Eric Margolis - Iran's Nukes: Old Lies in New Bottles

Published on Saturday, November 12, 2011 by Eric Margolis

http://www.ericmargolis.com/political_commentaries/old-lies-in-new-bottles.aspx

by Eric Margolis

NEW YORK – The UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) long awaited, much ballyhooed report on Iran’s nuclear activities has been thunderously greeted here as conclusive evidence that Iran is working on nuclear weapons.

Both Tehran and a 2007 US combined intelligence assessment deny such claims.

There’s little new in this report, and a lot of déjà vu. We read the old story floating around since 2002 about a mysterious laptop stolen from Iran and passed to US intelligence. It allegedly contains scientific material about explosive compression methods to trigger a nuclear explosion, and designs to shrink nuclear warheads to fit in missile nosecones.

The UN and western powers say this stolen computer’s contents conclusively proves Iran has violated the UN’s non-proliferation treaty, to which Tehran is a signatory. Israel and its American partisans are raising a hue and cry about an impending nuclear attack on the Jewish state by Iran’s “crazy” leaders. Republicans are baying for war against Iran.

The US and UN also claim a Russian scientist who supposedly worked on Iranian nuclear weapons explosive technology defected and revealed all to western intelligence.

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Washington's Blog - Engineers Knew Fukushima Might Be Unsafe, But Covered It Up … And Now the Extreme Vulnerabilty of NEW U.S. Plants Is Being Covered Up

By Washington's Blog

Global Research, November 12, 2011 http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=27624

Preface: The current nuclear reactor design was chosen – not because it was safe – but because it worked on navy submarines. And governments have been covering up nuclear meltdowns for 50 years. BBC reporter Greg Palast reports – based on a first-hand interview of a senior engineer for the corporation which built the Fukushima nuclear plants, and a review of engineers’ field diaries – that the engineers who built the Fukushima nuclear plants knew their design would fail in an earthquake: The plant was riddled with problems that, no way on earth, could stand an earth- quake. The team of engineers sent in to inspect found that most of these components could “completely and utterly fail” during an earthquake. That quote is about the Shoreham, New York, power station, not Fukushima. But Palast claims that: (1) the company fraudulently changed the seismic report to pretend the plant was earthquake-safe; and (2) the exact same thing was done at Fukushima. As I noted in March:

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Joe Romm - Over Half of All U.S. Tax Subsidies Go to Four Industries. Guess Which Ones?

By Joe Romm

http://www.nationofchange.org/over-half-all-us-tax-subsidies-go-four-industries-guess-which-ones-1321200366

Citizens for Tax Justice has analyzed corporate tax rates from 2008 to 2010. The report [PDF] examines over half of the Fortune 500 companies

Perhaps it’s no surprise that the richest industries get the biggest subsidies, starting with finance and Big Energy.  That’s how the 1% operate.

Notably, 56 percent of the total tax subsidies went to just four industries: financial, utilities, tele-communications, and oil, gas & pipelines.

But hey, Solyndra got a $500 million loan and went bankrupt so that is story the media focuses on over and over again, rather than the big robbery in broad daylight.

Les Leopold - Occupy Wall Street Is Not a Spectator Sport

By Les Leopold, AlterNet

Posted on November 8, 2011, Printed on November 13, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/153015/occupy_wall_street_is_not_a_spectator_sport%3A_5_ways_the_99_percent_can_contribute_to_the_movement_right_now 

Let’s take a look at where we are right now. There is battle royale underway between inhabitants of two entirely different universes over what’s wrong with our nation and what should be fixed.  

On the one hand, the entire political establishment, blessed by Wall Street, wants the conversation to be all about debt and “entitlements." We are told 24/7 that we’re living over our heads, that our social safety net is too expensive, and that we need to cut, cut, cut trillions of dollars from public budgets so we don’t become the next Greece.

In that framework the only question is how much to cut and how much we should sacrifice. The so-called liberal position is that the rich should pay a bit more while the rest of us suffer cuts in education, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. (Please note that taxes on Wall Street are not on the table.) The “grand bargain” is all about how much we will have to pay for the economic collapse caused by Wall Street. It's also a loser because the more we cut, the longer unemployment will last, and the more fiscal distress we’ll face as tax revenues stall.  

On the other side is the framework that Occupy Wall Street successfully put into play. It argues that Wall Street should pay for the mess it created. It suggests that the issue is employment for the many, not debt repayments for the few. It also gets us to face up to myriad of ways that income inequality is hollowing out our society, destroying the middle-class and increasing poverty. It points the finger at those who crashed our economy and it demands reparations. And it does all this without making any specific demands. It doesn’t have to. It just needs to be the living embodiment of the many versus the few.  

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Mike Meyers - Republican Policies Would 'Soak the Poor'

Published on Sunday, November 13, 2011 by the Minneapolis Star Tribune

http://www.startribune.com/opinion/otherviews/133719503.html

by Mike Meyers

Republicans proudly champion freedom. Freedom from health care. Freedom from clean air and water. Freedom from immigrant potato pickers.

The holiest of holies for Republican true believers, however, is freedom from taxation. Taxes must go down and never, ever go up.

In 2011, however, Republicans have undergone something of a conversion. They are content to see taxes rise.

Indeed, they are pushing for tax increases. Of course, not higher tax bills for multinational corporations or Americans with seven- or eight-figure annual incomes.

Republicans are targeting the sick and unemployed, the indigent and elderly, as well as working-class families struggling to raise children.

These are what Wall Street Journal editorial writers and Fox News talking heads call the "lucky duckies."

The "lucky duckies" may ride the bus, strain to pay the rent and choose between eating and paying the heat bill. Yet one aspect of their lives is ever so enviable: They do not pay federal income taxes.

Nearly half of Americans pay no federal income tax. Let us pause for a moment to let the reader's jealousy seethe.

Yet who would want to change places with this "other half"?

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Tim Bolen - WHO, CDC, and FDA SCORNED at Third UN Mercury Conference...

Opinion by Consumer Advocate  Tim Bolen 

Monday, November 7th,  2011

http://www.bolenreport.com/unep%20mercury.htm

Things couldn't have seemed rosier for Big Pharma last January, 2011.  Dismayed as they were at failed attempts to stave off financial losses from upcoming patent-run-outs, the situation, at least in the vaccine program, was nicely going to generate tons of gold bullion, satchels of emeralds, and shiploads of cash in ever increasing amounts - more than enough to keep those CEO and top executive annual bonuses rolling in.  Boards of Directors, and Common Stock Financial Fund Managers were all friendly - warm and fuzzy. 

Then on January 27th, 2011 the bottom dropped out of their world.  Suddenly, with virtually no warning, the entire "Vaccine Construction" so carefully constructed, so snickered over in Boardrooms, was, not only at risk, but was likely to come crashing down.  Mark and David Geier, accompanied by Lisa Sykes showed up, information packets in hand, at the second United Nations Environment Programme - Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee to prepare a global legally binding instrument on Mercury (INC2). CoMeD, their anti-mercury in medicine organization, had been accepted by the UN as a Non Government Organization (NGO), an official delegate to the UN program.

The drug lords, and their under-minion's, gasping began...

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Kevin G. Hall - U.S. economy remains at risk from European financial mess

Kevin G. Hall | McClatchy Newspapers

November 10, 2011

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/11/10/129972/us-economy-remains-at-risk-from.html

WASHINGTON — Stocks around the globe returned to positive territory Thursday, a day after European worries sparked steep losses. Europe's woes, however, remain a clear and present danger to the fragile U.S. economic recovery.

U.S. blue chips had fallen almost 400 points Wednesday on fears that soaring borrowing costs for Italy could push it into a crippling debt default. Those fears waned a bit Thursday as a new coalition government seemed to be taking form and there was more clarity from Italian lawmakers over promised economic reforms.

Borrowing costs remain elevated for Italy, a nation with a $2.6 trillion deficit and about $300 billion in borrowing needs over the next year or so. On Wednesday, Italy was forced to pay investors a 7.6 percent rate of return on its 10-year bonds, well above the 7 percent threshold at which other European nations were forced to seek rescue packages.

Investors eased up on Italy on Thursday, and the rate of return on the benchmark 10-year bond fell to 6.873 percent, slightly below the danger zone.

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Naomi Klein - Capitalism vs. the Climate

The Nation | November 9, 2011

http://www.thenation.com/article/164497/capitalism-vs-climate

There is a question from a gentleman in the fourth row.
 
He introduces himself as Richard Rothschild. He tells the crowd that he ran for county commissioner in Maryland’s Carroll County because he had come to the conclusion that policies to combat global warming were actually “an attack on middle-class American capitalism.” His question for the panelists, gathered in a Washington, DC, Marriott Hotel in late June, is this: “To what extent is this entire movement simply a green Trojan horse, whose belly is full with red Marxist socioeconomic doctrine?”

Here at the Heartland Institute’s Sixth International Conference on Climate Change, the premier gathering for those dedicated to denying the overwhelming scientific consensus that human activity is warming the planet, this qualifies as a rhetorical question. Like asking a meeting of German central bankers if Greeks are untrustworthy. Still, the panelists aren’t going to pass up an opportunity to tell the questioner just how right he is.

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Michael Lind - 3 Ways Elites Rig the System

By Michael Lind, Salon

Posted on November 9, 2011, Printed on November 11, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/153025/3_ways_elites_rig_the_system

A growing number of Americans suspect that the American economic system is rigged in favor of the rich and merely affluent. That growing number of Americans is right.

Here are three of the many ways that markets for compensation are rigged to benefit not only the top 1 percent but also the top 10 percent, a group that includes many well-paid professionals:

Financial sector compensation. By now the phrase “too big to fail” has become so familiar that it is known by its acronym: TBTF. What needs to be emphasized is that TBTF is the basis for the huge bonuses paid to elite American bankers who benefit from a government that socializes their losses while allowing them to keep their profits.

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Wayne Madsen - War Clouds Form over Iran

By Wayne Madsen

Global Research, November 10, 2011

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=27584 

Israel’s all-powerful lobby in Washington, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), an organization composed of Israeli collaborators, infiltrators, and outright traitors to the United States, is steamrolling through the House of Representatives H.R. 1905, which would prohibit the President of the United States, the Secretary of State, members of the U.S. Foreign Service, or any special envoy from engaging in any sort of diplomatic contact, official or unofficial, with any member or agent of the government of Iran. Only when the President informs the requisite committees may he proceed with engaging on diplomatic contact with Iran. Israel has de facto control over the foreign affairs committees of Congress, so any White House notification of the need to contact Iranian officials would be instantly transmitted to Binyamin Netanyahu’s office in Jerusalem and Israel would then circumvent any U.S.-Iranian contact. AIPAC, with its resolution, is further making the United States a vassal of the Jewish state.

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