"David Sirota" - University of Hypocrisy

Friday 16 September 2011

by: David Sirota, Truthout | Op-Ed

http://www.truth-out.org/university-hypocrisy/1316178975

In the firmament of celebrated Americana, there is Mom, apple pie, football and beer -- but there most certainly is not marijuana. As it relates to drugs, this bizarre culture has us implicitly accepting that people will inevitably use mind-altering substances. But through our statutes, we allow law-abiding citizens to use only one recreational substance -- alcohol -- that just happens to be way more hazardous than pot.

Such idiocy is the product of many variables. There's been interest-group maneuvering and temperance-movement hypocrisy. There's been hippie-hating rage and reefer-madness paranoia. And, most invisibly, there's been college.

Though little noticed for its role in America's selective War on Drugs, the university system has now become a key player shotgunning the oxymoronic "alcohol is acceptable but pot is evil" mentality down the beer-bong-primed throats of America's youth. To see how it all works, consider the University of Colorado (CU).

Both figuratively and literally immersed in alcohol, CU is the higher education gem of a state whose governor famously made his millions on beer breweries. Today, the school's catering service sells alcohol, and university officials license CU's logo for use on beer-drinking merchandise. Meanwhile, every school year, CU forces kids to sit through a convocation in a beer-themed arena -- the Coors Events Center -- to learn about the "meaning and responsibilities" of student life.

Unsurprisingly, CU now has a binge-drinking problem, as evidenced by last week's news that another CU student died after a night of heavy imbibing.

This headline-grabbing tragedy -- CU's second such fatality in less than a decade -- is but one of the 600,000 alcohol-related student injuries each year, according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. But because, like other schools, CU is intertwined with alcohol culture, the university has danced around the issue, simultaneously acknowledging the problem and not doing much about it.

"(Alcohol) is the cause or primary factor in (a majority) of suicides, unintentional deaths, physical injuries, distressed personal relationships, legal problems, sexual assault, property damage and academic failure," admitted Donald Misch, CU's assistant vice chancellor for health and wellness, in 2010. Yet, Misch refrained from an abstinence message, imploring students to "drink responsibly."

This libertarian attitude seems laudable for acknowledging the fact that kids will party regardless of prohibitionist rules. However, it is counterproductive in the context of the school's no-tolerance posture toward marijuana -- a substance that has been connected to far fewer injuries and no overdoses.

In recent years, the Boulder Daily Camera newspaper reports, university regents have been looking to "crack down" on students' unsanctioned "4/20" pro-pot protest because officials say it gives the school a "party image" -- as if CU's beer-soaked tailgating festivities don't do that already. While students over 21 may possess alcohol in university residences, according to the Camera, "CU bans marijuana in its dorms, even if students have medical licenses." And whereas underage drinking typically results in soft punishments from university officials, CU campus police have been increasing citations for marijuana possession, which can result in students losing financial aid.

CU, of course, embodies the norm in our universities, almost all of which issue harsher penalties for marijuana possession than alcohol use. Though students at more than a dozen schools across the country recently voted for referenda demanding administrators equalize punishments, the initiatives have been ignored. Instead, school officials are fighting to instill America's destructive drug-war mentality in the next generation.

The result is the perpetuation of a destructive ethos that encourages us to party hard -- but only with a substance that is far more toxic than marijuana.



"David Galland" - Is The US Monetary System On The Verge Of Collapse?

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/guest-post-us-monetary-system-verge-collapse?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+zerohedge%2Ffeed+%28zero+hedge+-+on+a+long+enough+timeline%2C+the+survival+rate+for+everyone+drops+to+zero%29

Zero Hedge  September 20, 2011

Submitted by David Galland of Casey Research

Is the US Monetary System on the Verge of Collapse?

Tune into CNBC or click onto any of the dozens of mainstream financial news sites, and you’ll find an endless array of opinions on the latest wiggle in equity, bond and commodities markets. As often as not, you'll find those opinions nestled side by side with authoritative analysis on the outlook for the economy, complete with the author’s carefully studied judgment on the best way forward.

Lost in all the noise, however, is any recognition that the US monetary system – and by extension, that of much of the developed world – may very well be on the verge of collapse. Falling back on metaphor, while the world’s many financial experts and economists sit around arguing about the direction of the ship of state, most are missing the point that the ship has already hit an iceberg and is taking on water fast.

Yet if you were to raise your hand to ask 99% of the financial intelligentsia whether we might be on the verge of a failure of the dollar-based world monetary system, the response would be thinly veiled derision. Because, as we all know, such a thing is unimaginable!

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"Reuters" - Poll: More Americans Believe in Global Warming This Year

http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/667753/poll%3A_more_americans_believe_in_global_warming_this_year/#paragraph4

WASHINGTON, DC, September 16, 2011 (ENS) - More Americans today believe that global warming is occurring compared to one year ago, according to a new Ipsos poll conducted on behalf of Stanford University and Reuters news agency and released today.

Currently, 83 percent of all adults surveyed say that global warming has been happening while only 15 percent say they believe that it has not been happening.

The poll finds a statistically significant increase in the number of Americans who believe the Earth has been warming - from 75 percent one year ago in 2010 to 83 percent now.

Global warming has been a central focus in the recent Republican presidential primary debates.

While attitudes on the climate issue differ between Democrats and Republicans, the divide is not as great as the political debate might imply, says the global market research firm Ipsos in its release of the survey results.

Almost three-quarters (72 percent) of Republicans believe global warming has been happening, as do 92 percent of Democrats.

Still, the survey also shows that the climate skeptics have become more certain in their beliefs that global warming is not happening. The IPSOS measure of certainty has risen from 35 percent in 2010 to 53 percent in 2011.

The percentage of those surveyed who are certain that climate warming has been happening also has risen over the past year, from 45 percent to 53 percent.

A large majority (71 percent) believe that if warming has been happening, it has been caused either partly (45 percent) or mostly (27 percent) by human activities, which 27 percent believe warming to be the result of natural causes.

On this issue, the political polarization is more apparent - 37 percent of Democrats believe global warming is the result primarily of human action, while only 14 percent of Republicans believe this.

Today, 43 percent of Republicans believe global warming is the result of natural causes, up from 35 percent in 2010. Self-identified Tea Party members display still more certainty (49 percent) that global warming is caused by natural events.

Looking forward, a large majority of those surveyed (72 percent) expect the world's temperature to continue rising over the next 100 years if nothing is done to prevent it.

Here too, Democrats are much more likely to believe in global warming's continued impact (88 percent) compared to Republicans (57 percent) or Tea Party members (49 percent).

The Reuters/Ipsos poll of 1,134 adults, including 932 registered voters, had a margin of error of three percentage points for all respondents and 3.1 points for registered voters.



"Alliance for Natural Health" - Whose Side Is the USDA Really On?

Alliance for Natural Health  On September 20, 2011

http://www.anh-usa.org/whose-side-is-usda-really-on/

Last week, USDA secretary Tom Vilsack gave a clear directive to his department’s new Advisory Committee on Biotechnology and 21st Century Agriculture (AC21): come up with a plan ^[2] to compensate organic and conventional farmers whose crops become contaminated because of genetically engineered foods.

This directive is clearly intended to sound like it will help farmers. But we think it is actually intended to help Monsanto. To see why we think this, a bit of background.

The committee is comprised of a broad spectrum of interested parties ^[3]: organic scientists and organic trade organizations, conventional farming industry reps (including makers of high-fructose corn syrup), DuPont, agriculture experts, genetic engineering companies, lawyers, and a few concerned individuals.

As we reported recently, courts have increasingly been siding against GE and biotech farming ^[4] when surrounding farms and products become contaminated. Bayer CropScience recently agreed to pay up to $750 million ^[5] to farmers in the Midwest to settle lawsuits over its contamination of the US rice supply.

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"Amanda Marcotte" - What Awful Reality TV and Suburban Living Have to Do With the Tea Party's Lack of Empathy

By Amanda Marcotte, AlterNet
Posted on September 20, 2011, Printed on September 21, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/152480/what_awful_reality_tv_and_suburban_living_have_to_do_with_the_tea_party%27s_lack_of_empathy

If there’s any one defining feature of the Tea Party, it’s a lack of empathy for their fellow Americans. Republican candidates know this about their base: more than their supposed love of Jesus or the Founding Fathers, more than any coherent principled conservativism, more even than the strong streak of bigotry running through the Tea Party is this gleeful “screw you” attitude. Therefore, the Republican primary has become a contest to see who can heap the most abuse on Americans Tea Partiers don’t identify with.

You have Herman Cain preening about making Muslims second-class citizens; Michele Bachmann attacking doctors and public health officials who would prevent cervical cancer in young women; Rick Perry crowing about his heavy execution rate (which includes a willingness to execute people who should have been acquitted or had mistrials); and Ron Paul drawing heavy applause from a debate audience for his belief that government should just let the uninsured die. Far from being concerned about misfortune befalling others, the Tea Party routinely supports the expansion of suffering.   

To help explain this phenomena, we might remember another signifying characteristic of the Tea Party: despite the enthusiasm for country music, Tea Partiers proliferate in suburban and exurban districts. The most right-wing districts in the country are also some of its most suburban. Michele Bachmann serves the 6th District of Minnesota, which is composed of the suburban area surrounding the north of Minneapolis/St. Paul. Steve King, known for his competing hatreds of immigrants and sexually active women, serves the 5th District of Iowa, built from the suburban sprawl between Omaha and Des Moines. Anti-health-care fanatic Joe Walsh represents Illinois’s 8th District, composed of the northern suburbs of Chicago. Joe Barton, known for apologizing to BP for the White House post-oil spill investigation, serves the 6th District in Texas, which encompasses the suburban sprawl south of the Dallas/Ft. Worth areas.  

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"Robert Fisk" - Why the Middle East Will Never Be the Same Again

Published on Tuesday, September 20, 2011 by The Independent/UK

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-why-the-middle-east-will-never-be-the-same-again-2357514.html

The Palestinians won't achieve statehood, but they will consign the 'peace process' to history.

by Robert Fisk

The Palestinians won't get a state this week. But they will prove – if they get enough votes in the General Assembly and if Mahmoud Abbas does not succumb to his characteristic grovelling in the face of US-Israeli power – that they are worthy of statehood. And they will establish for the Arabs what Israel likes to call – when it is enlarging its colonies on stolen land – "facts on the ground": never again can the United States and Israel snap their fingers and expect the Arabs to click their heels. The US has lost its purchase on the Middle East. It's over: the "peace process", the "road map", the "Oslo agreement"; the whole fandango is history."In the new Middle East," writes Fisk, "Amid the Arab Awakening and the revolt of free peoples for dignity and freedom, this UN vote – passed in the General Assembly, vetoed by America if it goes to the Security Council – constitutes a kind of hinge; not just a page turning, but the failure of empire. (EPA)

Personally, I think "Palestine" is a fantasy state, impossible to create now that the Israelis have stolen so much of the Arabs' land for their colonial projects. Go take a look at the West Bank, if you don't believe me. Israel's massive Jewish colonies, its pernicious building restrictions on Palestinian homes of more than one storey and its closure even of sewage systems as punishment, the "cordons sanitaires" beside the Jordanian frontier, the Israeli-only settlers' roads have turned the map of the West Bank into the smashed windscreen of a crashed car. Sometimes, I suspect that the only thing that prevents the existence of "Greater Israel" is the obstinacy of those pesky Palestinians.

But we are now talking of much greater matters. This vote at the UN – General Assembly or Security Council, in one sense it hardly matters – is going to divide the West – Americans from Europeans and scores of other nations – and it is going to divide the Arabs from the Americans. It is going to crack open the divisions in the European Union; between eastern and western Europeans, between Germany and France (the former supporting Israel for all the usual historical reasons, the latter sickened by the suffering of the Palestinians) and, of course, between Israel and the EU.

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"Richard Wolff" - The Truth about 'Class War' in America

Published on Tuesday, September 20, 2011 by The Guardian/UK

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/sep/19/class-war-america-republicans-rich

Republicans claim, in Orwellian fashion, that Obama's millionaire tax is 'class war'. The reality is that the super-rich won the war

by Richard Wolff

Republicans and conservatives always fight back against proposals to raise taxes on corporations and rich individuals by making two basic claims. First, such proposals amount to un-American "class warfare", pitting the working class against corporations and the rich. Second, such proposals would take money for the government that would otherwise have been invested in production and thus created jobs

Neither logic nor evidence supports either claim. The charge of class war is particularly obtuse. Consider simply these two facts. First, at the end of the second world war, for every dollar Washington raised in taxes on individuals, it raised $1.50 in taxes on business profits. Today, that ratio is very different: for every dollar Washington gets in taxes on individuals, it takes 25 cents in taxes on business. In short, the last half century has seen a massive shift of the burden of federal taxation off business and onto individuals.

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"Single Payer Action" - Progressives Vow to Challenge Obama in Democratic Primaries

Published on Monday, September 19, 2011 by Single Payer Action

http://www.singlepayeraction.org/blog/

Progressive leaders led by Ralph Nader and Cornel West unveiled a proposal today to challenge President Obama in the Democratic Party’s presidential primaries in 2012.

The proposal, which has been endorsed by over 45 distinguished leaders, seeks to have a slate of six candidates run against President Obama, each representing a field in which Obama has never clearly staked a progressive claim or where he has drifted toward the corporatist right.

“Without debates by challengers inside the Democratic Party’s presidential primaries, the liberal/majoritarian agenda will be muted and ignored,” said Ralph Nader.

“The one-man Democratic primaries will be dull, repetitive, and draining of both voter enthusiasm and real bright lines between the two parties that excite voters,” Nader said.

A letter (full text below) is being sent to a list of distinguished elected officials, civic leaders, prominent members of academia and the NGO community who represent the fields of labor, poverty, military and foreign policy, health insurance and care, the environment, financial regulation, consumer protection, and civil, political and human rights/empowerment.

The list of potential candidates also includes progressive democrats who have held national and state office and have fought for progressive reforms.

“We need to put strong democratic pressure on President Obama in the name of poor and working people” said Cornel West, author and Professor at Princeton University. “His administration has tilted too much toward Wall Street, we need policies that empower Main Street.”

The letter pronounces that without primary chal

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"Eric Alterman" - The Problem of Media Idiocy, Why Do MSM Media Stars Pretend to Be Stupid?

By Eric Alterman, The Nation
Posted on September 19, 2011, Printed on September 20, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/152463/the_problem_of_media_idiocy%3A_why_do_msm_media_stars_pretend_to_be_stupid

There is a specter haunting America today. It is the specter of stupidity. A few months ago, I wrote a column I called “The Problem of Republican Idiots.” Believe me, this problem has not gone away. Rick Perry, the Republican Party’s presidential front-runner right now, believes the phenomenon of man-made global warming to be a conspiracy by “a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data.” No less alarming is that this stupidity is apparently contagious. The men and women who inhabit the upper reaches of the US media (and pull down the multimillion-dollar salaries) appear to believe that to do their jobs properly, they must make themselves behave like idiots in order to be “fair” to the Republicans and their idiotic ideas.

I have in mind two examples, both involving, as it happens, David Gregory, host of NBC’s Meet the Press. Neither one is exactly new, but I picked them because not only is Gregory host of television’s highest-rated Sunday morning news show, by far, but his program is also considered to be the most influential and important of all TV news programs. As the alleged gold standard of television interviewing and discussion, it sets the tone for much of the rest of the week’s reporting. Also, I just can’t get these two examples out of my head, they are so damn stupid. See if you agree.

I. On August 13, discussing the Ames, Iowa, straw poll, Gregory made this observation on MSNBC’s The Daily Rundown: “You know, Perry talked about potentially seceding from the union. You think that’s extreme. Well, people on the other side think introducing healthcare reform for the whole country is akin to European socialism.” To be honest, in the space allotted to me I’m not sure I can do justice to the multiple forms of stupidity this comment manages to combine. But let me try. To begin with, we have the stupidity of lavishing so much attention on the wholly meaningless Ames straw poll in the first place. Leave that aside. Gregory was trying to create a sense of moral and intellectual equivalence between Rick Perry’s 2009 suggestion that Texas might secede from the United States—an action that set off the Civil War when South Carolina did it in 1860—and Obama’s proposal and Congress’s passage of a healthcare reform bill modeled on the one put in place by Mitt Romney when he was the Republican governor of Massachusetts. Given that Obama dropped the bill’s public option, the legislation relies entirely on private healthcare providers and does not create any significant new government bureaucracies to help implement it. When all is said and done, the program is a modest—and in many ways disappointing—version of a vision that has been part of American debate since Teddy Roosevelt proposed it in 1912 and Harry Truman made it a central part of the Democratic Party platform since 1948.

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"DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER" - Mayor Bloomberg predicts riots in the streets if economy doesn't create more jobs

DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Friday, September 16th 2011, 12:15 PM

http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2011/09/16/2011-09-16_mayor_bloomberg_predicts_riots_in_the_streets_if_economy_doesnt_create_more_jobs.html#ixzz1YQNK89kf

Are you worried that American cities could face riots by jobless youth on the level of Madrid and Cairo if the economy doesn't pick up?

Mayor Bloomberg warned Friday there would be riots in the streets if Washington doesn't get serious about generating jobs.

"We have a lot of kids graduating college, can't find jobs," Bloomberg said on his weekly WOR radio show.

"That's what happened in Cairo. That's what happened in Madrid. You don't want those kinds of riots here."

In Cairo, angry Egyptians took out their frustrations by toppling presidential strongman Hosni Mubarak - and more recently attacking the Israeli embassy.

As for Madrid, the most recent street protests were sparked by widespread unhappiness that the Spanish government was spending millions on the visit of Pope Benedict instead of dealing with widespread unemployment.

Bloomberg's unusually alarmist pronouncement came as President Obama has been pressuring reluctant Republicans to pass his proposed job creation plan.

"The damage to a generation that can't find jobs will go on for many, many years," the normally-measured mayor said.

Bloomberg gave Obama kudos for coming up with a jobs plan.

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