Uri Avnery - The Fear Mongers and Netanyahu's Frightfest

WEEKEND EDITION DECEMBER 9-11, 2011

HTTP://WWW.COUNTERPUNCH.ORG/2011/12/09/THE-FEAR-MONGERS/

by URI AVNERY

ON THE anniversary of David Ben-Gurion’s death, the usual memorial meeting was held at his graveside in Sdeh Boker, the Negev desert village where he lived in his retirement. There is no cemetery, just his grave and that of his wife Paula.

The newspapers published a picture of Binyamin Netanyahu making a speech under a big photo of the late leader gazing thoughtfully into the distance.

One little detail in the picture caught my eye: Netanyahu was wearing a kippah.

Why? Ben-Gurion was a convinced atheist. He refused to wear a kippah even at funerals. (Though a complete atheist myself, I do sometimes wear a kippah at funerals, out of consideration for the feelings of others.)

The place was not a synagogue, nor even a cemetery. So why for God’s sake (sorry) did the man put this black kippah on his head?

For me that is a sign of what I call the re-Judaization of Israel.

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Joseph Stiglitz - What Can Save the Euro?

Monday 5 December 2011

by: Joseph E. Stiglitz, Project Syndicate [3] | Op-Ed

http://www.truth-out.org/what-can-save-euro/1323441211

New York - Just when it seemed that things couldn’t get worse, it appears that they have. Even some of the ostensibly “responsible” members of the eurozone are facing higher interest rates. Economists on both sides of the Atlantic are now discussing not just whether the euro will survive, but how to ensure that its demise causes the least turmoil possible.

It is increasingly evident that Europe’s political leaders, for all their commitment to the euro’s survival, do not have a good grasp of what is required to make the single currency work. The prevailing view when the euro was established was that all that was required was fiscal discipline – no country’s fiscal deficit or public debt, relative to GDP, should be too large. But Ireland and Spain had budget surpluses and low debt before the crisis, which quickly turned into large deficits and high debt. So now European leaders say that it is the current-account deficits of the eurozone’s member countries that must be kept in check.

In that case, it seems curious that, as the crisis continues, the safe haven for global investors is the United States, which has had an enormous current-account deficit for years. So, how will the European Union distinguish between “good” current-account deficits – a government creates a favorable business climate, generating inflows of foreign direct investment – and “bad” current-account deficits? Preventing bad current-account deficits would require far greater intervention in the private sector than the neoliberal and single-market doctrines that were fashionable at the euro’s founding would imply.

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David Enders - Huge numbers of Iraqis still adrift within the country

McClatchy Washington Bureau

Posted on Sun, Dec. 11, 2011

David Enders | McClatchy Newspapers

last updated: December 11, 2011 

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/12/11/132550/huge-numbers-of-iraqis-still-adrift.html

MOSUL, Iraq — Of all the problems that the U.S. troop withdrawal won't affect in Iraq, what to do about the number of internally displaced people looms the largest.

As many as 2 million Iraqis — nearly 6 percent of the country's estimated more than 31 million population — are thought to have been forced from the cities and towns where they once lived and are housed in circumstances that feel temporary and makeshift.

More than 500,000 of those are "squatters in slum areas with no assistance or legal right to the properties they occupy," according to Refugees International, a Washington-based advocacy group. Most can't go home: Either their homes have been destroyed or hostile ethnic and sectarian groups now control their neighborhoods.

Those who are displaced internally say the Iraqi government has done little or nothing to help them, and in some cases has even prevented them from returning to their homes.

Iraqi officials concede that the problem is formidable but they challenge the numbers, saying that the issue is getting better.

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Sandra Siagian - The Incoherent Imperialist: Deconstructing Tom Friedman's Work

By Sandra Siagian, Inter Press Service

Posted on December 9, 2011, Printed on December 10, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/153388/the_incoherent_imperialist%3A_deconstructing_tom_friedman%27s_work

A new book on the influential New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman sets out to debunk his hawkish, neo-liberal views, accusing him of overt racism, factual errors and skewed judgments on issues ranging from the United States invasion of Iraq to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Deconstructing one of the country's highest-paid journalists, Belen Fernandez's The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work presents a comprehensive overview of the man - and three-time Pulitzer Prize winner - she describes as "characterized by reduction of complex international phenomena to simplistic rhetoric and theorems that rarely withstand the test of reality".

Fernandez, 29, admits that prior to 2009 she wasn't too familiar with the work of the foreign affairs columnist. It wasn't until that summer she decided to analyze Friedman's work after reading "a sequence of ridiculous articles".

Finding it difficult to ''cram all of that incompetence into a concise book'', Fernandez divided the content into three issues that ''most enraged'' her, analyzing his work along with a brief examination of the shortcomings of the US media.

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James Petras - Obama Raises the Military Stakes -- Confrontation on the Borders with China and Russia

By Prof. James Petras

Global Research, December 10, 2011 http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28144

Introduction After suffering major military and political defeats in bloody ground wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, failing to buttress long-standing clients in Yemen, Egypt and Tunisia and witnessing the disintegration of puppet regimes in Somalia and South Sudan, the Obama regime has learned nothing: Instead he has turned toward greater military confrontation with global powers, namely Russia and China. Obama has adopted a provocative offensive military strategy right on the frontiers of both China and Russia . After going from defeat to defeat on the periphery of world power and not satisfied with running treasury-busting deficits in pursuit of empire building against economically weak countries, Obama has embraced a policy of encirclement and provocations against China, the world’s second largest economy and the US’s most important creditor, and Russia, the European Union’s principle oil and gas provider and the world’s second most powerful nuclear weapons power. This paper addresses the Obama regime’s highly irrational and world-threatening escalation of imperial militarism. We examine the global military, economic and domestic political context that gives rise to these policies. We then examine the multiple points of conflict and intervention in which Washington is engaged, from Pakistan , Iran , Libya , Venezuela , Cuba and beyond. We will then analyze the rationale for military escalation against Russia and China as part of a new offensive moving beyond the Arab world ( Syria , Libya ) and in the face of the declining economic position of the EU and the US in the global economy. We will then outline the strategies of a declining empire, nurtured on perpetual wars, facing global economic decline, domestic discredit and a working population reeling from the long-term, large-scale dismantling of its basic social programs.

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Chris Marsden - US Covert Operations Threaten War with Iran

Redrawing the Political Map of the entire Middle East. By Chris Marsden

Global Research, December 10, 2011

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28137

The United States is waging a sustained covert campaign of destabilisation against Iran, focusing on efforts to disrupt its nuclear program. Among a growing list of incidents are: • Two nuclear physicists were killed by bombs and the head of the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran, Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani, was wounded after bombs were attached to their cars or detonated near them in 2010. • The Stuxnet computer worm infected Iranian nuclear facilities in 2010, damaging computers used in industrial machinery; numerous reports suggest this was a US-Israeli attack to cripple Iranian nuclear centrifuges. • On November 12 this year, an explosion destroyed the Revolutionary Guard base at Bid Kaneh, killing 17, including a founder of Iran's missile programme. • On November 28, an explosion in the western Iranian city of Isfahan badly damaged a uranium enrichment facility. • On December 4, Iran shot down a US RQ-170 Sentinel drone after it illegally crossed the eastern border. The “Beast of Kandahar,” which has a wingspan of about 65 feet and can fly at around 50,000 feet, was, according to the New York Times and the Washington Post, part of an increased US surveillance effort monitoring suspect nuclear sites. The Wall Street Journal stated that the US had considered sending in covert missions to Iran to recover a drone or to blow it up with an air strike, but decided that this would be considered an act of war. • On December 5, the State Department’s arms adviser Robert Einhorn said: “Iran is violating international obligations and norms. It is becoming a pariah state… The timeline for its nuclear programme is beginning to get shorter, so it is important we take these strong steps on an urgent basis.”

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Stephen Leahy - Draft Climate Deal Dubbed a "Death Sentence for Africa"

Published on Saturday, December 10, 2011 by Inter Press Service

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/12/10-0

by Stephen Leahy

DURBAN, South Africa - No one is happy late Friday at the very contentious U.N. climate talks that went into extra time on Saturday. As the lights flicker on a rainy night here, the partial power failure echoes the failure of the multilateral process, according to civil society and some countries.

"If countries agree to the text as it stands, they will be passing a death sentence on Africa," said Nnnimmo Bassey, chair of Friends of the Earth International and a Nigerian activist.

And yet African countries and other vulnerable countries might go along because they will be bullied or bribed, said Bassey.

When Bolivia stood up to the United States at the Copenhagen climate meet in December 2009, Washington pulled its development aid the next year.

"Delegates must show that they care about the devastation across the continent and small island states .... or are they going to yield to arm twisting because a few dollars are being hoisted about," Bassey said.

So far African countries are not blocking an agreement, he told IPS.

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Anneli Rufus - Bugs and Krill, the Other White Meats: Time to Start Eating at the Bottom of the Food Chain

By Anneli Rufus, AlterNet

Posted on December 7, 2011, Printed on December 10, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/153359/bugs_and_krill%2C_the_other_white_meats%3A_time_to_start_eating_at_the_bottom_of_the_food_chain

The Eon Coffee Shop in Hayward, California serves krill. Mezcal -- a Mexican restaurant in nearby San Jose -- serves grasshoppers.

Whales and birds eat these things. A growing number of cutting-edge chefs think you should too.

They say the most sustainable way to eat creatures, if you eat them at all, is by dining at the bottom of the food chain. These organisms -- best known as bait, feed or vermin -- breed so easily and exist in such vast quantities as to be far more sustainable protein sources than, say, halibut or beef. A single baleen whale consumes up to 8,000 pounds of krill daily. Worldwide insect biomass exceeds human biomass by two hundredfold. We might manage to eat every last barnacle and roach, but we would really have to try.

It's a massive paradigm shift: Raised on steak, facing a dung-beetle future.

The rich and powerful have always eaten whatever is rare, expensive to farm, difficult to breed and hard to catch. The poor and powerless have always eaten whatever is cheap, free and plentiful.

But we might all be fighting over roadkill by 2050, according to a new UN report.

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Vandana Shiva - The Anthropocene Age

Eco Watch   11-30-2011

Dr. Vandana Shiva

http://ecowatch.org/2011/the-anthropocene-age-humanity%E2%80%99s-choice-to-be-destructive-or-creative/

We have moved out of the Holocene Age that began 10,000 years ago at the end of the Pleistocene. It comes from the greek words “holos” (whole) and “kainos” (new). This age provided the stable climate which gave us the conditions for our culture and material evolution as a human species.

Scientists are now saying we have entered a new age, the Anthropocene age, the age in which our species, the human, is becoming the most significant force on the planet. Current climate change and species extinction are driven by human activities and the very large ecological footprint of our species.

Climate catastrophes and extreme climate events are already taking lives—the floods in Thailand in 2011, in Pakistan and Ladakh in 2010, the forest fires in Russia, more frequent and intense cyclones and hurricanes, severe droughts and intense flooding are examples of how humans have destabilized the climate system of our self-regulated planet which has given us a stable climate for the past 10000 years. Humans have pushed 75 percent agricultural biodiversity to extinction because of industrial farming. Between 3 to 300 species are being pushed to extinction every day.

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Statement from Office of Senator Bernie Sanders - Sanders Files ‘Saving American Democracy Amendment’

Published on Thursday, December 8, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/12/08-6

Vermont Senator Calls for Constitutional Amendment to Protect Democracy from Citizens United

Statement from Office of Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT)

WASHINGTON – Warning that “American democracy in endangered,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) today proposed a constitutional amendment to overturn a Supreme Court ruling that allowed unrestricted and secret campaign spending by corporations on U.S. elections.

Warning that “American democracy in endangered,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) today proposed a constitutional amendment to overturn a Supreme Court ruling that allowed unrestricted and secret campaign spending by corporations on U.S. elections. The first constitutional amendment ever proposed by Sanders during his two decades in Congress would reverse the narrow 5-to-4 ruling in Citizens United vs. the Federal Elections Commission. In that controversial decision almost two years ago, justices gave corporations the same First Amendment free-speech rights as people.

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