"Deborah Dupre" - Martial law provision secretly passed in Congress Committee

• By Deborah Dupre, Human Rights Examiner
• June 25, 2011 10:12 am ET
• http://www.examiner.com/human-rights-in-national/martial-law-provision-secretly-passed-congress#ixzz1QSRKGuhC

 Martial Law provision goes to Senate

A noted human rights group spokesperson has stated that the mandatory military detention provision that the Senate Armed Services Committee secretly discussed and passed this week, is what martial-law states, not democracies do.

The Senate Armed Services Committee's vote this week redefined rules for detaining terrorism suspects, including giving power to military judges to review cases of prisoners in Afghanistan and mandating military detention for important Qaeda suspects even captured on United States soil according to The New York Times.

The Terrorism and Counterterrorism Program senior counsel for Human Rights Watch, Andrea Prasow said “mandatory military detention is what martial-law states do, not democracies” reported The Times.

Human Rights Watch is one of the world’s leading independent organizations dedicated to defending and protecting human rights.

The Times reported Friday that "the vote took place in a closed session and the text of the legislation has not been made public."

Click to read more ...

Chris Hedges: Gone With the Papers

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/gone_with_the_papers_20110627/

Posted on Jun 27, 2011

By Chris Hedges

I visited the Hartford Courant as a high school student. It was the first time I was in a newsroom. The Connecticut paper’s newsroom, the size of a city block, was packed with rows of metal desks, most piled high with newspapers and notebooks. Reporters banged furiously on heavy typewriters set amid tangled phone cords, overflowing ashtrays, dirty coffee mugs and stacks of paper, many of which were in sloping piles on the floor. The din and clamor, the incessantly ringing phones, the haze of cigarette and cigar smoke that lay over the feverish hive, the hoarse shouts, the bustle and movement of reporters, most in disheveled coats and ties, made it seem an exotic, living organism. I was infatuated. I dreamed of entering this fraternity, which I eventually did, for more than two decades writing for The Dallas Morning News, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor and, finally, The New York Times, where I spent most of my career as a foreign correspondent.

Newsrooms today are anemic and forlorn wastelands. I was recently in the newsroom at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and patches of the floor, also the size of a city block, were open space or given over to rows of empty desks. These institutions are going the way of the massive rotary presses that lurked like undersea monsters in the bowels of newspaper buildings, roaring to life at night. The heavily oiled behemoths, the ones that spat out sheets of newsprint at lightning speed, once empowered and enriched newspaper publishers who for a few lucrative decades held a monopoly on connecting sellers with buyers. Now that that monopoly is gone, now that the sellers no long need newsprint to reach buyers, the fortunes of newspapers are declining as fast as the page counts of daily news sheets.

Click to read more ...

Joshua Holland: Conservatives Fight to Let Corporate Bosses Break Laws Protecting Their Workers

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Posted on June 23, 2011, Printed on June 26, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/151408/conservatives_fight_to_let_corporate_bosses_break_laws_protecting_their_workers

Working America labors under the weakest protections from abusive management in the developed world, by far. We take it as a given that our bosses can fire us for any reason (with a few exceptions like discrimination on the basis of race or gender), or no reason at all – a notion that would shock and appall working people in most advanced economies. 

But corporate America doesn't want the very modest protections that do exist in this country to be enforced. Even as companies lay claim to many of the Constitutional rights of citizenship, they want to be held above the rule of law when it comes to their employees.

This desire lays at the heart of a recent barrage of assaults on the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), a New Deal agency that for over 75 years has been tasked with enforcing the very modest protections for organized workers afforded by the National Labor Relations Act. The agency, according to former NLRB general counsel Fred Feinstein, “has the stated purpose of encouraging private-sector collective bargaining, protecting employees’ right to form a union to improve working conditions and preventing retaliation for exercising these rights.” He adds that passage of the law “helped the U.S. climb out of the Great Depression and encouraged the growth of a vibrant middle class for much of the last century.”

Click to read more ...

"MICHAEL HUDSON" - Bankers Gear Up for the Rape of Greece, as Social Democrats Vote for National Suicide

By MICHAEL HUDSON

http://counterpunch.org/hudson06242011.html

The fight for Europe’s future is being waged in Athens and other Greek cities to resist financial demands that are the 21st century’s version of an outright military attack. The threat of bank overlordship is not the kind of economy-killing policy that affords opportunities for heroism in armed battle, to be sure. Destructive financial policies are more like an exercise in the banality of evil – in this case, the pro-creditor assumptions of the European Central Bank (ECB), EU and IMF (egged on by the U.S. Treasury).

As Vladimir Putin pointed out some years ago, the neoliberal reforms put in Boris Yeltsin’s hands by the Harvard Boys in the 1990s caused Russia to suffer lower birth rates, shortening life spans and emigration – the greatest loss in population growth since World War II. Capital flight is another consequence of financial austerity. The ECB’s proposed “solution” to Greece’s debt problem is thus self-defeating. It only buys time for the ECB to take on yet more Greek government debt, leaving all EU taxpayers to get the bill. It is to avoid this shift of bank losses onto taxpayers that Angela Merkel in Germany has insisted that private bondholders must absorb some of the loss resulting from their bad investments.

The bankers are trying to get a windfall by using the debt hammer to achieve what warfare did in times past. They are demanding privatization of public assets (on credit, with tax deductibility for interest so as to leave more cash flow to pay the bankers). This transfer of land, public utilities and interest as financial booty and tribute to creditor economies is what makes financial austerity like war in its effect.

Click to read more ...

"Robin McKie" - Diabetes Epidemic Affecting 350 Million – and Western Fast Food Is to Blame

Published on Sunday, June 26, 2011 by The Guardian/UK

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/jun/25/diabetes-epidemic-western-fast-food

• Lancet study shows diabetes now a major health problem • Number of people with disease has doubled since 1980

by Robin McKie

More than 350 million people in the world now have diabetes, an international study has revealed. The analysis, published online by the Lancet on Saturday, adds several tens of millions to the previous estimate of the number of diabetics and indicates that the disease has become a major global health problem.

Diabetics have inadequate blood sugar control, a condition that can lead to heart disease and strokes, as well as damage to kidneys, nerves and the retina. About three million deaths a year are attributed to diabetes and associated conditions in which blood sugar levels are disrupted.

The dramatic and disturbing increase is blamed by scientists on the spread of a western-style diet to developing nations, which is causing rising levels of obesity. Researchers also say that increased life expectancy is playing a major role.

Click to read more ...

"Rady Ananda" - Food Bombs and Wall Street

Preparing for the 2012 Farm Bill

By Rady Ananda

Global Research, June 24, 2011

Plutocrats aimed another weapon at the nation’s poor and at small and midsized farmers, this time thru the 2012 agriculture appropriations bill, H.R. 2112, which the House passed on June 16. The 82-page bill returns some federal spending to 2006 levels and others to 2008 levels.

Now being reviewed by the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture, the final version of HR 2112 will lay the terrain on which the 2012 Farm Bill will be crafted. The House Agriculture Committee began preparatory hearings on the 2012 Farm Bill this week, reports NSAC.

Key sections provide deep cuts to domestic food programs, threatening food banks, low-income seniors, women and children, and farmers markets supported by WIC vouchers issued thru the Women, Infants and Children program. 

HR 2112 also made deep cuts to rural development, conservation and eco-remediation programs, and to local and regional food system development programs.  This can be seen as nothing other than a punitive response to the growing local food sovereignty movement.

Click to read more ...

"Sarah Anderson and Marlee Blasenheim" - America Has the Wealth to End the Despair

Published on Sunday, June 26, 2011 by YES! Magazine

http://www.yesmagazine.org/people-power/nurses-join-worldwide-rally-for-tax-on-financial-speculation

Nurses come face-to-face with the fallout of the financial crisis every day. Now they've joined the worldwide movement for a tax that would curb financial speculation—and help fill public needs.

by Sarah Anderson and Marlee Blasenheim

Sandy Falwell, who has worked in a neonatal intensive care unit for some 20 years, could tell plenty of stories about the impact of the Great Recession on the lives of her patients. One of the most painful: After a woman gave birth to a 2-pound baby, she told Falwell that she blamed herself for her baby’s premature birth. During her pregnancy she had been unable to afford insulin treatments for her diabetes—in part because she was taking care of her elderly parents. 

Falwell is a member of National Nurses United, a union whose members come face-to-face with the fallout of the financial crisis every day. On Tuesday, they rallied on Wall Street with the message that “America has the wealth to end the despair and deprivation.”

Rose Ann DeMoro, the union’s executive director, explained:  “There’s a financial transaction fee that we’re going to have Wall Street pay—they’ve paid it here in the past—it’s very American. These yo-yos who buy and sell and buy and sell our country should have to pay a tax on that.”

Such taxes place a small fee on each trade of stocks, derivatives, foreign exchange, and other financial instruments, with the goal of raising massive revenues for public needs while also discouraging reckless speculation.

Click to read more ...

"Richard Gray" - Warming Oceans Cause Largest Movement of Marine Species in Two Million Years

Published on Sunday, June 26, 2011 by The Telegraph/UK

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/8598597/Warming-oceans-cause-largest-movement-of-marine-species-in-two-million-years.html

by Richard Gray

Warming ocean waters are causing the largest movement of marine species seen on Earth in more than two million years, according to scientists.

In the Arctic, melting sea ice during recent summers has allowed a passage to open up from the Pacific ocean into the North Atlantic, allowing plankton, fish and even whales to into the Atlantic Ocean from the Pacific.

The discovery has sparked fears delicate marine food webs could be unbalanced and lead to some species becoming extinct as competition for food between the native species and the invaders stretches resources.

Rising ocean temperatures are also allowing species normally found in warmer sub-tropical regions to into the northeast Atlantic.

Click to read more ...

Sylvia Earle: If the Sea Is in Trouble, We Are All in Trouble

Published on Saturday, June 25, 2011 by The Independent/UK

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/sylvia-earle-if-the-sea-is-in-trouble-we-are-all-in-trouble-2300273.html

 

by Sylvia Earle

The report that the ocean is in trouble is no surprise. What is shocking is that it has taken so long for us to make the connection between the state of the ocean and everything we care about – the economy, health, security – and the existence of life itself.

If the ocean is in trouble – and it is – we are in trouble. Charles Clover pointed this out in The End of the Line, and Callum Roberts provided detailed documentation of the collapse of ocean wildlife – and the consequences – in The Unnatural History of the Sea.

Since the middle of the 20th century, more has been learned about the ocean than during all preceding human history; at the same time, more has been lost. Some 90 per cent of many fish, large and small, have been extracted. Some face extinction owing to the ocean's most voracious predator – us.

Click to read more ...

Anneli Rufus: Why Prescription Ecstasy or LSD Could Happen Much Sooner Than You Think

By Anneli Rufus, AlterNet
Posted on June 24, 2011, Printed on June 26, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/151394/why_prescription_ecstasy_or_lsd_could_happen_much_sooner_than_you_think

Let's say an abuse-ridden childhood has left you with PTSD that sparks panic whenever you hear shouts, even on TV. Or let's say a bad accident has saddled you with crippling anxiety and chronic pain. Now let's say that you could ease -- or even cure -- these woes with prescription psiloscybin. Prescription ecstasy. Prescription LSD.

If a growing phalanx of scientists get their way, those prescriptions could be yours within 10 years. Research into the medical benefits of psychedelic drugs is booming. An April conference on the subject at Great Britain's University of Kent featured lectures on such topics as "Ketamine Psychotherapy" and "Ayahuasca in the Contemporary World."

Leading this wave is the Boston-based Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), whose executive director Rick Doblin spoke at that conference. MAPS researchers have spent 15 years conducting international clinical trials whose results indicate that LSD and psilocybin counteract depression and anxiety and are effective pain-management tools while MDMA (ecstasy) conquers fear. Just this month, the Israeli Ministry of Health approved a new MAPS study using MDMA to treat PTSD.

"Time is on our side," Doblin says. "The world is full of aging baby boomers who are looking forward to psychedelic retirement and psychedelic hospice.

Click to read more ...