ARi LeVaux: Why All Meat Eaters Should, at Least Once, Kill and Butcher an Animal

By Ari LeVaux, AlterNet
Posted on July 29, 2011, Printed on July 31, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/151844/why_all_meat_eaters_should%2C_at_least_once%2C_kill_and_butcher_an_animal

There's no way around the fact that if you eat meat you have blood on your hands. When I worked on a farm, the long afternoons spent slaughtering chickens helped shape my belief that all meat eaters should, at least once, kill and butcher an animal. It's the only way to really comprehend what you're eating.  

But when I began raising chickens in my yard, I made a promise to never kill them. Living in close proximity made them family to me, with names and distinct personalities. I felt that killing them would cut too close to home.  

Even after they stopped laying, I put the hens out to the happiest pasture I could. All they had to do was survive the coyotes, raccoons, skunks, owls, falcons, ravens, bobcats, neighbor dogs, and chick-gobbling rattlesnakes long enough to hit menopause, and this cushy retirement package would be theirs.

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Progressive Co-Chair Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva Statement on Emerging Debt Deal

WASHINGTON - July 31 - Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva, co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, today released the following statement on the emerging debt deal:

“This deal trades peoples’ livelihoods for the votes of a few unappeasable right-wing radicals, and I will not support it. Progressives have been organizing for months to oppose any scheme that cuts Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security, and it now seems clear that even these bedrock pillars of the American success story are on the chopping block. Even if this deal were not as bad as it is, this would be enough for me to fight against its passage.

This deal does not even attempt to strike a balance between more cuts for the working people of America and a fairer contribution from millionaires and corporations. The very wealthy will continue to receive taxpayer handouts, and corporations will keep their expensive federal giveaways. Meanwhile, millions of families unfairly lose more in this deal than they have already lost. I will not be a part of it.

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Robert Freeman: We Must Destroy the Government in Order to Save It

Published on Sunday, July 31, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/07/31

by Robert Freeman

A certain, macabre phrase came to personify the Vietnam War: “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” The colonel who uttered it was doubtless oblivious to both the psychotic irony and the larger surreal symbolism that the phrase represented. Savage destruction was perfectly consonant with ideologically-intended salvation, just so long as both were issued by the same sanctimonious American official. Indeed, in some perverse medieval rendering of modern imperial justice, salvation could only be achieved through destruction.

The phrase might just as well be a rallying cry for the Tea Party Republicans and their holy jihad against government and the cooperative society that government represents: they must destroy it in order to save it. For that is unquestionably what the debt ceiling debacle is really about.

Let’s dispense once and for all with the fiction that the debt ceiling debate is anything but a contrivance to destroy government and the shared aspirations to civility that government represents.

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Saul Landau: Stupid Empire Prevails

"If You Think Education is Expensive, Try Ignorance"

By SAUL LANDAU

http://counterpunch.org/landau07292011.html

“The reason we have a Department of Defense is to break things and kill people. The problem we have now is that so much of the money is not going to the people who are breaking things and killing people.” 

-- Ret. Marine General Arnold L. Punaro, Member of the Defense Business Board, to the Washington Post (7-21-11)

As strategic minds of Washington figure out nation building in Afghanistan while undermining the crumbling infrastructure at home, U.S. political culture focuses on gay marriage and debt ceilings. 

On his radio show Rush Limbaugh still severely stresses the President’s middle name, “Huuu—ssssein.” Millions righteously titter over Rush’s “subtlety” and, of course, continue to believe the radical Muslim Obama was born in Kenya. For Rush, Obama represents the left, a threat to our rights to choose our own doctors and keep all our money. Left and progressive circles have re-christened Obama: President Disappointing.

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Norman Mathews: Time to Reset Our Moral Compass

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/07/30-2

Published on Saturday, July 30, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

by Norman Mathews

Progressives are suffering from debilitating cognitive dissonance. Incapable of reconciling President Obama’s rhetoric with his actions, they have created an elaborate, but flimsy, structure of rationales to harmonize this dissonance. These rationales began shortly after Obama took office, with progressives blaming all those nasty triangulating, progress-by-tiny-increment advisers from the Clinton Administration, who were leading him astray from his principles. From the outset, the Administration supplied it’s own excuses for its failure to achieve audacious goals: “Change comes slowly” and “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” Then, despite control of the House and a sizable Democratic majority in the Senate, the party was deemed the problem, because it couldn’t keep its troops in line to get the 60 votes required to pass his agenda. This morphed into a much larger obstacle—the Republicans, following the 2010 landslide. In the recent debt-ceiling debate (and particularly with progressives’ denial that he would actually cut Social Security and Medicare) we’ve seen a rebirth of the meme: “He's playing chess while everyone else is playing checkers.” Numerous current articles indicate that we now face an epidemic of “he’s just not a competent negotiator” rationale.

Glenn Greenwald adroitly addressed this in his April 14, Salon.com article, “Why Do We Assume Obama’s Actually Trying to Enact a Progressive Agenda.” The crisis is now so threatening that a rational mind can no longer make such excuses credible. His supporters correctly maintain that he’s a man of extraordinary intelligence. They seem blissfully unaware that it is impossible to hold this belief concurrently with the notion that he is just not capable of learning the most basic negotiation skills, or that his advisers, who have been both hardened politicians and businessmen and who, after all, include a vice president who was a senator since 1972, are incapable of instructing him in these arts.

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Paul Craig Roberts: "Economic Armageddon" -- Washington’s Response to a Failed Ecomomy: More War

By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

Global Research, July 30, 2011

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=25813

As the second decade of the 21st century began, the US economy had not recovered from the Great Recession that began in December 2007.

The economy’s failure to recover was despite the largest fiscal and monetary stimulus in the country’s history. There was a $700 billion bank bailout, a $700 billion stimulus program, a couple of trillion in “quantitative easing,” that is, in debt monetization or the printing of money to finance the government’s expenditures. In addition the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet had expanded by trillions of dollars as the Fed purchased troubled mortgage bonds and derivatives in its effort to keep the financial system solvent and functioning. According to the Government Accountability Office’s audit of the Federal Reserve released by Senator Bernie Sanders, the Federal Reserve provided secret loans to US and foreign banks totaling $16.1 trillion, a sum larger than US Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

Despite the enormous fiscal and monetary stimulus, the economy remained dead in the water.

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Arun Gupta: The 6 Biggest Lies About the U.S. Debt

By Arun Gupta, AlterNet
Posted on July 28, 2011, Printed on July 31, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/151827/the_6_biggest_lies_about_the_u.s._debt

Editor's Note: This article has been corrected to reflect more accurate calculations. 

There is one simple truth about the discussion of the looming U.S. debt crisis: it is largely a compendium of half-truths, distortions, myths and outright lies.

For example, is it true that the U.S. debt is unsustainable, which is spurring the budget-cutting fever? Far from it. While U.S. debt is at one of its highest levels ever in terms of gross domestic product, the estimated interest payments for all of 2011 on the  $14.3 trillion public debt will be a mere $430 billion. This is only 18 percent more than the $364 billion paid way back in 1998, while the U.S. economy has grown nearly 30 percent since then. Rock-bottom interest rates on U.S. government debt account for the low payments today, but the practical effect is that servicing the debt as a percentage of GDP is near the lowest it’s been in decades.

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Mike Whitney: Shadow Banking and the Repo Market

By MIKE WHITNEY

http://counterpunch.org/whitney07292011.html

"International markets are absolutely on tenterhooks, because up until now there really has been a pretty blithe assumption that sooner or later politicians would strike a deal, and it would probably be last-minute, but a deal would be done before Aug. 2.

What is really starting to think in right now is that not only is there a growing risk the rating agencies could downgrade U.S. debt, even if there is some kind of short-term Band-Aid solution, but secondly there may not even be a deal by August the 2nd. And so a lot of people in the financial markets right now are starting to look at what-if scenarios and creating plans for what they half-jokingly call doom day, potential -- or D-day, potential default day."

-- Gillian Tett, editor Financial Times, PBS Newshour

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Michelle Chen: Who’s Grabbing Africa’s Land? U.S. Speculators, Including Universities

Published on Sunday, July 31, 2011 by Colorlines

http://colorlines.com/archives/2011/07/us_investors_and_universities_join_the_land_rush_in_africa.html

by Michelle Chen

When a massive tire corporation rolled into Nigeria’s Iguobazuwa Forest Reserve a few years ago, just one thing stood in the path of the CEOs’ plans to set up a rubber plantation: the communities that lived there. With cruel precision, the communities that got in the way were uprooted and displaced, their farmland devastated. As documented by Friends of the Earth International, the bulldozers of the French conglomerate Michelin sowed the ground for “increased hunger, malnutrition, poverty and forced migration, as food became harder to find or produce.”

“It was as if there was no reason to live again,” recalled a local woman. “Now, no land, no farm, no food.”

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Joe Conason: Why China Is Laughing All the Way to the Bank

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/why_china_is_laughing_all_the_way_to_the_bank_20110729/

Posted on Jul 29, 2011

By Joe Conason

The global impact of the American debt crisis—and the likelihood of permanent damage to American interests—are already visible to Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., from his perch as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Indeed, he is not only seeing but hearing those effects.

“The Chinese are laughing all the way to the bank,” said the former Democratic presidential nominee, because a downgrading of U.S. Treasury securities will mean enormous and completely unnecessary increases in our interest payments to the nation’s largest creditor—and our most important competitor in the international arena.

“If we suffer a downgrade of our (U.S. Treasury) debt simply because of the brief time before we have to go through this exercise again,” said Kerry, referring to the House Republican insistence on a debt-limit increase that will expire before next Christmas, “it would mean billions of additional dollars that would have to be paid to the Chinese.”

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