Massive 'Social Justice' Protests Sweep Israel

Published on Sunday, July 31, 2011 by Agence France-Presse

http://www.afp.com/afpcom/en/

 

TEL AVIV -- Tens of thousands of Israelis have taken to the streets in 10 cities to protest against the high cost of living and to demand ''social justice, not charity''.

Police and media estimated that between 80,000 and 120,000 people demonstrated on Saturday. More than 50,000 people marched in Tel Aviv; about 10,000 protested in the northern city of Haifa, and in Jerusalem 15,000 demonstrators congregated outside the residence of the Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, waving placards that read: ''A whole generation wants a future.''

''I came because I cannot make ends meet, and taxes end up in the pockets of the rich,'' one protester, who runs a nursery school, said.

Demonstrations against high rents and house prices have spread in recent weeks, with protesters setting up tent villages and road blocks.

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"Prashant Rao" - Iraq 'Less Safe Than a Year Ago': US Watchdog

Published on Saturday, July 30, 2011 by Agence France-Presse

http://sg.news.yahoo.com/iraq-less-safe-ago-us-watchdog-090050434.html

by Prashant Rao

Iraq is a less safe place than it was one year ago as security deteriorates, an American watchdog warned on Saturday, just months ahead of a US withdrawal from the country.

The assessment by Stuart Bowen, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, contrasts markedly from the more optimistic view often voiced by senior US army officers who argue Iraqi forces are able to maintain internal security.

Bowen noted that efforts by the US embassy to train Iraq's fledgling police force would be "challenging."

While the military has been in charge of developing Iraq's policemen, that responsibility is being transferred to the US State Department.

"Iraq remains an extraordinarily dangerous place to work," Bowen said in the report published on Saturday. "It is less safe, in my judgment, than 12 months ago."

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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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