Paul Craig Roberts - The Roads To War And Economic Collapse

http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Roads-To-War-And-Econo-by-paul-craig-roberts-111123-233.html

November 23, 2011 By paul craig roberts The day before the Thanksgiving holiday brought three extraordinary news items. One was the report on the Republican presidential campaign debate. One was the Russian President's statement about his country's response to Washington's missile bases surrounding his country. And one was the failure of a German government bond auction. Comments on Today's News November 23, 2011: The day before the Thanksgiving holiday brought three extraordinary news items. One was the report on the Republican presidential campaign debate. One was the Russian President's statement about his country's response to Washington's missile bases surrounding his country. And one was the failure of a German government bond auction. As the presstitute media will not inform us of what any of this means, let me try.

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Fiona Harvey - UN Chief Slams Rich Nations' Plans to Delay Climate Change Treaty

Published on Wednesday, November 23, 2011 by The Guardian/UK

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/nov/23/un-chief-rich-nations-climate-change

Achim Steiner says reaching an agreement in 2020 instead of at next month's Durban conference would be 'very high risk'

by Fiona Harvey, environment correspondent

The United Nations' environment chief has slammed plans by the world's richest nations to put off a global treaty on climate change to 2020, saying the proposals were "very high risk".

Achim Steiner, executive director of the UN environment program, said postponing an agreement – which was meant to be signed in 2013 – to the end of this decade was a "political choice" rather than one based on science.

The Guardian revealed this week that most of the world's rich economies have quietly decided to shelve plans for a global agreement on climate change to take effect within the next few years, instead pushing for an agreement by the end of 2015 or 2016, and coming into effect until 2020. Scientists and economists have said this plan risks leading to catastrophic and irreversible climate change.

Steiner is the first senior UN official to speak out against the plans, which will be aired next week at the latest round of UN climate negotiations in Durban, South Africa.

He said: "Those countries that are currently talking about deferring an agreement [to come into force] in 2020 are essentially saying we are taking you from high risk to very high risk in terms of the effects of global warming. This is a choice – a political choice. Our role, working with the scientific community, is to bring to the attention of the global public that this is the risk that policymakers and governments will expose us to."

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David Loy - Buddhist Reflections on Occupy Wall Street

David R. Loy

http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/buddhist-reflections-on-occupy-wall-street-by-david-loy

In a Buddhist blog about Occupy Wall Street, Michael Stone quotes the philosopher Slavoj Žižek, who spoke to the New York Occupiers at Zuccotti Park on October 9:

They tell you we are dreamers. The true dreamers are those who think things can go on indefinitely the way they are. We are not dreamers. We are awakening from a dream which is turning into a nightmare. We are not destroying anything. We are only witnessing how the system is destroying itself. We all know the classic scenes from cartoons. The cat reaches a precipice. But it goes on walking. Ignoring the fact that there is nothing beneath. Only when it looks down and notices it, it falls down. This is what we are doing here. We are telling the guys there on Wall Street – Hey, look down!

As Slavoj and Michael emphasize, we are beginning to awaken from that dream. That’s an interesting way to put it, because the Buddha also woke up from a dream: the Buddha means “the awakened one.” What dream did he wake up from? Is it related to the nightmare we are awakening from now?

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Greg Palast - Goldfinger eats Congo

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Goldfinger-eats-Congo-by-Greg-Palast-111123-358.html 

November 23, 2011

By Greg Palast

If God doesn't give a rat's ass about The Vulture, and what he does for a living, and what he's done for Africa, why should I? The thought struck me while sitting here, coffee getting cold, in my old Toyota, trying to look invisible, staked out in front of 300 Dekalb Avenue.  It's just after dawn here in Brooklyn, New York, and I'm hoping that Peter Grossman, a Wall Street star, will pop out of his posh brownstone for a jog or a cup of joe.  Then I can jump him.  He's on the look-out for me because I'd already jumped his crony, Goldfinger, the man who's making Grossman stunningly rich. Grossman's riches, nearly $100 million for his firm, FG Management, come from the Congo.  I was just there in Congo, two days before this stake-out, at a cholera quarantine center in the capital, Kinshasa. Besides lots of cholera, Congo has lots of cobalt.  Grossman has, through a crazy legal loophole in British law, waylaid a payment of $80 million to the African government for a shipment of cobalt from a government-owned mine. Grossman is a "vulture," the name Wall Street gives, with an affectionate smile, to those who somehow can get their hands on old, forgotten debts of desperately poor nations----Congo, Zambia, Peru, and Liberia are cases I've investigated----which they pick up for pennies on the dollar of face value.

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Robert Scheer - Thanks for What?

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/thanks_for_what_20111124/

Posted on Nov 24, 2011

By Robert Scheer

I love Thanksgiving for its illusion of abundance. It brings back early childhood memories of the one day each year during the Depression when the food on my family’s table was not the leftover produce that my Uncle Leon could no longer sell at his stall, or the nearly spoiled organ meats that our local butcher offered at a steep discount. 

But Thanksgiving day was quite the opposite, and while I obviously can’t recall what was served in 1936, the year I was born, the holiday was soon seared into my childhood memory as the day when the good times looked upon us in the form of charity gift baskets from philanthropists of various religious and political orders, much like the needy will be served today in volunteer kitchens across America and just as soon will be forgotten.

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Mike Whitney - The Eurozone Past the Point of No Return

NOVEMBER 23, 2011

HTTP://WWW.COUNTERPUNCH.ORG/2011/11/23/PAST-THE-POINT-OF-NO-RETURN/

by MIKE WHITNEY

“Eurozone banks’ demand for European Central Bank funding surged to a two-year high on Tuesday, as fast spreading sovereign debt worries left lending markets virtually frozen and  the ECB the only available funding option for many institutions.”

– Reuters, Nov 22, Frankfurt

The European Central Bank continued to buy Italian bonds on Tuesday in an effort to calm markets and slow the flight of capital from Europe. Yields on Italian and Spanish debt continued to rise increasing the cost of borrowing for the debt-stricken states. At the same time, the cost of borrowing euros in the interbank market  remained at elevated levels while credit market stress gauges (Libor) reached their highest point since July 2010. What started out as a brushfire on the perimeter (Greece) has now turned into a raging inferno that threatens to consume the eurozone. Here’s an excerpt from Roubini Global Economics Newsletter:

“Italian debt dynamics have become unsustainable in light of much-weaker-than-expected growth prospects and elevated borrowing costs. Following a sharp loss in market confidence and a buyers’ strike, we expect Italy will be forced to restructure its sovereign debt.

The environment of heightened political uncertainty in Italy has rendered it incapable of tackling the current challenges….

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Eric Alterman - The Virus of GOP Ignorance

By Eric Alterman, The Nation

Posted on November 23, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/153198/the_virus_of_gop_ignorance%3A_why_don%27t_media_protect_us_from_the_lies_spewed_in_the_republican_primary  

It is a symbol of our current political predicament that anytime anyone tells the truth about anything in the contest for the Republican nomination, a new scandal erupts. Newt Gingrich was briefly drummed out of the Republican Party for accurately terming Paul Ryan’s destructive Medicare plan a “radical” step toward “right-wing social engineering.” Jon Huntsman caused virtually the only stir of his all-but-invisible campaign when he admitted to what the Salt Lake Tribune straight-facedly called the “politically dicey belief that climate change is human-caused and needs to be addressed.” And most recently, CBS’s John Dickerson caused a contretemps when a stray e-mail revealed that Michele Bachmann was “not going to get many questions” in the debate the network was sponsoring because “she’s nearly off the charts.”

Being a member of the MSM in good standing, Dickerson was in all likelihood referring to Bachmann’s poll position rather than her approach to reality, and uncharacteristically for this race, they happen to be pretty much perfectly proportional. Bachmann has long been loony, but it has been her poll standing that has determined the treatment she has received from the press.

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Mitchell Anderson - Weeding Out Corporate Psychopaths

Published on Thursday, November 24, 2011 by the Toronto Star

http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/1091678--weeding-out-corporate-psychopaths

by Mitchell Anderson

Given the state of the global economy, it might not surprise you to learn that psychopaths may be controlling the world. Not violent criminals, but corporate psychopaths who nonetheless have a genetically inherited biochemical condition that prevents them from feeling normal human empathy.

Scientific research is revealing that 21st century financial institutions with a high rate of turnover and expanding global power have become highly attractive to psychopathic individuals to enrich themselves at the expense of others, and the companies they work for.

A peer-reviewed theoretical paper titled “The Corporate Psychopaths Theory of the Global Financial Crisis” details how highly placed psychopaths in the banking sector may have nearly brought down the world economy through their own inherent inability to care about the consequences of their actions.

The author of this paper, Clive Boddy, previously of Nottingham Trent University, believes this theory would go a long way to explain how senior managers acted in ways that were disastrous for the institutions they worked for, the investors they represented and the global economy at large.

If true, this also means the astronomically expensive public bailouts will not solve the problem since many of the morally impaired individuals who caused this mess likely remain in positions of power. Worse, they may be the same people advising governments on how to resolve this crisis.

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Fiona Harvey - Shale gas push 'would wreck UK's climate change targets'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/nov/23/shale-gas-climate-change-targets?CMP=EMCENVEML1631

Report says that exploiting just one-fifth of Lancashire's shale gas reserves would put carbon emissions targets out of reach

• Fiona Harvey, environment correspondent

• guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 23 November 2011

• The UK will fail to meet its climate change targets if industry and politicians back controversial new plans to go ahead with widespread drilling for shale gas, according to a report published on Wednesday.

About 2tr cubic feet of natural gas trapped in dense shale rocks is estimated to lie beneath Lancashire according to Cuadrilla Resources, the main shale gas company operating in the UK. Further exploration in Wales, Scotland and other parts of England could add substantially to this total.

But burning it for fuel results in large-scale carbon dioxide emissions, and scientists from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Research, in a report commissioned by the Cooperative Group, warned that exploiting even a minor proportion of this gas would generate so much carbon dioxide that the government's greenhouse gas emissions targets would be rendered unreachable.

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Emily Chung - Arctic Sea Ice Shrinking at 'Unprecedented' Levels

Published on Thursday, November 24, 2011 by CBC News

by Emily Chung

The recent loss of sea ice in the Arctic is greater than any natural variation in the past 1½ millennia, a Canadian study shows.

"The recent sea ice decline … appears to be unprecedented," said Christian Zdanowicz, a glaciologist at Natural Resources Canada, who co-led the study and is a co-author of the paper published Wednesday online in Nature.

"We kind of have to conclude that there's a strong chance that there's a human influence embedded in that signal."

In September, Germany's University of Bremen reported that sea ice had hit a record low, based on data from a Japanese sensor on NASA's Aqua satellite. The U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center, using a different satellite data set, reported that the sea ice coverage in 2011 was the second-lowest on record, after the record set in 2007.

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