Hannah Allam - Syrian civil war seems certain as death toll rises among security forces

Hannah Allam | McClatchy Newspapers

last updated: November 17, 2011 

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/11/17/130647/syrian-civil-war-seems-certain.html

CAIRO — The Syrian uprising against authoritarian President Bashar Assad appears headed toward a Libya-style civil war, with dissidents increasingly using violence against the government's forces and no apparent letup in the government's deadly crackdown despite a renewed Arab push for an end to the bloodshed.

In November alone, the Syrian government has reported at least 108 deaths of soldiers, police and other security forces in attacks by "armed terrorist groups," while army defectors calling themselves the Free Syrian Army claimed this week to have conducted attacks on several government targets, including a military intelligence compound, an especially brazen move.

It's impossible to verify how many members of Assad's security forces have been killed. Syrian officials have said in recent weeks that the pro-regime death toll is more than 1,000.

But if even a fraction of the reported deaths are true — and activists don't dispute that security forces are being targeted — the attacks on Assad's forces represent an escalation that many analysts say pushes Syria beyond any hope of peaceful resolution as long as Assad remains in power.

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Cornucopia Institute - Future of Organic Food and Agriculture at Risk

November 17, 2011

http://www.cornucopia.org/2011/11/future-of-organic-food-and-agriculture-at-risk/

Cornucopia Institute

Use of Synthetic Preservatives, Genetically Mutated Ingredients and Weak Animal Welfare Standards Headed for Vote by USDA Panel

CORNUCOPIA, Wis. - November 17 - The Cornucopia Institute, one of the nation’s leading organic industry watchdogs, is urging members of the USDA's National Organic Standards Board (NOSB), in formal testimony, to vote to preserve the integrity of organic food and farming at its upcoming meeting in Savannah, Georgia.  

Some of the hot button issues on the agenda, including using artificial preservatives and genetically modified ingredients, would seem Orwellian to many longtime organic farmers and consumers.  The forecasted dustup will be debated by a USDA panel, deeply divided between corporate agribusiness representatives and organic advocates. 

Under the Bush and Obama administrations, the USDA Secretaries have been criticized for appointing a significant number of corporate representatives, whose primary interest appears to be loosening the federal organic standards, allegedly in pursuit of enhanced profits. 

"We think this meeting may well decide the fate of organic food and agriculture in this country," said Mark A.  Kastel, Codirector of The Cornucopia Institute, which represents family-scale organic farmers and their consumer allies across the U.S.

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Walden Bellow - The Puzzling Persistence of APEC

Wednesday 16 November 2011

by: Walden Bello, Foreign Policy in Focus 

http://www.truth-out.org/puzzling-persistence-apec/1321561579

The Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation has just concluded its annual summit in Honolulu, once President Obama’s home turf. It will probably be most remembered for the traffic jams it created in the Waikiki Beach area, to the consternation of residents and tourists alike.

APEC’s continuing existence is a puzzle to many, for APEC’s record of irrelevance is rivaled by few other international forums. It was not always so. I still remember the early 1990s, when APEC was one of the key battlegrounds against neoliberalism and free trade. The Uruguay Round of negotiations was stalled, and President Bill Clinton proposed and pushed for the Asia Pacific Free Trade Area as a U.S.-centered trading bloc that would counter the European Union if the Uruguay Round failed.

That first effort to create an APEC FTA failed, when the Osaka Summit in 1995 affirmed that liberalization would be carried out “voluntarily, flexibly, and in a non-binding fashion,” a position that had been pushed by key ASEAN countries along with Japan.

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Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility - Fracking Fluids - The Deeper, the Dirtier

CONTACT: Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER)

http://www.peer.org/news/news_id.php?row_id=1534

November 17, 2011

New Study Finds Bottom-of-Barrel Flowback Fluids Much More Contaminated

WASHINGTON - November 17 - A new federal study finds wastewater from natural gas hydrofracturing has higher levels of contaminants the deeper in the storage tank the samples are taken.  These findings may be a key to preventing environmental damage from disposal of huge volumes of post-fracking water produced in the boom to exploit shale gas, according to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).

Released November 16, 2011, the study by the U.S. Forest Service researchers is entitled “Chloride Concentration Gradients in Tank-Stored Hydraulic Fracturing Fluids Following Flowback.”  It analyzes 11,000 gallons of fracking fluids that flowed back to the surface and were stored in two 18-foot tall tanks after drilling in the Fernow Experimental Forest within West Virginia’s Monongahela National Forest.  

The key finding is that samples taken near the surface below the top scum are far less contaminated than samples taken deeper in the tank.  Increasingly higher levels of the tracked chemical, chloride (Cl), are found the deeper samples are drawn.  These differences are also visible to the naked eye:

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David Rosen and Bruce Kushnick - Why Telecoms Get Away With Screwing Customers to Pump Up Their Massive Profits

By David Rosen and Bruce Kushnick, AlterNet

Posted on November 17, 2011, Printed on November 18, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/153109/why_telecoms_get_away_with_screwing_customers_to_pump_up_their_massive_profits

In light of Major Mike Bloomberg’s displacement of Liberty Plaza/Zuccotti Park, the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) campaign is spreading throughout the nation and the world. Most important, its critique of inequality is getting sharper and more systematic. Its core target has been the banking and financial-services industry, but activists are turning the spotlight on other, equally pernicious sectors of the economy, including the extraction, healthcare military and prison industries. Analyses of these industries reveal a common story: the fix is in.

The nation’s communications industry traditionally escapes critical inspection. In our busy postmodern life, communications, like air, water and electricity, is essential, merely taken for granted. Whether making a phone call, emailing a friend, accessing information, paying a bill or watching a political debate or TV show, our telecommunications infrastructure is a vital link to others and the world.

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Jeff Madrick - It’s Wages, Stupid

Thursday 17 November 2011

by: Jeff Madrick, New Deal 2.0

http://www.truth-out.org/its-wages-stupid/1321561873

By focusing on supply, economists and policymakers have lost sight of the fact that driving down wages destroys demand.

For a few decades now, American economic policy has focused on keeping inflation low, assuming that the natural rate of unemployment is fairly high. In general, that has led to stagnating wages. Family income today is at 1990s levels. Adjusted for inflation, hourly wages are at levels they last reached in the 1960s. The wage share has been falling.

Some economists claim inequality is the bigger issue due to runaway income at the top. My own view is that a better way to understand America’s dilemma to focus on stagnation for the broad middle and bottom. As I note in my latest piece [4] for the New York Review of Books, the incomes at the top, which account for most of the inequality, are made in finance — much of which is a game Wall Street plays with itself. For this brief piece, I will put that issue aside.

It is time to talk about the importance of high wages to sustainable growth in America and Europe — indeed, in most countries around the world. The precarious circumstances in the eurozone today are widely understood, as was the U.S. financial crisis, as a problem of fiscal and financial discipline. In fact, I’d argue they were mostly a product of economic models based on low wages that were not sustainable.

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TERRA DAILY.COM - Evidence supports ban on growth promotion use of antibiotics in farming

by Staff Writers, TERRA DAILY.COM
Boston MA (SPX) Nov 18, 2011

http://www.seeddaily.com/reports/Evidence_supports_ban_on_growth_promotion_use_of_antibiotics_in_farming_999.html

In a review study, researchers from Tufts University School of Medicine zero in on the controversial, non-therapeutic use of antibiotics in food animals and fish farming as a cause ofantibiotic resistance.

They report that the preponderance of evidence argues for stricter regulation of the practice. Stuart Levy, a world-renowned expert in antibiotic resistance, notes that a guiding tenet of public health, the precautionary principle, requires that steps be taken to avoid harm.

"The United States lags behind its European counterparts in establishing a ban on the use of antibiotics for growth promotion. For years it was believed that giving low-dose antibiotics via feed to promote growth in cows, swine, chickens and the use of antibiotics in fish farming had no negative consequences.

"Today, there is overwhelming evidence that non-therapeutic use of antibiotics contributes to antibiotic resistance, even if we do not understand all the mechanisms in the genetic transmission chain," says Levy, MD, professor of molecular biology and microbiology and director of the Center for Adaptation Genetics and Drug Resistance at Tufts University School of Medicine.

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Robert Koehler - Bomb Iran? Sanity in Exile

Published on Thursday, November 17, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/11/17

by Robert C. Koehler

Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran . . .

Or as Mitt Romney put it, playing the irresponsible-lunatic game convincingly enough to become the leading Republican presidential candidate: “If we re-elect Barack Obama, Iran will have a nuclear weapon.”

The consensus congeals: Our next war must be with Iran. A report issued by the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency, which the New York Times called “chillingly comprehensive” (though this is debatable), stoked this long-simmering agenda. It charges that Iran has conducted secret experiments on nuclear triggers and created computer models of nuclear explosions, among other things, which proves that the nation, despite its leaders’ protestations to the contrary, is pursuing . . . oh God, oh God . . . a nuclear weapons program.

War hysteria springs eternal. It certainly makes great fodder for a presidential campaign, as virtually all the GOP commander-in-chief wannabes are playing tough as nails on the issue, yanking the debate screamingly to the right. This is the way the game works. The Obama administration thus has to defend itself for eschewing, so far, a military response to the threat and pursuing only economic sanctions.

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Tina Lynn Evans - As Oil Declines, Can We Fill Our Lives with Creative Energy Instead?

Monday 7 November 2011

by: Tina Lynn Evans, New Clear Vision

http://www.truth-out.org/running-empty-oil-declines-can-we-fill-our-lives-creative-energy-instead/1321560157

The modern industrial lifestyle is predicated on oil. This notion is widely accepted in American society. Less so is the idea that oil supplies are depleting to the point that rising prices will affect — and in fact currently are affecting — the economy in significant ways. Perhaps even less accepted is the notion that, in a world with less oil, we can’t simply sit back and wait for the next technological breakthrough to solve our energy problems for us — we have to change the way we live.

We won’t be hitting empty overnight, but inevitably and soon, global demand for oil and natural gas will outstrip global extraction and supply. This situation may not sound so dire — until one considers the long-term implications. I study energy issues and have been teaching college classes on the subject for some years now. My understanding of the complexities of energy supplies and their interrelationships with the global economy, geopolitics, food production, transportation, and more, lead me to a sobering conclusion: oil depletion is truly a game changer for modern industrial societies. As evidenced by the Occupy Movement protests in U.S. cities and around the world, people everywhere are already experiencing the impacts of economic problems that stem, in part, from oil depletion — and this is just the beginning.

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Dave Lindorff - Rebellion in the Air -- Quan's Quackery and Bloomberg's Bullshit

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Rebellion-in-the-Air-Quan-by-Dave-Lindorff-111117-501.html

November 17, 2011 By Dave Lindorff Attacks on occupation encampments, like the ones in Oakland and New York, by pushing protesters out of the squares and into the street, are turning a protest into a rebellion. By Dave Lindorff New York -- The scripted excuses provided by mayors around the country to justify their police-state tactics in rousting peaceful occupation movement activists from their park-based demonstrations now stand exposed as utter nonsense, and, given their uncanny similarity in wording, can be clearly seen as having been drawn up for them by some hidden hands in Washington. the same can be said of the brutal tactics used. If Mayor Jean Quan in Oakland, or Mayor Mike Bloomberg in New York, had been genuinely concerned about the health and well-being of the people in the encampments in their cities, they would not have dispatched police suited up in riot gear and armed with pepper spray and big clubs into the camps in the dead of night, as each did, and as other mayors are doing. They would not have used tear gas and guns firing projectiles like so called "bean bags" and rubber coated bullets, as police in Oakland reportedly did on several occasions -- weapons that can cause severe injury and even death on occasion, especially when fired at close range.

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