F. William Engdahl - Why Moscow does not Trust Washington on Missile Defense. Towards a Pre-emptive Nuclear War?

By F. William Engdahl

Global Research, December 2, 2011

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=27987

Most in the civilized world are blissfully unaware that we are marching ineluctably towards an increasingly likely pre-emptive nuclear war. No, it's not at all about Iran and Israel. It's about the decision of Washington and the Pentagon to push Moscow up against the wall with what is euphemistically called Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD).

On November 23, a normally low-keyed Russian President Dmitry Medvedev told the world in clear terms that Russia was prepared to deploy its missiles on the border to the EU between Poland and Lithuania, and possibly in the south near Georgia and NATO member Turkey to counter the advanced construction process of the US ballistic missile defense shield: "The Russian Federation will deploy in the west and the south of the country modern weapons systems that could be used to destroy the European component of the US missile defense," he announced on Russian television. "One of these steps could be the deployment of the Iskander missile systems in Kaliningrad."1 Those would be theatre ballistic missile systems. The latest version of Iskander, the Iskander-K, whose details remain top secret, reportedly has a range up to 2000 km and carries cruise missiles and a target accuracy to 7 meters or less.

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Robert Reich - The Rebirth of Social Darwinism

http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Rebirth-of-Social-Darw-by-Robert-Reich-111201-487.html

December 1, 2011 By Robert Reich Social Darwinism offered a moral justification for the wild inequities and social cruelties of the late nineteenth century. If one of the current crop of Republican hopefuls becomes president, and if regressive Republicans take over the House or Senate, or both, Social Darwinism is back. What kind of society, exactly, do modern Republicans want? I've been listening to Republican candidates in an effort to discern an overall philosophy, a broadly-shared vision, an ideal picture of America. They say they want a smaller government but that can't be it. Most seek a larger national defense and more muscular homeland security. Almost all want to widen the government's powers of search and surveillance inside the United States -- eradicating possible terrorists, expunging undocumented immigrants, "securing" the nation's borders. They want stiffer criminal sentences, including broader application of the death penalty. Many also want government to intrude on the most intimate aspects of private life. They call themselves conservatives but that's not it, either. They don't want to conserve what we now have. They'd rather take the country backwards -- before the 1960s and 1970s, and the Environmental Protection Act, Medicare, and Medicaid; before the New Deal, and its provision for Social Security, unemployment insurance, the 40-hour workweek, laws against child labor, and official recognition of trade unions; even before the Progressive Era, and the first national income tax, antitrust laws, and Federal Reserve.

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Mary Robinson & Desmond Tutu - Climate Justice

http://www.nationofchange.org/climate-justice-1322760404

By Desmond Tutu and Mary Robinson

Before the Copenhagen climate-change summit two years ago, the two of us sat together in Cape Town to listen to five African farmers from different countries, four of whom were women, tell us how climate change was undermining their livelihoods. Each explained how floods and drought, and the lack of regular seasons to sow and reap, were outside their normal experience. Their fears are shared by subsistence farmers and indigenous people worldwide – the people bearing the brunt of climate shocks, though they played no part in causing them.

Now, two years later, we are in Durban, where South Africa is hosting this year’s climate-change conference, COP17, and the situation for poor people in Africa and elsewhere has deteriorated even further. In its latest report, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concludes that it is virtually certain that, in global terms, hot days have become hotter and occur more often; indeed, they have increased in frequency by a factor of 10 in most regions of the world.

Moreover, the brutal paradox of climate change is that heavy precipitation is occurring more often as well, increasing the risk of flooding. Since 2003, East Africa has had the eight warmest years on record, which is no doubt contributing to the severe famine that now afflicts 13 million people in the Horn of Africa.

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Adam Federman - What Killed Dunkard Creek? Residents in Pennsylvania and West Virginia Say Fracking

Published on Thursday, December 1, 2011 by Earth Island Journal

http://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/eij/article/what_killed_dunkard_creek/

by Adam Federman

On August 27, 2009, Dan Cincotta, a fisheries biologist with West Virginia’s Department of Natural Resources, was conducting a routine inventory of Dunkard Creek, a small river that runs through West Virginia and southwestern Pennsylvania. He was accompanied by a consultant and an environmental engineer from the state’s largest coal and gas company, Consol Energy, which operates a coalmine, Blacksville #2, just outside of Wana, West Virginia. Cincotta was supposed to do electro-fish surveys, whereby the fish are temporarily stunned in order to assess populations, and to take a series of conductivity readings – a basic measure of how much salt is dissolved in water.

When his first reading measured 20,000 micro siemens per centimeter squared (µS/cm), Cincotta thought his equipment was broken; he had never seen readings above 5,000. The Consol consultant took her own reading in the same location but farther from the riverbank. It registered 40,000 µS/cm. Still in disbelief, Cincotta says, “we wandered upstream and found [Consol’s mining] discharge. And in the discharge alone, straight out of the pipe our equipment registered over 50,000 µS/cm,” roughly the equivalent of seawater. Untreated acid mine discharges typically have conductance values of between 1,000 and 1,500 µS/cm.

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Nomi Prins - The Fed’s European “Rescue” -- Another Back-Door US Bank / Goldman Bailout?

http://www.nationofchange.org/fed-s-european-rescue-another-back-door-us-bank-goldman-bailout-1322759036

By Nomi Prins

In the wake of chopping its Central Bank swap rates today, the Fed has been called a bunch of names: a hero for slugging the big bailout bat in the ninth inning, and a villain for printing money to help Europe at the expense of the US. Neither depiction is right.

The Fed is merely continuing its unfettered brand of bailout-economics, promoted with heightened intensity recently by President Obama and Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner in the wake of Germany not playing bailout-ball.  Recall, a couple years ago, it was a uniquely American brand of BIG bailouts that the Fed adopted in creating $7.7 trillion of bank subsidies that ran the gamut from back-door AIG bailouts (some of which went to US / some to European banks that deal with those same US banks), to the purchasing of mortgage-backed–securities, to near zero-rate loans (for banks).

Similarly, today’s move was also about protecting US banks from losses – self inflicted by dangerous derivatives-chain trades, again with each other, and with European banks.

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Michelle Chen - Is China’s Economic Miracle Hitting the Fan?

Published on Thursday, December 1, 2011 by In These Times

http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/12345/is_chinas_economic_miracle_hitting_the_fan/

by Michelle Chen

If you believe the hype about living in the “Pacific Century,” then the new millennium is bound to be a pretty rowdy one.

A few days ago about 1,000 workers in the heart of China’s manufacturing belt walked off the job at the Taiwan-owned Jingmo Electronics Corporation, saying they were tired of being cheated by overtime pay. Around the same time in the Guangdong boomtown known as Dongguan, thousands of shoe factory workers protested over overtime pay and marched with their grievances to a local government office.

This may seem like a reprise of the powerful 2010 strike wave that rippled through big-name manufacturing plants, including Toyota and Honda. Last year, workers' newfound militancy yielded some significant gains—mainly in the form of pay hikes and other concessions. But whether they’ll be able to wrest a fairer paycheck from the management this time around hinges not so much on workers’ will, as on the global economic house of cards that’s getting rocked by countless factors that the labor force can’t control. Though concessions could be coming down the pipeline for some workers, in the backdrop is an alarming slowdown in China’s exports, which drive the country’s development and stuff consumers in rich countries with an endless stream of cheap goods.

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Justin McCurry - Fukushima Fuel Rods May Have Completely Melted

Published on Friday, December 2, 2011 by The Guardian/UK

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/02/fukushima-fuel-rods-completely-melted

One of the plant's nuclear reactors was close to being breached as fuel rods bore through its concrete floor, says Tepco

by Justin McCurry in Tokyo

Fuel rods inside one of the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant may have completely melted and bored most of the way through a concrete floor, the reactor's last line of defence before its steel outer casing, the plant's operator said.

Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco) said in a report that fuel inside reactor No 1 appeared to have dropped through its inner pressure vessel and into the outer containment vessel, indicating that the accident was more severe than first thought.

The revelation that the plant may have narrowly averted a disastrous "China syndrome" scenario comes days after reports that the company had dismissed a 2008 warning that the plant was inadequately prepared to resist a tsunami.

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Jon Herskovitz - Drinking the Radioactive Kool-Aid: Countries Switching From Coal to Nuclear

Published on Thursday, December 1, 2011 by Reuters

http://www.reuters.com/

by Jon Herskovitz

DURBAN - South Africa, the host of U.N. global climate talks, is faced with a conundrum -- it wants to wean itself off of coal-powered plants seen as primate culprits of greenhouse gas emissions and find a cleaner energy source.

It is turning to nuclear power, despite the catastrophic environmental degradation the world witnessed after Japan's Fukushima plant disaster this year.

The global climate talks that opened earlier this week in Durban are seeing a widening division on nuclear power, with many advanced economies moving away from it after Fukushima and emerging states heavily reliant on fossil fuels embracing it as a cleaner way to power their development.

"If you want to be part of the climate change race and mitigation you basically have renewables and nuclear. Renewables are intermittent and you need a firm and reliable baseload technology. Renewables are not in a position to provide this yet," said H. Holger Rogner, section head of the International Atomic Energy Agency's planning and economic studies section.

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Rainforest Action Network - Bankrolling Climate Change: New Study Ranks Top 20 Climate Killer Banks

November 30, 2011

Rainforest Action Network (RAN) http://www.ran.org/bankrolling-climate-change-new-study-ranks-top-20-climate-killer-banks

DURBAN, SOUTH AFRICA - November 30 - Today, as world leaders gather in Durban to discuss solutions to global climate change, an international coalition of civil society and environmental organizations released a new study, “Bankrolling Climate Change,” highlighting the top 20 banks that finance the coal industry. The study examines commercial banks’ lending for the coal industry and provides the first comprehensive climate ranking for financial institutions. The study finds JPMorgan Chase, Citi and Bank of America to be the top three banks in the world financing climate change.

A full copy of the study with a ranking of all the researched banks can be downloaded at www.banktrack.org.

The report comes from German environment organization urgewald, the South African social and environmental justice organizations groundWork and Earthlife Africa Johannesburg and the international network BankTrack.

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Richard Clark - In Both Europe and America the Banksters Are Now Running the Government -- Here's Why & How

http://www.opednews.com/articles/In-Both-Europe-and-America-by-Richard-Clark-111201-256.html

December 1, 2011 By Richard Clark The top 1%, whose wealth & income continue to multiply, expects those of us who have lost jobs and homes, and watched our retirement nest eggs disappear, to ignore the fact that our gov't has unlimited resources available for them, the top 1% (including the banksters), but nothing for we the American people?! Sorry, but this ignorance is not gonna continue! Americans are waking up to what's been ever so cleverly done to them For years, Republicans and some Democrats have said that a strong government, careful regulation and progressive taxation are markers on the road to serfdom.   The politicians and neoliberal economists who spout this baloney say, "Let's take planning out of the hands of government and put it into the "free market.'"   What they don't understand is that every market is planned -- by someone or other.   And if governments step aside, then planning passes into the hands of the banksters.

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