Vijay Prashad: The Undoing of Libya

http://counterpunch.org/prashad06272011.html

By VIJAY PRASHAD

NATO headquarters shares with the caves of al-Qaeda the error of hubris. The jihadis believe that it was their rag-tag mujahideen that chased the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan. Nothing in their world-view allows them to share the glory with the United States, the Saudis and the Pakistanis, nor yet with the infestation of economic termites inside the heart of the Soviet industrial base. In much the same way, the NATO war planners believe that it was their seventy-eight day bombing campaign that freed Kosovo from the clutches of Slobodan Milosevic's forces. Nothing in the Brussels briefing books underlines the crucial step taken by the Russians, when theywithdrew their support of Milosevic and left him, "looking at the stars," as he put it in his famous invocation of the 1389 Battle of Kosovo. Neither the mujihideen nor the NATO aircraft are themselves capable of military victories that have a political impact. A skirmish here and a bombing campaign there, but not the decisive blow that overturns a political dispensation.

Outgoing U. S. Defense Chief Robert Gates complains that the Europeans are not bearing enough responsibility for the NATO campaign. France's Sarkozy replies that Gates' retirement causes him to use "bitter words." It is only when they are set to retire or do retire that sensible custodians of the hierarchical world order speak the truth: Eisenhower warned the U. S. about the military industrial complex in his farewell address of 1961, World Bank heads Robert McNamara and James Wolfensohn snubbed their own certainties only when the door of the Bank shut behind them. Gates indicates that the U. S. can no longer use its military power to sustain its flagging hegemony. It has to turn things over to partners. The European ship falters, as the Greek sinkhole widens. It does not have the fortitude.

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Don Fitz: The Deep Green Meaning of Fukushima

By DON FITZ

http://counterpunch.org/fitz06272011.html

Humanity must decrease its use of energy.  The decrease must be a lot (not a little bit) and it must happen soon.  A failure to do so will lay the foundation for the destruction of human life by some combination of climate change and radiation.

How long will the disastrous consequences of Fukushima continue?  A good estimate is about 4.5 billion years — the half life of uranium-238. [1]  The March 11, 2011 meltdown sounded alarms that environmentalists have rung for over half a century.  There is also a deeper green meaning: The limits of economic growth have long since passed and we need to design a world with considerably less stuff.

Nuclear power is based on lies

The industry claims that there is such a thing as a safe level of radiation and that nuclear production can be safe.  Both are profoundly untrue.

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Patrick Cockburn: The Demonization of Gaddafi – Don’t Believe Everything You See and Read

http://counterpunch.org/patrick06272011.html

By PATRICK COCKBURN

In the first months of the Arab Spring, foreign journalists got well-merited credit for helping to foment and publicize popular uprisings against the region's despots. Satellite TV stations such as Al Jazeera Arabic, in particular, struck at the roots of power in Arab police states, by making official censorship irrelevant and by competing successfully against government propaganda.

Regimes threatened by change have, since those early days, paid backhanded compliments to the foreign media by throwing correspondents out of countries where they would like to report and by denying them visas to come back in. Trying to visit Yemen earlier this year, I was told that not only was there no chance of my being granted a journalist's visa, but that real tourists – amazingly there is a trickle of such people wanting to see the wonders of Yemen – were being turned back at Sanaa airport on the grounds that they must secretly be journalists. The Bahrain government has an even meaner trick: give a visa to a journalist at a Bahraini embassy abroad and deny him entry when his plane lands.

It has taken time for this policy of near total exclusion to take hold, but it means that, today, foreign journalistic coverage of Syria, Yemen and, to a lesser extent, Bahrain is usually long-distance, reliant on cellphone film of demonstrations and riots which cannot be verified.

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"Fiona Harvey" - Donor Aversion to 'Unsexy' Water Projects Threatens Development Goal

Published on Monday, June 27, 2011 by The Guardian/UK

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/jun/27/donor-aversion-water-projects

More than 1 billion people will not get the basic sanitation and the clean water promised as such projects shrink sharply as a proportion of global aid budgets

by Fiona Harvey

A key development goal to halve the number of people without access to basic sanitation by 2015 will be missed because donor countries have diverted aid money away from "unsexy" water projects, according to the World Bank and the charity WaterAid.

Aid to give people in developing countries access to clean water and sanitation has been shrinking as a proportion of global aid budgets, new research has shown, with the result that more than a billion people will not get the help they were promised by rich countries under the millennium development goals.

Instead, donors are restricting aid to "sexier" projects such as schools and hospitals – even though the benefits of those are diminished if their recipients have no clean water or toilets.

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David Swanson: When the Public Rises, We'll Want an Ally in Congress

June 27, 2011

By David Swanson

For the majority of people in the United States -- a majority does not vote, a majority believes the government is broken, a majority thinks our public policy is headed in the wrong direction -- the fact that we call this place a democracy is apparently outweighed by the fact that our national government almost never does what a majority of us want done. Some of the things we don't want done include the destruction of the planet's environment, the mass slaughter of war, the spreading of violence, and the concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny aristocracy while millions at home and billions abroad suffer horrifically for lack of readily available resources.

When the people of Egypt decided earlier this year to rise up and resist their government's abuses, it would have been helpful for them to have more real allies already in positions of partial power within that government. The same applies to us, should we ever determine that we are not going to take it anymore. Perhaps that moment will come in October: http://october2011.org Perhaps, as momentum builds around the country for real resistance, it will come ahead of schedule this summer. Perhaps it will come a few years down the road.

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Joe Conason: The Ruinous Rant of John McCain

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_ruinous_rant_of_john_mccain_20110626/

Posted on Jun 26, 2011

By Joe Conason

The decline of the Grand Old Party into an angry mob is gaining momentum, with crackpot rage displacing common sense on every major issue from public finance to marriage rights.

An ominous signal of this transformation emanated last week from John McCain, who has been a sometime voice of rationality on such sensitive partisan matters as torture, climate change and immigration. Now he, too, has descended into demagoguery by falsely claiming that illegal immigrants are behind the spread of destructive wildfires in Arizona.

Insisting that there is “substantial evidence” to support his racially inflammatory accusation, the Arizona senator could produce none, and neither could his staff. Instead, there is, as The Washington Post noted, not even a shred of evidence that immigrants set those fires. Nobody knows yet why the borderlands blazed, but the U.S. Forest Service has blamed an “escaped campfire”—and indicated clearly that there is no reason to believe that illegal immigrants are to blame.

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"Paul Craig Roberts" - Who Does The Law Serve?

When my book (with Lawrence Stratton), The Tyranny of Good Intentions, was published, progressives and the left-wing refused to believe that the rich suffer frame-ups from prosecutorial abuse.  Their response was that law is controlled by the rich and functions in their service.  Only the poor and minorities suffer at the hands of the law.

The political left knew that Michael Milken was guilty, because the rich “junk bond king” financed takeovers of corporations that threw workers out of jobs.  Leftists accepted the Justice (sic) Department’s fanciful claim that the Exxon Valdez oil spill was a criminal act, not an accident for which civil damages were the remedy. Leona Helmsley was guilty, because she was a rich bitch. So was Martha Stewart.  The left-wing was firm:  all rich white people in prison are guilty, and the only reason they are in prison is that they are so obviously guilty that the system couldn’t let them off. In other words, they were so audacious in their crimes that the crimes couldn’t be covered up.

The same mentality now dominates discussions of the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case.

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"Tim Murphy, Mother Jones" - Psycho Talk: The 32 Craziest Things GOP Presidential Contender Michele Bachmann Has Said

By Tim Murphy, Mother Jones
Posted on June 27, 2011, Printed on June 28, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/151439/psycho_talk%3A_the_32_craziest_things_gop_presidential_contender_michele_bachmann_has_said

The following article first appeared in Mother Jones. For more great content from Mother Jones, sign up for their free email updates here.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Over the weekend, Fox News' Chris Wallace asked Michele Bachmann if she was a flake. Below is a compendium of some of her more outlandish remarks. Judge for yourself. Bachmann has officially announced her candidacy for President.

Now in just her third term in Congress, Michele Bachmann, the leader of the House tea party caucus, has earned a reputation as one of the lower chamber's leading bomb-throwers, lobbing overheated rhetoric at Democrats and needling establishment Republicans. Her Minnesota colleague, Democratic Rep. Keith Ellison once accused her of "psycho talk"; in an interview with Politico, a Pawlenty aide was just as blunt: "She's a real pain in the ass." Former state senator Dean Johnson, who was the Republican minority leader during Bachmann's stint in St. Paul, has said, "I don't think I ever served with anybody who I mistrusted more, from either side of the aisle."

Ouch. Bachmann also has a tendency to stretch the truth, or simply sidestep it altogether. Bill Adair, editor of PolitiFact, recently told Minnesota Public Radio that he has never researched a Bachmann quote and found it to be true (the only major politician for which that's the case).

Here's an incomplete guide to Bachmann's greatest hits:

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"Sally Kohn" - Conservative Politics Increasingly Out of Whack With Public Opinion -- Is an Anti-GOP Backlash Coming Up?

By Sally Kohn, AlterNet
Posted on June 27, 2011, Printed on June 28, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/151435/conservative_politics_increasingly_out_of_whack_with_public_opinion_--_is_an_anti-gop_backlash_coming_up

The Republican Party is now officially out of touch with the vast majority of the American people. While there was no real doubt of this before, Republicans did a better job of feigning mainstream populism on and off. Until last week, when the GOP proudly stood its ground against not only core American values and principles but even mainstream popular opinion.

First, it was taxes. Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and Republican Senate Minority Whip John Kyl petulantly abandoned debt negotiation talks with Democrats because the Republicans are firmly opposed to any repeal of tax breaks for the super rich.  Here were are, a nation that has always relied on those who get the most out of America to give the most back — now at a time when, as the profits of the rich continue to reach record levels, unemployment and economic stagnation for the rest of us remains.  All the Democrats want to do is restore the upper tax rates to the levels under President Clinton, then the economy was thriving — not even to the much, much higher levels under past Republican presidents like Reagan or Eisenhower.  And almost two-thirds of Americans agree that we should raise taxes on the rich to address the deficit

Yet the Republicans continue to push irresponsible and unpopular cuts to Medicare and Medicaid.  It should now be apparent to every American that the Republican agenda in these respects does not prioritize the economic health and well-being of the hardworking American middle class but, rather, the greedy interests of wealthy campaign donors and Wall Street.  The GOP would rather create even richer billionaires than create more jobs for working people.  The GOP would rather give handouts to insurance companies than make sure our seniors can keep affording their health care. 

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"Progressive Radio Network Host Bhavani Jaroff, Wednesday @ 5pm I Eat Green Newsletter

iEat Green with Bhavani on The Progressive Radio Network

Hello Everyone,

After my show last week, I drove up to Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, to listen to Bill McKibben's speak about the state of our planet, and the organization he started called 350.org. As optimistic as one can be about the local, sustainable food movement, and the growth we have seen over the last 10 years, there is nothing optimistic about the lack of our governments participation in turning the Global Warming crisis around. 2010 was the warmest year on record, and all of the weather changes associated with that, Artic melt, droughts, floods, fires, tornados, earthquakes, tsunamis, are just the beginning. Our government will not take it seriously, unless all of us start to demand it, and that will take a lot of work! Please, roll up your sleeves, and get involved in 350.org. Their website is www.350.org

My guest for my show this week, Wednesday @ 5pm(EST) will be George Pitagorsky, a man who is integrating his knowledge and wisdom of Eastern philosophies, and bringing it to Corporate America. His book, The Zen Approach to Project Management: Working from Your Center to Manage Expectations and Performance, Project Management (PM) Basics™, is a self-paced interactive e-learning course that can be adopted by corporations and professional services, and applied to business relationships. He also co-created the Conscious Living and Working Wisely Workshops and has written many articles and presentations on project management, organizational development, team building, conflict resolution and personal development subjects.  He regularly leads courses and workshops in applying mindfulness and open-minded thinking in a very practical and realistic way.

My guest for next week will be Sheryl Duchess, a Certified Naturopathic Doctor and Master Herbalist. Dr. Duchess developed an educational program to help educate the average person on the basic principles of naturopathy and preventative care, which has been shared with thousands of people across the United States.  It is Dr Sheryl's passion to help both adults and children discover more natural solutions to many of the most common health challenges.

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