Richard RJ Eskow - Wanna See A Real Ass Kicking (Itself)? Read The Dems' Disastrous "Super Committee" Proposal

By Richard (RJ) Eskow

October 27, 2011 - 9:38pm ET

http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2011104327/wanna-see-ass-kicking-itself-read-dems-disastrous-super-committee-proposal

If you've ever questioned whether the so-called "Super Committee" represents a breakdown in the democratic process, yesterday's proposal from the group's Democratic members should put your doubts to rest. The system's seriously broken when unelected super-legislators from both parties keep trying to top each other in proposing inhumane and unpopular programs.

The party of the donkey is about to give itself a real ass-kicking.

Representatives from the "party of the people" want to cut Medicare and Social Security, and they're looking for bragging rights on who'd cut government more in a time of need.

If the regular folks' party is trying to impose this much pain on the elderly, poor, and disabled, what's the rich people's party going to do: sacrifice babies in Times Square on live television?

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Counterfire.org - Greece on the brink of social explosion

COUNTERFIRE.ORG  WEDNESDAY, 19 OCTOBER 2011 10:03

As another 48 hour strike begins in Greece Matthaios Tsimitakis describes a situation where despair and hope coexist in weird combination and where something seems to be about to change in the country.

http://www.counterfire.org/index.php/articles/international/15037-greece-on-the-brink-of-social-explosion-

WRITTEN BY MATTHAIOS TSIMITAKI  

While surfing online, last week, I stuumbled on a blog-post that describes the life of a 37-year-old woman in Athens in these days of crisis. Unfortunately it is indicative of the condition in which so many gradually have entered as time under Troika and IMF, “rescue policies” passes by. Translated here is an excerpt:

“I have worked since I was 16 and I have lived in Athens since I was 24. I remember that many times I had to struggle in order to survive with two jobs, but never have I stayed unemployed for too long. During the past eight years there were times when things were tight and difficult and other times when things were more or less OK.

But not even in the most difficult period of my life, as a University student, did I find myself in the position I am today. For thirteen years I struggled, I fought, I stood on my feet. But now I can’t take it anymore. I’m giving up.

I’ve been unemployed for ten months. Knowing that I was going to lose my job, I started searching for a new one from as early as the Easter of 2010. By now I’ve sent 155 CVs but I only got two replies back, both saying that they didn’t need employees. For the first time in my life I’m facing an eviction order by the end of this month. The landlord says that I have no dignity and that I live on her expense, forgetting the eight years that I have been meeting my obligations regularly or even the improvements I ‘ve made to her house on my own expenses. Still, she’s right. She’s no charity – she wants her money.

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Jim Hightower - "We the People," Not "We the Corporations"

Wednesday 26 October 2011

by: Jim Hightower, Truthout | Op-Ed

http://www.truth-out.org/we-people-not-we-corporations/1319632343

A year from now, Americans will be caught in an unprecedented blizzard of presidential campaign ads. We'll be blinded by the whiteout and buried in the storm's negativity.

For the first time ever, most of this ad blizzard will not come from the candidates, but from ads secretly funded by huge corporations. This is because a five-man cabal on the Supreme Court issued an edict last year that perverts nature itself. In a case titled Citizens United, the five decreed that -- shazam! -- lifeless corporate entities are henceforth "persons" with more electioneering rights than ... well, us real-life persons.

In a black-robed coup against our democracy, the Supremes ruled that a corporation's money is "speech" and that CEOs may dump unlimited sums of it into their own ad campaigns to elect or defeat any candidates they choose.

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Michael LeVesque - The Multivitamin Battle

http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Multivitamin-Battle-by-Michael-LeVesque-111025-402.html

October 26, 2011 By Michael LeVesque Perception is everything. Medicine is based upon observation, as the French Philosopher Michel Foucault stated in The Birth of the Clinic, when describing the medical profession. Observation is Perception  For years the wealthy in northern Europe ate off pewter plates, which have a very high lead content.  Tomatoes are very acidic and when placed in contact with the pewter they leached out the lead.  When eaten, the tomatoes then produced lead poisoning.  Lead poisoning manifests itself in many ways from headaches to delirium to death.  Based upon perception tomatoes were considered poisonous in those regions for several hundred years by society and the medical community until the 19th Century when a merchant publicly ate a bushel of tomatoes to prove they were harmless without ill effects.

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Terra Daily - No simultaneous warming of northern and southern hemispheres as a result of climate change for 20 000 years

TERRA DAILY
Lund, Sweden (SPX) Oct 27, 2011

http://www.terradaily.com/reports/No_simultaneous_warming_of_northern_and_southern_hemispheres_as_a_result_of_climate_change_for_20000_years_999.html

A common argument againstglobal warming is that the climate has always varied. Temperatures rise sometimes and this is perfectly natural is the usual line.

However, Svante Bjorck, a climate researcher at Lund University in Sweden, has now shown that global warming, i.e. simultaneous warming events in the northern and southern hemispheres, have not occurred in the past 20 000 years, which is as far back as it is possible to analyse with sufficient precision to compare with modern developments. Svante Bjorck's study thus goes 14 000 years further back in time than previous studies have done. "What is happening today is unique from a historical geological perspective", he says.

Svante Bjorck has gone through the global climate archives, which are presented in a large number of research publications, and looked for evidence that any of the climate events that have occurred since the end of the last Ice Age 20 000 years ago could have generated similar effects on both the northern and southern hemispheres simultaneously.

It has not, however, been possible to verify this. Instead, he has found that when, for example, the temperature rises in one hemisphere, it falls or remains unchanged in the other.

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Environmental News Network - Calcutta leads world city list most at risk from climate change

Environmental News Network, October 26, 2011 08:37 AM

http://www.enn.com/top_stories/article/43464/top_stories/article/43464/print

A major new mapping study, analysing climate change vulnerability down to 25km² worldwide, has revealed some of the world's fastest growing populations are increasingly at risk from the impacts of climate related natural hazards and sea level rise

Many of the countries with the fastest population growth are rated as 'extreme risk' in the Climate Change Vulnerability Index (CCVI) released by risk analysis and mapping firm Maplecroft. These include the strategically important emerging economies of Bangladesh (2nd), Philippines (10th), Viet Nam (23rd), Indonesia (27th) and India (28th).

The CCVI forms part of Maplecroft's fourth annual Climate Change and Environmental Risk Atlas. It features subnational maps and analysis of climate change vulnerability and the adaptive capacity to combat climate change in 193 countries.

It analyses the exposure of populations to climate related natural hazards and sensitivity of countries in terms of population concentration, development, natural resources, agricultural dependency and conflict.

At a national level, the CCVI rates 30 countries at 'extreme risk,' with the top 10 comprising of Haiti, Bangladesh, Zimbabwe, Sierra Leone, Madagascar, Cambodia, Mozambique, DR Congo, Malawi and the Philippines.

The value of Maplecroft's research is much better appreciated at a subnational level, where risks to towns, cities, economic zones and individual company assets can be identified through interactive maps, which chart vulnerability, exposure and sensitivity to climate change down to 25km² worldwide. For instance, extreme hotpots of vulnerability can be seen in the South West of Brazil and coastal regions of China, but both countries are rated 'medium risk' by the CCVI the national level.

Vulnerability on this scale is illustrated particularly well when looking at the effects of climate change on the megacities of Asia; some of which have the highest rates of population growth, along with extreme vulnerability to climate change.

J. Holcombe - Saying Good-Bye to Fear of the 1918 Flu

Salem News (Oregon), Apr-01-2011

By J. Holcombe for Salem-News.com

http://www.salem-news.com/articles/april012011/1918-flu-jh.php

And as with 9/11, most of what we have been told about the 1918 flu is untrue.

(LONDON) - The fear of pandemics provided the basis on which Bush set up medical martial laws in each state, a huge apparatus intersecting with the military and DHS, and opened the door to the unheard of - military on the ground in the US for a flu.

They are still here, based on Sebelius "extending" the flu until 2012.

We have had a pandemic run-through already.  By now the country's knows the H1N1 pandemic was a dud.  Many even know it was fake. 

The whole thing was so bizarre that the Eu Parliament investigated as did the British Medical journal, condemning ties between the pharmaceutical industry and flu "experts."

A man at the WHO named Osterhaus has been the main person at the WHO saying that pandemics - SARS, Ebola, Avian flu, swine flu -  were going to kill millions.  

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Robert Scheer - Thirty Years of Unleashed Greed

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/thirty_years_of_unleashed_greed_20111026/

Posted on Oct 26, 2011

By Robert Scheer

It is class warfare. But it was begun not by the tear-gassed, rain-soaked protesters asserting their constitutionally guaranteed right of peaceful assembly but rather the financial overlords who control all of the major levers of power in what passes for our democracy. It is they who subverted the American ideal of a nation of stakeholders in control of their economic and political destiny.

Between 1979 and 2007, as the Congressional Budget Office reported this week, the average real income of the top 1 percent grew by an astounding 275 percent. And that is after payment of the taxes that the superrich and their Republican apologists find so onerous.

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EJ Dionne - The Vatican Meets the Occupiers

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_vatican_meets_the_occupiers_20111026/

Posted on Oct 26, 2011

By E.J. Dionne, Jr.

Will we soon see a distinguished-looking older man in long white robes walking among the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators in New York’s Zuccotti Park? Is Pope Benedict XVI joining the protest movement?

Well, yes, and no. Yes, the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace issued a strong and thoughtful critique of the global financial system this week that paralleled many of the criticisms of unchecked capitalism that are echoing through lower Manhattan and cities around the world.

The report spoke of “the primacy of being over having” and of “ethics over the economy,” plus “embracing the logic of the global common good.”

In a knock against those who oppose government economic regulation, the council emphasized “the primacy of politics—which is responsible for the common good—over the economy and finance.” It commented favorably on a financial transactions tax and supported an international authority to oversee the global economy.

But Vatican officials were careful to say that their report was not a direct response to the worldwide demonstrations. “It is a coincidence that we share some views,” said Bishop Mario Toso, secretary of the council. “But after all, these are proposals that are based on reasonableness.”

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Henry Giroux - Occupy Wall Street's Battle Against American-Style Authoritarianism

Wednesday 26 October 2011

by: Henry A. Giroux, Truthout | News Analysis

http://www.truth-out.org/occupy-wall-streets-battle-against-american-style-authoritarianism/1319570241

Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people.

        -Theodor Adorno

The Occupy Wall Street movement is raising new questions about an emerging form of authoritarianism in the United States, one that threatens the collective survival of vast numbers of people, not through overt physical injury or worse, but through an aggressive assault on social provisions that millions of Americans depend on. For those pondering the meaning of the pedagogical and political challenges being addressed by the protesters, it might be wise to revisit a classic essay by German sociologist and philosopher Theodor Adorno titled "Education After Auschwitz," in which he tries to grapple with the relationship between education and morality in light of the horrors perpetrated in the name of authoritarianism and its industrialization of death.[1]

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