Dave Lindorff: Blowing It: Democrats, Unable to Be a Party of the People, are Sinking Themselves

Published on Sunday, July 17, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/07/17

by Dave Lindorff

The smoking ruin that is the the Obama White House, and the rotting corpse that is the Democratic Party, have, incredibly, together been boxed into a corner by, of all things, the certifiably insane Republican Party.

This amazing situation has resulted not through any brilliant strategy on the part of the Republicans, but by the self-inflicted wounds of the Democrats.

Faced with a collapsing economy that is at serious risk of performing a reprise of the Great Depression, Congressional Democrats and President Obama were in a perfect position to grab the flag and run home with it by declaring war on unemployment and on the party that has unequivocally declared itself openly to be the standard bearer of the wealthy and powerful.

All the president and Congressional Democrats had to do was announce that Social Security, Medicare, education and programs to protect the poor were all off limits in any discussion of the federal budget, and to declare an immediate 25% cut in military spending, as called for earlier by Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), the ranking member of the House Financial Services Committee.

How hard would that have been to do? The polls show it’s what the public wants. Any elected official who did this, particularly someone elected and re-elected as a Democrat, would have been hailed by voters for such a bold action.

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Chris Hedges: America’s Disappeared

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/americas_disappeared_20110718/

Posted on Jul 18, 2011

By Chris Hedges

Dr. Silvia Quintela was “disappeared” by the death squads in Argentina in 1977 when she was four months pregnant with her first child. She reportedly was kept alive at a military base until she gave birth to her son and then, like other victims of the military junta, most probably was drugged, stripped naked, chained to other unconscious victims and piled onto a cargo plane that was part of the “death flights” that disposed of the estimated 20,000 disappeared. The military planes with their inert human cargo would fly over the Atlantic at night and the chained bodies would be pushed out the door into the ocean. Quintela, who had worked as a doctor in the city’s slums, was 28 when she was murdered.

A military doctor, Maj. Norberto Atilio Bianco, who was extradited Friday from Paraguay to Argentina for baby trafficking, is alleged to have seized Quintela’s infant son along with dozens, perhaps hundreds, of other babies. The children were handed to military families for adoption. Bianco, who was the head of the clandestine maternity unit that functioned during the Dirty War in the military hospital of Campo de Mayo, was reported by eyewitnesses to have personally carried the babies out of the military hospital. He also kept one of the infants. Argentina on Thursday convicted retired Gen. Hector Gamen and former Col. Hugo Pascarelli of committing crimes against humanity at the “El Vesubio” prison, where 2,500 people were tortured in 1976-1978. They were sentenced to life in prison. Since revoking an amnesty law in 2005 designed to protect the military, Argentina has prosecuted 807 for crimes against humanity, although only 212 people have been sentenced. It has been, for those of us who lived in Argentina during the military dictatorship, a painfully slow march toward justice.

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John Nichols: Elizabeth Warren for US Senate

Published on Monday, July 18, 2011 by The Nation

http://www.thenation.com/blog/162089/elizabeth-warren-us-senate

by John Nichols

President Obama was never going to appoint Elizabeth Warren to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that the Harvard professor conceptualized and created.
 
Wall Street speculators, big bankers and all the other insiders who make money by gaming the system -- rather than innovating, creating or contributing anything of value to the economy or the nation -- objected to being regulated by someone who would use not just the the rules but the bully pulpit to hold the robber barons to account.
 
So Obama went with a safer choice: former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray. The head of the CFPB's enforcement division, Cordray was hired by Warren and is a capable and honest player -- so honest that he is all but certain to face a confirmation fight of his own before he can take charge of the new agency, which will be up and running on July 21.
 
As Progressive Change Campaign Committee co-founder Stephanie Taylor, whose group led a campaign that collected 350,000 signatures backing Warren's nomination said, "Rich Cordray has been a strong ally of Elizabeth Warren's and we hope he will continue her legacy of holding Wall Street accountable."

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Donna Smith: ‘Let ‘Em Eat Peas’ -- An Elitist Mantra for Our Age

Published on Sunday, July 17, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/07/17-4

by Donna Smith

It has been a challenging week for many people.  While our elected officials have been broadly reported to be at odds about exactly how to raise the debt ceiling or not, millions of Americans have no work, are running out of ways to keep their homes – rented or owned, and struggle even to keep the basic necessities for themselves and their families.

The elite of this nation have largely forgotten the rest of us. Wall Street was bailed out; Main Street was sold out.

Nurses served soup to hungry folks in Lansing, Michigan. There was a stampede of people hoping to secure low-cost housing in Dallas. 

Yet in a glaring display of the inability of this nation’s elected leaders to publicly recognize and address the suffering happening across the country – in every Congressional District and in every state – those who have the power to alleviate some of that suffering have decided it’s time to cut the social safety nets of Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security rather than protect and enhance it.  How that will help the economy is unclear to me.  No one has yet explained to me how allowing more people to go belly up helps us now or in the longer term. 

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RT: US raised debt ceiling 102 times – economist

RT, 17 July, 2011, 13:02

https://rt.com/news/usa-debt-currency-default/

President Obama has warned the US is running out of time to deal with its financial troubles - the Congress must raise the current $14.3-trillion debt ceiling again. And as Professor Rodrigue Tremblay told RT, this has become a tradition in the US.

The US repeatedly gets away with raising the debt ceiling, Rodrigue Tremblay told RT.

“This system that the US has, has been in place since 1917. They raise the debt ceiling each year, they have done it 102 times; eight times under George W. Bush alone. Most countries do not run their governments this way. In the US it is always a mess,” stated Tremblay.

The professor of economics at the University of Montreal says the US is actually the country with the highest debt, and not Greece. But Washington will never be in line for a bailout, he adds.

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David Sirota: Why Americans Can't Afford to Eat Healthy

Published on Friday, July 15, 2011 by Salon.com

http://www.salon.com/news/david_sirota/2011/07/15/vegetable_price_politics/index.html

The real reason Big Macs are cheaper than more nutritious alternatives? Government subsidies

by David Sirota

The easiest way to explain Gallup's discovery that millions of Americans are eating fewer fruits and vegetables than they ate last year is to simply crack a snarky joke about Whole Foods really being "Whole Paycheck." Rooted in the old limousine liberal iconography, the quip conjures the notion that only Birkenstock-wearing trust-funders can afford to eat right in tough times

It seems a tidy explanation for a disturbing trend, implying that healthy food is inherently more expensive, and thus can only be for wealthy Endive Elitists when the economy falters. But if the talking point's carefully crafted mix of faux populism and oversimplification seems a bit facile -- if the glib explanation seems almost too perfectly sculpted for your local right-wing radio blowhard -- that's because it dishonestly omits the most important part of the story. The part about how healthy food could easily be more affordable for everyone right now, if not for those ultimate elitists: agribusiness CEOs, their lobbyists and the politicians they own.

As with most issues in this new Gilded Age, the tale of the American diet is a story of the worst form of corporatism -- the kind whereby the government uses public monies to protect private profit.

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James Ridgeway: Has America Become a Nation of Psychotics? You'd Certainly Think So, Based on the Medications We're Taking

By James Ridgeway, Al Jazeera English
Posted on July 15, 2011, Printed on July 18, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/151657/has_america_become_a_nation_of_psychotics_you%27d_certainly_think_so%2C_based_on_the_medications_we%27re_taking

Has America become a nation of psychotics? You would certainly think so, based on the explosion in the use of antipsychotic medications. In 2008, with over $14 billion in sales, antipsychotics became the single top-selling therapeutic class of prescription drugs in the United States, surpassing drugs used to treat high cholesterol and acid reflux.

Once upon a time, antipsychotics were reserved for a relatively small number of patients with hard-core psychiatric diagnoses - primarily schizophrenia and bipolar disorder - to treat such symptoms as delusions, hallucinations, or formal thought disorder. Today, it seems, everyone is taking antipsychotics. Parents are told that their unruly kids are in fact bipolar, and in need of anti-psychotics, while old people with dementia are dosed, in large numbers, with drugs once reserved largely for schizophrenics. Americans with symptoms ranging from chronic depression to anxiety to insomnia are now being prescribed anti-psychotics at rates that seem to indicate a national mass psychosis.

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"Mark Blaxill" - New Autism Twin Study Demolishes Decades-Long Belief in Genetic Causation

By Mark Blaxill

http://www.ageofautism.com/2011/07/new-autism-twin-study-demolishes-decades-long-belief-in-genetic-causation.html

For over two decades now, so-called “autism experts” have been claiming that autism is more than 90% caused by genes. The influence of these claims on autism policy and research funding is hard to overstate. But few realize that the basis of these claims hangs on a fragile evidence base: two small twin studies--one from Great Britain, the other from Scandinavia--that reported high rates of concordance for autism among identical twins and no concordance at all among fraternal twins. Last week, the largest and most rigorous twin study ever conducted, the California Autism Twin Study (CATS) reported contradictory new evidence that struck a devastating blow to these claims. The CATS identical twins had lower and the fraternal twins higher concordance rates than past studies, a striking finding that suggests that instead of being highly heritable, the vast majority of autism cases stem from environmental causes.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of the CATS findings. They mean that everything leading “autism experts” have been saying for decades is wrong. And everything leading autism parent advocates have been saying for years is right.

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"Bill McKibben" - Will North America Be the New Middle East? It’s Yes or No For a Climate-Killing Oil Pipeline -- and Obama Gets to Make the Call

The climate problem has moved from the abstract to the very real in the last 18 months.  Instead of charts and graphs about what will happen someday, we’ve got real-time video: first Russia burning, then Texas and Arizona on fire.  First Pakistan suffered a deluge, then Queensland, Australia, went underwater, and this spring and summer, it’s the Midwest that’s flooding at historic levels.

The year 2010 saw the lowest volume of Arctic ice since scientists started to measure, more rainfall on land than any year in recorded history, and the lowest barometric pressure ever registered in the continental United States.  Measured on a planetary scale, 2010 tied 2005 as the warmest year in history.  Jeff Masters, probably the world’s most widely read meteorologist, calculated that the year featured the most extreme weather since at least 1816, when a giant volcano blew its top.

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"Rodrigue Tremblay"- Greece and the Euro - Towards Financial Implosion

On the 4^th of July, the credit agency Standard & Poor called  Greece what it is, i.e. a country in de facto financial bankruptcy.  No slight of hand, no obfuscation, no debt reorganization and no “innovative” bailouts can hide the fact that the defective rules of the 17-member Eurozone have allowed some of its members to succumb to the siren calls of excessive and unproductive indebtedness, to be followed by a default on debt payments accompanied by crushingly higher borrowing costs.

Greece (11 million inhabitants), in fact, has abused the credibility that came with its membership in the Eurozone.  In 2004, for instance, the Greek Government embarked upon a massive spending spree to host the 2004 Summer Olympic Games, which cost 7 billion euros ($12.08 billion). Then, from 2005 to 2008, the same government decided to go on a spending spree, this time purchasing all types of armaments that it hardly needed from foreign suppliers. —Piling up a gross foreign debt to the tune of $533 billion (2010) seemed the easy way out. But sooner or later, the piper has to be paid and the debt burden cannot be hidden anymore.

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