe the nation's best days may have come and gone. Ninety percent say the social contract is broken and 87 percent - the largest portion in any age group - are calling out for a new one.

Friday, July 18, 2008
Israel May Start Nuclear War- NYT
(2 comments) Benny Morris, a Professor of Middle Eastern history at Ben Gurion University, claims Israel will most certainly attack Iran within the next 4 to 7 months, and if conventional weapons are unsuccessful to knock out Iran's nuclear program, than Israel will escalate to the use of nuclear weapons.

Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Phil Gramm's Porn Stash
Before Gramm joined the Christian Coalition's Ralph Reed to call for the defunding of the NEA, before he attacked an opponent for taking money from a gay rights group, and before he was interviewed by the white supremacist Southern Partisan magazine, Gramm was an avidly active investor in soft-core pornography movies.

Friday, July 11, 2008
They Rob You With a Fountain Pen
Under the conservative hand of Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve sat idly by as bankers had their predators' ball. Now the banks are in trouble. They are scrambling to sell off assets, raise new capital, and unload the lousy paper. The bankers and investors are walking away with millions of dollars in private profits. And now we're getting the bill

Thursday, July 10, 2008
This is How the World Ends
(5 comments) "What makes this such a terrifying book is it isn't based on theoretical mathematics. Rapid increases in greenhouse gases have shut down the ocean conveyor several times before, resulting in severe climate change and mass extinction. If Ward's analysis is correct, we know what caused it and we know how to make it not happen again. The question is: can we save us from ourselves?"

Thursday, July 10, 2008
How McCain Campaign Adviser Phil Gramm Helped Create the Subprime Mortgage Crisis
(1 comments) In the midst the chaos of the 2000 election aftermath, Senator Phil Gramm slipped into a must-pass spending bill a 268-page bill that totally deregulated credit "swaps" - a market that's now about four times the size of Wall Street - and turned a large part of the economy into a secret casino where the stakes are high, rules are almost non-existent, and the high-rollers' gambling debts are paid by the rest of us.

Thursday, July 10, 2008
StrangeBedfellows
Strangebedfellows is a unique and diverse left--right coalition which has come together to put a stop to the eradication of civil liberties in America. It includes Ron Paul supporters, leading bloggers from the left (Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com, Jane Hamsher of firedoglake.com) and many more who share the view that warrantless surveillance, telecom immunity and other such outrages of the lawless surveillance state MUST END

Thursday, July 10, 2008
THE PERILS OF PLAYING NICE
(1 comments) Global warming is an emergency, and "for emergency situations we need emergency action," UN's Ban Ki-Moon told the world in November 2007. Why, then, has climate policy moved in such a painfully slow manner? How can the impasse be resolved between what needs doing quickly, based on the science, and what seems a "reasonable" thing to do? In all these examples, we see reluctance to go beyond the bounds of perceived acceptabilit

Wednesday, July 9, 2008
Roll Call Vote- Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
See how your Senators voted. Three amendments concerning immunizing telecommunication companies from lawsuits for handing over their records to federal investigators were defeated. One amendment would have stripped the immunity provision, while two others would have delayed granting immunity until it was determined necessary. They trashed the Constitution.

Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Take Action: Tell Your Senators to Say NO to the FISA Amendments Act
On July 9, the Senate will vote on whether to expand the government's surveillance powers to allow warrantless surveillance of Americans and give immunity to telecommunications companies that helped the Bush administration engage in illegal surveillance in the past. Please tell your senators to vote NO on this legislation. The FISA Amendments Act of 2008 (H.R. 6304) is based on flawed rationales rejected last week in Fed Court

Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Special Report on Weapons Technology
A Microwave ray gun that controls crowds with noise; "smart" bombs dropped by stealth bombers, coupled with space-based sensors and precision satellite navigation. The US has embraced Full Spectrum Dominance, the belief that superior technology in all fields guarantees victory, though critics disagree.

Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Pentagon Refuses EPA's Pollution Cleanup Orders
(2 comments) The nation's worst polluter, the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), is refusing to sign enforcement agreements with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that require DOD to clean up polluted sites nationwide. The military bases covered by EPA's enforcement orders may endanger public drinking water supplies as a result of the military dumping toxic pollutants at the sites.

Monday, July 7, 2008
Gaza: When You Shoot the Messenger
The assault of IPS Gaza correspondent Mohammed Omer has left Israeli security personnel with a lot of explaining to do. And they are not doing a very good job of it. Omer was returning from Europe where he had addressed European parliamentarians on the situation on the ground in Gaza. Omar told IPS he was verbally abused, strip-searched at gunpoint and physically beaten. He was later hospitalised with broken ribs and trauma.

Monday, July 7, 2008
CHINA: 'Within a Generation Beijing Will Cease to Exist'
Few in the Chinese capital are aware of the price their city would pay for staging the world's first 'green Olympics' in August. The fabulous capital of Chinese emperors and the epitome of modern China's ambitions is being driven to extinction by its chronic lack of water. And the Olympic games are expediting the city's slow demise, according to experts. "Within a generation this city would cease to exist," says Dai Qing

Saturday, July 5, 2008
Invading the Middle East: An interview with Juan Cole
Americans more or less conducted a social revolution when they conquered Iraq, of empowering their Shi'a and Kurdish allies, and of allowing them to run roughshod over the Sunni Arab former ruling class. It would be as though a foreign country conquered the United States and put Latinos and African Americans in charge and told people in Connecticut that henceforth they're unemployed and they might get to be janitors

Saturday, July 5, 2008
Secret report: biofuel caused food crisis
World Bank study delivers blow to plant energy drive. Biofuels have forced global food prices up by 75% - far more than previously estimated - according to a confidential World Bank report. The figure emphatically contradicts the US government's claims that plant-derived fuels contribute less than 3% to food-price rises.

Friday, July 4, 2008
How dare they rip the Fourth Amendment?
(3 comments) Next week the U.S. Senate will vote on an extension of FISA, with a few small amendments intended to immunize telecommunications corporations that assisted our government in the warrantless and illegal wiretapping it has grown to love. How can any senator on either side of the aisle vote for this law that does nothing to enhance our security and everything to diminish our rights as a free people?

Friday, July 4, 2008
Getting All Our Lemmings in a Row
The G8 is an exclusive club that includes Canada, England, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, and the U.S. Since 2005, the G8 has been systematically putting together the pieces of its CO2-burial plan, which will be endorsed again at next week's meeting in Japan. Burying carbon dioxide in the ground is called "carbon capture and storage", or CCS for short, is being promoted as a "silver bullet" but is untested

Wednesday, July 2, 2008
Blind Whistling Phreaks and the FBI's Historical Reliance on Phone Tap Criminality
37 years ago Joe Engressia, a blind telephonic hacking pioneer with perfect pitch and a high IQ, seized control over phone systems by whistling dual-tone, multi-frequency pitches into telephone receivers. The FBI viewed Engressia as a real threat. The FBI ran warrantless wiretaps as Hoover saw fit and with the phone company's compliance.

Wednesday, July 2, 2008
African Dictatorships and Double Standards
(2 comments) The Bush administration has justifiably criticized the Zimbabwean regime of liberator-turned-dictator Robert Mugabe. But the United States currently provides economic aid and security assistance to such repressive African regimes as Swaziland, Congo, Cameroon, Togo, Chad, Cote d'Ivoire, Rwanda, Gabon, Egypt, and Tunisia. None of these countries holds free elections, and all have severely suppressed their political opposition.

Wednesday, July 2, 2008
Don't Wait for World War III- by Justin Raimondo
The drumbeat for war with Iran is getting louder. Determined to ensure their success, the neoconservatives inside the administration, and their supporters in Israel, have launched a three-front campaign to provoke a confrontation with Tehran. We must defeat the Lobby on the issue of Senate Resolution 580 (in the House, Cong. Res. 362). A new war in the Middle East is the last thing Americans want. Call your rep today!

Wednesday, July 2, 2008
Not Your Grandma's Depression
American society is sliding into a greater depression than the one Grandma lived through. On the technical side, there has been unending controversy as to whether we're gripped by inflation or deflation. Food and gasoline prices are rising faster than the rivers of Iowa. But the prices of assets, like houses, stocks, jet-skis, and GMC Yukons are cratering as America into Yard Sale Nation.

Wednesday, July 2, 2008
Medicare meltdown? See how your senator voted!
Thirty-nine senators left town for their Fourth of July picnics knowing that the most vulnerable Americans are at risk because of the Senate's inability to act to stop drastic payment cuts for health care services. See how your senators voted. When you see them this weekend, thank those who stood up for physicians and patients by voting "yes" on H.R. 6331. Urge "No" voters to support H.R. 6331!

Wednesday, July 2, 2008
Surrogate Silliness
ENOUGH ALREADY! The country's at war, the economy is struggling, oil prices are surging. The Republican and Democratic presidential candidates have dramatically different approaches to all this and more. And we've just concluded Day Three of the latest surrogate pseudo-drama:

Wednesday, July 2, 2008
US Torture Tactics at Guantánamo Inspired by Communist China
In 2002 military trainers at Guantánamo based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of "coercive management techniques" for possible use on prisoners, including "sleep deprivation," "prolonged constraint," and "exposure." What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean W

Tuesday, July 1, 2008
DNI to Oversee All Security Clearance Policy
Consolidating power: The Director of National Intelligence will oversee security clearance investigations and related policies on access to classified information for all federal agencies, according to an executive order issued yesterday by President Bush. The move appears to significantly augment the authority of the DNI since it extends his reach to personnel policies and security clearances that are unrelated to intelligenc

Tuesday, July 1, 2008
Feingold on FISA- video
I teased some of my colleagues and said we can celebrate the Constitution on July 4th and maybe when we come back you'll decide not to tear it up. -Russ Feingold on FISA

Tuesday, July 1, 2008
McCain's Long Strange Trip South of the Border
Our economy has been battered on multiple fronts, including the loss of 3.4 million manufacturing jobs. The current trade strategy has not only contributed to the offshoring of jobs, but helped harm the lives of workers abroad. NAFTA in particular has disrupted the agricultural economy in Mexico, displacing peasant labor and driving illegal immigration. McCain decides to campaign across the border where the jobs are being sent

Tuesday, July 1, 2008
McCain's Secret, Questionable Record
(1 comments) Some of the unreleased pages in McCain's Navy file may not reflect well upon his qualifications for the presidency. From day one in the Navy, McCain screwed-up again and again, only to be forgiven because his father and grandfather were four-star admirals. McCain's sense of entitlement to privileged treatment bears an eerie resemblance to George W. Bush's.

Tuesday, July 1, 2008
How Ignorant Are We?
The study by the new McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum found that 22 percent of Americans could name all five Simpson family members, compared with just 1 in 1,000 people who could name all five First Amendment freedoms.

Tuesday, July 1, 2008
'The US is Not a Republic Anymore'
(1 comments) We no longer have a country. We don't have a republic any more. During the last 7 or 8 years of the Bush regime, they've got rid of the Bill of Rights, they've got rid of habeas corpus. They have got rid of one of the nicest gifts that England ever left us when they went away and we ceased to be colonies - the Magna Carta - from the 12th century. All of our law and due process of law is based on that. And Bush got rid of it.

Tuesday, July 1, 2008
Col. Hackworth(Jan. 25, 2000): Is McCain's "war hero" status the creation of a very slick publicity campaign?
In McCain's own words just four days after being captured, he admits he violated the U.S. Code of Conduct by telling his captors "O.K, I'll give you military information if you will take me to the hospital." A Vietnam vet detractor says, "He received the nation's third highest award, the Silver Star, for treason. He provided aid and comfort to the enemy!"

Monday, June 30, 2008
Bush's top general quashed torture dissent
New evidence shows that despite warnings from across the military, former Gen. Richard Myers shut down legal scrutiny of brutal interrogation tactics. "He did play a much more central role" than previously known, Jonathan Turley said. "The minute the military lawyers expressed concern, they were shut down."

Monday, June 30, 2008
Israelis Assault Award Winning IPS Journalist
(2 comments) Mohammed Omer, the Gaza correspondent of IPS, and joint winner of the 2008 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, was strip-searched at gunpoint, assaulted and abused by Israeli security officials Thursday as he tried to return home to Gaza. Every cavity of his body was searched as one of the investigators pinned him down on the floor, placing his boot on Omer's neck. Omer began vomiting, and fainted.

Monday, June 30, 2008
How the "Dear Leader" Blackmailed Bush
After seven years of nonstop belligerence and saber rattling, the Bush administration has given North Korea everything it has demanded. In return, the US gets nothing. The UN's nuclear watchdog, the IAEA, will not get access to Kim Jong-il's nuclear stockpile or its "Top-Secret" file on weapons programs or be allowed to conduct surprise "go anywhere, see anything" inspections. Kim will continue to develop his long-range ballis

Monday, June 30, 2008
Iraq fails to sign contracts with global oil majors
Iraq said on Monday it has failed to sign technical support agreements with global oil majors which were aimed at helping boost the war-torn country's oil production. Iraq is negotiating with Shell, BP, ExxonMobil, Chevron and Total, and a consortium of other smaller oil companies, Oil Minister Hussein al-Shahristani said at press briefing. "We did not finalise any agreement with them because they wanted a share of the oil,"

Monday, June 30, 2008
AIPAC tries to Intimidate Congressional Candidates
(2 comments) Darcy Burner said she got a call from people affiliated with the conservative Jewish political group AIPAC who told her to distance herself from the new pro-peace group J Street, which they said is full of radical leftists who believe in capitulation to the forces of the Arab world who would overrun and destroy Israel. Like most conservative arguments, it is utter nonsense backed up by a political threat designed to suppress

Sunday, June 29, 2008
Home-grown veg ruined by toxic fertiliser
Gardeners across Britain are reaping a bitter harvest of rotten potatoes, withered salads and deformed tomatoes after an industrial herbicide tainted their soil. The affected gardens and allotments have been contaminated by manure originating from farms where the hormone-based herbicide aminopyralid, made by Dow AgroSciences, has been sprayed on fields.

Sunday, June 29, 2008
Iran-Contra's 'Lost Chapter'
(2 comments) As historians ponder George W. Bush's disastrous presidency, they may wonder how Republicans perfected a propaganda system that could fool tens of millions of Americans, intimidate Democrats, and transform the vaunted Washington press corps from watchdogs to lapdogs. Now revealed, the Reagan administration built a domestic covert propaganda apparatus managed by a CIA propaganda and disinformation specialist.

Sunday, June 29, 2008
Community Solar Power
(1 comments) A community in Canada has an unusual form of solar power that can provide over 90% of the annual heating and hot water needs for the homes, despite being situated in a cold Alberta location where winter temperatures can reach -33 degrees C (-27 F). Combined together, the 52 home community is able to collect and store enough energy from the sun during the summer that the ground storage temperatures reach 80 degrees C (176 F).

Friday, June 27, 2008
Ending 10 000 Years of Conflict between Agriculture and Nature
Organic agriculture is not enough; we must replace annual with perennial crops. Humans now directly manage 27 percent of the Earth's surface area, harvesting more than 40 percent of the planet's biological productivity for our own uses. Yet food production per person is on the decline, and agriculture worldwide is doing more than ever to worsen the global ecological crisis.

Thursday, June 26, 2008
Why The Right Isn't Future-Ready
Authoritarians tend to be ideologues -it's virtually impossible for them to envision any alternative future besides the one that fulfills the eschatology of the ideology they've chosen. There will always be oil. There will always be glaciers. Jesus is coming Real Soon Now. And we will always be at war with Oceania. Ideologies are boxes; and once you're stuck in one, no other reality is possible.

Thursday, June 26, 2008
Mike Davis: Welcome to the Next Epoch
Farewell to the Holocene. Our world, our old world that we have inhabited for the last 12,000 years, has ended, even if no newspaper in North America or Europe has yet printed its scientific obituary.

Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Hoyer hails FISA bill as "a significant victory for the Democratic Party"
(2 comments) Democrats achieved a "significant victory" because -- by giving Republicans everything they demanded -- Republicans are no longer able to criticize Democrats on this issue. What a shrewd strategy: "if we comply with all their demands, then they can't criticize us for anything." That's the Democratic Party's plan for winning, according to Hoyer.

Monday, June 23, 2008
Time magazine uncritically prints Nancy Pelosi's "justifications" for the FISA "compromise"
The article has only one purpose -- to depict the spying "compromise" as a brilliant and heroic centrist masterstroke by Nancy Pelosi to protect us from Terrorists. It must be a decent and reasonable compromise if both the extremes on the Right and Left are angry about it -- except the whole premise is patently false. The Right isn't attacking the bill at all; they're ecstatic about it.

Monday, June 23, 2008
The Hedonists of Power
Washington has become Versailles. We are ruled, entertained and informed by courtiers. The popular media are courtiers. The Democrats, like the Republicans, are courtiers. Our pundits and experts are courtiers. We are captivated by the hollow stagecraft of political theater as we are ruthlessly stripped of power. It is smoke and mirrors, tricks and con games. We are being had.

Sunday, June 22, 2008
Can You Pass The Israel-Palestine Quiz?
In the spirit of Senator Daniel Moynihan of New York, who used to remind people that "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts," this quiz was designed and may lead some to reexamine their misconceived opinions.

Sunday, June 22, 2008
The Best Farmland in the U.S. Is Flooded; Most Americans Are Too Stupid to Panic
(7 comments) While the food supply situation has skated along a knife edge so far this year, with higher prices and many countries experiencing food riots, widespread famine did not take hold. Now, this growing season, when yields need to be at record levels to avert disaster, what do we find? Floods or droughts in several of the breadbaskets of the world.

Friday, June 20, 2008
If 42 days detention was wrong, how about 548?
A new directive allowing EU states to detain immigrants for 18 months makes Britain's new anti-terrorism laws seem liberal. Members of the European Parliament backed the so-called 'return directive', which allows the 27 EU member states to hold undocumented migrants in detention centres for up to 18 months and to ban them from re-entering EU territory for five years. The draft law allows children to be detained, too.

Friday, June 20, 2008
Safe Toys, Edible Food, Smart Globalization
The stories are painfully familiar. A million pounds of Chinese seafood sold in the U.S with carcinogens and antibiotics not approved for use in the U.S. Half a million pounds of cantaloupes consumed from Mexico and Costa Rica with salmonella contagion. Even cats and dogs aren't safe. Melamine, a nitrogen-rich chemical used to make fertilizer and plastic, made its way into 60 million cans and pouches of pet food. Now tomatoes

Friday, June 20, 2008
Roll Call Votes for FISA Capitulation- Corp shills triumph
(2 comments) H R 6304 FISA Amendments Act of 2008 YEAS 293 NAYS 129

Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Anything for a Bath, Anything for Fuel
Gaza is on the brink, and Israel is keeping it that way. The girl, about 16, is wandering about Jebaliya refugee camp, picking up anything she thinks can burn. She cannot find enough bits of wood, so she gathers plastic bags, old notebooks and even a pair of broken plastic sandals. "I want to heat some water," she said. "I want a bath."

Wednesday, June 18, 2008
 US Special Forces counterinsurgency manual leaked
(2 comments) From Wikileaks: How to covertly train paramilitaries, censor the press, ban unions, employ terrorists, conduct warrantless searches, suspend habeas corpus, conceal breaches of the Geneva Convention and make the population love it. The leaked manual, which has been verified with military sources, is the official US Special Forces doctrine for Foreign Internal Defense or FID.

Wednesday, June 18, 2008
The Incredible Story of Youssef Nada
Under the cover of the "war against terror", the United States and the EU have granted unlimited powers to secret services and police. Emergency measures which were introduced on a provisional basis in 2001, outside any judiciary control, have become permanent. Since September 2001, at least 80,000 people, mainly Muslim, have been kidnapped, kept in secret prisons, and tortured by CIA and FBI agents.

Tuesday, June 17, 2008
America's Foreign Policy Bubble
(3 comments) We Americans think we live in the greatest country on earth. We think this because we never go anywhere else to test this proposition, except to places like Club Med or on cruises to the Caribbean (talk about bubbles!). Because we're the greatest country on earth, we have the right to disregard the opinions of other countries, which aren't as great as we are. In this perfect bubble, our self-regard builds on itself, higher and

Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Why Are Corporate Journalists So Afraid of Questioning Authority? - Ritter
(3 comments) Even after a former Bush spokesman says the press caved in on Iraq, the media are in total denial about their role in the invasion. Network executives either did, or didn't, pressure their producers and reporters when it came to covering and framing stories. Surely an investigative reporter can get to the bottom of this one?

Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Brendan Calling - Steny Hoyer's Offices Lied to Me Today
After working so hard to defeat the GOP on FISA and succeeding, watching Steny conspire to throw everyone under the bus was too much, so I called his office. They told me the article was false, that no deal was pending. After more research, I called the office back. "Why was I given misinformation about FISA?" "Well," the guy began, and began stammering and hemming and hawing his way through a bunch of non sequitors

Tuesday, June 17, 2008
ACLU: Tell Congress to Reject a Sham Spying "Compromise"
(1 comments) A sham spying "compromise" could be rammed through both the Senate and House this week. It's moving that fast. If we don't stop this, telecom companies that broke the law by supplying mountains of personal information to the government without a warrant will be let off the hook.

Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Lab rat, guinea pig, disposable hero
Mentally distressed veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan are being recruited for government tests on pharmaceutical drugs linked to suicide and other violent side effects. Veterans Administration doctors waited more than three months before warning veterans about the possible serious side effects, including suicide and neuropsychiatric behavior.

Monday, June 16, 2008
Gambling with science
Determined to defeat lawsuits over addiction, the casino industry is funding research at a Harvard-affiliated lab.The NCRG is a wing of the casinos' main trade group, the American Gaming Association, which has committed a total of $22 million to the center. To ethicists and casino critics, that relationship is a cautionary tale of science getting too close to industry.

Monday, June 16, 2008
Bush Pledges on Iraq Bases Pact Were a Ruse
Two key pledges made by the George W. Bush administration on military bases in its negotiations with the government of Iraq have now been revealed as carefully-worded ruses aimed at concealing U.S. negotiating aims from both U.S. citizens and Iraqis who would object to them if they were made clear. The real significance of the draft's wording on access to military bases was that it contained no time limit on access or use

Monday, June 16, 2008
Medicare Improvements for Patients and Providers Act - How did your Senators vote?
(1 comments) Thursday afternoon, the Senate was blocked from moving forward with a bipartisan bill (the Baucus-Snowe-Smith-Rockefeller bill) that would have improved Medicare and protected Medicare recipients from skyrocketing premiums. With a looming deadline for Congress to act on Medicare, the next few weeks are going to be critical in the campaign to Keep Medicare Fair.

Monday, June 16, 2008
Why Aren't We Shouting the Battle Cry of Freedom?
(2 comments) Freedom is, quite simply, the most popular political principle in America. After years of warrantless wiretapping, illegal imprisonments, and torture, we should all be saying the F-word with regularity. I mean freedom. Why do progressives seem allergic to this word? Why aren't we shouting the battle cry of freedom??

Monday, June 16, 2008
When McCain Drops Out - Steve Rosenbaum
(9 comments) When the Republicans choose their candidate on September 4th, there is a very real chance that they could throw the election into an unexpected chaos as they pull a genuine September Surprise. I think there is every reason to believe John McCain won't be the nominee. Ok, let me say that again. McCain will not be the Republican candidate in November.

Sunday, June 15, 2008
British debate highlights the cravenness and complicity of congressional Democratic "leaders"
The intense and escalating political dispute in Britain over civil liberties is interesting in its own right, but it also vividly illustrates how craven and barren our own political system -- and the U.S. Democratic Party -- have become. As the Democratic Party prepares this week to endorse the Bush administration's illegal spying program and immunize telecoms which deliberately broke our surveillance laws for years

Saturday, June 14, 2008
How Speculators Are Causing the Cost of Living to Skyrocket
(1 comments) After investing in high-tech stocks and real estate loans for years, legions of speculators have now discovered commodities like oil and gas, wheat and rice. Their billions are pushing prices up to astronomical levels -- with serious consequences for ordinary people's quality of life and the global economy. What really changed the market were the big pension and investment funds.

Friday, June 13, 2008
Republicans Block Senate Debate on Medicare Physician Payment Bill
After Senate Republicans defeated Democrats' effort to bring up a Medicare bill for debate Thursday, Democratic leaders conceded that they will have to negotiate with the GOP on a compromise. The bill (S 3101), by Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus , D-Mont., is aimed at reversing a 10.6 percent cut in physician payments under Medicare that is scheduled to take effect July 1. Doctors say the cut is unaffordable

Friday, June 13, 2008
Conservatism vs. authoritarianism: The British vs. the U.S. right
British conservatives largely oppose a policy merely to allow the Government to detain terrorist suspects for 42 days with no charges, our "conservatives" react with fury over the U.S. Supreme Court's rejection of the President's claimed authority to hold such suspects in Guantanamo for 6 years -- really indefinitely -- without providing them any meaningful process at all.

Wednesday, June 11, 2008
On the Economy Debate, The Gloves Come Off
Despite ritual boosterism, soothing rhetoric and quiet prayers by Wall Street pundits, the economy is foul and likely to get much worse. We've lost jobs for five months in a row. Gas, food, health care costs are soaring. For workers, the mess is worse than the stagflation of the 1970s. Why are we in this mess? Obama put the blame for this directly on the Bush-McCain economic strategy- a "worn dogma" that has failed

Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Both McCain, Obama exaggerating Iran's nuclear program
Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Barack Obama, D-Ill., say that Iran is developing nuclear weapons. The U.S. intelligence community, however, thinks that Iran halted an effort to build a nuclear warhead in mid-2003, and the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency, which is investigating the program, has found no evidence to date of an active Iranian nuclear-weapons project.

Wednesday, June 11, 2008
NYT circulates fear-mongering claims on FISA debate
The New York Times' Eric Lichtblau had a long, prominent article Tuesday on the pending debate over FISA and telecom amnesty- headlined: "Return to Old Spy Rules Is Seen as Deadline Nears"- that features (and endorses) virtually every blatant falsehood that has distorted these spying issues from the beginning. Democrats control the agenda in Congress. They determine what bills are voted on. All they have to do is

Wednesday, June 11, 2008
You Know Something's Happening
(1 comments) The progressive tries to game a rigged system to work in the people's interest. He's a true Sisyphus. His chance of getting that stone over the top and achieving a permanent state of popular political control is slim to none. The populist wants to fundamentally change the system, eliminate that insuperable mountain, that is, de-privatize it, so that it operates in the interest of the general Welfare. It currently does not

Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Diverting a Diet Drug
How did a controversial product become the first weight-loss drug to be available without a prescription?

Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Stop Trashing the Climate
Stop Trashing the Climate provides compelling evidence that preventing waste and expanding reuse, recycling, and composting programs - that is, aiming for zero waste - is one of the fastest, cheapest, and most effective strategies available for combating climate change. This report documents the link between climate change and unsustainable patterns of consumption and wasting, and dispels myths about landfills and incineration

Tuesday, June 10, 2008
BBC uncovers lost Iraq billions
A BBC investigation estimates that around $23bn may have been lost, stolen or just not properly accounted for in Iraq. A US gagging order is preventing discussion of the allegations. While George Bush remains in the White House, it is unlikely the gagging orders will be lifted.

Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Fearing Escalation, Pentagon Fought Cheney Plan
Pentagon officials firmly opposed a proposal by Vice President Dick Cheney last summer for airstrikes against Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) bases by insisting that the administration would have to make clear decisions about how far the United States would go in escalating the conflict with Iran, according to a former George W. Bush admin. official, J. Scott Carpenter.

Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Armed revolution in Latin America is over, says Chavez
The armed revolutionary has no place in modern Latin America, the Venezuelan President has declared. Catching his critics off guard, Hugo Chavez called on the Marxist rebel army in neighbouring Colombia to lay down its arms and release its hostages, declaring that guerrilla armies are now "out of place".

Monday, June 9, 2008
More Food Summits, But Less to Eat
The inability to manage the current food crisis is an illustration of the failure of three decades of market deregulation in agriculture.

Sunday, June 8, 2008
US Economy is a National Security Crisis: 'US Needs to Raise $6 Trillion and It is Simple,'
(1 comments) China, Russia, India and Saudi Arabia basically own the United States. Our economy is the real target of terrorists and this is our potential downfall," says Wm Glynn. His solution is ... a 10% solution. "If we are to prevent another Great Depression we need to pass one simple law: All pension plans, endowments, 401(k)s etc will be required to allocate 10% to buy back U.S. debt. (I'm not convinced)

Saturday, June 7, 2008
Two governments- the public and the deep (video)
(2 comments) UC Berkeley professor emeritus Peter Dale Scott points out that there are really two governments, the public government and the deep government. The public government is aboveboard, well intentioned, and accountable. Then there's the deep one...the one that really runs things.

Friday, June 6, 2008
Three Fixes For Our Lobbyist Problem
(2 comments) Lobbyists are influential because, as the main providers of policy information and expertise to policymakers, they increasingly define the terms of political debate. Even if we funded all elections publicly and banned lobbyists from running campaigns, they would still play a major role in the legislative processes for a simple reason: They know a lot of stuff. Increasingly, it is even lobbyists who are drafting the laws.

Friday, June 6, 2008
US issues threat to Iraq's $50bn foreign reserves in military deal
(2 comments) The US is holding hostage some $50bn (£25bn) of Iraq's money in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to pressure the Iraqi government into signing an agreement seen by many Iraqis as prolonging the US occupation indefinitely, according to information leaked to The Independent. The threat by the American side underlines the personal commitment of President George Bush to pushing the new pact through by 31 July.

Friday, June 6, 2008
Intellectual Violence
(5 comments) We're living in a society which is being controlled and dominated by people who have no respect for others. Our laws are quickly being changed from things that protect our God given right to exercise our free will without encumbrance from power and privilege, into things which give all permission to the power elite to encumber us and prevent us from living in freedom. The lie is that it done to secure us, but we are not secure

Friday, June 6, 2008
The Global Crisis: Food, Water and Fuel
(11 comments) The provision of food, water and fuel is a precondition of civilized society: they are necessary factors for the survival of the human species. In recent years, the prices of these three variables has increased dramatically at the global level, with devastating economic and social consequences. These three essential goods or commodities are under the control of a small number of global corporations and financial institutions

Thursday, June 5, 2008
Israel's Influence on US Foreign Policy (video)
Former U.S. Marine Corps officer and UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter talks about the unique influence that the Israel war lobby has on the U.S. news media and U.S. foreign policy. To talk of "Israel", "Jews" and even "Zionists" as the problem is ignorant and counterproductive. It is the Israeli war party and their supporters in the US that is the problem.

Thursday, June 5, 2008
Militarizing Your Cyberspace
The Air Force has now set up its own Cyber Command, redefined the Internet as just more "air space" fit for "cyber-craft," and launched its own Bush-style preemptive strike on the other military services for budgetary control of the same. A massive $30 billion cyberspace boondoggle will provide the Air Force with the ability to fry any computer on Earth.

Wednesday, June 4, 2008
Climate Change- effects on agriculture, land and water resources
The report finds that climate change is already affecting U.S. water resources, agriculture, land resources, and biodiversity, and will continue to do so. Specific findings include: risk of crop failures, reduced productivity of livestock and dairy animals, increases in the size and frequency of forest fires, insect outbreaks and tree mortality, and a trend toward reduced mountain snowpack in the western US.

Wednesday, June 4, 2008
Ban GMOs Now
(1 comments) Dr. Mae-Wan Ho warns that further indulgence in GMOs will severely damage our chances of surviving the food crisis and global warming; organic agriculture and localised food systems are the way forward. The biotech industry's aggressive campaign of disinformation and manipulation of science did nothing to obscure the signs that the dream would soon turn into nightmare.

Wednesday, June 4, 2008
The Health Care Entitlement That Must Not Be Named
The 2nd biggest health care entitlement isn't Medicaid, it's the $200+ billion tax break for employer-sponsored health insurance. The health insurance tax break costs around $30 billion more than Medicaid and, if my recollection is correct, is increasing at a faster rate than either Medicaid or Medicare. It's also, unlike Medicare or Medicaid, a regressive tax subsidy that provides more benefits for the wealthy.

Tuesday, June 3, 2008
Globalization death watch, Part I
Globalization was built on cheap oil. As that era draws to a close, so will the current phase of global integration, whether Thomas Friedman, Wal-Mart, and all those involved in intercontinental trade like it or not. The current transportation infrastructure is based on cars, trucks, airplanes, and cargo ships, which together consume about 70% of the gasoline used in the US. Cargo shipping costs have nearly tripled since 2000

Tuesday, June 3, 2008
Why Working Assets Opposes Lieberman Warner on Climate Change
Lieberman Warner doesn't provide for what scientists say we need - 80 percent reductions by 2050. And it rewards polluters by giving away rather than auctioning emissions credits. One of the reasons that many companies like the cap and trade system is that setting it up is a fundamentally political act, subject to all the good and bad that is decision making in D.C- all to ensure that someone else has to pay the tax.

Monday, June 2, 2008
The Corporate State and the Subversion of Democracy
America, the country of my birth, the country of my father, my father's father, stretching back to the generations of my family that were here for the country's founding, is so diminished as to be nearly unrecognizable. If we do not muster the courage to challenge those in the Democratic and Republican parties who herd us towards the corporate state, we will have squandered our integrity when we need it most.

Saturday, May 31, 2008
Interview with former "Donahue" producer and MSNBC pundit Jeff Cohen
(1 comments) Glenn Grennwalk interviewed Jeff Cohen, the former producer of the MSNBC show Donahue, which was canceled weeks before the invasion of Iraq despite being that network's highest rated show because, as a leaked NBC memorandum revealed, that network did not want to host an anti-war commentator- not even a single one. Cohen's comments reveal corporate and political pressures at MSNBC at that time to promote only pro-war/pro-Bush

Saturday, May 31, 2008
'US bribing Iraqi MPs to sign deal"
(1 comments) Sources in Iraq's parliament told Press TV on Thursday that Washington has offered three-million dollars in bribe to the lawmakers who sign the "framework accord." Under the agreement, the US would be allowed to set up at least 13 permanent military bases in Iraq and US citizens would be granted immunity from legal prosecution.

Friday, May 30, 2008
McCain's scary economic advisor
Not only is former Texas Sen. Phil Gramm a shill for special interests, his deregulation policies helped spur the mortgage crisis, among other financial disasters. Gramm is promoting the agenda of those who subsidize him, as he has done ever since he entered politics as a servant of oil interests in his home state. He took hundreds of thousands of dollars from energy and financial interests as a congressman and senator

Friday, May 30, 2008
WTC7 "It was a controlled demolition" (video)
Dutch demolition expert Danny Jowenko was shown video of the collapse of WTC 7 by a Dutch television crew which captured his first reactions to images of the collapse. Viewing the video, he had no doubt that was brought down by a controlled demolition. (video is there, even tho it says "removed".)

Friday, May 30, 2008
Truths for a new world of them and us
For all its tacit recognition that power has been flowing eastwards, the west still wants to imagine things as they used to be. In this world of them and us, "they" are accused by Democratic contenders in the US presidential contest of stealing "our" jobs. Now, you hear Europeans say, "they" are driving up international commodity prices by burning "our" fuel and eating "our" food.

Thursday, May 29, 2008
Where Is the Outrage? By Robert Scheer
(8 comments) Are we Americans truly savages or merely tone-deaf in matters of morality, and therefore more guilty of terminal indifference than venality? It's a question demanding an answer in response to the publication of the detailed 370-page report on U.S. complicity in torture, issued last week by the Justice Department's inspector general.

Thursday, May 29, 2008
Iraq War May Have Increased Energy Costs Worldwide by a Staggering $6 Trillion
(1 comments) The Iraq War means oil costs three times more than it should. How are our lives going to change with oil heading toward $200 a barrel?

Thursday, May 29, 2008
MP paid big price for speaking out in Harper's Ottawa
(1 comments) Welcome to Mr. Harper's Ottawa. This is a world in which a member of Parliament, sent by the people to represent them, is cowed and threatened by an unelected staffer. It's a place where a political party can silence internal debate and, in a hasty few moments, overthrow the results of an election. It's where Harper MPs are told they need permission from the PMO to speak to reporters

Thursday, May 29, 2008
LifeLock, identity-protection firm, fails to protect CEO's I.D.
(2 comments) For two years, LifeLock has run ads on TV, radio, newspapers, and billboards that broadcast Davis's most intimate details. After putting his SSN on the air, CEO Davis was himself defrauded. A man in Texas used Davis's numbers to obtain a $500 payday loan.

Thursday, May 29, 2008
FCC Wants Free Broadband Service, Plus Content Filtering
The Federal Communications Commission is looking for a bidder to provide free broadband service in the 1.9 GHz-2.1 GHz bands, agency Chair Kevin Martin told reporters on Friday. The data will have to download at a minimum of 768 kilobits, Martin said, provided at a "pretty aggressive" build out schedule: Half the United States population must be able to access it after four years, and 95% in ten years.

Thursday, May 29, 2008
Eighteen years of work destroyed in less than four hours
(3 comments) "They came at four in the morning, with two bulldozers, and they left before 8am. I own this chicken farm with my three brothers, and we worked day and night for 18 years to build up our business. The Israelis destroyed everything in less then four hours." Nasser Jaber's chicken farm was bulldozed by the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) ten days ago. He still looks stunned. Wearily he guides us round the ruins

Thursday, May 29, 2008
Memo To Corporate Media: Anyone Can Dress Up As An Arab Terrorist & Fake An Al-Qaeda Tape
Nearly four years after Benjamin Vanderford hoodwinked the global media by manufacturing a fake Al-Qaeda beheading tape, America's corporate press whores are once again gearing up to fearmonger about the prospect of mushroom clouds over American cities by instantly ascribing gospel status to a dubious "Al-Qaeda fan" Internet videotape that encourages the use of WMD in a terrorist attack.

Thursday, May 29, 2008
The Stupidity of Dignity
How did the United States, the world's scientific powerhouse, reach a point at which it grapples with the ethical challenges of twenty-first-century biomedicine using Bible stories, Catholic doctrine, and woolly rabbinical allegory?

Thursday, May 29, 2008
Senate Restricting Public Access to Contractor Data
(1 comments) The U.S. Senate is moving to restrict public access to a new contractor misconduct database, part of a new proposal being spearheaded by the Project on Government Oversight and Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO).

Thursday, May 29, 2008
The Tar Sands, Downstream: Cancer, and the BC connection
The backyard of the tiny community of Fort Chipewyan, Alberta contains the second largest reserve of petroleum in the world. The tar sands development is Canada's fastest growing source of greenhouse gas emissions, the cause of rapid pollution of the Athabasca river basin, the reason for strip mining of thousands of square kilometres of boreal forest; a huge consumer of natural gas, and the likely cause of alarming cancer rate

Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Will We See the End of Empire in Our Time? by Richard C. Cook
I believe we have had two Americas. One started with the imperialist state which Alexander Hamilton tried to put into place in the 1790s with the First Bank of the United States. Thomas Jefferson overthrew this early expression of empire in the Civic Revolution of 1800 and created a strong and free America which lasted until 1913 in spite of the convulsion of the Civil War.

Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Army Intelligence Analyst Buswell, 'The 9/11 NCO,' Speaks Out
I simply said, 'If the Pentagon were hit by a plane, there would be a 190-foot wingspan impact on the building, which there was not. There would be two large engine holes in the building, which there was not. There'd be tail wreckage, bodies and debris everywhere, but there wasn't. Compare the impact hole at either World Trade Center tower to the impact hole at the Pentagon. There it was just a 16-foot hole

Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Network news anchors praise the job they did in the run-up to the war- Greenwald
The three network news anchors appeared jointly on The Today Show and were forced by McClellan's book to address whether the media failed in its duties in the run-up to the war- the first time, to my knowledge, that this topic has ever been broached by network news journalists. (They think they did a fine job pandering and propagandizing the war).

Wednesday, May 28, 2008
USDA axes the sole national survey to chart pesticide use
(1 comments) Comprehensive information about what chemicals are sprayed on food crops just got much harder to come by. The USDS recently announced that they will no longer conduct and publish annual national surveys of "which states apply the most pesticides and where bug and weed killers are most heavily sprayed to help cotton, grapes and oranges grow." The report is used extensively by farmers, environmental advocates, chemical companies

Wednesday, May 28, 2008
New Teen Health Worry: Energy in a Can
Heavy consumption of caffeinated energy drinks may be a predictor of risky behavior by teens. In addition, teens and young adults are mixing alcohol and energy drinks, which can increase the risks associated with alcohol consumption. Some dangerous disease connections are also being reported.

Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Death Squad in Delaware: The Case of the Murdered Marine
(3 comments) Derek J. Hale, a retired Marine Sergeant who served two tours in Iraq and was decorated before his combat-related medical discharge in January 2006, was murdered by a heavily armed 8–12-member undercover police team in Wilmington, Delaware last November 6. He had come to Wilmington from his home in Manassas, Virginia to participate in a Toys for Tots event.

Tuesday, May 27, 2008
US will be forced to soften: Francis Fukuyama
(2 comments) THE US can no longer assume it has hegemony over world affairs and will have to change its approach dramatically to emphasise soft power, diplomacy and regional security co-operation, according to American scholar Francis Fukuyama. "The US, despite its predominant position, is not going to be able to restructure the world as it chooses."

Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Germany calls for ban on oil speculation
German leaders are to propose a worldwide ban on oil trading by speculators, blaming the latest spike in crude prices on manipulation by hedge funds. It is the most drastic proposal to date amid escalating calls from Europe, the US and Asia for controls on market forces, underscoring the profound shift in the political climate since the credit crunch began. India has already suspended futures trading of five commodities.

Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Those who kept silent
Bystander guilt. That is what FBI and Justice Department officials have on their conscience and what John Ashcroft, the former attorney general, and FBI Director Robert Mueller should be haunted by every day. The long-awaited report from the Justice Department inspector general on abusive detainee interrogations says that the FBI should be credited for its "professionalism" --But that was not enough.

Monday, May 26, 2008
How telecoms are attempting to buy amnesty from Congress
Just in the first three months of 2008, recent lobbyist disclosure statements reveal that AT&T, Verizon and Comcast spent a combined total of almost $13 million on lobbyists. They're set to spend more than $50 million on lobbying this year. This, of course, is what leads to having these corporations literally write our nation's laws and get so close to having such an extraordinarily corrupt gift- retroactive immunity

Monday, May 26, 2008
Roger Stone on Chris Matthews
Friends who are friends of Chris Matthews tell me that despite the withering profile in the NY Times Magazine by Mark Leibovich that Chris continues to ponder and is likely to make a race against Sen. Arlen Specter, who is receiving treatment for his recently returned cancer. (One ego-mad pol-watcher's take on another....)

Monday, May 26, 2008
Weather warfare
(1 comments) Rarely acknowledged in the debate on global climate change, the world's weather can now be modified as part of a new generation of sophisticated electromagnetic weapons. Both the US and Russia have developed capabilities to manipulate the climate for military use. Air Force documents suggest HAARP is an integral part of the militarisation of space.

Monday, May 26, 2008
Movie damns Monsanto's deadly sins
The story starts in the White House, where Monsanto often got its way by exerting influence over policymakers via the "revolving door". One example is Michael Taylor, who worked for Monsanto as an attorney before being appointed as deputy commissioner of the FDA in 1991. While at the FDA, Taylor made crucial decisions that led to the approval of GE foods and crops. Then he returned to Monsanto, as VP for public policy.

Sunday, May 25, 2008
How and why the threat of bioterrorism has been so greatly exaggerated
William R. Clark, professor and chair emeritus of immunology at UCLA, has been a research scientist for 30 years and has written a string of books for the general public. His latest, Bracing for Armageddon?, examines the science and politics of bioterrorism in the United States. Although the United States will have spent $50 billion on defense against bioterrorism, Clark argues that we have more to fear from natural pandemics.

Sunday, May 25, 2008
End of the Bush-Clinton Era?
This period – roughly marked by George H.W. Bush's rise as Vice President and then President from 1981 to 1993, Bill Clinton's embattled two terms, and then eight years under George W. Bush – represented an extraordinary period of lost opportunities for the nation as its global power peaked and began a rapid descent. Notable for its bitter partisanship, mindless jingoism and willful historical amnesia, this era saw the United

Sunday, May 25, 2008
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.- How the news media fails us (video)
(8 comments) The US news media is fascinated by the Kennedys. Fascinated with smearing them, fascinating with sensationalizing them, fascinated with the process of making them disappear. How often have you seen Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on mainstream TV news? Not very often. This video shows why.

Saturday, May 24, 2008
Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy by Murray N. Rothbard
(1 comments) Afterword By Justin Raimondo: As Rothbard explains in his economic writings, the key is in understanding that money is a commodity, like any other, and thus subject to the laws of the market. A government-granted monopoly in this, the very lifeblood of the economic system, is a recipe for inflation, a debased currency – and the creation of a permanent plutocracy whose power is virtually unlimited.

Saturday, May 24, 2008
Message to Military Personnel: Bring the War Home
WE HAVE FAILED YOU The ongoing United States invasion of Iraq has cost the lives of more than 4,000 American soldiers and 1.2 million Iraqis. The Democratic-majority U.S. Senate has just passed $165 billion "to fund the war in Iraq until President Bush's successor takes over." Congress will provide another seven month's funding to sustain the bloody, miserable, and prolonged occupation of Mesopotamia.

Saturday, May 24, 2008
Nation's Leading Moral Issues
It is a moral issue that the United States- the world's one and only military superpower- spends half of its federal budget on warfare, weaponry and on maintaining a spectacular, historically unprecedented "empire of bases"- including more than 720 military installations located in nearly every nation on Earth- while billions of world citizens (including millions in the imperial "homeland") live in conditions of deprivation.

Saturday, May 24, 2008
Economic Exploitation and Empire
Key to enforcement of US economic exploitation of people outside the US is the use and threat of military force. The dominance of the military in US public life and the US economy is also key to the economic exploitation of Americans. Our largest export is weapons, and our largest and longest public investment is in killing. With corporations no longer paying significant taxes, half of every tax dollar is for death and destruc

Friday, May 23, 2008
Vast cracks appear in Arctic ice
Dramatic evidence of the break-up of the Arctic ice-cap has emerged from research during an expedition by the Canadian military. Scientists travelling with the troops found major new fractures during an assessment of the state of giant ice shelves in Canada's far north. The team found a network of cracks that stretched for more than 10 miles (16km) on Ward Hunt, the area's largest shelf.

Friday, May 23, 2008
Israeli pilots threatened to blast Blair's jet out of sky
(4 comments) Tony Blair came within moments of being killed when two Israeli fighter aircraft threatened to shoot down a private jet taking him to a Middle East conference in the belief that it might have been staging a terrorist attack. The warplanes were scrambled to intercept after the jet pilot failed to contact air traffic control.

Friday, May 23, 2008
Shouldn't Chemicals Be Proven Safe for Kids Before Marketing?
(2 comments) Currently, U.S. chemicals law is so toothless that the U.S. EPA was unable to ban asbestos under its provisions, even though asbestos is perhaps the most potent cancer-causing substance ever introduced into commerce and kills about 10,000 people per year. Time for a new law.

Thursday, May 22, 2008
Government Insider: Bush Authorized 911 Attacks
(5 comments) Stanley Hilton was a senior advisor to Sen Bob Dole (R) and has personally known Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz for decades. This courageous man has risked his professional reputation, and possibly his life, to get this information out to people. The following is from his latest visit to Alex Jones' radio show.

Thursday, May 22, 2008
A new compound fights drug-resistant bacteria
Sifting through South African soil samples, scientists at Merck Research Laboratories found a new compound called platensimycin. It is effective against methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus and other multiple-drug-resistant bacteria, thus representing an entirely new class of antibiotic.

Thursday, May 22, 2008
We'll go no more a-Rove-ing
Rove's merger of politics and policy was an effort to forge a total one-party state. While he is acclaimed as a political strategist, his true innovation was in governing. He sought to subordinate the entire federal government to his goal of creating a permanent Republican majority. Every department and agency has been subject to an intense and thorough politicization. Rove's ambitious plan was nearly a proto-Sovietization.

Thursday, May 22, 2008
Bush uses food crisis aid package to promote genetically modified crops
(1 comments) The Bush administration has added a controversial ingredient to the $770-million aid package it recently proposed to ease the world food crisis: language that would promote the use of genetically modified crops in food-deprived countries. The value or detriment of genetically modified, or bioengineered, food is an intensely disputed issue in the U.S. and in Europe, where many countries have banned foods made from GMO

Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Budget Hero - setting federal budget priorities (video)
If you ever wanted to control where your tax dollars go, here's your chance to decide.

Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Reuters/Zogby Poll: Obama Opens Double-digit Lead Over McCain in National Test
Obama does well among his Democratic base, winning 79% support – an indication that the party faithful may be coming together behind his campaign as a bruising nomination campaign nears the end. He also does well among non-aligned voters, as independents favor him over McCain by a 48% to 32% margin.

Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Hologram Man: The Sad, Weird Twilight of George Bush
It must be a soul-crushing gig, pretending to care; of constantly being forced, simply for official reasons of state, to pantomime concern about human life, about the death of innocent people, about the education of children, about the hunger of the poor- to even act like you're paying attention to other people at all -when in your heart you know that you're only the designated front-man for a criminal business-syndicate.

Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Little girls gone wild
(4 comments) Now companies sell padded bras to 6-year-olds. Isn't it time to stop marketing grown-up sexuality to little kids? Some clothes project sexual symbols. And we know what they are: fishnet hose and stilettos and corsets. They're almost clichés of sexuality. But when you see them on a very young child, there's that sexual overtone- the kinds of clothing that they're being encouraged to wear are really associated with sex work

Tuesday, May 20, 2008
With Friends Like These- Uri Avnery
(1 comments) Lately we are flooded with friends. The Great of the Earth, past and present, come here to flatter us, to fawn on us, to grovel at our feet. Not one of them had a word of criticism. No occupation. No settlements. No Gaza blockade. No daily killings. Just a wonderful, peace-loving state that the bad, bad terrorists want to throw into the sea. Not one of the guests stood up to warn us against going on with the present policy.

Tuesday, May 20, 2008
The Conservative Case for Barack Obama
For conservatives to hope the election of yet another Republican will set things right is surely in vain. To believe that President John McCain will reduce the scope and intrusiveness of federal authority, cut the imperial presidency down to size, and put the government on a pay-as-you-go basis is to succumb to a great delusion. The Republican establishment may maintain the pretense of opposing Big Government, but pretense it

Monday, May 19, 2008
Max Keiser: Post Traumatic Oil Price Disorder
Here's the deal folks, oil is priced in dollars, and to bail out the U.S. banking system America's central bank is flooding the market with record amounts of dollars. What happens when too many dollars chase too few barrels of oil? Well, believe it or not, the price of oil goes up.

Monday, May 19, 2008
Better Secrecy for Open Source Intel Collectors Urged
U.S. intelligence employees who are collecting open source intelligence online should do more to ensure that they are not identified as intelligence personnel, the House Armed Services Committee said in its new report on the 2009 Defense Authorization Act. Failure to conceal the identity of open source intelligence collectors could conceivably lead to spoofing, disinformation or other forms of compromise.

Monday, May 19, 2008
Linguist gives students lesson in free thinking
(1 comments) Via speakerphone from his office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, linguistics professor Noam Chomsky told Dundee-Crown High School students that a two-tiered educational system exists: While the elite attend schools that promote critical, independent thought, the masses attend schools that train students to pass tests and follow orders.

Monday, May 19, 2008
Controlled Unclassified Information
The Bush admin. has a problem. Sometimes you're running the government but, inconveniently, it's not the government of Burma and so you need to be accountable to voters, etc. Under the circumstances, it helps if you can keep all your conduct secret. But that's hard to do purely through abuse of the classification process. Why not invent a new form of secret information? Good idea! Let's call it "Controlled Unclassified Inform

Monday, May 19, 2008
Thousands killed by US's Korean ally
Grave by mass grave, South Korea is unearthing the skeletons and buried truths of a cold-blooded slaughter from early in the Korean War, when this nation's U.S.-backed regime killed untold thousands of leftists and hapless peasants in a summer of terror in 1950. With U.S. military officers sometimes present, the southern army and police emptied South Korean prisons, lined up detainees and shot them in the head

Sunday, May 18, 2008
Bolivia under siege - US-funded autonomy movements threaten to tear the country apart
Bolivia is facing a new crisis, which many Latin Americans believe is caused by the United States. On one hand is a proposed new progressive constitution, which gives significant rights to the native majority; on the other is an up swelling of separatist movements, which the Bolivian government calls the Kosovo strategy - an American attempt to destabilize a national government it cannot control.

Sunday, May 18, 2008
Racebaiting at the Washington Post
In one of the most repellent columns one will ever read, syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker defended Fry's claim that Obama is something other than "a full-blooded American." She claims it has to do with "blood equity," "heritage," and "bloodlines." The Washington Post is distributing this white supremacist cant to newspapers all over the country.

Friday, May 16, 2008
Sex Hormones and City Life
No. California is in the grip of a horrific aerial spray program designed to eradicate an insect pest, the light brown apple moth (LBAM). A report from a Task Force set up by the city of Albany, CA states that, "Following the spraying in Monterey and Santa Cruz in 2007, there were more than 600 reports of health problems, including asthma-like attacks and difficulty breathing, chest pains, headaches, blurred vision, swollen

Friday, May 16, 2008
Larisa Alexandrovna: All the President's Nazis (Real and Imagined): An Open Letter to Bush
(3 comments) Dear Mr. Bush,your exploitation of the Holocaust in a country carved out of the wounds of that very crime, in order to strike a low blow at American citizens whose politics differs from your own is unforgivable. Your family's fortune is built on the bones of the very people butchered by the Nazis, my family and the families of those in the Knesset who applauded you today.

Friday, May 16, 2008
Chicago Citizens Reject Terror Drill Fearmongering
(2 comments) The latest opportunity for authorities to grandstand, fearmonger and practice processing citizens through a de facto internment camp fell flat on its face yesterday after just 350 out of an expected 4,000 turned up to participate in a mock terror drill at Chicago's Sears Centre Arena. Authorities practiced processing citizens through the de facto internment camp and giving them mandatory pharmaceutical products.

Thursday, May 15, 2008
Top Ten Reasons Karl Rove Won't Testify
Monday was the deadline for former Bush advisor Karl Rove to agree to voluntarily testify under oath about his involvement in sending former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman to prison. The House Judiciary Committee wants to know whether Karl Rove ordered Siegelman targeted for prosecution

Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Hillary Clinton. Sweatshops. Abramoff. She has not been vetted!
In 2006 only Republicans were connected to the Abramoff Web of Corruption. That is still mostly true, but one Democrat has become the exception. Her name is Hillary Clinton. She can not be our Nominee for President or Vice-President. She is connected to the Scandal and Abramoff.

Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Feds: Drugs made at kosher meat plant
Federal authorities charged that a methamphetamine laboratory was operating at the nation's largest kosher slaughterhouse and that employees carried weapons to work. The charges were among the most explosive details to emerge following the massive raid Monday at Agriprocessors in Postville, Iowa.

Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Politics of Aggression
You wouldn't know it from the campaign so far, but we may be living at the end of the age of smashmouth media coverage. Rove ridiculed Obama at length for suggesting a moral equivalence between black and white racism. Rove's outburst was notable, I told the audience, "because you've just heard the Republican campaign in a nitroglycerin tablet," should Obama get the nomination.

Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Obama vs. The Lobby- by Justin Raimondo
Poor Obama. No matter how much he tries to placate the Israel lobby, they just won't take yes for an answer. The Lobby has been after him for months, trying to dig up "evidence" that someone with the middle name of "Hussein" is necessarily an enemy of Israel. According to the Frum-Lewis Doctrine, we are obligated to carry out whatever edicts the Israeli government issues – and if Obama doesn't buy that he's obviously a secret

Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Finding Obama guilty of insufficient devotion to Israel - Glenn Greenwald
The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg conducted what he's calling an "interview" with Barack Obama regarding Israel, but it sounded much more like an inquisition. Goldberg repeatedly demanded that Obama swear his devotion to Israel and affirm prevailing orthodoxies. Obama's vows of devotion to Israel were not enough for the right-wing polemicists who endlessly play on the fears of American Jews and exploit Israel-related issues for

Tuesday, May 13, 2008
OMB Interference under Scrutiny in Congress
The White House Office of Management and Budget's review of federal agencies' draft regulations and scientific information was highlighted in two congressional hearings the week of May 5. The review process gives Office of Management and Budget (OMB) officials an opportunity to delay or undermine public health and safety standards. Complaints were also heard about OMB's role in advancing the unitary executive theory

Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Running on Empty: Cars That Never Need Gas
Darrell Dickey regularly commutes to work 24 miles, one way, by bike. But when it's too cold or wet for the bike, or when he and his family travel long distances from their home in Davis, California, he drives a battery-powered electric vehicle that he charges with photovoltaic (PV) panels mounted on his garage roof. "Five years ago, I spent about $45,000 and got a brand new car (the RAv4EV) and the solar system," he says.

Monday, May 12, 2008
White House Issues Policy on "Controlled Unclassified Info"
The White House last week issued a long-awaited policy on "controlled unclassified information" (CUI) to provide a uniform government-wide system for safeguarding unclassified information that is deemed sensitive. But the new policy will do nothing to restore public access to government records that have been improperly withheld.

Monday, May 12, 2008
Secret Law Hearing Follow-Up
"It's a given in our democracy that laws should be a matter of public record," wrote Senator Feingold in a Los Angeles Times opinion piece. "But the law in this country includes not just statutes and regulations, which the public can readily access. It also includes binding legal interpretations made by courts and the executive branch. These interpretations are increasingly being withheld from the public and Congress."

Monday, May 12, 2008
Brain scam
Why is PBS airing Dr. Daniel Amen's self-produced infomercial for the prevention of Alzheimer's disease? I learned after several frustrating phone calls and e-mails with PBS spokespersons, the nation's public broadcasting system did not vet "Change Your Brain, Change Your Life" for scientific validity. Faced with the prospect of overlooking a preventable disaster, the public is a sitting duck for Amen's medical sales pitch.

Monday, May 12, 2008
Quiet US Confession: Weapons Were Not Made In Iran After All
(5 comments) According to a report by the LA Times correspondent Tina Susman in Baghdad: "A plan to show some alleged Iranian-supplied explosives to journalists last week in Karbala and then destroy them was cancelled after the United States realized none of them was from Iran.

Monday, May 12, 2008
Government Efficiency and Network Theory
Science News reports on a study relating (in a loose way) the efficiency of a national government with the size of its cabinet. Researchers in Vienna found that the development level of countries, as a proxy for the efficiency of their governments, is in general lower for countries with more members in the national cabinets.

Sunday, May 11, 2008
The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder by Vincent Bugliosi
(7 comments) There is direct evidence that President George W. Bush did not honorably lead this nation, but deliberately misled it into a war he wanted. Bush and his administration knowingly lied to Congress and to the American public - lies that have cost the lives of more than 4,000 young American soldiers and close to $1 trillion.

Saturday, May 10, 2008
Women don't work enough: expert
(1 comments) Social researcher for the University of Melbourne Mark Wooden said men were earning on average 15 per cent more than women because they put in more time at the workplace. "It's (the pay equity gap) got a lot to do with the fact that women are not prepared to work longer hours." (Because they're putting in all those unpaid hours elsewhere, no doubt.)

Friday, May 9, 2008
Britain throwing away food amid world food crisis
(1 comments) A new study is attracting much attention. Amidst global food shortages and soaring prices, each day Britain throws away 550,000 chickens and 660,000 eggs, amongst other food items. The study revealed the extent of Britain's throwaway food culture after sifting through the dustbins of 2,138 people who signed up to an audit of food detritus. America is certainly just as wasteful.

Friday, May 9, 2008
Giant Food & Biotech Corporations Make Billions in Profit from Growing Global Food Crisis
The World Bank says that 100 million more people are facing severe hunger. Yet some of the world's richest food companies are making record profits. Monsanto last month reported that its profits increased from $1.44bn to $2.22bn in the last quarter. Archer Daniels Midland, one of the world's largest agricultural processors of soy, corn and wheat, saw operating profits jump 16-fold from $21m to $341m.

Thursday, May 8, 2008
The Challenge Of Modern Slavery
Almost every product we consume has a hidden dark history, from slave labor to piracy, from counterfeit to fraud, from theft to money laundering. We know very little about these economic secrets because modern consumers live inside the market matrix.

Thursday, May 8, 2008
U.S. deploys more than 43,000 unfit for combat
More than 43,000 U.S. troops listed as medically unfit for combat in the weeks before their scheduled deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan since 2003 were sent anyway, Pentagon records show. This reliance on troops found medically "non-deployable" is another sign of stress placed on a military that has sent 1.6 million servicemembers to the war zones, soldier advocacy groups say.

Thursday, May 8, 2008
Aging systems releasing sewage into rivers, streams
America's aging sewer systems continue to dump human waste into rivers and streams, despite years of fines and penalties targeting publicly owned agencies responsible for sewage overflows, a Gannett News Service analysis shows. The analysis of Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) data found that since 2003, hundreds of municipal sewer authorities have been fined for violations, including spills that make people sick, threat

Thursday, May 8, 2008
McCain's Big Idea: Create A Human Trafficking Task Force (That Already Exists)
While McCain's proposal sounds great and creates the illusion that he is a champion of this particular cause, there is one problem -an "Inter-Agency Task Force on Human Trafficking" already exists. And McCain's "proposal" does not match his past rhetoric. In 2001, he opposed an earmark that funded the fight against human trafficking. "There is also a $200,000 earmark for a conference in human trafficking" McCain complained

Thursday, May 8, 2008
One million voters cancelled in Indiana
In April 2008 when Indiana Secretary of State Todd Rokita announced the release of "record high" voter registration rolls, with 4.3 million voters set to vote in the Tuesday May 6 primary, he didn't mention that a whopping 1,134,427 voter registrations have been cancelled.

Thursday, May 8, 2008
FBI Withdraws Unconstitutional National Security Letter After ACLU and EFF Challenge
The NSL was served on the Internet Archive - a digital library recognized by the state of California - and its attorneys in November of 2007. The letter asked for personal information about one of the Archive's users, including the individual's name, address, and any electronic communication transactional records pertaining to the user. Kahle, who is also a member of EFF's Board of Directors, decided to fight the NSL

Thursday, May 8, 2008
How business starves the world's poor
If the farmer gets less, the consumer pays more and the supermarket makes more, where's all the profit in the food chain going? EU agriculture commissioner, Mariann Fischer Boel says that only about two-thirds of the rise in food prices we have seen in Europe can be attributed to increases in the cost of ingredients. "Energy, transport and labour costs have risen" and then there are global agri-business firms, speculators

Wednesday, May 7, 2008
Deja Vu: NYT, US Propaganda and War with Iran
Greg Mitchell of Editor and Publisher notes that New York Times military reporter Michael Gordon, "who contributed several false stories about Iraqi WMD in the run-up to the U.S. attack in Iraq," has been writing about Iran's alleged involvement in attacks against U.S. service members in Iraq. Gordon's latest article, "Hezbollah Trains Iraqis in Iran, Officials Say," is "based solely on unnamed sources," notes Mitchell.

Wednesday, May 7, 2008
USDA isn't on board with beef industry's downer cow ban
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has been criticized for not totally banning "downer" cows -- animals "too sick or hurt to stand for slaughter" -- from the food supply. So "when a coalition of major industry groups reversed their position and joined animal advocates and several lawmakers in calling for an absolute ban," why wouldn't the USDA agree?

Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Military and Homeland Security Dictate Who Lives And Who Dies In A Pandemic
A new report compiled by a medical "task force" comprising physicians from prestigious universities, medical groups, the military and government agencies has outlined that specific groups of people should not be treated and be left to die should a flu pandemic or other deadly disease disaster infect millions throughout the USA: doctors must allow elderly, weak to perish after "trigger event"

Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Global Famine
With large sectors of the World population already well below the poverty line, the short-term hike in the prices of food staples is devastating. Millions of people around the World are unable to afford food. These hikes are contributing in a very real sense to "eliminating the poor" through "starvation deaths". In the words of Henry Kissinger: "Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people."

Tuesday, May 6, 2008
If I Were A Terrorist- A James Pence Video!
nah- they'd never let them......

Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Autism Linked to Coal Power Plant Emissions
(1 comments) How do mercury emissions affect pregnant mothers, the unborn and toddlers? Do the level of emissions impact autism rates? Does it matter whether a mercury-emitting source is 10 miles away from families versus 20 miles? Is the risk of autism greater for children who live closer to the pollution source? A new study shows a statistically significant link between pounds of industrial release of mercury and increased autism rates.

Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Intel Community Moves Towards Performance-Based Pay
The Director of National Intelligence last week issued several new Intelligence Community Directives (ICDs) that implement new community-wide personnel practices, including a performance-based compensation policy that rewards superior job performance. Can bounties be far behind?

Tuesday, May 6, 2008
William Astore: Coming Down to Earth
Consider the Air Force's new slogan: "Air Force -- Above All." I admit it's catchy, even cute, if, that is, you can get past the "high ground" conceit and ignore the Germanic über alles overtones. Its literal meaning is obvious enough and it does fit with the Air Force's most basic precept, that mastery of the air means mastery of the ground. It's yet another manifestation of our military's quest for "full spectrum dominance"

Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Daniel Pearl's last words, uncensored
(5 comments) I was surfing YouTube one day and decided, just out of curiosity, to listen to Daniel Pearl's last words. I heard the famous part, "My name is Daniel Pearl... My father is Jewish. My mother is Jewish. I am a Jew." Then he went on to mention his father's Zionism, his family's trips to Israel -All this was in line with the heroic story of Daniel Pearl as it has come to be known. But then I heard Pearl go on to say

Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Iran cites Israeli nuclear activity as example of world's hypocrisy
Tehran says stringent IAEA inspections are unfair as Israel not partner to non-proliferation treaty, and claims western countries practice 'nuclear apartheid'. Iran on Monday rejected pressure to submit to intrusive nuclear inspections, claiming it is unfair to subject Iran to such pressure while Israel is outside the global treaty to curb atomic weapons.

Tuesday, May 6, 2008
We didn't mean to kill them
Israel says it doesn't mean to kill Palestinian children, yet they keep on dying. Yet as usual, even though we didn't mean it – we hit them. We have killed a total of 1,000 Palestinian children since the second Intifada broke out on September 29, 2000. A thousand.

Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Newly Unredacted Report Confirms Psychologists Supported Illegal Interrogations In Iraq and Afghanistan
Uncensored documents from the Church Report, obtained as a result of the ACLU's Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, include new details exposing the role of psychologists in military interrogations. "The documents reveal that psychologists and medical personnel played a key role in sustaining prisoner abuse - a clear violation of their ethical and legal obligations" said Amrit Singh, a staff attorney with the ACLU.

Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Yoo Subpoenaed To Discuss Interrogation Practices
John Yoo, a former Justice Department lawyer who wrote a now-repudiated memo allowing harsh interrogations of military prisoners, now a law professor at University of California-Berkeley, has agreed to testify to the House Judiciary Committee voluntarily about the Bush administration's interrogation practices after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Post-War Suicides May Exceed Combat Deaths
Bloomberg reported this week on yet another devastating and deadly aspect of the war in Iraq: the U.S. troops, burdened with post-traumatic stress, who commit suicide. The number of suicides among veterans of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may exceed the combat death toll because of inadequate mental health care, the U.S. government's top psychiatric researcher said.

Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Insurrection Of The Famished
Over the past few months in multiple places in the world we have been seeing riots caused by food shortages – the revolt of the famished. Every day 100,000 people die from silent hunger, until very recently seen as a normal phenomenon by the people in the North. According to Jean Ziegler there are today 854 million permanently undernourished people in the world.

Monday, May 5, 2008
Landowners' Rebellion: Slavery and Saneamiento in Bolivia
Efforts by Bolivia's land reform authorities to free 167 Guaraní families living in servitude in Alto Parapetí, a rural area in the eastern Bolivian lowlands province of Santa Cruz, have brought to light a phenomenon that had remained largely hidden and ignored until now in the country's vast Chaco plains region. Another 1,050 families living in a kind of modern-day slavery are in the Chaco grasslands region

Monday, May 5, 2008
How Fraud Fueled the Mortgage Crisis
Despite its widespread role, fraud hasn't yet been at the forefront of proposed rescue plans, which center on refinancing people out of loans now resetting to higher rates. That may begin to change as the mortgage market continues a meltdown that seems to have no end. As fraud becomes a focus, the question of who did most of the lying and cheating will be crucial in deciding who deserves help in any housing rescue plan.

Monday, May 5, 2008
The Tax Cut That Neutered Congress
(3 comments) On Inauguration Day, January 20, 2001, President George W. Bush and Vice President Richard Cheney went to work. The centerpiece of their agenda was an unprecedented $1.6 trillion tax cut that took Congress by surprise. The magnitude of the cut caught even House Speaker Dennis Hastert off balance. The Cheney-Bush strategy behind the cut was to preempt the Congress on every issue. It would tame any resistance to a radical agenda

Friday, May 2, 2008
From the Pump to the Plate: Rethinking & relocalizing our food and fuel systems
(2 comments) Rice riots have broken out in Haiti and bread shortages are causing chaos in Egypt- just two examples of encroaching famine and food fatalities. Haiti was self-sufficient in rice till the mid 1980s when it began to be flooded with subsidized US rice, and Egypt was once a legendary agricultural producer. More and more countries have become, by force, accident or design, more dependent on imports and so-called Green Revolution

Friday, May 2, 2008
Gail Tverberg: The Expected Economic Impact of an Energy Downturn
Video- Gail Tverberg is known on the website The Oil Drum as Gail the Actuary. She created this presentation for a public health program called "Converging Environmental Crises: A Teach-in on Energy, Climate Change, Water, Agriculture and Population." It explains the large economic changes that even a minor energy downturn could bring about.

Friday, May 2, 2008
KunstlerCast- audio downloads
Duncan Crary's latest interviews with Post Carbon Fellow James Kunstler. In his irascible but ever engaging style, Kunstler talks with Crary about the plight of children raised in suburbia, answers questions from some of the urban planners (a profession he regularly skewers), and critiques energy guru Amory Lovins for his obsession with keeping the world motoring in hydrogen-powered cars.

Friday, May 2, 2008
The plague of Potomac Fever
As states crack down on predatory lending and abusive mortgage fees, Washington lawmakers tell reporters "it's irrelevant" how many -if any- homeowners are helped. As state legislators demand serious aid to borrowers, Washington constructs a bailout for financial firms. This is the contrast between minimally healthy democratic systems in the states, and a federal government ravaged by Potomac Fever (corporate domination).

Friday, May 2, 2008
Hidden Food Costs - Confined Animal Operations Cost Taxpayers Billions
Misguided federal farm policies have encouraged the growth of massive CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations) by shifting billions of dollars in environmental, health, and economic costs to taxpayers and communities. As a result, CAFOs now produce most of the nation's beef, pork, chicken, dairy and eggs, even though there are more sophisticated and efficient farms in operation.

Thursday, May 1, 2008
The White House email controversy: hearings spotlight disturbing IT practices
IT operations at the White House are terrible. The archiving system currently in use is a bad joke. In a big PR problem for IBM Lotus, Congress is also badly miscategorizing Lotus Notes as an obsolete technology. The cost to manage data recovery is being misrepresented by at least an order of magnitude. And Congress behaves like an old married couple, constantly bickering. That last, at least, is no surprise to anyone.

Thursday, May 1, 2008
A Litany of Horrors by Tom Engelhardt and Chalmers Johnson
The RAND Corporation was the Cold War granddaddy of all thinktanks, and it's still with us. In the 1950s, nuclear war-gaming a conflagration, it took the U.S. military into virtuality and science fiction long before there was an Internet to play with. In the 60s, it helped several administrations plan and fight the Vietnam War and was instrumental in giving our empire the militaristic cast it retains to this day.

Thursday, May 1, 2008
Are political journalists falling prey to technological misdirection?
An information technology expert suggests five important points journalists are overlooking when it comes to the missing White House e-mails.

Thursday, May 1, 2008
MAYDAY ALERT! Terror Drills Could Go Live!
(3 comments) Pentagon sources say that they have been ordered to prepare attack plans against Iran. Admiral "Fox" Fallon, the Centcom commander who opposed war with Iran, has been ousted in favor of Bush loyalist General David Petraeus, who has spent the last month accusing Iran for our increasing problems with the Iraqi resistance. Saudi Arabia has been preparing for nuclear fallout from an attack on Iran since Dick Cheney paid a visit.

Thursday, May 1, 2008
The world is run by sleazy creeps with a license to print money By William Bowles
Have you noticed that whenever we see/hear a corporate boss or government hack open their mouths, they're invariably no more than mediocre creeps in shiny suits? So who do these so-called regulatory bodies work for, us or the industries they claim to be regulating?

Thursday, May 1, 2008
Unqualified
Winning the election is more important than telling the truth for the other two front- runners too. That's why none of them are qualified to be President of the United States. So now it is ever more clear that there is no hope at all among the leading three candidates that any one of them has the courage, the consciousness, or the capacity to lead this country out of its quagmire.

Thursday, May 1, 2008
Unqualified
Winning the election is more important than telling the truth for the other two front- runners too. That's why none of them are qualified to be President of the United States. So now it is ever more clear that there is no hope at all among the leading three candidates that any one of them has the courage, the consciousness, or the capacity to lead this country out of its quagmire.

Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Consider the Consequences of Bombing Iran's Nuclear Power Plants, and Pray
Never in history has it happened that nuclear power plants and enrichment facilities have been deliberately bombed. Such facilities, everywhere in the world, operate under severe safety conditions because the release of radioactive materials is deadly, immediately and also long after exposure. If the USA or Israel deliberately bomb a fully fueled nuclear power plant or enrichment facilities, will be breached; radioactive el

Wednesday, April 30, 2008
EU finds GM feed in 90% imported meat
"It is a great irony that we import poultry, pig and beef meat from outside the EU from animals fed on products we deny our own farmers. This helps no-one, consumers have no idea whether their meat has been fed on GM and farmers have to pay through the nose for feed," said Neil Parish, chairman of the European Parliament agriculture committee.

Wednesday, April 30, 2008
EU finds GM feed in 90% imported meat
(1 comments) "It is a great irony that we import poultry, pig and beef meat from outside the EU from animals fed on products we deny our own farmers. This helps no-one, consumers have no idea whether their meat has been fed on GM and farmers have to pay through the nose for feed," said Neil Parish, chairman of the European Parliament agriculture committee.

Wednesday, April 30, 2008
U.S. Military Contractor 'Used Armored Cars To Transport Prostitutes'
"DynCorp's site manager was involved in bringing prostitutes into hotels operated by DynCorp. A co-worker unrelated to the ring was killed when he was traveling in an unsecure car and shot performing a high-risk mission. I believe that my co-worker could have survived if he had been riding in an armored car.

Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Israel Could Make Orphans Homeless Again
Nibaal Shriteh may soon be homeless. The 17-year-old Palestinian lives in a Hebron orphanage but, if the Israeli military has its way, she and 240 fellow orphans like her will be out on the streets. The Israel Defence Forces issued orders Feb. 25 for the closure and confiscation by Apr. 7 of orphanages, schools and other facilities owned by the Islamic Charitable Society (ICS; buildings must be closed to maintain "security of

Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Mass Protests against GM Crops in India
On 8 April 2008, farmers' organizations and other civil society groups in different states undertook concerted direct actions to highlight the dangers of GM crops in general and Bt Brinjal in particular, a prelude to a national level protest in Delhi on 6 May 2008. Reports continue to pour in on animal illnesses and deaths after grazing on Bt cotton fields and workers allergic reactions during harvest of Bt cotton.

Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Pentagon Pundit Scandal Broke the Law
The Pentagon military analyst program unveiled in last week's exposé by David Barstow in the New York Times was not just unethical but illegal. It violates specific restrictions that Congress has been placing in its annual appropriation bills every year since 1951. Someone with the power to act needs to enforce the law, which is why Congress needs to hold hearings and create enforcement mechanisms to ensure compliance.

Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Special Offer: Free Grass to Subject Your Children to Sludge
Sludge keeps rearing its ugly head. Scientists used federal grant money to "spread fertilizer made from human and industrial wastes on yards in poor, black neighborhoods to test whether it might protect children from lead poisoning in the soil." The residents were not alerted to any harmful ingredients in the sludge, and were assured that it posed no health risks for their families and documents, but no medical follow-up was

Wednesday, April 30, 2008
A Not-So-Candid CAMERA
CAMERA, a lobby group that campaigns against criticism of the Israeli government in U.S. media, had a campaign to impact Wikipedia's coverage of Israel and Palestine issues. Gilead Ini stressed that the effort should be secret, and counseled members to avoid "picking a user name that marks you as pro-Israel" and build up enough support to become nominated as administrators. "We will go to war after we have build [sic] our army

Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Corporate Vultures Lurk Behind the World Food Crisis
The IMF, WTO and the rest of the neoliberal world are still pushing more trade as a cure for what ails us. "The food crisis of 2008 may become a challenge to globalization," exclaims The Economist in its April 17, 2008 issue. Not surprisingly then, the "Doha Development Round" which has been in a stalemate since 2003, largely due to the hypocrisy of agricultural polices of the rich nations, is being resuscitated as a solution

Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Poison ice:
(1 comments) As the sea ice melts, a toxic stew of mercury and synthetic chemicals is seeping into the Arctic food web, harming the area's people. We may be next.

Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Debbie Almontaser and the Arab culture school- victims of the proxy battle over Israel and Palestine
The so-called culture wars in the United States between Islam and Arabs and the West are in many ways a proxy war for what's happening in Israel and Palestine. Here's an important letter from Jewish leaders, organized by our friends at the NY-based Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, about the treatment of Debbie Almontaser, a moderate by any definition who took pains to unite and speak to all corners of a divided community.

Tuesday, April 29, 2008
The McCain Health Plan: Millions Lose Coverage, Health Costs Worsen, and Insurance and Drug Industries Win
McCain wants to dismantle the employer-provided system that now covers over 60 percent (or about 158 million) of non-elderly Americans, forcing millions of us who now get fairly decent health insurance on the job to instead buy whatever they can find on the individual market controlled by unregulated and predatory insurance companies. And he would drive health care costs upward, not downward.

Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Probe in the mysterious death of Riad Hamad sought
The Council on American-Islamic Relations today called for a Justice Department investigation into the death of Riad Hamad, whose body was found earlier this month in a Texas lake. The body had been bound with duct tape. Hamad, a 55-year-old middle school teacher, was a peace activist and director of the Palestine Children's Welfare Fund. Hamad claimed on a videotape that he was being targeted by federal agents

Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Plastics Chemical Poses Health Risk, Businesses Respond
(2 comments) The findings of a U.S. government science panel and actions by the Canadian government are prompting major retailers and manufacturers to reconsider selling products containing bisphenol-A, a chemical commonly found in hard plastics and food containers. High levels of exposure to the chemical can cause reproductive or developmental abnormalities, such as low birth weight, and may lead to a wide variety of cancers

Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Farm Bill Proposes Food Safety Improvements
The huge farm bill reauthorization under discussion among House and Senate conferees contains two food safety-related items that could help regulatory agencies better protect the U.S. food supply and provide consumers with more information when making purchasing decisions. First, the bill contains country-of-origin labeling, primarily for marketing livestock by-products. Second, it proposes a bipartisan food safety commission

Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Report: Rampant Political Meddling with Science Documented at EPA
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) scientists are faced with widespread political interference that has significantly increased under the Bush administration, a new report from the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) shows. Hundreds of the scientists surveyed (60 percent) reported some degree of political meddling, ranging from unnecessary delays to forced resignations.

Tuesday, April 29, 2008
The Iraq War Morphs Into The Iranian War- By Paul Craig Roberts
(1 comments) It is 1939 all over again. The world waits helplessly for the next act of naked aggression by rogue states. Only this time the rogue states are not the Third Reich and Fascist Italy. They are the United States and Israel. The neoconservatives are ecstatic. Hegemony uber alles is back on track.

Tuesday, April 29, 2008
No Problems!! (why we care about trivia)
I think the most important thing to note about the Jeremiah Wright Story is that we're a Nation plagued by exceedingly few significant problems; blessed with a quite healthy political culture and very trusted political and media institutions; composed of a citizenry that is peacefully content with its Government and secure and confident about their future; endowed with a supremely sturdy economic foundation free of debt and

Monday, April 28, 2008
Rearming the world
Why nations are suddenly locked in an arms race unseen since the early days of the Cold War: Much of this new arms spending is concentrated among the world's biggest consumers of resources, which are trying to protect their access to energy, and the biggest producers of resources, which are taking advantage of their new wealth to build up their defenses at a rate that would have been unthinkable for a developing country until

Monday, April 28, 2008
"Transgenic Seed Companies Lie and Bribe:" Interview with Goldman Prize Winner Jesus Leon Santos
Biotech corporations that developed genetically modified seeds are bribing authorities and carrying out costly advertising campaigns "plagued with lies in order to create monsters that attack life," says Jesús León Santos, an indigenous man who is one of this year's winners of the Goldman Environmental Prize. To everyone who thinks that our ancient systems are just a matter of romantic ideals, we say we are on the right path

Monday, April 28, 2008
What is really causing agflation?
The old laws of the marketplace are no longer working. Food prices have been rising for six years because of surging demand, and increased production is not restoring the balance as in the past. In fact, prices have been going up even faster over the last year. The so-called "financialization" of commodities markets, that is, the influx of investment funds seeking safer and more lucrative assets, has intensified the trend

Monday, April 28, 2008
THE BRIDGE AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD
Half the world's tropical and temperate forests are now gone. The rate of deforestation in the tropics continues at about an acre a second. About half the wetlands and a third of the mangroves are gone. An estimated 90 percent of the large predator fish are gone, and 75 percent of marine fisheries are now overfished or fished to capacity. Species are disappearing at rates about a thousand times faster than normal.

Monday, April 28, 2008
EPA OPENS CHEMICAL RISK ASSESSMENT TO CORPORATE LOBBYING
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has unveiled a new process for assessing the health risks of new chemicals that allows chemical manufacturers and other industries to play key roles. As a result, it will be much easier to inject corporate influence into public health determinations that should be purely scientific. One hallmark of the changes is pushing government research to the side in favor of industry funded

Monday, April 28, 2008
Agrobacterium and Morgellons Disease, A GM Connection?
(4 comments) Preliminary findings suggest a link between Morgellons Disease and Agrobacterium, a soil bacterium extensively manipulated and used in making GM crops; has genetic engineering created a new epidemic?

Monday, April 28, 2008
"No Refuge But in Audacity": Barack Obama and the Democratic Party
(1 comments) "It's time," Obama said, "to stop spending billions of dollars a week trying to put Iraq back together and start spending the money putting America back together." "Putting Iraq back together?" Is that what "we" have been doing over there? Never mind that the United States' brazenly imperialist assault has killed as many as 1.3 million Iraqis and caused the exodus and displacement of many millions more.

Monday, April 28, 2008
Race, Class & Democratic Primaries
Race has mattered a great deal in the presidential primaries but it has done so in different and conflicting sorts of ways related to class. In my home precinct, Obama's skin color was frankly a big advantage. It helped make many of my neighborhood's many "liberal" and relatively affluent whites reluctant to take a hard and honest look at his strong corporate connections and imperial commitments.

Monday, April 28, 2008
Principles of the Imperial New World Order
(2 comments) We have to recognize that in the Imperial New World Order (INWO), with the Soviet Union gone, and an aggressive and highly militarized US projecting its great power across the globe, destabilizing and devastating in all in the alleged interest of liberation and stability, a revised set of principles should be discernible. The United States enjoys first-class aggression rights and has long been able to violate the UN Charter

Sunday, April 27, 2008
Saving the Honeybee Through Organic Farming
Investigations carried out by the Institute of Science in Society implicated a synergistic interaction between the recent widespread use of new pesticides (including Bt toxin from GM crops) and fungal infections, in the worsening decline of honeybees. This winters' bee loss was 34 percent, up from the 25 percent the previous year. According to the USDA, one mouthful in three of the foods we eat depend on honeybees.

Sunday, April 27, 2008
IDF choppers in service of drug cartel
(2 comments) American officials demand Israel provide explanations for how U.S.-made choppers sold to Israel ended up in service of Columbian drug cartel. The incident may cloud relations between the countries. According to American sources, the military copters currently serve the drug mafia in the South American country.

Sunday, April 27, 2008
The "Green Peril": Creating the Islamic Fundamentalist Threat
Islamic fundamentalism should not be considered 'a disease that spreads willy-nilly to infect whole populations.' Like Protestant fundamentalism, argues David Ignatius, it is a 'religious response to the confusion and contradictions of the modern world. The anti-American attitudes of Islamic groups in the Middle East are not directed against Christianity but are instead a reaction to U.S. policies and interventions

Sunday, April 27, 2008
Top 25 Censored Stories for 2008 | Project Censored
(2 comments) The stories are ever more horrific. Links at site: (view article)

Sunday, April 27, 2008
3 Reasons the Economy Is Headed South
(1 comments) Crude prices have increased by about two-thirds in just the past year, after essentially doubling during the prior few years. As it burst, the bubble in housing spread to credit markets across the U.S. and beyond. And inflation is precipitated by increasing fuel and food costs.

Saturday, April 26, 2008
Ralph Nader: Disintegration is Everywhere
(24 comments) The Politics of Distraction in an Age of Gotcha Capitalism: "Disintegration is everywhere. Public works are crumbling-schools, clinics, public transit, libraries, drinking water and sewage-treatment plants. Tax dollars are being used to destroy more of Iraq and to subsidize or bail out companies recklessly run by obscenely overpaid CEOs. Public deficits are soaring."

Saturday, April 26, 2008
Diebold Admits ATMs Are More Robust Than Voting Machines
Chris Riggall, a spokesman for Premier (formerly Diebold) acknowledged that less money is spent making an electronic voting machine than on a typical ATM. The ironically named Riggall also notes that security could indeed be improved, but at a higher price than most election administrators would care to pay.

Saturday, April 26, 2008
THE CREATURE FROM JEKYLL ISLAND
An accessible article on why the Federal Reserve should be abolished: 1. The Federal Reserve is incapable of accomplishing its stated objectives. 2. It is a cartel operating against the public interest. 3. It's the supreme instrument of usury. 4. It generates our most unfair tax. 5. It encourages war. 6. It destabilizes the economy. 7. It is an instrument of totalitarianism.

Saturday, April 26, 2008
Why the US has really gone broke, by Chalmers Johnson
(1 comments) The military adventurers in the Bush administration have much in common with the corporate leaders of the defunct energy company Enron. Both groups thought that they were the "smartest guys in the room". The neoconservatives in the White House and the Pentagon outsmarted themselves. They failed even to address the problem of how to finance their schemes of imperialist wars and global domination.

Saturday, April 26, 2008
Pentagon Reports on Iraq's Military Are Suspect, Audit Says
The U.S. public and lawmakers should be skeptical of the Pentagon's quarterly reports on Iraq's progress toward building a viable military and police force, according to a new audit. An analysis of Iraq's data ''suggests a continuing need for caution in relying on the accuracy and usefulness of the numbers,'' Bowen wrote in the 21-page audit released today. U.S. Army Doesn't Disagree

Saturday, April 26, 2008
Heathrow Terminal 5: the true horror
The scene on the ground was reminiscent of a police state, rather than a cradle of democracy. The most prominent officials were not those of BA, nor even the battalions of electricians trying to patch the system up, but larger battalions of burly cops carrying their prominent military hardware.

Friday, April 25, 2008
Exposed: The Great GM Crops Myth
(6 comments) Genetic modification actually cuts the productivity of crops, an authoritative new study shows, undermining repeated claims that a switch to the controversial technology is needed to solve the growing world food crisis. GM soy produces 10 per cent less food than its conventional equivalent.

Friday, April 25, 2008
Australia: Latest "terror plot" claims unravel in court
Each case has displayed a common modus operandi. Provocateurs and informers have been recruited, prejudicial allegations have been splashed throughout the media, and politicians have done their best to blacken the names of those arrested. These methods have been driven by the political demands of the federal and state governments and their security agencies to whip up fears of terrorism and obtain convictions

Friday, April 25, 2008
Six Suspects Will Be Tried a Third Time in Sears Plot
Prof. Jonathan Turley of George Washington Law School, a critic of the Bush administration's handling of terrorism-related cases, said that by seeking a new trial the government was hoping to justify "previous headlines" about evidence - including wiretaps and informant reports - presented by Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales after the suspects' arrest in June 2006.

Friday, April 25, 2008
Bear Stearns Buy-Out... 100% Fraud
Bear Stearns stock was artificially collapsed so that illegal insider traders would make billions and J.P. Morgan would be paid $55 billion of US tax payer money to shore up themselves and buy Bear Stearns at bankruptsy prices.

Friday, April 25, 2008
The Clintons Learned Their Lessons Well
It cannot be assumed that Hillary Clinton as president would be less irrationally hawkish and more restrained in the unleashing of military force than John McCain. It is bizarre that a politician who bought into the phony threat about Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction arsenal now plays political games with the alleged threat posed by Iran.

Thursday, April 24, 2008
Latin America: the attack on democracy
(3 comments) John Pilger argues that an unreported war is being waged by the US to restore power to the privileged classes at the expense of the poor.

Thursday, April 24, 2008
Ex-prosecutor: New arrest shows reach of 1980s spy ring
New charges that an Army veteran passed military secrets to the same Israeli handler as convicted spy Jonathan Pollard confirms the espionage ring reached further than initially thought, and that the Israelis lied about it, a former prosecutor said Wednesday. diGenova said. "This was a much larger espionage operation ... than we understood or could have known at the time."

Thursday, April 24, 2008
CIA Acknowledges It Has More Than 7000 Documents Relating to Secret Detention Program, Rendition, and Torture
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) must stop stonewalling congressional oversight committees and release vital documents related to the program of secret detentions, renditions, and torture, three prominent human rights groups said today.

Thursday, April 24, 2008
Colombia's Uribe under probe over 1997 massacre
Colombian President Alvaro Uribe denied Wednesday charges he helped plan a 1997 massacre by right-wing paramilitaries, while confirming that his role was being examined in an official investigation. The Supreme Court investigation into links between politicians and the right wing paramilitary group United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia has been going on since 2006.

Wednesday, April 23, 2008
SEN DORGAN: THE AMERICAN PEOPLE SHOULD NOT STAND FOR THIS! Video
(1 comments) Out of control fraud and abuse in military contracts......Billions wasted. Why no public outrage?

Wednesday, April 23, 2008
How Elites Control the News
(1 comments) "The CIA owns everyone of any significance in the major media" former CIA Director William Colby (died suddenly after freak canoe accident) Bernstein's 1977 Oct. Rolling stone article. Mapping the Ministry of Propaganda........

Wednesday, April 23, 2008
The Democratic Party : Tell Gov. Dean What You Think
Fill out the form below to share your thoughts with DNC Chairman Gov. Howard Dean. (you have to go to the site) The two party system has failed us.

Wednesday, April 23, 2008
GINA cleared for a vote in the Senate!
Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) has just agreed to lift his hold on the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) and allow it to come to a vote in the Senate. GINA will prevent people from being discriminated against in the workplace or for health insurance purposes because of a genetic predisposition or family history of a disease. But Coburn has now placed a hold on the Breast Cancer and Environmental Research Act

Wednesday, April 23, 2008
US 'war on terror' backfiring, says thinktank
(3 comments) The US "war on terror" has backfired, strengthening extremists in Afghanistan and Somalia and turning them into legitimate political actors in the eyes of their local populations, the Senlis Council said today. They have strongly criticised US policy in Afghanistan in the past, are particularly scathing of the Bush administration's "abject policy failures" in Somalia. The lack of strategic acumen is in fact enabling the insurg

Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Compromise Efforts on FY 2009 Budget Resolution
Two major challenges face a congressional conference committee this week as it enters a critical period in forging a compromise out of the House and Senate FY 2009 budget resolutions adopted in March. The conference committee will need to address some of the glaring inadequacies and misplaced priorities in funding for domestic investments in both the House and Senate resolutions.

Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Rocky Road for Credit Card Bill
House Democrats are pushing legislation- the Credit Cardholders' Bill of Rights, sponsored by Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.)-that would force card companies to disclose looming rate increases, eliminate confusing fees and cease the retroactive application of hiked rates to existing balances. Republicans, siding with the banks, prefer to leave the task of reform to federal regulators, who are crafting new rules for the industry.

Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Google enlists video ID tools to combat child porn
Google said it is working the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) of Alexandria, Virginia to help automate and streamline how child protection workers troll through millions of pornographic images to identify victims of abuse.

Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Putting a Check on Corporate Power
The ultimate enemy of democracy -- corporate power -- extends far beyond the two major parties and the three major branches of government. Their permanent 'government' inside the beltway -the 30,000 lobbyists that work for corporations and the dozens of corporate legal foundations, public relations firms, think tanks, trade associations and front groups- have overwhelmed democratic institutions.

Tuesday, April 22, 2008
EPA whistleblower sues university over toxic sludge
David Lewis, A University of Georgia (UGA) microbiologist and whistleblower at the Environmental Protection Agency, claims that Risse project members intentionally distorted toxic substance amounts in their sludge study and that the university Board of Regents and the research foundation, which supervised the projects, knew they were fraudulent but supported the work in order to obtain further federal grants.

Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Iraq's Sadr cannot be defeated by force: experts
(2 comments) Suddenly, after many months in which the news from Iraq has been mostly about falling violence, the country is reeling towards a rebellion by millions of Sadr's followers against a government crackdown on his black-masked Mehdi Army militia. Ultimately, say experts, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki may never be able to defeat the popular cleric by force, and his attempt to do so could make Iraq far more unstable

Tuesday, April 22, 2008
U.S. arrests American over suspected nuclear espionage for Israel
U.S. authorities on Tues. arrested an American engineer suspected of giving military secrets involving nuclear weapons, fighter jets and air defense missiles to Israel during the 1980s, the Justice Department said. Ben-Ami Kadish, an 84-year-old Connecticut-born U.S. citizen who worked at an Army engineering center in New Jersey, was suspected of reporting to the same Israeli government handler who dealt with Jonathan Pollard

Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Hard Times
A former volunteer after Katrina (and current Chicago cop) describes his trip back with his family to visit St. Bernard Parish and blocks of concrete foundations without houses or people.

Monday, April 21, 2008
6 decades of one-party rule end in Paraguay
Former Catholic bishop wins with mandate to help the poor and indigenous. The world's longest-ruling political party lost its six-decade grasp on power in Paraguay with the presidential victory of a former Roman Catholic bishop.

Monday, April 21, 2008
Jose Can You See? Bush's Trojan Taco
A reason Bush has kept the major NAFTA summit a virtual secret is its real agenda and the agenda-makers, the guys who called the meeting: The North American Competitiveness Council. Harmonization means making rules and regulations the same in all three countries. Or, more specifically, watering down rules – on health, safety, labor rights, oil drilling, polluting and so on - in other words, any that get in the way of profits.

Monday, April 21, 2008
inequality
(1 comments) The top one percent of households received 21.8 percent of all pre-tax income in 2005, more than double what that figure was in the 1970s. (The top one percent's share of total income bottomed out at 8.9 percent in 1976.) This is the greatest concentration of income since 1928, when 23.9 percent of all income went to the richest one percent. The top 10% control 71% of US assets.

Monday, April 21, 2008
Food - the ultimate weapon of the ruling elite By William Bowles
Using food as a weapon is as old as the siege but today's barbarians have upped the anté by several orders of magnitude. Countries that grew their own food which not only fed them but also created employment, now grow food and things like flowers, for export in order to 'earn' the precious dollar which obviously they have to spend on importing the food they once grew- or starve.

Sunday, April 20, 2008
'McMafia' Profiles World's Globalized Criminals : NPR
(2 comments) Journalist Misha Glenny points out that while globalization may have given the world new opportunities for trade and investments, it also gave rise to global black markets and made it easier for criminal networks to do business.

Sunday, April 20, 2008
The world, the brain- video
(5 comments) Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened -- as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding -- she studied and remembered every moment. This is a powerful story about how our brains define us and connect us to the world and to one another.

Saturday, April 19, 2008
If ABC ran the Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858
GIBSON: We get questions about this all the time over at Powerline and on Hannity's talk show. Mr. Douglas has said this is a major vulnerability for you in the fall. So I'll ask again – do you love America?

Saturday, April 19, 2008
A New Deal in Pakistan
On my travels I found a surprisingly widespread consensus that the mullahs should keep to their mosques, and the increasingly unpopular military should return to its barracks. The new army chief, General Ashfaq Kayani, who took over when Musharraf stepped down from his military role, seems to recognize this. He has repeatedly talked of pulling the army back from civilian life, and ordering soldiers to stay out of politics.

Saturday, April 19, 2008
When bananas ruled the world
(2 comments) It may seem hard to believe that the banana business could be as nefarious as the oil business. But to our banana chroniclers, it may have been worse. The banana men managed to be at once ferociously exploitative, while cultivating a beloved image with their customers, pioneering public relations and marketing practices still in use today.

Saturday, April 19, 2008
David Brooks' fictitious defense of his industry's behavior
Greenwald describes in gory detail the pandering and pretentious pronouncments of Brooks, Broder et al; the voters disregard for the ABC pseudo-debate; and all those who evidently didn't rise on cue to the hatchet job after all. Guess we've all learned it isn't wise to let the media select the candidates....

Saturday, April 19, 2008
Three States Subjected To "Martial Law Sweeps"
Law-enforcement agencies in Tennessee, Miss. and Arkansas took part in what was described by local media as "an anti-crime and anti-terrorism initiative" involving officers from more than 50 federal, state and local agencies and given the military style name "Operation Sudden Impact". One sheriff's deputy described it as "martial law training". Forget innocent until proven guilty, you are now a terrorist suspect until you are

Saturday, April 19, 2008
Volcker Says Fed's Bear Loan Stretches Legal Power
(1 comments) Volcker, the Fed chairman from 1979 to 1987, had implicit criticism for U.S. regulators and market participants who allowed "excesses of subprime mortgages" to spread into "the mother of all crises." The Fed's Bear Stearns loan was at "the very edge" of its legal authority. Volcker said the modern financial system has "failed the test" of the marketplace.

Friday, April 18, 2008
The *real* third-rail of politics
The issue isn't really that Obama talked about people who "cling" to guns or religion. The issue is that he got too close to the real Third Rail of politics. Social Security is not the Third Rail, no matter what the media tells you. No, the Third Rail is economic class. Talk about income disparity in America? "You're engaging in class warfare!" The least debated issue in politics today is our society's class-based system

Friday, April 18, 2008
International panel dispels aggressive GMO corporate propaganda
A fundamental change in farming practice is needed to counteract soaring food prices, hunger, social inequities and environmental disasters. Genetically modified (GM) crops are highly controversial and will not play a substantial role in addressing the challenges of climate change, loss of biodiversity, hunger and poverty. Instead, small-scale farmers and agro-ecological methods are the way forward

Friday, April 18, 2008
The Gulag Wealth Fund and Toll Booths in Outer Space - Business on The Huffington Post
Hedge fund managers who pay themselves billions are not 'making money' as most people understand that phrase. The cash they take is actually being carved out of the system; and this is no stray cash - this is support cash. This is cash that should be employed to prop up America's financial infrastructure. One reason the U.S. economy is imploding is that vital cash is being drained away by parasites in suits.

Friday, April 18, 2008
We have already exceeded the Earth's "carrying capacity"
(6 comments) About six months ago, the United Nations Environment Programme's fourth Global Environmental Outlook Report (GEO-4) concluded that we humans presently require 22 acres per person to support our global average lifestyle -- but, the report said, Earth has only 15 acres per person available. Human activity is putting such strain on the natural functions of Earth that the future is no longer sustainable.

Thursday, April 17, 2008
Behind The Anti-Sadr Agenda
Who can be expected to gain from exacerbating the intra-Shi'ite conflict? Most obviously, the U.S. As qualified Iranian sources have stressed to this author, Iran's power lies in its ability to promote and mediate cooperation among all these factions, as demonstrated in its mediating the end to the first anti-Sadr offensive at the end of March. The occupying power is seen as intent on utilizing intra-Shi'ite conflict to damage

Thursday, April 17, 2008
FBI Caused Delay in Terror Case Ahead of Senate Testimony
Counterterrorism officials in FBI headquarters slowed an investigation into a possible conspirator in the 2005 London bombings by forcing a field agent to return documents acquired from a U.S. university. Why? Because the agent received the documents through a lawful subpoena, while headquarters wanted him to demand the records under the USA Patriot Act, using a power the FBI did not have, but desperately wanted.

Thursday, April 17, 2008
Thank you Jimmy Carter for everything, even for using the apartheid word
An Haaretz's editorial thanks Jimmy Carter for all he's done, like that little peace agreement he brokered with Egypt, despite the fact that Israel is now "boycotting" him. It's worth pointing out that high level Israeli officials ans reporters were using the term "apartheid" to describe Israel's unequal and separate systems for Israelis and Palestinians long before Carter's book came out and caused a firestorm

Thursday, April 17, 2008
How come Zimbabwe and Tibet get all the attention?
If a government wants to abuse human rights and rig elections, it needs to have the support of - or be - the western powers.

Wednesday, April 16, 2008
New Jewish Lobby Seeks to Redefine "Pro-Israel"
(4 comments) A new group of prominent U.S. Jews who believe that the so-called "Israel Lobby" has been dominated for too long by neo-conservatives and other Likud-oriented hawks has launched a new organisation to help fund political candidates who favour a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and a stronger U.S. role in achieving it. The new project has been endorsed by some two dozen prominent Israelis, including three

Wednesday, April 16, 2008
A man-made famine
Without agricultural support policies, there's no buffer between the price shocks and the bellies of the poorest people on earth. No option to support sustainable smaller-scale farmers, because they've been driven off their land by cheap EU and US imports. No option to dip into grain reserves because they've been sold off to service debt. No way of increasing the income of the poorest, because social programmes have been cut

Wednesday, April 16, 2008
UN biofuel warning, call for return to traditional farming
Despite being highly productive, modern agricultural practices have exhausted land and water resources, squelched diversity and left poor people vulnerable to high food prices, according to a United Nations scientific report. "Business as usual is no longer an option" as global grain stores are today at their lowest level on record and prices of staple foods such as rice, maize and wheat are expected to continue to rise

Wednesday, April 16, 2008
A Torture Debate Among Healers
At the heart of the race for president of the largest association of psychologists in the world, the American Psychological Association (APA,is a raging debate over torture and interrogations. While the other healing professions, including the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association, bar their members from participating in interrogations, the APA leadership has fought against such a restriction.

Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Stolen and sensitive military equipment found on EBay
(1 comments) Stolen and sensitive U.S. military equipment, including fighter jet parts wanted by Iran and nuclear biological protective gear, has been available to the highest bidder on popular Internet sales sites, according to congressional investigators. "Many of the sensitive items we purchased could have been used directly against our troops and allies, or reverse engineered to develop counter measures or equivalent technologies,"

Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Demand Accountability for Bush's Top-Down Torture Policy
The ACLU is calling on Congress to demand an independent prosecutor to investigate possible violations by the Bush administration of laws including the War Crimes Act, the federal Anti-Torture Act, and federal assault laws. Take action!

Monday, April 14, 2008
Corporate tax declines and U.S. inequality
(1 comments) Over the last 60 years, the U.S. tax code has dramatically shifted away from corporate taxes and toward taxes on individuals, especially through the payroll tax, the financing backbone of Social Security and Medicare. In the 1950s, the corporate income tax brought in, on average, one of every four dollars in federal tax revenues. By the 2000s, however, it raised just one of every 10 tax dollars. The top 20% actually pay less

Monday, April 14, 2008
John Baer: Decades of working-class neglect - now that's insulting
What's offensive to me is suggesting that small-town, working-class, gun-toting and/or religious Pennsylvanians are somehow injured by a politician's words. They're injured all right..by a system of isolated, insulated political leadership that protects itself and the status quo above all else.. by a lack of political guts to fix a health-care system that works against the poor and forces middle-class families to pay more for

Monday, April 14, 2008
Project Update
Before delivering his State of the Union address in January of 1998, President Clinton received a letter containing one explicit demand: invade Iraq immediately and overthrow the regime of Saddam Hussein. The letter was written by a group called the Project for the New American Century (PNAC)

Monday, April 14, 2008
You want elitism? You want bitter? I'll give you both
You want bitter - I am bitter. You want elitism - I am an elitist. Or am now anyway. I am sick of sacrificing personally for people who just don't care and are just too stupid to do anything about it.

Monday, April 14, 2008
Genocide announced: "All of the Palestinians must be killed"
(2 comments) "All of the Palestinians must be killed; men, women, infants, and even their beasts." This was the religious opinion issued one week ago by Rabbi Yisrael Rosen, director of the Tsomet Institute, a long-established religious institute attended by students and soldiers in the Israeli settlements of the West Bank.

Sunday, April 13, 2008
Final Autopsy Report: Circumstances of Death: Iraqi detainee died while in U.S. custody
(2 comments) The remains are received clad in a white shirt, white pajama type pants, and white undershorts. Feces covers the clothing from the waist down....There is gauze dressing on the left wrist. No other evidence of medical intervention is noted.... The right chest wall has fractures of ribs three through seven anteriorly and ribs six through twelve posteriorly. The left chest wall has fractures of ribs two through nine anteriorly

Sunday, April 13, 2008
Joe Bageant: Welcome to Middle-Class Lockdown
Now shut up and buy something! "Take away America's Wal-Mart junk and cheap electronics and what you have left is a mindless primitive tribe and a gaggle of bullshit artists pretending to lead them." -- James "Mad Dog" Howard

Sunday, April 13, 2008
John Yoo: Spearhead or scapegoat? - Glenn Greenwald
(2 comments) Turning John Yoo into the poster child for the torture regime misses the point and relieves other officials of responsibility. John Yoo was not a mastermind but a mere instrument - a tool - in the Bush administration's arsenal to abolish constraints on our treatment of detainees and to implement torture methods. These recent reports that Cheney, Rice, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld, Powell, etc. -with the knowledge and approval of Bush

Sunday, April 13, 2008
TOXIC SOCKS
(2 comments) Arizona State University researchers have found that socks impregnated with odor-fighting silver nanoparticles release the nanoparticles when washed. This study, the first to examine how nanoparticles are released from commercially available clothing raises concerns about silver particles leaching into wastewater and the environment." In the environment, both ionic and nanosilver exhibit adverse effects to aquatic organisms

Sunday, April 13, 2008
An Economy Built On Lies by Gary North
By now, the term "liar loans" is common. Prospective house buyers provided false information to representatives of loan-initiating firms. The loan-initiators winked at the practice. Their well-compensated job was to pass on the paperwork to a government-created agency, who then sold to investors and hedge funds. From start to finish, from top to bottom, the entire structure was based on lies. No one worried about it.

Sunday, April 13, 2008
Honey Bee Collapse Now Worse on West Coast
(1 comments) Bees are not healthy. Bees have not been healthy for a few years and they are becoming more unhealthy. The beekeepers, the industry that uses them as a tool, is in a precarious situation. The Apiary Inspectors of America just completed a survey of 327 beekeepers and we came up with about a 34% loss rate over this past 2007 to 2008 winter season even more than last year. Destroying honeybees by bringing in Africanized be

Sunday, April 13, 2008
UN scientists say industrial agriculture has failed
(4 comments) The report has unflattering things to say about large-scale commercial agriculture, which it claims has failed, and calls for a systematic reassessment of past and ongoing agricultural research, with a view to steering it towards addressing hunger, severe social inequities and contradictions as well as environmental problems. The report challenges the basic tenets of the green revolution, and use of expensive chemicals

Saturday, April 12, 2008
Coming Ecological Collapse: Failing Ecosystems the Mother of All Bubbles
(2 comments) Ecological overshoot whereby humanity exceeds the Earth's carrying capacity is the mother of all "bubbles". Within the current sub-prime mortgage and financial bubbles, and food and energy price increases, we are witnessing the logical and inevitable economic consequences of over-population, resource scarcity, inequitable and unreasonable consumption, and unsustainable economic growth.

Saturday, April 12, 2008
Contacts with Wecht jurors criticized- FBI called panelists' homes after deadlock
On the day the U.S. government said it will retry Dr. Cyril H. Wecht on the same 41 counts that resulted in a hung jury, two Democratic congressmen yesterday expressed unease about the FBI contacting discharged jurors to seek information about the impasse. "Whether reckless or intended, it is simply common sense that such contacts can have a chilling effect on future juries in this and other cases." said Rep. John Conyers

Saturday, April 12, 2008
Six US cities tamper with traffic cameras for profit
(2 comments) Six U.S. cities have been found guilty of shortening the amber cycles below what is allowed by law on intersections equipped with cameras meant to catch red-light runners. The local governments in question have ignored the safety benefit of increasing the yellow light time and decided to install red-light cameras, shorten the yellow light duration, and collect the profits instead.

Friday, April 11, 2008
Hallucinations of Empire
(3 comments) In his brilliant new book, Olivier Roy shows that Iraq was no war for oil or war for Israel: it was an unwieldy product of the new 'politics of chaos'. Instead of dreaming up sinister conspiracies behind world events, Roy shows how America's incoherent war effort flows from an underlying Western political framework that carries with it distinctive views about globalisation, intervention and political development.

Friday, April 11, 2008
Canadian pork imports may be laced with antibiotic-resistant Staph
(2 comments) In Canada-a country that provides 80 percent of the United States' pork imports-a strain of MRSA was found in a sample of pigs and their farmers. One-fourth of 285 pigs studied were infected, according to a report in Veterinary Micro­biology, with a 20 percent rate of transmission to the pig farmers. The USDA has found that foodborne outbreaks have occurred due to contamination by food handlers who spread bacteria from pork p

Friday, April 11, 2008
Performance enhancing drugs reach academia
The journal Nature surveyed the use of a number of drugs that enhance mental performance. The group of over 1,400 respondents were heavily biased towards US-based researchers, who accounted for 70 percent of the results. Almost 35 percent of them have taken Ritalin, Provigil, or beta blockers, and 60 percent of those were taking the drugs specifically for improving mental capacity instead of medical reasons.

Thursday, April 10, 2008
Food as a Weapon - The Rape of Iraq
Paul Bremer put new US-mandated laws into effect in April '04. Iraq had kept its precious natural seed varieties in a seed bank in the town of Abu Ghraib. Sometime during the early part of the occupation the seed bank vanished. Patent protected GM seeds were introduced to Iraqi farmers by the Ministry of Agriculture. Once farmers began using the seeds, under Order 81, they would be forced to buy new seeds every year from

Thursday, April 10, 2008
Yoo's on First?
Is it because John Yoo, the former Justice Department's hired hand, is such an easy target? Is it because of the cheeky, in-your-face way in which Yoo argues that the president has the authority to have your eyes poked out and your sons' testicles crushed, because we are "at war" and he is commander in chief? Or is it because our press is STILL reluctant to go after Yoo's boss– President George W. Bush?

Thursday, April 10, 2008
Top Bush Advisors Approved 'Enhanced Interrogation'
Highly placed sources said a handful of top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al Qaeda suspects -- whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding. The high-level discussions about these "enhanced interrogation techniques" were so detailed, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed -- down to the number of times CIA agen

Thursday, April 10, 2008
"A Tale of Three Lawyers" by Scott Horton
Matthew Diaz served his country as a staff judge advocate at Guantánamo. He watched a shameless assault on America's Constitution and commitment to the rule of law carried out by the Bush Administration. He watched the introduction of a system of cruel torture and abuse. As a uniformed officer, he was bound to follow his command. As a licensed and qualified attorney, he was bound to uphold the law. And these were at odds.

Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Why I Will Not Vote for John McCain- fellow POW
I can verify that John has an infamous reputation for being a hot head. He has a quick and explosive temper that many have experienced first hand. Folks, quite honestly that is not the finger I want next to that red button. It is also disappointing to see him take on and support Bush's war in Iraq, even stating we might be there for another 100 years. For me John represents the entrenched and bankrupt policies of Washington-

Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Israel places employees of pro-peace radio under house arrest - International Herald Tribune
Israel has placed under house arrest seven employees of a pro-peace radio station based in the West Bank, the station said Wednesday. On Monday, Israeli police raided RAM-FM's Jerusalem office and seized its transmission equipment, saying the station was broadcasting without a license. The station said seven employees were placed under house arrest for one week, and forbidden to speak to anyone but their families.

Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Eating Soy Foods In Puberty Protects Against Breast Cancer
(4 comments) Evidence is growing from animal and human studies that genistein, a potent chemical found in soy, protects against development of breast cancer - but only if consumed during puberty.

Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Exhausted, Overextended Troops Ready to 'Unravel'
The health of our military must be a top priority because current deployment rates are grinding up our military men and women, tearing at the bonds of families, eroding military readiness -- and leaving us less secure at home.

Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Wash Post Opines on Future of Entitlements
The Washington Post wrote their lead editorial yesterday on the future of entitlement programs. The editorial once again lumps Social Security, a relatively healthy program, with Medicare and Medicaid, which face more serious funding issues not because they are entitlement programs, but because of the rapidly growing cost of health care in both the public and private sectors.

Wednesday, April 9, 2008
House plants improve air quality
Our space program made an important discovery about the role of houseplants indoors. NASA has been researching methods of cleansing the atmosphere in future space stations to keep them fit for human habitation over extended periods of time. They've found that many common houseplants and blooming potted plants help fight pollution indoors and are able to scrub significant amounts of harmful gases from the air.

Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Pilger: Honouring the 'unbreakable promise'
On my wall in London is a photograph I have never grown tired of looking at. You might even say it helps keep me going. It is a picture of a lone woman standing between two armoured vehicles, the notorious 'hippos', as they rolled into Soweto. Her arms are raised. Her fists are clenched. Her thin body is both beckoning and defiant of the enemy. It was May Day 1985 and the uprising against apartheid had begun.

Monday, April 7, 2008
Food Without Fossil Fuels Now
Hhow switching to organic agriculture and localised food and energy systems can save us from the ravages of industrial agricultural and climate change. It can feed the world; more than that, it is the only way we can feed the world, and also the most effective way to mitigate climate change. It can potentially compensate for all greenhouse gas emissions due to human activities and free us completely from fossil fuels.

Monday, April 7, 2008
The State Department's Trivialization of Anti-Semitism
Why the US Department of State wastes US taxpayers' money preparing a sloppy report on global anti-semitism is beyond me. We are treated to the familiar false dichotomy between "legitimate criticism of Israel's policies" (although we are never given examples) and illegitimate criticism of Zionism or Jewish self-determination, as if to be an anti-Zionist makes you an anti-semite.

Monday, April 7, 2008
Maliki threatens to bar Sadr from vote
Iraq's prime minister raised the stakes in his showdown with followers of Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, saying in an interview broadcast on Monday they would be barred from elections unless their militia disbands. The ultimatum comes at a sensitive time, just two days before Sadr has called a million followers onto the streets of the capital for a mass anti-U.S. protest. Rigging the vote for democracy' Bush-style??

Monday, April 7, 2008
A story the US media will not tell you: The Palestinian Medical Relief Society
Over the past five years, Jewish Voice for Peace members have worked as volunteers with our colleagues in the Palestinian Medical Relief Society (PMRS), and we have come to know them as friends. This is part of their story. On February 27, 2008 an Israeli air strike hit the Ministry of Interior building in Gaza City, also destroying PMRS' head office in Gaza, including PMRS' main Gaza clinic, its pharmacy, a mobile clinic, and

Sunday, April 6, 2008
Permissible Assaults Cited in Graphic Detail
(2 comments) Thirty pages into a memorandum discussing the legal boundaries of military interrogations in 2003, senior Justice Department lawyer John C. Yoo tackled a question not often asked by American policymakers: Could the president, if he desired, have a prisoner's eyes poked out? Or, for that matter, could he have "scalding water, corrosive acid or caustic substance" thrown on a prisoner? How about slitting an ear, nose or lip?

Sunday, April 6, 2008
The General and the Trap
After years of intensive training by American advisors and an investment of $22 billion dollars, U.S. military spokesmen are once again left trying to put the best face on a strategic disaster (from which they were rescued thanks to negotiations between Muqtada al-Sadr and advisors to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, brokered in Iran by General Qassem Suleimani, a man on the U.S. Treasury Department's terrorist watch list).

Sunday, April 6, 2008
Fed Up: Bernanke joins G-7 to Stem Global Financial Meltdown
(2 comments) Another Fed bailout to hide the damning evidence that $trillions$ of MBSs are utterly worthless and devouring the financial system from the inside. Congress is being muscled out of financial market supervision by a troop of venal banksters and corporate picaroons who are threatening to finish-off the already-defanged SEC and put the Fed in the driver's seat for good. Police the markets on the 'honor' system? Crazy!

Saturday, April 5, 2008
The Case for a Sustainability Emergency, Part II
Most climate change policies aim to limit the average global temperature rise to 2-3 degrees. Given that the earth is already overheated these goals are practically useless. Today we'll discuss how, with a shared sense of purpose and heroic leadership, humans have the technical and social capacity to go into emergency mode and design an economic and environmental turnaround in 10-20 years.

Saturday, April 5, 2008
The End of Cheap Oil
(1 comments) We are heading into a period of resource scarcity and the depletion of our oil supplies, and the disruption of the oil markets and the allocation of this crucial resource all around the world. Small towns are coming back. One of the reasons that they will, is that in the future we're going to have to have human urban habitats that have a meaningful relationship with productive ag-land outside of the city.

Saturday, April 5, 2008
Think green to reduce nanotech hazards
The University of Oregon's Jim Hutchison already holds three patents in the emerging field of nanotechnology. He also embraces a strong call for exploring potential environmental and health implications, which he says could be many, and for designing new materials with reduced hazard. The available data, he notes, are often uncertain or in conflict. He urges the industry to adopt a proactive approach now, before hazards

Saturday, April 5, 2008
British fear US commander is beating the drum for Iran strikes
A strong statement from General David Petraeus about Iran's intervention in Iraq could set the stage for a US attack on Iranian military facilities, according to a Whitehall assessment. In closely watched testimony in Washington next week, Gen Petraeus will state that the Iranian threat has risen as Tehran has supplied and directed attacks by militia fighters against the Iraqi state and its US allies.

Saturday, April 5, 2008
Colombian Government terminates contract with Burson-Marsteller
(1 comments) It was ok for Penn to be paid by both sides- as long as it wasn't public knowledge. Mark Penn yesterday called his meeting with Colombia, a client of the firm he heads, an "error," and the Colombian government, in a statement from its embassy, calls the notion that its hired gun won't meet with it "unacceptable," and fires the firm.

Saturday, April 5, 2008
Arab-Israelis are increasingly treated as the enemy within
A law making it next to impossible for West Bankers and Gazans to get Israeli residence or citizenship through marriage has made it much harder for Palestinians in Israel to marry their own kind in the occupied territories, as they used to. Earlier this year the attorney-general finally ruled out any prosecutions against police suspected of killing 13 Arabs during riots in October 2000, citing lack of evidence. Several other k

Friday, April 4, 2008
Bird flu spreads among dogs
(1 comments) A study has shown a bird flu strain that has killed dogs can spread from one dog to another, showing that the disease is capable of crossing species and causing sickness in mammals. Dozens of dogs in South Korea have been sickened by the H3N2 strain of the bird flu virus.

Friday, April 4, 2008
ACLU And NACDL Assembling Guantanamo Defense Teams
The Guantánamo military commissions process – which allows detainees to be convicted on the basis of secret evidence, hearsay, and confessions derived from torture – is an affront to civil liberties and a stain on America's reputation around the world. And although our involvement cannot cure the fundamental flaws of this process, we are stepping into the ring to make the proceedings as fair as possible

Friday, April 4, 2008
Soros: The false belief at the heart of the financial turmoil
For the past 25 years or so the financial authorities and institutions they regulate have been guided by market fundamentalism: the belief that markets tend towards equilibrium and that deviations from it occur in a random manner. All the innovations - risk management, trading techniques, the alphabet soup of derivatives and synthetic financial instruments - were based on that belief. Regulators ought to have known better.

Friday, April 4, 2008
The Corporate-written Colombia Trade Deal
(1 comments) The U.S. Chamber of Commerce claims that NAFTA-style trade deals that throw farmers off their land, privatize social services and inflate medicine prices in the developing world are wildly popular among the masses in the developing world. Trade deals are all about investor rights, outsourcing and imperialism - the latter of which stokes anti-Americanism.

Friday, April 4, 2008
Federal agencies: Our rules pre-empt injury lawsuits
(1 comments) A developing body of judicial opinion could place new limits on the rights of those who buy or use products, consumer advocates say. It also could mean the savings of billions of dollars by companies insulated from lawsuits. Federal agencies now assert their rules override state product liability laws.

Friday, April 4, 2008
Antibiotics feed bacteria
Hundreds of bacteria isolated from soil samples are able to live exclusively on antibiotics as a food source, according to a report published today (April 3) in Science; this may help us understand how some bacteria develop resistance. Having an identified group of bacteria that can break down and digest antibiotics could be used in water treatment plants to remove excess antibiotics leeched into runoff.

Friday, April 4, 2008
61% of Historians Rate the Bush Presidency Worst
A Pew research poll last week found Bush's approval rating has dropped to 28% with the American public. An informal poll of professional historians the same week found 98% rate his presidency as a failure.

Friday, April 4, 2008
A Time to Break Silence: By Rev. Martin Luther King
Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak...Why are you speaking about war, Dr. King? Peace and civil rights don't mix, they say...their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.

Friday, April 4, 2008
Should the U.S. End Aid to Israel?
During periods of recession, when Americans are thrown out of work, homes are repossessed, school budgets cut and businesses fail, Congress continues to give Israel massive amounts of our tax money; currently, about 7 million dollars per day.

Friday, April 4, 2008
Levin: Bush backs 'corrupt and incompetent' Iraqi government
(2 comments) The Bush administration is backing a corrupt and incompetent government in Iraq, Sen. Carl Levin told reporters Friday, setting a tough tone for next week's hearings with the top U.S. commander in Iraq.

Friday, April 4, 2008
Israel Happily Buying Iranian Oil
Israel, supposedly observing an ironclad boycott of all things Iranian, has been buying Iranian oil for years. Israel gets around the boycott by having the oil delivered via Europe. A reliable Israeli energy newsletter, EnergiaNews, reported this last week

Friday, April 4, 2008
Fed's interest rate games could destroy the dollar
(2 comments) Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has reduced the key federal funds rate six times in as many months. "Helicopter Ben" is living up to the nickname he earned after he remarked in a 2002 speech that he would stave off a recession even if he had to drop money from helicopters to do it. Why would Bernanke, Moy, et al., want to degrade our money? Who benefits?

Thursday, April 3, 2008
Cell phones could kill far more people than smoking or asbestos
A brain expert warns of a huge rise in tumours and calls on industry to take immediate steps to reduce radiation from mobile phones. Using handsets for 10 years or more can double the risk of brain cancer. Cancers take at least a decade to develop, invalidating official safety assurances based on earlier studies which included few, if any, people who had used the phones for that long.

Thursday, April 3, 2008
Why Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke tore up the rule book
This ad for investment advice also contains some important info: Just five major U.S. commercial banks control 97% of all the bank-held derivatives in the United States, a concentration of power - and risk - unsurpassed in the history of finance. The bailout of Bear Stearns may also have been a bailout of JP Morgan-Chase!

Thursday, April 3, 2008
Doctors and Patients Agree
As they say in those drug-company ads, doctors and patients agree on universal care. It's the politicians who are lacking in courage, too cautious to confront the fear tactics that the insurance industry, the drug industry and other big players roll out every time. Belief isn't political action, and it comes up awfully short against the lobbyists' talking points...

Thursday, April 3, 2008
al-Sadr- Who Is Iraq's "Firebrand Cleric"?
Patrick Cockburn writes: Muqtada al-Sadr leads the only real mass movement in Iraq. It's a mass movement of the Shia, who are 60 percent of the population, and of poor Shia-and most Shia are poor. Otherwise the place is full of sort of self-declared leaders, many of whom spend most of their time outside Iraq. In general the government here is amazingly unpopular.

Wednesday, April 2, 2008
This 'Bombshell' Took a Year Falling
(1 comments) A recent article in Vanity Fair magazine "exposing" a US planned coup attempt against Palestinian resistance movement Hamas last year has ignited a storm of debate about Washington's Middle East policies. Yet for more than nine months, details of the plot were reported in the independent Arabic press, and elsewhere,leading some observers to ask: where was the mainstream media? The US planned "to provoke a Palestinian civilwar"

Tuesday, April 1, 2008
1.2 million HS students drop out annually
Seventeen of the nation's 50 largest cities had high school graduation rates lower than 50 percent, with the lowest graduation rates reported in Detroit, Indianapolis and Cleveland. "When more than 1 million students a year drop out of high school, it's more than a problem, it's a catastrophe," said former Secretary of State Colin Powell, founding chair of the America's Promise Alliance.

Tuesday, April 1, 2008
The Paulson Plan: Doing What He Wanted To Do Anyway
Paulson's plan will do nothing to slow this meltdown, or the next meltdown. Ultimately, this remains "shock therapy" - wait for a shock, in this case the market collapse, then do what you wanted to do anyway, but couldn't get through in normal times.

Tuesday, April 1, 2008
GOP to go on Iraq message offensive
(1 comments) As Congress prepares for next week's testimony by Army Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker, House Republicans are launching what they call a "full-fledged assault on the misinformation campaign promoted by Democratic leaders," whom they accuse of trying to "legislate defeat" by calling for troop withdrawals. Look for a "steady stream" of "op-eds and editorial board memos," an "aggressive" TV and radio opera

Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Barr speaks out on the Fed
When the Federal Reserve Bank ("The Fed") was set up nearly a century ago, it was not and was not intended to be a "Central Bank of the United States." None of us as mere citizens have any say whatsoever in what the Fed does or who runs it. The "Governors" of the Fed are appointed, as is the Chairman; none are elected by or accountable to the people.

Tuesday, April 1, 2008
U.S. fails to halt Emirates' dangerous trade
Roadside bombings of American troops in Iraq were occurring with bloody regularity when military investigators made a disturbing discovery: American-made computer circuits sold to a trading company in the United Arab Emirates had turned up in the bomb detonators. The Bush administration backed down only after the United Arab Emirates promised to pass their own export control law, but little has changed. (business as usual)

Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Military Report: Secretly 'Recruit or Hire Bloggers'
The report introduces the military audience to the "blogging phenomenon," and lays out a number of ways in which the armed forces -- specifically, the military's public affairs, information operations, and psychological operations units -- might use the sites to their advantage. "Hiring a block of bloggers to verbally attack a specific person or promote a specific message may be worth considering," write the report's co-author

Monday, March 31, 2008
Delusionary, Dancing Bush
Events of the last week offer a metaphorical glimpse at the delusion pervading President George W. Bush's White House. Bush and the First Lady spent last Monday clowning with the Easter Bunny while back in the southern Iraq city of Basra and elsewhere, full-blown civil war seemed about to explode. And in Baghdad, formerly protected folks were getting killed by mortar and rocket fire in "the highly fortified Green Zone"

Monday, March 31, 2008
Basra returning to normal after Sadr truce
Sadr called his Mehdi Army fighters off the streets on Sunday, nearly a week after Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki launched a crackdown on them, sparking clashes that spread through the mainly Shi'ite south and also the capital. The government painted the crackdown as an attempt to assert state authority in a lawless city. Sadr's followers saw the offensive as an effort to sideline them ahead of provincial polls scheduled by Oct

Monday, March 31, 2008
The Smart Way Out of a Foolish War- Brzezinski
(2 comments) The war has become a national tragedy, an economic catastrophe, a regional disaster and a global boomerang for the United States. Ending it is thus in the highest national interest. The decision to militarily disengage will have to be accompanied by political and regional initiatives designed to guard against potential risks. We should fully discuss our decisions with Iraqi leaders, and with Iraq's neighbors, including Iran.

Monday, March 31, 2008
The Decriminalization of Corporate Crime
George W. Bush and his cohorts have quietly dismantled more than a century of regulatory history-and good history at that. If we truly are to have "change" in Washington, the "changers" must begin by restoring those proven, efficient and protective elements of the regulatory state. What is the future of all this privati