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

Chinese Chaos is the Immediate Threat to the Dollar

In twenty or thrity years, I expect future monetary historians looking back on this period of history to frequently misquote Ernest Hemingway:

How did the dollar die? First it died slowly — then all at once.

The slow death began with the dollar’s birth as a global reserve currency. America was creditor and manufacturer to the world, and the capitalist superpower. People around the globe transacted overwhelmingly in dollars. Above all else, people needed dollars to conduct trade, and they were willing to pay richly for them, and for dollar-denominated debt .

By the ’90s America began enjoying a tremendous free lunch — the world provided America with goods, resources and services, and Americans provided the global reserve currency, as well as acting as world military policing global shipping. Why manufacture at home, or produce resources at home when the world wants your currency? To get what you want, all you have to do is run your printing press — which was much easier after 1971, when Nixon ended the gold exchange standard. In a flat free-trade world, supply chains and technology agglomerated wherever the labour was cheapest, which was predominantly Asia. So America let her industrial base and her domestic supply webs degenerate, to enjoy the free lunch that the dollar brought:

Read More:

http://azizonomics.com/2012/05/26/chinese-chaos-is-the-immediate-threat-to-the-dollar/

Stephen Leahy - Global Temperatures Rising on a Devastating Trajectory

Climate-heating carbon emissions set a record high in 2011, in a 3.2 percent increase over the previous year, the International Energy Agency reported this week. The main reason for this dangerous increase is that governments are failing to implement policies to prevent catastrophic increases of global temperatures.

A new report released on the last days of international climate talks in Bonn, Germany this week reveals that the planet is heading to a temperature rise of at least 3.5 degrees Celsius, and likely more, according to the Climate Action Tracker (CAT), despite an international agreement to keep global temperature rise below two degrees Celsius.

Not only are pledges inadequate, but countries are unable to fulfill even those pledges, a new CAT analysis shows. CAT is a joint project of Dutch energy consulting organisation Ecofys, Germany's Climate Analytics, and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

"When we compared the emission reduction pledges of countries like Brazil, Mexico and the U.S., we found they did not have the policies in place to meet those pledges," said Niklas Höhne, director of energy and climate policy at Ecofys.

Read More:

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=107928

Death by Medicine Reviewed in The Clinton Chronicle

Death By Medicine

Revealing DVD From Gary Null, PhD

by Eliot M. Camaren

Ask  anyone  what  the  leading cause of death in the United States is and they are likely to say it’s heart disease. Well, that is a big killer but it is not the leading cause of death. Cancer? Nope. Smoking? No again. 

The corporate media has been covering it up for years, but the medical establishment knows what the leading cause of death in this country is: iatrogenesis. That’s  a  $10 word meaning death from medical treatment. You read that right. The leading cause of death in this country is the supposedly “live-saving” medical  treatment  people  receive, accounting for up to 50% of all hospital admissions.

On this subject, the film Death By Medicine  pulls  no  punches. Nor does it reveal anything that the medical profession does not already know. They just don’t want YOU to know it. Well, with this film, out on DVD, Gary Null PhD pulls back the curtain on this shameful condition. 

Why is it that medicine kills people in  higher  numbers  than  anything else in this  country? How  can this be happening? For the old, old reason: money. Drugs generate billions and  billions  of  dollars  in  profits. The drug companies will not let an insignificant little thing like human life, yours or mine, stand in the way of their greed. After  all, your misfortune is  a  prime  business  opportunity  to  these  vultures.  But,  hey, that’s  Capitalism, right? What  are you, some  kind  of  commie? Businessmen have a god-given right to make  money  even  if  it’s  off  your illness!  Besides,  the  drugs  are  all regulated by the FDA, right? Unfortunately, yes. But what does that do for  you? 

Consider  this: You  know how much testing of new drugs the Food & Drug Administration does? None. Absolutely none at all. They rely on the “research” done by the drug  companies  themselves  when pronouncing  a  drug  safe.  Worked wonders with Vioxx, did it not? You know who supports the FDA financially? The  drug  companies, that’s who. This DVD will show you exactly which drugs have been proven conclusively to be fatal, have been approved with demonstrably FAKE STUDIES,  and  yet  are still  on the market. All this  as  patients - read: victims - drop like flies. All to feed the  greed  and corruption  in  the medical community.

As one expert in the film points out,  we  do  not  have  anything  like health  care  in  America.  We  have DISEASE  care.  Will  that  change with  the  wildly misnamed Affordable  Health  Care  Act  which  the Administration  passed?  No.  That bill was not in any way “health care reform,” as expert Len Saputo, MD points out in the film. It is merely insurance reform. What the  democrats did with this law is turn over our entire health care system to the insurance companies, a cadre even more money-hungry than Big Pharma. And if you do not pay the insurance companies, you are a criminal. How is this “health care” reform? 

Why is this happening? Simply put, it is to the financial advantage of the drug companies to find a disease from which you suffer - even if they must invent that disease - and medicate you for the rest of your life. Are you  kind  of shy  around strangers? You have Social Anxiety Disorder! TAKE A PILL! Your 4 year old is not  all  that  interested  in  learning multiplication  tables?  Your  child has ADHD! Drug  your  child! You have  a  3-year  old  who  is  obstreperous?  OPPOSITIONAL DEFIANCE DISORDER! There’s a drug for your 3 year-old to take till he’s 95! 

To you, your little one is a child. To the medical system your child is merely a revenue stream. The great comedian Victor Borge once joked about an uncle who went broke because he invented a cure for which there  was  no  disease.  Today,  that uncle would be the chairman of an international  drug  company  which finances  the  medical  school  research that proves a disease DOES exist. But it gets worse. 

The  object  is  not  to  cure  you, but  to  keep  you  on  drugs  forever. What happens when you try to get off those drugs? First there are legal ramifications. Should you refuse to drug your child whose mind simply wanders at times, you can lose custody  of  your  child  and  even  go to jail. But worse than that is the list of effects you will suffer getting off these  powerful  drugs.  Sure,  they tell  you  about  the  so-called  “side effects”  that  occur  when  you  take the  drug,  but  they  never  tell  you what happens when you quit. 

Death By Medicine studies the  case  of  a woman who took drugs for chronic pain, and what happened when she got off them. The woman’s deterioration is shocking; a clarion call to everyone - demanding that you investigate the withdrawal tortures of any drug before you consent to take it. But  are  drugs  the  only  way  to go? No. As the DVD shows, there was a time in America when medical schools taught several palliative and diagnostic disciplines. Homeopathic,  Naturopathic,  Osteopathic medicine  were all  studied  along with the Allopathic medicine which is  prevalent  today.  

How  did  this happen? Greed  took  a  hand  at  the table. At the start of the 20th Century,  corporate  billionaires refused to see people treated with diet and exercise when that added nothing to their massive stock portfolios. So the Rockefellers, among others, showed their partners in the pharmaceutical companies  how  to  finance  medical schools.  Purely  for  the  money they could derive from medicating rather than curing people. This evil persists  today.  The  FDA has  even raided  -  at  GUNPOINT!  -  shops that  sell  vitamin  supplements.  All this approved by conservatives who claim  they  believe  in  limited  government  intervention  in  our  lives. 

Yeah, right. Not when there is a dollar to be made, they don’t. To  reinforce  this  deadly  drug culture,  we  now  have  something only one other country in the worlds has: direct to consumer advertising of drugs. Smiling, happy people in TV spots run and cavort on a hillside  while  a soothing  voice  extols the  virtues  of  things  with  idiotic names that sound like AMBISTENE or MELTIFIZENE, LYFEONNALYNE or anything else composed of a silly collection of syllables pulled out of thin air. 

A comforting voice tells you that these drugs will manage  your  disease...  but  what  disease?  The  ads  generally  don’t  tell you that. Nevertheless, millions of gullible saps see it on TV and demand  this  drug  from  their  doctor. 

Doctor refuses? Okay, they can get another  doctor;  a  doctor  who  will say yes because that doctor is well rewarded  by  the  drug  representatives who haunt the medical suites these  days.  Several  such  reps  are interviewed in Death By Medicine. What they have to say is horrific!

After  seeing  this  eye-opening film, one thought haunted my mind: Given the current state of medicine, namely, that the American medical system  is  under  the  stranglehold of  Big  Pharma  and  the  Insurance Companies, to whom you are merely a dollar sign, perhaps it’s a good thing  after  all  that  we  Americans lack universal health coverage...

TEPCO: 2-1/2 Times More Fukushima Radiation Released Than Previously Announced

The nuclear meltdowns at Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant released at least 2-1/2 times more radiation than Japan’s government had announced last year, the company responsible for the disaster said in a Tokyo news conference today.

TEPCO: 2-1/2 Times More Fukushima Radiation Released Than Previously Announced. The severely damaged Fukushima Unit 4 TEPCO, set to benationalized in July in exchange for a Japanese government bailout, estimated meltdowns at three Fukushima reactors released about 900,000 terabecquerels of radioactive substances into the air during March. The total radiation release at the Chernobyl accident was estimated to be about 5.2 million terabecquerels.

The Fukushima Daiichi catastrophe has cost TEPCO over $100 billion in estimated costs, which includes compensation and clean-up costs. However, the actual costs are much bigger. Many Japanese are bearing the brunt of the damages in their daily lives with most of their claims and losses going uncompensated and most of their suffering unrecognized.

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/05/24-1

Steven Strauss - America: Slouching Towards Third World Status

"The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity" -- "The Second Coming", William Butler Yeats

Yeats' lines aptly describe our current age of political mediocrity. As we consider our politicians, we can hardly say that they're our best. And the worst of them are full of passionate intensity, with passions driven by ideology, rather than fact-based analysis.

The United States has been in decline relative to other countries for the last 30 years. On key metrics, we've fallen behind our peer group of industrialized countries, such as the UK, France, Germany, and Japan.

Am I exaggerating? Well, according to the Corruption Perception Index, we rank 24th in the world (only slightly better than Qatar) for public sector corruption. We rank 25th (way behind our peer group) in the OECD for math scores among 15-year-olds.

Over the past 30 years, our national debt has grown from about 30 percent of GDP to over 100 percent, and will become much worse based on current trends. In a recent survey of 10,000 Harvard Business School Alumni, "66 percent of respondents see the U.S. falling behind emerging economies." It is difficult to find many encouraging metrics.

Read More:

http://www.project-syndicate.org/blog/america--slouching-towards-third-world-status

Mehdi Hasan - Sadly Barack Obama, like Mitt Romney, is an apologist for the 1%

Poor Mitt Romney. Despite defeating a weird and wacky line-up of candidates in a gruelling Republican primary race, and despite selling himself as "the CEO president", he can't seem to shake off his image as a slash-and-burn private equity boss, a modern-day incarnation of Gordon Gekko.

It hasn't escaped his opponents' attention. In 2008, Romney's then rival for the nomination, Mike Huckabee, mocked him for looking like "the guy who laid you off". Last year, during his own brief and bizarre bid for the presidency, the billionaire entrepreneur Donald Trump ridiculed Romney as "a funds guy" who would "buy companies … close companies [and] get rid of the jobs". And, last week, Team Obama released a campaign ad attacking Romney's private equity firm, Bain Capital, and referring to the Republican candidate as a "vampire".

In a show of co-ordinated faux outrage, Republicans have since called on the president to disown such attack ads. But drawing attention to Romney's record as a corporate raider is fair game. As co-founder and chief executive of Bain Capital, Romney did make hundreds of millions of dollars from private equity deals, and did lay off hundreds of workers in the process.

Read More:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/may/24/barack-obama-mitt-romney-apologist

Messing With Our Minds: The Ever Finer Line Between News and Advertising

The manufacturing of consent is endemic within modern societies. Throughout history, the need to "persuade and influence" has always been manipulated by those people in power as a means to maintain authority and legitimacy. In more recent years, the overall manipulation of the mass public mind has become less about making speeches and more about becoming a pervasive presence within the lives of each individual.

Edward Bernays has often been called "the father of public relations," as it was his teachings and research that spurred the postwar years of propaganda. Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, utilized psychological and psychoanalytical ideas to construct an informational system - propaganda - capable of manipulating public opinion. Bernays, apparently, considered that such a manipulative apparatus was necessary because society, in his regard, was composed of too many irrational elements - the people - which could be dangerous to the efficient mechanisms of power (or so-called "democracy"). Bernays wrote that, "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society."[1] Bearing in mind that Bernays was working in the early 1920s, we can expect the mechanisms of propaganda - mass manipulation - to have progressed to a very advanced degree since then. Within the context of our modern mass societies, propaganda has morphed into a mechanism for not only engineering public opinion, but also for consolidating social control.

Read More:

http://truth-out.org/news/item/9156-messing-with-our-minds-the-ever-finer-line-between-news-and-advertising