Science can be a battleground — witness the politics of climate change, the teaching of evolution, the uncharted terrain of genetic modification and stem cell research, among other contentious issues. But when industries release untested chemicals into our environment — putting profits before public health — our children are the first to suffer. Nowhere is this more troubling than in the ongoing story of lead poisoning.
An interesting juxtaposition occurred in 2008. “With the enactment of the 2008 Constitution, Ecuador became the first country in the world to codify the Rights of Nature.”1 (Bolivia made a similar law in 2011.) Meanwhile, the United States Empire (USE) — though it was really the People who were affected — saw its housing bubble burst, the economy take a stinking nose-dive, and, while some big bank-institutions went under, some were (by the grace of In God We Trust) bailed out.Here we have the essence of one of the biggest dichotomies, the choice of our times ― Nature or Mammon, Compassion or Commodity.In his new book, Children of the Days, Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano sums up the mind-set of the-powers-that-be, as well as showing us how to shift our priorities: “If nature were a bank, they would have already rescued it.”2
Nature is, in fact, a bank of real wealth (providing the resources that fuel our lives), as well as its own slow food movement (plant a seed and the instant gratification you get will not fill your belly, rather nourish your mind and soul).
In a 2008 article, “Eduardo Galeano’s Earth Day Exclusive,” Galeano pinpoints the origin of this great divide: “The communion between nature and people, a pagan custom, was abolished in the name of God and later in the name of Civilization. Throughout the Americas, and the world, we are paying the consequences of this divorce.”3
A recent headline was a real button-pusher for a lot of people: “Supreme Court Says Monsanto Has ‘Control Over Product of Life.’”4 Monsanto’s attempt to monopolize control of seeds and prices can be linked to East Indian farmer suicides and other tragedies. This ongoing expression of absurd corporate(Monsanto)-state(court system) hubris got me thinking how these behemoths exhibit a maniacal sense of ‘playing God’ over life. And that’s nothing new.
The 500-plus years old “Doctrine of Christian Discovery” (keenly explained by Steven Newcomb in his wonderful book, Pagans in the Promised Land), proves that church and state are still not separate. The essence of the Doctrine states that, land uninhabited by Christians was up for Christians’ grab (see Pope Alexander’s Inter Caetera papal bull, 1493), hence the genocidal ‘discovery’ of the Americas. In some instances, patents (corporatism) issued to seafaring ‘discoverers’ with the twisted blessing of the church (theology) and nation (state) created a perfect storm called theofascism.
As a later example, “Sir Robert Heath’s Patent 5 Charles 1st; October, 30 1629”:5
“Charles by the grace of God of England Scotland France & Ireland King Defender of the faith . . . A certaine Region or Territory to bee hereafter described, in our lands in the parts of America betwixt one & thirety & 36 degrees of northerne latitude inclusively placed (yet hitherto untild, neither inhabited by ours or the subjects of any other Christian king, Prince or state But some parts of it inhabited by certain Barbarous men who have not any knowledge of the Divine Dietye) He being about to lead thither a Colonye of men large & plentifull, professing the true religion; seduously & industriously applying themselves to the culture of the sayd lands & to merchandising to be performed by industry & at his owne charges & others by his example.”
This “merchandising/industry” (corporate) under the banner of “God of England Scotland France & Ireland” (church and state), reveals a phase in the ongoing theofascist recipe for Global Corporate Empire disaster.
According to Benito Mussolini, “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.” Maybe we could call it theo-corporatism, but whatever the name, for the masses, it sucks!
The Urban Dictionary states: “Theofascist: Theology based totalitarian government.” A corporate-state collusion, driven by an ideology of supremacist God-hood.
Pledge Drive Down Memory Lane
Let’s take a look in the rearview mirror of history as well as a gander under the God-hood to see how this beastly vehicle operates.
The USE interstate highway system was patterned after the autobahn which was a creation of the Third Reich:
“At the outset of World War II in Europe, the autobahn proved to be a key asset to Germany. The German blitzkrieg (“lightning war”), which involved massive coordinated air and ground attacks to stun opponents into defeat, was a key to the German defeat of Poland in 1939, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands in 1940, and the Soviet Army in 1941. The highway network also enhanced Germany’s ability to fight on two fronts – Europe in the west, the Soviet Union in the east.”6
It is worth noting that what Americans now typically call “the highway,” was originally “The Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways”7 (bold added).
In the 1940s, “Lobbyists from the oil, tire, and automobile industries, among others, had persuaded state and federal agencies to assume that fundamental expense. Had the big auto companies been required to pay for the roads ― in the same way that trolley companies had to lay and maintain track ― the landscape of the American West would look quite different today,” wrote Eric Schlosser in Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal.
Thus, oil, tire, and auto companies, with government backing, conspired and bought up and drove out (no pun intended) the trolley system, and so, ahem, paved the way for the modern American interstate as well as the oxymoronic, fast-paced yet lazy lifestyle still haunting us today.
Nowadays one can readily see fast food restaurants flying their American flags. They appear as forts . . . dotting the landscape . . . symbols of the conquerors.
As an example of malnutrition being a side effect of warfare, “The Lakota were eventually confined onto reservations, prevented from hunting buffalo and forced to accept government food distribution.”8
More currently, on the Pine Ridge and Cheyenne River Reservations,
“Children attend after-school programs to take advantage of snacks as it is often the only food they will have for dinner. Government food programs are not designed for sharing societies . . . There are no food banks or food resources available to regularly meet basic food needs not covered by the government programs. There is also an extremely high incidence of diabetes and other health problems that are likely related at least in part to diet. Government programs provide a high starch diet with little fruits and vegetables.”9
Since the pledge of allegiance to said flag includes “one Nation under God,” once again a recipe of theofascism. And, to connect the plethora of fast food restaurants and gas stations at virtually every corner of suburban America, an old billboard text comes to mind: “Eat Here Get Gas.”
Lawrence Ferlinghetti calls the overall side effects of vehicular addiction “autogeddon.” The recent report of carbon dioxide levels reaching their highest recorded parts-per-million attests to that.10
In his book Fast Food Nation, Schlosser also exposes how flavors can be created from chemical manipulations, revealing that so-called “natural flavors” (approved by the FDA) may be anything but. The main culprit of these taste-bud deceptions is International Flavors and Fragrances, which happens to have a manufacturing facility along the not-so-fragrant New Jersey Turnpike.
Let’s break this down and try to digest it
“According to the study, a whopping $17 billion of the total $260 billion the government spent subsidizing agriculture went to just four common food additives: corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, corn starch and soy oils.”11
“Why is corn everywhere? Part of the reason is a subsidy system that has helped glut the marketplace with corn and left the government to find ways to use it. Nowadays, ranchers feed corn to their cows and chickens, and food companies sweeten their foodstuffs with it.”12
“That the $100-billion fast food industry rests on a foundation of corn has been known more through inference and observation than hard scientific fact — until now.
“Chemical analysis from restaurants across the United States shows that nearly every cow or chicken used in fast food is raised on a diet of corn, prompting fresh criticism of the government’s role in subsidizing poor eating habits.”13
In a nutshell, the government subsidy of corn pumps up the fast food industry as well as the shelves of supermarkets and mini-marts, not to mention the pockets of those pushing this instant gratification food system like a street-drug.
“ ‘Government subsidies make sweet food very cheap’, says Marion Nestle, a nutrition professor at New York University and author of Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health, pointing to one of the most prevalent sweeteners: high fructose corn syrup, which sweetens most soda pop while upping the calories.” . . . Michael Pollan, food author, sums it up: ‘We’re subsidizing obesity’.”14
There exist other problems behind the scenes of fast, super sweet, and cheap meals — revealing how all is connected.
According to Pollan, “Hybrid corn is the greediest of plants, consuming more fertilizer than any other crop.”
Add to this the questionable safety of agri-business GMO corn and suddenly the problem threatens to reduce our even having a choice as to what kind of foods to eat.
Also, corn requires lots of water. “Consider the Ogallala Aquifer, the huge underground reservoir underlying eight states from Texas to South Dakota… By some estimates, the Ogallala could be used up in as little as 25 years. From a water point of view alone, our rush to corn does not seem sustainable.”15
With the mention of the Ogallala Aquifer we come full circle to the Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island and the current battle to prevent the Keystone XL pipeline from ruining the water supplies and further tainting Mother Earth.
William Salatin and Polyface, Inc. farm encourage “Grass-based, pastured livestock and poultry, moved frequently to new “salad bars,” offer landscape healing and nutritional superiority.”16
The documentary “Food, Inc.” portrays some of his holistic methods, plus the nasty side of agri-business and the mistreatment of animals.
Of course, the government could support farmers AND nutrition, but that’s another story.
Lording over the Earth or Working with it
Another recent juxtaposition pits new heights against grassroots, or potentially treeroots, uprisings. In a two-day time-span, the new “spire that will make One World Trade Center the tallest in the Western Hemisphere was moved into place”17 and the Dow and S&P hit new highs.18
Despite the nationalist-mammonistic euphoria of all that, over a longer period of time (befitting the seed metaphor), there has developed a series of fast food worker strikes.
April, 2013: “In what people are calling the largest ever protest of its kind, over 400 workers from the country’s biggest corporate “food” chains—including McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Pizza Hut, and KFC among others—took part in the action.”19
May, 2013: “They came to New York City. Chicago, St. Louis, Detroit. And on Wednesday the wave of strikes by fast food workers has come to Milwaukee, where hundreds of workers are echoing the chorus of voices calling for $15 an hour and the right to unionize.”20
My sentiments are certainly with the workers because, for one, it’s hard work, and two, fast food is the only industry available to many workers in the USE.
Another example points to an evolutionary leap of efficiently out-smarting the theofascist, fast food, industrial-complex.
“After 14 years in the nation and despite many campaigns and promos McDonald’s was forced to close in 2002, its 8 Bolivian restaurants in the major cities of La Paz, Cochabamba and Santa Cruz de la Sierra.”
Why? Because, as “El Polvorin blog noted, ‘Fast-food represents the complete opposite of what Bolivians consider a meal should be. To be a good meal, food has to be prepared with love, dedication, certain hygiene standards and proper cook time.’”21
Farmworkers are also affected, the best known being the Coalition of Immokalee Workers.
“The Coalition has had an impressive wave of wins as many companies — eleven to date — have signed an agreement to improve conditions for farmworkers. Of the top five fast food chains, McDonald’s, Burger King, Subway, and Yum! Brands (owners of Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, KFC and A&W) have all joined the Fair Food Program . . . By signing on to the agreement, companies must now comply with a code of conduct that includes protections for cases of wage theft, sexual harassment, and forced labor. Companies also agree to pay a small premium for tomatoes — just a penny more per pound. As a result, workers have safer working conditions and have started seeing increases in their paychecks for the first time in more than 30 years.”22
While there is a positive side to fast food, namely the apparatus from which to feed large numbers of people efficiently, unless the food quality and worker treatment improves the overall process will continue to reflect a culture of slave labor, highly questionable food products, and a collusion-based system more interested in profit than people.
An antidote to the overall situation comes from the wise sarcasm of Eduardo Galeano:
“Nature has a lot to say, and it has long been time for us, her children, to stop playing deaf. Maybe even God will hear the cry rising from this Andean country and add an eleventh amendment, which he left out when he handed down instructions from Mount Sinai: ‘Love nature, which you are a part of.’”23
As the Aymara Peoples of the Andes are reminding us, there is “the law of Pachacuti, that says the Earth is in a time of recovery. In order to heal, just like us, the Earth must rest . . . we must let the Earth rest so that it may protect us in the future.”24
Theofascism and its overlord Mammon are addicted to a boom-time buffet. That boom is not only funded by subsidies, it is also funded by the People’s participation. The next time you consider doing something or eating something, at least ask the question: would it be better if I gave it a rest
* US GOVERNMENT SHILLS FOR GMO SEED COMPANIES THROUGHOUT THE WORLD, INCLUDING MONSANTO, REPORT REVEALS
By Mark Karlin, Buzzflash
Monsanto to Own Our Amber Waves of Grain
It’s official, the amber waves of grain in “America, The Beautiful” are now unofficially owned, in growing acreage, by Monsanto and the other giant seed companies. Not only that, the US State Department and executive branch have been acting as marketing agents for the companies who are patenting the most basic seeds necessary for human survival – and doing it throughout the world.
The non-profit organization Food and Water Watch just released a report in which it concludes:
In the past decade, the United States has aggressively pursued foreign policies in food and agriculture that benefit the largest seed companies. The U.S. State Department has launched a concerted strategy to promote agricultural biotechnology, often over the opposition of the public and governments, to the near exclusion of other more sustainable, more appropriate agricultural policy alternatives.
Russian Television (RT) provided more insight into the basis for the Food and Water Watch findings:
After US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks showed that the State Department was lobbying worldwide for Monsanto and other similar corporations, a new report based on the cables shows Washington’s shilling for the biotech industry in distinct detail.The August 2011 WikiLeaks revelations showed that American diplomats had requested funding to send lobbyists for the biotech industry to hold talks with politicians and agricultural officials in “target countries” in areas like Africa and Latin America, where genetically-modified crops were not yet a mainstay, as well as some European countries that have resisted the controversial agricultural practice.
The title of the white paper is “Biotech Ambassadors: How the U.S. State Department Promotes the Seed Industry’s Global Agenda” […]
* 10 YEARS LATER: A REVIEW OF GM CROPS FARMER TO FARMER
Source: naturalcuresnotmedicine
Survey Says No!
Well.. You heard it first. Straight from the farmers mouth. Here is a short look into the life of farmers that have chosen to grow GM crops. Here we discover the birth of “superweeds” – and cross contamination from bird droppings (in this case) but even just pollen blowing in the wind could lead to you being sued. They even explain how Tank-mixing is actually patented by Monsanto. It’s not much they don’t have their sticky fingers in at the moment. The epic grip-hold on these poor farmers hopefully is enough to stop or prevent other farmers from going GM or GE. Please let this message be heard.
* GENETICALLY MODIFIED DEMOCRACY: MONSANTO AND CONGRESS MOVE TO STOMP ON YOUR RIGHTS
By Ronnie Cummins, CommonDreams
[…] Over the past 20 years Monsanto and the biotech industry, aided and abetted by indentured politicians and corporate agribusiness, have begun seizing control over the global food and farming system, including the legislative, patent, trade, judicial and regulatory bodies that are supposed to safeguard the public interest.
In the U.S., despite mounting evidence of the damage GE crops inflict on human health and the environment, approximately 170 million acres of GE crops, including corn, soybeans, cotton, canola, sugar beets, alfalfa, papaya, and squash, are currently under cultivation. These crops, untested and unlabeled, comprise 41 percent of all cultivated cropland, or 17 percent of all cropland and pastureland combined. According to the GMA, at least 70 percent of non-organic grocery store processed foods contain GMOs. And GE grains and mill byproducts now supply the overwhelming majority of animal feed on the factory farms that supply 90 percent to 95 percent of the meat, eggs and dairy products that Americans consume.
Yet despite their marketplace dominance, record profits and enormous political clout in Washington D.C., Monsanto and the biotech industry are in deep trouble. Evidence is mounting that Monsanto’s top-selling herbicide, Roundup, is a deadly poison, destroying important human gut bacteria and likely contributing to the rapid increase of food allergies and serious human diseases including cancer, autism, neurological disorders , Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD), dementia, Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Those most susceptible to poisoning by Monsanto’s Roundup are children and the elderly.
Scientists aren’t the only ones raising new questions about Roundup. Farmers are complaining that they’re being forced to spray more and more chemicals on crops increasingly under siege from a growing army of herbicide-resistant weeds. The situation is so bad that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) just raised the limits of Roundup residue allowed on grains and vegetables to even more dangerous levels. But just in case the EPA someday stops raising the limits, Monsanto, Dow and the biotech industry are working on a new “solution” to the onslaught of herbicide-resistant Superweeds: They’ve applied for approval of a new and highly controversial generation of super toxic herbicide-resistant GE crops, including “Agent Orange” (2,4-D and dicamba-resistant) corn, soybeans and cotton.
The use of 2,4-D is not new; it’s actually one of the most widely used herbicides in the world. What is new is that farmers will now ‘carpet bomb’ staple food crops like soy and corn with this chemical at a previously unprecedented scale—just the way glyphosate has been indiscriminately applied as a result of Roundup Ready crops. In fact, if 2,4-D resistant crops receive approval and eventually come to replace Monsanto’s failing Roundup-resistant crops as Dow intends, it is likely that billions of pounds will be needed, on top of the already insane levels of Roundup being used (1.6 billion lbs were used in 2007 in the US alone).
In addition to these Agent Orange crops, an expanded menu of genetically engineered organisms are awaiting approval. Next on the menu? GE apples, trees, and salmon. […]
Images from the anti-nato protests in Chicago — footage by crankstrop, cut with a few videos retrieved online. A sincere thanks to everyone who independently documented this event and published their media. special appreciation for circle takes the square and their song: “non-objective portrait of karma.”
* IMPRISONED HUMAN RIGHTS ATTORNEY LYNNE STEWART DENIED CANCER TREATMENT
By Stephen Lendman, realnewsworldwide
Numerous previous articles have discussed Lynne Stewart’s case, character and dedication to rule of law principles. She’s an internationally recognized human rights lawyer.
Lynne Stewart and her husband Ralph Poynter leave the courthouse following her conviction on terrorism charges Oct. 20, 2006. – Photo: Chang W. Lee, New York Times
She tirelessly worked for justice. She devoted her life and work to upholding principles too important to reject. She knew the risks and took them. She did so because it matters.
For 30 years, she defended America’s poor, underprivileged, unwanted and forgotten. Without advocates like her, they never have a chance for due process and judicial fairness.
She was targeted for representing clients prosecutors want convicted. One case made her especially vulnerable.
At former U.S. Attorney GeneralRamsey Clark’s request, she joined Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman’s defense team. In 1995, he was wrongfully convicted of seditious conspiracy, solicitation of murder, solicitation of an attack on American military installations, conspiracy to commit murder and conspiracy to bomb in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center attack.
He was bogusly accused. He was innocent of all charges. It didn’t matter. He never had a chance. Prosecutorial injustice framed him. It’s standard Justice Department practice.
She tirelessly worked for justice. She devoted her life and work to upholding principles too important to reject. She knew the risks and took them. She did so because it matters.
* POPE BLAMES TYRANNY OF CAPITALISM FOR MAKING PEOPLE MISERABLE
By Nick Squires, The Age
Rome: Pope Francis has attacked the ”dictatorship” of the global financial system and warned that the ”cult of money” is making life a misery for millions.
He said free market capitalism had created a ”tyranny” and that people were being judged purely by their ability to consume goods.
Money should be made to ”serve” people, not to ”rule” them, he said on Thursday, calling for a more ethical banking system and curbs on financial speculation. Countries should impose more control over their economies and not allow ”absolute autonomy”, in order to provide ”for the common good”.
The gap between rich and poor was growing and the ”joy of life” was diminishing in many developed countries, the Pope said. ”While the income of a minority is increasing exponentially, that of the majority is crumbling,” said the pontiff who, as archbishop of Buenos Aires, visited slums, opted to lived in a modest flat rather than an opulent church residence and went to work by bus. In poorer countries, people’s lives were becoming ”undignified” and marked by violence and desperation, he said.
The Pope, who was elected two months ago, made the remarks in his first substantial speech on finance and the economy, during an address to foreign ambassadors in the Vatican. It underlined his reputation for showing deep concern for the plight of the poor and vulnerable.
”The worship of the golden calf of old has found a new and heartless image in the cult of money and the dictatorship of an economy which is faceless and lacking any truly human goal,” he told the ambassadors.
As the Catholic leader in Argentina, he often spoke out about the plight of the poor during the country’s economic crisis. Unchecked capitalism had created ”a new, invisible, and at times virtual, tyranny”, he said.
”The Pope loves everyone, rich and poor alike, but the Pope has the duty, in Christ’s name, to remind the rich to help the poor, to respect them, to promote them,” he said.
Pope Francis will make the first foreign trip of his papacy to Brazil in July. He will visit a Rio de Janeiro slum, meet young prison inmates and attend World Youth Day, a week-long event expected to attract more than 2 million people.
* UPCOMING TRANS-PACIFIC PARTNERSHIP (TPP) LOOKS LIKE CORPORATE TAKEOVER (BECAUSE IT IS)
By Dave Johnson, OpEdNews
You will be hearing a lot about the upcoming Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement. TPP’s negotiations are being held in secret with details kept secret even from our Congress. But giant corporations are in the loop.
TPP is a “trade” agreement between several Pacific-rim countries that is actually about much more than just trade. It will be sold as a trade agreement (because everyone knows that “trade” is good) but much of it appears to be (from what we know) a corporate end-run around things We the People want to do to reign in the giant corporations — like Wall Street regulation, environmental regulation and corporate taxation.
One-Sided Process
The TPP process appears to be set up to push corporate interests over other interests. The TPP is being negotiated in secret, so what we know about it comes from leaked documents. Even our Congress is being kept out of the loop. But 600 corporate representatives are in the loop while representatives of groups that protect working people, human, political and civil rights and our environment are largely not in the loop.
This one-sided participation unfortunately indicates that the interests of giant corporations are likely to override the interests of working people and those who want to protect non-corporate interests. Otherwise there would be more representation by representatives of organizations representing these concerns, and greater transparency into the process.
* SENATE BANKING COMMITTEE – NOMINATION HEARING FOR FRED HOCHBERG
Source: youtube
U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren’s Q&A at the May 7, 2013 Senate Banking Committee hearing to consider the nomination of Fred P. Hochberg to serve as President of the Export-Import Bank.
Our elected and unelected officials tell us that drone strikes target top level enemies of the United States who are imminent threats to us, and that killing innocent people is avoided altogether or minimized.
Congressional hearings, with a couple of excellent exceptions, question outside academics about the legality of this purported strategy. The Obama administration declines to send any witnesses.
But drone pilots have begun talking to the media. And they describe policies that bear a lot closer resemblance to reporting from the areas where the missiles strike. These pilots should be brought before Congress.
Here is a stunning new interview with one of them:
“So the pilot is not only flying the airplane, he or she is using all those sensors to watch a potential target, circling over it for hours or days at a time. What can you really see?
“Okay, so in a village in, say, country X, where the houses are built together, there are adults who live in this house, and these children belong to those adults because we see them out in the fields together or we see them eating dinner. So you can start figuring out who is associated with who. Who is a stranger, who is it that’s visiting this house? There’s a dog and it barks at strangers, so if we needed to go in and free a hostage or conduct a raid, you’d want to tell the land forces there’s a dog there and either it’s an attack dog or it alerts the village that somebody’s coming.
“You must develop an emotional tie with the people on the ground that makes it hard if there is going to be a strike or a raid, people are going to be killed.
“I would couch it not in terms of an emotional connection, but a … seriousness. I have watched this individual, and regardless of how many children he has, no matter how close his wife is, no matter what they do, that individual fired at Americans or coalition forces, or planted an IED — did something that met the rules of engagement and the laws of armed conflict, and I am tasked to strike that individual. The seriousness of it is that I am going to do this and it will affect his family. But that individual is the one that brought it on himself. He became a combatant the minute he took up arms.”
This pilot, in fact this director of the Air Force Remotely Piloted Aircraft Capabilities Division, has not said that a high level operation leader of terrorists who is imminently threatening the United States is targeted. He has said that some ordinary guy who has chosen to violently resist the hostile foreign occupation of his country by shooting at the occupiers is targeted.
He has also not said anything to satisfy those who support the notion of just wars but want them conducted in compliance with the Geneva Conventions and other such legally binding limitations. This director of a U.S. drone kill program openly says that our public employees target a family for death if needed in order to blow up a foreign soldier from thousands of miles away. Every effort is made to avoid killing innocent family members, he says in the interview, but if it can’t be avoided, well, the target “brought it on himself.”
Here another pilot describes specific such incidents. Here the New York Times reports on the resulting PTSD suffered by drone pilots.
War is murder, and this type of war ought to look to most people like the murder that it is. But even if you accept war, this is not how ANYBODY claims it is to be legally done. This is beyond what Congressional witnesses or even Congress members would say is acceptable or legal. Yet this pilot blurts it out to the media with apparently no concern that his life will be inconvenienced by further questioning.
* GREEK ADDICTS TURN TO DEADLY SHISHA DRUG AS ECONOMIC CRISIS DEEPENS
By Helena Smith, Guardian
A sisa user smoking his pipe on Kapodistriou Street.
Nobody knows which came first: the economic crisis tearing Greece apart or shisha, the drug now known as the “cocaine of the poor”. What everyone does accept is that shisha is a killer. And at €2 or less a hit, it is one that has come to stalk Greece, the country long on the frontline of Europe‘s financial meltdown.
“As drugs go, it is the worst. It burns your insides, it makes you aggressive and ensures that you go totally mad,” said Maria, a former heroin addict. “But it is cheap and it is easy to get, and it is what everyone is doing.”
The drug of preference for thousands of homeless Greeks forced on to the streets by poverty and despair, shisha is described by both addicts and officials as a variant of crystal meth whose potential to send users into a state of mindless violence is underpinned by the substances with which the synthetic drug is frequently mixed: battery acid, engine oil and even shampoo.
Worse still, it is not only readily available, but easy to make – tailor-made for a society that despite official prognostications of optimism, and fiscal progress, on the ground, at least, sees little light at the end of the tunnel.
“It is a killer but it also makes you want to kill,” Konstantinos, a drug addict, told Vice. “You can kill without understanding that you have done it … And it is spreading faster than death. A lot of users have died.” […]
* UKIP’s NIGEL FARAGE MOBBED BY PROTESTERS IN EDINBURGH
Source: The Guardian
The leader of the UK Independence party, Nigel Farage, is hounded by protesters in Edinburgh on Thursday. The crowd, chanting ‘Ukip scum, off our streets’, encircles a taxi Farage attempts to get away in. The politician is followed to a pub where he planned to hold a news conference, with police forced to barricade him inside to keep him apart from the crowd.
* IMF CHIEF LAGARDE HECKLED BY STUDENTS IN AMSTERDAM
Source: Roarmag
Dutch, Greek and Spanish members of the Occupy movement interrupt a lecture by IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde at the University of Amsterdam.
Christine Lagarde, the former French Finance Minister and current Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, was treated to an Occupy-style mic-check at the University of Amsterdam on Tuesday. During a lecture at the university’s economics department, a group of students rose up to interrupt (or rather start) the discussion, confronting the Fund’s chief with a number of inconvenient questions.
Attendees had been asked to send in questions before the “debate”, but the protesters were angry that their critical notes appeared to have been ignored. By standing up and submitting the IMF chief to a mic-check, they tried to get their concerns across anyway: “why is technocracy better than democracy?” one activist asked. Another asked Lagarde why the IMF submits developing countries to Western imperialism, to which the upper-class moderator tellingly responded that “we will not do that question”.
In a sign of the academic freedom at the University of Amsterdam, and civil liberties in the Netherlands more generally, the students — who reportedly included Dutch Occupy protesters, Spanish indignados and Greek activists associated with ReINFORM – were immediately escorted away by security and event organizers. Dutch daily NRC Handelsbladreports that some of the event organizers seemed to act like a “gang” in their willingness to use physical force while removing the activists. […]
* THE TRICK TO SUPPRESSING THE REVOLUTION: KEEPING DEBT/TAX SERFDOM BEARABLE
By Charles Hugh-Smith, Of Two Minds
The 30 million whose labor funds the parasitic status quo don’t have to rebel; they simply have to stop going to work, stop starting enterprises, stop being productive.
Parasites must balance their drive to maximize what they extract from their host with the risk of losing everything by killing their host. This is the dilemma of the parasitic partnership of the central state and financial Elites everywhere: to extract the maximum possible in debt payments and taxes without sparking rebellion and revolution.
I have often commented on the current class structure, which paradoxically unites the interests of the top 1/5% of 1% and their political-class toadies and the bottom 50% who are drawing transfer payments/benefits from the state: both support the status quo because both receive direct benefits from it.
The 20% who pay most of the tax and service much of the debt are in the middle, a political minority of debt/tax serfs who finance the status quo, i.e. cartel-crony capitalism owned and operated by the financial and political Elites:
* 10 AMAZING CHARTS THAT DEMONSTRATE THE SLOW, AGONIZING DEATH OF THE AMERICAN WORKER
By Michael Snyder, The Economic Collapse
The middle class American worker is in danger of becoming an endangered species. The politicians are not telling you the truth, and the mainstream media is certainly not telling you the truth, but the reality is that there is nothing but bad news on the horizon for workers in the United States. In the old days, when the big corporations that dominate our society did well, that also meant good things for American workers since those corporations would need more of us to work for them. But in the emerging one world economic system that our economy is being merged into, those corporations have other choices now. For instance, the big corporations can now choose to limit the number of “expensive” American workers that they employ by shipping millions of jobs to the other side of the world. And from their perspective, it makes perfect sense. They can make much bigger profits by hiring people on the other side of the planet to work for them for less than a dollar an hour. If they can get good production out of those people, then why should they hire Americans for ten to twenty times as much, plus have to give those Americans health insurance and other benefits? Another major factor in the slow, agonizing death of the American worker is technology. We live during a period when technology is advancing at a pace that is almost unimaginable at the same time that it is steadily becoming cheaper and cheaper. That means that it is going to become easier and easier for companies to replace workers with robots and computers. As I have written about previously, it is being projected that our economy will lose millions of jobs to technology in the coming years. Yes, some of us will still be needed to help build the robots and the computers, but not all of us will. And of course the overall general weakness of the economy is not helping matters either. The American people inherited the greatest economic machine in the history of the world, and we have wrecked it. Decades of very foolish decisions have resulted in the period of steady economic decline that we are experiencing now.
America is simply not the economic powerhouse that it once was. Back in 2001, the U.S. economy accounted for 31.8 percent of global GDP. By 2011, the U.S. economy only accounted for 21.6 percent of global GDP. That is a collapse any way that you want to look at it.
Today, American workers are living in an economy that is rapidly declining, and their jobs are steadily being stolen by robots, computers and foreign workers that live in countries where it is legal to pay slave labor wages. Politicians from both political parties refuse to do anything to stop the bleeding because they think that the status quo is working just great.
So don’t expect things to get better any time soon.
The following are 10 amazing charts that demonstrate the slow, agonizing death of the American worker… […]
The debate over what actions actually constitute “terrorism,” I believe, will become one of the defining ideological battles of our era. Terrorism is not a word often used by common people to describe aberrant behaviors or dastardly deeds; however, it is used by governments around the world to label and marginalize political enemies. That is to say, it is the government that normally decides who is a “terrorist” and who is a mere “criminal,” the assertion being that one is clearly far worse than the other.
The terrorist label elicits emotional firestorms and fearful brain-quakes in the minds of the masses. It causes the ignorant and unaware to abandon principles they would normally apply to any other malicious enterprise. They begin to reason that a criminal should be afforded justice, while a terrorist should be afforded only vengeance, even though the act of branding a person a “terrorist” is often completely arbitrary. This vengeance is usually pursued by any means. Thus, the terrorist moniker becomes a rationalization for every vicious and inhuman policy of the establishment, as well as for the citizenry.
Dishonorable and foolish people claim the existence of terrorism essentially gives license for the rest of us to become criminal, willfully trampling on individuals’ rights to privacy, property, free speech, due process, civic participation, etc. Mass criminality against the individual in the name of social safety is the glue that holds together all tyrannical systems, triggering a catastrophic cycle of moral relativism that eventually bleeds a culture dry.
Historically, the expanded use of the terrorist label by governments tends to coincide with the rising tides of despotism. A government that quietly seeks to dominate the people will inevitably begin to treat the people as if they are the enemy. Those citizens who present the greatest philosophical or physical threat to the centralization of power are usually the first to suffer. I do not think it is unfair to say that any system of authority that suddenly claims to see terrorists under every rock and behind every tree is probably about to rain full-on fascism down upon the population. […]
* WHY COPS AND PROSECUTORS GET AWAY WITH THROWING INNOCENTS IN PRISON
By Margaret Kimberly, AlterNet
It is indisputable that America strives to put as many black people behind bars as possible.
The ironically named criminal justice system in this country is good at prosecuting and creating many criminals but not very good at producing any justice. The United States would not have the largest prison population of any other country on earth if it did not also have the harshest prosecution and sentencing system of any other country. America’s addiction to racism and violence creates outright criminality among police and prosecutors. Their misconduct is tolerated and even encouraged and the result is an untold number of innocent people in jail.
In 1989, five New York City teenagers, four black and one Latino, were convicted of raping and assaulting a then anonymous woman known as the Central Park jogger. In the now infamous case the teens were coerced into giving false video taped confessions. None of the established procedures for interviewing minors were in place and police and prosecutors broke the law in order to convict them. Unable to pay for good legal representation and convicted in the court of public opinion, the five spent between six and thirteen years behind bars.
In 2002 a sole perpetrator confessed to the attack, DNA tests proved his guilt and the convictions were vacated. Thanks to the new documentary, The Central Park Five, the prosecutors who orchestrated the travesty have come under scrutiny but none of them have suffered as a result of their actions. Until very recently prosecutor Elizabeth Lederer bragged about her involvement in the case and included it in her biography. She is still a law professor at Columbia University. It isn’t clear why anyone would want her to teach anything about the law, but there she sits in the lap of establishment legal profession luxury. When an outraged citizen circulated a petition pressuring Columbia to fire Lederer, the wagons circled around her and the media excoriated those who only wanted accountability and justice.
“The prosecutors who orchestrated the travesty have come under scrutiny but none of them have suffered as a result of their actions.” […]
* EVERYTHING IS RIGGED, CONTINUED: EUROPEAN RAIDS OIL COMPANIES IN PRICE-FIXING PROBE
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
European finance workers/Jason Alden/Bloomberg via Getty Images
We’re going to get into this more at a later date, but there was some interesting late-breaking news yesterday.
According to numerous reports, the European Commission regulators yesterday raided the offices of oil companies in London, the Netherlands and Norway as part of an investigation into possible price-rigging in the oil markets. The targeted companies include BP, Shell and the Norweigan company Statoil. The Guardian explains that officials believe that oil companies colluded to manipulate pricing data:
The commission said the alleged price collusion, which may have been going on since 2002, could have had a “huge impact” on the price of petrol at the pumps “potentially harming final consumers”.
Lord Oakeshott, former Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman, said the alleged rigging of oil prices was “as serious as rigging Libor” – which led to banks being fined hundreds of millions of pounds.
The inquiry also involves Platts, the world’s largest oil price reporting agency. The concept here is very similar to both the LIBOR scandal, which involved banks manipulating the benchmark rates for interest rates, and to the possible rigging of interest rate swap prices through the manipulation of ISDAfix, the benchmark rate for those instruments, which is also the subject of a regulatory probe.
We wrote about both of those scandals in last month’s Rolling Stone article, “Everything is Rigged.” In that piece, finance professionals talked about the potential for manipulation in other markets that involve voluntary price reporting:
What other markets out there carry the same potential for manipulation? The answer to that question is far from reassuring, because the potential is almost everywhere. From gold to gas to swaps to interest rates, prices all over the world are dependent upon little private cabals of cigar-chomping insiders we’re forced to trust.
“In all the over-the-counter markets, you don’t really have pricing except by a bunch of guys getting together,” Masters notes glumly.
That includes the markets for gold (where prices are set by five banks in a Libor-ish teleconferencing process that, ironically, was created in part by N M Rothschild & Sons) and silver (whose price is set by just three banks), as well as benchmark rates in numerous other commodities – jet fuel, diesel, electric power, coal, you name it. […]
Elizabeth Warren is one of the few Senators out there pushing to understand why the federal government has created an untouchable class of criminals in America that can do whatever they want whenever they want and, not only get away with it, but also get bailed out when they make mistakes.
* THE ANTI-GLOBALIZATION MOVEMENT AND THE WORLD SOCIAL FORUM. IS “ANOTHER WORLD’ POSSIBLE
By Prof Michael Chossudovsky Global Research
The World Social Forum operating under the banner of “Another World is Possible” was founded in 2001 at its inaugural venue of Porto Alegre. Brazil.
From the outset in 2001, the WSF has been upheld as an international umbrella representing grassroots people’s organizations, committed to reversing the tide of globalization. Its stated intent is to challenge corporate capitalism and its dominant neoliberal economic agenda.
The World Social Forum at its inaugural meeting defined itself as a counter-offensive to the World Economic Forum (WEF) of business leaders and politicians which meets annually in Davos, Switzerland. The 2001 Porto Alegre WSF was held simultaneously with that of the WEF in Davos.
Yet upon careful review, the WSF –rather than effectively confronting the economic and financial elites– actually serves their interests.
From the outset in 2001, the World Social Forum was funded by governments and corporate foundations, including the Ford Foundation which has ties to US intelligence.
The anti-globalization movement is opposed to Wall Street and the Texas oil giants controlled by Rockefeller, et al. Yet the foundations and charities of Ford, Rockefeller et al will generously fund progressive anti-capitalist networks as well as environmentalists (opposed to Wall Street and Big Oil) with a view to ultimately overseeing and shaping their various activities.
The mechanisms of “manufacturing dissent” require a manipulative environment, a process of arm-twisting and subtle co-optation of a small number of key individuals within “progressive organizations”, including anti-war coalitions, environmentalists and the anti-globalization movement. Many leaders of these organizations have in a sense betrayed their grassroots. […]
Americans deserve to hear the dirty secrets of the CIA’s war on terror. We’ll all be better off with the truth.
In April 1975, Sen. Frank Church impaneled a special investigative committee to look into shocking accounts of CIA dirty tricks. The Church Committee ultimately published 14 reports over two years revealing a clandestine agency that was a law unto itself — plotting to assassinate heads of state (Castro, Diem, Lumumba, Trujillo), carrying out weird experiments with LSD, and suborning American journalists. As a result, President Gerald Ford issued an executive order banning the assassination of foreign leaders, the House and Senate established standing intelligence committees, and the United States set up the so-called FISA courts, which oversee request for surveillance warrants against suspected foreign agents.
But the war on terror unleashed the CIA once again to carry out dark deeds against America’s enemies — torture, secret detention, and “rendition” to “black sites” across the world. How have Americans reckoned, this time, with the immoral and illegal acts carried out in their name? They have not: the CIA has retained control over the narrative. As the Constitution Project’s Detainee Treatment report describes in great detail, the CIA falsely reported — to the White House as well as to the public — that torture “worked” in wresting crucial information from high-level detainees, and thus needed to be an instrument available to interrogators. Officials like Vice President Dick Cheney repeated ad nauseum that the CIA’s dark arts had saved thousands of lives. Is it any wonder that a plurality of Americans think the United States should torture terrorists?
I wrote last month about the detainee treatment report, but I find it incredibly frustrating — and all too telling — that the findings were overwhelmed by the tidal wave of coverage of the Boston bombing. Because we fear terrorism far more viscerally than we feared communism — certainly by 1975 — we are all too susceptible to the view that America cannot afford to live by its own professed values. But of course that’s what Chileans and Brazilians thought in the 1970s. That’s why Sri Lankans have granted themselves the right to slaughter homegrown terrorists wholesale, and react furiously to any hint of criticism.
People give themselves a pass unless and until they are forced to face the truth, which is why a public airing of history is so important — and so politically fraught. There’s always a compelling reason to avoid facing the ugly truth. In early 2009, Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, called for an independent commission to investigate allegations of torture. But President Barack Obama’s spokesman said that the proposal would not be “workable.” We know what he meant: you can hardly blame the president for avoiding a colossal fight with Republicans over the past, especially, when he had so many fights he needed to wage over the future. […]
Murder is our national sport. We murder tens of thousands with our industrial killing machines in Afghanistan and Iraq. We murder thousands more from the skies over Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen with our pilotless drones. We murder each other with reckless abandon. And, as if we were not drenched in enough human blood, we murder prisoners—most of them poor people of color who have been locked up for more than a decade. The United States believes in regeneration through violence. We have carried out blood baths on foreign soil and on our own land for generations in the vain quest of a better world. And the worse it gets, the deeper our empire sinks under the weight of its own decay and depravity, the more we kill.
There are parts of the nation where the electorate, or at least the white electorate, routinely and knowingly puts murderers into political office. Murder is a sign of strength. Murder is a symbol of resolve. Murder means law and order. Murder keeps us safe. Strap the criminal into the gurney. Plunge the needles into veins. Haul away the corpse. It is our Christian duty. God Bless America! And one of the next on the list to be murdered in Florida—a state that has decided, under its new and cynically named “Timely Justice Act,” that it needs to accelerate its execution rate—is William Van Poyck. He is scheduled to die by lethal injection at 6 p.m. June 12 at Florida State Prison. He is a writer who has spent years exposing the cruelty of our system of mass incarceration. On June 12, if Gov. Rick Scott has his way, Van Poyck will write no more. And that is exactly how our political class of murderers wants it.
“Only God can judge,” Matt Gaetz, a Republican who sponsored the Timely Justice Act in the Florida House of Representatives, said during the debate. “But we sure can set up the meeting.” […]
‘The Terror Courts’ by Jess Bravin, Yale University Press
As the hunger strike at Guantanamo Bay enters its fourth month and pressure to close the prison mounts, it’s easy to forget that Guantanamo is not only a detention facility but also the site of a unique legal experiment that has no direct precedent in U.S. history. At times, it can be difficult to keep track of the tangled mess of authorities claimed, cases appealed and lives destroyed with Guantanamo at its center. Those looking for clarity on these issues have a new, important resource in author Jess Bravin’s book The Terror Courts: Rough Justice at Guantanamo Bay, which tells the story of the evolution of Guantanamo’s legal universe in captivating detail, and provides the reader with a clear picture of just how we arrived at this bizarre moment in our history.
Bravin, who is also the Supreme Court correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, populates his narrative with memorable characters, like Charlie Swift, the defense attorney in Navy whites who pulls a surprise Columbo moment before an early commission. Or Tom Umberg, who can’t believe that some of his fellow prosecutors want to push forward with the case against a detainee named Salim Hamdan despite a federal judge ruling it would be unlawful. “Guys, this is huge,” Umberg says in disbelief. “This is Marbury v. Madison.” Stu Couch, a prosecutor who refused to bring charges using evidence he thought was obtained through torture, plays a prominent role in the book as well.
Modern military commissions began as the result of an executive order signed by George W. Bush in November 2001. They were later approved by Congress in 2006, and again in 2009. Among other things, Bravin’s book examines the potential lasting implications of such commissions being formally approved by statute – rather than as the ad hoc, temporary authority they had always held in past wars. As they currently operate, they’re a mix of the civilian court and military court martial systems, a hybrid with very little case law and precedent to offer as guides.
Especially fascinating is Bravin’s description of the overlapping theories the government has used to justify detention. “From the perspective of the U.S. government, both in the Bush and Obama administrations, there are two separate and virtually unrelated legal rationales for holding people at Guantanamo,” the author says in a new 30-minute interview. First, “the government has asserted that under the laws of war it can detain people who are fighting against the United States for preventative reasons” – that is, to keep them from committing acts in the future. Bravin refers to this as “prospective detention,” and says “that premise has explained the imprisonment of everyone who has ever been held at Guantanamo Bay.” […]
* JUSTICE DEPARTMENT’S PURSUIT OF AP’s PHONE RECORDS IS BOTH EXTREME AND DANGEROUS
By Glenn Greenwald, Guardian
The claimed legal basis for these actions is unknown, but the threats they pose to a free press and the newsgathering process are clear
Attorney General Eric Holder was required by DOJ regulations to personally approve efforts to obtain phone records for AP journalists. Photograph: Mark Wilson/Getty Images
Associated Press on Monday revealed that the Department of Justice (DOJ) “secretly obtained two months of telephone records of [its] reporters and editors”, denouncing it as a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into the news gathering process. In a letter sent yesterday to Attorney General Eric Holder, AP’s President, Gary Pruitt, detailed that the phone records cover more than 20 telephone lines used by AP journalists, including their homes, offices and cell phones. He said the phones for which the DOJ obtained records also include ones at the AP bureaus in New York City, Washington DC, Hartford, and at the House of Representatives.
Pruitt wrote that “we regard this action by the Department of Justice as a serious interference with AP’s constitutional rights to gather and report the news.” He added that while AP is “evaluating its options”, he “urgently request[ed]” that the DOJ “immediately return to the AP the telephone toll records” obtained by the DOJ “and destroy all copies.” AP learned of the DOJ’s acquisition of these records only after the fact, and thus had no opportunity to raise legal and constitutional objections nor attempt to negotiate to narrow the scope of the records to be sought. Pruitt’s letter uses some inflammatory language as it is designed to advance the AP’s case and to generate public anger, but that’s entirely appropriate. The phone records reveal, at a minimum, all of the telephone numbers called by those AP journalists over the course of two months.
The ACLU last night condemned the DOJ’s acts as “press intimidation” and said it constitutes “an unacceptable abuse of power”. The Electronic Frontier Foundation denounced it as “a terrible blow against the freedom of the press and the ability of reporters to investigate and report the news”. The New York Times’ Editorial Page Editor Andy Rosenthal called the DOJ’s actions “outrageous” while Washington Post Executive Editor Marty Baron said they were “shocking” and “disturbing”. Even Democratic Sen. Pat Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said: “I am very troubled by these allegations and want to hear the government’s explanation.” […]
Launching a lawsuit against the very company that is responsible for a farmer suicide every 30 minutes, 5 million farmers are now suing Monsanto for as much as 6.2 billion euros (around 7.7 billion US dollars).
The reason? As with many other cases, such as the ones that led certain farming regions to be known as the ‘suicide belt’, Monsanto has been reportedly taxing the farmers to financial shambles with ridiculous royalty charges.
The farmers state that Monsanto has been unfairly gathering exorbitant profits each year on a global scale from “renewal” seed harvests, which are crops planted using seed from the previous year’s harvest.
The practice of using renewal seeds dates back to ancient times, but Monsanto seeks to collect massive royalties and put an end to the practice. Why? Because Monsanto owns the very patent to the genetically modified seed, and is charging the farmers not only for the original crops, but the later harvests as well. Eventually, the royalties compound and many farmers begin to struggle with even keeping their farm afloat. It is for this reason that India slammed Monsanto with groundbreaking ‘biopiracy’ charges in an effort to stop Monsanto from ‘patenting life’.
Jane Berwanger, a lawyer for the farmers who went on record regarding the case, told the Associted Press:
“Monsanto gets paid when it sell the seeds. The law gives producers the right to multiply the seeds they buy and nowhere in the world is there a requirement to pay (again). Producers are in effect paying a private tax on production.”
Clearly, an investigation of large-scale government corruption by this singularly destructive corporation is long overdue.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has been taken over by an outside organization. RootsAction has launched a campaign demanding a Congressional investigation.
The organization is called Monsanto.
Monsanto is, of course, the world’s largest biotech corporation. These are the people who brought us Roundup weed killer and the resulting superweeds and superbugs, along with growth hormones for cows, genetically engineered and patented seeds, PCBs, and Agent Orange — which Monsanto now wants us to use as herbicide on genetically engineered corn and soybeans.
This chemical company — responsible for environmental disasters that have destroyed entire towns, and a driving force behind the international waves of suicides among farmers whose lives it has helped ruin — has monopolized our food system largely by taking over regulatory agencies like the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
A recent study links Roundup to autism, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s.
While Hungary has just destroyed all Monsanto genetically engineered corn fields, the USDA takes a slightly different approach toward the chemical giant. The USDA has, in fact, never denied a single application from Monsanto for new genetically engineered crops. Not one. Not ever. […]
* VANDANA SHIVA ON THE PROBLEM WITH GENETICALLY-MODIFIED SEEDS
By Vandana Shiva interviewed by Bill Moyers
Bill talks to scientist and philosopher Vandana Shiva, who’s become a rock star in the global battle over genetically modified seeds. These seeds — considered “intellectual property” by the big companies who own the patents — are globally marketed to monopolize food production and profits. Opponents challenge the safety of genetically modified seeds, claiming they also harm the environment, are more costly, and leave local farmers deep in debt as well as dependent on suppliers. Shiva, who founded a movement in India to promote native seeds, links genetic tinkering to problems in our ecology, economy, and humanity, and sees this as the latest battleground in the war on Planet Earth.
* ALL IN IT TOGETHER: HOW GOVERNMENT IS HANDING THE OWNERSHIP OF OUR SCHOOLS AND HOSPITALS TO BANKS
Source: Scriptonite Daily
There is a scandal unfolding quietly in this country which poses an existential threat to our most critical public services. It is called the Private Finance Initiative. Today, we look at the dangerous circle of self-interest which means our government is making the tax payer pay the bill for private service providers and banks to take over our schools, hospitals and other core public services.
What is PFI?
PFI stands for Private Finance Initiative. The schemes were initially designed by Tory Chancellor Norman Lamont in 1992 and were rapidly expanded under New Labour. They are touted as a form of Public Private Partnership. The government uses private finance, rather than borrowing in the usual way, to raise funds for projects. Since 1992, our hospitals and schools have been built this way. PFI loans are at least twice the rate of interest of ordinary government loans, and repaid over 25-30 years.
EARLY last month, a triple suicide was reported in the seaside town of Civitanova Marche, Italy. A married couple, Anna Maria Sopranzi, 68, and Romeo Dionisi, 62, had been struggling to live on her monthly pension of around 500 euros (about $650), and had fallen behind on rent.
Because the Italian government’s austerity budget had raised the retirement age, Mr. Dionisi, a former construction worker, became one of Italy’s esodati (exiled ones) — older workers plunged into poverty without a safety net. On April 5, he and his wife left a note on a neighbor’s car asking for forgiveness, then hanged themselves in a storage closet at home. When Ms. Sopranzi’s brother, Giuseppe Sopranzi, 73, heard the news, he drowned himself in the Adriatic.
The correlation between unemployment and suicide has been observed since the 19th century. People looking for work are about twice as likely to end their lives as those who have jobs.
In the United States, the suicide rate, which had slowly risen since 2000, jumped during and after the 2007-9 recession. In a new book, we estimate that 4,750 “excess” suicides — that is, deaths above what pre-existing trends would predict — occurred from 2007 to 2010. Rates of such suicides were significantly greater in the states that experienced the greatest job losses. Deaths from suicide overtook deaths from car crashes in 2009. […]
* AUSTERITY AND THE UNRAVELING OF EUROPEAN UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE
By Adam Gaffney, Dissent
From the “Block the Bridge, Block the Bill” rally, October 9, 2011. Photo: Loz Pycock/Flickr
A great human disaster is now unfolding in the many Eurozone countries that have agreed to slash spending, wages, and living standards to meet the demands of fiscal austerity. One facet of this story that has received far too little attention, however, is the effect of these measures on the health of these nations.
Austerity derives from the Greek austeros, for harsh or severe; but, in the area of health care, it has veered into the cruel: health expenditures dwindle, hospital budgets shrink, health care needs rise, and human suffering worsens. Suicide is on the rise; basic hospital supplies are missing; potentially life-saving surgeries are delayed; the rate of new HIV infections increases; drug shortages are ubiquitous; the prevalence of mental illness spikes. And these are just the obvious results.
The effects of austerity on health care are both immediate and long reaching. Deep cuts in public health spending clearly exacerbate the suffering caused by the prolonged economic depression. At the same time, the cuts contribute to a more pernicious, slow-moving, and decidedly political process.
For austerity is being wielded to initiate the unraveling of one of the great and humane achievements, indeed inventions, of modern Europe: the universal health care system. To understand why this is the case, let us take a brief look at how Europe came to have what it has today, before we return to the dangers of the present course. […]
Metronome is the first short video in Mass Transient, a research strand of the project The City at a Time of Crisis, which can be viewed here crisis-scape.net.
Mass Transient is an ethnographic study of spaces of mass transit in Athens — and beyond: it is a study that seeks to reveal the ever-growing antagonisms and tensions in these quintessential spaces of the everyday, as the crisis deepens. At this historical conjuncture, buses, trolleys and metro carriages become the primary public spaces: on the one hand moving around are the ‘fallen angels’ of the bourgeois dream, and on the other, those swirling through the city are the undocumented, seeking survival. A close, meticulous reading of these spaces can help us understand how the transitory flux of a society in turmoil becomes a galvanized reality; how a transient mass becomes critical.
The private sector is evading its taxes, failing to pay workers a living wage, and becoming a burden on the tax payer for subsidies and bailouts. At what point to we stop calling them wealth creators and start calling them parasites?
Neoliberal democracies around the globe have been using taxpayer money to underwrite and directly pay off phantom debts made by the banking sector.
According to the National Audit Office, The UK National Debt rose by £1.5trn as a result of the Bank Bailout. This is twice the nation’s total annual budget. For this amount, the UK could have funded the health service (£106.7bn a year) for fourteen years , the entire education system for forty years(£42bn a year) or over three hundred years of Job Seekers Allowance (£4.9bn a year).
According to the Special Investigator General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program’s (SIGTARP) quarterly reports, the US government’s total layout in bailouts was $3.3trn whilst guaranteeing $16.9trn of future protections. The GDP of the US currently stands at just $14.99trn, meaning the tax payer has guaranteed toxic bank debts to the value of 113% of their total annual earning capacity. This is equivalent to ten years of total federal spending ($6.3trn a year), sixteen years of pension payments ($1.1trn a year), twenty one years of total education spending ($0.8trn a year) or a whole twenty eight years of the entire welfare system ($0.6trn a year).
Most recently, the people of Cyprus have had the Eurogroup and the IMF place conditions on their bailout of the Cypriot Banking sector requiring Cypriot depositors (people holding their money in the banks) rather than bondholders (people investing in the banks). This is the first time that the bailout of the banks by the public has been made in such an explicit way. The total sum required from Cyprus’ population of just 1.1 million people, is 5.8bn Euros.
One might argue the changes made to the Cyprus bailout have made it more egalitarian than those in the US and UK, given that all deposits under 100,000 Euros will be left untouched, whilst those over 100k could see up to 40% of their wealth confiscated in return for shares in the banks (worthless). The approach in the US, UK and wider Europe has been to fund the bailouts through catastrophic ‘austerity’ measures that have seen the eurozone economies stall, public services cut drastically, and mass unemployment.
However, the precedent of the EU and IMF creating the legal framework and the technical capacity to flick a switch and transfer money directly from the bank accounts of citizens to central banks cannot be overlooked.
Not a single banker has been tried or jailed for their undisputed responsibility for the financial crisis. Not one piece of additional regulation has been agreed for the derivatives market which the crisis emanated from, and the market continues unabated. Today, there is $700trn in derivatives debt just waiting to kick off the next financial crisis.
The poor and middle classes of Europe and the US are being asked to make life limiting cuts to their standards of living, wages and public services; meanwhile, there is no such thing as austerity for the 1%. […]
Este jueves por la tarde miles de españoles se reúnen en el centro de Madrid para “asediar” el Congreso de los Diputados en protesta contra las políticas sociales y económicas que han llevado a la sociedad española a la pobreza.
El movimiento 15-M está de aniversario. Dos años después de que miles de personas salieran a las plazas españolas para mostrar su “indignación” con el sistema político y económico, cientos de ciudadanos han vuelto esta tarde a la calle para reivindicar y actualizar las razones que gritaron aquel 15 de mayo de 2011. Con una estructura más atomizada y diseminada que entonces, pero con nuevas formas de protesta y visibilidad, los indignados han tomado de nuevo las principales ágoras. Ha habido manifestaciones en más de una veintena de ciudades. En Madrid, varias marchas han recorrido la capital hasta confluir en la Puerta del Sol, el símbolo público del movimiento. A las ocho estaba convocado un grito mudo colectivo, para el que se han congregado miles de personas, aunque la plaza emblema de la indignación no estaba tan llena como en otras ocasiones. Aquí te contamos en directo cómo trascurren las principales concentraciones a esta hora: […]
US special forces in Afghanistan. Hamid Karzai’s government has ordered the elite force to leave Maidan Wardak province over claims of killing or torture of disappeared civilians. Photograph: David Bathgate/ David Bathgate/Corbis
MAIDAN SHAHR, Afghanistan — The authorities in Afghanistan are seeking the arrest on murder and torture charges of a man they say is an American and part of a Special Forces unit operating in Wardak Province, three Afghan officials have confirmed.
The accusations against the man, Zakaria Kandahari, and the assertion that he and much of his unit are American are a new turn in a dispute over counterinsurgency tactics in Wardak that has strained relations between Kabul and Washington. American officials say their forces are being wrongly blamed for atrocities carried out by a rogue Afghan unit. But the Afghan officials say they have substantial evidence of American involvement.
They say they have testimony and documents implicating Mr. Kandahari and his unit in the killings or disappearances of 15 Afghans in Wardak. Mr. Kandahari is of Afghan descent but was born and raised in the United States, they say. Included in the evidence, the Afghan officials say, is a videotape of Mr. Kandahari torturing one of the 15 Afghans, a man they identified as Sayid Mohammad.
Mr. Mohammad was picked up by the unit in Wardak six months ago and has not been seen since, the officials said. The partial remains of Mohammad Qassim, another of the 15 Afghans, were found in a trash pit just outside the fence around the unit’s base in the Nerkh district, according to Mr. Qassim’s family and Afghan officials.
Afghan officials who have seen the videotape say a person speaking English with an American accent can be heard supervising the torture session, which Mr. Kandahari is seen conducting. […]
Video: Alberto Reveron & Amira Bochenska. Thank you for all people that participates, special thanks for music – HK & les Saltimbanks (http://www.saltimbanks.fr).
