Atlantic Free Press was launched in September 2006 by Dutch-Canadian R.G.
Kastelein of V.O.F. Expathos, in the Netherlands and American Expatriate Chris Floyd of
Oxford, UK.
Brick Ogden, an American Expatriate in Amsterdam has been a key supporter of this project.
Assistant Editor Canadian Chris Cook hails from Victoria, British Columbia and Senior Writer Paul William Roberts is based in Toronto - but often on the road.
The mission of AF Press is simple: to dig out nuggets of truth from
the slag-heap of lies, ignorance and witless diversion that has buried
public discourse today. AF Press provides a new venue for
disseminating hard news and insightful, fact-based analysis of the
harsh realities too often ignored or distorted by the mainstream press.
To a few individuals in the civilian and defense communities, Divine Strake was more than just an exercise to determine the lowest nuclear calibration needed to destroy a hardened underground bunker in limestone geology. The 'other' purpose of Divine Strake, one that I personally never had much belief in, was to conduct a 'dry run' on an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities.
Such an event would have disastrous radiological consequences not just for Iran, but also Pakistan, China, and other nations in that entire region. The 'thinking' is that if you hit a deeply buried object with a nuclear bomb, the 'dirty stuff' most likely will not just stay in the ground. That's where the term 'bunker buster' becomes infused with the word 'fantasy'. It seems that there really are no ideal conditions for a fully contained, successful bunker buster. The reason is that even if a detonation can result in the explosion being contained beneath the surface, the event will still result in a collapsed crater or at the very least an open passageway from which the bomb entered. Harmful clouds of radioactive gasses will emerge vertically up through the crater or the passageway and reach the surface where gasses and contaminated particulates can travel over a great area.
Divine Strake, in the eyes of a few defense and other conspiracy theorists, was a dry run to see what will happen when radioactive dust is thrown into the atmosphere. This is where you have to put on your 'I'm thinking sinister' hat and go along for a bumpy ride: Since the DOE knew there was plutonium in the soils at the Divine Strake ground-zero and plutonium is a good substitute in experiments for uranium since the two closely resemble each other, the DOE would have the perfect rock formation, blast size, charge depth, tunnel depth, etc... and surrogate radiological substance at the Nevada Test Site to determine the size and toxicity of the plume that may be emitted from a less-than-perfect nuclear bunker blast on a uranium-packed facility in Iran. Where would the uranium dust go? How far? What would be the health effects?
A day of violence, fraud and a “grand rebellion” against the Santa Cruz oligarchy.
This is how Bolivian president, Evo Morales Ayma, described the result of the unconstitutional May 4 “autonomy” referendum organised by the authorities in Santa Cruz — which many feared was aimed at dividing Bolivia.
The referendum was the first in a series of proposed referendums to be held in the departments of the so-called Half Moon — Santa Cruz plus Pando, Beni and Tarija, resource-rich departments in Bolivia’s east. The Half Moon remains dominated by the white oligarchy despite the coming to power nationally of Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president, on the back of a mass movement against neoliberalism led by the indigenous majority.
Illegal vote
While the National Electoral Court had ruled that the autonomy referendum — which the government had proposed be held simultaneously with a referendum to approve the new constitution — could not go ahead on May 4 due to lack of time and suitable political conditions, the prefecture and civic committee of Santa Cruz, backed by the Santa Cruz Electoral Court, decided to go ahead with what was an illegal referendum.
The drums of war are once again beginning to sound, as US imperialism steps up its propaganda attack on Venezuela's Bolivarian revolution.
The new offensive has centred on the supposed documents found on the laptops retrieved from the site of the illegal military assault by Colombia that massacred over 20 people at a Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) campsite inside Ecuador in early March. This is despite clear evidence of Colombian government interference with the laptops before handing them over, which many accept would rule such evidence as illegitimate.
On May 16, the Venezuelan government denounced as a "provocation" the incursion of 60 Colombian soldiers into Venezuelan territory, intercepted 800 metres over the border. This occurred at the same time as the US Navy has decided to reactivate, after 58 years, its Fourth Fleet to patrol Latin American waters.
A new period of uncertainty has opened in Bolivia with the initiation of recall referendums for the president and prefects of Bolivia's nine departments by the opposition-controlled Senate.
The law, first introduced into the House of Deputies by the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) government in December, had been gathering dust due to the refusal of the right-wing opposition to approve it in the Senate. The sudden move this month to pass the law has left many wondering why the opposition would take a decision that will have Bolivia go to the polls on August 10.
The idea behind the law is to let the people resolve through the ballot box the "catastrophic deadlock" between the government of President Evo Morales, backed by the social movements, and the opposition, spearhead by the elites from the eastern region who are tied to gas multinationals and agribusiness interests.
Elite manoeuvres
MAS and the social movements have been campaigning to approve the new constitution, finally handed down by the elected constituent assembly in December, that needs to be ratified by a national referendum. The new constitution would dramatically broaden recognition of indigenous rights within a new "plurinational" state, as well as increase state control over natural resources.
Seeking to defend their economic and political interests, the elites based in the eastern Santa Cruz department have counterposed a proposal for increased autonomy for the eastern regions — where the opposition control the prefectures and where most of Bolivia's natural resources and more than 60% of GDP originate from.
With the release of the US censored climate report — that Bush and his corporate handlers censored for four years — the words of the late Hopi spiritual leaders are mirrored forth.
Hopi Sinom, including Thomas Banyacya and Dan Evehema, foretold of a time when hurricanes, storms and wildfires would seize the planet if human beings did not care for Mother Earth. They also warned if the secret agenda of coal mining was carried out on Black Mesa, under the guise of the so-called Navajo Hopi land dispute and Navajos were relocated, that natural calamities would increase.
Just a few days ago in the Navajos' Chuska Mountains, I was listening to a traditional Navajo farmer talk about how dry the earth is. Looking at the dry pinon trees and dusty earth, she said it would be hard to get the corn and squash to grow this summer. The earth is so dry that it does not absorb water like it used to. Every year it gets worse.
The U.S. censored climate report, just released under court order, reflects this truth about the drought in the Southwest. The report also reveals the truth foretold by the Hopi spiritual leaders. Hurricanes and storms are increasing with global warming and changes in ocean air circulation.
Mohawk grandmothers Kahentinetha Horn and Katenies were in custody at the US/Canadian border on Saturday, June 14, 2008, when the two women were handcuffed and beaten by gangs of officers and border patrol agents. Eight officers beat Kahentinetha, 68, and five officers beat Katenies. Kahentinetha, publisher of Mohawk Nation News, suffered a heart attack and is in a Canadian hospital. Katenies was released from jail Monday evening and is in seclusion. Katenies, in a telephone interview on Tuesday afternoon, described the police attack on the women at the border. Katenies said the women were returning to Canada from a visit in the US, when they were stopped at the border. After the women showed their Haudenosaunee identification, they were told the IDs were not sufficient and they were detained.
Katenies was told she had an earlier warrant. She had refused to recognize the authority of the Canadian government over her. In the earlier case she had stopped at a border check and was granted permission to pass, but border agents later claimed she was not cleared to pass. When she refused to recognize the authority of the Canadian government over her, a warrant resulted.
On Saturday, when Katenies refused to get out of the car, five huge Canadian officers and border agents jumped on her, dragged her out and threw her to the concrete, grinding her chin into the concrete.
"I went down so fast, they had knees in my back and kidneys. They were like a football team on me and they acted like they had no boundaries."
"They told me if I didn't cooperate, they would break my arms."
In the aftermath of a major natural disaster, the ongoing tragedy that is playing out in Myanmar (formerly known as Burma) is unnecessary and criminal in nature. The military junta, that had initially withheld relief aid from reaching the majority of the population most negatively impacted by the May 2-3 cyclone, have reportedly stolen much of the goods and have blocked some people's access to them.
Even today, a month after the cyclone struck, over two million are still homeless and hundreds of children have become orphans without steady caretakers. Early on, a peculiar relationship between the junta, U.S. political figures and business interests became quickly evident. Most notably Senator John McCain's political adviser, Douglas Goodyear, and Doug Davenport, another lobbyist linked to McCain and Myanmar, have played major roles in seedy dealings.
Another disturbing connection to the regime is UnoCal, representing another outrageous wrong wherein human rights and social justice represent secondary concerns relative to wealth extraction, civilian exploitation and overall profit motives. Yet, few people outside of Myanmar seem aware of this association and the general populous in the country dares not contest the arrangement for fear of backlash.
Well here it is folks-the great unraveling so many of us have been forecasting during the past five years as we've read the tea leaves and researched the unprecedented convergence of myriad natural, political, economic, and environmental realities. As most of you know, I'm traveling, yes on the road, across this country. I was going to wait until arriving at my final destination before writing about my experience, but with oil rapidly heading for $200 a barrel, it feels important to do so sooner rather than later because our lives have just changed more dramatically than we can imagine, and we will only be able to comprehend to what extent as the repercussions of the end of the age of oil reverberate through what is left of industrial civilization.
In my travels I've seen exactly one RV on the road, a few SUV's and vans, a number of small cars and motorcycles, and lots of eighteen-wheelers going 55 MPH. Motels have a record low number of guests, and few people are eating in restaurants. I thought about writing an article entitled "Ghost Town USA: Echo Across America", but that was before oil reached a new record of $135 yesterday. The speed of collapse is taking even a seasoned collapse-watcher like me by somewhat of a surprise, and I feel compelled to talk about it as it unfolds in this moment.
For approximately ten days last month I traveled across the United States from my former home in New Mexico to my new home in Vermont. My journey has been the culmination of years of researching and soul searching in response to the odyssey of my species and the earth community which has now entered an irreversible trajectory of collapse.
At the completion of this transition, I feel compelled to clarify a number of issues around my relocation and relocation in general. Obviously, for the past two years on this website I have been talking about relocation as one piece in the complex tapestry of collapse preparation. Therefore, I feel that I owe it to regular readers and subscribers of Truth To Power to let you know that I've taken this enormous step since many of you have relocated long before I did, and many more of you are contemplating doing so. I believe that where we choose to stay or move to is monumentally important in terms of how we prepare or do not prepare for collapse. I do not believe that everyone should relocate, and I certainly do not believe that everyone should relocate in Vermont since relocation is a highly individual decision encompassing myriad factors, and one size definitely does not fit all.
In his most recent post, Richard Heinberg asks "How Do You Like Collapse So Far?" and also asks why we should think or talk about collapse if there's nothing we can do about it? He suggests that in the face of the gargantuan unraveling over which we have very little power, keeping in mind what it is about our species that is worth saving is a salutary emotional and spiritual practice. In fact he says, "...there may in fact be only one occupation worthy of our attention: that of identifying the qualities that make our species worth saving, and then celebrating and exemplifying those qualities. If we concentrate on doing that, perhaps we win no matter what. Outwardly, it will probably look a lot like what many of us are already doing: working to save a species, an ecosystem, a human community; to make a village sustainable, or to halt a new coal power plant."
What Heinberg states here is exactly what many other collapse watchers have been up to for the past several years. We look at the truth, we feel it, we act. As we take action, we do not do so naively believing that any particular action or several actions taken even by masses of individuals will prevent collapse, but we do it because it's the right thing to do-that is, acting according to what Sharon Astyk calls "The Theory Of Anyway."
I keep coming back to that fundamental underpinning in collapse-that thing called "death" and notice that no matter how you spin the unraveling, it keeps coming back to the two most unpleasant realities: the death of the planet and of one's individual egoic existence. I notice what a Herculean task it is for any of us to thoughtfully ponder our own demise, but I cannot escape or deny the fact that that is exactly what collapse is putting in our faces whether we like it or not. If you've read this far, and if you've been consciously watching and preparing for collapse, then to a large extent, you are already confronting your own death, but I believe it's important to consider the many layers of death that are in front of us. Of course, there's the possibility of the end of our own physical bodies, but more importantly, in my opinion, is the diminution and transformation of the ego with which we identify.
Atlantic Free Press brings you this report from Northern California — one family's true saga of a bursting housing bubble, the corporate corruption that engendered it, and the painful reverberations through their lives Sonoma County, Calif. — Nearly three years ago, the Taylor Family found a home they thought was perfect, a four-bedroom, single-story home with a hot tub in the backyard in a middle-class neighbor located between two parks. It was a safe neighborhood and a place that seemed to meet their needs as a family.
The price was a major stretch at $747,500. But as a couple, they had owned two other homes. One they had sold after they bought their last home. They tried to be landlords and found the experience frustrating. They rented their first home, but it was in a neighborhood where keeping tenants was extremely challenging. They sold the home for a small gain, but the cost of maintaining the rental was becoming a burden.
So it was that the Taylors moved from a gang-infested area in hopes of getting into an area where there was less violence and a better school district for the children. They moved into a nicer home knowing that while it was not perfect, they might eventually move into another someday.
Over the course of 12 years, they had adopted three children who were siblings and in the need of a home. In fact the children were all related to their family, and the decision was made that the children needed a stable family where they could be loved and cared for. The Taylors then refinanced their home to help cover large adoption expenses and other household repairs. The home became too small for their growing family, and they began to look at the possibility of adding on or moving to a larger home.
For two years they worked with several real estate people looking for a new home that was single-level and a bit larger to accommodate their family. However, when they did find a home, they were often out-bid, and usually the home was worth what a buyer was willing to pay. The homes seemed out of their reach; it was a seller's market for sure. Eventually, they gave up and decided that when the children finished grammar school and the youngest was about to enter kindergarten, they would look in a state less expensive than California for a home they wanted and could afford.
This morning as I began gathering Truth To Power's Daily News Stories, I opened Energy Bulletin's site and found a stunning article by Kathy McMahon "26 Things You Can Do Right Now To Manage Your Anxiety." Although she doesn't directly talk about humor, numbers 20 and 21 in the article which refer to protecting one's mental health and cultivating healthy pleasures certainly include it.
References on the internet to George Carlin since his death earlier this week are ubiquitous. All the photos and video clips have taken me back to the early seventies when I first discovered him as "the hippie-dippie mailman with your hippie-dippie mail — Man." More recently he gave us priceless routines such as "The American Dream" and "7 Words You Can't Say On Television". Like all skillful court jesters, George made us take a second look at the insanity of our world and our government, put it in perspective, and see it for what it is-unequivocally absurd. Of course, that does not erase the lethality and horror of it, but it offers another way of looking at and living with it. Humor has always empowered the victims of oppression, even as they know that it cannot make it go away. Not a few holocaust concentration camp inmates were able to maintain some sense of humor, however faint, amid the horrors of their daily lives. Sanity and human dignity are always augmented when brutalized people are able to laugh at their torturers.
Covering the period of March-June 2008, this article will try to highlight the political pressure applied by the US and UK governments on Turkey in view of their war plans against Iran. It is complementary to an earlier article titled "Will Turkey be Complicit in Another War Against Another Neighbour?" [1]
"[The Middle East] is capable of a very bright future:… a place of innovation and discovery, driven by free men and women. In recent years, we've seen hopeful beginnings toward this vision. Turkey, a nation with a majority Muslim population, is a prosperous modern democracy. Afghanistan under the leadership of President Karzai is overcoming the Taliban and building a free society. Iraq under the leadership of Prime Minister Maliki is establishing a multi-ethnic democracy." — US President George W. Bush (World Economic Forum, Sharm el Sheikh, 18 May 2008) [2]
Turkey was the last stop of US Vice President Dick Cheney's tour in the Middle East in March. Coverage of the event by the Turkish press gave the impression that Mr Cheney did not make any demands from Turkey's President, Prime Minister or Chief of General Staff, concerning the US foreign policy in the Middle East and/or Afghanistan. Given the increasingly evident Anglo-American hostility against Iran on all fronts, this wasn't very plausible. In fact, all the evidence since then suggests otherwise.
Shortly after Mr Cheney's visit, the US-based RAND Corporation published a report on the US-Turkish relations:
"Given its growing equities in the Middle East, as well as the current strains in U.S.-Turkish relations, Turkey will be even more reluc-tant to allow the United States to use its bases in the future, particu-larly the [U.S.] airbase at Incirlik, to undertake combat operations in the Middle East… Turkey is unlikely to support U.S. policies aimed at isolating Iran and Syria or overthrowing the regimes in either country." [3]
George W. Bush and David Petraeus are preparing to make a new Fallujah in Sadr City, home to two million Shiites in Baghdad. Thousands of people are already fleeing the area before the full-scale slaughter and destruction begin. As in Fallujah, the multitudes who cannot escape will be trapped in a "free fire zone", subjected to ruthless bombardment and ground assault. Thousands — perhaps tens of thousands — of innocent civilians stand in the shadow of imminent death.
The assault is part of the run-up to the coming attack on Iran — an attempt to secure the rear of that new front by destroying Iraq's Shiite nationalist forces. It is also part of an on-going effort to eliminate the strongest rival to the Shiite extremists that Bush has installed in office in Iraq, before the conquered land's fall elections.
The preliminary assault on Sadr City has already begun, of course. As the BBC notes, in the last seven weeks around 1,000 people — most of them civilians — have already been killed by the Bush-Petraeus "surge" into the area. Petraeus is frantically building high-walled ghettos in Sadr City, slicing neighborhoods in half, sundering families, destroying communities and livelihoods. Meanwhile, the Iraqi government is circulating leaflets in Sadr City districts, warning the people to leave — or else.
This, you understand, is liberation. This is freedom. This is the glorious "surge" to victory. As Tacitus noted:
A rich enemy excites their cupidity; a poor one, their lust for power. East and West alike have failed to satisfy them.... To robbery, butchery, and rapine, they give the lying name of "government"; they create a desolation and call it peace.
Tell me that this doesn't sound like something out of a history of Nazi tactics in World War II:
The rules [of engagement]t explicitly allowed the killing of unarmed Iraqis under certain circumstances...Specifically, the snipers were allowed to shoot unarmed people running away from explosions or firefights....Of course, it's not unusual for innocent people to run from explosions.
Didier, who has since been promoted to captain, said that "if that individual makes contact with you and then breaks contact of their own accord and disarms themselves while they are breaking contact, they are still an engageable target because they are not wounded, nor did they surrender." He explained, "They are only breaking contact so that they can engage coalition forces at a later time." In court, Sgt. Anthony Murphy, one of the snipers who was responsible for a questionable kill, testified that he interpreted this order about breaking contact so they can engage at a later time as: "Engage fleeing local nationals without weapons."
In other words, if an innocent, unarmed Iraqi runs away to seek safety from a suicide bombing, a missile attack or a gunfight — which any human being would instinctively do — then he is fair game to be killed by an American sniper.
The excerpt above comes from a story in Salon.com, "Killing by the Numbers," about an "elite" U.S. sniper squad that murdered a captured, unarmed civilian in cold blood. A more detailed excerpt follows below, but I'd like to deal briefly with one ancillary aspect first.
The story expands to talk more generally about the sniper program in Iraq, and is careful — overly careful — to emphasize that the snipers responsible for so many "questionable kills" are operating in very stressful conditions: sleep-deprived, sweltering in deadly heat, surrounded by potential "hostiles," at constant risk of attack. All true, of course, but it prompts this simple question: What the hell are they doing there in the first place? Why are they squatting and sweltering in "hides" in a foreign land, looking to kill people who never attacked the United States?
Arthur Silber has the second part of his powerful "Choosing Sides" series up now: Killing Truth and Hope — The Fatal Illusion of Opposition. There is little I can add to the insight and eloquence of the piece — just go read the whole thing, and follow up on the links provided there as well.
But I would like to highlight two particular aspects of the post. First is Silber's succinct description of the "corporate-authoritarian political system" that confronts us at every turn with its soul-crushing, death-dealing power:
This system encompasses every area of our national life....The military-industrial complex — or what is now often more accurately described as the military-industrial-congressional complex — is the most significant component of these interrelationships, but there are many other parts. They encompass all major industries, and almost every minor one, as well as many of our educational and cultural institutions....
This system as it exists today consists of innumerable interrelated, constantly moving parts. Countless agencies, commissions and bureaucrats act in concert and on their own to expand their power, and that of government generally. The system has a life of its own; it is its own reason for being. It sustains itself, and it seeks more and more territory for its dominance. The exercise of power and the acquisition of still more power are not directed at the improvement of the lives of "ordinary" Americans, whoever they may be; ordinary Americans are of no interest or concern to the ruling elites, except insofar as their labor and often their lives are necessary for the maintenance of the lives of immense comfort and privilege enjoyed by the powerful. Power is not the means to some other end, although that claim is a crucial element of the extraordinarily successful propaganda so willingly swallowed by the public. Power — its exercise and maintenance, and the acquisition of still more power — is the end.
Again, see the original for the several illuminating links provided.
There has been much throwing about of brains in the "progressosphere" about George W. Bush's shocking and unseemly injection of – gasp! – partisanship into his address to the Israeli Knesset the other day. Evidently this was the first time in American history that a president has ever indulged in such un-statesmanlike behavior while gadding about in foreign parts. And what exactly did Bush do, what was this act of unprecedented moral and political depravity? Brace yourself: he made a remark that could be construed as an implied criticism of Barack Obama.
Now, it so happens that there was indeed a very grave and sinister scandal in Bush's appearance before the Knesset on the 60th anniversary of Israel's founding. But it had nothing to do with his witless ejaculation of that clapped-out right-wing trope of yore: the "Neville Chamberlain gambit," in which anyone who fails to evince sufficient eagerness to immediately obliterate Washington's designated enemy of the day is accused of "appeasement," paving the way for the next Hitler, etc. No; the real scandal lies elsewhere. But the fact that it was universally ignored, in favor of starchy outrage over the non-issue of Bush's remark, tells us a great deal about the clueless – and gutless – nature of so much of what passes for political dissent in America today.
I.
We will get to the genuine outrage shortly, but first let's cut through some of the starch. The reaction of Will Bunch, who writes the Attywood blog for the Philadelphia Daily News, is a good example of the overwrought reaction that greeted Bush's typically bug-eyed reading of the words that someone put on the autocue for him. This is the offending passage, which Bunch took from this CNN story:
"Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along," said Bush, in what White House aides privately acknowledged was a reference to calls by Obama and other Democrats for the U.S. president to sit down for talks with leaders like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
"We have heard this foolish delusion before,” Bush said in remarks to the Israeli Knesset. "As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American Senator declared: 'Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history."
We have often noted here the special role that New York Times reporter Michael Gordon plays in the national media. For years, he has served as a key conduit for government propaganda aimed at fomenting military aggression, then justifying it once it has begun. In many ways, he has probably been a far more effective tool of the militarists than the Fox News network.
The latter, of course, pumps the toxic, bloodstained sewage of Bush Regime spin directly into the public discourse 24 hours a day. But Fox is a very crude instrument. The network makes almost no attempt to hide its direct relationship with the warmongers, as demonstrated by its recent hiring of "news analyst" Karl Rove – who, though supposedly retired from politics, is of course still a principal adviser of both the White House and the McCain campaign. Fox preaches largely to the converted, and although it plays a vital role in keeping the faithful roused to fury, its partisan extremism tempers its credibility with the great and the good, the "serious" Establishment players.
The New York Times, on the other hand, is widely regarded as the nation's leading newspaper: somber, serious, independent. It is also seen as a bastion of "liberal" journalism, forever skeptical of government – especially a government run by Republicans. Thus a dollop of militarist propaganda in its pages has a much broader and deeper impact than whole truckloads of bile on Fox. "Wow, the New York Times says Saddam has WMD – and they hate Bush, so it can't be White House spin!" "Look at this: the New York Times says Iran is killing Americans in Iraq – and those liberals wouldn't publish anything that agreed with Bush unless it was really true." And because innumerable media venues throughout the country take their lead from the Times, a well-planted piece of "credible" spin appearing there immediately becomes "conventional wisdom" on the subject.
Did you hear the alarming story about a country led by draconian Muslim religious extremists acquiring enriched uranium for their nuclear plants — plants which could be weaponized anytime in the future, putting weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Sharia law fanatics who repress women, chop off heads and throttle all dissent? What's more, they were given this weapons-grade material by a rogue nation led by a goonish tyrant who gained power only because he was the wastrel son of the former leader. Break out the regime change machinery right away; this evil must be stopped!
What's that? No, we're not talking about Iran getting souped-up nukestuff from North Korea. We're talking about George W. Bush's bestowal of enriched uranium on his pals and business partners, the Saudi royals, the most draconian religious tyrants in the world. Harvey Wasserman has the goods at Democracy Now:
You know, I'd like to know the insane asylum in which this policy was concocted. The idea of giving enriched uranium to the Saudis while threatening war with the Iranians for enriching uranium is astonishing. The idea that the Saudis are going to somehow lower the price of oil on the basis of possibly getting nuclear reactors in the future is just almost staggering to think about. It's something, I guess, we've come to expect with the Bush administration.
But the nuclear power industry is trying desperately to spread itself all over the world, and we have proliferation problems. As you may recall, the Clinton administration cut a deal with the North Koreans to build a reactor there, and of course now suddenly, when Bush comes in, they're a nuclear threat. We have to put this in perspective. We have to remember that when the Shah was in power in Iran so many years ago, he was in the process of buying thirty-six reactors, and had those reactors been completed before he fell to the Ayatollah, Iran would now have thirty-six reactors. So what the Bush administration is telling us is that this current Saudi government is always going to be in power and it's perfectly fine for them to have nuclear reactors. We know that India and Pakistan built—both built nuclear weapons from their commercial atomic power programs, as perhaps did South Africa. And it's just almost staggering to think about this prospect.
How strange: Bush and the many beaters of drums for war with Iran tell us over and over that Tehran's nuclear program must be aimed at building weapons, for why else would a country awash in oil want to pursue nuclear energy? Yet when Bush's smooching buddy King Fahd and his immensely corrupt court of baksheeshers — led, of course, by the billion-dollar bribe maven, Prince Bandar Ibn Sultan (or as he is known in America's own two-bit royal family, "Bandar Bush") — say they want to supplement their oil resources with nuclear power, why, that's perfectly logical. Enriched uranium? By all means, be our guest!
The
symbolic significance of Obama Barack's nomination victory is not
insubstantial. In a land where, not so long ago, having the slightest
drop of "Negro blood" in your genetic inheritance was enough to bar you
— legally and formally — from many jobs, educational opportunities,
places of residence, medical care, full participation in society, etc.
(and where these obstacles still persist, in practice if not in law,
for many people), it is striking to see a man whose father was not only
black but also a "full-blooded African" (cue the psychosexual
"Mandingo" anxieties of generations of trembly white folk) on the
doorstep of the White House.
At the very least — until the novelty
wears off (and novelty wears off very, very quickly in America) — if
Obama wins the presidency, there will be some aesthetic relief in
seeing a different kind of face on the tee-vee mouthing various
pieties, refusing to take any options off the table, etc., in place of
the long procession of pasty white males of Northern European descent.
As for the substantial significance of
Obama's nomination win, there is none. The only thing that really
matters is what the human being named Barack Obama will do with power
(if he gets it), and not his skin color. Or to put it another way: What
difference did Colin Powell's status as a non-white person in the
highest cabinet office make when the question of aggressive war was on
the line? None. He was later replaced not only by another non-white
person, but by a non-white female, Condi Rice. What difference did
Rice's ethnicity and gender make to her collusion with the Bush
faction's brutal policies of aggressive war, torture, rendition, state
terror, etc.? None.
The salient point of this truly
degrading campaign has always been: what will the winner do in office?
Will he (there is no need to add the "or she" now) immediately begin
the process of withdrawing from Iraq and making reparations for the
mass slaughter and mass destruction of our war crime there? And
speaking of war crimes, will the winner instigate investigation and
prosecution of Bush Administration officials for a host of high crimes,
foreign and domestic? Will he begin the process of winding down
America's worldwide military empire of more than 700 bases? Will he
halt the militarization of space? Will he end the multi-generational
boondoggle of "missile defense"? Will he call for the immediate repeal
of the draconian Bankruptcy Bill, that bipartisan weapon of mass
destruction in the elite's unrelenting class war against working
people, artisans, small business owners and the poor?
These are just a very few of the many
essential and highly urgent issues that a new president committed to
genuine change in the corrupted currents of our moribund Republic would
have to take on. It goes without saying that John McCain will do none
of the things outlined above. He is a dedicated, unashamed errand boy
of empire, and would never upset the apple cart — and long-term agenda
— of the war-profiteering class and its many courtiers and dependents.
A young, fresh-faced candidate, with a feisty, savvy wife, takes the political world by storm. He is highly intelligent, remarkably articulate, in sharp and ready command of the issues, with a winning charm and the common touch — in stark contrast to the aging, bumbling, cantankerous dullard he faces in the election. He offers hope and change, a whole new paradigm, a reinvention of politics as usual. He will take on the vested interests, the lobbyists, the tired ideas and rampant corruption of the Establishment. He will build a new international consensus, restoring America's tarnished reputation and its moral leadership after years of covert ops, secret wars, military adventurism, collusion with tryants, deceit and scandal.
Yet he is no knee-jerk liberal, no throwback to the divisive policies of the past. He transcends the rigid categories of left and right. He embraces the sunny optimism of Ronald Reagan, the populism of Franklin Roosevelt, the internationalist principles of Woodrow Wilson, the visionary ideals of Abraham Lincoln.
His candidacy becomes a media sensation. His whiz-bang campaign staff employs new techniques and technologies never seen in presidential campaigns before. He draws huge crowds; big Hollywood names flock to his side, and he himself is frequently compared to a rock star. His election — a narrow but solid win — is greeted by his supporters as a new era, a new dawning for America.
The year, of course, is 1992.
Perhaps many of Barack Obama's supporters are too young to remember, but the heady atmosphere of his transformative, transcendent campaign is, in almost every particular, a replay of what we saw in Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign. Clinton's supporters were just as enthused about the world-altering, Republic-renewing potential that they believed his candidacy represented. They too turned a blind eye to the many aspects of the Clinton campaign that didn't comport with their hopes — or else justified those aspects as things that Clinton had to do or say in order to get elected and then do great liberal things.
This has been one of the most extraordinary weeks in modern American history. The many isolated streams of evidence about the Bush Administration's torture system – and the direct responsibility of the Administration's highest officials for this vast crime – have now converged into a mighty flood: undeniable, unignorable, pouring through the halls of Congress and media newsrooms, lashing at the walls of the White House itself. In the course of the past few days, a series of events has laid bare the stinking sepsis at the heart of the Bush Regime for all to see.
It began last Sunday with the launch of a remarkable series by McClatchy Newspapers, detailing the torture, brutality, injustice and murder that has riddled the Bush gulag from top to bottom. Then came fiery Senate hearings, in which long-somnolent legislators finally bestirred themselves to confront and denounce some of the torture system's architects, including Dick Cheney pointman William Haynes III, who was left reeling, shuffling, dissembling – and bracing for perjury charges after his blatantly mendacious testimony.
Companion hearings in the House produced stunning confirmation of mass murder in the Bush gulag – a bare minimum of 27 killings, among the 108 known cases of death among Terror War captives. This evidence came from rock-solid Establishment figure Col. Larry Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell. (Of course, as many captives have been and are being held in "secret prisons," and an untold number of others have been hidden from the Red Cross, there is no way of knowing at this point how many prisoners have actually died or been murdered – or even how many prisoners there are in the gulag.)
And while the McClatchy series and Congressional hearings were going forward, a retired major general of the United States Army directly and openly accused the commander-in-chief of committing a war crime: authorizing "a systematic regime of torture." Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba – forced out of the service in 2006 for trying to honestly investigate the atrocities at Abu Ghraib – was unequivocal in his statement in a new report by Physicians for Human Rights:
"After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account…The commander-in-chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture."
Arthur Silber brings the heat in his latest posts on the FISA "compromise." He cuts through the surface outrage over the Democratic-led, Obama-approved evisceration of the Constitution to expose the even deeper outrages beneath. And he takes on those progressive enablers who denounce critics of Obama's position for their "freshman dorm cynicism" – i.e., calling a shameful action a shameful action, and decrying the Democratic candidate's active collusion in undermining freedom.
But first, I urge you to get on over to Arthur's site right now and put something in the hat for the man. As we've noted often before – and as Silber explains here – the website is his only means of support. He lives on a perilous margin, with failing health, in constant pain, in brutal poverty, yet still manages to produce insightful, eloquent and illuminating essays at an astounding rate. We cannot afford to lose this unique voice and vision. So give whatever you can.
…[As] odious and destructive of liberty and privacy as the new FISA "compromise" bill is, there is one perspective from which the momentous to-do about this legislation is very badly misplaced. The selective focus on FISA misses the crucial larger picture in a way that ensures that the ruling class's hold on increasingly tyrannical power will never be challenged — which is, of course, precisely what the ruling class wants. In one sense, I certainly won't criticize those who protest the FISA legislation so vehemently, because I favor almost anything that throws a monkey wrench into the operations of our monumentally awful and oppressive federal government.
However, and it is an exceptionally large however, if their protests about FISA remain the sole (or even the major) focus of the complaints about the surveillance state, the protesters will make a very large gift to those who wish to oversee, regulate and control every aspect of our lives.
He then quotes Jack Balkin's pertinent observation that Obama approves the compromise because he very much wants to have those broad powers when he is president. As Balkin notes, it is the unheralded part of the bill — which vastly expands "the executive's ability to wiretap and engage in much broader searches of communications than were permissible under the law before" — that is actually its most egregious and far-reaching element. The legal immunity for telecoms that helped Bush violate the law is but the icing on this poison cake. Obama can score political points by criticizing this element of the bill, because it doesn't really matter. It's almost impossible that immunity will be stripped from the final bill, as Democratic leaders have already admitted. The big corporations will be protected, and President Obama will have those expanded powers in hand — to be used only for good, of course.
Suicide has gotten a bad rap. In our culture of endless imbecile optimism, the culture of self-help and medicated despair, we have lost respect for the suicide. For my part, I have on a few bad nights thought of suicide but never seriously; more contemplatively, as in: death is of course the other half of our equation, a partner always growing stronger. I have a pistol here at home: how to use it effectively? In the temple? Or up through the palate, directly into the brain? Coward thoughts because anodyne, without the context of real pain – you haven’t lived the long deaths of places like Iraq, the Congo, Colombia…the murmurings of one who’d like to have this balls-out vision of death and reflect on it as if it were cake.
Still, to call the suicide a coward is an insult. The suicide enters the greatest unknown in human history. He steps willfully toward an abyss that the priests and philosophers build gossamer webs to conceal. Schopenhauer writes that suicide is the last act of a free man. Such a freedom is not to be dismissed. The prison, the county jail, the merest municipal lock-up confiscates the tie and shoe-lace of the incarcerated to curb this final freedom – implicit in the lock-down of a man is that suicide is indeed his last act of full agency, therefore it must be thwarted.
According to De Telegraaf (in Dutch) , the world is coming to an end at lunchtime. Since it’s already gone 12, maybe it will be tomorrow now.
If this is news to you, it’s a doomcast by the Chairman of one of Europe’s largest banks, Fortis. Fortis reckons it raised 8 billion in the nick of time, since the ‘volledig instorten’ - complete collapse - of the American financial market will happen within a few days. Just for good measure, General Motors will follow the banks down the toilet.
Fortis’ CEO thinks he has hoovered some of the last liquidity around. Looking at the number of British banks struggling with rights issues, he’s probably right. So, what happens when the banks run out of money?
Fortunately, we have a precedent in Russia with the 1998 rouble crash. You’ll have to get down to your bank at 6am and get signed on for a place in the queue. Panic buy food on the way. Put a table out on the street and sell what possessions you can. If your bank has already gone under, get some vegetable plants and head off for the country. The Russian bust saw a boom in survival strategies and you can learn a lot.
At the moment, we have most of the propellants of the Russian crash. A bursting, bubble economy. An expensive war. (More expensive than Chechnya.) Absurd levels of Government debt. (Even more than the Soviets owed.) An overvalued currency and rising inflation.
Inflation is cool. In the death throes of the Yeltsin economy, Russians went on a spending spree, since anything could cost 10 or 20 percent more the next day, who knows how much by the end of the week. Avto Vaz sold out its entire stock of Zhigulis. So if you have anything left under the mattress, spread it around while things are still at old prices.
Recently, the Independent’s correspondent revisited Russia and asked people what was the worst thing about the Yeltsin years. ‘The rouble crash, doh’, they replied. She then asked, ‘ . . and what was the best thing?’ After a pause and a headscratch, ‘the rouble crash’. Of course, it destroyed a bonkers economy and put a working market in its place. For bonkers, read bankers. When crunch comes to phut, they won’t be missed.
Tuesday, 01 July 2008 | 149 Hit(s)2 comment(s)
27. House prices collapse by 60% in 7 years (Opinion/Opinion)
Author : Daan de Wit
by Daan de Wit
In the interview Albert Spits explains why and based on what facts huge collapses are to be expected, resulting in housing pices dropping by 60% in seven years.
My name is Daan de Wit. With me here today is Albert Spits from the Frédéric Bastiat Foundation. We met each other at one of the info-dinners hosted by Willem Middelkoop, author of the bestseller (Dutch only) If The Dollar Falls. Mr. Spits, you are an advisor for pension funds.
I am.
But you are also clearly interested in the mechanisms behind money.
Exactly.
And this interest of yours is incorporated into the advice you give. Could you first talk about what your work involves and how much money we're talking about here?
The advisory organization that I work for deals in the millions of euro's, hundreds of millions, and that involves personal advice, actuary, pension administration, and everything associated with that. We're talking about pensions with an average turnover in the hundreds of millions.
So the advice you give has a fair amount of impact?
Sharp increases in food prices have generated a new wave of anti-occupation and anti-U.S. sentiment in Fallujah.
"This is a country that was damned by the Americans the moment they stepped on our soil," Burhan Jassim, a farmer from Sichir village just outside Fallujah told IPS. "This is Iraqi land that has always been blessed by Allah with the best production in quality and quantity, but now see how it has been turned into a wasteland."
Fallujah faces this new crisis after much of the city was destroyed by U.S. military operations in 2004.
The area around Fallujah city, which lies 70 km west of Baghdad, has traditionally been one of the most agriculturally productive in Iraq. Farmers planted tomatoes and cucumbers north of Fallujah, others grew potatoes south of the city near Amiriya. Both areas had plenty of date palm trees and small fruit plantations. Now production is down to a fraction of what it was.
The 60th anniversary of the state of Israel prompted reviews of the post World War II declarations that resulted in the formation of a nation that had no name until David Ben Gurion proclaimed on May 14, 1948, the birth of the new state of Israel. Books, articles, documents, memoirs and letters from past generations have detailed how a miniscule group of insiders prevailed over recommendations from the experienced and famous U.S. State Department of "wise men." An embattled clique, surrounded by powerful detractors, struggled against all odds and succeeded in its endeavors. It is the story of the Zionist mission. It is the story of Israel.
The history is available, but the impact, legacy and relevance of the 1945-1948 events to today's occurrences have not been sufficiently explored. Under the surfaced stories are the hidden messages and obscure drives that shaped the past and extend into the future. A more complete analysis of the legacy from Truman's rapid recognition of the state of Israel explains the past and clarifies the present.
We have the initiation of a trend whereby the supporters of those who derailed State Department Near East policy were able to morph it into Middle East policy and subsequently shape global policies. We have turmoil from previous events provoking a continuous turmoil in the Middle East. We have the George W. Bush administration functioning much differently than the Harry S. Truman administration, and, despite the contrary operations, we have both administrations framing Middle East polices that favor a Zionist cause.
The results in Tuesday’s twin primaries—Barack Obama by 14 percent in North Carolina and Hillary Clinton by 2 percent in Indiana—confirmed that Clinton is finished as a contender. Barack Obama will be the Democratic candidate for president this fall.
Clinton, the private-schooled, Wellesley and Yale-educated millionaire lawyer from Chicago, who first tried to present herself as a White House veteran, and then, in recent weeks, as a NASCAR mom on Food Stamps, and who in Pennsylvania resorted to cheap race-baiting and red-baiting in an effort to derail her opponent, has failed. Barack Obama, another private-schooled Harvard and Yale-educated lawyer, but one who actually did have to work his way up the economic ladder, won decisively in North Carolina, even drawing a significant number of working-class white voters in a state where white voters have not traditionally voted for candidates with dark skin.
As a resident of Pennsylvania, I can only express a sense of shame for the large number of white voters here who bought Clinton’s subtle racist message. North Carolina, my mother’s home state, proved to be more resistant to the Clintons’toxic campaign than my adopted state. Exit polls suggest that as more than one in five Pennsylvanians voted in the primary on the basis of race.
Now, if half of the 14 percent of the voters who were black voted for Obama for racial reasons, this still means that perhaps 14 percent of the state’s white voters, or about one in seven, voted for Hillary simply because her oppponent was black. I would argue that for a black person to vote for a black candidate because he is black is qualitatively different from a white person voting for a white candidate because the other candidate is black. First of all, blacks have not had the opportunity, ever, to vote for a candidate of their race who has a real chance at winning the nomination. It is a historic first. They are not saying they would not vote for a white candidate, and indeed, if they voted in the past, they probably did vote for white candidates, since that’s all there were on offer. It’s akin to women (and men) voting for Clinton because she is a woman. Obviously they are not saying they won’t vote for men, just that they want a chance to vote for a woman.
Americans are in a panic over rising gas and heating oil prices, and with reason. For months, the price of a barrel of crude oil has been rising steadily, hitting a record $127 yesterday.
Analysts keep getting trotted out on TV and in print, attributing the dramatic price rise to everything from “peak oil”—the idea that producing countries have reached their peak of productive capacity, and that the only direction for oil supplies looking forward is down, while demand continues to rise—to increasing demand in China and India, to supply bottlenecks, to specific news events, like a pipeline break in Nigeria, or a closed refinery in California.
Politicians, like Republican presidential candidate John McCain and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, have called for a two-month moratorium on federal gas taxes, but with taxes running at something on the order of 18 cents a gallon, this is not going to do much to bring prices down—in
Archives 
Hopi Sinom, including Thomas Banyacya and Dan Evehema, foretold of a time when hurricanes, storms and wildfires would seize the planet if human beings did not care for Mother Earth. They also warned if the secret agenda of coal mining was carried out on Black Mesa, under the guise of the so-called Navajo Hopi land dispute and Navajos were relocated, that natural calamities would increase.
Well here it is folks-the great unraveling so many of us have been forecasting during the past five years as we've read the tea leaves and researched the unprecedented convergence of myriad natural, political, economic, and environmental realities. As most of you know, I'm traveling, yes on the road, across this country. I was going to wait until arriving at my final destination before writing about my experience, but with oil rapidly heading for $200 a barrel, it feels important to do so sooner rather than later because our lives have just changed more dramatically than we can imagine, and we will only be able to comprehend to what extent as the repercussions of the end of the age of oil reverberate through what is left of industrial civilization. 
In his most recent post, Richard Heinberg asks "
Sonoma County, Calif. — Nearly three years ago, the Taylor Family found a home they thought was perfect, a four-bedroom, single-story home with a hot tub in the backyard in a middle-class neighbor located between two parks. It was a safe neighborhood and a place that seemed to meet their needs as a family. 
This morning as I began gathering Truth To Power's Daily News Stories, I opened Energy Bulletin's site and found a stunning article by Kathy McMahon "
George W. Bush and David Petraeus are preparing to make 
The
symbolic significance of Obama Barack's nomination victory is not
insubstantial. In a land where, not so long ago, having the slightest
drop of "Negro blood" in your genetic inheritance was enough to bar you
— legally and formally — from many jobs, educational opportunities,
places of residence, medical care, full participation in society, etc.
(and where these obstacles still persist, in practice if not in law,
for many people), it is striking to see a man whose father was not only
black but also a "full-blooded African" (cue the psychosexual
"Mandingo" anxieties of generations of trembly white folk) on the
doorstep of the White House. 
by The Copydude