Tariq Ali - NATO vs Pakistan – What’s Next

http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/11/28/nato-vs-pakistan/

by TARIQ ALI

The Nato assault on a Pakistani checkpoint close to the Afghan border which killed 24 soldiers on Saturday must have been deliberate. Nato commanders have long been supplied with maps marking these checkpoints by the Pakistani military. They knew that the target was a military outpost. The explanation that they were fired on first rings false and has been ferociously denied by Islamabad. Previous such attacks were pronounced ‘accidental’ and apologies were given and accepted. This time it seems more serious. It has come too soon after other ‘breaches of sovereignty’, in the words of the local press, but Pakistani sovereignty is a fiction. The military high command and the country’s political leaders willingly surrendered their sovereignty many decades ago. That it is now being violated openly and brutally is the real cause for concern. 

In retaliation, Pakistan has halted Nato convoys to Afghanistan (49 per cent of which go through the country) and asked the US to vacate the Shamsi base that they built to launch drones against targets in both Afghanistan and Pakistan with the permission of the country’s rulers. Islamabad was allowed a legal fig-leaf: in official documents the base was officially leased by the UAE – whose ‘sovereignty’ is even more flexible than Pakistan’s.

Motives for the attack remain a mystery but its impact is not. It will create further divisions within the military, further weaken the venal Zardari regime, strengthen religious militants and make the US even more hated than it already is in Pakistan.

So why do it? Was it intended as a provocation? Is Obama seriously thinking of unleashing a civil war in an already battered country? Some commentators in Islamabad are arguing this but it’s unlikely that Nato troops will occupy Pakistan. Such an irrational turn would be difficult to justify in terms of any imperial interests. Perhaps it was simply a tit-for-tat to punish the Pakistani military for dispatching the Haqqani network to bomb the US embassy and Nato HQ in Kabul’s ‘Green Zone’ a few months back.

The Nato attack comes on the heels of another crisis. One of Zardari and his late wife’s trusted bagmen in Washington, Husain Haqqani, whose links to the US intelligence agencies since the 1970s made him a useful intermediary and whom Zardari appointed as Pakistan’s ambassador to Washington, has been forced to resign. Haqqani, often referred to as the US ambassador to Pakistan, appears to have been caught red-handed: he allegedly asked Mansoor Ijaz, a multi-millionaire close to the US defense establishment, to carry a message to Admiral Mike Mullen pleading for help against the Pakistani military and offering in return to disband the Haqqani network and the ISI and carry out all US instructions.

Mullen denied that he had received any message. A military underling contradicted him. Mullen changed his story and said a message had been received and ignored. When the ISI discovered this ‘act of treachery’, Haqqani, instead of saying that he was acting under orders from Zardari, denied the entire story. Unfortunately for him, the ISI boss, General Pasha, had met up with Ijaz and been given the Blackberry with the messages and instructions. Haqqani had no option but to resign. Demands for his trial and hanging (the two often go together when the military is involved) are proliferating. Zardari is standing by his man. The military wants his head. And now Nato has entered the fray. This story is not yet over.

Steve Horn and Allen Ruff - How Private Warmongers and the US Military Infiltrated American Universities

Monday 28 November 2011

by: Steve Horn and Allen Ruff, Truthout | News Analysis

http://www.truth-out.org/how-private-warmongers-and-us-military-infiltrated-american-universities/1321396333

A matrix of closely tied university-based strategic studies ventures, the so-called Grand Strategy Programs (GSP), have cropped up on a number of elite campuses around the country, where they function to serve the national security warfare state.

In tandem with allied institutes and think tanks across the country, these programs, centered at Yale University, Duke University, the University of Texas at Austin, Columbia University, Temple University and, until recently, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, illustrate the increasingly influential role of a new breed of warrior academics in the post-9/11 United States. The network marks the ascent and influence of what might be called the "Long War University."

Ostensibly created to train an up-and-coming elite to see a global "big picture," this grand strategy network has brought together scores of foreign policy wonks heavily invested - literally and figuratively - in an unending quest to maintain US global supremacy, a campaign which they increasingly refer to as the Long War. [5]

He Who Pays the Piper ...

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NRDC - Limerick Nuclear Plant’s Re-Licensing Application Circumvents Safety Analysis Requirements

Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC)

November 28, 2011

NRDC Files Petitions to Intervene in the Limerick Nuclear Plant Operating License Renewal Application, Citing Obsolete Accident Mitigation Study

WASHINGTON - November 28 - Exelon Generation, the owner of the Limerick nuclear power plant outside of Philadelphia, is seeking federal re-licensing of its plant without updating a 1980s-era accident mitigation study, due to an inappropriate exemption received from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), according to petitions filed last week by the Natural Resources Defense Council.

“The tragedy in Japan has resulted in a hard look at the safety of nuclear plants worldwide and is providing critical new information that can help prevent future disasters. We need to learn from that failure, not ignore it,” said Christopher Paine, director of the nuclear program at NRDC. “The Limerick nuclear power plant’s safety analysis for mitigating unlikely but severe accidents is decades out-of-date. Re-licensing it now without a fresh analysis of potential safety upgrades would be a reckless decision, especially given that the current operating licenses for these twin units don’t expire until 2024 and 2029. There is ample time to take a fresh look at safety improvements.”

The NRDC petitions contend that Exelon’s license renewal application is deficient because it relies on outdated and insufficient safety and risk information and fails to fully consider the alternatives to re-licensing Limerick as required by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).

All U.S. nuclear plants are required to conduct a critical safety review known as a Severe Accident Mitigation Alternatives, or “SAMA,” analysis to determine potentially cost-beneficial operational safety upgrades at nuclear plants. The last analysis for Limerick, completed in 1989, relied upon population data from 1980 and therefore didn’t take into account evacuation planning and the health risk from radiation exposure for up to 1.4 million additional people now living downwind in the Philadelphia-Wilmington-Newark metropolitan area.

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Robert Jensen - Norman Solomon Sees a Role for Progressive Legislators

Published on Monday, November 28, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/11/28-0

by Robert Jensen

Conventional politics in the United States focuses on elections, while left activists typically argue that political change comes not from electing better politicians but building movements strong enough to force politicians to accept progressive change.

Norman Solomon has concluded it isn’t either/or. A prominent writer and leader in left movements for decades, Solomon is running for Congress  in the hopes of being practical and remaining principled.

“Since I first went to a protest at age 14 in 1966 -- a picket line to desegregate an apartment complex -- my outlook on electoral politics has gone through a lot of changes,” Solomon said. “First I thought politics was largely about elections, later I thought politics had very little to do with elections, and now I believe that elections are an important part of the mix.”

Solomon argues that when the left has treated elections as irrelevant, the result has been self-marginalization that helps empower the military-industrial complex.

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CEPR - Co-Directors Call for Fed to Intervene in European Bond Market

November 28, 2011

Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) 

http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2011/11/28-3

Risk to U.S. Economy from European Financial Meltdown Is High and Potentially Costly

WASHINGTON - November 28 - Center for Economic and Policy Research Co-Directors Dean Baker and Mark Weisbrot today called on the Federal Reserve to stabilize European bond markets by buying Italian and Spanish bonds – and other sovereign bonds as necessary -- thereby lowering interest rates on these bonds.  They issued the following statement:

“The risk of a financial meltdown in Europe is significant and growing each day. The financial fallout could be bigger than that following the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, and could easily push the U.S. economy into recession. The European authorities are moving much too slowly to contain this risk. The European Central Bank (ECB), especially, is not fulfilling its function as a central bank to act as a lender of last resort in a crisis situation.

"The ECB needs to intervene in order to stop the yields on Italian and Spanish bonds from rising to the point where they are no longer able to borrow from private markets, as happened to Greece, Portugal, and Ireland.  But it has refused to do so, and last week German Chancellor Angela Merkel directly rejected the idea of Eurobonds, on the grounds that it would reduce pressure on the weaker economies to cut their budgets.

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Eliván Martínez - Monsanto's Caribbean experiment

Eliván Martínez   
The Center for Investigative Journalism, 21 November 2011

http://cpipr.org/inicio/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=271

*The largest producer of transgenic seeds in the world is leasing some of the best agricultural lands on the Island [of Puerto Rico] with a pattern of questionable legality, while receiving incentives from the Fortuño administration.

When environmentalist Juan Rosario traveled to an Amish religious community in Iowa, to learn to make compost, he was surprised that they had a laboratory and the services of an expert in chemistry. What was a scientist doing in a place where people live far from technology and practice ecological farming with the simplest of methods?

An Amish dressed in their style, with a wide-brimmed black hat, white shirt, and black pants and black jacket, pointed toward a large cornfield on a nearby farm. "The scientist helps us verify that pollen from genetically modified corn does not contaminate our crops," he told Juan Rosario. "It's the same corn that you develop in Salinas." [Salinas is a small municipality in the southern part of Puerto Rico] 

Puerto Rico, laboratory for corn, sorghum, cotton and transgenic soybeans

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Danny Schechter - Occupy Wall Street is All Over The Media: But for How Long?

By Danny Schechter

This is the first in what we hope will be a series of Mediachannel1 reports exploring the media and the Occupy Movement. Share yours with dissector@mediachannel.org

One of the oldest patterns of media coverage can be summed up this way:

First, they ignore you. Then, they ridicule you. Then, they realize you are a story and fall in love. So they build you up at first but then, all at once, tear you down 

You may not have changed, but they have, addicted as they are to keep coming up with shifting story lines, more to fight their own boredom and fear of tune out, than the validity or importance of the topic.

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Danny Schechter - WILL SHOPPING SAVE US?

By Danny Schechter 

Today’s the day. It’s “Black Friday” (“black” as in the day our business supposedly go into the black.) This may not have been such a wise use of language since the Wall Street crash of l929, ushering in the Great Depression, started on a “Black Thursday.” 

Throughout America, an advertising-dominated media is plugging all the “bargains” while shoppers, hungry to save a few bucks, in a country where more than half of our families are barely making it, are off to the malls in an annual ritual that each year barely saves the retail outlets but adds costly bills to already squeezed and debt dependent consumers. 

The easy availability of credit has created what Robert Manning calls our Credit Card Nation, where we are encouraged to shop until we drop. In the aftermath of the terror attacks of September l1, 2001, recall that President Bush made that point shamelessly when he told the American people that the best way to help in that traumatic period was to go shopping again. 

He knew, even if most Americans didn’t, that it is their non-stop consumption that drives the economy. Without it, I guess, the terrorists could have won. 

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Danny Schechter - OCCUPY THIS: POETRY SURVIVES THE TRASHING OF THE PEOPLE’S LIBRARY

By Danny Schechter

Author of The Crime of Our Time

One of the clearest indicators of a fascist mentality is its contempt for ideas it disagrees with.

The Nazis staged mass book burnings, and some religious zealots followed in their footsteps, in our country, by burning rock and roll records they considered the “Devil’s Music.” The war on Sarajevo began with the burning of its world acclaimed library by rightwing nationalists who found the city too multi-cultural for their tastes,

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Gary Null, PhD and Nancy Ashley, VMD, MS - DEADLY INJECTION: THE HIDDEN INGREDIENTS IN VACCINES

DEADLY INJECTION:  THE HIDDEN INGREDIENTS IN VACCINES

By Gary Null, PhD and Nancy Ashley, VMD, MS

For more than 100 years, Americans have lined up to take their vaccines.   We have never questioned the safety and efficacy of these vaccines, and why should we?  Vaccines are backed by the full faith and confidence of the entire scientific community, including the FDA, the CDC, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and the American Academy of Pediatrics, and virtually all of the esteemed medical journals, including the British Medical Journal, the Lancet, and the Journal of the American Medical Association, have given their unconditional support to vaccines. Therefore, in fact, if any physician, scientist, journalist, or health activist ever challenges either the safety or efficacy of vaccines, they are immediately assaulted.  The normal arguments are:

1. There are dozens of gold standard studies proving beyond a shadow of a doubt the safety and efficacy of every vaccine and every combination of vaccines.
2. There is an independent group of scientists at the FDA and the CDC that examines the childhood vaccine schedule to make sure it is appropriate.
3. There is no scientific proof that vaccines are dangerous.
4. On rare occasions, when someone does have an adverse reaction, it in no way affects the safety and efficacy for anyone else.
5. Virtually all major scourges -- polio, smallpox, and measles -- were eliminated by our vaccine program.

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