"Timothy Wise & Kevin Gallagher"- Obama's "21st Century Trade Deals" Look a Lot Like the Same Bad Policies He Campaigned Against

By Timothy A. Wise and Kevin Gallagher, Comment Is Free
Posted on September 9, 2011, Printed on September 11, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/152359/obama%27s_%2221st_century_trade_deals%22_look_a_lot_like_the_same_bad_policies_he_campaigned_against

 It is bad enough that President Obama is reversing his campaign pledge and supporting Bush-era trade deals with Korea, Colombia and Panama. Starting this week in Chicago, the US will be hosting the first major trade negotiations since the "Battle in Seattle" World Trade Organisation talks came here in 1999. This occasion is for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) with a wide range of industrialised and developing Pacific Rim countries.

As part of his plan to revive the US economy and create jobs, Obama claims he will be unveiling "a trade agreement for the 21st century". Ironically, though, he will be pushing the same "Nafta-style" trade pacts he campaigned against, and to howls of protest from his own electoral base. Let us not forget what he said:

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"Arun Gupta"- Empire of Chaos -- How 9/11 Shaped the Politics of a Failing State

By Arun Gupta, AlterNet
Posted on September 9, 2011, Printed on September 11, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/152320/empire_of_chaos%3A_how_9_11_shaped_the_politics_of_a_failing_state

The events made my mind reel. The angry plumes of smoke, office paper raining like confetti, tumbling windows flashing in the sunlight. I could make out jumpers and watched a jet fighter whoosh by the burning towers, bank and disappear. I thought, “This is like a movie.”

It upset me that my only way to comprehend the events was to reference the Hollywood imaginarium. But it was understandable. Where else would I have seen images resembling the war in my backyard – collapsing skyscrapers, gigantic fireballs and thousands of dead?

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"Joshua Holland"- How 'Small Government' Conservatives Raise Your Taxes Through Stealthy Back-Door Fees

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet

Posted on September 9, 2011, Printed on September 11, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/152364/how_%27small_government%27_conservatives_raise_your_taxes_through_stealthy_back-door_fees

Here's a simple fact the Right would like you to ignore: cutting public spending doesn't lead to fewer dollars being “taken out of your pocket” for the services government provides; it merely shifts those costs around, and often increases them.

When conservatives say, “I'm for lower taxes and fiscal responsibility,” what they really mean is that they favor cutting top marginal tax rates – those paid by a relatively wealthy few – capital gains taxes on investments, inheritance taxes and taxes on corporations. And to make up for those revenue losses, they are happy to run higher deficits and very quick to raise taxes on the rest of us.

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"Chris Hedges" - A Decade After 9/11 -- We Are What We Loathe

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/nationalism_in_the_aftermath_of_9_11_20110910/

Posted on Sep 10, 2011

By Chris Hedges

I arrived in Times Square around 9:30 on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. A large crowd was transfixed by the huge Jumbotron screens. Billows of smoke could be seen on the screens above us, pouring out of the two World Trade towers. Two planes, I was told by people in the crowd, had plowed into the towers. I walked quickly into the New York Times newsroom at 229 W. 43rd St., grabbed a handful of reporter’s notebooks, slipped my NYPD press card, which would let me through police roadblocks, around my neck, and started down the West Side Highway to the World Trade Center. The highway was closed to traffic. I walked through knots of emergency workers, police and firemen. Fire trucks, emergency vehicles, ambulances, police cars and rescue trucks idled on the asphalt.

The south tower went down around 10 a.m. with a guttural roar. Huge rolling gray clouds of noxious smoke, dust, gas, pulverized concrete, gypsum and the grit of human remains enveloped lower Manhattan. The sun was obscured. The north tower collapsed about 30 minutes later. The dust hung like a shroud over Manhattan. 

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"David DeGraw" - The Richest 0.1% Have Launched A War On Us – It’s Time To Fight Back And Hold These 400 Billionaires Personally Responsible For Our Economic Crisis

September 8, 2011 

http://ampedstatus.org/the-richest-0-1-have-launched-a-war-on-us-its-time-to-fight-back-and-hold-these-400-billionaires-personally-responsible-for-our-economic-crisis/print/

We have endured financial oppression for long enough. In a time of national crisis and shared sacrifice, the richest one-tenth of one percent of the population cannot continue on their merry way, living in obscene wealth and detached from reality, while the majority of the population desperately struggles to make ends meet. We are under attack, and it’s time to fight back.

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Koala Rescue

It is not common for a Koala to bear twins and, regrettably in this instance, the Mum was struck and killed by a passing car. Fortunately, the driver stopped, and took the mother to the local vet, not knowing she was dead - where it was soon discovered that she had these twins in her pouch.
 
First photo: Tiny Koala being fed with syringe...so tiny!!
Followed by a pictorial chronology of their growth...
"Thanks for saving my life!"

It is just so nice to see a story that has a happy ending

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"Adam Lee" - Why the Anti-Science Creationist Movement Is So Dangerous

By Adam Lee, AlterNet
Posted on September 8, 2011, Printed on September 12, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/152349/why_the_anti-science_creationist_movement_is_so_dangerous

A few weeks ago, Jon Huntsman torpedoed his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination by making the following announcement: "To be clear. I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy."

It's a pathetic commentary on the anti-intellectualism rampant in American politics that this is newsworthy. A major-party candidate announces that he doesn't deny a foundational theory of modern science! In fact, given the political atmosphere in the Republican party, it's not just newsworthy but a daring act: polls have shown that almost 70 percent of Republicans deny evolution.

Huntsman is clearly trying to position himself as the moderate candidate. But while that strategy might play well in the general election, it won't do him any good unless he can get the Republican nomination. And to win that nomination, he has to get past a huge obstacle: a solid bloc of Republican primary voters who are emphatically anti-science. This isn't an exaggeration for polemical effect; it's the plain truth. The modern Republican party has made a fervent rejection of scientific consensus its defining attribute -- both on evolution and climate change, as well as in other fields -- and Huntsman's refusal to submit to party orthodoxy is likely a fatal blow to his chances.

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"Steve Fraser & Josh Freeman" - Uncle Sam Does(n’t) Want You

Posted on September 11, 2011, Printed on September 12, 2011
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175439/

America's Reserve Army of Labor Marches Through Time
By Steve Fraser and Josh Freeman

Not long ago, the city council of Ventura, California, passed an ordinance making it legal for the unemployed and homeless to sleep in their cars.  At the height of the Great Recession of 2008, one third of the capital equipment of the American economy lay idle.  Of the women and men idled along with that equipment, only 37% got a government unemployment check and that check, on average, represented only 35% of their weekly wages. 

Meanwhile, there are now two million ”99ers” -- those who have maxed out their supplemental unemployment benefits because they have been out of work for more than 99 weeks. Think of them as a full division in “the reserve army of labor.”  That “army,” in turn, accounts for 17% of the American labor force, if one includes part-time workers who need and want full-time work and the millions of unemployed Americans who have grown so discouraged that they’ve given up looking for jobs and so aren’t counted in the official unemployment figures.  As is its historic duty, that force of idle workers is once again driving down wages, lengthening working hours, eroding on-the-job conditions, and adding an element of raw fear to the lives of anyone still lucky enough to have a job.

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"Progressive Radio Network Host Danny Schechter, Fridays @ 2pm(EDT)" - A COUNTER-NARRATIVE CHALLENGES THE OFFICIAL 911 STORY

By Danny Schechter

Author of The Crime Of Our Time

When the whole media system is presenting an official narrative, as most were this past weekend in reporting on the official commemorations of the tenth anniversary of the tragic events of 911, it is almost impossible for alternative perspectives and critical ideas to be seen and heard.

The shear weight of the events seemed to have mandated media memorialization and mourning to honor the dead and allow their families to feel the love and solidarity of the American people.

While this may be reassuring and reinforcing to those in pain, a predictable ceremonial approach and tribute keeps the society of deeper reflections and lessons that might help us avoid more attacks.

That an estimated 80 members of the US military came under attack in Afghanistan was a strong signal that the forces and wars set in motion after 911 are not over by a long shot. The Americans who grieved this weekend did not shed any tears for the victims of the drones and bombs that have taken so many lives in many countries—not just the ones we invaded.

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" Anticorruptionsociety" - The Looting of America

http://anticorruptionsociety.com/2011/09/11/the-looting-of-america/#respond

Posted on September 11, 2011 by anticorruptionsociety 

BRILLIANT EXPOSE BY CATHERINE AUSTIN FITTS

Former Washington/Wall Street insider Catherine Austin Fitts explains the well planned and executed Looting of America. Here are some of the important facts that Catherine exposed:

• Washington and Wall Street are fraught with corruption
• Washington is centralizing both political and economic power
• Decentralization restores prosperity to communities – not Wall Street
• Currently we are all shipping our money into Washington and Wall Street and it is trickling back
• Local banks can play an important role in rebuilding our communities because investments should be make locally – Wall Street just extracts wealth
• The banker bailout refinanced toxic paper and derivatives . . . it was a leveraged buyout of the country
• GATT changed rules regarding capital moving around the world.
• The shift of global capital creates the end of sovereign governments and the rise of corporatocracies
• Currently we are literally governed by private corporations
• The baby-boomer’s pension funds were ransacked
• The decision was made in the 90′s to transfer all the jobs and huge amounts of capital abroad and the banks were involved in that decision. Fed and financier policies encouraged large corporations to replace small local businesses
• The Federal Reserve engineered a housing bubble. The banks were knowledgeable and willing participants. Because of this a case can be made for ‘fraudulent inducement’ when it came to encouraging people to buy big houses and take out mortgages they couldn’t afford

Part 1: Catherine Austin Fitts: The Looting Of America 1/4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9dGHuRExiM&feature=player_embedded

Part 2: Catherine Austin Fitts: The Looting Of America 2/4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhIgvkc5CoQ&feature=player_embedded

Part 3: Catherine Austin Fitts: The Looting Of America 3/4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90zvtIEaU_Q&feature=player_embedded

Part 4: Catherine Austin Fitts: The Looting Of America 4/4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SM5tQrfrHdk&feature=player_embedded

MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan completely supported Catherine Austin Fitt’s conclusions. The banking institutions and the ‘government’ has been ‘EXTRACTING’ wealth from our country via their policies for the past 20 or so years. Dylan doesn’t however admit that it was an economic coup d’etat, which Catherine proved was the case. Watch right here:

Dylan Ratigan (rightfully) loses it on air

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIcqb9hHQ3E&feature=player_embedded#!

Catherine Austin Fitt’s web site: Solari.com