"David Swanson" - To Whom Do We Now Turn?

http://www.opednews.com/articles/To-Whom-Do-We-Now-Turn-by-David-Swanson-110801-81.html

August 1, 2011 By David Swanson "The Democratic Party is running away from its traditional role of protecting the poor, the elderly, and the working class," writes Congressman Dennis Kucinich.  "To whom do these groups now turn?" We turn to ourselves, Congressman.  You know that.  And you know I love you.  But we've got to stop turning to people, much less parties.  It's killing us.  We can work with you and all of our friends, but we're going to have to do this ourselves.  There's nobody so poor, so elderly, so working class, so sick, so weak, or so wounded that they can't help this country a hell of a lot more themselves than can your colleagues, Congressman, the vast majority of whom, politically speaking, aren't worth a bucket of warm spit. There were 54 members of Congress who signed a letter to Congresswoman Pelosi opposing cuts to Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid, and then voted against a bill to allow such cuts. Forty-one of them were in the so-called Progressive Caucus. In a close vote we'd probably have lost three quarters of them. A few others didn't vote, and four more were not permitted to vote because they're just given the pretense of representing imperial territories. But a bunch of death-dealing lowlifes took a public position against the destruction of what's left of our public programs and then voted for that destruction. I'm talking about Congress members John Garamendi, Frederica Wilson, Hank Johnson, Mazie Hirono, Bobby Rush, Luis Gutierrez, Danny Davis, Stephen Lynch, William Lacy Clay, Chaka Fattah, Mark Critz, Shelia Jackson-Lee, Lloyd Doggett, and Eddie Bernice Johnson.

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"The Telegraph UK" - Hackers target 72 organisations in 'biggest cyber attack in history'

Security experts have discovered the biggest series of cyber attacks to date, involving the infiltration of the networks of 72 organisations including the United Nations, governments and companies around the world.

The Telegraph UK BST 03 Aug 2011

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/8678492/Hackers-target-72-organisations-in-biggest-cyber-attack-in-history.html

Security company McAfee, which uncovered the intrusions, said it believed there was one "state actor" behind the attacks but declined to name it, though one security expert who has been briefed on the hacking said the evidence points to China.

The long list of victims in the five-year campaign include the governments of the United States, Taiwan, India, South Korea, Vietnam and Canada; the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN); the International Olympic Committee (IOC); the World Anti-Doping Agency; and an array of companies, from defence contractors to high-tech enterprises.

In the case of the United Nations, the hackers broke into the computer system of the UN Secretariat in Geneva in 2008, hid there unnoticed for nearly two years, and quietly combed through reams of secret data, according to McAfee.

"Even we were surprised by the enormous diversity of the victim organizations and were taken aback by the audacity of the perpetrators," McAfee's vice president of threat research, Dmitri Alperovitch, wrote in a 14-page report.

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"Ray McGovern" - Obama Blows a Judas Kiss to the Poor

Published on Wednesday, August 3, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/08/03-11

by Ray McGovern

The unconscionable result of the manufactured crisis over the debt ceiling shows that the political Right knows how to play hardball, and that President Obama and his hapless party know how to get rolled.  There are other options; and we, the people, need to press them home.

The Obama-brokered deal on debt and spending was certainly what the Germans call eine schwere Geburt (a difficult birth); this one should have been aborted.

The Obama surrender reminds me of a sermon that Dr. Martin Luther King gave during the turbulent 1950s, in which he peered into the future and issued a prescient warning:

“A nation or a civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on an installment plan.”

In promoting and then signing yesterday the so-called “deficit reduction” legislation, President Barack Obama has placed himself squarely in the ranks of those spiritual-death-dealing, “soft-minded” men about whom Dr. King warned so ominously.

Many dyed-in-the-wool Obama supporters may now summon the courage to let the scales fall from their eyes.  Obama’s one-sided “compromise” so clearly promotes the interests of the wealthy over those of the poor that, in Biblical terms, it can readily be seen — literally — as a God-damned deal.

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"Matt Taibbi" - Debt Ceiling Deal -- The Democrats Take a Dive

Published on Wednesday, August 3, 2011 by Rolling Stone

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/debt-ceiling-deal-the-democrats-take-a-dive-20110801

by Matt Taibbi

So the debt deal has finally been reached. As expected, the agreement arrives in a form that right-thinking people everywhere can feel terrible about with great confidence.

The general consensus is that for the second time in three years, a gang of financial terrorists has successfully extorted the congress and the White House, threatening to blow up the planet if they didn't get what they wanted.

Back in 2008, the congress and George Bush rewarded Hank Paulson and Wall Street for pulling the Cleavon-Little-"the-next-man-makes-a-move-the-n---er-gets-it" routine by tossing trillions of bailout dollars at the same people who had wrecked the economy.

Now, Barack Obama has surrendered control of the budget to the Tea Party, whose operatives in congress used the same suicide-bomber tactic, threatening a catastrophic default unless the Democrats committed to a regime of steep spending cuts without any tax increases on the wealthy.

Commentators everywhere are killing the president for his seemingly astonishing level of ball-less-ness. Both the New York Times house editorial and the Nobel prizewinning liberal columnist Paul Krugman are insisting the president should have invoked extreme measures to counter the radicals on the other side, using emergency legal tactics to unilaterally raise the debt limit. Or, at least, he should have threatened to do this, according to Krugman:

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"Matthew Norman" - The Unmaking of a President

Published on Wednesday, August 3, 2011 by The Independent/UK

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/matthew-norman/matthew-norman-the-unmaking-of-a-president-2330667.html

Governing in prose is one thing. Preferring weasel words to governing at all is another

by Matthew Norman

At 50, observed George Orwell, "everyone has the face he deserves". Unusually for that godliest of lefty seers, he was wrong. Rupert Murdoch passed that milestone three decades ago with no appendages emerging from his temples (although in Orwell's defence, he may have endured a pioneering double hornectomy).

With Barack Obama, on the other hand, Orwell was broadly correct. The President hits the half-century tomorrow with the handsome, placid features he deserves. It is the fizzog of a gentle, decent if intellectually arrogant man, untormented by the self-loathing that made Nixon look so cruelly vulpine, and free from the lupine seediness that hinted at Bill Clinton's appetites long before that woman Miss Lewinsky's blue dress went to the DNA analysis section at Sketchley's.

Signs of middle age are evident, it's true, from the rapidly greying hair and heavy creasing at the sides of the mouth. But his face remains enviably unravaged by the sleep deprivation and unimaginable stresses imposed by the rapid imperial decline set in motion by his predecessor's monstrous cabal.

Michelle certainly likes it. "She still thinks I'm cute," said Obama the other day. "And I guess that's all that matters, isn't it?" Well, no, you felt, it isn't. Other things matter too: things such as his fiscal capitulation to the terrorist far right that will rob tens of millions – the very people on whose primary behalf he ran for president – to ensure that the rich, mega-rich and hyper-rich continue to pay a smaller proportion in tax than the average American nurse. Looking at that face today, in fact, the only way it could conform more precisely to Orwell's dictum is if, in the next 12 hours, his liver succumbed to the jaundice that turned it bright yellow. For this was a heartbreaking act of skin-saving cowardice.

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"Ignacio Ramonet" - Neoliberalism's Newest Product -- The Modern Slave Trade

By Ignacio Ramonet

Global Research, August 3, 2011

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=25888

PARIS, Jul (IPS) Two centuries after the abolition of slavery we are seeing the reintroduction of an abominable practice: human trafficking. The International Labour Organisation (ILO) estimates that 12.3 million people each year are taken captive by networks tied to international crime and used as forced labour in inhuman conditions.

In the case of women, the victims are subjected mostly to sexual exploitation while others are exploited as domestic servants. There is also the case of youths who are taken captive through various scams so their body parts can be sold in the international human organ trade.

These practices are expanding more and more to satisfy the demand for cheap labour in sectors like the hotel and restaurant industries, agriculture, and construction.

The OSCE dedicated two days of its last international conference in Vienna in late June to this subject [i]. Though the phenomenon is international, various specialists asserted that the plague of slave labour is growing rapidly in the EU. Unions and labour groups estimate that in Europe there are hundreds of thousands of workers subjected to the blight of slavery [ii].

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"Nick Turse" - A Secret War in 120 Countries – The Pentagon’s New Power Elite

Posted on August 3, 2011, Printed on August 4, 2011
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175426/

The Pentagon’s New Power Elite
By Nick Turse

Somewhere on this planet an American commando is carrying out a mission.  Now, say that 70 times and you’re done... for the day.  Without the knowledge of the American public, a secret force within the U.S. military is undertaking operations in a majority of the world’s countries.  This new Pentagon power elite is waging a global war whose size and scope has never been revealed, until now.

After a U.S. Navy SEAL put a bullet in Osama bin Laden’s chest and another in his head, one of the most secretive black-ops units in the American military suddenly found its mission in the public spotlight.  It was atypical.  While it’s well known that U.S. Special Operations forces are deployed in the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, and it’s increasingly apparent that such units operate in murkier conflict zones like Yemen and Somalia, the full extent of their worldwide war has remained deeply in the shadows.

Last year, Karen DeYoung and Greg Jaffe of the Washington Post reported that U.S. Special Operations forces were deployed in 75 countries, up from 60 at the end of the Bush presidency.  By the end of this year, U.S. Special Operations Command spokesman Colonel Tim Nye told me, that number will likely reach 120.  “We do a lot of traveling -- a lot more than Afghanistan or Iraq,” he said recently.  This global presence -- in about 60% of the world’s nations and far larger than previously acknowledged -- provides striking new evidence of a rising clandestine Pentagon power elite waging a secret war in all corners of the world.

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"Joshua Holland" - 4 Reasons the Tea Partiers Were Big Losers in the Debt Ceiling Deal

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Posted on August 2, 2011, Printed on August 4, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/151898/4_reasons_the_tea_partiers_were_big_losers_in_the_debt_ceiling_deal

The conventional wisdom holds that the Tea Partiers were among the “winners” of the debt ceiling fight. We know this because the Washington Post, that font of Beltway conventional wisdom, told us as much:

There were major questions coming into the 112th Congress about who would blink first — the largely establishment-aligned leaders of the new Republican House majority or the tea-party-aligned freshman members. We got our answer to that question late Thursday as House Speaker John Boehner was forced not only to postpone his compromise bill but ultimately to add conservative sweeteners to get the 217 votes he needed. (He got 218.) The tea party — inside and outside Congress — will almost certainly be emboldened by the result of this fight.

That narrative conflates Tea Party-endorsed politicians and the professional conservative operatives working behind the scenes to advance their agenda with the rank-and-file Tea Partiers themselves. And it's important to understand what different creatures they really are. 

In her book, Boiling Mad, veteran New York Times reporter Kate Zernike untangled some of the movement’s apparent contradictions. The Tea Party groups are touted by their fans as part of a “leaderless” movement, yet its various “leaders” are all over the media, weighing in on the issues of the day. Zernike squares that circle by describing the Tea Party brand as a franchise of sorts—a movement of small, local groups whose organizers are fiercely suspicious of “elites,” but which also enjoy training – and guidance on messaging -- PR and infrastructure provided to them by high-profile conservative groups like FreedomWorks, which are led by Washington insiders and backed by boatloads of corporate money.

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"Scott Thill" - Our Biggest Security Threat Is Global Warming-Induced Extreme Weather

By Scott Thill, AlterNet
Posted on August 2, 2011, Printed on August 4, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/151885/our_biggest_security_threat_is_global_warming-induced_extreme_weather

Scientists have been predicting for years that global warming would produce record-breaking extremes on either side of the thermometer. This past winter, America survived its so-called snowpocalypse, and now that summer has arrived, we've got a heat dome.

If you're wondering what the hell that is -- it's just another obvious climate change assassin that we could see coming miles away, if some of us were paying better attention. If you're looking for a more technical definition, according to National Geographic a heat dome is a seasonal high-pressure system of dense hot air, albeit one with a highly unusual (for now) strength and size, stretching one million square miles from the Rocky Mountains to the East Coast. It's already killed a couple dozen people, adding to a swelling death toll resulting from recent tornadoes and floods that bedeviled the nation this year.

It conforms easily to the ravages of Kevin Borden and Susan Cutter's so-called Death Map -- academically known as "Spatial patterns of natural hazards mortality in the United States" -- which in 2008 peered into climate change's crystal ball and found intensifying natural disasters capable of regionally reshaping the nation with every catastrophe. According to University of South Carolina scholars Cutter and Borden, heat and drought were the main death-dealers, along with extreme summer and winter events. Borden now works for homeland security risk management specialist Digital Sandbox. If his post-academic career choice doesn't confirm it outright, then recent warnings from the United Nations Environment Program should: These global warming nightmares, not domestic or international terrorists, are the most dangerous threat to global security in existence.

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"Greg Mitchell" - How the US Hid Shocking Hiroshima Footage For Decades

By Greg Mitchell, The Nation
Posted on August 3, 2011, Printed on August 4, 2011
http://www.thenation.com/blog/162543/great-hiroshima-cover

In the weeks following the atomic attacks on Japan sixty-six years ago this week, and then for decades afterward, the United States engaged in airtight suppression of all film shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bombings. This included vivid color footage shot by U.S. military crews and black-and-white Japanese newsreel film.

The public did not see any of the newsreel footage for twenty-five years, and the shocking US military film remained hidden for nearly four decades. While the suppression of nuclear truths stretched over decades, Hiroshima sank into “a kind of hole in human history,” as the writer Mary McCarthy observed. The United States engaged in a costly and dangerous nuclear arms race. Thousands of nuclear warheads remain in the world, often under loose control; the United States retains its “first-strike” nuclear policy; and much of the world is partly or largely dependent on nuclear power plants, which pose their own hazards.

Our nuclear entrapment continues to this day—you might call it “From Hiroshima to Fukushima.”

The color US military footage would remain hidden until the early 1980s, and has never been fully aired. It rests today at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, in the form of 90,000 feet of raw footage labeled #342 USAF.

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