Eric Margolis: Banking Has Become Our State Religion

Published on Sunday, July 10, 2011 by Eric Margolis

http://www.ericmargolis.com/political_commentaries/banking-has-become-our-state-religion.aspx

by Eric Margolis

In 1922 Greek armies trying to conquer western Anatolia were routed by Turkey’s military leader, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Hundreds of thousands of ethnic Greeks were uprooted from Ionian coastal areas.After this debacle, Greek officers took three former prime ministers, a general and two other politicians who had led the Turkish-Greek War and shot them. Greeks cheered.

Many Greeks today must be wishing to see similar punishment inflicted on their politicians who were responsible for the nation’s bankruptcy and staggering $500 billion debt.

For decades, Greece’s conservatives and Socialist parties alike bought votes by dishing out the very cushy, do-nothing government jobs, high pensions, and benefits that brought Greece to its knees. Call it state sponsored laziness.

In 2010, the second shoe of the 2008 US financial crisis hit Europe. Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain came under financial attack, showing the alarming degree to which uncontrolled, run amok banks and money men had poisoned Europe’s economic waters by speculation and outright gambling.

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Paul Rosenberg: Reagan Mythology is Leading US Off a Cliff

Published on Sunday, July 10, 2011 by Al Jazeera

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/07/2011771074476381.html

During Reagan's presidency, the US went from a creditor to debtor nation and marked a take-off for financial inequality.

by Paul Rosenberg

As things stand today, the US is hurtling toward a budget showdown in less than a month. Either President Obama will once again capitulate to extreme Republican budget-slashing demands, making Democrats seem as much of a threat to Medicare as Republicans, and virtually ensuring a GOP electoral sweep in 2012, or the US will default on its debt for the first time in its history, most likely plunging the world economy back into another five-continent recession, also costing Democrats the 2012 elections. These are the options left for a president and a political class completely divorced both from reality, and its own history of how one of the three greatest US presidents of all time steered the country from the brink of collapse eight decades ago

Entirely forgetting the real history of how Franklin D Roosevelt used activist government to save American capitalism from itself, the entire US political establishment is instead hypnotized by the false history woven around its most over-hyped president of all time: Ronald Reagan.

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"Henry Gass" - Plans to Strip Mine the Moon May Soon be More Than Just Science-Fiction

By Henry Gass

http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/962678/plans_to_strip_mine_the_moon_may_soon_be_more_than_just_sciencefiction.html

The Ecologist - 2011-07-04

It may not be long before we start mining the moon for its resources, particularly the rare Helium-3 for its use in nuclear fusion.

Billions of tonnes of resources, ranging from water to gases to metals, have been detected on the Moon and further out into space, and both governments and private companies are navigating the ambiguous legal parlance to determine how to reach, extract and distribute it all.  

Vast quantities of the isotope Helium-3 are known to exist on the Moon, as well as in the atmospheres of planets like Jupiter, and could come into high demand as the essential fuel for the so-called 'golden dream' of nuclear fusion power.

While existing nuclear fission plants break apart atoms and harvest the excess energy, nuclear fusion combines atoms of hydrogen to create helium, a process that releases vast amounts of energy.

According to Matthew Genge, lecturer in the Faculty of Engineering at Imperial College London, the Moon’s lack of atmosphere means it has been bombarded by high-energy particles for billions of years, some of which have embedded on its surface.

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"Fay Paxton" - Michele Bachmann -- a sign of Electile Dysfunction Disorder

July 10, 2011

By Fay Paxton

I first noticed   Michele Bachman when I read a fundraising letter   she'd written that proclaimed: Obama sees ACORN as his ideological "shock troops" leading his "revolution."  Obama wants to use ACORN to radicalize America because he isn't interested merely in defeating Conservatives"HE WANTS TO ANNIHILATE US!

I became interested in learning what she stood for, but all I could learn was what she is against:

Bachmann's district has the highest foreclosure rate in Minnesota, yet she voted against every bill aimed at helping average homeowners.

NO on revitalizing severely distressed public housing

NO on regulating the subprime mortgage industry  

NO on monitoring TARP funds to ensure more mortgage relief.

Bachmann has either proven she is a revisionist or just plain ignorant.   When talking about the Constitution as it relates to slavery, she said: "we also know that the very founders that wrote those documents worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States."

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John Vidal: Geo-Engineering -- Green vs Greed in the Race to Cool the Planet

Published on Sunday, July 10, 2011 by the Sunday Observer/UK

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jul/10/geo-engineering-weather-manipulation 

Critics fear that manipulating weather patterns could have a calamitous effect on poorer countries

by John Vidal

The alert on the Climate Ark website in January 2009 was marked urgent: "Take action: A rogue science ship is poised to carry out risky experimental fertilization of the Southern Ocean. This is likely [to be] the first of many coming attempts to begin geo-engineering the biosphere as a solution to climate change. The chemical cargo is likely to provoke a massive algal bloom big enough to be seen from outer space..."

The response was immediate and vitriolic: "You morons," fumed a woman from a Canadian university. "That isn't a rogue ship... it's one of the best marine science research groups in the world. You are no different than anti-science religious fanatics. You seek to keep the world ignorant. May you drown in your lies..."

Professor Peter Liss, then chair of Britain's Royal Society's global environment research committee and himself involved in research to see the effect of iron on phtyoplankton, stepped in: "The [intention] is to find out what role iron plays in marine biogeochemistry. In no way is it an attempt to geo-engineer the planet. Only by knowing the facts can you argue effectively against such geo-engineering proposals. Emotion and opinion will not win the argument; knowledge and understanding will."

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"Washington's Blog" - The Economy Cannot Recover As Long As Inequality Continues to Skyrocket ... But Government Policy Is INCREASING Inequality

By Washington's Blog

Global Research, July 6, 2011

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=25529

The Economist noted in January:

Hu Jintao, David Cameron, Warren Buffett and Dominique Strauss-Kahn ... have all worried, loudly and publicly, about the dangers of a rising gap between the rich and the rest.

***

A new survey by the World Economic Forum, whose annual gathering of bigwigs in Davos begins on January 26th, says its members see widening economic disparities as one of the two main global risks over the next decade (alongside failings in global governance).

Numerous prominent economists in government and academia have all said that large inequalities can cause - or at least contribute to - financial crises, including:

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David Michael Green: Stupid Democrats, Stupid Republicans

July 9, 2011

By David Michael Green

There are precious few things that Republicans and Democrats can agree on, but one of them is that Barack Obama is a liberal.

That rare manifestation of consensus might ordinarily be occasion for celebration (according to conventional wisdom, at least – though certainly not mine – which celebrates consensus), except for one pesky problematic detail:  the notion is utterly ludicrous.

Consider a batch of recent headlines as merely the most proximate examples of a phenomenon that's been on display since before the president was inaugurated.

Last week, the New York Times ran a front page piece, entitled "U.S. Pressing Its Crackdown Against Leaks", in which it was noted that, "The Justice Department shows no sign of rethinking its campaign to punish unauthorized disclosures to the news media, with five criminal cases so far under President Obama, compared with three under all previous presidents combined.  This week, a grand jury in Virginia heard testimony in a continuing investigation of WikiLeaks, the antisecrecy group, a rare effort to prosecute those who publish secrets, rather than those who leak them."  Though the article doesn't mention it, we should also note here that the Obama administration is also all but Gitmo-style torturing Bradley Manning, the soldier accused of releasing documents to Wikileaks.

The article does allude, however, to the gross inappropriateness of the charges in many of these cases, a sentiment that is even joined by several conservative commentators and national security experts.  In particular, the White House is bringing down the hammer on individuals who appear to be fully patriotic public servants, who acted as whistle-blowers in order to live up to their own patriotic standards.  In other words, the secrets they were publicizing had no effect in terms of jeopardizing national security, unless one defines protecting the nation as covering up malfeasance, corruption or waste in government.  No doubt some people do define it as exactly that, since, by some purely random coincidence, doing so happens to serve very well their own interests.  Evidently the big liberal now in the Oval Office concurs.

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Michel Chossudovsky: Mounting Evidence that Dominique Strauss Kahn was Framed

By Michel Chossudovsky

Global Research, July 7, 2011

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=25533

While the media has gone to arms length to obfuscate the matter, there is mounting evidence that Dominique Strauss Kahn was framed. 

According to media reports, the 32-year-old Guinean Sofitel housemaid received the modest sum of 100,000 dollars paid into her bank account. The New York Times acknowledges the payment but fails to analyze the source of these payments. In an utterly confused statement, the NYT suggests that the money was deposited in the housemaid's account by her Guinean boy friend who is serving time in a high security prison:

According to the two officials, the woman had a phone conversation with an incarcerated man within a day of her encounter with Mr. Strauss-Kahn in which she discussed the possible benefits of pursuing the charges against him. The conversation was recorded.

That man, the investigators learned, had been arrested on charges of possessing 400 pounds of marijuana. He is among a number of individuals who made multiple cash deposits, totaling around $100,000, into the woman’s bank account over the last two years. The deposits were made in Arizona, Georgia, New York and Pennsylvania.

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Gwynne Dyer: Murdoch’s Troika

Published on Saturday, July 9, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/07/09-0 

by Gwynne Dyer

The troika hurtles across the frozen plain. The wolves are close behind, and from time to time a peasant is hurled from the sleigh in the hope of letting the more important people escape. But nothing distracts the pack for long, not even when the occupants of the sleigh move up the pecking order and throw a couple of minor aristocrats to the wolves.

Wait! What’s this? They have thrown a newspaper to the wolves? An entire newspaper, with two hundred full-time employees and hundreds more freelance contributors? How do they think that that will help them to get away?

The troika is called News International, the newspaper wing of Rupert Murdoch’s globe-spanning media empire. The paper that has just been sacrificed is the News of the World, a Sunday tabloid that claims to have more readers than any other paper in the English-speaking world.

The NoW makes a tidy profit, but this Sunday’s edition will be its last. After 168 years, the institution that pioneered the art of persuading the emerging class of semi-literate English people to buy newspapers has been shut down by its owners.

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Michelle Chen: The Globe’s Not Only Getting Hotter. It’s More Unjust and Unstable, Too

By Michelle Chen, ColorLines
Posted on July 6, 2011, Printed on July 10, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/151542/the_globe%E2%80%99s_not_only_getting_hotter._it%E2%80%99s_more_unjust_and_unstable%2C_too

Over the next few decades, tens of millions of people will be driven from their homes. Braving violence and poverty, they’ll roam desperately across continents and borders in search of work and shelter. Unlike other refugees, though, their plight won’t be blamed simply on the familiar horrors of war or persecution; they’ll blame the weather.

If you haven’t heard about the rising tide of environmental migrants, that’s because throngs of displaced black and brown people don’t evoke the same public sympathy as photos of polar bear cubs. The governments of rich industrialized nations will scramble to shut the gates on the desperate hordes with the same self-serving efficiency with which they’ve long ignored the social, ecological and economic consequences of their prosperity. But both efforts at blissful ignorance will fail, because climate change is forcing society to confront the mounting natural and man-made disasters on the horizon.

In 2010, according to the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, “more than 90 percent of all disasters and 65 percent of associated economic damages were weather and climate related (i.e. high winds, flooding, heavy snowfall, heat waves, droughts, wildfires). In all, 874 weather and climate-related disasters resulted in 68,000 deaths and $99 billion in damages worldwide.”

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