Fiona Harvey - Bonn climate talks end in discord and disappointment

The latest round of international climate change talks finished on Friday in discord and disappointment, with some participants concerned that important progress made last year was being unpicked.

At the talks, countries were supposed to set out a workplan on negotiations that should result in a new global climate treaty, to be drafted by the end of 2015 and to come into force in 2020. But participants told the Guardian they were downbeat, disappointed and frustrated that the decision to work on a new treaty – reached after marathon late-running talks last December in Durban – was being questioned.

China and India, both rapidly growing economies with an increasing share of global emissions, have tried to delay talks on such a treaty. Instead of a workplan for the next three years to achieve the objective of a new pact, governments have only managed to draw up a partial agenda. "It's incredibly frustrating to have achieved so little," said one developed country participant. "We're stepping backwards, not forwards."

Read More:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/may/25/bonn-climate-talks-end-disappointment/print

Jack A. Smith - American Politics: THE ELECTIONS WON'T BRING PROGRESSIVE CHANGE, SO WHAT CAN?

Less than six months before the November presidential elections in an exceptionally distressed United States the narrow, unpleasant parameters of political possibility are emerging. Two alternatives confront the American people, both to the right of center

1. If President Barack Obama is reelected, with the Democratic Party retaining control of at least one chamber of Congress, there probably will be four more years of economic stagnation, high unemployment, increasing poverty and inequality, more wars, erosions of civil liberties and global warming.

2. If Mitt Romney is elected, with the right/far right Republican Party dominating either House or Senate, every particular of the travail afflicting the country today will be multiplied, with emphasis on fulfilling the desires of the 1% at the expense of the 99%.

What else could be expected during the present conservative era? Paul Krugman, the liberal Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist, recently described Obama, whom he supports, as having ruled like "a moderate Republican circa 1992." Viewing the ultra-conservatives, African American professor and left intellectual Cornell West detected "creeping fascism."

Read More:

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=31042

Greg Palast - Killings, cancer, corruption and Azerbaijan: Eurovision in the Islamic Republic of BP

Palast's book Vultures' Picnic will be released in Britain June 26. Catch with Special Guest Warren Ellis, info here.

Will “Beyond Petroleum” oil giant BP pick the winner of the Eurovision Song Contest today in Baku, Azerbaijan? If so, I wouldn’t be surprised.

When I was arrested by the military police of Azerbaijan during my investigation of BP for Channel 4′s Dispatches in 2010, one of the cops who surrounded our crew in the desert told us, with great pride:

“BP drives this country.”

Indeed it does.

In 1992, the newly independent former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan elected a kindly Muslim Professor, Abulfaz Elchibey, as President.

But the voters had made an error: Elchibey refused to give BP an exclusive contract to drill the nation’s massive Caspian Sea fields as the company wished. In 1993, with assistance and, reportedly, guns provided by MI6, Elchibey was overthrown by the nation’s former Soviet KGB boss, Heydar Aliyev.

Read More:

http://www.leftfootforward.org/2012/05/eurovision-bp-azerbaijan-killings-cancer-corruption/

Lynn Parramore - The Best and the Greediest? Ivy League Students Are Still Heading to Wall Street

The Ivy League classes of 2012 arrived on campuses in fall of 2008, just as the world economy was plunging into a Wall Street-driven freefall. Many were glad they weren’t out facing a nasty job market. But they worried about the future. They networked earlier. They fretted over internships. 

Their senior year started with the launch of the Occupy movement, which raised a collective fist at the financiers whose casino games wrecked the economy. A few students from elite colleges even joined the protest. Back in November, some Harvard students interrupted a Goldman Sachs recruiting event hosted by the Office of Career Services.

But now the show is over, and it’s time to don the caps and gowns. Will students be any less likely to flock to Wall Street this year?

A look at last year’s numbers: In 2011, finance was still the most popular career for Harvard graduates, luring up 17 percent of those who went from college to a full-time job. Finance accounted for 14 percent of the 2010 graduating class at Yale. Princeton, which wins the Lloyd Blankfein Booby Prize for the most Wall Street-crazed campus, sent 35.9 percent of those who had jobs at graduation into finance. That’s more than a third of the entire student body.  

Read More:

http://www.alternet.org/story/155535/the_best_and_the_greediest_ivy_league_students_are_still_heading_to_wall_street

Marc McDonald - How Right-Wingers Took Over Wikipedia

Wikipedia is one of the most useful sites on the Web. It's a fantastic reference source that provides an incredible wealth of data on an endless variety of topics.

A big strength of Wikipedia is that anyone can edit any article. If, for example, an expert on quantum mechanics happens to notice a small factual error in the Wikipedia article on that topic, he or she can easily fix it on the spot. By harnessing the power of the knowledge of millions of people, Wikipedia has grown into the world's biggest reference resource.

However, Wikipedia's strength is also its biggest flaw. The very fact that anyone can edit an article means that errors, spin and bias can easily creep into the Wikipedia database.

If you're looking to read up on millions of disparate topics, from aardvarks to Frank Zappa, Wikipedia can offer you an enormous amount of helpful info that is reasonably free of bias.

But there's one big exception: articles on current political figures and topics.

Here, Wikipedia falls woefully short in its goal of providing a "neutral point of view."

Read More:

http://www.beggarscanbechoosers.com/2012/05/how-right-wingers-took-over-wikipedia.html

Your rights or GMOs?

Last chance to Drop the Money Bomb on Monsanto and Turn the Connecticut Massacre into the California Miracle!

Exactly 20 years ago today, Vice President Dan Quayle announced a new policy by the first Bush administration that declared genetically engineered foods to be “substantially equivalent” to foods that farmers had traditionally planted and bred for thousands of years.

With this single policy, the U.S. government radically altered the food supply, introducing novel genes into our food that have been genetically altered in laboratories and never before consumed by humans. While the technology of genetic engineering was brand new, corporate executives at Monsanto colluded with elected officials to make sure that their new “products” were place onto the market as quickly as possible.

The Bush/Quayle 1992 policy, crafted by former Monsanto attorney Michael Taylor, who had been hired by the Bush FDA to fill a new position of deputy commissioner of policy, was designed to fast track approvals of GMOs and guarantee the new seed technology avoid rigorous safety testing and labeling, or as stated, “burdensome regulation”.

Two decades later, Americans are still denied the basic right to know what’s in their food because of this infamous policy, despite the fact that polls regularly show that 90% of Americans believe in labeling GMOs.

But this fall, all that can change! With your help, you can make GMO labeling history by chipping in to make sure that the California Right to Know 2012 ballot initiative succeeds in November!

Chip in today to join the effort to end this 20-year pseudo-scientific policy and regain your basic right to Label GMOs!

http://fdn.actionkit.com/go/596?t=7&akid=559.419237.x4Gk_i

As we reported yesterday, the biotech industry and Big Food retailers are already pledging millions of dollars to attempt to defeat us this fall. Earlier this month in a secret meeting, industry lobbyists promised to raise between $40 to $50 million to kill the GMO labeling initiative in California and deny us our right to know what’s in our food.

But we’re not going to allow that to happen!

The movement to label GMOs in the U.S. has grown exponentially in the past year and now California is on the front lines for this important battle for our basic rights. In order to match Monsanto and the biotech industry’s millions of dollars, we need to run an effective campaign to counter the lies and propaganda that will soon hit the California airwaves.

This will take all of us chipping in what we can and working together for victory in November!

We can do this – with your help. With just two days left, we need about $50,000. We’re counting on small donations of $5, $10, $20 to get us there. Your donation could be the one that puts us over the top!

Please chip in today to tell Monsanto: We have a right to know if our food contains GMOs! Every dollar counts!

http://fdn.actionkit.com/go/596?t=10&akid=559.419237.x4Gk_i

To make this a memorable experience, we’re giving the first 100 people that donate more than $100 a free limited-edition Label GMOs t-shirt with the quote from President Obama’s famous promise to label GMOs on the back.

"Here’s what I’ll do as President. I’ll immediately implement Country of Origin Labeling because Americans should know where their food comes from. And we’ll let folks know whether their food has been genetically modified because Americans should know what they’re buying."

Thank you for contributing what you can today - Together we can win!

Now's the time. Let’s drop the money bomb on Monsanto and take back our food supply!

Thanks for participating in food democracy,

David Murphy

President, Food Democracy Action!

P.S. All money raised for this campaign will go through Food Democracy Action!, a 501(c)4 allied organization of Food Democracy Now!, focused on grassroots lobbying and legislative action. Donations are not tax-deductible. Thank you for your support!

China hits back at critical U.S. human rights report

China hit back on Friday at the U.S. State Department's annual survey of human rights, saying that only the Chinese people could pass judgment on what the Foreign Ministry said were the country's obvious achievements in the area.

Asked about criticism of China in the report, Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei condemned it for being prejudiced.

"The United States State Department's annual report on human rights maligns other countries, and the content concerning China ignores the facts and is filled will prejudice, confusing black and white," he told a daily news briefing.

Since the launch of landmark economic reforms more than three decades ago, Hong said: "China's human rights endeavors have made achievements that are plain for all the world to see. The Chinese people themselves have the most right to speak about China's human rights situation".

"In human rights, there is no such thing as the best; there is only doing even better," he added.

Human rights have long been a source of friction between China and the United States, especially since 1989 when the United States and other Western countries imposed sanctions on China after a crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators.

Read More:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/25/us-china-usa-rights-idUSBRE84O0DM20120525

Eric Holt-Giménez - Obama's New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition: Nothing New About Ignoring Africa's Farmers

President Barack Obama wants to convince the world that he is actually a liberal after all.

First he not-so-hastily follows Vice-president Joe Biden's support for gay marriage to assure us he is a social liberal. Then, last week at the G8 meeting, he announces The New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition -- a $3 billion corporate investment initiative to end hunger in Africa -- to remind us he is still an economic liberal.

Not that the world needs reminding.

Like Bush, Clinton and every other president since Ronald Reagan, Obama believes that proprietary technologies, unregulated global markets and the unchecked power of corporate monopolies will solve all our social, economic and environmental ills. Never mind that 30 years of economic liberalization has impoverished the farmers of the global South, kicked off global warming, pushed the number of hungry people up over 1 billion and dragged us into the largest world-wide economic depression since -- well, the last liberal Great Depression.

The New Alliance is an initiative to convince the world that government and industry are finally doing something about world hunger. But as one African civil society group pointed out, it is not new and it is not an alliance.

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/05/25-5

Paul Craig Roberts - Washington’s Hypocrisies

The US government is the second worst human rights abuser on the planet and the sole enabler of the worst--Israel.  But this doesn’t hamper Washington from pointing the finger elsewhere.

 

The US State Department’s “human rights report” focuses its ire on Iran and Syria, two countries whose real sin is their independence from Washington, and on the bogyman- in-the-making--China, the country selected for the role of Washington’s new cold war enemy.

 

Hillary Clinton, another in a long line of unqualified Secretaries of State, informed “governments around the world: we are watching, and we are holding you accountable,” only we are not holding ourselves accountable or Washington’s allies like Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the NATO puppets.  

 

Hillary also made it “clear to citizens and activists everywhere: You are not alone. We are standing with you,” only not with protesters at the Chicago NATO summit or with the Occupy Wall Street protesters, or anywhere else in the US where there are protests.

Read More:

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=31046

Barack Obama: Let’s Steal 150 Million Dollars An Hour From Our Children

Do you think that someone could steal 150 million dollars and get away with it?  Well, the truth is that such a theft is taking place every single hour of every single day.  The federal government is stealing 150 million dollars an hour from our children and our grandchildren and Barack Obama thinks that is a good thing.  The new Obama budget projects a $1.33 trillion federal budget deficit for the 2012 fiscal year.  That is significantly higher than the $1.15 trillion that the Congressional Budget Office was projecting because it includes a whole bunch of stimulus spending that the Obama administration plans to do.  So let's do a little math.  When you divide $1.33 trillion by 365 days, you get 3.6438356 billion dollars.  So on average, the United States will be adding more than 3.6 billion dollars to the national debt every single day during fiscal 2012.  And when you divide $3.6438356 billion by 24 hours, you get 151.8 million dollars.  So on average, the U.S. national debt will be going up by more than 151 million dollars every single hourduring fiscal 2012 if Obama has his way.  This is a theft from our children and our grandchildren that is so vast that it is almost unimaginable.

The 2012 budget deficit that the Obama administration is projecting would be equivalent to approximately 8.5 percent of GDP.  We simply cannot afford to be running these kinds of outrageous budget deficits year after year.

Read More:

http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/barack-obama-lets-steal-150-million-dollars-an-hour-from-our-children