Why The Greater Depression Still Lies Ahead

Obama, Bernanke pile on debt when de-leveraging is needed.

by Michael Pento

If policymakers do not understand the real cause of a problem, they will in all likelihood be unable to provide a genuine solution.

Messrs. Barack Obama, Benjamin Bernanke and Timothy Geithner do not understand the real cause of this debt crisis. They are politicians first and economists or students of the market second--if at all. Therefore, it is not wise to count on them to tell us when the Great Recession is over, or to provide a plan to prevent another one in the future.

The cause of the Great Depression in the 1930s, and the Great Recession beginning in 2007, was one and the same: an overleveraged economy. Excessive debt levels are the direct result of the central bank providing artificially low interest rates and of superfluous lending on the part of commercial banks.

The easy money provided by banks eventually brings debt in the economy to an unsustainable level. At that point, the only real and viable solution is for the public and private sectors to undergo a protracted period of deleveraging. The ensuing depression is, in actuality, the healing process at work, which is marked by the selling of assets and the paying down of debt.

Unfortunately, our politicians today are focused on fighting this natural healing process by promoting the accumulation of more debt.

During this latest economic contraction, the Federal Reserve took interest rates to near 0%, and the Obama administration is leveraging up the public sector to record levels in a bid to re-leverage the private sector. The government's philosophy is tantamount to sticking a frostbitten man in the freezer so he won't have to suffer the pain associated with the thawing of his extremities.

http://www.forbes.com/2010/06/30/greater-depression-still-ahead-personal-finance-economy.html

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Surprising new studies on statins dispute & reputation of big pharma: media silent on nutrition

 

by Anne Hart

Sacramento radio, at least on one sports station, is finally alerting average listeners to the latest medical studies on statins as related to the risks and benefit. The studies are pointing to statins raising more risk of harm than benefits of health for average cardiovascular disease and stroke risk folks. Also check out my other Examiner article, "Are too many doctors paid to advocate statin use?"

It's looking more like statins aren't reducing that many heart attacks and strokes after all, according to the latest studies on statins. Basically, it's one of the radio talk show personalities that yesterday (and repeated this morning) has let the public know more about the latest studies on statins and where to read one study. Also read the June 29, 2010 Los Angeles Times article by Melissa Healy about this latest study, Rift Over Statins‎.

You also can read the study from its primary source, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine. Read the study yourself, "Statins and All-Cause Mortality in High-Risk Primary Prevention: A Meta-analysis of 11 Randomized Controlled Trials Involving 65,229 Participants." Archives of Internal Medicine, 2010; 170(12):1024-1031. You also might want to take a look at the article, "Drug Company Pleads Guilty to Health Fraud," Life Extension magazine, March 2010.

The media is now disseminating this dispute between medical studies and the claims of the big prescription drug industries. The consumers' questions keep asking whether most doctors are controlled by big pharma's claims? And what happens to dissenting doctors that don't want to prescribe? Do they get intimidated by insurance companies who may want them to prescribe in order to get insurance?

Also a British study of more than 2 million patients found that those using statins were significantly more likely to suffer cataracts.The five-year study found that for every 10,000 patients on statins, up to 307 more had cataracts than non-statin users. Read the article about the study, "Heart drugs may increase cataract, kidney failure risk," published May 22, 2010 in The Age.

Patients and consumers in general wonder whether doctors who don't prescribe drugs, but use nutrition and certain supplements instead, usually make patients pay out of pocket because the doctors can't get insurance based on nutritional solutions or treatments using food-based products such as vitamins or minerals?

These are questions patients have about the decision to go with statins. Patients have to decide as a first line of treatment whether to go with food as medicine without being called a quack follower--unless of course, you work with licensed dietitians with R.D. certification or nutritionists and naturopaths with M.D. or D.O. degrees who really know their food biochemistry.

Basically, disputes almost always are about following the big money. And when it comes down to statins or any other drug, the lawyers are waiting in the wings for symptoms to show up. So what's the latest statins dispute about? The answer is the reputation of drugs. How are the various media handling news of the statins studies?

The dispute in the latest news concerns statins, the cholesterol-lowering prescription drugs that earn about $26 billion a year for their makers. Basically, news articles and medical studies in scientific journals are pummeling the reputation of the widely prescribed medications in one area even as it advanced their stature in another.

A meta-analysis — a review of previous studies — published in the Archives of Internal Medicine found that statins do not lower death rates among patients with risk factors but no evidence of established cardiovascular disease who take them as a preventive measure, according to the Los Angeles Times article.

http://www.examiner.com/x-7160-Sacramento-Nutrition-Examiner~y2010m7d1-Surprising-new-studies-on-statins-dispute--reputation-of-big-pharma-media-silent-on-nutrition

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Study: US media redefined torture after US started practicing it

By Daniel Tencer

The US news media radically changed how it reported on the issue of waterboarding after it emerged that US forces had used the practice, says a new study from Harvard University.

The study also found a double standard when defining waterboarding, with news sources commonly referring to waterboarding as "torture" when talking about foreign countries using the practice, but declining to do so when it's being carried out by the United States.

The study (PDF) reports:

From the early 1930's until the modern story broke in 2004, the newspapers that covered waterboarding almost uniformly called the practice torture or implied it was torture: The New York Times characterized it thus in 81.5% (44 of 54) of articles on the subject and The Los Angeles Times did so in 96.3% of articles (26 of 27). By contrast, from 2002-2008, the studied newspapers almost never referred to waterboarding as torture. The New York Times called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture in just 2 of 143 articles (1.4%). The Los Angeles Times did so in 4.8% of articles (3 of 63). The Wall Street Journal characterized the practice as torture in just 1 of 63 articles (1.6%). USA Today never called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture.

The study went on to note a marked difference in the way waterboarding is portrayed when the individuals doing the waterboarding are American, and when they're not.

[N]ewspapers are much more likely to call waterboarding torture if a country other than the United States is the perpetrator. In The New York Times, 85.8% of articles (28 of 33) that dealt with a country other than the United States using waterboarding called it torture or implied it was torture while only 7.69% (16 of 208) did so when the United States was responsible. The Los Angeles Times characterized the practice as torture in 91.3% of articles (21 of 23) when another country was the violator, but in only 11.4% of articles (9 of 79) when the United States was the perpetrator.

The study, from Harvard University's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, may be the first empirical evidence of what many media critics have been accusing the US media of, anecdotally, for some time: That the press changed its standards for "torture" once it became known the US was practicing it.

http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0630/media-redefined-torture/

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Pre-Crime? Try Pre-Diagnose and Pre-Drug: Psychiatrists target infants as mental patients

By CCHR International

A new study, published in the American Journal of Psychiatry and headed by psychiatrist John H. Gilmore, professor of psychiatry and Director of the UNC Schizophrenia Research, claims to be able to detect "brain abnormalities associated with schizophrenia risk"  in infants just a few weeks old.   We would like to point out the obvious flaw in this bogus study; there is no medical/scientific test in existence that schizophrenia is a physical disease or  brain abnormality to start with.  There is not one chemical imbalance test, X-ray, MRI or any other test for schizophrenia, not one.   So with no evidence of medical abnormality to start with, the "associated with schizophrenia risk" amounts to what George Orwell called Doublespeak (language that deliberately disguises, distorts, misleads)—it means nothing.

For decades, psychiatrists and Pharma have spouted lines to the press and public amounting to, "researchers now believe" they have medical evidence of schizophrenia as a physical/biological abnormality, or "new evidence suggests" evidence of schizophrenia as a real disease.   But despite millions of dollars in research funds and countless tales of "belief" —no evidence to support the theory.  One of the most common tricks employed by the Psycho/Pharmaceutical industry to mislead the public, legislators and the press, is to take X-rays or brain images of people who have been long-term users of antipsychotic drugs (known to cause brain atrophy/shrinkage) and then claim people with schizophrenia have smaller brains.   They've spouted similar studies on kids with ADHD having smaller brains, but the bottom line to that study was that the kids with smaller brains, were…smaller kids. These are just a few of the many PR spins employed by Psycho/Pharma to try and maintain the "belief" in psychiatry, in their credibility as a science.   As evidenced by the recent statement of psychiatrist Allen Frances, former DSM- IV Task Force Chairman, this belief is falling apart even within their own ranks, "There are no objective tests in psychiatry-no X-ray, laboratory, or exam finding that says definitively that someone does or does not have a mental disorder." —Allen Frances (And Frances isn't the only psychiatrist exposing the fraud of the biological brain disease model; click here for more.)

The logical question the press should be asking is what are the American Journal of Psychiatry and "the Director of UNC Schizophrenic Research" really after?  What is their goal?

As we have exposed in the article "Australian Psychiatrist Patrick McGorry Wants His Pre-Drugging Agenda to Go Global" there is a concerted push being headed by Australian psychiatrist Patrick McGorry and other pharmaceutically funded psychiatrists for the global implementation of a new mental health paradigm; preventative mental health, i.e., pre-diagnosing (diagnosing children before they develop a "mental disorder") and pre-drugging children ( before they show "signs" of the mental disorder).   There is an obvious push for the same pre-diagnosing and pre-drugging agenda with this latest study, which claims "major cases of schizophrenia are usually not diagnosed until a person begins witnessing its related symptoms like delusions and hallucinations as a teenager or adult . However, by that time, the disease [notice the term disease despite no medical evidence of disease] crosses the stage of preliminary treatment and is difficult to treat."   In other words, if we wait to administer drugs to them it may be too late.

http://www.cchrint.org/2010/06/23/pre-crime-try-pre-diagnose-and-pre-drug-psychiatrists-target-infants-as-mental-patients/

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Rep. Gohmert Warns Of Baby Terrorists

by Walid Zafar

Speaking on the House floor last night, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) continued his assault on common sense by making the generally nonsensical claim that terrorists were recruiting pregnant women in order for them to have U.S.-born children who would, several decades from now, attack the United States and "destroy our way of life."  Gohmert made the comments while discussing border security and Arizona's controversial new immigration law. 

Gohmert: I talked to a retired FBI agent who said that one of the things they were looking at were terrorist cells overseas who had figured out how to game our system.  And it appeared they would have young women, who became pregnant, would get them into the United States to have a baby.  They wouldn't even have to pay anything for the baby.  And then they would turn back where they could be raised and coddled as future terrorists.  And then one day, twenty...thirty years down the road, they can be sent in to help destroy our way of life.  'Cause they figured out how stupid we are being in this country to allow our enemies to game our system, hurt our economy, get setup in a position to destroy our way of life.

Watch:

Law enforcement agencies have long warned that criminal elements (including suspected terrorists) are actively exploiting our porous borders to gain entry into the United States.  But Gohmert's claim is new and based solely on an unsubstantiated conversation with a retired FBI agent.  No news accounts or national security alerts seem to support this conclusion.  We contacted Gohmert's office to seek a clarification but got no response. 

http://politicalcorrection.org/blog/201006250005

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Baby Terrorists

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Shakedown

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Summer in Iraq

 

by William Rivers Pitt

Afghanistan has been getting all the ink lately, and for good reason. General Stanley McChrystal's act of self-immolation by way of Rolling Stone magazine kicked off a genuine no-bones-about-it constitutional crisis over civilian control of the military, until President Obama sacked him at pretty close to the speed of light. The number of troop deaths has reached 100, making June the deadliest month for the coalition since this war began eight years ago. Civilians continue to die all over the place, the poppies continue to flourish, and there's talk about talks with the Taliban, but nobody really wants to talk about that. The so-called "mainstream" media was kind enough to wait for a Democrat to be in the White House before publicly coming to the conclusion that the war looks unwinnable. Somewhere, George W. Bush is smirking over that one, but that's just par for the course.

So, yeah, every day is a busy day in the dust and mountains of Afghanistan, and June has been exceptionally busy even by that high standard. For the longest time - the better part of a decade, actually - Afghanistan was the war that nobody heard about. People died every day, the Bush-era strategies failed and failed again, but all eyes were focused on the war in Iraq. The script has been flipped, Afghanistan gets the headlines now, and the ongoing war in Iraq has been relegated to the back pages, if it makes the papers at all.

It would be a hell of a thing if this country, its people and its "mainstream" media could focus on more than one thing at a time, wouldn't it? Because we are still at war in Iraq, too. Soldiers are still dying there - 38 this year, seven this month - along with dozens of Iraqi service members and policemen. Hundreds of Iraqi civilians are killed and wounded every month, just like in Afghanistan, but we have somehow allowed ourselves to accept the farcical notion that things are settled enough over there that we can ignore what's going on.

Think again, folks, because it's high summer in Iraq, and tempers are getting very short. According to a recent article in the Washington Post, the ugly effect of this ongoing conflict continues to grind the people into the ground:

At least three times a week, Maher Abbas brings one of his two young children or his elderly mother to the hospital to be treated for dehydration, stomach bugs or heat exhaustion. Lack of water and electricity are killing his family and his business, he said. Abbas's comments reflect a wave of fury that has erupted across this country of 30 million as Iraq's sweltering summer begins. Most people are having to deal with electricity shortages that leave them with no respite from the heat and no water when their household electric pumps shut off.

Seven years after the U.S.-led invasion, Iraqis are taking to the streets to demand basic services they have not received, despite many promises and the expenditure of billions of dollars by the U.S. and Iraqi governments. Their anger has forced the hand of Electricity Minister Karim Wahid, who resigned Monday. In a news conference the same day, Wahid said the ministry could not keep up with demand and did not have enough money, adding that the situation was out of its control.

On Tuesday, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki defended his government and Wahid. He blamed Iraqis for consuming too much electricity, squatters for tapping into and overwhelming the electrical grid, and the previous parliament for not approving billions of dollars for infrastructure projects to be undertaken with several foreign firms, forcing the government to take out about $2.1 billion in bonds this year. He also warned that Iraqis should expect power cuts for two more years.

Two years. Think about that. Americans will be voting in another presidential election before the Iraqi people can even begin to hope for more than a few hours of reliable electricity a day, and they've been dealing with this situation for a very long time already.

http://www.truth-out.org/summer-iraq60901

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LEARNED HELPLESSNESS

by Ted Rall

PORTLAND, OREGON--In 1967 animal researchers conducted an interesting experiment. Two sets of dogs were strapped into harnesses and subjected to a series of shocks. The dogs were placed in the same room.

The first set of dogs was allowed to perform a task--pushing a panel with their snouts--in order to avoid the shocks. As soon as one dog mastered the shock-avoidance technique, his comrades followed suit.

The second group, on the other hand, was placed out of reach from the panel. They couldn't stop the pain. But they watched the actions of the first set.

Then both groups of dogs were subjected to a second experiment. If they jumped over a barrier, the dogs quickly learned, the shocks would stop. The dogs belonging to the first set all did it.

But the second-set dogs were too psychologically scarred to help themselves. "When shocked, many of them ran around in great distress but then lay on the floor and whimpered," wrote Russell A. Powell, Diane G. Symbaluk and P. Lynne Honey in Introduction to Learning and Behavior. "They made no effort to escape the shock. Even stranger, the few dogs that did by chance jump over the barrier, successfully escaping the shock, seemed unable to learn from this experience and failed to repeat it on the next trial. In summary, the prior exposure to inescapable shock seemed to impair the dogs' ability to learn to escape shock when escape became possible."

The decrease in learning ability caused by unavoidable punishment leads to a condition called "learned helplessness."

Which brings us to the midterm elections.

Battered and bruised, with no apparent way out, the American electorate has plunged into a political state of learned helplessness. They've voted Democratic to punish rapacious Republicans. They've voted Republican to get rid of do-nothing Democrats. They've tried staying home on Election Day. Nothing they do helps their condition. They're flailing.

Go ahead, little leftie: smash the windows at Starbucks in Seattle. It won't stop transnational corporations from raping the planet and exploiting you. Enjoy your Tea Party, little rightie. It sure is cute, listening to you talk about the wee Constitution. "Your" government and the companies that own "your" leaders have your number. And they're listening to your phone calls.

http://www.uexpress.com/tedrall/

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‘Weapons’ seized in G20 arrests not what they seem

Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair during a Tuesday press conference in the lobby of police headquarters at 40 College St. in Toronto.

Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail

by Jill Mahoney

Toronto Police staged a display of weaponry to demonstrate "the extent of the criminal conspiracy" among hard-line G20 protesters, but several of the items had nothing to do with the summit.

Facing criticism for their tactics, police invited journalists on Tuesday to view a range of weapons, from a machete and baseball bat to bear spray and crowbars.

Chief Bill Blair, who told reporters the items were evidence of the protesters' intent, singled out arrows covered in sports socks, which he said were designed to be dipped in a flammable liquid and set ablaze.

Police said arrows with cloth on the end were intended to be set on fire.

Jill Mahoney/The Globe and Mail

However, the arrows belong to Brian Barrett, a 25-year-old landscaper who was heading to a role-playing fantasy game when he was stopped at Union Station on Saturday morning. Police took his jousting gear but let Mr. Barrett go, saying it was a case of bad timing.

In addition to the arrows – which Mr. Barrett made safe for live-action role playing by cutting off the pointy ends and attaching a bit of pool noodle covered in socks – police displayed his metal body armour, foam shields and several clubs made of plastic tubing covered with foam and fabric.

 

Toronto Police display some of the items they say were seized during G20 summit protests over the weekend.

Jill Mahoney/The Globe and Mail

Mr. Barrett said he was "appalled" at the placement of his chain-mail beneath a machete. He regularly takes public transit from his Whitby, Ont., home to Centennial Park to play the game, called Amtgard, while wearing the 85-pound armour and is worried people will think: "Oh my God, that's one of the terrorists from G20."

Police also displayed a crossbow and chainsaw seized in an incident on Friday that they said had no ties to the summit. When asked, Chief Blair acknowledged they were unrelated, but said "everything else" had been confiscated from demonstrators.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/toronto/weapons-seized-in-g20-arrests-put-on-display/article1622761/

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Eisenhower on the Opportunity Cost of Defense Spending

Gen. Eisenhower speaks with soldiers of the 101st Airborne on the eve of D-Day

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. […] Is there no other way the world may live?"

–Dwight David Eisenhower, "The Chance for Peace," speech given to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Apr. 16, 1953.

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Bulwer-Lytton prize for bad writing goes to 'inappropriate' gerbil sentence

Award for world's worst writing goes to author Molly Ringle's comparison of a lovers' kiss with the sucking of a thirsty rodent

by Alison Flood

 

Love rat ... Judges praised Molly Ringle for her gerbil-based lampooning of public displays of affection. Photograph: Paul Brown/Rex Features

A sentence comparing a kiss to the sucking of a very thirsty gerbil has won Seattle-based novelist Molly Ringle the world's worst writing contest.

Ringle, who says she only writes bad fiction when she fails at good fiction, took the Bulwer-Lytton prize for the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels yesterday with: "For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity's affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss – a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity's mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world's thirstiest gerbil."

Given annually since 1982, the competition, sponsored by the English department at San Jose State University, is inspired by the melodramatic first line of Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton's 1830 novel Paul Clifford: "It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents – except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."

Ringle, the author of the published novel The Ghost Downstairs, in which the romance between a nurse and a houseboy is played out against growing paranormal activity, is the 28th winner of the contest. "I feel quite ridiculous. But there are definitely worse ways to get 15 minutes of fame," she wrote on her blog.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jun/30/bulwer-lytton-worlds-worst-writing

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Airport body scanners 'could give you cancer', warns expert

 

By Daily Mail Reporter

Full body scanners at airports could increase your risk of skin cancer, experts warn.

The X-ray machines have been brought in at Manchester, Gatwick and Heathrow.

But scientists say radiation from the scanners has been underestimated and could be particularly risky for children.

They say that the low level beam does deliver a small dose of radiation to the body but because the beam concentrates on the skin - one of the most radiation-sensitive organs of the human body - that dose may be up to 20 times higher than first estimated.

An airport staff member demonstrates a full body scan at Manchester Airport. Now a U.S expert has said the X-Ray may deliver a higher radiation dose to the skin than first thought

Dr David Brenner, head of Columbia University's centre for radiological research, said although the danger posed to the individual passenger is 'very low', he is urging researchers to carry out more  tests on the device to look at the way it affects specific groups who could be more sensitive to radiation.

He says children and passengers with gene mutations - around one in 20 of the population - are more at risk as they are less able to repair X-ray damage to their DNA.

Dr Brenner, who is originally from Liverpool but now works at the New York university, said: 'The individual risks associated with X-ray backscatter scanners are probably extremely small.

'If all 800 million people who use airports every year were screened with  X-rays then the very small individual risk multiplied by the large number of  screened people might imply a potential public health or societal risk. The  population risk has the potential to be significant.'

Following trials, the airport scanners were officially introduced at Manchester Airport in January, at Heathrow Terminal 4 in February and at Gatwick in May this year.

The most likely risk from the airport scanners is a common type of skin cancer called basal cell carcinoma, according to the academic.

The cancer is usually curable and often occurs in the head and neck of  people aged between 50 and 70. He points out it would be difficult to hide a weapon on the head or neck so proposes missing out that part of the body from the scanning process.

'If there are increases in cancers as a result of irradiation of children,  they would most likely appear some decades in the future. It would be prudent  not to scan the head and neck,' he added.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1290527/Airport-body-scanners-deliver-radiation-dose-20-times-higher-thought.html#ixzz0sMa6RW6c

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Venice, Louisiana, Boat Captain/ by Catherine Craig

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BP's First "Spill"

by Stephen Kinzer

Only one industry in the world can make Wall Street's earnings look like chump change: Big Oil. This is, after all, a business where a "slump" year for international oil giant ExxonMobil means annual profits of only $19 billion. A few years earlier, on the back of skyrocketing oil prices, the same company had netted $45 billion, the single largest annual profit in history, a sum that exceeded the gross domestic products of more than half the world's nations. And as Exxon was drilling its way into the record books in the U.S. in 2008, Royal Dutch Shell was doing the same in Britain, hauling in $27.5 billion, or a mind-bending $75 million in profits daily. To keep the cash coming in, the five biggest oil and gas corporations have spent nearly $34 billion in the past three years on exploration. To keep American lawmakers off their backs or in their pockets, they've spent $195 million on lobbying over that same period.

Here's what they haven't spent their largesse on: oil-spill response. BP, whose American operations may never recover from its Deepwater Horizon catastrophe, told Congress it spent about $9.6 million in each of the past three years on research into safer drilling technologies. ConocoPhillips spent an even more meager $1.3 million -- and that was over three years. Congressman Ed Markey (D-Mass.) has ripped oil companies for their negligence, and called their preparations for future catastrophes "paltry." Given the funding, it's hardly a surprise that oil companies like BP are now stuck with antiquated and ineffective tools when a spill occurs, no less a spill a mile under the Gulf of Mexico's waters. As the Associated Press reported recently, the main technologies being used in the Gulf -- oil dispersants, offshore booms, and skimmers -- are the very same ones employed to clean up the Exxon Valdez spill two decades ago.

Now that it's helped create one of the great environmental catastrophes in history, BP has typically pledged to right its wrongs, including by giving $500 million to fund "independent research" into the impact of the Gulf spill on the marine and shoreline environment. Of course, you don't need millions in funding to know that the effect of BP's spill will reverberate throughout the Gulf coast region and along Florida's white sand beaches for decades, possibly generations. As Stephen Kinzer, the acclaimed author of the newly published Reset: Iran, Turkey, and America's Future, writes in his debut TomDispatch post, the Deepwater spill is hardly the first time BP has wreaked havoc on a nation and its people. Andy

BP in the Gulf -- The Persian Gulf
How an Oil Company Helped Destroy Democracy in Iran
By Stephen Kinzer

To frustrated Americans who have begun boycotting BP: Welcome to the club.  It's great not to be the only member any more!

Does boycotting BP really make sense?  Perhaps not.  After all, many BP filling stations are actually owned by local people, not the corporation itself.  Besides, when you're filling up at a Shell or ExxonMobil station, it's hard to feel much sense of moral triumph. Nonetheless, I reserve my right to drive by BP stations. I started doing it long before this year's oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

My decision not to give this company my business came after I learned about its role in another kind of "spill" entirely -- the destruction of Iran's democracy more than half a century ago.

The history of the company we now call BP has, over the last 100 years, traced the arc of transnational capitalism.  Its roots lie in the early years of the twentieth century when a wealthy bon vivant named William Knox D'Arcy decided, with encouragement from the British government, to begin looking for oil in Iran.  He struck a concession agreement with the dissolute Iranian monarchy, using the proven expedient of bribing the three Iranians negotiating with him.

Under this contract, which he designed, D'Arcy was to own whatever oil he found in Iran and pay the government just 16% of any profits he made -- never allowing any Iranian to review his accounting.  After his first strike in 1908, he became sole owner of the entire ocean of oil that lies beneath Iran's soil.  No one else was allowed to drill for, refine, extract, or sell "Iranian" oil.

"Fortune brought us a prize from fairyland beyond our wildest dreams," Winston Churchill, who became First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911, wrote later. "Mastery itself was the prize of the venture."

Soon afterward, the British government bought the D'Arcy concession, which it named the Anglo-Persian Oil Company.  It then built the world's biggest refinery at the port of Abadan on the Persian Gulf.  From the 1920s into the 1940s, Britain's standard of living was supported by oil from Iran.  British cars, trucks, and buses ran on cheap Iranian oil. Factories throughout Britain were fueled by oil from Iran. The Royal Navy, which projected British power all over the world, powered its ships with Iranian oil.

After World War II, the winds of nationalism and anti-colonialism blew through the developing world.  In Iran, nationalism meant one thing: we've got to take back our oil.  Driven by this passion, Parliament voted on April 28, 1951, to choose its most passionate champion of oil nationalization, Mohammad Mossadegh, as prime minister.  Days later, it unanimously approved his bill nationalizing the oil company.  Mossadegh promised that, henceforth, oil profits would be used to develop Iran, not enrich Britain.

This oil company was the most lucrative British enterprise anywhere on the planet. 

http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175267/

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US lawmaker: Not ‘one more dime’ for Afghanistan until corruption cleaned up

By Agence France-Presse

A senior US lawmaker on Monday angrily blocked billions of dollars in aid to Afghanistan, vowing not to give "one more dime" until Afghan President Hamid Karzai acts against corruption.

Representative Nita Lowey, who sits on the powerful committee in charge of the budget, said she would hold hearings into allegations that top Afghan officials flew suitcases full of cash from US aid to foreign safe havens.

"I do not intend to appropriate one more dime for assistance to Afghanistan until I have confidence that US taxpayer money is not being abused to line the pockets of corrupt Afghan governmentofficials, drug lords and terrorists," she said.

An aide to Lowey said that President Barack Obama's administration requested 3.9 billion dollars in aid for Afghanistan in the 2011 fiscal year.

Lowey, a member of Obama's Democratic Party from New York, said she would refuse to consider any assistance for Afghanistan other than "life-saving humanitarian aid" when her subcommittee meets on the budget on Wednesday.

http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0628/lawmaker-blocks-afghan-aid-vows-one-dime-corruption-cleaned/

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ACLU Study Highlights U.S. Surveillance Society

By David Kravets

Welcome to the surveillance society.

That's what the American Civil Liberties Union concluded Tuesday with a report chronicling government spying and the detention of groups and individuals "for doing little more than peacefully exercising their First Amendment rights."

The report, Policing Free Speech: Police Surveillance and Obstruction of First Amendment-Protected Activity (.pdf), surveys news accounts and studies of questionable snooping and arrests in 33 states and the District of Columbia over the past decade.

The survey provides an outline of, and links to, dozens of examples of Cold War-era snooping in the modern age.

"Our review of these practices has found that Americans have been put under surveillance or harassed by the police just for deciding to organize, march, protest, espouse unusual viewpoints and engage in normal, innocuous behaviors such as writing notes or taking photographs in public," Michael German, an ACLU attorney and former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent, said in a statement.

Read More http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06/aclu-surveillance/#ixzz0sMTMEdkU

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Wall Street Reform

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WHAT DID THURGOOD MARSHALL EVER DO TO THE GOP?....

 

In early May, soon after President Obama nominated Elena Kagan for the Supreme Court, we learned that Kagan had clerked for Justice Thurgood Marshall, whom she considers a personal hero. Inexplicably, the Republican National Committee considers this an area ripe for attack.

In particular, Marshall had characterized the Constitution as having been "defective" as it related to issues like slavery. Republicans hoped to use this to attack Kagan, and the RNC's Michael Steele demanded to know whether Kagan's reverence for Marshall included "support for statements suggesting that the Constitution 'as originally drafted and conceived,' was 'defective.'"

When it appeared the RNC's line was indirectly pro-slavery, the party quickly dropped the criticism. But for some reason, Republicans haven't given up on their Marshall-bashing.

As confirmation hearings opened Monday afternoon, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee took the unusual approach of attacking Kagan because she admired the late justice Thurgood Marshall, for whom she clerked more than two decades ago.

"Justice Marshall's judicial philosophy," said Sen. Jon Kyl (Ariz.), the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, "is not what I would consider to be mainstream." Kyl -- the lone member of the panel in shirtsleeves for the big event -- was ready for a scrap. Marshall "might be the epitome of a results-oriented judge," he said.

It was, to say the least, a curious strategy to go after Marshall, the iconic civil rights lawyer who successfully argued Brown vs. Board of Education. Did Republicans think it would help their cause to criticize the first African American on the Supreme Court, a revered figure who has been celebrated with an airport, a postage stamp and a Broadway show? The guy is a saint -- literally. Marshall this spring was added to the Episcopal Church's list of "Holy Women and Holy Men," which the Episcopal Diocese of New York says "is akin to being granted sainthood."

With Kagan's confirmation hearings expected to last most of the week, Republicans may still have time to make cases against Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa and Gandhi.

I often find Republican ideology to be rather twisted, but it simply never occurred to me that GOP senators would spend the first day of the confirmation hearings condemning one of the most venerated Supreme Court justices in American history.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2010_06/024488.php

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Recession cut into employment for half of working adults, study says

 

 

 

By Michael A. Fletcher

The recession has directly hit more than half of the nation's working adults, pushing them into unemployment, pay cuts, reduced hours at work or part-time jobs, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.

The economic shock has jolted many Americans into a new, more austere reality, which is likely to have lasting consequences for an economy fueled mostly by consumer spending. More than six in 10 Americans say they have cut down on borrowing and spending, the survey found.

The reason: Nearly half of the survey's respondents say they are in worse financial shape as a result of the downturn, which destroyed 20 percent of Americans' wealth.

"We're going to see much lower consumption going forward," said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. He blames diminished spending on the drop in housing prices. "People who thought they had equity in their homes have seen it disappear," he said.

The longest and deepest recession since the Great Depression has exacted a punishing toll that continues nearly a year after the economy started growing again. Hardest hit are the 9.7 percent of workers who have been out of a job for an average of nearly six months. Many Americans are delaying retirement and others have lower expectations for their children's futures, the Pew poll found.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/30/AR2010063000022.html?wprss=rss_business

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Drugsters in Academia: How Big Pharma “Educates” American Doctors

 The pharmaceutical industry has wormed its way into the hearts and minds of the medical professions in any number of ways—wining and dining doctors, sending them off to vacation in splendid spas, and even buying their names to put on industry-written articles promoting different drugs.

One little known facet of this drugster-doctor relationship is Big Pharma's role in continuing medical education (CME) programs, which are important in keeping medical professionals informed and up to date on the fast developing profession. Of the $2 billion-odd spent on these programs every year, nearly half comes from the drug business, which not-so-subtly uses the education programs to push new drugs.

Last week a conference at Georgetown University called "Prescription for Conflict" pulled together experts from academia, government, and industry to discuss the question: Should industry fund continuing medical education? The main instigator here is a former colleague of mine named Adriane Fugh- Berman, a doctor and teacher at Georgetown University Medical School. Fugh-Berman long ago became the nemesis of Big Pharma with a stream of articles and talks questioning the different aspects of liaison between the drugsters and the medical profession. I worked with her helping to set up PharmedOut.org, a website that seeks to educate the public on these liaisons, in part through exposes, both written and on video.

The conference at Georgetown included few critics as candid as Fugh-Berman. Those gathered included polite academics with hedged criticism of industry funding, and regulators like Joshua Sharfstein, principal deputy commissioner at the FDA,  and Julie Taitsman, chief medical officer the Department of Health and Human Services, who presented a list of  the different laws protecting the public. By the time they finished, I was so frustrated with government bureaucrats that I was about ready to join the Tea Party (except that they, of course, would want to do even less to control the greedmeisters at Big Pharma).

One blunt critique came from Paul Thacker, an investigator for Senate Republican Charles Grassley, who has been the most visible Congressional muckraker on the doctor-drug company love-in. Thacker bluntly told the docs to get off their supercilious "who me?'' attitude and come to grips with the scarcely believable conflicts of interest existing between the medical profession and the drug industry–conflicts that more often than not have been to the detriment of their patients.

http://unsilentgeneration.com/2010/06/28/drugsters-in-academia-how-big-pharma-educates-american-doctors/

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How David Vitter got away with it

Three years ago, the "family values" conservative was caught in a hooker scandal. Now, he's cruising to reelection

By Niall Stanage

 

Sometimes the strangest stories in politics are hiding in plain sight. So it is with Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana.

Vitter, a first-term senator, rose to infamy three years ago, when his phone number appeared in the records of the escort agency run by the so-called D.C. Madam, Deborah Jeane Palfrey. In the wake of the disclosure, Vitter made a de facto admission of having paid for sex, confessing to "a very serious sin in my past." 

The careers of other Republicans have been vaporized by infractions that could well be viewed as less serious. Last month, Indiana Rep. Mark Souder resigned after admitting to an extramarital affair. A hitherto-obscure California state assemblyman, Mike Duvall, departed last fall after being picked up on an open mic boasting about his amorous activities with women other than his wife. 

The taboo that continues to cling to prostitution -- along with the salient fact that soliciting a prostitute is illegal -- would have been enough, one might have thought, to put an end to Vitter's career. This is especially true given the contrast between his actions and his ardent social conservatism. (The year before he was ensnared in the scandal, Vitter declared himself "a conservative who opposes radically redefining marriage, the most important social institution in human history.")

Yet Vitter does not seem to face any great peril in his battle for reelection in November. 

A survey from the Democratic-affiliated Public Policy Polling (PPP) earlier this month gave him a 46-37 lead over his Democratic challenger, Rep. Charlie Melancon. Other polls have given Vitter even wider leads. According to Real Clear Politics' running average, Vitter enjoys an average advantage of 15.7 points. Especially considering the national climate of 2010, and Louisiana's ideological bent, Vitter doesn't seem to have much to sweat.

Perhaps more important from Vitter's perspective, no serious challenge has materialized on his right flank. Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council flirted with getting into the race, as did Louisiana Secretary of State Jay Dardenne. In the end, both men stepped back.

"It takes more than one sex scandal to bring down a Louisiana politician," is the salty verdict of John Maginnis, a Baton Rouge-based political journalist who, as the author of a book about the libidinous former Gov. Edwin Edwards, knows what he is talking about. Louisiana voters, Maginnis adds, "are able to separate human failures from one's performance in office."

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2010/06/29/david_vitter_wild_side/index.html

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Outsourcing Security: Defense Manufacturing Goes the Way of the Automobile

by John Lasker

From the microchips that fly F-16s and activate nuclear warheads, all the way down to the lowly (but deadly) bullet, more and more US military weapons are being made overseas by foreigners.

Some experts say that outsourcing defense contracts not only costs Americans jobs and America's connection to the war, but one of the nation's most essential assets, as well: its security.

According to William R. Hawkins, a defense expert on military contracting and former Republican Party staffer, foreigners have been manufacturing critical and sophisticated components of US weaponry for nearly 20 years now.

He says the Pentagon started outsourcing the manufacturing of "high-end" computer chips to Taiwan in the early 1990s - microchips used in US fighter jets and missile defense systems, for instance. Over time, the Taiwanese have "second-sourced" most of these contracts to the Chinese, he says.

"Can we trust buying [high-end] chips from China for our military systems? Will they perform as well?" asks Hawkins. "We have found Chinese chips do not perform as well. They've also found counterfeit chips in the supply chain. Can we be sure the Chinese won't plant Trojans or bugs in them?"

Indeed, on June 13th on 60 Minutes, Jim Gosler, an expert on cyberwarfare, said the US government has uncovered sabotaged microchips within some of the nation's most powerful weapons. "It's very clear that a foreign intelligence service put them there," he added.

Hawkins says outsourcing US weapons manufacturing started gaining serious traction back in 2004, when the Bush White House and Bush Administration free market neo-cons such as Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz began to force the outsourcing of an industry they all seemingly were in love with.

"The thinking was, there's not enough competition within the US defense industry," says Hawkins, who acknowledges the argument has substance, but argues that doesn't justify outsourcing.

Soon thereafter, the Pentagon awarded Brazilian jet manufacturer Embraer a $6 billion deal to build high-flying reconnaissance aircraft (spy planes). That contract would later be canceled; but the 240G machine gun is now made by Fabrique Nationale, based in Belgium. Italy's Beretta makes the 9mm pistol which is worn by nearly every US soldier.

The American public finally woke up to the issue two years ago when a $35 billion deal was cut with European and Aeronautic Defense and Space Company (EADS) to build 179 in-air refueling tankers for the US Air Force.

The Pentagon rescinded the contract after EADS' main American competitor Boeing protested the deal and lobbied strongly on its own behalf. On the second go-around, Boeing won the contract in March over EADS, which was caught trying to sell helicopters to Iran in 2005.

To grasp just how much the US defense industry's loyalty to its own nation has eroded, take what Alliance TechSystems (ATS) has done to make a simple bullet.

ATS of Minneapolis is the US military's largest civilian small-arms ammunition maker, and since 2008 has been awarded $200 million in American taxpayer dollars to deliver AK-47 rounds (7.62 x 39mm) to Afghan security forces.

Two-hundred million to make bullets sounds like a stimulus plan for American defense manufacturing. Yet ATK went on to "second-source" the contract to the former Soviet Union. ATK claims they had no choice but to go overseas, and offered only the following statement in explanation:

"There are no large manufacturers of non-standard, non-NATO ammunitions in this country," says ATK spokesperson Amanda Covington. "There are only small manufacturers."

http://www.truth-out.org/outsourcing-security-defense-manufacturing-goes-way-automobile60818

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Not So Neighborly Associations Foreclosing On Homes

Courtesy of Mike Clauer

Capt. Mike Clauer was serving in Iraq when he learned that his home was sold because of missed HOA dues. In many states, it is relatively easy for HOAs to foreclose on members' homes for missed payments as little as a few hundred dollars.

by Wade Goodwyn

Capt. Mike Clauer was serving in Iraq last year as company commander of an Army National Guard unit assigned to escort convoys. It was exceedingly dangerous work — explosive devices buried in the road were a constant threat to the lives of Clauer and his men.

He was halfway through his deployment when he got a bolt from the blue — a frantic phone call from his wife, May, back in Texas.

"She was bawling on the phone and was telling me that the HOA [homeowners association] had foreclosed on our house, and it was sold," he says. "And I couldn't believe that could even happen."

Clauer had a hard time understanding what his wife was saying. His $300,000 house was already completely paid for. Could it be possible that their home was foreclosed on and sold because his wife had missed two payments of their HOA dues?

In many states it is not difficult for an HOA to foreclose on a member's home for past dues even if the amount owed is just a few hundred dollars.

"I was really in a hurry trying to get home before my family was living on the streets," Clauer says.

Sold For A Steal

But by the time he got back to Texas, it was too late. The Clauers' four-bedroom, 3,500-square-foot home had been sold on the courthouse steps for just $3,500 — enough to cover outstanding HOA dues and legal costs.

The new owner quickly sold it for $135,000 and netted a tidy profit.

"Basically it's everything to us," Clauer says. "Having a house like this paid for was huge for us, for our retirement plans. We thought we were so far ahead, and now it's like we're starting from the beginning."

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128078864

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The last time a President accomplished this much in office, booze was illegal

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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Kucinich: ‘We are losing our nation to lies about the necessity of war’



By Stephen C. Webster

 

In Afghanistan, corruption is rife. It is so abundant, in fact, that a senior US lawmaker declared on Monday that she'd be freezing $3.9 billion in Afghan aid dollars until the situation is addressed.

Rep. Nita Lowey's declaration of principle was made in response to a Wall Street Journal report that claimed over $3 billion has been legally shipped through the airport in Kabul over just the last three years, leading investigators to believe much of it comes from U.S. aid dollars being diverted by corrupt officials.

Rep. Dennis Kucinich, making a speech to the House of Representatives on Monday, had a few choice words to describe the situation.

"We are losing our nation to lies about the necessity of war," the iconoclastic Democrat opined.

The Journal reported that "the cash – packed into suitcases, piled into pallets and loaded into airplanes – is declared and legal to move" through the airport. The paper added: "The officials believe [...] customers who have sent millions of dollars of their money abroad include high-ranking officials and their associates in President Hamid Karzai's administration, including Vice President Mohammed Fahim, and one of the president's brothers, Mahmood Karzai, an influential businessman.

"Where they allegedly get the money is one of the questions under investigation."

Speaking before Congress, Kucinich raised the specter of the $12 billion shipped in pallets from the United States to Iraq just after the Bush administration's "shock and awe" bombing campaign.

"Vanity Fair reported in 2004 that 'at least $9 billion' of the cash had 'gone missing, unaccounted for,'" he noted. "$9 billion."

Kucinich continued: "

Last week, the BBC reported that 'the US military has been giving tens of millions of dollars to Afghan security firms who are funneling the money to warlords.' Add to that a corrupt Afghan government underwritten by the lives of our troops
 ... And now reports indicate that Congress is preparing to attach $10 billion in state education funding to a $33 billion spending bill to keep the war going.

 Back home, millions of Americans are out of work, losing their homes, losing their savings, their pensions and their retirement security.

"We are losing our nation to lies about the necessity of war. Bring our troops home. End the war. Secure our economy."

It's not the first time Kucinich has lambasted aid funding to Afghanistan. The Congressman declared in a 2009 press release: "U.S. contractors are paying U.S. tax dollars to the Taliban in order to protect the delivery of U.S. shipments of U.S. goods to U.S. soldiers so that our soldiers can fight the Taliban."

http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0629/kucinich-we-losing-nation-lies-necessity-war/

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Sticking the public with the bill for the bankers’ crisis

by Naomi Klein

My city feels like a crime scene and the criminals are all melting into the night, fleeing the scene. No, I'm not talking about the kids in black who smashed windows and burned cop cars on Saturday.

I'm talking about the heads of state who, on Sunday night, smashed social safety nets and burned good jobs in the middle of a recession. Faced with the effects of a crisis created by the world's wealthiest and most privileged strata, they decided to stick the poorest and most vulnerable people in their countries with the bill.

How else can we interpret the G20's final communiqué, which includes not even a measly tax on banks or financial transactions, yet instructs governments to slash their deficits in half by 2013. This is a huge and shocking cut, and we should be very clear who will pay the price: students who will see their public educations further deteriorate as their fees go up; pensioners who will lose hard-earned benefits; public-sector workers whose jobs will be eliminated. And the list goes on. These types of cuts have already begun in many G20 countries including Canada, and they are about to get a lot worse.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/g8-g20/opinion/sticking-the-public-with-the-bill-for-the-bankers-crisis/article1620729/

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The Death -- or the Evolution -- of the Midlist Author?

by Peta Jinnath Andersen

Is the publishing crunch killing midlist authors? Or just forcing them to move on?

If you've ever walked around a bookstore, chances are you've picked up a midlist book. Midlist books take up the majority of the shelf space, filling in the gaps between bestsellers and popular books we love to hate (*cough* Twilight Saga *cough*). According to James McGrath Morris over at the Huffington Post, though, e-books are killing midlist authors everywhere, rearing their ugly, easily read e-ink heads to take chunks out of the reader-bookstore relationship. Fortunately, the slow death McGrath Morris predicts may never come to pass, if e-books and e-rights are handled with care. In fact, e-books could well be the savior of the midlist book, perhaps even the writing life itself.

Midlist books are exactly what they sound like—the middle sellers, middle catalog books that make up the bulk of a publisher's output. If you imagine publishing as a cake (as I often do), bestsellers are the frosting, midlist books are the cake itself, and poorer, unpopular books are the burnt bottom crust. Midlist books are the titles which sell well (10,000 - 20,000 copies), their authors the arguably lucky folk who make their living writing, though many still need to supplement their income with day jobs.
  
(Full disclosure: I am, for the most part, pro e-book (the iPhone Peter Rabbit app still freaks me out). I have a kindle, and I've been reading Project Gutenberg downloads since my first taste of the internet, back in the '90s.)

Authors, contrary to popular belief, do not laze around all day thinking up stories, or sit at keyboards tapping away as The Next Big Thing flows unhindered from their fingers. Publishers don't throw them giant book launch parties, and their sales information isn't always as forthcoming as they'd like. In 2004, Salon.com posted an article by a midlist author known only as Jane Austen Doe, detailing the difficulties of life as a not-quite bestseller.

From Doe's piece:

In the 10 years since I signed my first book contract, the publishing industry has changed in ways that are devastating—emotionally, financially, professionally, spiritually, and creatively—to midlist authors like me. You've read about it in your morning paper: Once-genteel "houses" gobbled up by slavering conglomerates; independent bookstores cannibalized by chain and online retailers; book sales sinking as the number of TV channels soars. What once was about literature is now about return on investment. What once was hand-sold one by one by well-read, book-loving booksellers now moves by the pallet-load at Wal-Mart and Borders—or doesn't move at all.

If that's not disheartening enough, here's James Kirvin's 2002 take (via the Salon piece):

Publishing today is a business, dominated by stockholders and profit margins, run entirely according to the hard, cold numbers. Investors in the major megacorporations that own nearly all of the New York majors want profit, and lots of it. In a business that traditionally makes maybe 4-6 percent profit in a good year, today's stockholders are demanding 15-18 percent. Gone are the days when a publisher could nurture a writer with potential through several lackluster efforts. Today's editors can't afford a single flop.

Since 2004, the situation has grown yet more dire. With the exception of children's publishing, numbers are down across the board, and publishers are scrambling to make do, struggling to get a foot in the door of the new digital domain and cement their rights lest they go the way of the music industry. Advances are lower, print runs smaller, promotion almost non-existent. As print media fights the good fight (and dies the slow death), midlist reviews, once fairly common, are dwindling, replaced by blog reviews which, while useful, simply don't pull the same numbers or respect as their print counterparts (yet). Authors and publishers are each looking for a savior, a game changer, a way to have their cake and eat it, too. And they may have found one: the e-book.

Saviors are notoriously hard to recognize, often greeted with disdain. The Gutenberg press? Met with disdain by the nobility and the Pope.  The industrial revolution? Bad, bad, bad, let's destroy the machinery. But e-books offer the industry a chance to reassess and start afresh, for us to move beyond older standards and ideas and rewrite the way we think of publishing economics in general. And it's understandable that the industry is afraid. The 1979 Supreme Court ruling on Thor Power Tool Company v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue changed publishing economics for the worse—and was the beginning of the end for midlist authors (to read more about the case and its ramifications, check out this SFWA article by Kevin O'Donnell Jr.).

http://www.popmatters.com/pm/post/127313-the-death-or-the-evolution-of-the-midlist-author

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Bob Staake depicts the gulf oil spill in the style of M.C. Escher

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Uncle Cheney

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MODERN PIRATE DEMANDS: RESPIRATORS FOR FISHERMEN NOW! END THE USE OF COREXIT 9500!

by Plutonian Mac

 

 

Now here's a pirate lass after my own my heart. Meet Bonny Blaire Johnson



With Blackbeard's flag flying on the Beach, this beauteous pirate throws down the gauntlet against BP, the modern equivalent of the ruthless East India Trading Company that so many pirates warred against. Sharpen your cutlusses, mates, it's time to go to war again against the oppressive rich and powerful!

Hempforhope's (Blaire Johnson) Video and YouTube Channel text:

Out of growing concern for the welfare of fishermen, wildlife and clean up crews in the Gulf coast comes a call to President Obama to end the use of the toxic chemical Corexit 9500.

Through the use of the deadly chemical dispersant Corexit 9500, BP is making the oil spill 4x more toxic. Why has the US continued to allow the use of Corexit when it was outlawed in Britain in 1998, and the EPA told BP to quit using it in May? And why are the criminals in charge of cleaning up the crime scene?

 

And when the EPA tells BP to stop using Corexit 9500, and BP refuses,

THEN IT'S TIME FOR PRESIDENT OBAMA TO STEP IN, AND SUPPLY ALL CLEAN UP WORKERS WITH RESPIRATORS, AND TO PERSONALLY SEE TO THE IMMEDIATE END OF THE USE OF COREXIT 9500.

 

http://plutonianmac.blogspot.com/2010/06/modern-pirate-demands-respirators-for.html

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7,300 Palestinians in Israeli jails

 

Israeli soldiers take a young boy into custody by force.‎

 

7,300 Palestinians, including 17 legislators and two former ministers, are currently detained in about 20 Israeli prisons, a report says.

Hundreds of them have never been charged or put on trial.

Among the detained are 33 women, nearly 300 children, 296 administrative detainees, and dozens of political leaders, Palestinian researcher Abdul Nasser Farawna said in a report issued on Monday.

Farawana, who specializes in detainee affairs, said that 1,500 of them are ill and need urgent medical attention and dozens need surgeries and hospitalization, but no action has been taken by the Israeli authorities.

The detainees are held in about twenty prisons and detention and interrogation centers, mainly in Ramon, Shatta, Galboa, Asqalan, Hadarim, Al-Damoun, Be'er Sheva, Ofer, Majoddo, and the Negev detention camp, he added.

He went on to say that 83 percent of the detainees are from the West Bank, 10.6 percent are from Gaza, while the rest are Arab residents of Israel and other Arab nationals.

Jail terms range from 10 years to life sentences, Farawna, who is also a former detainee, explained.

Political figures like Nael al-Barghouthi, Fakhri al-Barghouthi, and Akram Mansour have been in prison for over 30 years.

 

http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=132472&sectionid=351020202

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