Image of the Day

Daily News Digest December 31, 2012
63rdAnniversary of the Cuban Revolution
The fall of Batista and the arrival of Castro spelled the end of the mob’s
investments in Cuba. On the day of Batista’s departure,
the casinos were smashed and looted.
1804 — Independence Day In Haiti

Quote of the Day:
Less than a month after North Korea’s latest missile
test, the Obama administration has offered to sell South
Korea advanced spy drones so it can keep a closer eye on its
northern adversary. The decision raises some concerns, and
Congress would be wise to ask a lot of questions before going
along, including whether the deal is part of a comprehensive
strategy or just a way to penalize North Korea.. . .
— New York Times Editorial, Drones for South Korea
Images of the Day:
End The Drug War
Haiti: American Continent Helping
Haiti Fight UN Occupation – Rapadoo Observateur!
Videos of the Day:

The Vitamin Water Deception
Sweden Runs Out of Garbage — True story
Made in the USA — By prisoner labor: Re-inventing the slave trade
The numbers American prisoners produce:
• 100% of all military helmets, ammunition belts, ID tags etc.
for the military
• 93% of all domestically produced paints
• 36% of domestically produced home appliances
• 21% of office furniture
• 1 out of 30 US men aged 20-34 are behind bars
• For black men of the same age group, it's 1 out 9
End Wall Street’s Wars!
Occupy Wall Street!
Occupy Wall Street is the Only Organization
That Identifies The Enemy —
The 1% That Own and Control The Wealth!
1960s The Realist — One Nation Under God/1%
(Unlike The Trade Union Misleaders
Nor The Misleaders Of The Oppressed
Who Strive To Be In ‘Partnership’ With The 1%)
(Unlike The Trade Union Misleaders
Nor The Misleaders Of The Oppressed
Who Strive To Be In ‘Partnership’ With The 1%)

1960s The Realist — One Nation Under God/1%
Occupy Wall Street — ‘We Are The 99%’
The resistance continues at Liberty Square
Occupy Denver Calls On All Available Occupy Networks to Mobilize
Against Keystone XL Pipeline January 7th
Tags: denver, environment, tar sands blockade
Occupy Denver stands in solidarity with The Tar Sands Blockade,
and is calling for national and international mobilization and solidarity
actions against the construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline. Tar sands
giant TransCanada has begun construction on the southern leg of the
Keystone XL. Leading NASA Climate Scientist James Hansen has called
the Keystone XL “game over” for the climate, and Americans are already
feeling the heat. The pipeline will make TransCanada rich while

encroaching on ranch lands, poisoning Texas’ working class communities,
and destroying the environment that makes the lone star state so beautiful.
Kick off the new year by demonstrating your resistance to Keystone
XL!
Join us for another mass action in Southeast Texas on Monday,
January 7th, including a 3 day training camp leading up to the big event.
Our trainings and events are open and include roles for everyone ready to
defend our homes from toxic tar sands.
RSVP right now so we can know how many people to expect.
tarsandsblockade.org/jan7/
SCHEDULE (Jan. 3rd – 8th):
Thursday, Jan. 3rd – Travel & Arrival
Friday, Jan. 4th – Day 1: Direct Action Training Camp
Saturday, Jan. 5th – Day 2: Direct Action Training Camp
Sunday, Jan. 6th – Day 3: Direct Action Training Camp
Monday, Jan. 7th – Mass Action to Stop Keystone XL
Tuesday, Jan. 8th – Debrief and Depart
Questions? Contact: 972-439-5310, TSBComms@riseup.net
Tar Sands Blockade is a coalition of Texas and Oklahoma landowners
and climate justice organizers using peaceful and sustained civil
disobedience to stop the construction of TransCanada’s Keystone XL tar
sands pipeline.
As a grassroots campaign, we are funded entirely by the generosity of
individual donors. Meaning that every dollar of your contribution goes
directly into stopping TransCanada and the Keystone XL tar sands
pipeline where it matters most. The Tar Sands Blockade is one of the most
important resistance actions in the nation. If you can’t join us, you can still
help. Please consider donating.
Wish List tarsandsblockade.org/donate-3/wishlist/
WePay wepay.com/donations/tsbdonate
And please join our E-Action to help continue to spread awareness
and support our people on the ground.
U.S.:

Fiscal Cliff 2013:
Why American Austerity is Not the Answer To US Fiscal Woes
Cliff Notes
by
Steve Lendman
Congressional/administration hype, theater, gamesmanship,
brinksmanship, and duplicity define yearend fiscal cliff discussions.
Previous articles explained what's at stake. Years ago, Republicans
and Democrats conspired to destroy America's social contract.
Militarism, imperial dominance, tyranny, corporate/super-rich
priorities, class war, and widening the unprecedented wealth disparity
followed.
Economist Jack Rasmus calls fiscal cliff subterfuge "austerity
American style."
Media scoundrels conceal what readers and viewers most need to
know. Fiscal cliff hype shows what they're up against. Eleventh hour
discussions continue.
The New York Times headlined "Senate Leaders Set to Work on a
Last-Minute Tax Agreement."
The Washington Post said "Agreement within reach on 'fiscal cliff'
deal, officials say."
"Cliff Deal Hinges on Senators," headlined the Wall Street Journal.
Senate leaders said they'd "launch a last-ditch weekend effort to avert the
so-called fiscal cliff."

Unexplained is that none exists. Hype substitutes for reality. Budget
and deficit problems are real. Effective fixes are spurned. Destructive ones
are prioritized.
Progressive Radio News Hour regular Paul Craig Roberts told
listeners that suspending Afghan military operations for three months
would solve things for now. Ending hostilities entirely would do so longer
term.
Prioritizing peace over war, using US resources responsibly, enacting
sustainable economic growth legislation, re-industrializing America, and
job creation would do so in perpetuity.
Obama and party bosses don't explain. Nor do media scoundrels. On
December 26, a New York Times editorial headlined "Fiscal Endgame,"
saying:
House Republicans "rejected (Obama's) overly generous budget
deal." They also "rejected their own leadership's proposal."
No deal means ordinary Americans will be hit hardest, claims The
Times. Omitted was explaining bipartisan agreement to destroy social
America. Details alone remain to be resolved.
Pre or post-yearend doesn't matter. Continuing resolutions extend
many policies when agreements aren't reached. Before Congress adjourns,
grand plan resolution won't happen.
Expect talks to end by kicking the can down the road. Temporary
resolution will likely be reached. More time will be bought. Major issues
will be delayed for 2013 Q I and later discussions.
Endgame intentions are clear. Crisis conditions fester. Ordinary
Americans will suffer most. Both parties prioritize making them pay for
dire conditions predatory bankers caused.
A December 27 Washington Post editorial headlined "Avoid the
'fiscal cliff,' " saying:
Democrats and Republicans remain "at loggerheads." America "faces
a harmful and gratuitous economic shock that would be inflicted by its
own leaders."
Both sides share blame. Before January 1, expect nothing more than
stopgap legislation. Passage will avoid "disaster."

Obama and Congress have days left to agree. Failure would "abdicat
(e) their responsibility to the nation."
WP, NYT, and other major media consumers have no idea what's
going on. Scoundrel editors, commentators, and staff writers don't tell
them.
Economist Michael Hudson discussed "America's Deceptive 2012
Fiscal Cliff." He published part one of a two-part article.
Victors and powerful interests write history, he said.
"Holding the bottom 99% in debt, the top 1% are now in the process
of subsidizing a deceptive economic theory to persuade voters to pursue
policies that benefit the financial sector at the expense of labor, industry,
and democratic government as we know it."
Powerful special interests blame unemployment and America's "loss
of industrial competitiveness" on spending and deficit woes.
Junk economics turns truth on its head. Financial lobbyists claim
"austerity can enable private sector debts to be paid."
In fact, "when banks load the economy down with debt," less remains
for "domestic goods and services."
Bad policies produce bad results. Destructive ones "reduce private
sector market demand." Doing so "shrink(s) markets and employment."
Distressed governments are told to sell valued land and natural
resources. Buyers want fire sale prices. Bankers and other financial
predators profit greatly.
Lucrative bank loan financing is created. Privileged 1% players
profit. Indebtedness and mass privatizations benefit them. Ordinary people
end up severely harmed.
Austerity advocates lie. Central banks only print new money to wage
war, destroy property, and benefit financial interests, other corporate
favorites, and super-rich elites.
Fundamental infrastructure and popular needs go begging. Effective
policies are spurned.
"Governments need to provide the economy with money and credit to
expand markets and employment. They do this by running budget deficits,
and this can be done by creating their own money."

Bankers oppose what harms their interests. Washington is Wall Street
occupied territory. What banking giants and other major financial
companies want they get.
They "captured mainstream economics." They're "winning (their) war
against the economy at large." They want ordinary people to think there's
no alternative.
Political Washington and media scoundrels support them. Much
better alternatives than force-fed austerity and debt peonage exist, says
Hudson. Part two will explain more. Read More
The Logical Result of Austerity: Return of Child Labor
Happy holidays!
The Corporatization Of San Jose High School and child labor
By
Danny Weil
Joe Rodriguez, a reporter for the Mercury News recently reported
that in San Jose, California:
“The city is blessed with high schools that prepare low-income,
underachieving students for college, but here comes one with a twist.
Students at this school will attend classes four days a week, but on the
fifth they’ll put on work clothes and hoof it over to a local business,
corporation or agency and put in a day’s work for a day’s pay. The catch is
they can’t keep the money” (http://www.mercurynews.com/education/
ci_22251566/new-cristo-rey-high-school-san-jose-will).

Yes, the heady days of neo-feudalism have now arrived and with
them have come the school to work pipeline that affords students the
ability to be exploited, like prison inmates all in the name of education.
Pegged as an opportunity for students, so-called philanthropist John
A. Sobrato, who recently donated $1.25 million for the new Cristo Rey
San Jose High School, which is scheduled to open in the fall, commented:
“Basically, I liked the work requirement. I worked as a young kid,
and I think it’s important for them to learn what it’s like to work in a
business or office” (ibid).
Yes, the philanthro-pirates like Sobrato love child labor especially
when it is free, offers minimal protection and can be sold as “helping kids”
when in fact it is child abuse and child labor all designed and bundled up
by businessmen in silk back suits with lofty plans for the transition of
education into purgatory for low paid work under failing capitalism.
When 125 freshmen reopen a shuttered school at Five Wounds
Portuguese National Parish church just east of downtown, they will join
some 7,400 other low-income, mostly minority and urban students at 17
Catholic high schools across the country. The schools are run by the
Chicago-based Cristo Rey Network and Jesuit religious order.
The schools says it offers an “all-around education and emphasizes
independent and critical thinking”, but when one reads the warning label
what differentiates Cristo Rey from the low-income, college-prep pack is
the mandatory requirement for off-campus jobs. Students typically
perform clerical work in corporate and legal offices, but here they’ll have
the opportunity to work at high-tech campuses, too. This is what one can
only call being tied to the carpet loom of peonage.
Khanh Russo, a Cisco manager who wrote the feasibility plan for the
school, said a big selling point for the San Jose campus was its potential
for bridging the educational gap between the valley’s low-income
populations and the vast number of Silicon Valley companies where even
entry level positions require college degrees. Now why would an entry
level position require a college degree? They don’t. College degrees are
little more than commodities to be bought and sold for student debt and
then once purchased, they are used to gain a handhold on the low paid

ladder of despair. Moving up on the salary scale is another scam used to
force people into colleges to seek phony degrees that carry little in the way
of education but pack a low paid punch for low paid work.
Even so, as Rodriguez noted, Cristo Rey schools are open to students
of all faiths. Sobrato said 40 percent are not Catholic. Students typically
come from families earning $35,000 a year or less a year. The school has
lined up 37 San Jose employers eager to hire the kids — lending credence
to the fact the school is little more than a recruiting center for precarious
employment, a holding tank for capitalist work in the race to the bottom.
Rodriguez reports that many of the students are in for culture shock.
When a CBS 60 Minutes news team visited Cristo Rey’s flagship school in
Chicago recently, it videotaped students learning how to knot ties for the
first time and how to shake hands with the confidence of professionals —
charm schools for the working class, disenfranchised, people of color and
the poor or better yet, for Fagin’s kids.
Whatever the students earn will go toward tuition (just like whatever
prisoners earn will go to the ‘canteen’). The cost of tuition averages about
$10,000 a year at Cristo Rey schools. Thus, the students will work to pay
debt while their employers exploit them in the name of progress and trade
student loan debt, or Student Loan Asset Backed Securities (SLABS) on
Wall Street. Sobrato said most of the families could afford to contribute
up to $1,000, with the rest covered by student earnings and various grants
and donations.
Sobrato’s $1.25 million gift was actually a challenge grant, which he
said has already been met by other seedy and smarmy ‘donors’. Take for
example another lead benefactor, Brendan J. Cassin, a venture capitalist
and Cristo Rey board member. The school’s board of directors has selected
the Rev. Peter Pabst, a Jesuit and founder of two college prep middle
schools in San Jose, as the new high school’s president.
These philanthro-pirates love to use religion as a hook to get students
and their parents to pray for pie in the sky when they die. Using
‘reverends’ without reverence, these hucksters can then clamp on to young
children like parasites looking for a host, which they are.

All of this is being sold as something good for students when in fact
it is a Dickensian abhorrence that can only be envisioned as something
beneficial by those who seek to exploit children while denying them a
truly meaningful and contemplative education.
This is where we are today when it comes to ‘schooling under
capitalism’. It has nothing to do with education and everything to do with
boosting profits for the wealth vultures and flocks for the sheepherders.
This is faith based capitalism in action – the neo-feudal landscape of
the new childhood where there are those who rule, those who work and
those who pray. The truly disgusting part is that it is all part of the Obama
Department of Education’s plans for the cementing of the new Jim Crow
and acceptance of an escalating inequality that can only worsen under the
current economic oligarchs.
U.S. ‘terror’ and gun laws extended to Somalia
Somalis face New York City trial
By
Mick Kelly
Brooklyn, NY - Three men from Somalia, Ali Yasin Ahmed, Madhi
Hashi and Mohamed Yusuf, appeared in Federal District Court here, Dec.
21, on charges of violating U.S. “material support for terrorism” and gun
laws. What makes this case different from the dozens of U.S. cases
involving Somali men and women in Minnesota, California and other
states is that there is no indication the men are U.S. residents or citizens,
or that they have ever traveled to the U.S.
The conspiracy to provide “material support to a foreign terrorist
organization” stems from their alleged membership in the Somali
resistance organization, al Shabaab. Al Shabaab is an Islamic political
movement that is fighting the U.S.-backed foreign intervention in Somalia.
The gun charge, according to a Dec. 21 press release form the New
York Eastern District U.S. Attorney’s Office, involves the “unlawful use of
machine guns” in Somalia.
The case against the three men rests on the dubious legal theory that
U.S. laws can be applied anywhere in the world. The New York Times

states, “Court documents show no connection between the alleged crimes
and the United States.”
Two of the men, Mohamed Yusuf and Ali Yasin Ahmed, lived in
Sweden for a time. Madhi Hashi was born in Somalia and grew up in
England. The British newspaper, The Independent reported on Dec. 23 that
when Hashi lived in London, he was one of a group of young people who
said they were pressured by the UK intelligence agency, MI5, to become
informants. After his return to Somalia, Hashi’s UK citizenship was
revoked.
The Independent says of Hashi, “His family had no idea where he
was for five months until he appeared in a New York court on Friday
accused of terrorism. Last night, his British lawyer, Saghir Hussain, said:
‘This has all the hallmarks of rendition. It appears the withdrawal of
citizenship and the kidnapping by the Americans may have been coordinated.’”
The U.S. Attorney’s Office claims, “In early August 2012, the
defendants were apprehended in Africa by local authorities while on their
way to Yemen.” On Oct. 18, 2012, a grand jury in the Eastern District of
New York returned a sealed indictment against the defendants. On Nov.
14, 2012, the Federal Bureau of Investigation took custody of the
defendants and brought them to the Eastern District of New York.”
The Independent quotes Hashi’s father, Mohamed, “’We are not some
slaves who can be passed around from one owner to another,’ he said.
‘Why was our son sent to the U.S.? He has been a British citizen for 15
years but then his citizenship was taken away suddenly and now we find
out that he's in New York? Our family had to find out this news from
public news sources as no one has contacted us until now. We are very
worried about his condition as we have no information. The U.S. have not
given our son any rights – we don't know where he's being held, how to
contact him or how he's being treated. It is shocking that something like
this can be done to someone based on accusations and suspicion only.’”
Among those who announced the charges against the three men Dec.
21 was Raymond Kelly, the Commissioner of New York City Police

Department. The NYPD has built a massive intelligence network that spys
on Arabs and Muslims around the U.S. It is also setting up satellite offices
in other countries.
Environment:
Solutions exist to avoid climate disaster
By
Simon Butler
Several recent scientific reports on climate change have warned we
are headed for disaster, giving frightening evidence of just how bad things
could get. It’s just as frightening how little world governments intend to
do about it.
But it’s maddening to think how easy it would be to take serious
action on climate, and staggering to add up the benefits of doing so.
Take the example given by US ecologist Lester Brown in a speech in
2008. He said burning coal makes up 40% of world carbon emissions from
energy. To replace that coal with wind power, Brown said we’d need to
build about 1.5 million wind turbines worldwide — and we should aim to
do it in 10 years.
That might seem like too huge a task: 1.5 million wind turbines
would be close to an 800% rise on today’s level.
But Brown pointed out that about 65 million cars had been made in
the past year. If just one industry can produce that many cars in a single
year, there is no question we could build 1.5 million wind turbines in 10
years, if society’s resources were mobilised to that end.
The car industry, such a big polluter, is still not building as many cars
as it wants to. In their 2012 book The Endless Crisis, US Marxists John
Bellamy Foster and Robert McChesney said the car industry, even before
the 2008 crash, “was faced with huge amounts of excess capacity — equal
to approximately one-third of its total capacity”.
They quoted a 2008 BusinessWeek article, which said: “Having
indulged in a global orgy of factory-building in recent years, the industry

has the capacity to make an astounding 94 million vehicles each year.
That’s about 34 million too many based on current sales.”
Business groups tell us that the profit motive and markets allocate
resources rationally and efficiently. But in practice, it’s so irrational and
inefficient that the idle manufacturing capacity in the car industry alone
could build Brown’s 1.5 million wind turbines.
It is not just with the car industry that the “efficient markets
hypothesis” falls flat. On an economy-wide scale, Foster and McChesney
present data showing idle manufacturing capacity across the US rose from
15% in 1970 to 22% in 2010. That’s an immense store of potential jobs
and climate solutions that is idle because its private owners haven’t
worked out a way to profit from using it.
In his book Plan B 4.0: Mobilising the Planet to Save Civilisation,
Brown came up with a “Plan B Budget”, which added up the costs of
restoring the Earth’s ecosystems. His budget included social goals, such as
universal education and health care, and natural restoration projects, such
as tree planting, soil renewal and water security.
Brown said this budget to “restore the Earth” required $187 billion a
year: equal to just one eighth of global military spending. It’s questionable
that Brown’s budget includes all the right goals or enough goals. But even
if he has underestimated the cost by 200%, the world’s military budget
could finance the job several times over.
Then consider the $32 trillion the Tax Justice Network estimates the
tax-dodging super-rich could have hidden in offshore tax havens. That’s
equal to almost half of global GDP. Imagine what could be achieved if that
ill-gotten wealth was not locked up by banks and other financial parasites.
Last year, environmental consultants Ecofys released a report that
said the world could switch to 100% renewable energy in 40 years. It said
the task would cost about 3% of world GDP a year, with the money spent
on renewables, energy infrastructure and energy efficiency.
The report also said that this big upfront clean energy investment
would pay big social dividends, lowering energy costs by about $5.7
trillion a year by 2050. Along with the climate benefits, spending big on a

ollout of renewable energy would save money that otherwise will go into
the hands of fossil fuel companies.
That is also why every oil, coal and gas company’s business plan is to
make sure that never happens.
It is sometimes said that the big corporate polluters and bankers are
guilty of ignoring the climate crisis. Some are, but the big money is paying
very close attention — looking for ways to profit from whatever happens.
A much warmer world will bring more dangerous storms, droughts,
floods and bushfires — but it will also present new opportunities to profit
from the disasters. In her book The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein showed
how corporations and Western governments have become experts in taking
advantage of crisis and human misery.
She said this tendency has grown worse, with an “intensely violent
brand of disaster capitalism” — defined by the West’s invasions of
Afghanistan and Iraq — dominating “since September 11”.
Because fossil fuel use is so central to the capitalist economy, and
because the system must ceaselessly grow in wasteful ways or risk
collapse, “disaster capitalism” is the only capitalism we will ever get.
Humanity won’t be able to shape a new, sustainable relationship with
nature as long as mining CEOs, media barons and army generals still
make all the big decisions. The steps we need to take on climate change
are affordable and relatively straightforward, but we won’t get close to
dealing with climate change without fundamental social change as well.
The People’s Agreement adopted by the 2010 World People’s
Conference on Climate Change, held in Cochabamba, Bolivia, made
the point this way: “Humanity confronts a great dilemma: to continue
on the path of capitalism, depredation, and death, or to choose the
path of harmony with nature and respect for life.
“It is imperative that we forge a new system that restores
harmony with nature and among human beings. And for there to be
balance with nature, there must first be equity among human beings.”
NRC ASLB rules against environmental coalition's contentions
challenging 20-year license extension at Davis-Besse

"Homer Simpson and Humpty Dumpty act out" the Blizzard of '78 "snow job"
root cause theory for shield building cracking at Davis-Besse's front entrance on
March 24, 2012. The street theater was held in solidarity with the SAGE
Alliance's Shut Down Vermont Yankee day of action, and protested FENOC's
cherry-picked "root cause of convenience," first floated on Feb. 28th.
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission's (NRC) Atomic Safety
(sic) and Licensing Board (ASLB) today issued two rulings rejecting an
environmental coalition's intervention against the 20-year license
extension sought by FirstEnergy Nuclear Operating Company (FENOC) at
its problem-plagued Davis-Besse atomic reactor near Toledo.
The first ruling supported FENOC's Motion for Summary Dismissal
of the environmental interveners' (Beyond Nuclear, Citizens Environment
Alliance of Southwestern Ontario, Don't Waste Michigan, Green Party of
Ohio, represented by Toledo attorney Terry Lodge) Severe Accident
Mitigation Alternatives (SAMA) analyses contentions, previously
admitted for hearing. To do so, both ASLB and NRC had to ignore
FENOC's assumption that the containment structures at Davis-Besse are
fully functional, which they are not. This ruling came despite FENOC's
admission that it had made five major errors in its original SAMA
analyses, such as under-estimating the value of Ohio farmland and urban
property values, and even getting wind directions 180 degrees wrong.
The second ruling rejected interveners' proposed cracked concrete
containment contention. Intervenors' have dubbed FENOC's claim that the
Blizzard of 1978 severely cracked its concrete containment shield building
a "Snow Job," and its cover up of the visual evidence of the cracking with

concrete in late 2011, and with a coat of paint on the shield building
exterior in August 2012, a "White Wash."
The environmental coalition issued a press release in response to the
ASLB rulings, vowing to fight on.
The Toledo Blade has reported on this story. At the bottom righthand
side of the article, the Toledo Blade is conducting an online poll as to
whether or not Davis-Besse should be re-licensed. Beyond Nuclear
encourages readers to vote NO in the poll.
The article quoted Beyond Nuclear's Kevin Kamps:
"...Kevin Kamps, a radioactive-waste specialist for Maryland-based
Beyond Nuclear, was unconvinced by the licensing board’s findings.
The cracks pose a 'major safety risk,' he said. 'If they can dismiss the
cracking contention given the gravity of that risk, then it’s not a good sign
for due process.'
Relicensing opponents believe the NRC and FirstEnergy don’t
'understand the root causes' of the cracking problem, and if the wrong
cause is pinpointed then 'they can’t have adequate corrective action in
place.'
'[It’s a] huge loss for the public. The risks don’t go away regardless,'
he said...
...Mr. Kamps said the licensing board’s rulings are subject to
challenge, and re-licensing opponents also may raise new contentions as
the renewal process continues. Among unresolved issues is the effect of a
June 8 federal appeals-court ruling in Washington declaring that regulators
had not assessed potential environmental consequences of long-term
radioactive waste storage at nuclear plant sites if no permanent disposal
site is developed."
Interveners can still submit contentions based on NRC's Draft
Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (DSEIS), due out in
February. Also, the NRC has acknowledged that interveners' application at
Davis-Besse, of a recent court victory against its "Nuke Waste Con
Game," will result in at least a two year delay in issuance of the final
approval for the license extension. NRC has said it will take at least that

long to carry out the court-ordered Environmental Impact Statement on its
Nuclear Waste Confidence Decision and Rule.
For more information on the Davis-Besse proceeding, click here.
Fracking:
Nuclear Fallout: Ongoing Tragedy/Disaster In Japan:
EnergyNews:
03:16 PM EST on December 30th, 2012 | 29 comments
U.S. Navy Sailors on TV: “I’m not what I used to be… my thyroid’s
not what it used to be” since 3/11 — “Degenerative disks all over my
back… I was healthy before all of this” (VIDEO)
11:28 AM EST on December 30th, 2012 | 22 comments
Former NRC Chairman in Fukushima: No excuse for any of us in
nuclear arena to let this happen — I wish more people could come see
it firsthand (VIDEO)
01:20 AM EST on December 30th, 2012 | 19 comments
Report: Many sailors from USS Ronald Reagan suffered problems
after 3/11 — “No amount of money would compensate me if I’m 23
years old and bleeding from my behind”
06:39 PM EST on December 29th, 2012 | 6 comments
Another M5 quake hits near same spot off Fukushima — Third in
region over last 15 hours
05:09 PM EST on December 29th, 2012 | 60 comments
Top Conservative Website: If lawsuit proves true and Tepco lied about
radiation to get Americans in there, this is despicable
03:22 PM EST on December 29th, 2012 | One comment

Independent flyover footage of giant sinkhole: 19 weeks later we’re
seeing quite a different situation! — Comparison photos
Ongoing Gulf of Mexico Oil Disaster:
Oil Spill Attorney Stuart Smith’s Blog:
Black Liberation/Civil Rights:
NY Subway Murder:
Anti-Muslim Ads Lead to Horrendous Hate Crime
Erika Menendez in police custody., a Muslim-hating woman,
was charged with murder as a hate crime for senselessly shoving a
Queens man to his death in front of the 7 train, officials said today.
Washington, DC | www.adc.org | December 30, 2012 – The
American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) is appalled and
shocked at the horrendous murder of Sunando Sen, who was pushed onto
the tracks of an elevated subway station in Queens, NY and crushed by an
oncoming train, on Thursday, December 27. ADC extends deepest
condolences to the family of the victim. The suspect, a 31 year-old
woman was arrested Saturday and charged with second-degree murder as
a hate crime.
Upon her arrest, Erika Menendez, informed law enforcement officials
that she believed the victim “to be a Muslim or Hindu,” and continued by
telling police, “I pushed a Muslim off the train tracks because I hate

Hindus and Muslims ever since 2001 when they put down the twin towers
I’ve been beating them up.”
The murder of Mr. Sen at a New York Subway Station comes only
weeks after Pamela Geller placed hate-ads targeting the Arab and Muslim
community in subway stations across New York. One of the ads
insinuated that Arab and Muslims are “savages” and another ad has an
image of the World Trade Center exploding next to a quote from the
Quran.
Mr. Sen’s murder is a clear example of how hate speech can lead to
and incite violence against Arabs, Muslims, and those perceived to be
Arab or Muslim. ADC, and hundreds of diverse coalition partners, have
been warning public officials about the impact the ads can have against
community members. The promotion and placement of advertisements
targeting and vilifying any community must not be tolerated.
ADC calls on the Metropolitan Transit Authority, and appropriate law
enforcement agencies, to immediately investigate the role the ads played
in the death of Mr. Sen.
Pamela Geller is recognized as being at the core of a group promoting
intolerance of Muslims and Arabs in America. The Southern Poverty Law
Center, a group that monitors the hate movement in the United States,
calls her “the anti-Islam movement’s most visible and flamboyant
figurehead.”
ADC, along with NY civic and community leaders, calls on all Arab
and Muslims in New York City to exercise extreme caution and diligence
when using the subway system. ADC will continue to monitor the matter
and work to make certain adequate measures are taken to ensure the safety
and protection of Arabs, Muslims, and those perceived to be Arab or
Muslim, in New York. Read more about this horrendous crime.
Labor:
Economy:
World:

Jan 1, 2013: Another Independence Day Under Occupation
by
Ezili Dantò of HLLN
Ours has been a long struggle. It started, 510 years ago in 1503 when
the first kidnapped African captives set chained foot on what is now
known as Haitian soil.
Back on Jan. 1, 1804, European/U.S. barbarity and savagery received
its greatest blow in the Western Hemisphere. We continue to face their
guns, greed, foreign germs and odious cruelties. But we also continue to
celebrate our victories, humanity and determination never to be as shallow
and violent as these enemies. Haitians have been stigmatized and forced to
pay with their lives and freedom for that achievement ever since.
Every Jan. 1st marks Haiti’s freedom day.
Oceans of our blood have poured and watered the soil to nourish
civilized co-existence on this planet Earth and continue, this very minute,
to soak the earth needlessly, simply because Haitians were the first to
counter, in combat, European/U.S. biological fatalism, destroy their myth
of white superiority and to do what even Spartacus could not.
How should Haitians mark this anniversary?
Who should we confer with about our awesome burden, our plight,
our long struggle to be treated as human beings by the European
"discoverers" and settlers? About the U.N. soldiers’ massacres, about the
US occupation of Haiti behind the UN front, about the US/Euro open-pit
mining for Haiti's $20 billion in gold in the time of UN-imported cholera;
about the savage disenfranchisement of the impoverished with USsupported
sham elections since 2004, about their feudal pillage masked as
humanitarian aid in Haiti, about $7.5 billion in earthquake dollars
collected that's been put in foreign pockets leaving practically no footprint
in Haiti, about the use of Haiti misery by the US/UN/NGOs to cash in,
about the arsonist and firemen role played by the fake humanitarians,
about the rapes of our women, importation of cholera that's killed 8000+
and infected 620,000+ innocent Haitians in two years and the repression of
Haiti’s defenseless poor? About the lies of the mainstream media and

awful propaganda for empire by the likes of Bill Clinton and Dr. Paul
Farmer?
Who should we confer with about this insane Western force that
attacks all that is not like itself, even though it had no attackers? About
Bartholomew De La Casas’ “New World,” enmeshed in its own armor of
materiality, caged in centuries of self-serving lies that defends itself
endlessly from the planet’s masses, bringing genocide it veils in false
declarations of benevolence?" (See full text of HLLN’s regular Jan 1st
essay at Another Independence Day Under Occupation.)
How do we Haitians get justice?
Who do we tell about the UN repackaging old donor pledges and Dr.
Paul Farmer and Obama's complicity in denying the earthquake and
cholera victims justice and reparations, all the while telling the world
they're bringing stability, democracy and civilization to Haiti. How do we
show that Haiti's violence rate is lower than that of most of the tourist
destinations in the Caribbean, has one of the lowest violence rates in the
Western Hemisphere when the US has a Chapter 7 UN peace enforcement
(tourista/MINUSTAH) mission in Haiti collecting nearly a billion per year
when there's no civil war or peace agreement to enforce? Who do we tell
that the kidnappings in Haiti are not the work of impoverished Black
youths but mostly the work of the wealthy global elites and began with the
kidnapping of democratically elected President Jean Bertrand Aristide by
US Special Forces and that the cholera epidemic began under the US
occupation of Haiti behind the UN and NGO humanitarian front? How do
we show a world, convinced by the false benevolence of the "first world"
rulers, absorbed in white gluttony, profit-over-people values, monopolistic
and unfettered capitalism of its absolute evil? How should we Haitians,
who still live and breathe free, fight on for ourselves, our children, for
those who don’t?
In the book “Two Thousand Seasons,” Ayi Kwei Armah writes:
How have we come to be mere mirrors to annihilations?
For whom do we aspire to reflect our people’s death? For whose
entertainment shall we sing our agony? In what hopes? That the
destroyers, aspiring to extinguish us, will suffer conciliatory

emorse at the sight of their own fantastic success? The last
imbecile to dream such dreams is dead, killed by the saviors of
his dreams.
It is an exercise in futility to go to the perpetrators and
executioners of human rights crimes in Haiti in hopes of getting
justice for our people.
Those who ousted the constitutional government of Haiti in
2004 – the U.N., which acts as proxy to maintain this
international crime, the Haitian lackeys and their Bill Clinton,
Paul Farmer and State Department masters – are dead inside and
cannot hear the cries of the Haitian masses.
It’s not their mission or mandate. For they don’t represent
life, liberty, democracy, development and decency, but its
opposite. This officialdom, this authority, rains death, despotism,
destruction, cruelty, inhumanity, injustice, and represents all that
civilized peoples worldwide struggle to overcome. They write
laws but are too “high tech” to live them. They mouth words of
“justice” and fairness but their words are DEAD.
To further quote Ghanaian writer, Ayi Kwei Armah:
Those utterly dead, never again to awake, such is their
muttering.
See for yourself, my people, Paul Farmer’s mutterings and back
peddling on the UN as the source of Haiti cholera quoted at “Haitians
Won't Play Baseball in the time of cholera." The Haitian Blogger,
December , 2012
But as you read Dr. Farmer’s racist obfuscations and immoral lies
that seek to mask the US occupation behind UN front as Haitian
“progress” that is worthy of international support, remember: A zombie’s
mutterings are meaningless.
Ayi Kwei Armah explains what’s to be done with such predators and
their blan-peyi Haitian lackeys, for they are dead: “Leave them in their
graves. Whatever waking form they wear, the stench of death pours
ceaseless from their mouths. From every opening of their possessed
carcasses comes death’s excremental pus. Their soul itself is dead and long

since putrefied. Would you have your intercourse with these creatures
from the graveyard?” NO. Leave the dead in their graves... Read More
Robert Fisk: Does Arab progress founder on an ossified language?
The Long View: We need to understand our history better: why
did Arabs disappear from ‘our’ science?
I’ve heard all kinds of reasons for the Arab-Israeli failure to agree on
UN Security Council Resolution 242 – because the Arabic text calls upon
Israel to withdraw from ‘the lands occupied by Israel in 1967’ (including
the West Bank, Gaza and Golan) whereas the English text (as the
Americans intended) leaves out the word ‘the’. So ‘occupied land’ leaves
the Israelis free to decide which bits of land they want to hand back – and
which they don’t.
But the French version also takes the definite article ‘les’ – so it can’t
be the Arabs’ fault. Or does this all come about because the language
Arabs speak and the language they write is not the same. Does it lack
clarity? I hear this all the time – from Westerners, of course.
There can be a kind of imprecision in practical life. I recall arriving
with colleagues in southern Lebanon during one of Israel’s five invasions
and asking how many Israeli tanks were on the road in front of us.
“Many,” came the reply of the refugees. How many? “Ktir” – very many.
Ten? “Na’am”. (Yes.) Twenty? “Na’am” (Yes again.) A dangerous lack of
clarity there, surely.
Hasan Karmi, the Palestinian lexicographer who died six years ago,
nursed the theory that having learned colloquial Arabic as children before
progression to the much more precise written form -- and because
language is so crucial to the development of thought – “Arabs were often
handicapped by a lack of precision in their thinking.” Here I am quoting
from Karmi’s obituary by my mate Donald Macintyre. Hence, perhaps, the
failure of Arabs to maintain their historical superiority in science and
intellectual thought.
For while I rabbit on about the poisonous influence on our Romance
languages of SMS text messages, internet-speak and blogopop culture,
Arabs are debating the most controversial issue of their language: that

while it should be living and adapted to the modern age, its linguists have
produced dictionaries only to serve the “reciters of religion and to sanctify
the dead”.
Arabic culture, according to Iraqi-born journalist and writer Walid al-
Kobeissi, is founded upon three pillars: Arab nationalism, Islam and the
Arabic language. If one of these pillars gives way, the culture collapses.
The idea that to change or “touch” the language is a kind of profanation –
since the very message of God, the Koran, was written in Arabic – has
prevented any modernization of the written language. But since the 1990s,
the Kurds have begun to lose their interest in Arabic. Arab Christians use a
dictionary which incorporates modern medical terms. Egyptian Copts use
Egyptian Arabic dialect on the internet.
Literary Arabic, of course, is written, not spoken. Yet most Arab
writers, according to al-Kobeissi, do not progress linguistically after the
age of 40 because written Arabic language takes more time to master than
European languages. He believes his fellow Arabs were losing time in
learning syntax. “Grammatical analysis is in reality the main problem of
our language,” he writes.
In the early days of Islam, Arabs made mistakes because there did not
exist a real break between the language they wrote and the language they
spoke. In those days, language reformers were not accused of being
Orientalists. The Omayad Caliph Al-Walid told his citizens to stop
worrying about grammar when he wished to spread Arabic in the Latin-
and Persian-speaking regions of Iraq and Syria.
Dialects would bridge the gap between spoken and written Arabic –
as they do today. Al-Kobeissi, an Arabic teacher in Norway, notes that
there were two versions of Norwegian 50 years ago – but that dialects
developed into a single language. Yet in an Arabic dictionary of 80,000
words, most of the words are unused -- there are, for example, perhaps 600
terms for a camel. Palestinian writer Hanan Bakir disagrees. She points
out that Arabs no longer speak the language of the pre-Islamic or Abbassid
eras, that Arabs do not even speak the same language as their
grandmothers. Language evolves naturally, not because of linguistics.

Syrian-born astrophysician Rim Turkmani of Imperial College
believes that Arab and Muslim science had a profound influence on the
West during the Renaissance. In the 17th century, European scientists even
gave written references in Arabic and Persian. They translated Arabic
scientific texts. Edmond Halley – of comet fame – translated two Arabic
books into English, and wrote an essay on the mathematician al-Battani,
the ‘Arabic Ptolemy’. Chemist Robert Boyle studied the works of Jabir bin
Hayan. “At the time of the Renaissance and the scientific revolution,”
Turkmani told the newspaper L’Orient Le Jour, “…Western scientists
recognized the Arab contribution and cited Arabic works.”
But today, no-one talking about Halley or Boyle refers to their debt to
Arab scientists. Turkmani won’t give any reason for this. Perhaps we
should reassess our debt to Arab scientists by understanding our history a
little better. Why did the Arabs disappear from ‘our’ science? Because they
didn’t bridge that gap between writing and the spoken word? Or because
we Westerners suddenly discovered ‘Orientalism’, the suspicious Muslim
‘other’ which still dominates our lives?
“…and the word was with God,” we are told. It’s a moot point.
Health, Education, Science and Welfare:
Fluctuating Environment May Have Driven Human Evolution
The researchers examined lake sediments from Olduvai Gorge in northern Tanzania,
looking for biomarkers -- fossil molecules -- from ancient trees and grasses. (Credit: Gail
Ashley)

Dec. 24, 2012 — A series of rapid environmental changes in East
Africa roughly 2 million years ago may be responsible for driving human
evolution, according to researchers at Penn State and Rutgers University.
"The landscape early humans were inhabiting transitioned rapidly
back and forth between a closed woodland and an open grassland about
five to six times during a period of 200,000 years," said Clayton Magill,
graduate student in geosciences at Penn State. "These changes happened
very abruptly, with each transition occurring over hundreds to just a few
thousand years."
According to Katherine Freeman, professor of geosciences, Penn
State, the current leading hypothesis suggests that evolutionary changes
among humans during the period the team investigated were related to a
long, steady environmental change or even one big change in climate.
"There is a view this time in Africa was the 'Great Drying,' when the
environment slowly dried out over 3 million years," she said. "But our
data show that it was not a grand progression towards dry; the
environment was highly variable."
According to Magill, many anthropologists believe that variability of
experience can trigger cognitive development.
"Early humans went from having trees available to having only
grasses available in just 10 to 100 generations, and their diets would have
had to change in response," he said. "Changes in food availability, food
type, or the way you get food can trigger evolutionary mechanisms to deal
with those changes. The result can be increased brain size and cognition,
changes in locomotion and even social changes -- how you interact with
others in a group. Our data are consistent with these hypotheses. We show
that the environment changed dramatically over a short time, and this
variability coincides with an important period in our human evolution
when the genus Homo was first established and when there was first
evidence of tool use."
The researchers -- including Gail Ashley, professor of earth and
planetary sciences, Rutgers University -- examined lake sediments from
Olduvai Gorge in northern Tanzania. They removed the organic matter that
had either washed or was blown into the lake from the surrounding

vegetation, microbes and other organisms 2 million years ago from the
sediments. In particular, they looked at biomarkers -- fossil molecules
from ancient organisms -- from the waxy coating on plant leaves.
"We looked at leaf waxes because they're tough, they survive well in
the sediment," said Freeman.
The team used gas chromatography and mass spectrometry to
determine the relative abundances of different leaf waxes and the
abundance of carbon isotopes for different leaf waxes. The data enabled
them to reconstruct the types of vegetation present in the Olduvai Gorge
area at very specific time intervals.
The results showed that the environment transitioned rapidly back
and forth between a closed woodland and an open grassland.
To find out what caused this rapid transitioning, the researchers used
statistical and mathematical models to correlate the changes they saw in
the environment with other things that may have been happening at the
time, including changes in the Earth's movement and changes in seasurface
temperatures.
"The orbit of the Earth around the sun slowly changes with time,"
said Freeman. "These changes were tied to the local climate at Olduvai
Gorge through changes in the monsoon system in Africa. Slight changes in
the amount of sunshine changed the intensity of atmospheric circulation
and the supply of water. The rain patterns that drive the plant patterns
follow this monsoon circulation. We found a correlation between changes
in the environment and planetary movement."
The team also found a correlation between changes in the
environment and sea-surface temperature in the tropics.
"We find complementary forcing mechanisms: one is the way Earth
orbits, and the other is variation in ocean temperatures surrounding
Africa," Freeman said. The researchers recently published their results in
the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences along with another
paper in the same issue that builds on these findings. The second paper
shows that rainfall was greater when there were trees around and less
when there was a grassland.

"The research points to the importance of water in an arid landscape
like Africa," said Magill. "The plants are so intimately tied to the water
that if you have water shortages, they usually lead to food insecurity.
"Together, these two papers shine light on human evolution because
we now have an adaptive perspective. We understand, at least to a first
approximation, what kinds of conditions were prevalent in that area and
we show that changes in food and water were linked to major evolutionary
changes."
The National Science Foundation funded this research.
Daily News Digest December 30, 2012
Largest Mass Execution in US History: 150 Years Ago Today
Jon Wiener
Execution of the Thirty-Eight Sioux Indians at Mankato, Minnesota, December 26, 1862,
lithograph. Milwaukee Lithograph & Engraving Company, [1883]
December 26, 1862: thirty-eight Dakota Indians were hanged in
Mankato, Minnesota, in the largest mass execution in US history–on
orders of President Abraham Lincoln. Their crime: killing 490 white
settlers, including women and children, in the Santee Sioux uprising the
previous August.
The execution took place on a giant square scaffold in the center of
town, in front of an audience of hundreds of white people. The thirty-eight
Dakota men “wailed and danced atop the gallows,” according to Robert K.

Elder of The New York Times, “waiting for the trapdoors to drop beneath
them.” A witness reported that, “as the last moment rapidly approached,
they each called out their name and shouted in their native language: ‘I’m
here! I’m here!’ ”
Lincoln’s treatment of defeated Indian rebels against the United
States stood in sharp contrast to his treatment of Confederate rebels. He
never ordered the executions of any Confederate officials or generals after
the Civil War, even though they killed more than 400,000 Union soldiers.
The only Confederate executed was the commander of Andersonville
Prison—and for what we would call war crimes, not rebellion.
Minnesota was a new frontier state in 1862, where white settlers were
pushing out the Dakota Indians—also called the Souix. A series of broken
peace treaties culminated in the failure of the United States that summer to
deliver promised food and supplies to the Indians, partial payment for their
giving up their lands to whites. One local trader, Andrew Myrick, said of
the Indians’ plight, “If they are hungry, let them eat grass.”
The Dakota leader Little Crow then led his “enraged and starving”
tribe in a series of attacks on frontier settlements. The “US-Dakota War”
didn’t last long: After six weeks, Henry Hastings Sibley, first governor of
Minnesota and a leader of the state militia, captured 2,000 Dakota, and a
military court sentenced 303 to death.
Lincoln, however, was “never an Indian hater,” Eric Foner writes in
his Pulitzer Prize–winning book The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and
American Slavery. He did not agree with General John Pope, sent to put
down a Sioux uprising in southern Minnesota, who said “It is my purpose
utterly to exterminate the Sioux if I have the power to do so.” Lincoln
“carefully reviewed the trial records,” Foner reports, and found a lack of
evidence at most of the tribunals. He commuted the sentences of 265 of
the Indians—a politically unpopular move. But, he said, “I could not
afford to hang men for votes.”
The 265 Dakota Indians whose lives Lincoln spared were either fully
pardoned or died in prison. Lincoln and Congress subsequently removed
the Sioux and Winnebago—who had nothing to do with the uprising—
from all of their lands in Minnesota.

Mankato today is a city of 37,000 south of Minneapolis, notable for
its state university campus, which has 15,000 students. In Mankato, which
has heretofore neglected its bloody past, a new historical marker is being
erected at the site of the scaffold, at a place now called Reconciliation
Park. The marker, a fiberglass scroll, displays the names of the thirty-eight
Dakota who were executed.
The Minnesota History Center in St. Paul is currently featuring an
exhibit titled “Minnesota Tragedy: The U.S.-Dakota War of 1862.” “You
can’t turn your head from what is not pretty in history,” said Stephen
Elliott, who became the director of the Minnesota Historical Society last
May after twenty-eight years at Colonial Williamsburg. He told the
Minneapolis Star Tribune, “Whatever we do, it’s not going to somehow
heal things or settle it.” The impressive state-of-the-art exhibit includes the
views of both white settlers and Indians, voices from the past as well as
the present. “Visitors are encouraged to make up their own minds about
what happened and why,” the official guide declares. The website and
online video are particularly impressive.
The mass execution of the Dakota Indians isn’t the only fact missed
in the Lincoln biopic. Check out Jon Wiener on “The Trouble with Steven
Spielberg’s ‘Lincoln.’”
GOP and Feinstein join to fulfill Obama's demand for renewed
warrantless eavesdropping
The California Democrat's disgusting rhetoric recalls the worst of
Dick Cheney while advancing Obama's agenda
Glenn Greenwald

Democratic Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein joined with GOP
Senator Saxby Chambliss (right) to extend Obama's warrantless eavesdropping powers.
Photograph: J Scott Applewhite/AP
To this day, many people identify mid-2008 as the time they realized
what type of politician Barack Obama actually is. Six months before,
when seeking the Democratic nomination, then-Sen. Obama
unambiguously vowed that he would filibuster "any bill" that retroactively
immunized the telecom industry for having participated in the illegal Bush
NSA warrantless eavesdropping program.
But in July 2008, once he had secured the nomination, a bill came
before the Senate that did exactly that - the FISA Amendments Act of
2008 - and Obama not only failed to filibuster as promised, but far worse,
he voted against the filibuster brought by other Senators, and then voted in
favor of enacting the bill itself. That blatant, unblinking violation of his
own clear promise - actively supporting a bill he had sworn months earlier
he would block from a vote - caused a serious rift even in the middle of an
election year between Obama and his own supporters.
Critically, the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 did much more than
shield lawbreaking telecoms from all forms of legal accountability. Jointly
written by Dick Cheney and then-Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Jay
Rockefeller, it also legalized vast new, sweeping and almost certainly
unconstitutional forms of warrantless government eavesdropping.
In doing so, the new 2008 law gutted the 30-year-old FISA statute
that had been enacted to prevent the decades of severe spying abuses
discovered by the mid-1970s Church Committee: by simply barring the
government from eavesdropping on the communications of Americans

without first obtaining a warrant from a court. Worst of all, the 2008 law
legalized most of what Democrats had spent years pretending was such a
scandal: the NSA warrantless eavesdropping program secretly
implemented by George Bush after the 9/11 attack. In other words, the
warrantless eavesdropping "scandal" that led to a Pulitzer Prize for the
New York Times reporters who revealed it ended not with investigations
or prosecutions for those who illegally spied on Americans, but with the
Congressional GOP joining with key Democrats (including Obama) to
legalize most of what Bush and Cheney had done. Ever since, the Obama
DOJ has invoked secrecy and standing doctrines to prevent any courts
from ruling on whether the warrantless eavesdropping powers granted by
the 2008 law violate the Constitution.
The 2008 FISA law provided that it would expire in four years unless
renewed. Yesterday, the Senate debated its renewal. Several Senators -
Democrats Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden of Oregon along with Kentucky
GOP Senator Rand Paul - each attempted to attach amendments to the law
simply to provide some modest amounts of transparency and oversight to
ensure that the government's warrantless eavesdropping powers were
constrained and checked from abuse.
Just consider how modest these amendments were. Along with
Democratic Sen. Mark Udall of Colorado, Sen. Wyden has spent two years
warning Americans that the government's eavesdropping powers are being
interpreted (by secret court decisions and the Executive Branch) far more
broadly than they would ever suspect, and that, as a result, these
eavesdropping powers are being applied far more invasively and
extensively than is commonly understood.
As a result, Wyden yesterday had two amendments: one that would
simply require the NSA to give a general estimate of how many
Americans are having their communications intercepted under this law
(information the NSA has steadfastly refused to provide), and another
which would state that the NSA is barred from eavesdropping on
Americans on US soil without a warrant. Merkley's amendment would
compel the public release of secret judicial rulings from the FISA court
which purport to interpret the scope of the eavesdropping law on the

ground that "secret law is inconsistent with democratic governance"; the
Obama administration has refused to release a single such opinion even
though the court, "on at least one occasion", found that the government
was violating the Fourth Amendment in how it was using the law to
eavesdrop on Americans.
But the Obama White House opposed all amendments, demanding a
"clean" renewal of the law without any oversight or transparency reforms.
Earlier this month, the GOP-led House complied by passing a reform-free
version of the law's renewal, and sent the bill Obama wanted to the Senate,
where it was debated yesterday afternoon.
The Democratic Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne
Feinstein, took the lead in attacking Wyden, Merkley, Udall and Paul with
the most foul Cheneyite accusations, and demanded renewal of the FISA
law without any reforms. And then predictably, in virtually identical 37-54
votes, Feinstein and her conservative-Democratic comrades joined with
virtually the entire GOP caucus (except for three Senators: Paul, Mike Lee
and Dean Heller) to reject each one of the proposed amendments and thus
give Obama exactly what he demanded: reform-free renewal of the law
(while a few Democratic Senators have displayed genuine, sustained
commitment to these issues, most Democrats who voted against FISA
renewal yesterday did so symbolically and half-heartedly, knowing and
not caring that they would lose as evidenced by the lack of an attempted
filibuster). Read More
Quote of the Day:
In other words, Obama successfully relied on Senate
Republicans (the ones his supporters depict as the Root of
All Evil) along with a dozen of the most militaristic
Democrats to ensure that he can continue to eavesdrop on
Americans without any warrants, transparency or real
oversight. That's the standard coalition that has spent the
last four years extending Bush/Cheney theories, eroding core
liberties and entrenching endless militarism: Obama + the

GOP caucus + Feinstein-type Democrats. As Michelle
Richardson, the ACLU's legislative counsel, put it to the
Huffington Post: "I bet [Bush] is laughing his ass off." —
GOP and Feinstein join to fulfill Obama's demand for
renewed warrantless eavesdropping
Image of the Day:
It is hard to look at these photos and not be reminded of events in Europe fifty years later.
The Millenarian Ghost Dance and Massacre at Wounded Knee
Videos of the Day:
End Wall Street’s Wars!
Occupy Wall Street!
Occupy Wall Street is the Only Organization
That Identifies The Enemy —

The 1% That Own and Control The Wealth!
1960s The Realist — One Nation Under God/1%
(Unlike The Trade Union Misleaders
Nor The Misleaders Of The Oppressed
Who Strive To Be In ‘Partnership’ With The 1%)
(Unlike The Trade Union Misleaders
Nor The Misleaders Of The Oppressed
Who Strive To Be In ‘Partnership’ With The 1%)
1960s The Realist — One Nation Under God/1%
Occupy Wall Street — ‘We Are The 99%’
The resistance continues at Liberty Square
U.S.:
Chicago Teachers File Federal Lawsuit Charging CPS with Racial
Discrimination

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: DECEMBER 27, 2012
CONTACT: STEPHANIE GADLIN
STEPHANIEGADLIN@CTULOCAL1.COM
CHICAGO -- The oft-maligned Chicago Public Schools (CPS)
policy of subjecting neighborhood schools to “turnaround” discriminates
against African-American teachers and staff according to a federal lawsuit
filed this week by the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and three public
school educators. More than half of the 347 tenured teachers who were
terminated by CPS as a result of the most recent turnarounds are African-
American. This is the second major legal action on this matter taken by the
union.
The Dec. 26 lawsuit alleges that the process for selecting schools for
turnaround results in schools being selected that have a high percentage of
African-American teachers, compared to schools that performed similarly
but are not selected for any school action. More than 50 percent of the
tenured teachers terminated as a result of the most recent turnarounds were
African American, despite making up less than 30 percent of the tenured
teaching staff at CPS, and 35 percent of the tenured teacher population in
the poor performing schools.
The complaint, a potential class action first filed with the Equal
Employment Opportunity Commission in August by the CTU and teachers
Donald L. Garrett Jr., Robert Green and Vivonell Brown Jr., challenges
termination by virtue of the Chicago Board of Education’s policy and
practice in selecting 10 South and West side schools for turnaround in
February 2012—effective June 2012.
“While no one wins when jobs are lost, to disproportionately affect a
particular segment of the population— whether intentional or not—
indicates a glaring oversight and lack of concern for what the loss of jobs
does to an individual and their community,” said CTU President Karen GJ
Lewis.
Most of the district’s African-American teachers are employed in
schools on the South and West sides, where school closings and teacher
layoffs have been prevalent since 2001. In the last six years, 26 schools
have been reconstituted, or become turnaround schools, where all faculty

and staff and dismissed and replaced. Dismissals are handed down
regardless of qualifications or experience, and are followed by a CPS
selection process to re-staff the school.
“CPS terminates every single employee when it subjects a
neighborhood school to ‘turnaround,’ regardless of qualifications and
experience,” said attorney Robin Potter. “The inequity of the most recent
‘turnarounds’ is not merely perception but a reality.”
Approximately 90 percent of students in CPS’s 578 non-charter
schools are minorities. Forty-two percent of these students are identified
as African-American, but the African-American teaching population has
gradually declined in recent years, from 40.6 percent in 2000 to 29.6
percent in 2010.
It should be noted that once CPS “turns around a school,” one of two
operators are given control over the school—either the CPS Office of
School Improvement or the Academy for Urban School Leadership. Under
both operators, schools remain subject to the terms of the CTU labor
agreement, CPS policies and Board rules. The operators are also
responsible for the hiring process to re-staff the school.
The Board of Education approved the turnaround of 10 schools in
February 2012, stating that each of the schools was selected because of its
alleged poor performance. Each of these schools was located on the South
or West sides of the city, where the student and teacher populations are
predominantly minority.
The school district has yet to release any information on how these 10
schools were chosen from over 180 allegedly poor performing schools in
the CPS system. The Board has been roundly criticized for its lack of
transparency and published criteria in selecting schools for turnaround. In
fact, the Chicago Educational Facilities Task Force, a statutorily-created
oversight group, called for a complete halt of turnarounds and other school
action, saying, “CPS’s historic and continuing lack of transparency and
evidence-based criteria for decisions resulted in the pervasive climate of
public suspicion about what drives CPS to take school actions and allocate
resources, often in ways perceived to be highly inequitable.”

The federal lawsuit seeks relief for all teachers affected by the 2012
and any future turnarounds—including reinstatement and damages—and
importantly, an immediate moratorium on turnarounds and the
appointment of an independent monitor to oversee any future turnarounds,
should any occur or be permitted.
LINKS TO LEGAL DOCUMENTS: CTU vs. Board of
Education: Turnarounds and Race Class Action
U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Filing
CPS Turnarounds: 2006 to present
From the Lakota to Gaza: The Deep Wound of Wounded Knee
by
Johnny Barber
December 29 th marks the 122 nd anniversary of the Massacre at
Wounded Knee. It is a story that remains fresh in the lives of many
indigenous peoples across America. Each generation is taught to never
forget.
In 1891, reviewing the history leading up to the massacre,
Commissioner of Indian Affairs Thomas Morgan said,
“It is hard to overestimate the magnitude of the calamity which
happened to the Sioux people by the sudden disappearance of the buffalo.
The boundless range was to be abandoned for the circumscribed
reservation, and abundance of plenty to be supplanted by limited and
decreasing government subsistence and supplies. Under these
circumstances it is not in human nature not to be discontented and restless,
even turbulent and violent.”
Commissioner Morgan was not empathetic about the plight of the
indigenous people. He was just stating facts. One year prior to the
massacre, in Oct 1889, he issued a policy paper stating his convictions
regarding the native population.
“The Indians must conform to “the white man’s ways,” peaceably if
they will, forcibly if they must. They must adjust themselves to their
environment, and conform their mode of living substantially to our
civilization. This civilization may not be the best possible, but it is the best

the Indians can get. They cannot escape it, and must either conform to it or
be crushed by it. The tribal relations should be broken up, socialism
destroyed, and the family and the autonomy of the individual substituted.”
The Wounded Knee Massacre is still commonly depicted as a “battle”
that no one can be blamed for, but if blame is assigned it is always made
clear that a Lakota fired the first shot. This is the justification for all that
followed. A century after the murders, Congress issued an apology,
expressing “deep regret” for the events on that day in 1890 when upwards
of 370 men, women, and children were gunned down as they fled for their
lives. But the Wounded Knee Massacre was not an anomaly, nor was it an
accident. Wounded Knee is the entire history of indigenous peoples
relationship with Imperialism made manifest in a single event.
“I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now
from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and
children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as
when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else
died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s
dream died there. It was a beautiful dream.” Black Elk.
The ancestors of the victims commemorate the massacre in order to
honor those who have fallen and to foster healing of their still devastated
communities. The ancestors of the perpetrators ignore inflicting the wound
and the wound festers.
From Wounded Knee, where just days after the massacre a young
newspaper editor named Frank Baum (later to become famous for the
children’s story “The Wizard of Oz”) opined, “The Pioneer has before
declared that our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the
Indians. Having wronged them for centuries, we had better, in order to
protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these
untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth.“
To Vietnam, where Lyndon Johnson’s call to win hearts and minds of
the civilian population was corrupted by GI’s to, “When you have them by
the balls their hearts and minds will follow.”

To Iraq, where Madeline Albright was asked if the deaths of ½
million children during sanctions was worth it, she replied “I think this is a
very hard choice, but the price — we think the price is worth it.”
To Gaza, where Dov Weisglass said, “The idea is to put the
Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.”
To Iran where a new sanctions regime is in place and the state
department claims, “The sanctions are beginning to bite,” and dozens of
places in between, the wound festers.
In each case, the power with the superior military claims that the
occupied and oppressed are dangerous and threaten the very existence of
the state, even as the state starves the population, restricts their every
move and denies them the most basic rights under the guise of
“security”. All attempts by the “enemy” to seek peace are ignored or
derided as “lies” while the theft of land and/or resources continue
unabated. Each time the oppressed demand their rights or dare to strike
back against their oppressors, the oppressor claims that the people are
motivated by hate and seek the annihilation of the state. Negotiations are
viewed as a sign of weakness and are rarely pursued unless they can be
used as a tool to further oppression. The oppressors continually talk about
“pursuing peace” as they systematically destroy any and all opposition.
We kill by starvation, we kill by denying medicine, and we kill by
isolation. When that doesn’t silence dissent of the “malcontents” we do
not hesitate to kill with bullets and bombs. Remember Commissioner
Morgan’s words, “This civilization may not be the best possible, but it is
the best they can get. They cannot escape it, and must either conform to it
or be crushed by it.”
One day we too will be crushed by this flawed concept of
civilization.
The Dahiya doctrine is a military strategy in which the Israeli army
deliberately targets civilian infrastructure as a means of inducing suffering
on the civilian population, making it so difficult to survive that fighting
back or resisting occupation are no longer practical, thereby establishing
deterrence. The doctrine is named after a southern suburb in Beirut with
large apartment blocks. Israeli bombs flattened the entire neighborhood

during the 2006 Lebanon War. But this doctrine is not a modern strategy
for controlling populations. Nor is putting the people of Gaza on a “diet”
new- subjugating an entire population through a combination of poverty,
malnutrition, a struggle over limited resources, and violence is the
American way, adopted by our closest allies, (and “the only democracy in
the Middle East,” with the “most moral army in the world,”) the Israelis.
Dec 27th marks the 4 th anniversary of the beginning of Operation
Cast Lead, (the name derives from a popular Hannukah children’s song
about a dreidel made from cast lead.) During this attack on Gaza, 1,417
people were killed (330 children), 4336 were wounded. 6,400 homes were
destroyed. Hospitals, mosques, the power plant, and the sewage system
were deliberately targeted. Read More
Environment:
Special Report:
IPCC, assessing climate risks, consistently underestimates
Residents of Tumana, in the Philippines, clean up after a 2009 typhoon. The country was
hit with another devastating typhoon in December, 2012. An assessment of projections by
the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change finds the group has consistently
understated the risk posed by climate change. Photo by Audrey N. Carpio/flickr.
Checking 20 years of projections by the foremost global climate
science panel against reality finds that the group has consistently
underestimated the pace and impacts of climate change – with severe
consequences for the public it is tasked to inform.
Sidebar: IPCC predictions: Then versus now
By
Glenn Scherer
The Daily Climate
Across two decades and thousands of pages of reports, the world's
most authoritative voice on climate science has consistently understated

the rate and intensity of climate change and the danger those impacts
represent, say a growing number of studies on the topic.
We're underestimating what it means for the future and
what we should be planning for. — Kevin Trenberth, National
Center for Atmospheric Research
This conservative bias, say some scientists, could have significant
political implications, as reports from the group – the U.N.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – influence policy and
planning decisions worldwide, from national governments down to local
town councils.
As the latest round of United Nations climate talks in Doha wrap up
this week, climate experts warn that the IPCC's failure to adequately
project the threats that rising global carbon emissions represent has serious
consequences: The IPCC’s overly conservative reading of the science,
they say, means governments and the public could be blindsided by the
rapid onset of the flooding, extreme storms, drought, and other impacts
associated with catastrophic global warming.
"We're underestimating the fact that climate change is rearing its
head," said Kevin Trenberth, head of the climate analysis section at the
National Center for Atmospheric Research and a lead author of key
sections of the 2001 and 2007 IPCC reports. "And we're underestimating
the role of humans, and this means we're underestimating what it means
for the future and what we should be planning for."
Underplaying the intensity
A comparison of past IPCC predictions against 22 years of weather
data and the latest climate science find that the IPCC has consistently
underplayed the intensity of global warming in each of its four major
reports released since 1990.

The drastic decline of summer Arctic sea ice is one recent example:
In the 2007 report, the IPCC concluded the Arctic would not lose its
summer ice before 2070 at the earliest. But the ice pack has shrunk far
faster than any scenario scientists felt policymakers should consider; now
researchers say the region could see ice-free summers within 20 years.
Sea-level rise is another. In its 2001 report, the IPCC predicted an
annual sea-level rise of less than 2 millimeters per year. But from 1993
through 2006, the oceans actually rose 3.3 millimeters per year, more than
50 percent above that projection.
Some climate researchers also worry that recent institutional changes
could accentuate the organization's conservative bias in the fifth IPCC
assessment, to be released in parts starting in September 2013.
The tendency to underplay climate impacts needs to be recognized,
conclude the authors of a recent paper exploring this bias. Failure to do so,
they wrote in their study published last month in the journal Global
Environmental Change, "could prevent the full recognition, articulation
and acknowledgement of dramatic natural phenomena that may in fact be
occurring."
Conservative bias
The mandate of IPCC is to assess where there is
consensus, and to reflect the full diversity of views that are
scientifically valid where there isn't.
— Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, IPCC
The conservative bias stems from several sources, scientists say. Part
can be attributed to science's aversion to drama and dramatic conclusions:
So-called outlier events – results at far ends of the spectrum – are often

pruned. Such controversial findings require years of painstaking,
independent verification.
Yet some events in nature are dramatic, conclude University of
California, San Diego, history and science professor Naomi Oreskes and
Princeton University geosciences professor Michael Oppenheimer, coauthors
of the study looking at the IPCC's bias. "If the drama arises
primarily from social, political or economic impacts," they wrote, "then it
is crucial that the associated risk be understood fully, and not discounted.”
IPCC Vice-Chair Jean-Pascal van Ypersele countered that, "the
mandate of IPCC is to assess where there is consensus, and to reflect the
full diversity of views that are scientifically valid where there isn't." He
conceded that by requiring teams of authors to agree upon a report's text,
the IPCC process is inherently conservative. Getting the balance right, he
said in an e-mail, is "not always easy."
Oreskes, Oppenheimer and their co-authors argue the conservative
bias pervades all of climate science. Read More
Kate Sinding’s Blog
"Promised Land" powerfully highlights what's at stake for
communities in fracking's path
Posted December 28, 2012 by Kate Sinding in Curbing Pollution,
Health and the Environment
Tags: fracking, gasdrilling, hydraulicfracturing, hydrofracking,
marcellus, naturalgas, newyork, pennsylvania, promisedlandmovie
I was fortunate to have the chance last week to attend an early
screening of "Promised Land," the compelling new fracking
movie starring Matt Damon, Frances MacDormand and John Krasinski
and directed by Gus Van Sant. The film, which opens in selected cities
today and nationwide on January 4th, effectively highlights the very real

costs that communities confront when fracking comes to town – costs to
their essential character and quality of life.
“Promised Land” is set in a small farming town that is almost
certainly meant to be in Pennsylvania, where it was filmed. Pennsylvania
is a hotbed of fracking activity and has become the poster child for all that
can go wrong when a state decides to let the frackers in before fully
considering the risks and putting safeguards in place.
But “Promised Land” isn’t really about that aspect of fracking –
important as it is. Instead, the movie is concerned with the Hobson’s
choice that many communities face when the oil and gas industry comes to
town. Is the prospect of speculative economic gain worth sacrificing your
hometown’s traditional rural/agricultural character and bucolic
landscapes? Because no matter where one stands in regards to the debate
about fracking’s potential environmental and public health threats, there is
no question that oil and gas development is a heavy industrial activity –
one exemplified by extraordinary levels of heavy truck traffic, noise, dust
and visual assaults. It is also one accompanied by a significant influx of
transient out-of-state workers, and frequently characterized by the
standard boom-and-bust cycles of fossil fuel development.
These are not impacts that can be addressed through better rules or
tighter enforcement by state governments (though both are certainly
necessary to address the wide range of environmental and health threats
posed by fracking). Rather, these community impacts are inherent in the
nature of oil and gas development.
As “Promised Land” powerfully depicts on the strength of the actors'
performances and gorgeous cinematography, all of this adds up to a choice
for the towns in fracking’s path as to whether to take a gamble on what is,
inevitably, an utterly transformational industry.
This is not to deny that many communities are, like the one
represented in the film, facing severe economic straits. But what we as a
society should be giving such communities are real options for clean,
long-term, stable economic growth, such as policies that revitalize
sustainable agriculture and encourage renewable energy development.

The story “Promised Land” tells is why NRDC created the
Community Fracking Defense Project, which is designed to help provide
localities with the legal tools they need to make their own decisions about
whether to accept fracking’s inescapable effects. Unlike the town
portrayed in the film, communities in most states – including Pennsylvania
– don’t currently have the right to just say no to fracking. New York, so
far, is a notable example, and communities in Colorado and Ohio have
recently undertaken actions in an effort to establish their rights to do so.
NRDC, working with our local partners, is fighting to expand, enhance
and protect the rights of communities to opt out of fracking, or at the least
to limit where and how it occurs.
At the end of the day, what “Promised Land” is about is a
fundamental, and much-coveted, American principle – that of a
community’s right to self-determination. The oil and gas industry simply
should not be allowed the unique power it has been given to trample on
that right.
Amy Mall’s Blog
Another risk to landowners: liens for an oil and gas company's unpaid
bills
Posted December 29, 2012 by Amy Mall in Health and the
Environment
Tags: fracking, gasdrilling, hydraulicfracturing, hydrofracking,
oilandgas
There is a scathing new report out from Reuters about the finances of
Chesapeake Energy Corporation. Chesapeake is being sued by landowners
and contractors. The article outlines Chesapeake's financial challenges.
What really caught me eye, however, was the fact that contractors
who aren't being paid by Chesapeake are now placing liens on the
properties of landowners who leased their oil and gas rights. Of course
some mineral owners make a lot of money from leasing their oil and gas
rights. But many don't. As we've blogged about before, mineral owners
may be victims of air pollution and water contamination, predatory leases,
destruction of their property and property values, and risks to their

mortgages, title insurance and homeowner's insurance-- as are their
neighbors. But now there is apparently another risk to leasing one's
minerals.
According to Reuters, companies are placing liens for unpaid bills
against some property owners who signed leases with Chesapeake. The
report quote an attorney as saying that "such liens could interfere with an
owner's ability to sell the property." Reuters spoke to one property owner
who was never even informed about the lien until he found out about it
from the Reuters reporter.
Amy Mall’s Blog
Oil and gas industry takes a toll on local health care providers
Posted December 28, 2012 by Amy Mall in Health and the
Environment
Tags: fracking, gasdrilling, hydraulicfracturing, hydrofracking,
marcellus, oilandgas, pennsylvania, shale
In addition to the environmental impacts of oil and gas production,
including dangerous air and water contamination and destruction of
wildlife habitat, NRDC is concerned about other impacts to communities
that have been documented, such as increased crime, infrastructure
burdens that require massive repair, and the growing demand for social
and municipal services. Another serious impact is a large increase in the
need for health care services. Communities with oil and gas development
can see increased emergency room visits in particular, from traffic and
occupational accidents.
A recent report from Tioga County, Pennsylvania, tells of a
community-owned not-for-profit hospital that is experiencing its first
budget loss in five years, due to workers in the oil and gas industry who do
not have health insurance. According to the hospital's CEO, "many
subcontractors attracted to the area’s Marcellus Shale drilling boom do not
cover employees." Not only should the oil and gas industry clean up its
environmental mess, but it should also provide health care insurance to its
workers so that taxpayers or those who are insured do not foot the bill.
The industry can afford it.

Mice carry toxic chemicals to wildlife, alliance says
Toxic rats, mice spur rodenticide battle
Peter Fimrite
Poisoned rats and mice are spreading toxic chemicals into the
ecosystem despite widespread pressure from federal regulators, wildlife
officials and environmentalists to remove the most harmful rodenticides
from store shelves.
A coalition of environmental and public health groups urged state
regulators this month to reject 2013 registration renewals for the
dangerous pesticides known as brodifacoum, bromadiolone, difethialone
and difenacoum.
The lethal compounds, which are known as second-generation
anticoagulants, interfere with blood clotting, resulting in uncontrollable
bleeding and a slow, agonizing death, according to the demand letter
signed by the Center for Biological Diversity, Californians for Pesticide
Reform, Earthjustice and the American Bird Conservancy.
The coalition wants the California Department of Pesticide
Regulation to end the use of the rodenticides, which toxics experts say can
also kill hawks, owls, foxes, mountain lions and other predators that
capture poisoned rodents or scavenge their contaminated carcasses.
Pets, children seen at risk
The rodenticides have also been linked to the poisoning of pets and
children, said attorney Jonathan Evans, the toxics and endangered species
campaign director for the Center for Biological Diversity.
"There is no reasonable justification to have the worst of the worst
toxic rat poisons still on the market," Evans said, "especially since there is
a range of other options."
Rats and mice can do a lot of damage to electrical systems, tubing,
upholstery and carpets when left unchecked, but Evans said owl boxes
work better than poisons in getting rid of the ravenous rodents. A family of
barn owls can gobble between 3,000 and 5,000 of the vermin in a year,
according to wildlife experts.

Plastic rat boxes and old-fashioned snap and electric traps are also
preferable to poisoning, he said, because they do not allow the pointynosed
critters to run off somewhere and contaminate other species.
The demand letter, which was sent to Ann Prichard, the state's
pesticide registration chief, comes one year after the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency declared it would begin the process of banning lethal
anticoagulants used in rodent control products. The EPA move came
shortly after the California Department of Fish and Game asked state
regulators to designate second-generation anticoagulant rodenticides
restricted materials.
Effects on wildlife
Despite unanimous concern, no new statewide regulations have been
adopted and three companies - Reckitt Benckiser, which makes D-Con;
the Spectrum Group division of United Industries Corp., which makes Hot
Shot and Rid-a-Rat; and Liphatech Inc., which makes Generation rodent
control products - still use toxic ingredients.
Lea Brooks, the spokeswoman for the Department of Pesticide
Regulation, said staff scientists have prepared a draft analysis of the effect
rodenticides in bait products have on wildlife. The study, which is under
review by University of California scientists, is expected to be completed
in February.
"We have been evaluating rodenticide for some time at the request of
the Department of Fish and Game," Brooks said. State pesticide regulators
are "very concerned about the effect of these rodenticides on wildlife.
Once the analysis has been finalized, we will consider what additional
measures are needed to protect wildlife from the effect of these products."
Recent studies by UC researchers found second-generation
anticoagulants in 70 percent of the mammals and 68 percent of the birds
that were examined. Another study found rodenticide contamination in 75
percent of the Pacific fishers that were tested, Evans said.
Fish and Game biologists have documented poisonings in raptors and
several mammals, including the endangered San Joaquin kit fox. Mountain
lions and bobcats in the Santa Monica Mountains in Southern California

have died from poisoning, according to biologists with the National Park
Service.
A study analyzing owls found dead in British Columbia and the
Yukon Territory showed that nearly three-quarters of the birds had
rodenticides in their livers.
Natural controls
"The sick and disoriented rodents become easy prey for a hungry
raptor that can consume six mice in one night," said Cynthia Palmer, the
pesticides program manager for the American Bird Conservancy. "By
killing owls and hawks, those who use these secondary poisons are
destroying nature's own rodent-control system."
The pesticide issue is huge in the Bay Area, where an estimated 10
million pounds of pesticides are used every year, much of it in
rodenticides. State and federal pesticide regulators have said that as many
as 15,000 children under age 6 are accidentally exposed to rat poisons
nationwide each year, a disproportionate number from lowincome
families.
Legal obligation
The Center for Biological Diversity co-filed a lawsuit in 2011
accusing the EPA of failing to prevent the pesticide poisonings of more
than 200 endangered and threatened species, including the California
condor. The plaintiffs alleged that EPA officials consistently ignored their
obligation under the Endangered Species Act to consult with the U.S. Fish
and Wildlife Service to determine whether pesticides being considered for
registration were harming listed species or their habitats.
The EPA is moving forward with its proposed rodenticide
restrictions, but the process is long and the pesticide companies are
fighting. With no state or federal regulations to fall back on, the San
Francisco Department of Environment began a "Don't Take the Bait"
program urging city businesses and residents not to buy or sell harmful rat
poisons, but the initiative has no teeth.
"It's been over a year now, and these products are still on the
shelves," Evans said. "It's time to stop the bleeding and pull these poisons
from the shelves."

Fracking:
Nuclear Fallout: Ongoing Tragedy/Disaster In Japan:
EnergyNews:
11:16 AM EST on December 29th, 2012 | Leave a comment
CNN: Major health issues in ill US Navy sailors who were exposed to
Fukushima radiation -Attorney
10:02 AM EST on December 29th, 2012 | One comment
M5 hits Fukushima — Webcam shows intensity 4 quake rattling plant
(VIDEO)
09:28 AM EST on December 29th, 2012 | One comment
TV: US sailors having traits associated with radiation poisoning after
Japan operation — Bleeding from rectum — Baby with birth defects
— Cancer — Thyroid problems (VIDEO)
Ongoing Gulf of Mexico Oil Disaster:
Oil Spill Attorney Stuart Smith’s Blog:
Black Liberation/Civil Rights:
Labor:
Economy:
World:
Syrian rebels sidetracked by scramble for spoils of war

Looting, feuds and divided loyalties threaten to destroy unity of
fighters as war enters new phase
Photograph: Ghaith Abdul-Ahad
Syrians carry a desk out of a school in the Saif al-Dawla district of Aleppo.
It wasn't the government that killed the Syrian rebel commander Abu
Jameel. It was the fight for his loot. The motive for his murder lay in a
great warehouse in Aleppo which his unit had captured a week before. The
building had been full of rolled steel, which was seized by the fighters as
spoils of war.
But squabbling developed over who would take the greater share of
the loot and a feud developed between commanders. Threats and counterthreats
ensued over the following days.
Abu Jameel survived one assassination attempt when his car was
fired on. A few days later his enemies attacked again, and this time they
were successful. His bullet-riddled body was found, handcuffed, in an
alley in the town of al-Bab.
Captain Hussam, of the Aleppo military council, said: "If he had died
fighting I would say it was fine, he was a rebel and a mujahid and this is
what he had set out to do. But to be killed because of a feud over loot is a
disaster for the revolution.
"It is extremely sad. There is not one government institution or
warehouse left standing in Aleppo. Everything has been looted.
Everything is gone."
Captured government vehicles and weapons have been crucial to the
rebels since the start of the conflict, but according to Hussam and other

commanders, and fighters interviewed by the Guardian over a fortnight in
northern Syria, a new phase has been reached in the war. Looting has
become a way of life.
"Spoils" have now become the main drive for many units as battalion
commanders seek to increase their power.
The problem is particularly pronounced in Aleppo, according to Abu
Ismael, a young lieutenant from a wealthy family, who ran a successful
business before joining the fight against Bashar al-Assad.
Many of the battalions that entered the city in the summer of this year
came from the countryside, he said. They were poor peasants who carried
with them centuries-old grudges towards the wealthier Aleppans.
There was also a lingering feeling that the city where businesses had
been exploiting cheap peasant labour for several decades had not risen up
quickly enough against the Assads. "The rebels wanted to take revenge on
the people of Aleppo because they felt that we had betrayed them, but they
forgot that most of the people of Aleppo are merchants and traders and a
merchant will pay money to get rid of his problem," Abu Ismael said.
"Even as the rest of Syria was gripped by revolution, the Aleppans said,
why should we destroy our business and waste our money?"
When the rebels entered the city and started looting the factories, a
source of money dried up.
"In the first month and a half the rebels were really a united
revolutionary group," Abu Ismael said. "But now they are different. There
are those who are here only to loot and make money, and some still fight."
Did Abu Ismael's unit loot? "Of course. How do you think we feed the
men? Where do you think we get all our sugar, for example?"
In the chaotic economics of the war, everything has become a
commodity. Abu Ismael's unit, for example, took a supply of diesel from a
school compound, and every day his unit exchanges a few jerrycans of the
precious liquid for bread.
Because Abu Ismael has a supply of food and fuel his battalion is
more desirable than others in the sector. Commanders who are unable to
feed their men tend to lose them; they desert and join other groups.

Bullets are equally important. When military installations and
warehouses are looted the battalion that captures ammunition grows by
cannibalising smaller, less well-equipped units that have no bullets to
hand.
In a dark apartment in the Salahuddin neighbourhood of Aleppo we
sat with a group of commanders who were discussing the formation of a
new brigade that would bring their various battalions together. They soon
turned to the topic of loot.
One of the commanders present had led an operation into the
predominantly Kurdish neighbourhood of Ashrafiya in Aleppo, but
according to several fighters who were there the action failed when the
army counterattacked because the rebel support units that were supposed
to reinforce the front instead turned their attention to looting.
"I want to know exactly what you took that day," the commander of a
small unit told the leader of the assault. The commander opened a
notebook to write, while another man held a flashlight above his head. "As
long as one fights while the others are busy collecting loot we can't
advance," he said. "The loot has to be divided equally."
The leader started to list the luxury cars and the weapons his units
had found and taken, while the other commander wrote them down in the
notebook. Some of the cars would be sold back to the owners if they paid
out a hefty ransom.
Outside sponsors
The war in Aleppo is not only funded by what can be appropriated by
the various units, but also by the patronage that they can attract from
sponsors outside Syria, a factor which has also contributed to the myriad
forming and re-forming of units, all of which control individual fiefdoms
in the city.
All of this has fuelled rivalries and ever-shifting allegiances, factors
that have undermined the struggle to defeat the forces of the Syrian
president. Read More
Israel arrests 900 Palestinian children in 2012
By

Naif Zaydani
Al Arabiya Haifa
An Israeli soldier stands guard next to three Palestinian boys who
were arrested for throwing stones during clashes in the West Bank
city of Hebron. (AFP)
The Palestinian Authority is currently looking into the possibility of
filing a complaint to the International Criminal Court (ICC) against Israel
for arresting 900 Palestinian children in 2012.
In taking such an action, Palestine will be using its newly-acquired
rights as an observer state at the United Nations, said Eissa Karakea,
Palestinian Minister of Detainees’ Affairs.
“We need to use the newly gained state status to take measures
against Israel for its crimes especially the arrest, detention, and abuse of
Palestinian children, let alone trying them before military courts,” he told
Al Arabiya.
Karakea added that after being granted observer status, Palestine has
the right to join international human rights organizations and through them
can file complaints against Israel.
“Israel is violating the Child Protection Act and all international laws
by subjecting children to such traumatic experiences. The Israeli minister
of security had actually said earlier that Palestinian children have no
immunity.”
According to Karakea, the International Community is already aware
of the crimes committed against Palestinian children.

“Several human rights organizations are launching campaigns and
organizing conferences in solidarity with Palestinian children and are
spreading testimonials by the victims, but this is not enough. We need to
take further steps.”
The minister’s statement followed a report issued by the Ministry of
Detainees Affairs, which revealed that the number of Palestinian children
arrested by Israeli authorities has jumped from 700 in 2011 to 900 in the
present year.
According to the report, those children are usually mistreated and
brutally beaten during detention in order to admit to crimes they have not
committed and to tell on their friends and acquaintances who allegedly
also committed crimes that threaten Israel’s security.
The report added that those children are interrogated for long hours
while their hands and feet are tied and sometimes they are blindfolded. In
some interrogation centers, the report noted, children are left for hours
under the rain. In most cases, the children are subjected to various forms
of collective punishment.
The detainees are deprived of basic rights like seeing their families
and they are also not allowed to sit with psychiatrists. They are often
detained with adult prisoners and subjected to verbal, physical, and sexual
abuse by fellow inmates.
Could Cuba be back on the US tourist schedule?
Simon Calder

For more than 50 years American airlines have been banned from
flying to Cuba because of Washington’s strict embargo against commercial
dealings with its Communist foe.
But now there are hopes that the sanctions could be eased – and
direct flights resume – thanks to a deal between Sir Richard Branson’s
airline and the American carrier, Delta.
Virgin Atlantic is currently 49 per cent owned by Singapore Airlines.
Delta, the world’s biggest carrier, is bidding for that stake. If and when
almost half the airline becomes US-owned, Virgin will continue with its
thrice-weekly jumbo jet from Gatwick to Cuba. A spokeswoman for
Virgin Atlantic said: “We have no plans to cancel flying to Havana”.
At Delta’s Atlanta headquarters, the planned minority ownership of
an airline serving Cuba is not regarded as an issue according to a
spokesman for the airline. The confidence that the Virgin’s Havana
connection will continue has led to speculation that the Obama
administration is preparing to ease the long-standing embargo.
Chris Parrott, director of the specialist travel firm, Journey Latin
America, said: “One would imagine that Delta has spoken to people in
power rather than just going ahead on a commercial basis”. Trying to book
a flight to Havana on a US-owned website is currently either frustrating or
amusing, depending on your degree of impatience. When you tap in
“Havana” as your destination, Travelocity.co.uk instructs “Verify the
location is a valid airport or city”.

Neither does Expedia.co.uk recognise the Cuban capital, offering 10
alternatives airports “with a similar name” – all of them scattered across
the state of Hawaii.
The sanctions are so restrictive that Boots travel insurance, which is
underwritten by an American-owned company, does not cover British
visitors to Cuba. And at one stage the giant tour operator, Thomson,
abandoned its entire UK-Cuba programme because of fears that its
directors might be barred from the USA.
Neil Taylor, who pioneered travel to Cuba in the 1970s for Regent
Holidays, said two-centre holidays comprising the island and Florida
would appeal to British travellers: “Miami and the Florida Keys, would
offer a total contrast to Cuba. Boat travel would be the way to approach
Havana – and then the 1950s will have well and truly returned.
“Ernest Hemingway can perhaps be seen as the pioneer for such a
sojourn, having kept a house in Key West and Havana. Both are now
museums.”
Health, Education, Science and Welfare:
Daily News Digest December 29, 2012
Videos of the Day:
Al Jazeera video on UN fake cholera aid for Haiti
Reality Check: The Next Financial Crisis: The calm before the storm?
Images of the Day:

Occupy Wall Street's March Against Police Brutality
The Deceptive Framing of the Debate on the Deficit
Quote of the Day:
. . . In reality, the only violence at the hundreds of
Occupy movement actions during late 2011 and early 2012
across the US, from New York to Boston to Los Angeles to
Seattle, was perpetrated by heavily armed police. Occupy
activists were the victims, not the perpetrators of this
violence and criminal behavior.

Now it turns out that when some as yet unidentified
group or organization — possibly even one affiliated with
banking interests for all we know — actually plotted to
assassinate Occupy activists and leaders, those same
intelligence and national, state and local police agencies,
instead of protecting the public, turned their backs and did
nothing about it. . . . — FBI Ignored Deadly Threat to
Occupiers: US Intelligence Machine Instead Plotted with
Bankers to Attack Protest Movement
End Wall Street’s Wars!
Occupy Wall Street!
Occupy Wall Street is the Only Organization
That Identifies The Enemy —
The 1% That Own and Control The Wealth!
1960s The Realist — One Nation Under God/1%
(Unlike The Trade Union Misleaders
Nor The Misleaders Of The Oppressed
Who Strive To Be In ‘Partnership’ With The 1%)
(Unlike The Trade Union Misleaders
Nor The Misleaders Of The Oppressed
Who Strive To Be In ‘Partnership’ With The 1%)
1960s The Realist — One Nation Under God/1%
FBI Ignored Deadly Threat to Occupiers: US Intelligence Machine
Instead Plotted with Bankers to Attack Protest Movement

y
Dave Lindorff
NYPD cops became Wall Street's private army during the Occupy Wall Street
campaign, even getting paid by the banks on the side
New documents obtained from the FBI and the Department of
Homeland Security by the Partnership for Civil Justice and released this
past week show that the FBI and other intelligence and law enforcement
agencies began a campaign of monitoring, spying and disrupting the
Occupy Movement at least two months before the first occupation actions
began in late September 2011.
As early as August, while acknowledging that the incipient Occupy
Movement was “peaceful” in nature, federal, state and local officials from
the FBI, the DHS and the many Fusion Centers and Joint Terrorism Task
Force centers around the country were meeting with local financial
institutions and their private security organizations to plot out a strategy
for countering the Occupy Movement’s campaign.
Interestingly, one document obtained by PCJ from the Houston FBI
office refers to what appears to have been a plan by some group, the name
of which is blacked out in the released document, to determine who the
leaders were of the Occupy Movement in Houston, and then to assassinate
them with “suppressed” sniper rifles, meaning sniper rifles equipped with
silencers.
The chilling document in question reads as follows:
“One identified BLANK as of October planned to engage in sniper
attacks against protesters in Houston, Texas if deemed necessary. An
identified BLANK had received intelligence that indicated the protesters

in New York and Seattle planned similar protests in Houston, Dallas, San
Antonio and Austin, Texas. BLANK planned to gather intelligence against
the leaders of the protest group and obtain photographs, then formulate a
plan to kill the leadership by suppressed sniper rifles.”
The wording does not sound like it’s some crank Tea Party faction
they’re talking about — especially the words “deemed necessary” and the
reference to “gathering intelligence against the leaders of the protest
group.” Fortunately, in any case, no such assassination campaign
materialized in Houston or anywhere else during the wave of Occupy
actions across the country, but at the same time, there were never any
arrests of whatever organization or individuals that the FBI clearly knew
to be planning such a terrorist action against the Occupy activists.
Commenting on this peculiar lack of action by the FBI and other
national anti-terrorist organizations, Partnership for Civil Justice executive
director Maya Verheyden-Hilliard says, “The documents we’ve obtained
show that the FBI was acting as a private intelligence and protective
agency for Wall Street and the banks against people who are engaged in
First Amendment-protected free speech activities. Yet here you had
a real terrorist threat, which, if the FBI were serious about combating and
preventing terrorism it would have acted upon, and it did nothing!”
Indeed, since 9-11, there have been a number of prominent arrests
and trials and even convictions of people who were alleged to have merely
talked with FBI informants about some fanciful terror plot. These arrests
are typically prominently publicized to the media, with the perps trotted
out in front of cameras during the arrests. There was nothing like this done
in the above case, though. No arrests, no publicity. The only reason we
know about it at all was that the FBI was required to release its files on the
bureau’s monitoring of the Occupy Movement, and this particular
document surfaced among the pages that were released.
Could the FBI have been so close to the plotters, whoever they are,
that it felt confident it could simply instruct them to call off their plan —
or put it on hold? We can’t know from the heavily redacted documents that
have thus far been pried loose from the bureau. But it would not be that
surprising if it turns out there is some link between the would-be assassins

and the government. It would just be Nixon’s COINTELPRO all over
again, where local police were killing activists as part of a nationally
organized campaign.
Verheyden-Hilliard says that the latest documents do show that “Well
before Zuccotti Park was occupied and before the first protest began on
Wall Street, you had the FBI meeting with leaders of the New York Stock
Exchange and with the security organizations of the Wall Street banks to
develop a coordinated strategy for dealing with the Occupy protests.”
She says,
“The other thing that is apparent from these latest documents is the
scope of the FBI’s effort against the Occupy Movement. It’s not an
anomaly at one or two FBI district offices. It’s how they’re doing business.
And all through this period, they are commenting in their communications
that the movement’s actions are peaceful. Yet the subject lines in the
memos classify them as relating to counter-terrorism or anti-crime
actions.”
She adds,
“If you look at how the US government viewed the demonstrations of
the Arab Spring, and particularly the demonstrations against Mubarak in
Tahrir Square in Cairo, they were concerned about the government using
police against the demonstrators, who were said to be exercising their
democratic right to protest. Only in America is such protest considered to
be terrorist activity.”
The contradiction between the US intelligence and law-enforcement
response to the Occupy Movement and those same agencies‘ assessment
of the actual threat posed by Occupy activists is evident in a publication
by the National Protection and Programs Directorate (NPPD), a unit of the
Department of Homeland Security. That document, published in October
2011, as the Occupy Movement was just taking off, refers to Occupy Wall
Street as “a loose coalition of ongoing peaceful protests taking place in
cities across the U.S.”
Yet it also states:
“Mass gatherings associates with public protest movements can have
disruptive effects on transportation, commercial and government services,

especially when staged in major metropolitan areas. Large scale
demonstrations also carry the potential for violence, presenting a
significant challenge for law-enforcement.”
In reality, the only violence at the hundreds of Occupy movement
actions during late 2011 and early 2012 across the US, from New York to
Boston to Los Angeles to Seattle, was perpetrated by heavily armed
police. Occupy activists were the victims, not the perpetrators of this
violence and criminal behavior.
Now it turns out that when some as yet unidentified group or
organization — possibly even one affiliated with banking interests for all
we know — actually plotted to assassinate Occupy activists and leaders,
those same intelligence and national, state and local police agencies,
instead of protecting the public, turned their backs and did nothing about
it.
Perhaps the very “loose coalition” nature of the Occupy Movement,
which has consciously avoided having or following leaders, in the end
saved it from attack, as the plotters with their sniper rifles never were able
to ascertain who their targets should be.
Occupy Wall Street — ‘We Are The 99%’
The resistance continues at Liberty Square
U.S.:
Is The USA Democratic?
Not If You Do Not Have The Right To Protest!:
Activists voice dismay as
Senate renews government surveillance measure
Two amendments that would have provided basic oversight for US
government's warrantless surveillance program
Tom McCarthy

An amendment by Ron Wyden (above) would have required the government to estimate
the number of US citizens it had spied on. Photo: Joshua Roberts/Reuters
Civil rights campaigners voiced dismay on Friday over the US
Senate's re-authorization of the government's warrantless surveillance
program, and the defeat of two amendments that would have provided for
basic oversight of the eavesdropping.
The Senate voted 73-23 to extend the law, called the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments Act, for five years. The House
of Representatives has already passed the measure, which President
Obama has said he will sign.
But while the program was extended as expected, campaigners saw a
silver lining in that the vote was closer than when the legislation was first
introduced in 2008.
"We're incredibly disappointed, not just that it passed, but that they
rejected some very moderate amendments that wouldn't have interfered
with the collection of intelligence," said Michelle Richardson, an ACLU
expert on surveillance issues.
An amendment by senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon would have
required the secret court that oversees surveillance requests to disclose
"important rulings of law." It failed 37-54. An amendment by Merkley's
fellow Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden would have required the government
to estimate the number of US citizens it had spied on. It fell by a narrower
margin, 43-52.
"We're actually pleased that so many [Senate] members today want
more transparency," Richardson said, pointing to the 43 votes for Wyden.

"There were more members voting for transparency and accountability
than there were in 2008. The amendments did better this time."
The amended FISA Act was passed in 2008 to retroactively cover
Bush-era domestic surveillance. The law permits the National Security
Agency to track communication between foreign targets and people inside
the United States without obtaining a warrant. Critics say it violates fourth
amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. NSA
whistleblower Bill Binney has estimated that the agency, under protection
of the law, has "assembled" 20 trillion transactions between US citizens.
Intelligence Committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat
from California, said in debate on the Senate floor that the surveillance
program provides useful intelligence and does not target US citizens. She
opposed both oversight amendments but agreed in principle to release
unclassified summaries of actions taken by the secret court.
The Obama administration has already begun reviewing FISA court
decisions to see what can be released, Richardson said.
"I think we have a long and slow fight on this, but we'll eventually
get there," Richardson said.
Whaddya Know? Professional Economy Wrecker Alan Greenspan Is
at the Heart of the Insidiious 'Fix the Debt' Campaign
Mr. Incompetent rears his ugly head in corporate deficit hawk
coalition.
By
Dean Baker

Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com
Alan Greenspan will go down in history as the person who has
done more damage to the U.S. economy and society that anyone who was
not a foreign enemy. In fact the destruction he wreaked through his
incompetence would also exceed the damage caused by almost all wouldbe
enemies as well.
Greenspan accomplished the remarkable feat as Fed chair of
ignoring the growth of the $8 trillion housing bubble. This bubble could
not have been easier to see if it had been 500 feet high and lit up with huge
neon signs saying "Huge Housing Bubble." But Greenspan insisted the
bubble was not there.
And Greenspan somehow didn't recognize that the collapse of this
massive bubble would devastate the economy. The bubble was generating
over $1 trillion in annual demand through its direct impact on housing
construction and its indirect impact on consumption through the housing
wealth effect. This demand would inevitably disappear when the bubble
burst, leaving a huge hole in demand.
Did Greenspan think that the private sector had some magic
formula to replace this demand? What could he have been thinking or
smoking?
If we had a political debate that was driven by evidence, where the
accuracy of one's past judgements played any role in the credibility
granted their current opinion, then Greenspan would be relegated to the

ole of ranting fool. His opinions on the economy would be given slightly
less credibility than the mumblings of a street drunk.
This is why it would have been worth highlighting the news
contained in a NYT article on the origins of the "Campaign to Fix the
Debt," the corporate financed effort to reduce the deficit. The article tells
readers in passing:
"The Campaign to Fix the Debt started to come together at a salon
dinner held in the backyard of Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of
Virginia, in the fall of 2011. An influential group of economic, political
and business leaders — including the former Federal Reserve chairman
Alan Greenspan and Mark Bertolini, the chief executive of the Aetna
insurance company — huddled in a too-small tent in the pouring rain."
This is such an amazing tidbit that it really should have been the
lead of the article. The person most responsible for wrecking the economy
— and incidentially adding trillions of dollars to the debt — was there at
the founding of the Campaign to Fix the Debt.
Wow, what did Santa get you for Christmas?
How Today’s Fiscal Austerity is Reminiscent of
World War I’s Economic Misunderstandings
America’s Deceptive 2012 Fiscal Cliff
by Michael Hudson
When World War I broke out in August 1914, economists on both
sides forecast that hostilities could not last more than about six months.
Wars had grown so expensive that governments quickly would run out of
money. It seemed that if Germany could not defeat France by springtime,
the Allied and Central Powers would run out of savings and reach what
today is called a fiscal cliff and be forced to negotiate a peace agreement.
But the Great War dragged on for four destructive years. European
governments did what the United States had done after the Civil War
broke out in 1861 when the Treasury printed greenbacks. They paid for
more fighting simply by printing their own money. Their economies did
not buckle and there was no major inflation. That would happen only after
the war ended, as a result of Germany trying to pay reparations in foreign

currency. This is what caused its exchange rate to plunge, raising import
prices and hence domestic prices. The culprit was not government
spending on the war itself (much less on social programs).
But history is written by the victors, and the past generation has seen
the banks and financial sector emerge victorious. Holding the bottom 99%
in debt, the top 1% are now in the process of subsidizing a deceptive
economic theory to persuade voters to pursue policies that benefit the
financial sector at the expense of labor, industry, and democratic
government as we know it.
Wall Street lobbyists blame unemployment and the loss of industrial
competitiveness on government spending and budget deficits – especially
on social programs – and labor’s demand to share in the economy’s rising
productivity. The myth (perhaps we should call it junk economics) is that
(1) governments should not run deficits (at least, not by printing their own
money), because (2) public money creation and high taxes (at lest on the
wealthy) cause prices to rise. The cure for economic malaise (which they
themselves have caused), is said to be less public spending, along with
more tax cuts for the wealthy, who euphemize themselves as “job
creators.” Demanding budget surpluses, bank lobbyists promise that banks
can provide the economy with enough purchasing power to grow. Then,
when this ends in crisis, they insist that austerity can squeeze out enough
income to enable private-sector debts to be paid.
The reality is that when banks load the economy down with debt, this
leaves less to spend on domestic goods and services while driving up
housing prices (and hence the cost of living) with reckless credit creation
on looser lending terms. Yet on top of this debt deflation, bank lobbyists
urge fiscal deflation: budget surpluses rather than pump-priming deficits.
The effect is to further reduce private-sector market demand, shrinking
markets and employment. Governments fall deeper into distress, and are
told to sell off land and natural resources, public enterprises, and other
assets. This creates a lucrative market for bank loans to finance
privatization on credit. This explains why financial lobbyists back the new
buyers’ right to raise the prices they charge for basic needs, creating a
united front to endorse rent extraction. The effect is to enrich the financial

sector owned by the 1% in ways that indebt and privatize the economy at
large – individuals, business and the government itself.
This policy was exposed as destructive in the late 1920s and early
1930s when John Maynard Keynes, Harold Moulton and a few others
countered the claims of Jacques Rueff and Bertil Ohlin that debts of any
magnitude could be paid if governments would impose deep enough
austerity and suffering. This is the doctrine adopted by the International
Monetary Fund to impose on Third World debtors since the 1960s, and by
European neoliberals defending creditors imposing austerity on Ireland,
Greece, Spain and Portugal.
This pro-austerity mythology aims to distract the public from asking
why peacetime governments can’t simply print the money they need.
Given the option of printing money instead of levying taxes, why do
politicians only create new spending power for the purpose of waging war
and destroying property, not to build or repair bridges, roads and other
public infrastructure? Why should the government tax employees for
future retirement payouts, but not Wall Street for similar user fees and
financial insurance to build up a fund to pay for future bank over-lending
crises? For that matter, why doesn’t the U.S. Government print the money
to pay for Social Security and medical care, just as it created new debt for
the $13 trillion post-2008 bank bailout? (I will return to this question
below.)
The answer to these questions has little to do with markets, or with
monetary and tax theory. Bankers claim that if they have to pay more user
fees to pre-fund future bad-loan claims and deposit insurance to save the
Treasury or taxpayers from being stuck with the bill, they will have to
charge customers more – despite their current record profits, which seem
to grab everything they can get. But they support a double standard when
it comes to taxing labor.
Shifting the tax burden onto labor and industry is achieved most
easily by cutting back public spending on the 99%. That is the root of the
December 2012 showdown over whether to impose the anti-deficit
policies proposed by the Bowles-Simpson commission of budget cutters
whom President Obama appointed in 2010. Shedding crocodile tears over

the government’s failure to balance the budget, banks insist that today’s
15.3% FICA wage withholding be raised – as if this will not raise the
break-even cost of living and drain the consumer economy of purchasing
power. Employers and their work force are told to save in advance for
Social Security or other public programs. This is a disguised income tax
on the bottom 99%, whose proceeds are used to reduce the budget deficit
so that taxes can be cut on finance and the 1%. To paraphrase Leona
Helmsley’s quip that “Only the little people pay taxes,” the post-2008
motto is that only the 99% have to suffer losses, not the 1% as debt
deflation plunges real estate and stock market prices to inaugurate a
Negative Equity economy while unemployment rates soar.
There is no more need to save in advance for Social Security than
there is to save in advance to pay for war. Selling Treasury bonds to pay
for retirees has the identical monetary and fiscal effect of selling newly
printed securities. It is a charade – to shift the tax burden onto labor and
industry. Governments need to provide the economy with money and
credit to expand markets and employment. They do this by running budget
deficits, and this can be done by creating their own money. That is what
banks oppose, accusing it of leading to hyperinflation rather than help
economies grow. Read More
Environment:
Fracking:
Nuclear Fallout: Ongoing Tragedy/Disaster In Japan:
EnergyNews:
08:06 PM EST on December 28th, 2012 | Leave a comment
Newspaper: Navy sailors have experienced “great physical pain”
after Fukushima radiation exposure says lawsuit — “Therapies such
as chelation and bone marrow transplants” required

04:31 PM EST on December 28th, 2012 | 6 comments
Newspaper: Sinkhole burps up organic material — Experts on Dec.
18: Burps are “large gas outbursts”… up to 50,000 cubic feet
(VIDEOS)
11:26 AM EST on December 28th, 2012 | 21 comments
NSFW: Footage of alarms going off during radiation scans on USS
Ronald Reagan — “This is crazy… We’re dying and we’re taking
videos of it” — “Hey put the camera away” (VIDEO)
11:11 PM EST on December 27th, 2012 | 53 comments
1-year-old named in Fukushima lawsuit by US Navy members
07:04 PM EST on December 27th, 2012 | 6 comments
Legal Expert in Tokyo: Fukushima perpetrators are escaping
responsibility
Ongoing Gulf of Mexico Oil Disaster:
Oil Spill Attorney Stuart Smith’s Blog:
Environmental Must-Reads – December 28, 2012
Matt Damon tackles “fracking” issue in the “Promised Land”
The hot-button topic of “fracking” has finally made its way to
Hollywood in the new movie “Promised Land,” out in U.S. theaters on
Friday, with actors Matt Damon and John Krasinski teaming up to further
the debate on the energy drilling technique.
State assemblyman introduces fracking ban extension bill
State Assemblyman Declan O’Scanlon (R – 13th Dist.) has
introduced a bill in the state Legislature that would establish a freeze on
hydraulic fracturing, also known as “fracking,” for the purpose of natural
gas exploration or production until certain conditions are met.
Jackson Quitting EPA Hands Successor Fracking Fight

isa Jackson’s exit as head of the U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency leaves her successor to combat global warming and set rules for
hydraulic fracturing over the objections of businesses and Republican
lawmakers.
New Orleans native Lisa Jackson leaving EPA after pushing to
send BP fines to Gulf states
Washington — Rep. Steve Scalise, R-Jefferson, said he has had some
“heated arguments” with outgoing EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson,
including sharp questioning at a House hearing in which he challenged her
view that reducing carbon emissions would increase jobs by producing
green technologies.
EPA chief Lisa Jackson resigns after tenure marked by friction
with GOP
The most prominent member of Barack Obama’s environmental team
announced she was stepping down on Thursday, after four years of
running battles with industry and Republicans in Congress opposed to
stricter pollution controls.
After Jackson, EPA faces big decisions on U.S. fracking boom
The past four years of U.S. environmental regulation was marked by a
crackdown on emissions that angered coal miners and power companies.
Over the next four, the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency
will have to decide whether to take on an even larger industry: Big Oil.\
California Fracking Disclosure Rules Leave Some
Environmentalists Unsatisfied
Underneath much of Central and southern California sits the single
largest deposit of shale oil in the United States, boasting a motherlode of
some 15 billion barrels of oil.
While the Monterey Shale’s unique geology has prevented energy
companies from unleashing a new West Coast energy boom, California
regulators have begun to take the first steps in regulating hydraulic
fracturing (or “fracking”), a controversial practice decried by
environmentalists and the most promising solution for retrieving said oil.
Fracking opponents prep for comments fight

New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation released a
draft set of regulations for hydraulic fracturing in November. Those
proposed rules are open for public comment until Jan. 11, 2013.
Anti-fracking rally is Friday on Youngstown’s North Side
Frackfree Mahoning is having a march Friday on the city’s North
Side that will include former Pittsburgh City Council President Doug
Shields as featured speaker. Shields was council president when Pittsburgh
passed a ban on hydraulic fracturing within city limits.
Fracking decisions loom as study declaring it safe is withdrawn
A study hailed as clearing the reputation of the oil-extraction method
known as fracking has ended up muddying the reputation of the scientist
who oversaw it, and thrown a shadow on optimistic forecasts about the
nation’s energy prospects.
Plan to mine gas under homes
LARGE-SCALE coal seam gas drilling would take place directly
under suburban streets and backyards in Sydney under a proposal being
assessed by the state’s planning and infrastructure department.
But the gas company AGL has ruled out using the controversial
fracking technique at its proposed 66-well gasfield between Liverpool and
Campbelltown.
Sinkhole belches organic material
The 8.5-acre Assumption Parish sinkhole, located between the Bayou
Corne and Grand Bayou communities, burped this week for the second
time in a month, the company cleaning up the site reported Thursday.
Sonny Cranch, a spokesman for Texas Brine Co. LLC, said the burp
happened either Christmas night or early Wednesday.
Noble Discoverer Investigation: Arctic Drill Ship Used By Shell
Ordered To Stay In Alaska
A drill ship used by Shell Oil in Arctic waters off Alaska’s coast is
under investigation by the Coast Guard for issues with pollution control
equipment and crew safety.
Judge Recuses Himself From Keystone XL Protesters’ Cases
Over Conflict of Interest

A $65,000 bond for three young people arrested on misdemeanor
charges sounded unusually high to us when we wrote about the Keystone
XL protesters locked up in Smith County a week ago. Bail was halved
Wednesday, but that was only after the presiding judge recused himself
from the case over a conflict of interest. TransCanada, the pipeline
company, paid Smith County Court at Law Judge Thomas Dunn some
$40,000 for an easement across land he recently sold, according to a local
criminal defense attorney who isn’t involved in the case.
Environment: More Gulf restoration projects coming online
More restoration projects — valued at about $9 million — to repair
damage from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon Oil Disaster are set to begin in
the next months along the beaches of the Florida panhandle, Mississippi
and Alabama, including habitat improvements for nesting sea turtles and
seabirds.
US Regulators Are Not Prepared to Prevent Arctic Spill, Sue for
Access to Info on Shell Oil Drilling Plan
Royal Dutch Shell plans to drill for oil this spring in the arctic
Chukchi and Beaufort Seas off the northern coasts of Alaska, but
watchdogs and environmentalists are not yet convinced that Shell and
federal regulators have taken enough steps to prevent or contain a
potential oil spill in the treacherous and icy waters.
LSU AgCenter researchers testing oil cleanup chemical toxicity
LSU AgCenter scientists are working with researchers at Columbia
University and Iowa State University on an environmentally friendly
substance that could be used to clean up oil spills.
Deepwater Horizon NRDA Trustees Approve Two More Early
Restoration Projects in GoM
Additional early restoration projects totaling about $9 million will
begin along the Gulf Coast in 2013, according to the Deepwater Horizon
oil spill Natural Resource Damage Assessment (NRDA) trustees.
Fishermen decry frequent spills at Qua Iboe oil fields
Residents along the Atlantic coast in Akwa Ibom have decried
frequent spills at the Qua Iboe Oil Fields, operated by Mobil Producing
Nigeria, MPN), a local arm of ExxonMobil Corporation.

Hunger Strike Continues as Community Demands Transparency
of Petrochemical Giant
Residents of the Houston neighborhood of Manchester are
demanding today that the Valero refinery, which has been polluting the air
surrounding their homes for decades, reveal exactly what toxins it is
forcing residents to breathe. Community members were joined by Gulf
Coast activists Diane Wilson and Bob Lindsey Jr., who have committed to
an indefinite hunger strike until Valero agrees to divest from the Keystone
XL tar sands pipeline, which is linked to environmental destruction and
human rights abuses in Canada. Today marks the 29th day of their
sustained strike.
U.S. Navy sailors sue over exposure to Fukushima radiation
It was the American Way of humanitarianism when the U.S. Navy
dispatched some of its Pacific fleet toward the shores of Japan in March
2011, as news spread that a massive earthquake followed by a devastating
tsunami had struck the island nation. But what the crew members of the
U.S.S. Ronald Reagan could not have imagined was that the real danger
they would face would not be from the quake but from exposure to
radiation from a nuclear accident.
Indeed, officials had to reposition the massive aircraft carrier after it
passed under the massive plume of airborne radiation from the Fukushima
Nuclear Power Plant operated by Tokyo Electric, or TEPCO. A number of
sailors and other U.S. personnel were treated for exposure at the time:
Davis said the source of the radiation was a radioactive
plume emitted by the plant.
After the helicopters landed on the carrier, radioactive
contamination was found on the exterior surface of three
aircrafts.
Following decontamination protocols, the 17 crewmembers
aboard and the three helicopters were tested and found to have
been exposed to low levels of radiation.

Most of the radiation was found on the crewmembers
clothes, but radiation was detected on the skin of one of the
crewmembers.
The low level radioactivity from affected personnel was
removed by washing with soap and water. Their clothes were
also discarded.
The incident was something of a blip on the radar screen, at a time
when the whole world was watching to see if there would be a devastating
meltdown at Fukushima’s crippled reactors. In the 21 months since then,
the authorities — especially the Japanese government and TEPCO — have
worked hard to downplay any lingering fears of contamination, despite
evidence of persistent radioactivity in marine life as well as on land.
But the U.S. crew members did not forget their exposure. Now, eight
members of San Diego-based crew — along with the infant daughter of
one female sailors — are suing TEPCO in an American courtroom,
claiming that the Japanese utility lied about the level of radiation that they
were ultimately exposed to. Saying their experience was similar to
exposure suffered by workers in the vicinity of Russia’s 1986 Chernobyl
accident who later developed cancer, the Americans state in court papers
that they are very concerned for their future health:
They claim the utility company, “a wholly owned public
benefit subsidiary of the government of Japan,” misrepresented
radiation levels to lull the U.S. Navy “into a false sense of
security.”
Lead plaintiff Lindsay R. Cooper claims Tokyo Electric
(TEPCO) intentionally concealed the dangerous levels of
radiation in the environment from U.S. Navy rescue crews
working off the coast of Japan after the March 10, 2011
earthquake and tsunami set off the nuclear disaster.
“TEPCO pursued a policy to cause rescuers, including the
plaintiffs, to rush into an unsafe area which was too close to the
FNPP [Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant] that had been damaged.
Relying upon the misrepresentations regarding health and safety

made by TEPCO … the U.S. Navy was lulled into a false sense
of security,” the complaint states.
In the lawsuit, the plaintiffs express the same worries and concerns
that many felt regarding the Japanese authorities, that they were not being
honest about the risks:
The plaintiffs claim the government deliberately misled
them: “the Japanese government kept representing that there was
no danger of radiation contamination to the U.S.S. Reagan …
and/or its crew, that ‘everything is under control,’ ‘all is OK, you
can trust us,’ and there is ‘no immediate danger’ or threat to
human life, all the while lying through their teeth about the
reactor meltdowns at FNPP.
This is a situation that we’ll be keeping a close eye on. Unfortunately,
the fallout (no pun intended) from Fukushima radiation is very wide,
affecting many people who were exposed directly on the Japanese
mainland or nearby (as in this case) or through broad contamination of the
food chain. Ultimately, history’s final verdict on the full extent of
Fukushima’s damage may be rendered in a court of law.
To read about the exposure of the U.S.S. Ronald Reagan to the
radioactive plume from Fukushima, please read: http://abcnews.go.com/
International/uss-carrier-ronald-reagan-moved-detecting-radioactiveplume/story?id=13129409#.UNzUJ6yH-So
To learn more about the lawsuit recently filed against TEPCO by U.S.
Navy crew members, please go to.
Black Liberation/Civil Rights:
Labor:
Economy:
World:
Betraying the People: The ANC and the Exploitation of South Africa

y
Eric Draitser
This week’s elective conference of the ruling African National
Congress (ANC) in South Africa highlighted what has become an ever
more apparent and painful reality to working people in that country and
political observers around the world – the revolution of 1994 effected little
more than cosmetic change. The ruling class in South Africa, though
fronted by black faces, continues to work in the service of Western finance
capital and the neoliberal agenda, lining their own pockets while the
streets, mines, and slums ring with the cries of the workers and the poor
demanding justice.
As the ANC convenes in Mangaung to chart its economic policy and
lay out its vision for the future of South Africa, there remains the most
important question: does the ruling party actually represent the people? If
their conduct this past summer in regards to the Marikana massacre is any
indication, the answer is a resounding NO! In fact, every decision taken
by the ANC has furthered the interests of the financiers and capitalists who
continue to exploit the natural and human resources of the country. For
example, the issues of mine nationalization, workers’ rights,
unemployment etc. all demonstrate the ANC’s unwavering support for the
Washington consensus. This, coupled with the recent political resurrection
of Cyril Ramaphosa, one of the principle exploiters and intermediaries
between the political ruling class and the international financiers,
demonstrates unequivocally South Africa’s descent into the quagmire of
neoliberalism.
ANC and the Economic Policy Prescription
One of the central economic questions in South Africa has been, and
continues to be, the issue of the mines and their nationalization. The
natural resources of the country, the principle reason for their colonization
in the first place, have been part of the allure of the country for investors.
However, the nationalization of these resources has also been one of the
central demands of the workers, particularly the mineworkers, for years.
The core of the conflict is between the workers, who labor and toil deep
inside those mines for little pay and the international business interests

which own the mines, who try to prevent any form of nationalization at all
costs. The ANC, the elected body which claims to represent the people of
South Africa, took the position this week that, “Mine nationalization is off
the agenda.” Instead, the ANC leadership, composed of a black ruling
class that has more in common with international capitalists than it does
with black mineworkers, has proposed a series of so-called “reforms”
which do little to undermine the fundamentally exploitative business
arrangement that exists – a perpetuation of the status quo. One of the most
insidious of these so-called reforms is the call for the creation of a stateowned
mining company which will partner with private capital in mining
ventures. This utterly transparent attempt to further entrench the ruling
class and enrich themselves without harming the co-conspirators around
the world can only be seen as a further betrayal of the workers by the
ANC.
Aside from mine nationalization, the political ruling class has
outlined an openly pro-financier monetary and fiscal policy. Focusing on
deficits as the centerpiece of the fiscal policy is directly in line with the
Washington consensus which, as we see playing out in the headlines in the
US daily, does nothing for the people while providing huge benefits for
the wealthy, the only group for whom deficits are ever really an issue. As
for monetary policy, here the ANC again shows its utter contempt for the
working people of South Africa, championing inflation targets over
employment and growth. If one needed any further evidence as to the
collaboration between the political elite and their partners in business, one
can simply look at the open letter recently issued by thirty of the most
prominent business leaders, urging the ANC to adopt this exact policy.
Once again, it seems that the interests of the ANC and the capitalist
exploiters are aligned, while those of the working class and the poor are
ignored. President Zuma has given the green light to this program, going
so far as to warn that there must not be any deviation from this course: an
obvious reference to the iron fist with which his government has beaten
down the labor uprisings throughout the country.
The ruling ANC party claims that they will attempt to force
corporations, which have enriched themselves on the backs of the workers,

to reinvest some of their profits in order to generate economic growth.
However, as usual, the party provides no clear plan as to how they would
actually do this. Instead, this is another mere platitude by the ANC to
placate an understandably upset people. It should be noted that, under
ANC leadership, “Businesses in South Africa have effectively been on an
investment strike for some time. South African corporate savings are at a
multi-decade high. The sector was sitting on roughly R520-billion in
mid-2012 – the highest levels since 1995.” In other words, the financiers
and corporate oligarchs have been making record profits without actually
spurring any real economic growth and, in fact, have been doing better
than at any point since the end of apartheid. This means then that, despite
the revolution of 1994, there has no tangible and permanent economic
progress for the mass of South Africans.
Glorifying Traitors, Silencing Dissent
No single figure more clearly symbolizes the moral and ethical
bankruptcy of the ruling establishment in South Africa than does Cyril
Ramaphosa, the newly appointed deputy to President Zuma. Ramaphosa
not only is a corporate oligarch himself, he has shown utter disdain for the
plight of mineworkers at Marikana and elsewhere. In fact, Ramaphosa
referred to the courageous strikers at Marikana as “criminals” and urged
“concomitant action” to be taken. In other words, Ramaphosa urged his
fellow collaborators in positions of power to crack down on the Marikana
workers and, in a very direct way, contributed to the circumstances that led
to the massacre. However, in examining Ramaphosa and his clear
allegiance to corporate interests, we must remember that he is no less than
a traitor to the labor movement and the cause of social justice in South
Africa.
Ramaphosa was seen as one of the heirs-apparent to Mandela in the
wake of the 1994 revolution, having founded the National Union of
Mineworkers. However, for a number of political reasons including
conflict with former president Thabo Mbeki, he left the movement to
establish a powerful and far reaching corporate empire. In so doing, he
aligned himself with those same forces which, just a few years earlier, had
been supporting the racist apartheid regime. Moreover, he became the

exploiter of workers rather than the “crusader” his reputation would have
had you believe. Now, this same traitor to the cause of the working class
and social justice is going to be in charge of shaping the economic destiny
of the country. This is, to say the least, a sad state of affairs.
As one examines those insidious figures that have risen to
prominence within the ANC, one must also focus on those true leaders
who have been purged. In this context, none is more important than Julius
Malema, former head of the ANC Youth League. Malema, recently
expelled from the ANC on dubious charges, had been one of the most
vociferous voices of dissent within the ANC, always standing up publicly
for the working class and the poor in South Africa and throughout the
region. As a recent article from the Mail & Guardian explains:
Malema was originally found guilty by the national disciplinary
committee of sowing divisions within the ruling party in November last
year and was sentenced to a five-year suspension by the ANC. He was
found to have unfavourably compared the leadership style of President
Jacob Zuma to that of former president Thabo Mbeki, and made remarks
about bringing regime change in Botswana. His suspension was turned
into an expulsion after Malema appealed the sentence and the NDCA
granted the young firebrand and the ANC the opportunity to argue in
mitigation of the original sentence.
This attack on free speech within the ruling party is more than just a
simple attempt to silence Malema. Instead, this was an orchestrated purge
of him and a few others who represent a new generation of leaders whose
allegiance is to the people and social justice, not to national and
international business interests. It should also be noted that one of
Malema’s cardinal sins was speaking favorably of President Mugabe of
Zimbabwe and the ZANU-PF party with regard to land expropriations,
advocating for similar programs in South Africa, along with his
condemnation of Morgan Tsvangirai and the MDC-T party, widely
understood to be the darlings of the imperial powers. Naturally, this sort of
truth-telling is dangerous to the ruling establishment of the ANC and
necessitated decisive action to get rid of Malema and his circle.
Sleeping with the Enemy

If the systematic oppression and repression of the workers and the
poor were only the work of the ANC, perhaps it would be easier to mount
effective resistance. However, the Congress of South African Trade
Unions (COSATU) has effectively transformed itself into a collaborator in
this injustice. As political author William Gumede points out:
[COSATU] has to deal with the perception that there is a deep divide
between union members and leaders, who are seen as the new elite, while
the rank and file, grassroots members are struggling…There is the feeling
that the alliance is not giving them as much as they are putting into it…
The alliance for many ordinary members doesn’t offer much protection or
deliver material benefits.
The inescapable fact that Gumede and others have pointed out is that
COSATU has transformed itself into the political elite of the labor
movement, contenting itself with trying to influence elections and the
ANC, thereby allowing the ruling class to continue their exploitation of
the workers. In fact, it is this form of collaboration, along with the
continued institutionalized white privilege, which has created what lawyer,
lecturer, and activist Tshepo Madlingozi has referred to as “class
apartheid”. This is a critical point because, as we examine the legacy of
the post-apartheid rule of the ANC, we must critique it based on the reality
of life for the people, not the ascension of a select few.
The mineworkers’ strikes at Marikana and elsewhere demonstrate
clearly the discontent of the workers at their supposed labor
representatives. The wildcat strike, unsanctioned by the National Union of
Mineworkers, itself an affiliate of COSATU, was led by what can be
called a dissident union, the Association of Mineworkers and Construction
Union (AMCU). This breakaway faction led by workers shows the power,
but also the danger, of challenging the status quo in South Africa.
Moreover, it shows the degree to which COSATU is in bed with the ANC
and the ruling class in South Africa.
The uprising of organized labor in South Africa is merely a product
of the corruption, ineptitude, and betrayal of the ANC and the ruling
establishment. Instead of representing the people and propelling the
country in a progressive direction, away from the horrific legacy of

apartheid and toward a prosperous future for all South Africans, the ANC
leadership and its collaborators have shown themselves to be traitors to the
cause of social justice and freedom which, at one time, the ANC
symbolized. By pushing a neoliberal economic agenda while
simultaneously silencing dissent and suppressing worker uprisings, the
ANC has discredited itself. It is now time that the voice of the people, not
just the elite few, finally be heard.
Eric Draitser is the founder of StopImperialism.com. He is an
independent geopolitical analyst based in New York City. You can reach
him at ericdraitser@gmail.com.
Health, Education, Science and Welfare:
Dangerous chemicals found in crib mattresses
By Patricia Callahan and Michael Hawthorne
A Chicago lab extracted foam from baby mattresses and tested it for flame retardants
identified as a cancer risk. (E. Jason Wambsgans, Chicago Tribune / October 23, 2012)
Three popular brands of baby mattresses that were marketed in recent
months to families and day care centers contained toxic flame retardants
linked to increased cancer risk, according to laboratory tests conducted for
the Chicago Tribune.
One member of that family of chemicals was removed from
children’s pajamas over cancer concerns a generation ago. Yet that same
flame retardant turned up in significant amounts in 11 baby mattresses

sold recently by national and local retailers under the Babies R Us,
Foundations and Angeles brands.
While furniture-makers often add flame retardants to the
polyurethane foam cushioning in sofas and upholstered chairs, the test
results on infant mattresses surprised and alarmed some scientists who
have studied the chemicals.
The response to the test results from manufacturers, importers and
retailers varied. Wayfair, the retailer that fulfilled the Tribune’s Wal-Mart
order through the retail giant’s online marketplace program, halted sales of
the Angeles crib mattress, which fits cribs that are popular at child care
centers.
One importer, however, vigorously defended its product. Summer
Infant Inc., the importer of the Babies R Us branded crib and bassinet
mattresses that contained the flame retardant chemical, noted that the
mattresses “are in a sealed impermeable plastic covering,” which “ensures
no exposure of the inner mattress foam to the child.”
For all the test results, go to the graphic.
Read the full story, “Chemicals in the crib,” as a digitalPLUS
member. For a look at the rest of the series, visit chicagotribune.com/
flames
Chemicals in the crib
By
Patricia Callahan and Michael Hawthorne
Three popular brands of baby mattresses that were marketed in recent
months to families and day care centers contained toxic flame retardants
linked to increased cancer risk, according to laboratory tests conducted for
the Chicago Tribune.
One member of that family of chemicals, known collectively as
chlorinated tris, was removed from children's pajamas over cancer
concerns a generation ago.
Yet that same flame retardant turned up in significant amounts in 11
baby mattresses sold recently by national and local retailers under the

Babies R Us, Foundations and Angeles brands. Two other mattresses made
by Angeles contained a related form of tris.
While furniture-makers often add flame retardants to the
polyurethane foam cushioning in sofas and upholstered chairs, the test
results on infant mattresses surprised and alarmed some scientists who
have studied the chemicals. Babies and even toddlers can spend 12 or
more hours a day in a crib, and foam mattresses can meet federal firesafety
rules without the use of chemicals.
Linda Birnbaum, director of the federal government's National
Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, said regulators had assured
her that chlorinated tris and other toxic flame retardants weren't used in
mattresses.
"These are bad chemicals, and we've known they've been bad for a
long time," said Birnbaum, a toxicologist. "If these chemicals are in your
child's mattress, they are going to be constantly exposed."
In the late 1970s, University of California at Berkeley scientists
found that TDCPP, a form of tris, could cause mutations in DNA, and its
manufacturer removed it voluntarily from the market for children's
pajamas. When researchers look for flame retardants in house dust, they
still find TDCPP, which was never banned.
The Tribune tested 27 mattresses. All of the mattresses containing
chlorinated tris had one thing in common: labels saying they were made in
China or imported from China. None of the tested mattresses made
domestically contained significant amounts of any form of chlorinated tris.
The response to the test results from manufacturers, importers and
retailers varied.
Wayfair, the retailer that fulfilled the Tribune's Wal-Mart order
through the retail giant's online marketplace program, halted sales of the
Angeles crib mattress, which fits cribs that are popular at child care
centers.
One importer, however, vigorously defended its product.
Summer Infant Inc., the importer of the Babies R Us branded crib and
bassinet mattresses that contained chlorinated tris, noted that the

mattresses "are in a sealed impermeable plastic covering," which "ensures
no exposure of the inner mattress foam to the child."
Responding to questions from the Tribune, the company wrote,
"Simply put, the statements made are misleading and reckless in that they
imply a health hazard that doesn't actually exist."
But Birnbaum and Heather Stapleton, a Duke University chemist who
studies flame retardants, questioned whether any foam product can be
sealed completely. They said chemicals escape when they vaporize and
seep through seams or holes and get into air and dust.
And Inez Tenenbaum, chairman of the U.S. Consumer Product Safety
Commission, stressed that she sees no need for flame retardants in
children's mattresses, which can be protected with inherently flameresistant
wraps or barriers.
"I strongly encourage all mattress manufacturers to comply with our
performance standard through the use of barrier technologies and to avoid
using any potentially harmful chemicals to which children can be
exposed," she said in a statement. "The law strictly prohibits children's
products from having hazardous chemicals that children could be exposed
to and could foreseeably cause substantial illness or injury."
The agency is awaiting approval from its federal safety
commissioners for a broad study of children's exposure to flame retardants
in consumer products. Responding to the Tribune, agency officials last
week began purchasing the same models tested by the Tribune for their
own studies to determine how much chlorinated tris could escape and be
absorbed through a baby's skin, ingested or inhaled.
The findings from the testing commissioned by the Tribune echo
those of a California environmental group. The Center for Environmental
Health, in Oakland, hired a lab to conduct tests but did not release the
precise results in announcing its findings earlier this month. Instead, that
group is using a California labeling law and the threat of a lawsuit to prod
companies to reformulate their products without tris.
Neither the Tribune nor the Center for Environmental Health knew
that the other was testing baby mattresses.

Daily News Digest December 28, 2012
Mendacity* of Nuclear Power Corporations:
Tokyo Electric sued by U.S. sailors exposed to radiation
Bloomberg in Nuclear
Workers in protective suits and masks wait to enter the emergency operation center at the
crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power station in Okuma, Japan, Saturday, Nov. 12,
2011. Media allowed into Japan's tsunami-damaged nuclear power plant for the first time
Saturday saw a striking scene of devastation: twisted and overturned vehicles, crumbling
reactor buildings and piles of rubble virtually untouched since the wave struck more than
eight months ago. (AP Photo/David Guttenfelder, Pool)
Tokyo Electric Power Co. (9501), owner of the power plant which
had the world’s biggest nuclear disaster since 1986, was sued by eight
U.S. sailors claiming they were exposed to radiation and the utility lied
about the dangers.
The sailors aboard the USS Ronald Reagan nuclear-powered aircraft
carrier were involved in disaster relief operations following the March 11,
2011 earthquake and tsunami in northeastern Japan that caused the
meltdown, according to the complaint filed in U.S. federal court in San
Diego on Dec. 21.
Tepco, as the Japanese utility is known, and the Japanese government
conspired to create the false impression radiation leaking from the
Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant didn’t pose a threat to the sailors, according to
the complaint. As a result the plaintiffs rushed into areas that were unsafe

and too close to the power plant, exposing them to radiation, the sailors’
lawyers said.
The Japanese government was “lying through their teeth about the
reactor meltdown” as it reassured the crew of USS Reagan that
“everything is under control,” the plaintiffs’ lawyers said in the complaint.
“The plaintiffs must now endure a lifetime of radiation poisoning and
suffering.”
The sailors each sought $10 million in damages, $30 million in
punitive damages and a judgment requiring the creation of a $100 million
fund to pay for their medical monitoring and treatments.
“We can’t comment as we have not received the complaint document
yet,” Yusuke Kunikage, a Tepco spokesman, said by phone today. “We
will consider a response after examining the claim.”
In July, the Nuclear Damage Liability Facilitation Fund took control
of Tepco in return for a 1 trillion yen ($11.7 billion) capital injection after
the disaster left the utility on the brink of bankruptcy. The utility received
1.4 trillion yen in state funds to compensate those affected by the disaster.
The USS Reagan, a Nimitz-class carrier, has a crew of about 5,000,
according to U.S. Navy’s website.
The case is Lindsay R. Cooper against Tokyo Electric Power Co. 12cv-3032.
U.S. District Court, Southern District of California (San Diego).
*The other (sometimes attributed to Disraeli), identifies three species of mendacity, each
worse than the one before - lies, damned lies, and statistics. — Stephen Jay Gould
Quote of the Day:
Videos of the Day:
U.S. Drone Strikes Have Killed 178 Children in Pakistan and Yemen
When the US set the military against veterans
80 years ago - and no one noticed
What happened when veterans marched on Washington DC to collect
the bonuses they'd been promised for combat in WW I? Who rules the

US? Well, Hoover had to go, but using military force against veterans
lawfully demonstrating for payments promised them did NOTHING
to hurt the careers of McArthur, Patton, and Eisenhower.
Image of the Day:
Resegregation By Bendib
End Wall Street’s Wars!
Occupy Wall Street!
Occupy Wall Street is the Only Organization
That Identifies The Enemy —
The 1% That Own and Control The Wealth!
1960s The Realist — One Nation Under God/1%
(Unlike The Trade Union Misleaders
Nor The Misleaders Of The Oppressed
Who Strive To Be In ‘Partnership’ With The 1%)
(Unlike The Trade Union Misleaders
Nor The Misleaders Of The Oppressed
Who Strive To Be In ‘Partnership’ With The 1%)

1960s The Realist — One Nation Under God/1%
Occupy Wall Street — ‘We Are The 99%’
The resistance continues at Liberty Square
U.S.:
Bipartisan Assault on Middle East Peace
Imperial Lockstep:The Bipartisan Assault on the Middle East
by
Jason Hirthler
Imperial adventures are nothing new in the Middle East. Neither is
their glorification, as Peter O’Toole’s pained Lawrence of Arabia eternally

eminds us. But for a decade or so now, things have been heating up, as if
to coincide with climate change and fears of declining petroleum reserves.
Fuelled by 9/11 and inspired by material avarice, the West has been
proudly shouldering its “White Man’s Burden” across the Middle East and
has now dipped into the Maghreb. Under the rippling flag of “democracy
promotion,” the West has attempted to install prefabricated democracies in
regional populations already steeped in decades of interventions—mostly
at the hands of noble Anglo-Saxon tribes. So anxious is the West to impart
its “values” to demented Asian nomads, it is apt to shrug off diplomacy,
international law, global consensus, and other minor impediments that
might slow its efforts to give thankless Arabs a crash course in
enlightenment values.
The Belly for Belligerence?
In the post-election haze, as smoke from liberal fireworks settled over
our metastasizing urban ghettos, we were entertained by erudite
speculation among the punditry whether President re-elect Obama had the
“stomach” for more “humanitarian interventions” abroad. The question
loomed over beltway intelligentsia like an ephemeral Gordian knot. Then
two weeks ago, threatening to violate the War Powers Act all by himself,
our stalwart Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta posted two Patriot missile
batteries and 400 soldiers to Turkey. This nicely complements the 150member
“task force” Obama quietly dispatched to Jordan in October,
supposedly to help “process” the flow of immigrants streaming out of
Syria. Amman must have been clamoring for assistance from our worldrenowned
border control experts. Perhaps it would have been wiser to
simply hire IDF construction crews to build a replica of the West Bank
apartheid wall? In either case, we’ve actually been busy in Jordan since
the summer, when we staged a training “mission” – note the ecumenical
undertone – suitably entitled “Eager Lion.”
We have now bookended Syria, that fearsome new addition to a
revanchist Axis of Evil. Panetta noted the cause for these postings: the
grave threat of chemical weapons use posed by the Assad government.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, still baffled by the Benghazi bombing,
has lately been worried that the “increasingly desperate” Assad might

deploy chemical stores against rebel forces. A serious threat, as any of the
thousands of U.S. soldiers indiscriminately exposed to our own
radioactive depleted uranium bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan could attest.
Still, the presence of our troops on Syrian borders should answer the
beltway question of Obama’s ability to stomach another war. If that
question wasn’t already answered by the clandestine arms support we’ve
provided to the Free Syrian Army and its Islamist fanatics—a worrisome
confection of genuine Syrian rebels and flanks of disgruntled Islamists
from around the region.
We’re All Hawks Now
What disturbs the distant observer is the memory of Wesley Clark’s
revelatory aside in a speech last December when he distinctly recalled
Donald Rumsfeld mapping out multiple regime changes across the Middle
East—seven countries in five years. Nominated “regimes” included those
of Iraq, Lebanon, Somalia, Sudan, Libya, Syria, and Iran. (Afghanistan
was a side project.) Notice the last three on the list? Our Democratic
administration has already toppled Gaddafi and left a humanitarian
catastrophe to sort itself out in Libya. We are now banging the drums for a
confrontation with the Syrians. And, as always, the imaginary specter of
an Iranian bomb looms menacingly on the horizon.
Is Obama executing the neoconservative’s original plan? After
making a fuss about the foolishness of the Iraq war during his inaugural
Presidential campaign? After depositing a small river of American blood
into Afghan soil and a mountain of American treasure into the pockets of
corrupt “government” functionaries?
If true, then the Democrats have only made a couple of tweaks to the
plan. One being semantic—the substitution of the liberal incantation,
“humanitarian intervention” for the conservative mantra of “regime
change.” The former is no improvement on the latter. The Libyan
intervention generated social chaos, when instead of enforcing the no-fly
zone the UN had mandated it to ensure, NATO bombed government forces
to tip the civil conflict in favor of the rebels. This precipitated the turmoil
that UN resolution 1973 was intended to prevent. It also produced the
epiphenomenon—unremarkable to American hawks—of a multi-party

civil conflict in neighboring Mali. Thugs from al-Qaeda-linked Ansar Dine
—passing easily across the nations’ shared Saharan border after the
Libyan war— have effectively taken control of Northern Mali, instituting
Sharia law and enforcing it with such popular tactics as stoning adulterers,
chopping off the hands of thieves, and imposing the usual raft of
misogynistic restrictions on females. Tens of thousands have been
displaced. The UN just this weekend green-lighted an African
expeditionary force to reclaim the territory.
Mostly because of the Libyan adventure, which was a clear regime
change action. Troublingly for the U.S., the nationalist-minded Gaddafi
had been acting like a born-again socialist in recent years, persuading the
African Union to reject American bases and doing his best Hugo Chavez
impersonation by establishing an African Investment Bank to elide IMF
influence on the continent. This kind of behavior is precisely what the
U.S. detests—attempts at regional independence. Hence the need to unseat
the crazed terrorist fanatic.
The second modification to the Rumsfeld plan is military in nature—
the substitution of conventional ground warfare (code word “quagmire”)
with heavy aerial bombardments, a temporary deviation from the ‘always
on’ tactic of drone warfare. While George W. Bush mired troops and
mercenaries in Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama only briefly explored an
expanded ground presence in the latter. His Afghan “surge” failed;
elsewhere he has opted for aerial attacks. Any Democrat will tell you that
fighting from the sky is more manageable, safer for American soldiers,
and, unlike the complicated issue of prisoners of war, dodges the entire
legal challenge of detainment through the alembic of assassination. It
seems America has finally settled on a strategy of addressing asymmetrical
terror. Read More
Obama’s Video Drone Warfare ‘Game’:
'Did we just kill a kid?': The moment drone operator who
assassinated Afghans with the push of a button on a computer in the
U.S. realized he had vaporized a child... and could not go on

By
Helen Pow
Drone operators: A drone pilot, left, and a drone sensor operator practice
on a simulator at Holloman Air Force base in New Mexico
A former U.S. drone operator has opened up about the toll of killing
scores of innocent people by pressing a button from a control room in
New Mexico.
Brandon Bryant, 27, from Missoula, Montana, spent six years in the
Air Force operating Predator drones from inside a dark container.
But, after following orders to shoot and kill a child in Afghanistan, he
knew he couldn't keep doing what he was doing and quit the military.
'I saw men, women and children die during that time,' he told Spiegel
Online. 'I never thought I would kill that many people. In fact, I thought I
couldn't kill anyone at all.'
Bryant joined the military by accident when he accompanied a friend
who was enlisting in the army and heard that he could go to university for
free if he signed up to the Air Force.
He excelled in his course and was assigned to an intelligence
collection unit where he soon learned how to control the cameras and
lasers on a drone, to analyse ground images, maps and weather data.
He was made a sensor operator, the equivalent of co-pilot, and at just
20 flew his first mission over Iraq - seated in the safety of a control room
in Nevada.
But it began to take its toll immediately.

The first time he fired a missile, he killed two men instantly and cried
on his way home.
'I felt disconnected from humanity for almost a week,' he said.
But it was an incident when a Predator drone was circling above a
flat-roofed house made of mud in Afghanistan, more than 6,250 miles
away, that really sticks in his mind.
The hut had a shed used to hold goats and when he received the order
to fire, he pressed a button with his left hand and marked the roof with a
laser.
The pilot sitting next to him pressed the trigger on a joystick, causing
the drone to launch a Hellfire missile. There were 16 seconds left until
impact.
'These moments are like in slow motion,' he told the website.
As the countdown reached seven seconds, there was no sign of
anyone on the ground.
Bryant could still have diverted the missile at that point.
But when it was down to three seconds, a child suddenly walked
around the corner.
The next thing he saw was a flash on the screen - the explosion. The
building collapsed, and the child disappeared.
Bryant had a sick feeling in his stomach, he told the website.
'Did we just kill a kid?' he asked the pilot next to him.
'Yeah, I guess that was a kid,' the man replied.
Thoughts jotted in his diary on uneventful days clearly show the
heavy burden his job was placing on him.
'On the battlefield there are no sides, just bloodshed. Total war. Every
horror witnessed. I wish my eyes would rot,' he wrote on one occasion.
He began to shut himself off from his friends, and his girlfriend
complained about his bad moods.
'I can't just switch and go back to normal life,' he said to her. He
stopped sleeping and began to exercise instead.
One day he collapsed at work, doubling over and spitting blood. The
doctor ordered him to stay home, and not to return to work until he could
sleep more than four hours a night for two weeks in a row.

'Half a year later, I was back in the cockpit, flying drones,' Bryant
told Spiegel Online.
But he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.
Now Bryant has left the military and is living back at home in
Montana where he feels he is slowly recuperating.
'I haven't been dreaming in infrared for four months,' he said with a
smile.
VIDEO: Inside the Air Force's Unmanned Drone Control Center:
A Year in Review: Democracy & Detroit, 2012
by
Elena Herrada
Detroit is the largest of the internal colonies of Michigan. It is
followed by Benton Harbor, Flint, Muskegon Heights, Pontiac and
Highland Park. The aforementioned cities have been occupied by
“Emergency Managers” for the past several years.
In 2009 Democratic governor Jennifer Granholm, the first woman
governor of Michigan, appointed Robert Bobb over Detroit Public
Schools. Two years later, after Snyder was elected (Republican) governor
of Michgan, he appointed former GM executive and MGM casino
magnate Roy Roberts to the position of Emergency Manager.
Each of these two have caused Detroit Public Schools to go into
exponentially greater debt than before the “emergency” was created by the
governor and his mouthpiece corporate media. The people of Michigan
(82% in Detroit) repealed the Emergency Manager law 52% to 48% when
it became clear that the law was nothing more than a license to loot and
terminate collective bargaining agreements and sell off public goods to
private interests, who do not have to bid or say who they are or where
they got their money.
We passed a bond to rebuild our schools in Detroit, only to have them
seized by a new separate and unequal school district called “Educational
Achievement Authority.” It is a Jim Crow district with no transparency
and no public accountability except to shareholders and “non profits” and
foundations.

The role of the philanthropic interests is one that requires a deeper
investigation than this simple review of 2012 in Detroit can achieve, but
one worth pursuing in depth. It is an example of what happens when
government is replaced by corporations.
Detroit is the epicenter of the racialized privatization battle going on
in Michigan, but it is only one part of the story. The Emergency Manager
remains in charge of Detroit Public Schools despite the repeal of the law.
Everything the State could do to subvert the vote was done, and when the
vote came in at against the Emergency Manager law, the governor ignored
the vote and kept the EMs in charge.
There is utter contempt for the people in this lawless corrupt state.
It does not matter if we vote because the results are ignored. It does
not matter if we go to court; the judges simply postpone the proceedings.
There is no voice of moral authority in Michigan; there are looters
from top to bottom stealing the public treasury and the future of our youth.
Schools are so severely underfunded that Teach for America teachers are
in front of classrooms of 40 and more students all by themselves.
Millions of dollars have gone missing from the Detroit Public
Schools’ classrooms, to the joy of charter operators and new shadow
governments in the form of “self-governing schools” and “review boards.”
The Emergency Manager is surrounded by security guards at all
times because he and his minions are so despised by the people they rob. It
is a good time for a few, but not a sustainable plan.
When the colleges and universities catch on that their future students
cannot score high enough on ACT or SATs, they will have to let in only
the white students from the suburbs. Then there will be a movement for
equity and access and we can start all over again.
Elena Herrada is a Detroit community activist leader, longtime
organizer, and member of the Detroit Public Schools board. She can be
reached at elenamherrada2@gmail.com.
Environment:
The new fight over who owns the earth

‘Landgrabbers’ offers a bleak picture of land grabs by corporations
for agriculture or resource exploitation and equally appalling ‘green
grabs’ by conservationists
reviewed by Katharina Neureiter
Think Africa Press
Fred Pearce. The Landgrabbers: The New Fight Over Who Owns the Earth.
Beacon Press, Boston: 2012
“Buy land. They are not making it anymore.”
This statement, uttered more than one hundred years ago by Mark
Twain, still holds a sad and powerful truth and makes a telling start for
Fred Pearce’s account in The Landgrabbers: The New Fight Over Who
Owns the Earth about the struggle over the Earth’s most precious
resources: land and water.
In the book, the reader is taken on a whirlwind tour around the globe
to witness, through Pearce’s eyes, a new kind of colonialism driven not by
countries, but by powerful private capitalists. We encounter figures such
as George Soros and Richard Branson; we learn about the effects of the
conflicts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Liberia; we find
out why President Robert Mugabe’s land seizures in Zimbabwe were not
so bad after all for small-scale farmers; and we see how the global

financial crisis and the intricate mechanisms of stock market speculations
in commodities exacerbate the problem.
Pearce’s passion and outrage about the selling off of communal
resources shines through the book. Each chapter is dedicated to a certain
country, where protagonists change, yet the storyline stays the same:
governments around the globe grant large concessions to wily investors in
the hope of advancing their economies but displace and disadvantage large
parts of their own population in the process.
As Mike Ogg, an agriculture specialist from Swaziland, told Think
Africa Press: “I fundamentally believe that agriculture can lead
development in Africa. The quandary is: How do you create a win-win
situation where investors and the community benefit?”
Pearce presents a bleak picture of increasingly prevalent ‘land grabs’
by corporations for agriculture or resource exploitation as well as by wellmeaning
environmentalists for so-called “green grabs.” This is, Pearce
argues, encircling the last remaining habitats of indigenous peoples and
the landless poor, destroying their past and forever altering their future.
Pearce mixes this narrative with historical references to imperialism
and colonialism giving the impression of a continuous cycle of
exploitation. But his greatest achievement in the book is to give those
exploited a voice. He recounts their stories in numerous interviews, as
well as talking to those involved in the land acquisitions and a variety of
experts.
Pearce concludes that the bulk of the blame rests with foreign buyers
though it is crucial to recognise that most deals are also pursued by
respective governments which may give out large land concessions, tax
breaks and other incentives to draw foreign capital into their country in the
first place. And politicians are not only accomplices, but often also carve
out deals in return for money or land for themselves.
This is enabled by an environment in which laws are either nonexistent
or easily circumvented. As Graziano da Silva, director-general of
the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation, notes: “It appears
to be like the Wild West and we need a sheriff and law in place.”

Although Pearce does not go so far as to propose possible solutions,
there is a range of opinion and ideas as to how to begin to tackle the
problem.
Olivier De Schutter, UN special rapporteur on the right to food, has
suggested that when national governments are unable or unwilling to
devise regulations, the international community should step in to monitor
whether the rights of land users are being respected. Oxfam’s
recent report ‘Our Land, Our Lives’ highlights the pivotal role of the
World Bank as an advisor to governments in reforming their laws.
But this is easier said than done. As a representative from USAID in
Dar es Salaam admitted to Think Africa Press, “Land tenure, we know, is
at the heart of many problems as it is difficult for poor people to feed
themselves with limited and insecure access to land, but we are not
touching this subject, because it’s too contentious and complicated.”
An example of a private sector-driven initiative is Bonsucro, a
certification scheme which aims to ensure companies involved in the
production of sugar and ethanol from sugarcane meet environmental,
social and business standards. With consumers believed to be increasingly
concerned about the impacts of the goods they buy, the Bonsucro
certification is meant to reassure buyers that companies are acting in
sustainable ways and taking account of human rights and pollution
control.
Pearce acknowledges these developments in his last chapter where he
analyses some of the attempts at solutions though he does not put forward
his own. Nevertheless, Pearce’s book is a worthwhile read. His writing
style is highly engaging and reveals the duplicity of investors and interest
groups. He not only presents complicated and contentious issues such as
the correlation of Wall Street speculations and rising food prices in an
accessible manner, but also masterfully interweaves stories and issues
across countries and continents achieving a well-researched, logical and
informative account.
Amazon Deforestation Brings Loss of Microbial Communities

The Amazon Rainforest containing thousands of plant species (background) is
converted to a pasture. First hard timber is removed, followed by fire and
sowing of a single exotic grass species. (Credit: UMass Amherst)
Dec. 24, 2012 — An international team of microbiologists led by
Klaus Nüsslein of the University of Massachusetts Amherst has found that
a troubling net loss in diversity among the microbial organisms
responsible for a functioning ecosystem is accompanying deforestation in
the Amazon rainforest.
Nüsslein, an expert in tropical rain forest microbial soil communities,
says, "We found that after rainforest conversion to agricultural pastures,
bacterial communities were significantly different from those of forest
soils. Not only did the pasture soils show increased species numbers, these
species were also less related to one another than in rainforest soil. This is
important because the combination of lost forest species and the
homogenization of pasture communities together signal that this
ecosystem is now a lot less capable of dealing with additional outside
stress."
He and colleagues studied a large farm site over the past four years at
the frontier where farmers drive agriculture into pristine rainforest in
Rondonia, Brazil, to convert rainforest to agricultural use. Findings in part
validated previous research showing that bacteria in the soil became more

diverse after conversion to pasture. However, in its fourth year, their study
overcame limitations of earlier investigations to show that changes in
microbial diversity occurred over larger geographic scales. Results appear
in the current issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
In addition to Nüsslein at UMass Amherst, the research group
includes first author Jorge Rodrigues at the University of Texas at
Arlington with Brendan Bohannan at the University of Oregon, James
Tiedje at Michigan State University, and others at the University of Sao
Paulo. Lead investigators Nüsslein and Rodrigues emphasize that the
study is an equal collaboration among the four research groups.
Findings do not support earlier study conclusions, instead they show
that the loss of restricted ranges for different bacteria communities results
in a biotic homogenization and net loss of diversity overall. Scientists
worry that the loss of genetic variation in bacteria across a converted
forest could reduce ecosystem resilience. The researchers hope their work
will provide valuable data to those making decisions about the future of
the Amazon rainforest.
Biologist and first author Jorge Rodrigues of the University of Texas
at Arlington adds, "We have known for a long time that conversion of
rainforest land in the Amazon for agriculture results in a loss of
biodiversity in plants and animals. Now we know that microbial
communities which are so important to the ecosystem also suffer
significant losses."
As Nüsslein and colleagues point out, the Amazon represents half of
the world's rainforest and is home to one-third of Earth's species, yet the
Amazon has one of the highest rates of deforestation. Agriculture is one of
the largest and most dynamic parts of Brazil's economy, so dealing with
standing rainforests in the tropics will be tricky, but nevertheless, it is vital
that the issue is tackled."
Rodrigues says he and colleagues are currently compiling findings
about the potential for recovery of the microbial diversity after pastureland
is abandoned and returned to "secondary forest." At the same time,
Nüsslein and colleagues are leading an effort to investigate how the
redundancy of functions provided by soil microbes provides resilience to

the effects of agricultural land use change to support a stressed ecosystem
to recover stability.
"Whether bacterial diversity will completely recover from ecosystem
conversion will depend in part on whether the taxa lost due to conversion
are truly locally extinct or whether they are present in the pasture sites but
of such low abundance that they are undetectable in our study," the authors
write.
This work was supported by grants from the USDA National Institute
of Food and Agriculture and the Research Support Foundation of the State
of São Paulo.
Fracking:
Balitmore Sun Editorial: No study, no fracking
Our view: The potential impact of hydraulic fracturing for natural
gas in Maryland, both good and bad, is too great not to merit a
thorough, unbiased study
Most of us have probably seen or heard the ubiquitous ads promoting
domestic natural gas drilling. While they don't tend to use the word
"fracking," their message about hydraulic fracturing of shale is clear
enough — little kids playing happily on green patches of grass and the
promise of bountiful clean energy, jobs and all-around happiness all rolled
into one.
Two things can be inferred from the ads. First, that those in the oil
and gas industry are absolutely intent on selling their product with
extraordinary promises; and second, that they are willing to spend an
enormous sum to do so.
Here's what experience has taught us when any corporation, industry
or government works that hard and spends that much money to persuade:
Better get a second opinion. Whatever the "facts" about fracking (and the
ads always wave around that word like they had cornered the global
market on facts), it would be wise to hear what scientists who don't draw a
paycheck from energy companies had to say on the subject.

That's why it's so frustrating that Maryland's own efforts to
investigate the potential problems with hydraulic fracturing in the western
part of the state have been thwarted by the industry's failure to support an
independent study. What are the oil and gas companies hiding?
Last year, Gov. Martin O'Malley issued an executive order calling
for the creation of a commission and a study into fracking in Western
Maryland. It was a sensible approach that balanced the concerns about the
possible harmfulness of drilling with the potential economic bounty that
could come from natural gas development.
But the study needs to be funded, and what has advanced so far — a
modest $185,000 survey of "best practices" in other states — is wholly
inadequate. State regulators estimate that what's truly needed is a study
that will look in far greater detail at the consequences to Maryland of
tapping the Marcellus shale deposits. That would cost $2 million.
Companies have balked at financing such a study, perhaps out of fear
that it would set a precedent other states might copy. Their lobbyists
successfully thwarted legislation in the 2012 General Assembly session
that would have financed it with a fee on gas leases. Surely it wasn't the
cost that gave them pause, since one less 30-second Super Bowl ad would
more than make up the expense (with about $1.5 million left over for beer
and chips).
The more likely explanation is that energy companies don't mind a
delay. Natural gas prices have fallen in recent years because of the new
supply, so they are no longer in the same hurry to close leasing deals.
Meanwhile, the governor's executive order will expire when he leaves
office after the 2014 election, and the current moratorium will essentially
end. Perhaps the industry thinks the next administration will be less
protective of the environment and the health of Western Maryland's
residents?
That could happen. What's needed is a law on the books that makes it
clear that companies can't exploit Maryland's natural resources as they've
done in neighboring Pennsylvania and West Virginia without first funding
an independent study that will fully explore the consequences — the
equivalent of an environmental impact study.

Del. Heather R. Mizeur, a Montgomery County Democrat, is leading
the charge in Annapolis to approve that measure. Her supporters say they
believe most in the General Assembly will support that proposal but her
chief obstacle is expected to be Sen. Joan Carter Conway of Baltimore,
who chairs the Senate Education, Health and Environmental Affairs
Committee. She has, in the past, demonstrated a reluctance to bring such a
bill to a vote.
While we appreciate the potential profits that might be made from
natural gas production in Garrett and Allegany counties, lawmakers need
to be mindful of the value of the region's other natural resources — clean
water and air — and a tourism industry that depends upon them. We have
yet to see any harm come from a study, particularly on such a
controversial topic. If Maryland is to ever approve fracking for natural
gas, its elected officials should do so with the deepest possible
understanding of the risks and rewards involved.
Nuclear Fallout: Ongoing Tragedy/Disaster In Japan:
EnergyNews:
04:35 PM EST on December 27th, 2012 | Leave a comment
Top blogs feature Fukushima news reports to end 2012
03:22 PM EST on December 27th, 2012 | 4 comments
New flyover of giant sinkhole shows large area of flooding to south
(VIDEO)
1:38 PM EST on December 27th, 2012 | Leave a comment
Company Officials: Giant sinkhole has released debris to surface —
Says new oil is being contained
12:30 PM EST on December 27th, 2012 | 2 comments
Report: Worker says Fukushima Dai-ni “might be getting ready to be
restarted”

11:33 AM EST on December 27th, 2012 | 4 comments
Fukushima graveyard with radiation dose of 380 microsieverts per
hour (VIDEO)
10:06 AM EST on December 27th, 2012 | 37 comments
“Lifetime of radiation poisoning” for U.S. rescue workers in Japan
during 3/11 disaster
09:28 PM EST on December 26th, 2012 | Leave a comment
Tanks for holding radioactive Fukushima liquid are too fragile and
flimsy — Breaking open much easier than expected
08:43 PM EST on December 26th, 2012 | One comment
‘Impermeable wall’ between leaking Fukushima reactors and ocean
yet to be built — Tepco still working on silt fence (PHOTO)
Ongoing Gulf of Mexico Oil Disaster:
Oil Spill Attorney Stuart Smith’s Blog:
More proof that radiation and drinking water don’t mix
Radioactive waste and a community’s drinking water don’t mix well
together. I learned that 20 years ago, early in my career as an
environmental lawyer, when we went after oil companies for their
improper and often illegal dumping activities. What some of these energy
giants were doing was taking the produced water from the drilling process
— which dredged up radioactive material deep under the earth — and then
dumping in unlined pits or other unsound landfills in Mississippi and
elsewhere across the Deep South. Over the year, it’s been quite a struggle
to halt this unsafe practice, given the power of Big Oil and its political
connections.
That said, this report published today by ProPublica, the Pulitzer
Prize-winning, non-profit investigative reporting outfit, about the legal

pollution of a potential significant source of drinking water, is shocking
and disturbing:
Christensen has made ends meet by allowing prospectors to
tap into minerals and oil and gas beneath his bucolic hills. But
from the start, it has been a Faustian bargain.
As dry as this land may be, underground, vast reservoirs
hold billions of gallons of water suitable for drinking, according
to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Yet every day
injection wells pump more than 200,000 gallons of toxic and
radioactive waste from uranium mining into Christensen’s
aquifers.
What is happening in this remote corner of Wyoming
affects few people other than Christensen — at least for now.
But a roiling conflict between state and federal regulators
over whether to allow more mining at Christensen Ranch — and
the damage that comes with it — has pitted the feverish drive for
domestic energy against the need to protect water resources for
the future. The outcome could have far-reaching implications,
setting a precedent for similar battles sparked by the resurgence
of uranium mining in Texas, South Dakota, New Mexico and
elsewhere.
The ProPublica report explains that the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency has issued about 1,500 of these permits for uranium
and other types of mining — making the calculation that the underground
water polluted by these radioactive wastes was too deep for people to
drink. But as the article notes, drinking water in the West and elsewhere in
the United States has become more scarce, while the technology for
tapping into deep aquifers — like the one underneath the Christiansen
Ranch — got better. The ruination of these potential water sources is a
waste in every sense of the word.
There’s something deeper here. The more desperate that we get in our
quest for fossil fuels or energy sources like uranium deep under the
ground, the more harm we’re doing to our environment. We’re seeing this
now with the fracking boom that is taking place across much of the United

States — drillers producing polluted, radioactive wastewater with no
where to put it except into our aquifers or our rivers. It’s the same as in the
oil patch down in the Gulf, or as uranium mining in Wyoming. And it will
continue to happen as long as our leaders don’t start looking more
seriously at alternative forms of energy.
It’s beginning to look like 2013 is going to be a make or break year
for fracking in the United States. On the big screen, the Oscar buzz about
the soon-to-be-released Matt Damon movie “Promised Land” should bring
the issue to the forefront for citizens who hadn’t been paying attention.
Politically, leaders such as New York’s governor Andrew Cuomo and the
Obama administration in Washington have critical decisions to make on
whether to allow fracking and how stringently we will regulate it. The
notion of injecting so much radioactive water into potential sources of
drinking water ought to be a warning sign: America’s energy policy does
not need tinkering, but a major overhaul.
To read the new ProPublica report on uranium mining and water
pollution in Wyoming, please go to: http://www.propublica.org/article/ona-wyoming-ranch-feds-sacrifice-tomorrows-water-to-mine-uranium-today
To check out the trailer for the movie “Promised Land,” please
watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHQt1NAkhIo
Environmental Must-Reads – December 27, 2012
Restoring Democracy in the Fight Against Fracking
Same story. Different day.
People are threatened by an activity that will injure them, and they
work overtime to pass a law that bans the activity.
An affected corporation—or industry association—then sues the
municipality, contending that the community can’t prohibit what the state
allows, and that the ban violates the “rights” of the corporation.
The BLM makes the case for banning pits, but doesn’t ban them
The BLM recently issued a new Instruction Memorandum to its field
offices. This IM establishes policy for reducing preventable wildlife
mortality, increasing protection of livestock, and increasing human health
and safety around oil and gas facilities.

State issues first fracking rules
Long-awaited draft regulations on fracking were recently issued by
state oil regulators, following a series of public workshops, including one
in Santa Maria last summer.
California’s Division of Oil, Gas, and Geothermal Resources
(DOGGR) said the draft rules are “a starting point for discussion” by the
industry, the environmental community, other regulators, and the public.
Major EPA Fracking Study Will Tap Into Pennsylvania Data
A major Environmental Protection Agency report on natural gas
drilling will include a lot of information from Pennsylvania.
The federal study won’t be released until 2014, but the agency
recently published a progress report. The EPA is examining five stages of
hydraulic fracturing, and assessing each step’s risk of contaminating
drinking water. That includes everything from where drillers withdraw
their water, to what chemicals they mix in, to how fracking fluid is stored
on drilling sites. The study will also probe well construction standards and
waste disposal methods.
Commission to consider disclosure of fracking chemicals
Welcome to Lycoming County, Pa., where energy companies
searching for natural gas blast pressurized chemicals through underground
shale rock.
In this particular fracking site—somewhere near the county seat of
Williamsport—there’s nothing particularly unique about the chemical
stews, composed of 87 percent water and 11 percent sand.
Yoko Ono Claims Fracking Can’t Be Safe
Yoko Ono added her voice to the outcry against fracking, claiming
the complex process that uses masses of groundwater to extract oil and gas
can’t be safe anywhere.
Ono wrote in the Dec. 26 edition of the New York Times that “no
amount of regulation can make fracking safe.”
Oil field company gets well under control near Watford City
An oil well that went out of control late Friday night five miles west
of Watford City was plugged early Sunday evening.

Keith Schmidt, spokesman for well owner Newfield Exploration Co.,
said a crew from Wild Well Control was able to install a temporary plug at
the well and all flow of fluids was stopped.
Lafourche president faces ethics charges for renting camp to BP
post-oil spill
Lafourche Parish President Charlotte Randolph will appear before the
Ethics Adjudicatory Board this spring regarding ethics charges against her.
Bayonne official says massive oil spill from barge isn’t a health
threat
More than 156,000 gallons of oil and water have been recovered
since a spill that dumped oil from a barge into the Kill Van Kull, allowing
it to wash up on the shores of Bayonne and Staten Island, according to
officials.
Oil spill threatens desalination plants
KUWAIT: A local environmental group issued a warning yesterday
about discovery of an oil spill recently along the country’s southern shores
which was moving towards water desalination plants and could raise
serious concerns about the state’s water security strategies.
Watchdogs: US Regulators Are Not Prepared to Prevent Arctic
Spill, Sue for Access to Info on Shell Oil Drilling Plan
Royal Dutch Shell plans to drill for oil this spring in the arctic
Chukchi and Beaufort Seas off the northern coasts of Alaska, but
watchdogs and environmentalists are not yet convinced that Shell and
federal regulators have taken enough steps to prevent or contain a
potential oil spill in the treacherous and icy waters.
Seattle mayor calls for city’s pension funds to dump oil stocks
Student groups at 192 colleges and universities are calling on their
schools’ endowments to sell off stocks in fossil-fuel companies, inspired
by a 350.org campaign that we’ve reported on before.
Shell’s Ursa makes waves in offshore industry
ABOARD THE URSA TENSION LEG PLATFORM: When the
Guinness Book of Records was looking for the tallest structure in the
world in 2009, it selected Shell’s Ursa platform, located about 130 miles
southeast of New Orleans in the Gulf of Mexico.

MRI maps heat from cellphone radiation in jarred cow brains
Plastic containers of cow brains could help further a consensus on
cellphone radiation and brain tumors – with an imaging technique that
shows what happens to radiation when absorbed by the brain. IEEE
Spectrum reports.
Worth Electronic Debris but Radiation Risk Exist
The noise over whether the human race is at risk of radiation from
cell phone use is as divisive as it is elusive, but lately, some countries like
Kenya appear to be taking notice.
Detrimental Impacts of Fukushima Nuclear Disaster Continue
As 2012 draws to a close, evaluating the ongoing effects of the
March 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster on the people of Japan is
a difficult and depressing task. After having fled their homes due to the
tsunami and resulting triple nuclear meltdown, 21 months later an
estimated 160,000 citizens still have not returned home.
Los Angeles prepares to fight Fukushima debris
Nearly two years after the Fukushima nuclear plant suffered a
massive meltdown in Japan, some Americans could be just now seeing
first-hand evidence of the disaster — and right in their backyards.
Fukushima operator seeks yet more money
The operator of Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant on
Thursday sought yet more money to pay ballooning bills for compensating
victims of last year’s disaster.
US Navy sailors sue Japan for lying about Fukushima radiation
American sailors have filed a lawsuit against the Japanese
government for allegedly lying about the health risks they faced while
assisting in rescue efforts after last year’s Fukushima nuclear disaster.
Fukushima Debris to Keep Hitting the Pacific Coast This Winter
Authorities expect more debris from the March 2011 Japanese
Tsunami to wash up on the Pacific Coast this winter. Seasonal changes in
ocean currents and North Pacific winds will push the 1.5 million tons of
debris still out there towards our shores.
Tokyo Electric sued by U.S. sailors exposed to radiation

Tokyo Electric Power Co. (9501), owner of the power plant which
had the world’s biggest nuclear disaster since 1986, was sued by eight
U.S. sailors claiming they were exposed to radiation and the utility lied
about the dangers.
Tribe to get hearing on Prairie Island nuclear waste concerns
Xcel Energy Inc. faces more scrutiny from a federal panel reviewing
the utility’s requested 40-year extension of its license to store high-level
nuclear waste at its power plant in Red Wing, Minn.
Feds want more data on possible tube wear at ailing California
nuclear power plant
Federal regulators Wednesday pressed the operator of the San Onofre
nuclear power plant for more analysis on its damaged steam generators, as
the government considers when, or if, one of the seaside reactors can be
restarted safely.
Black Liberation/Civil Rights:
Labor:
Economy:
World:
Robert Fisk: A word of advice about the Middle East – we’ve reached
the ‘tipping point’ with cliches
You've got to be careful when Syria's rebels are perpetually "closing
in"

Remember the days when we thought Egypt’s path to democracy was
a done deal? Western-trained Mohamed Morsi had invited the people to
come and meet him in Hosni Mubarak’s former presidential palace, the old
military toffs in the “Supreme Council of the Armed Forces” had been
pensioned off and the International Monetary Fund was waiting to bestow
some of those cruel deprivations upon Egypt that would ready it for our
financial benevolence. How happy the Middle East optimists were by
mid-2012.
Next door, Libya produced a victory for nice, pro-Western secularist
Mahmoud Jibril, promising freedom, stability, a new home for the West in
one of the Arab world’s most fecund oil producers. It was a place where
even US diplomats could wander around virtually unprotected.
Tunisia may have an Islamist party running its government, but it was
a “moderate” administration – in other words, we thought it would do
what we wanted – while the Saudis and the Bahraini autocracy, with the
purse-lipped support of Messrs Obama and Cameron, quietly suppressed
what was left of the Shia uprising which threatened to remind us all that
democracy was not really welcome among the wealthiest Arab states.
Democracy was for the poor.
Closing in
So, too, in Syria. By the spring of last year, the Western commentariat
was writing off Bashar al-Assad. He did not deserve “to live on this
earth”, according to French Foreign Secretary Laurent Fabius. He must

“step down”, “step aside”. His regime had only weeks to go, perhaps only
days. This was the “tipping point”.
Then by summer, when the “tipping point” had come and gone, we
were told that Assad was about to use gas “against his own people”. Or
that his supplies of chemical weapons might “fall into the wrong
hands” (the “right hands” still presumably being Assad’s).
Syria’s rebels were always “closing in” – on Homs, then Damascus,
then Aleppo, then Damascus again. The West supported the rebels. Money
and guns aplenty came from Qatar and Saudi Arabia, moral support from
Obama, Clinton, the pathetic Hague, Hollande, the whole factory of
goodness – until, inevitably, it turned out that the rebels contained rather a
lot of Salafists, executioners, sectarian killers and, in one case, a teenage
head-chopper who behaved rather like the ruthless regime they were
fighting. The factory had to put some of its machinery into reverse. The
US still supported the good, secular rebels but now regarded the horrible
Salafist rebels as a “terrorist organisation”.
And poor old Lebanon, needless to say, was about to explode into
civil war for the second time in less than 40 years, this time because
Syria’s violence was “spilling over” into its neighbour’s territory.
Wasn’t Lebanon’s sectarian make up the same as Syria’s? Wasn’t the
Lebanese Hezbollah an ally of Assad? Weren’t the Sunnis of Lebanon
supporting the Syrian rebels? All true. But the Lebanese did not oblige the
overpaid “think-tank” bores and journos and “experts” because, assaulted
as they were by Syria’s intelligence killers, they were too intelligent and
well-educated to return to the midden of 1975-1990. Iran, of course, was
about to be bombed because it was – or was not yet – manufacturing
nuclear weapons, or might – or could – manufacture nuclear weapons in a
month, or a year, or a decade from now.
Terror
Obama might not bomb Iran, he didn’t really want to, but – wait for it
– “all options” were “on the table”. And so, of course, with Israel, which
wanted to bomb Iran because it might, or could, manufacture nuclear
weapons or was in the process of doing so, or might have them in six
months, or a year, or several years’ time but – again – “all options” were

“on the table”. Netanyahu’s “window of opportunity” would last, we were
told, until the US presidential election. And so this nonsense continued
until... well, until the US presidential election, by which time we were
warned again that Iran was producing, or might, or could produce a
nuclear weapon.
Israel also threatened Lebanon because the Hezbollah had thousands
of missiles and threatened Gaza because the Palestinians had thousands of
missiles. And many were the Israeli journalists – along with their
American clones – who prepared their readers for these two wars against
“terror”. In the event, Lebanon remained unbombed while a highly
unsatisfactory conflict (from Israel’s point of view) broke out between
Israel and Hamas which ended when Morsi – the West’s avuncular ally –
persuaded the Palestinians to abide by a ceasefire, which Netanyahu then
mournfully accepted. He thus boosted the prestige of Khaled Meshal who
subsequently announced that Palestine must exist all the way from the
River Jordan to the sea. In other words, no more Israel. Just as the soon-tobe
resigned Foreign Minister of Israel, Avigdor Lieberman, and his chums
had been saying for a very long time that Israel must exist between the sea
and the River Jordan. In other words, no more Palestine. It was left to the
courageous – and very ageing – Israeli Uri Avnery to point out that if both
had their wish, only an open grave would exist between the river and the
sea.
A defunct language
So at year’s end, friendly, cuddly Mohamed Morsi was playing
Mubarak and hoovering up any old dictatorial powers available to him
while a very dodgy constitution was ram-rodded on to the secular
population of the land, whose Muslim and Christian people Morsi had all
along promised to serve. In Libya, of course, the US turned out to have
more enemies than it thought; the ambassador was murdered by – and the
jury must remain out on this despite the obfuscations of Clinton – an al-
Qa’ida-type militia.
Indeed, al-Qa’ida itself – politically bankrupt by the time of Osama
bin Laden’s murder by a US military assassination squad in 2011 – was
virtually written off by the White House in advance of the Obama re-

election. But the ghostly desperadoes of Wahabism acquired that habit so
beloved of movie monsters; they began to recreate themselves in different
form in different lands. Mali replaced Afghanistan, just as Libya replaced
Yemen and just as Syria replaced Iraq.
A word of advice, therefore, for Middle East potentates, dictators,
Western poseurs, television presenters and journos. Do not use the
following words or expressions in 2013: moderate, democracy, step down,
step aside, tipping point, falling into the wrong hands, closing in, spilling
over, options on the table or – terror, terror, terror, terror. Too much to
hope for? You bet. We’ll even get another load of cliches from the
goodness factory to replace those that have already served their purpose.
Health, Education, Science and Welfare:
Daily News Digest December 27, 2012
Quote of the Day:
War Is Kind
Stephen Crane
Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind,
Because your lover threw wild hands toward the sky
And the affrighted steed ran on alone,
Do not weep.
War is kind.
Hoarse, booming drums of the regiment,
Little souls who thirst for fight,
These men were born to drill and die.
The unexplained glory flies above them.
Great is the battle-god, great, and his kingdom--
A field where a thousand corpses lie.

Do not weep, babe, for war is kind.
Because your father tumbles in the yellow trenches,
Raged at his breast, gulped and died,
Do not weep.
War is kind.
Swift blazing flag of the regiment,
Eagle with crest of red and gold,
These men were born to drill and die.
Point for them the virtue of slaughter,
Make plain to them the excellence of killing
And a field where a thousand corpses lie.
Mother whose heart hung humble as a button
On the bright splendid shroud of your son,
Do not weep.
War is kind!
Videos of the Day:
The origins of the Middle East mess
Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan explained
The Israeli Arab conflict is the result of interactions of superpowers in
the early 20th century. British and French strategic interests in the
Middle East were related to the Mediterranean trading route, which
went from the Suez channel to Indian markets. But the presence of the
Ottoman navy based in the Levant was a direct threat to British
interests. So the British and the French decided to divide the Middle
East into smaller entities and countries to make it impossible for the
Ottoman Empire to control them all. A century later, the legacy of
European colonization of the Arab world is reflected by its many
ongoing conflicts.
The Gold Confiscation Myth — No gold was confiscated in 1933

Image of the Day:
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
End Wall Street’s Wars!
Occupy Wall Street!
Occupy Wall Street is the Only Organization
That Identifies The Enemy —
The 1% That Own and Control The Wealth!
1960s The Realist — One Nation Under God/1%
(Unlike The Trade Union Misleaders
Nor The Misleaders Of The Oppressed
Who Strive To Be In ‘Partnership’ With The 1%)
1960s The Realist — One Nation Under God/1%

(Unlike The Trade Union Misleaders
Nor The Misleaders Of The Oppressed
Who Strive To Be In ‘Partnership’ With The 1%)
Occupy Wall Street — ‘We Are The 99%’
The resistance continues at Liberty Square
U.S.:
Why the US Military Needs to Leave Afghanistan:
Institutionalizing “Secret” Drone Strikes
by
Mark Weisbrot
Drone Attack Afghanistan
There is perhaps no time in American history when our leaders have
fought a war with so little support. More than 60 percent of Americans
want out of Afghanistan. Even at the peak of the anti-Vietnam-war
movement, after a majority had turned against the war, there were still a
large number of citizens who believed in the war and its official
justifications. Today, as my colleague Robert Naiman of Just Foreign
Policy notes, “Western leaders have largely given up trying to explain or
justify why Western troops are still in Afghanistan and why they are still
killing and being killed.”

Yet the war goes on, and even the White House plans for too slowly
reducing the U.S. troop presence meet resistance from the Pentagon. In a
replay of the internal fight over U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, U.S.
commander General George Allen was pushing just a few months ago to
keep the current level of troops for another year. The military would also
like to maintain a permanent presence of some 6,000 to 15,000 troops.
That is not going to happen, as the Afghan people don’t want foreign
troops in their country any more than we would want armed fighters from
Al Qaeda here in the U.S. But the attempts to establish a permanent base
of operations will make it more difficult to negotiate an end to war.
And yes, ironically, the U.S. will most likely end up negotiating with
the Taliban to end this war, something our government refused to do after
9-11 when it launched the invasion instead. So, 11 years of war, more than
2,000 U.S. troops dead and tens of thousands wounded will have all been
for nothing, to arrive at the same opportunity that was available without
America’s longest war. Thousands of Afghans have been killed, and the
population has suffered enormously.
The invasion of Iraq was disaster on an even larger scale, with more
than a millionestimated dead, including more than 4,400 U.S. troops.
Hundreds of thousands came home wounded or with brain or
psychological trauma and bleak job prospects. Beside the fact that the war
was launched on the basis of lies, it is hard to see how anyone could
excuse this crime even in retrospect. As the revolution in Egypt showed,
people can get rid of their own dictators – foreign intervention is much
more likely tocreate or vastly expand a bloody civil war.
Meanwhile, U.S. drone strikes carried out “secretly” by the C.I.A.
are becoming institutionalized, widening the so-called “war on terror” to
more countries, in addition to the hundreds of strikes already carried out in
Pakistan. These attacks, which have killed hundreds of civilians and have
even targeted rescue workers, are each day making more people want to
kill Americans.
Our country and our media have too much reverence for the U.S.
military and the CIA, which are not making us safer but rather helping to
create new threats. As theWashington Post reports, some of our generals

have an “array of perquisites befitting a billionaire, including executive
jets, palatial homes, drivers, security guards.” Even worse, many officers
later join the boards and executive suites of military contractors, where
they rake in millions making corporations such as Lockheed Martin,
Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman richer at
taxpayer expense, and sometimes promoting war itself on the network
news. Our military-industrial complex is as corrupt and rotten as any
institution of America’s broken democracy, and more deadly than most in
its consequences.
We need to end this war in Afghanistan and the other operations that
are making Americans less secure and recruiting new enemies daily. Then
we can focus on fixing our broken economy at home.
Mark Weisbrot is an economist and co-director of the Center for
Economic and Policy Research. He is co-author, with Dean Baker,
of Social Security: the Phony Crisis.
This essay originally appeared in Stars and Stripes.
Is the Worst Yet to Come?
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or “Moral Injury”?
by
Shepherd Bliss
“My God, what have we done?” combat soldiers sometimes gasp as
they see those they or comrades just killed, especially when they include
innocent children, women, and other civilians.
“We knew that we killed them/…the terrified mother/ clutching
terrified child,” writes former Lieutenant Michael Parmeley in his poem
“Meditation on Being a Baby Killer.” In l968, Lt. Parmeley led a combat
platoon in the American War on Vietnam. He receives benefits for what is
clinically described as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
“My gunner…started to cry,” Parmeley writes. “There’s a myth of
recovery,/ that you put it behind you/…but memories aren’t like that/…I
know that we killed them.”
Parmeley and I have participated in the Veterans’ Writing Group for
twenty years. We attend regular meetings, break silences, tell our stories in

a healing context, and listen without judgment. His poem appears in our
book “Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace,” (www.vowvop.org) edited by
our writing teacher, award-winning author, and former University of
California Berkeley professor Maxine Hong Kingston.
Would the best description of what Parmeley has be a “disorder?” Or
might other words be more accurate?
“Moral injury” is a relatively new term to refer to what veterans and
others experience, especially those who saw combat or violence. Other
words that have been used include hidden war wounds, shell shock, battle
fatigue, and soldier’s heart.
“Moral injury” places the cause on war itself. A disorder implies that
something is permanently wrong, whereas the word “injury” suggests that
healing is possible. It also indicates that the problem was created by an
outside force, rather than a mental illness or weakness from within.
“Every generation gives war trauma a different name,” explained
Korean vet Jiwon Chung at our last vets’ meeting. “Moral injury, the latest
term, de-pathologizes the condition. If you go to war, come back, and are
not the same, troubled, or suffering, it is not because you are psychically
weak, but because you are morally strong. What you witnessed or did
went against your deepest moral convictions, violating our humanity to the
core.”
Chung later added, “That we vets suffer moral injury, despite the
tremendous suffering and anguish it brings, is actually a validation of our
humanity. War is the reason for moral injury, not any individual
shortcoming. Peace, justice, and reparation are the cures for moral injury.”
The ruthless, recent murder of elementary students and teachers in
Connecticut re-stimulates my grief about the deaths of children in wars. I
have cried for hours about the loss of life in Newtown and what it says
about us as Americans. The weapons used by the Connecticut killer were
military weapons. His killing is connected to the ongoing murders by
Americans in Afghanistan.
Parmeley concludes his poem as follows; “A Mother and child,/ alone
in a bunker,/ a war passing over,/ right now as I speak.” Those words,

which were written decades ago, remain true today—“a war passing
over”–this time in Afghanistan.
What are we teaching our children? As the old sayings go, what goes
around comes around, you reap what you sow, and the chickens come
home to roost. The wars that we have trained people for may be coming
home to the United States in more deadly ways.
I was also a young officer in the U.S. Army during the same years as
my vet buddy Parmeley. However, fortunately, I never made it to Vietnam.
But I was raised in the military family that gave its name to Ft. Bliss,
Texas, and lived in Chile during “the other 9/11”–Sept. 11, l973. I have
been diagnosed with PTSD. I have been treated by psychiatrists,
counselors, and at vets centers.
But what has helped me most has been the support by vets and our
allies to push through silence, shame, guilt, and feelings of worthlessness
and hopelessness to speak and write about my condition.
“Sound Shy” entitles my essay in our book “Veterans of War,
Veterans of Peace.” I suffer from sound trauma, after being raised on loud
Air Force bases around the world where my family was stationed. Even
today, decades later, certain sounds, such as weapon-like leaf blowers, can
trigger my sound trauma and bring back the kinds of nightmarish
“memories” about which Parmeley writes.
Much of my behavior is “sound-avoidant,” seeking quietness. So I
live and work on an organic farm, away from the concentration of people,
closer to plants, animals, and the elements. I engage in what I have written
about as agro-therapy—farms as healing places.
After leaving the military, I moved to Chile, where thousands of
young people from around the world gathered to participate in the
“democratic revolution” of Pres. Salvador Allende. Then Gen. Augusto
Pinochet, supported by the U.S. government, toppled Dr. Allende. Among
those tortured and executed was my good friend Frank Teruggi.
I survived, and still live, nearly forty years later. But I bear what is
described as “survivor’s guilt” from that experience. Rationally, I know
that it was not my fault that Frank was tortured and executed. But why
him and not me? I still hear Frank crying out, inside.

In 2006, I received a summons from an attorney to appear before a
judge in Chile investigating Frank’s case. I went and testified. I also
visited some of the torture centers. Though now transformed into peace
parks, I could still feel the cries of those tortured. Is that really a disorder?
Or does it indicate that humans have a natural kinship to other sentient
beings and can sense their pain?
My Post-Traumatic Stress was triggered in Chile. But the term
disorder does not seem accurate. I felt a kinship with the suffering of those
tortured. I received what would be better described as a “moral injury,”
dating back to being raised in a military family, having served in the
military, and then experiencing the loss of a buddy in my mid-twenties.
Such injuries leave a scar and do not disappear easily. The nervous
system is re-wired and the physiology of the brain is altered, as a way to
cope with them. They can lie dormant and then be re-stimulated by
present-time wounds, such as one that I recently received. I was rejected to
teach a section of a Leadership course at Sonoma State University, which I
had successfully taught for three years. A person replacing me had never
taught before or even been educated to teach.
So I am trying to tell my story and write my way out of having these
sleepless nights and nightmares again.
Having “moral injury” can sensitize one, making a person hypervigilant.
Yet others become de-sensitized to moral injury, the way they
become de-sensitized to violence.
What I feel in my body at this moment in America history is that the
killing of so many young innocent children and their teachers at Sandy
Hook School, and the continuing American War in Afghanistan, are
dangerous signs for our future. The worst may be yet to come. It’s time to
wake up and focus our attention more on the mounting problems our
violence bring us here, rather than deploy so many resources abroad.
It is not only vets who return from war with “moral injury.” Since at
least the American War in Vietnam, the U.S. has been on a steady moral
decline. Each time it invades another country, most recently Iraq and
Afghanistan, it deepens our national “moral injury.” What might be next?
Iran? Pakistan? More children here?

Shepherd Bliss teaches college, has contributed to two-dozen books,
and continues the organic farming that he has done for the last 20 years.
He can be reached at 3sb@comcast.net.
Costs of war
Käthe Kollwitz, "Nie wieder Krieg" (No More War)
Measuring the costs of war should have been conducted by
mainstream economists. But they haven’t done it. So, the task has fallen to
the Costs of War project by Brown University’s Watson Institute for
International Studies, a multidisciplinary team led by political scientist
Neta C. Crawford and anthropologist Catherine Lutz.*
Mainstream economists often defend what they do, and their
superiority over other social sciences, on the basis of their quantitative
methodology and rigorous empirical methodology. But they’ve been
absent from the debate concerning the costs of the ongoing wars in Iraq,
Afghanistan and Pakistan. The only exception is an analysis of the
“Economic Consequences of a War in Iraq” [pdf] conducted by William D.
Nordhaus in 2002. That’s it.

Instead, the responsibility has fallen to others—most famously, the
2008 book The Three Trillion Dollar War, by Linda Bilmes and Joseph
Stiglitz (which they updated here).
And now the Costs of War project. Here are some of their key
findings:
• While we know how many US soldiers have died in the wars (just
over 6000), what is startling is what we don’t know about the
levels of injury and illness in those who have returned from the
wars. New disability claims continue to pour into the VA, with
550,000 just through last fall. Many deaths and injuries among
US contractors have not been identified.
• At least 137,000 civilians have died and more will die in
Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan as a result of the fighting at the
hands of all parties to the conflict.
• The armed conflict in Pakistan, which the U.S. helps the Pakistani
military fight by funding, equipping and training them, has taken
as many lives as the conflict in neighboring Afghanistan.
• Putting together the conservative numbers of war dead, in uniform
and out, brings the total to 225,000.
• Millions of people have been displaced indefinitely and are living
in grossly inadequate conditions. The current number of war
refugees and displaced persons — 7,800,000 — is equivalent to
all of the people of Connecticut and Kentucky fleeing their
homes.
• The wars have been accompanied by erosions in civil liberties at
home and human rights violations abroad.
• The human and economic costs of these wars will continue for
decades, some costs not peaking until mid-century. Many of the
wars’ costs are invisible to Americans, buried in a variety of
budgets, and so have not been counted or assessed. For example,
while most people think the Pentagon war appropriations are
equivalent to the wars’ budgetary costs, the true numbers are
twice that, and the full economic cost of the wars much larger yet.
Conservatively estimated, the war bills already paid and obligated

to be paid are $3.2 trillion in constant dollars. A more reasonable
estimate puts the number at nearly $4 trillion.
• As with former US wars, the costs of paying for veterans’ care
into the future will be a sizable portion of the full costs of the war.
• The ripple effects on the U.S. economy have also been significant,
including job loss and interest rate increases, and those effects
have been underappreciated.
• While it was promised that the US invasions would bring
democracy to both countries, Afghanistan and Iraq, both continue
to rank low in global rankings of political freedom, with warlords
continuing to hold power in Afghanistan with US support, and
Iraqi communities more segregated today than before by gender
and ethnicity as a result of the war.
• Serious and compelling alternatives to war were scarcely
considered in the aftermath of 9/11 or in the discussion about war
against Iraq. Some of those alternatives are still available to the
U.S.
The authors of the report acknowledge the constraints of their
analysis. With their limited resources, they focused on U.S. spending, U.S.
and allied deaths, and the human toll in the major war zones.
There is still much more to analyze and understand. Unfortunately,
they’re not going to get any help from mainstream economists.
* There are, in fact, a number of economists working on the project.
They include Anita Dancs, Ryan D. Edwards, Heidi Garrett-Peltier, James
Heintz, and Bassam Yousif. At least a couple of them received their
doctorates from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. I don’t know
whether the others consider their work to be mainstream or heterodox. The
fact remains, mainstream economists have the quantitative skills to
measure the costs of war but, for the most part, they’ve neglected the
topic.
The question is, why? Maybe they were scared off after Larry
Lindsey, director of the National Economic Council (2001–2002) and
assistant to the president on economic policy, who played a leading role in

formulating President Bush’s $1.35 trillion tax cut plan, was fired after he
estimated the cost of the Iraq war could reach $200 billion.
Environment:
Entergy Watch:
NRC approves reduced inspections on troubled Vermont Yankee
steam dryer
The Bathtub Curve (referring to the graph's shape) for Nuclear Accidents, by David
Lochbaum of Union of Concerned Scientists
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), which is supposed
to protect public health, safety, and the environment, instead often
prioritizes nuclear utility profits. As reported by the Rutland Herald, NRC
has now approved Entergy inspecting its troubled Vermont Yankee (VY)
steam dryer not once every 1.5 years, but rather once every 4.5 years.
This, despite the fact that the steam dryer at VY has developed 65 cracks
in the past 7 years alone, likely related to the 20% "power uprate" NRC
has also rubberstamped there (this means that VY is being run at 120%
hotter and harder than it was originally designed for, with consequently
damaging vibrations).
A decade ago at Exelon's Quad Cities nuclear power plant in Illinois,
another NRC-approved power uprate's vibrations led to a steam dryer's
failure, sending chunks of metal hurtling down steam lines -- some of

which were never recovered, even though the reactor has been permitted
to keep operating.
VY's steam dryer is not the only age-degraded system, structure, or
component at the 41-year-old Fukushima Daiichi twin (a General Electric
Mark I Boiling Water Reactor). Its condensor is also on its last legs,
begging for replacement. Entergy seems in no hurry to pay the tens of
millions of dollars for that repair, either -- and NRC is not requiring it of
them.
The Bathtub Curve for Nuclear Accidents (above left) shows that
age-degradation significantly increases "break down phase" reactor risks.
NRC rubberstamped "power uprates" exacerbate those risks even worse.
PFS pulls the plug on parking lot dump
targeted at Skull Valley Goshutes in Utah
Skull Valley Goshute Margene Bullcreek has led the fight against the dump targeted at
her community. Photo by Gabriela Bulisova.
As reported by the Salt Lake Tribune, the Private Fuel Storage (PFS)
Limited Liability Corporation (LLC) has given up on its plans to turn the
tiny Skull Valley Goshutes Inidan Reservation in Utah into a parking lot
dump (or "centralized interim storage facility") for commercial high-level
radioactive waste. At one time, PFS was comprised of more than a dozen

nuclear utilities, led by Xcel Energy of Minnesota, with Dairyland Power
Co-Op as a front group.
In 2005-2006, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC)
granted PFS a construction and operating license, despite objections by
traditionals with the Skull Valley band, nearly 500 environmental and
environmental justice organizations, as well as the State of Utah. The plan
was for 40,000 metric tons of irradiated nuclear fuel to be "temporarily
stored" (for 20 to 40 years) in 4,000 dry casks on the reservation.
However, as the ultimate plan was to transfer the wastes to the Yucca
Mountain dump, when that proposal was cancelled in 2009, this would
have meant the wastes would have been stuck indefinitely at Skull Valley.
In 2006 a very unlikely coalition, involving the likes of Mormon
political leaders and wilderness advocates, succeeded in creating the first
federal wilderness area in Utah in a generation. This created a "moat"
around the Skull Valley reservation, blocking the railway needed to
directly deliver the waste. And, after lobbying efforts at the top echelons
of Republican Party decision making circles by U.S. Senator Orrin Hatch
(R-UT) as well as Utah Governor Huntsman, the George W. Bush
administration's Department of the Interior refused to approve the lease
agreement between PFS and the Skull Valley band, as well as the
intermodal transfer facility on Bureau of Land Management property
which could have allowed heavy haul trucks to ship the waste containers
the final leg of the journey to the reservation.
The Skull Valley Goshutes were first targeted by the nuclear power
establishment more than 20 years ago. Altogether, 60-some tribes have
been actively targeted for high-level radioactive waste parking lot dumps.
All the proposals have been stopped, as through the work of Native
American grassroots environmental activists like Grace Thorpe, working
in alliance with environmental and environmental justice organizations.
Energy Companies Fracking the Colorado River Basin:
The group, Western Resource Advocates, used public
records to conclude that energy companies are collectively
entitled to divert more than 6.5 billion gallons of water a day

during peak river flows. The companies also hold rights to
store, in dozens of reservoirs, 1.7 million acre feet of water,
enough to supply metro Denver for six years. — Oil, Water
Are Volatile Mix in West, Energy Firms Buying River Rights Add
to Competition for Scarce Resource
Endangered Colorado:
Is it Too Late to Save One of Our Greatest Rivers?
By
Wade Davis
Reproduced by permission of Island Press, Washington DC.
The following excerpt is fromRiver Notes: A Natural and Human History of the Colorado
[3]by Wade Davis, © 2013 Wade Davis.
"Man always kills the things he loves, and so we the pioneers, have
killed our wilderness. Some say we had to. Be that as it may. I am glad I
shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail
are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?" —Aldo Leopold, A
Sand County Almanac,1949
In 1922, having completed work on the first comprehensive
management plan for the Grand Canyon, Aldo Leopold, along with his
younger brother, set out by canoe to explore the mouth of the mighty
Colorado. At the time the main flow of the Colorado reached the sea,
carrying with it each year millions of tons of silt and sand and so much
fresh water that the river’s influence extended some forty miles into the

Gulf of California. The alluvial fan of the delta spread across two million
acres, well over three thousand square miles, a vast riparian and tidal
wetland the size of the state of Rhode Island. It was one of the largest
desert estuaries on earth. Off shore, nutrients brought down by the river
supported an astonishingly rich fishery for bagreand corvina, dolphins,
and the rare and elusive vaquita porpoise, the world’s smallest marine
cetacean. At the top of the food chain was the totoaba, an enormous
relative of the white sea bass that grew to three hundred pounds, spawned
in the brackish waters of the estuary and swarmed in the Sea of Cortez in
such abundance that even fishermen blinded in old age, it was said, had no
difficulty striking home their harpoons.
In contrast to the searing sands of the Sonoran Desert through which
the lower Colorado flowed, and the blue and barren hills of the Sierra de
los Cucapás, cradling the river valley to the north and west, the delta was
lush and fertile, a “milk and honey wilderness,” as Leopold called it, of
marshes and emerald ponds with cattails and wild grasses yielding to the
wind, and cottonwoods, willows, and mesquite trees overhanging channels
where the water ran everywhere and nowhere, as if incapable of settling
upon a route to the sea. The river, wrote Leopold, “could not decide which
of a hundred green lagoons offered the most pleasant and least speedy path
to the gulf. So he travelled them all, and so did we. He divided and
rejoined, he twisted and turned, he meandered in awesome jungles, he all
but ran in circles, he dallied with lovely groves, he got lost and was glad
of it, and so were we.”
Drifting with the ebb and flow of the tides, waking by dawn to the
whistles of quail roosting in the branches of mesquite trees, making camp
on mudflats etched with the tracks of wild boar, yellowlegs, and jaguar,
the Leopold brothers experienced the Colorado delta much as had the
Spanish explorer Hernando de Alarcón, who first reached its shores in
1540. There were bobcats draped over cottonwood snags. Deer, raccoons,
beavers, and coyotes, and flocks of birds so abundant they darkened the
sky. Avocets and willets, mallards, widgeons, and teals, scores of
cormorants, screaming gulls, and so many egrets on the wing that Leopold
compared them in flight to “a premature snowstorm.” He wrote of great

phalanxes of geese sideslipping toward the earth, falling like autumn
leaves. On every shore he saw clapper rails and sandhill cranes, and
overhead, doves and raptors scraping the sky.
It was an exquisite landscape, rich in fauna and flora, with hundreds
of species of birds and rare fish, and along the mudflats, melons and wild
grasses that yielded great handfuls of edible fruits and seeds. But the
brothers’ sojourn in the delta was not without its challenges. The river was
too muddy to drink, the lagoons too brackish, and every night they had to
dig to find potable water. The dense and impenetrable thickets of
cachinillamade movement on land almost impossible, leaving Leopold
doubtful that people had ever lived in the wetlands. “The Delta having no
place names,” he wrote, “we had to devise our own as we went.”
In this Leopold was quite wrong, for the marshes and lagoons of the
Colorado delta had for a thousand years been home to the Cocopah
Indians, who viewed themselves as the offspring of mythical gods, twins
who had emerged from beneath the primordial water to create the
firmament, the earth, and every living creature. In 1540 Hernando de
Alarcón encountered at the mouth of the river not hundreds but thousands
of men and women, who, in their rituals, he reported, revealed a deep
reverence for the sun. He described the Cocopah as tall and strong, with
bodies and faces adorned in paint. The men wore loincloths, the women
coverings of feathers that fell back and front from the waist. Every adult
man had shell ornaments hanging from the nose and ears, and deer bones
suspended from bands of cordage wrapped around the arms. They
gathered in great numbers, small bands of a hundred, larger assemblies of
a thousand, and in one instance, as Alarcón reported, no fewer than six
thousand.
To support such populations, the Cocopah grew watermelons and
pumpkins, corn, beans, and squash. From the wild they feasted on fish,
wood rats, beavers, raccoons, feral dogs, and cattail pollen and tule roots.
In the first months of the year, with their stores of harvested food
exhausted, they travelled to the high desert to gather cactus and agave.
Mesquite pods, ground with a metate, yielded flour that was made into
cakes or mixed with water and consumed as a drink. Their dwellings were

simple structures—round domes of reeds and brush. They slept beneath
blankets of rabbit skins. They moved through the marshes in dugout
canoes, carved from cottonwood, or on rafts of logs bound together by
ropes made from willow bark or wild grasses. Read More
Fracking:
Nuclear Fallout: Ongoing Tragedy/Disaster In Japan:
EnergyNews:
03:12 PM EST on December 26th, 2012 | Leave a comment
Yomiuri: “Alarming trend” in Fukushima children — Parent’s
radiation fears and stress from disaster blamed for spike in obesity
rates
01:11 PM EST on December 26th, 2012 | 4 comments
Lawsuit: “Reactor itself” melted down, not only nuclear fuel rods —
Japan gov’t “lying through their teeth about meltdowns”
12:10 PM EST on December 26th, 2012 | 10 comments
Navy rescue workers sue Japan over Fukushima cover-up —
“Irreparable harm to life expectancy” — Gov’t and Tepco conspired
Ongoing Gulf of Mexico Oil Disaster:
Oil Spill Attorney Stuart Smith’s Blog:
Environmental Must-Reads – December 26, 2012
‘Fracking’ overtakes ‘climate change’ in Google searches
Not so long ago, fracking was a technical term little known beyond
the energy industry. Now it’s coming to Hollywood, as the fierce battle

etween environmentalists and oil firms is played out in several
forthcoming films.
Pay in Oil Fields, Not College, Is Luring Youths in Montana
For most high school seniors, a college degree is the surest path to a
decent job and a stable future. But here in oil country, some teenagers are
choosing the oil fields over universities, forgoing higher education for jobs
with salaries that can start at $50,000 a year.
Wabasha fracking sand processing plant approved
Wabasha’s planning commission has unanimously approved a permit
for a permanent facility to process Wisconsin sand.
The Superior Sand System plant will be used to store silica sand and
load it onto rail cars, according to a report from the Rochester Post-
Bulletin.
Minister ‘misleads’ over fracking
Energy Minister John Hayes has been accused of misrepresenting a
Durham University study after he claimed it concluded fracking could not
contaminate drinking water.
Impact of fracking on air pollution still debated
The amount of air pollution associated with hydraulic fracturing
continues to be a point of contention among environmentalists, industry
leaders and scientists.
Scientists have been divided about the potential air-quality benefits of
natural gas compared with coal when fugitive emissions — gas that
escapes from drilling operations — are included. Industry officials state
that natural gas is the cleanest burning fossil fuel available, while
environmentalists have focused on methane being a greenhouse gas that, if
unburned, has a greater impact on global warming than carbon dioxide.
Shrub Willow Biofuel Heats Up New York Fracking Wars
Wow, that was fast. Just last summer, we noticed that scientists at
Cornell University were developing shrub willow biofuel as a means of
helping New York farmers to squeeze extra income from marginal land,
and before the ink has dried on the research papers, we’re getting news of
a 1,100 acre shrub willow biofuel operation that is already providing
biomass for power plants in the state. If shrub willow energy really does

catch on, it could provide farmers in New York and elsewhere with a more
sustainable source of extra income than natural gas fracking, despite
mounting pressure from the drilling industry.
Even with Cuomo’s blessing, shale gas rush unlikely in 2013
After more than four years of environmental review marked by
escalating battles between industry and anti-drilling protesters, New York
regulators appear likely to complete strict new regulations for shale gas
development by the end of February.
But it remains to be seen if drilling actually begins. Gov. Andrew
Cuomo and his Department of Environmental Conservation have refused
to say whether a 4½-year moratorium on high-volume hydraulic
fracturing, or fracking, will be lifted when regulations are completed.
Industry insiders say development will happen slowly if the ban is lifted.
And opponents have vowed to escalate protests.
Pipeline blast, quake strike 2014 Olympics Russian host Sochi
Russia’s Black Sea resort of Sochi, which will host the 2014 Winter
Olympics, has been hit by a gas pipeline blast and a mild earthquake, a
government spokeswoman said on Wednesday.
Researchers focus on oil dispersant for spills
LSU AgCenter scientists are partnering with researchers at Columbia
University and Iowa State University on development of an
environmentally friendly substance that could be used to clean up oil
spills.
Lafourche Parish president faces ethics probe on camp rental
after Gulf oil spill
The state ethics board has scheduled a March 7 hearing for Lafourche
Parish President Charlotte Randolph.
The Daily Comet reports she’s accused of breaking state ethics law
by renting her camp on Grand Isle to BP PLC after the company paid the
parish $1 million for expenses related to the 2010 oil spill.
Ecology adopts new rules enhancing protection from major oil
spills
The Washington Department of Ecology (Ecology) has formally
adopted changes to two state rules that will enhance protection of the

state’s environment, economy and cultural resources from the impacts of a
potential major spill.
Ecology has calculated that a major spill could cost Washington’s
economy $10.8 billion and adversely affect 165,000 jobs due to
disruptions to maritime shipping and public port activities, recreation and
tourism, and injuries to state fish, shellfish and wildlife.
NOAA warns large ships to avoid sanctuary
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is asking
ships of 400 gross tons or greater to stay farther away voluntarily from
part of the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary when traveling
along the coast to protect the area from possible oil spills.
Montana senators want feds to finish pipeline spill study
Two U.S. senators from Montana are urging federal safety regulators
to wrap up a yearlong study into whether oil spills into rivers, lakes and
other water bodies across the U.S. have resulted from inadequately buried
pipelines.
Oil Spill: Senate Committee on environment demands answers
The Senate Committee on Environment and Ecology has demanded
from NOSDRA, Ministry of Environment and Exxon Mobil Oil Company
to immediately furnish it and the general public with up-to-date
information about previous Oil Spills incidences and in particular the two
most recent Oil Spills that occurred in Ibeno and Idoho areas of Akwa
Ibom State.
Ethics hearing for Lafourche Parish president scheduled March 7
Lafourche Parish President Charlotte Randolph will appear before the
Ethics Adjudicatory Board this spring regarding ethics charges against her.
The hearing is set for March 7.
NJ Transit, nonprofit reflect on Grenloch Lake oil spill one year
later
It’s been nearly a year since 26,000 gallons of diesel fuel leaked out
of underground storage tanks at NJ Transit’s bus facility on Route 42 in
Washington Township, contaminating local waterways, streams and lakes.
Texas Man Takes Last Stand Against Keystone XL Pipeline

An east Texas landowner was so determined to block the Keystone
XL pipeline from coming through his forest that he took to his trees and
built an elaborate network of treehouses eight stories above the ground.
“It popped into my head a long time ago, actually,” says 45-year-old
David Daniel. “If I had to climb my butt on top of a tree and sit there, I
would. It started with that.”
Hiker, blogger researching the Keystone trai
Ken Ilgunas had reached a point in his life when he was searching for
adventure. He found it with the Keystone XL.
The Niagara Falls, N.Y., native is walking the 1,700-mile proposed
route for the extension to the Keystone Pipeline that was built in 2010.
The extension will begin at Hardesty, Alberta, and end at Cushing, Okla.,
if Presi-dent Obama approves the project.
Fukushima farmers return to the land
The fields around Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant were
contaminated with radioactive material following a meltdown in March
2011. Farmer Yoko Sudo is experimenting with new farming methods in
the post-nuclear landscape.
Inactivity amid nuclear crisis leaving Fukushima children out of
shape
Children in nuclear disaster-hit Fukushima Prefecture are getting
fatter due to lack of outdoor exercise amid daily radiation exposure
limitations, the government said Tuesday in its school health report.
Stuck indoors, Fukushima children have highest obesity rates
Children in Fukushima Prefecture have the highest obesity rates in
Japan in seven age groups, education ministry statistics showed, a possible
result of the restrictions on outdoor activities due to lingering fears of
radiation.
The facts on Fukushima’s fish
The catastrophe at Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s Fukushima No. 1
nuclear plant not only affected people directly in Fukushima Prefecture
but also harmed the local economy. Sales of products from the prefecture
have suffered, and tourist spots have lost business, because of rumors or
misinformation about radioactive contamination.

Flimsy waste tanks cause new delay in Fukushima plant
decontamination
Tanks designed to hold radioactive filtrate at the Fukushima No. 1
nuclear plant are proving too fragile to be used, and the operator has
announced a further delay in starting up machinery that cleans
contaminated water.
Black Liberation/Civil Rights:
Spike Lee Slams "Django Unchained"
“American Slavery Was Not A Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western,"
said Lee on Twitter.
Director Spike Lee’s decades long feud with fellow filmmaker
Quentin Tarantino appears to be alive and well.
The Inside Man auteur slammed Tarantino’s latest movie, the slaverythemed
revenge thriller Django Unchained, in a recent interview, even
though he hasn’t see it.
“I cant speak on it cause I’m not gonna see it,” Lee told VIBE
TV. “All I’m going to say is that it’s disrespectful to my ancestors. That’s
just me…I’m not speaking on behalf of anybody else.”
Lee continued his criticism of the potential Oscar nominee on Twitter.

“American Slavery Was Not A Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western. It
Was A Holocaust. My Ancestors Are Slaves.Stolen From Africa. I Will
Honor Them,” Lee tweeted.
Lee infamously lambasted Tarantino in 1997 during the release of his
cult classic Jackie Brown, because of that films ubiquitous use of the nword.
“The problem with Jackie Brown,” Spike Lee reportedly said. “I will
say it again and again. I have a definite problem with Quentin Tarantino’s
excessive use of the n-word. And let the record show that I never said that
he can not use that word — I’ve used that word in many of my films —
but I think something is wrong with him. You look at Pulp
Fiction, Reservoir Dogs and even that thing with Christian Slater, True
Romance. It’s just the n-word, the n-word, the n-word. He says he grew up
on Blaxploitation films and that they were his favorite films but he has to
realize that those films do not speak to the breadth of the entire African-
American experience. I mean the guy’s just stupid.”
In his defense, Tarantino argued in a Playboy interview: “I am
working with The English language. I am not just a film director who
shoots movies. I’m an artist, and good, bad, or indifferent, I’m coming
from that place. All my choices, the way I live my life, are about that.”
Despite scoring rave reviews, the high volume of n-words in Django
Unchained has also been a source of some controversy.
Quentin Tarantino defends depiction of slavery in Django Unchained
Director tells Bafta audience that, violent as his revenge western may
be, the reality of slavery in the deep south was 'far worse'
Andrew Pulver

'I wanted to break that history-under-glass aspect [of slavery]' …
Quentin Tarantino on the set of Django Unchained. Photograph:
Moviestore/Rex Features
Quentin Tarantino defended his decision to make slavery the
backdrop to his new revenge-western Django Unchained, saying that he
found the research he did on the subject "incredibly shocking" and that,
violent as his film may be, the reality was "far worse".
Tarantino was speaking to an audience of Bafta members and critics
after the first UK screening of Django Unchained on Thursday night,
which sees former slave Django Freeman (played by Jamie Foxx) team up
with a German bounty hunter (Christoph Waltz) to find and rescue his
enslaved wife.
"We all intellectually 'know' the brutality and inhumanity of slavery,"
Tarantino said, "but after you do the research it's no longer intellectual any
more, no longer just historical record – you feel it in your bones. It makes
you angry, and want to do something … I'm here to tell you, that however
bad things get in the movie, a lot worse shit actually happened."
"When slave narratives are done on film, they tend to be historical
with a capital H, with an arms-length quality to them. I wanted to break
that history-under-glass aspect, I wanted to throw a rock through that glass
and shatter it for all times, and take you into it."
Tarantino said he was particularly concerned to target what he called
the southern aristocracy – the plantation-owing families represented in the
film by Leonardo DiCaprio's character Calvin Candie – calling them "an
absurd, grotesque parody of European aristocracy". "I did a lot of research

particularly in how the business of slavery worked, and what exactly was
the social breakdown inside a plantation: the white families that owned the
houses, the black servants who worked inside the house, the black servants
that were in the fields, and the white overseers and workers that were hired
to work there."
Describing his film as "a big-budget, big-screen, quasi-epic …
spaghetti western", Tarantino also mentioned he would be keen to make
more films in the same vein: "I'd like to do a couple more, dealing with the
same issue: but different story, different characters." He also let slip the
film was rooted in his long-term critical interest in the Italian-produced
variant on the western genre: he said the story "came to him" while he was
working on a book chapter about film director Sergio Corbucci, director of
the 1966 film Django that inspired the film's title. (Franco Nero, the star of
Django, makes a cameo appearance in Tarantino's film.)
But some things don't change. When asked if he had considered using
digital effects to replace the copious bloodletting customary on spaghetti
westerns, Tarantino shot back: "Not at all; no fucking way. What's the
point of that?"
Labor:
Economy:
World:
Debate and Media Rumours Continue around Chavez’s Health and
Swearing-in
by
Tamara Pearson

Vice-president Nicolas Maduro speaking to media last night (Prensa Miraflores).
Merida, December 25 th 2012 (Venezuelanalysis.com) – According to
the Venezuelan government, President Hugo Chavez is “walking and
exercising”, in contrast to some private media claims that he is currently
“dependent on artificial respiration”. Debate continues over what to do if
Chavez can’t make the 10 January swearing-in, with officials stating there
would be a postponement.
Debate over postponing Chavez’s swearing-in
After winning the 7 October presidential elections, Chavez is due to
swear-in for his new term as president on 10 January, a date that is
stipulated in Venezuela’s constitution. However, there is the possibility
that Chavez may not be well by then, and political leaders on both sides of
the spectrum have been debating what should be done in that situation.
Yesterday Vice-president Nicolas Maduro urged people to “let 10
January arrive, and don’t fall victim to speculation”.
“The people re-elected a president on 7 October, and that’s Chavez,
the rest is speculation. What is certain is that the president has a leave of
absence granted by the national assembly to attend to his health.” As
required by the constitution, the national assembly granted Chavez the
leave shortly before he left for Cuba for the operation.
“If this leave of absence has to be extended beyond 10 January, the
constitution will be activated and surely his swearing-in would take place
before the Supreme Court,” Maduro said.

Also, PSUV leader and president of the national assembly, Diosdado
Cabello, told the opposition on Sunday not to hold high hopes of getting
into power through the 10 January situation, “you’re wrong, absolutely
wrong, that’s not the way you’re going to get into power... forget about 10
January ...read article [231] properly and get off your cloud”.
Article 231 of the constitution only states that the new president
should take the oath in front of the national assembly on that date, but “if
for any supervening reason, the person elected President of the Republic
cannot be sworn in before the National Assembly, s/he shall take the oath
of office before the Supreme Court”. No date is specified in that case.
New elections should be called within 30 days if a president becomes
permanently absent, but that absence is defined as death, resignation, or
permanent physical or mental incompetence certified by a medical board
designated by the Supreme Court.
MUD leaders have said in the past few days that the 10 January date
is unpostponable, and that if Chavez were absent on that day, “absolute
absence” would have to be declared. Opposition constitutional lawyer
Ricardo Antela said the only way postponing would be possible is if “by
the tenth there was a medical guarantee, publically declared and supported
by the national assembly, that the president will recover, and a new date is
decided on”.
However the opposition candidate in the October presidential
elections, Henrique Capriles, agreed with government officials, stating,
“It’s important to be very serious and transparent regarding this, a person
who can’t swear-in on the established day, doesn’t lose his/her condition
as president-elect”.
Chavez’s health and private media rumours
Rumours continue regarding Chavez’s progress recovering from his
operation for cancer. The Spanish agency ABC reported that “Chavez had
a tracheotomy”, a rumour which has since been repeated by English media
as well, including the Miami Herald. The ABC reported on 22 December
that Chavez is on “artificial respiration” after the supposed tracheotomy.
The ABC article also stated that “post operation complications are
accumulating” and that Chavez is getting worse. It says the tracheotomy

was necessary after the respiratory infection. Venezuelan government
officials have informed the public of the infection, but haven’t mentioned
the other complications referred to by the ABC, including “liquid in his
lungs” and a “serious renal deficiency”.
The ABC, which sites its source as “intelligence sources with access
to [Chavez’s] medical reports” even named the type of cancer Chavez has
as “pelvic cancer”, even though neither Chavez nor the government have
ever confirmed the location of Chavez’s reoccurring cancer.
However, yesterday Maduro spoke on public television VTV, saying
he had spoken directly with Chavez for 20 minutes, who is “walking,
doing exercises as part of his daily treatment routine” and gave Maduro “a
range of work orders”.
Maduro spoke to Chavez just before midnight last night, which is
when most Venezuelans celebrate Christmas. He said Chavez asked him to
“greet all the people of Venezuela, especially the boys and girls, on day of
the birth of Jesus”.
Chavez underwent his fourth operation for a reoccurring cancer in
Havana, Cuba, on 11 December.
Health, Education, Science and Welfare:
Daily News Digest December 26, 2012
The 12 Days of a Capitalist Christmas
By
Paul Bucheit

Photo Credit: © Pressmaster/Shutterstock.com
On the first day of Christmas my employer gave to me a penny for
every $3 [3] the richest 130,000 Americans make. It's been a national
tradition since 1980.
On the second day my doctor showed me TWO Americans needing
mental health care, but only one of the two could afford treatment [4]. The
doctor informed me that the fifty states have cut $1.8 billion [5] from their
mental health budgets during the recession, and that the 2013 Republican
budget proposes further cuts. "It's crazy," I protested. "Some states are
allowing guns [6] in schools and daycare centers and churches and bars
and hospitals, but they're cutting mental health care?" The doctor just
nodded in frustration.
On the third day The Economist [7] told me that it costs just THREE
cents [8] in administrative expenses for every $100 raised through a
Financial Transaction Tax (FTT) in the United Kingdom, versus $1.42 for
the personal income tax and $1.25 for the corporate income tax. With up
to THREE quadrillion dollars [9] in total U.S. financial transactions, we
could replace federal income taxes with a tiny FTT.
On the fourth day a food pantry gave me FOUR dollars worth of
food. That's about what food stamp recipients [10] get each day through
the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). To pay for rent
and utilities, a family of three gets $400 per month [11] from Temporary
Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which comes to about FOUR
dollars a day per person.

On the fifth day a financial advisor introduced me to his FIVE richest
investors, who were the only ones out of 100 Americans to increase [12]
their wealth over the past 25 years, by the impressive rate of almost 20%
[13]. It's like that throughout the entire country, the advisor said: only 5%
took almost all the gains. Five golden rings, indeed.
On the sixth day, as the traditional 12-day song started to get
annoying, Santa appeared to take me by the hand to the U.S. corporate
offices, where the tax lawyers gave to me SIX cents [14] for the national
treasury. "Hey," I said, "this used to be twenty-five cents. You've doubled
your profits [15] in the last ten years, but individual and payroll taxes have
to pay 94 cents out of every dollar!" The lawyers just smiled. Santa shook
his head in frustration.
On the seventh day a guidance counselor informed me that one out of
SEVEN [16] Americans between the ages of 16 and 24 is neither working
nor in school.
On the eighth day an IRS agent gave me these matching facts [17]:
Over EIGHT percent of the GDP (8.4%) goes for tax expenditures
(subsidies provided through the tax code, mostly to the very rich). That's
almost exactly the same amount (8.4% of the GDP) that goes to Social
Security and Medicare.
On the ninth day an unemployed dietitian told me that the average
male has increased his weight by NINE percent [18] over the past 20 years
(180 to 196), and the average female by TWELVE percent (142 to 160).
As a NINE dollar per hour [19] food-service worker gave me and Santa
our burgers and fries and shakes, my jolly old partner chortled, "Ho Ho
Ho, soon you'll all look like me!"
On the 10th day a Forbes article confirmed that the TEN richest
Americans [20] made more than our entire national housing budget [21] in
just one year [22]. That's over $50 billion. The twenty richest Americans
made more than our entire education budget. Santa assured me that the
transfer of wealth from society's needs to a few individuals was not the
norm around the world.

On the eleventh day a creditor gave me a bill for ELEVEN trillion
dollars [23] of debt incurred by the American consumer, including
mortgages, student loans, and credit card liabilities.
And on the twelfth day Santa gave me an IOU for TWELVE trillion
dollars [24], the U.S. share [25] of up to $32 trillion [26] held overseas,
untaxed. "One problem," cautioned Santa, "my reindeer haven't been able
to find any of it yet."w
After all this I stood perplexed. "What does it all mean?" I asked
Santa.
"Well, that's capitalism," I heard him exclaim as he drove out of sight.
"It's all about the individual getting all he can, because that will benefit
everyone. And let me tell you," he added with a twinkle, "those benefits
are just as real as I am!"
Quote of the Day:
A study conducted by Edward N. Wolff for the Levy
Economics Institute of Bard College in March 2010 made
the following findings:
‘The richest 1 percent received over one-third of the
total gain in marketable wealth over the period from 1983 to
2007. The next 4 percent also received about a third of the
total gain and the next 15 percent about a fifth, so that the
top quintile collectively accounted for 89 percent of the total
growth in wealth, while the bottom 80 percent accounted for
11 percent.
Debt was the most evenly distributed component of
household wealth, with the bottom 90 percent of households
responsible for 73 percent of total indebtedness.
Wealth concentration in too few hands while the general
populace is saddled with too much debt to buy the goods and
services produced by the corporations, is a replay of the
conditions leading to the crash of 1929 and the ensuing

Great Depression. — Pam Martens, Consumers Have
Powerful Weapons Against Wall Street’s Bad Practices
Video of the Day:
How Christmas as we know it came to be
Ancient and modern changes
101 East - Indonesia's Killing Fields
Image of the Day:
Under Capitalism’s Perpetual War For Perpetual Peace
There Can Be No Peace On Earth Goodwill For Humanity!
Laura Gray’s cartoon from the page of The Militant August 18, 1945,
under banner headline: “There Is No Peace,”
“The Only Victor”
End Wall Street’s Wars!
Occupy Wall Street!
Occupy Wall Street is the Only Organization
That Identifies The Enemy —

The 1% That Own and Control The Wealth!
1960s The Realist — One Nation Under God/1%
(Unlike The Trade Union Misleaders
Nor The Misleaders Of The Oppressed
Who Strive To Be In ‘Partnership’ With The 1%)
1960s The Realist — One Nation Under God/1%
(Unlike The Trade Union Misleaders
Nor The Misleaders Of The Oppressed
Who Strive To Be In ‘Partnership’ With The 1%)
Occupy Wall Street — ‘We Are The 99%’
The resistance continues at Liberty Square
U.S.:
Born in the USA:Regimen of Permanent Wars
by
Ron Ridenour
We live in the Permanent War Age. The United States’ goal is simple
—one that exposes a superpower’s arrogance and monetary greed, and one
that appeals to the American Dream for the majority of its citizens—world
domination!
Most US Americans believe they are the best people in the world, the
strongest, the bravest, owners of the Land of Opportunity. And if war is

necessary to maintain that predominance, so be it—although since the
2008 capital-created economic crisis, there are some cracks in the wall.
Granted, there have been wars for thousands of years ever since the
idea took hold that one should possess private property. From that came
acceptance of war to seize others’ private property. Wars for territorial
expansion have existed since the first empires were formed some 4000
years ago.
While emperors sought territorial expansion and control over sociopolitical
entities, modern imperialism concentrates on economic
domination without a permanent military presence, until a military
intervention is deemed necessary to put down domestic unrest or other
foreign influence.
For the last generation since the fall of state socialism (or state
capitalism) in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, as well as in Viet
Nam, Cambodia, China and Cuba, the US has stood as the world’s sole
superpower. Nevertheless, to assure world domination it must ally with
Europe especially NATO, along with Canada, Australia and Japan.
The so-called Cold War ended with the fall of any pretense of
functioning socialism but wars continue, and the militarization of the
world marches hand in hand with globalization extending even into outer
space. The United States gets off with its aggressive wars by simply
declaring them necessary to stop terrorism, especially in the Middle East,
but not, of course, its terrorist friends in Israel and Saudi Arabia. US selfrighteous
excuse is the terrorism committed against US power structures
within the United States, on September 11, 2001. No matter that almost all
of those allegedly identified terrorists were Saudi Arabians—none were
from Afghanistan or Iraq—the warriors in the Pentagon and Langley
unleashed patriotic murder and legitimized torture in Afghanistan, then
Iraq and other Middle Eastern and African countries where challengers
lurk.
“The War-On-Terror” script was written just a year before its terror
was enthusiastically unleashed to grab all oil and gas fuel and other raw
materials anywhere it could. The world’s policeman warehoused ample
ammo in 800 military bases, in 131 countries. Today, the US has military

ases where it never had before the fall of European socialist states,
including in several new sovereign states earlier under the Soviet Union,
but also in Iraq and Afghanistan, and even in Australia. It has doubled its
number of bases in Colombia for a total of eight where it also has troops.
It operates military war games with previous enemies in Viet Nam and
Cambodia.
The business warlord promoters, who wrote the script “to promote
American global leadership” with its preeminent military forces, had
founded the right-wing think tank, Project for a New American Century
(PNAC), in 1997. In September 2000, the PNAC published its imperial
report, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategies, Forces, and Resources
for a New Century”. They knew it would be unpopular so they predicted
that, in order for it to be accepted by sufficient numbers, a tragedy on the
scale of Pearl Harbor would have to occur. Some forces complied a year
later.
September 11, 2001 was the best of days for the weapons, oil and
construction industries. And it fortified the relatively new service branch
of professional paramilitary mercenaries into a large national killing
industry. Now that the stage was set, the Permanent War Age had to be
sold. We good humans must be fearful of the terrorists, and thus we will
passively or actively support all the wars the various US governments
render us, as we must accept their terror laws and the demise of civil and
labor rights fought for and won by workers, solidarity and leftist activists,
ethnic rights fighters and civil libertarians.
“When a state is committed to such policies, it must somehow find a
way to divert the population, to keep them from seeing what’s happening
around them. There are not many ways to do this. The standard ones are to
inspire fear of terrible enemies about to overwhelm us, and awe for our
grand leaders who rescue us from disaster in the nick of time,” so Noam
Chomsky asserted already in 1986 (What Uncle Sam Really Wants.)
The September 13, 2001 edition of the “Philadelphia Inquirer” spoke
to those fears aroused on 9/11 with the headline: “Give War a Chance”!

George Bush Jr. ordered the war-on-terror October 7, after having
granted the military forces unlimited money, weapons and resources. The
CIA got ten times the previous amount of money for bribes and payments
to mercenaries and torturers. “Preventative” war was approved with new
mass destruction weapons including nuclear and bacteriological weapons.
PNAC spokesmen took up many important posts in the Bush regime—
Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol, Elliott Abrahams,
John Bolton, Richard Perle, John Ashcroft, Richard Cheney (Halliburton’s
former CEO). They succeeded in ramming through the Patriotic Act.
People can now be arrested and detained indefinitely without a judge’s
approval or even a trial. A police state is well underway.
Former NATO Commander, U.S. General Wesley Clark told
“Democracy Now”(2007) that just ten days after 9/11, the Bush regime
had plans to invade as soon as possible several of 40 countries it listed as
“rogue states”—Iraq, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.
What they had in common was oil and banks not under the multinational
corporation control of the Banking International Settlement (BIS) rules
that benefit private capital interests. One of the empire’s fears, for
example, was that Saddam Hussein had agreed with France
President Jacques Chirac to switch from dollars to Euros in oil trading. Six
months later oil dollar rich Bush invaded.
Despite initial hesitancy from several European governments, the Bush
regime succeeded in drawing nearly all of Europe, including most Social
Democrats and Socialists, into its wars. NATO’s constitution had been
limited to defense but was remade, in order to allow for aggressive wars in
any area of the world.
While the Bush government was held down to two wars at a time, the
Obama regime has stepped up the ante with seven at once: Iraq still is
under partial control of U.S. military advisors and well paid mercenaries,
plus Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Uganda, Somalia, Libya. The Syrian
opposition is also politically and materially supported by the US and some
of Europe. Read More
‘Nobel’ Obama Invades Africa:

US deploying troops to 35 African countries
Tags: Military, Africa, Terrorism, USA, Army
U.S. Marines arrive with equipment at the United States embassy in Monrovia,
Liberia (Reuters / Luc Gnago)
The United States Army will be deploying troops to nearly threedozen
African nations in the coming year.
Soldiers based out of Fort Riley, Kansas’ 2nd Brigade, 1st Infantry
Division will begin training in March 2013 in order to prepare for a
project that will send troops to as many as 35 African nations, the
Associated Press reports.
Citing a growing threat from extremist groups, including those with
ties to al-Qaeda, the Department of Defense is hoping to install American
soldiers overseas in order to prepare local troops there for any future crises
as tensions escalate.
Earlier this month, DoD sources with insider knowledge told the
Washington Post that US troops will soon be en route to the nation of Mali
in order to thwart the emerging threat of Islamic extremists, including al-
Qaeda aligned insurgents. With the latest news from the Pentagon, though,
Mali will be just one of many African nations hosting US troops in the
coming year.
According to the AP’s update this week, soldiers will be sent overseas
in the new year to assist only with training and equipping efforts, and are
not necessarily permitted to participate in military operations. Should the

Pentagon ask the troops to engage in battle, however, the secretary of
defense could sign off on an order that would allow as much.
"If they want them for (military) operations, the brigade is our first
sourcing solution because they're prepared," Gen. David Rodriguez, the
head of U.S. Army Forces Command, tells the AP. "But that has to go
back to the secretary of defense to get an execute order."
Additionally, the AP says that US troops will head specifically to
Libya, Sudan, Algeria and Niger in order to prepare for any advances from
al-Qaeda linked groups. Americans will also train and equip forces in
Kenya and Somalia, reportedly, in order to stand up to al-Shabab militants.
Despite the troops being deployed to more than half of the countries in
Africa, though, the AP reports that Uncle Sam will try to avoid giving the
impression that the United States is leaving a substantial footprint across
the continent.
"The challenge we have is to always understand the system in their
country," explains Rodriguez. "We're not there to show them our system,
we're there to make their system work. Here is what their army looks like,
and here is what we need to prepare them to do."
Sources speaking with the AP say that the United States has already
prepared nearly 100 different exercises and training programs to conduct
with African troops during the coming year.
Global Warfare: US Deploying Troops to 35 African Countries
By
Russia Today
The United States Army will be deploying troops to nearly threedozen
African nations in the coming year.
Soldiers based out of Fort Riley, Kansas’ 2nd Brigade, 1st Infantry
Division will begin training in March 2013 in order to prepare for a
project that will send troops to as many as 35 African nations, the
Associated Press reports. Citing a growing threat from extremist groups,
including those with ties to al-Qaeda, the Department of Defense is hoping
to install American soldiers overseas in order to prepare local troops there
for any future crises as tensions escalate.

Earlier this month, DoD sources with insider knowledge told the
Washington Post that US troops will soon be en route to the nation of Mali
in order to thwart the emerging threat of Islamic extremists, including al-
Qaeda aligned insurgents. With the latest news from the Pentagon, though,
Mali will be just one of many African nations hosting US troops in the
coming year. According to the AP’s update this week, soldiers will be sent
overseas in the new year to assist only with training and equipping efforts,
and are not necessarily permitted to participate in military operations.
Should the Pentagon ask the troops to engage in battle, however, the
secretary of defense could sign off on an order that would allow as much.
“If they want them for (military) operations, the brigade is our first
sourcing solution because they’re prepared,” Gen. David Rodriguez, the
head of U.S. Army Forces Command, tells the AP. “But that has to go
back to the secretary of defense to get an execute order.” Additionally, the
AP says that US troops will head specifically to Libya, Sudan, Algeria and
Niger in order to prepare for any advances from al-Qaeda linked groups.
Americans will also train and equip forces in Kenya and Somalia,
reportedly, in order to stand up to al-Shabab militants. Despite the troops
being deployed to more than half of the countries in Africa, though, the
AP reports that Uncle Sam will try to avoid giving the impression that the
United States is leaving a substantial footprint across the continent.
“The challenge we have is to always understand the system in their
country,” explains Rodriguez. “We’re not there to show them our system,
we’re there to make their system work. Here is what their army looks like,
and here is what we need to prepare them to do.” Sources speaking with
the AP say that the United States has already prepared nearly 100 different
exercises and training programs to conduct with African troops during the
coming year.
As Gets HSBC Let Off Easy For Transfering Drug Money:
5 Senior Citizens Serving Life Without Parole for Pot
Should five non-violent offenders die behind bars for a crime
Americans increasingly believe should not even be a crime?
By

Kristen Gwynne
Photo Credit: Farsh/ Shutterstock.com
Right now, five adults await death in prison for non-violent,
marijuana-related crimes. Their names are John Knock, Paul Free,
Larry Duke, William Dekle, and Charles “Fred” Cundiff. They are all
more than 60 years old; they have all spent at least 15 years locked up
for selling pot; and they are all what one might call model prisoners,
serving life without parole. As time wrinkles their skin and weakens
their bodies, Michael Kennedy of the Trans High Corporation has filed
a legal petition with the federal government seeking their clemency.
Otherwise they will die behind bars for selling a drug 40% of
American adults have admitted to using, 50% of Americans want legal,
and two states have already legalized for adult use. Since these men
were convicted of these crimes many years ago, public opinion and
policy related to marijuana have shifted greatly. Should these five nonviolent
senior-citizen offenders die behind bars for a crime Americans
increasingly believe should not even be a crime?
1. John Knock, 65, has been incarcerated for more than 16 years.The
only evidence against him was the testimony of informants;
Knock was convicted of conspiracy to import and distribute
marijuana. The judge sentenced him to 20 years for money
laundering plus not one, but two terms of life-without-parole -- a

punishment typically reserved for murderers. Despite the uniquely
unjust sentence, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals and the U.S.
Supreme Court denied his pleas for reconsideration via appeal or
court order.
Waiting for death in jail, Knock suffers from chronic sinus
problems linked to an untreated broken nose. Due to circulatory
problems, one of his ankles swells to twice its size. Knock also
suffers from what the legal petition called “untreated" hearing and
vision problems. Easing some of his pain are visits from his
family and his participation in prison programs. He has taught
home building and physical education inside the prison that has
become his home. According to the legal petition, he is assured
employment and a home should his sentence be commuted.
2. Before he was incarcerated, Paul Free obtained a BA in marine
biology and was starting a school while teaching English in
Mexico. Now 62, he has continued his passion for education
behind bars, where he has lived for the past 18 years. Free helps
inmates prepare for the General Equivalency Diploma tests, and
according to the petition, prison officials have applauded Paul’s
hard work and his students’ high graduation rate. Paul suffers
from degenerative joint disease, failing eyesight, sinus problems,
and allergies, and he has had 11 skin cancers removed.
3. Once a union carpenter, Larry Duke, a 65-year-old decorated
Marine, has spent the last 23 years of his life behind bars for
weed. On top of the difficulties life in prison lays on the psyche,
Duke suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder stemming from
multiple tours in the Vietnam war. Like Knock, Duke received
two life sentences without parole for a non-violent marijuana
conspiracy, and was unsuccessful at appeal. According to the legal
petition, Duke is the longest-serving nonviolent marijuana
prisoner in the nation. Read More
Environment:

21st Century Eco-Socialism? Struggles over Nature in Venezuela
An interview with Santiago Arconada
Santiago Arconada was the first Community Coordinator
for the Caracas metropolitan region of HIDROCAPITAL, the
city's water utility, and subsequently held several prominent
positions in HIDROVEN, the national water company. He was
part of a team of reformers responsible for implementing the
participatory model of the technical water committees (mesas
técnicas de agua, MTAs) throughout Venezuela beginning in the
mid-1990s. He currently teaches at the Universidad Indígena de
Venezuela and has written extensively about decolonization,
socialism, the MTAs, and the Bolivarian Process. In this
interview, Santiago discusses the peaks and valleys experienced
by the mesas técnicas de agua and the differences between 21st
century socialism and eco-socialism. He concludes by proposing
a radical rethinking of the human-nature relationship.
— Susan Spronk and Rebecca McMillan.
Susan Spronk and Rebecca McMillan (SS and RM): What is the
history of your involvement with the mesas técnicas de agua?
Santiago Arconada.
Santiago Arconada (SA): In 1999, Jacqueline Faría[1] approached
me and asked me to start the community management office in
HIDROCAPITAL.

I had been a militant my whole life, and when Chávez was elected in
1999, it was a major turning point for leftists of my generation. Prior to
Chávez, we had always organized against the government – protesting,
organizing unions in the textile factories, etc. And then in 1999, all of a
sudden it was our turn to govern! We had to totally change our state of
mind.
One of the first things the government did when Chávez came into
office was to establish the community management office in
HIDROCAPITAL. That was important because Venezuelan cities were
plagued by water and sanitation problems. At the time, there were protests
around water almost everyday.
So when Chávez arrived, he inherited a water supply system that had
been abandoned for 40 or 50 years; people had enormous expectations of
him. It was like they were waiting for the ticket to heaven. But Chávez
handled this challenge marvellously. He rose to the occasion in such a
forceful, convincing way that during the first few years the water
experience was really the face of the Bolivarian Process.
We supported the government and the experiment wholeheartedly. I
gave up all that I had, including time with my family. I would pick up and
leave my wife and kids and go wherever the government sent me.
SS and RM: Can you tell us more about your personal
background?
SA: Before becoming a unionist, I only had a high school education.
After high school, I didn't feel the need to continue studying. Now,
because of my work at the Universidad Indígena de Venezuela, I decided
to go back and get a university degree. I am currently studying education
at the Universidad Nacional Experimental Simón Rodríguez. One of the
Bolivarian Process's most amazing contributions has been its attention to
education, particularly during the early years.
For me, the time of unionism was also the time of socialism because
unionism and socialism were like two sides of the same coin. When
socialism came into crisis in the 1980s, so too did unionism. The union
crisis was also brought on by Venezuela's neoliberal reforms. During the
neoliberal period, the textile industry, where we had been organizing,

virtually disappeared. But we remained committed to the idea of
workplace organizing and wanted to continue experimenting with selfmanagement.
So we started to do ideological work with the carpenters
between 1983 and 1999. When 1999 rolled around, I was working as a
carpenter and also spending time on my writing and other personal
projects.
It might be hard for you to imagine what the Bolivarian Process
meant for someone like me. When I was working in carpentry I was trying
to build a little bubble where I could live free from exploitation, in
harmony with the environment. However, I knew that this wouldn't go
beyond me and my children and my grandchildren. I wanted to prepare a
little safe space for them and also a space where I could write and work on
art. Then in 1999, they knocked on my door and said, “Now you have to
come out from your space and govern!” (Gasp). It was a huge surprise. It
was a life-changing event.
SS and RM: Why do you think the mesas técnicas de agua have
been so significant for the Bolivarian Process?
SA: During the first six years of the process, the MTAs were the most
significant spaces for public participation in Venezuela and had the biggest
impact. That's why in 2005 Chávez said that he was in love with the mesas
técnicas de agua.
The mesas técnicas de agua have enabled people to overcome
incredible situations of adversity. In 2000, the MTAs spent the entire year
dealing with the Vargas landslide.[2] There had been a long period of
heavy rain and the results were tragic. To put things in perspective, when
the USAID worker responsible for the recovery (back when USAID still
worked in Venezuela) flew over the site to survey the damages, his
reaction was “three Mitches!” He said that what he saw was three times as
bad as the devastation caused by hurricane Mitch. So we knew it was a
real tragedy. The water supply was totally destroyed in the state of Vargas.
Then, we faced the collapse of the Barlovento dam, which left many
parts of the capital without water. The mesas técnicas made it possible for
people to face so much adversity. Read More

Fracking:
Nuclear Fallout: Ongoing Tragedy/Disaster In Japan:
EnergyNews:
11:53 AM EST on December 25th, 2012 | 7 comments
Kyodo: Radiation fears keep Fukushima kids inside — Filmmaker:
Adults break down in tears when seeing children forced to play at
indoor ‘smile parks’… “Suddenly, I was overcome with emotion and
began to sob”
01:39 PM EST on December 24th, 2012 | 15 comments
Company Officials: Liquid oil is coming from bubbles in center of
giant sinkhole — No cleanup crews working from Dec. 22 to 26
10:34 AM EST on December 24th, 2012 | 33 comments
Large area of gas bubbling during flyover of giant sinkhole —
Pollution seen escaping into environment (PHOTOS)
02:14 AM EST on December 24th, 2012 | 22 comments
Report from Japan: Radioactive fallout around Fukushima
incineration plant being hidden — “It’s very odd” (VIDEOS)
11:32 PM EST on December 23rd, 2012 | 7 comments
Gundersen: Beams holding up nuclear reactor likely to fail during
accident at US plant — I was dumbfounded… how can they know
about this and not do anything for decades? (AUDIO)
10:10 PM EST on December 23rd, 2012 | 6 comments
CNN: Experts call Japan cleanup effort meaningless — An endless
task that’s simply spreading around radiation (VIDEO)
05:27 PM EST on December 23rd, 2012 | 8 comments

Expert: Concern about risk of gas pipeline rupture at NYC-area
nuclear plant — Could lead to multiple meltdowns — “Possible severe
damage to fuel in spent fuel pools” — Sissonville, San Bruno cited as
examples
Ongoing Gulf of Mexico Oil Disaster:
Oil Spill Attorney Stuart Smith’s Blog:
Our fight for a fair BP settlement will go on
It may well be a accident of timing — all of us are racing to complete
unfinished tasks before the Christmas holiday — but a major piece of
news regarding BP and the ongoing quest for justice in the news was
released late on Friday, heading right into the 12 days of Christmas when
folks are spending time with their loved ones, and not watching the news.
But it’s a story that BP surely doesn’t want you to dwell much upon,
as it races ahead in its mad dash to put the horrors of the 2010 Deepwater
Horizon catastrophe behind it: A federal judge has turned aside multiple
objections and approved the $7.8 billion settlement between BP and
thousands of Gulf residents and business owners:
A federal judge signed off on BP’s settlement with
businesses and people hard hit by the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf
of Mexico.
U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier in New Orleans issued a
125-page ruling Friday night on a class-action suit. He gave the
settlement preliminary approval in May and overruled questions
and criticism of the agreement in his Friday ruling.
“None of the objections, whether filed on the objections
docket or elsewhere, have shown the settlement to be anything
other than fair, reasonable, and adequate,” the ruling said. “The
low numbers of objections and opt-outs are evidence of the
settlement’s fairness.”
BP has estimated a settlement of about $7.8 billion paid
from a $20 billion trust. Thousands of businesses and

individuals made claims in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama,
some coastal counties in eastern Texas and western Florida and
adjacent Gulf waters and bays.
With the exception of seafood claims, there is no cap on the
amount BP will pay to those who agree to the settlement.
No doubt, this is a significant development, but it is not the end of the
story…far from it. In fact, as a new year dawns, we are preparing to
appeal Judge Barbier’s ruling on behalf of the numerous Gulf Coast
citizens, fishermen and boat captains and other clients that we represent in
this important matter.
We continue to maintain that there are significant problems with the
deal that Judge Barbier signed off on, and we are hardly alone. Many other
key players — including the U.S. Justice Department and the state of
Louisiana, among others — filed objections with the court that portrayed
the settlement as a rush to judgement, before the full extent of BP’s
environmental recklessness and harm is known.
As we noted earlier, Hurricane Isaac stirred up a lot of the estimated
1 million barrels of oil that were not fully cleaned up in the Gulf — too
much of which washed ashore on our beaches this past summer. This is on
top of mounting scientific evidence that the damage from the 2010 oil spill
— to fragile wetlands, to struggling oyster beds and depleted fisheries —
is even worse than initially feared. In the case of the 1989 Exxon Valdez
disaster off Alaska, several key marine fisheries did not collapse until a
few years after the incident, and we continue to be alarmed at the prospect
that this will also happen in the Gulf.
All this points to a deal this is too premature, and almost certainly is
too beneficial toward BP. And in court last month, I argued against the
arbitrary geography of the damage awards – in which businesses in the
same community are currently entitled to very unequal amounts. We will
continue to fight all of these issues on appeal.
It’s important to note that the judge’s ruling only applies to the
economic terms and not to the proposed medical settlement. You’ll recall
that serious objections have been lodged – by the likes of Dr. Michael
Robichaux, a doctor who has treated a number of chronically ill clean-up

workers and others exposed to BP’s spilled oil – over the fairness of
the terms of that deal to those suffering from chronic illness. So it is our
continued hope that Judge Barbier will send this back for more work.
All of us would like to put the Deepwater Horizon disaster behind us.
But that’s not possible, not when the Gulf is still reeling from the
environmental aftershocks some 32 months later. When it comes to
assessing the damages for this manmade disaster, fairness is ultimately
much, much important than speed.
And so our fight for fairness goes on.
To read more about Judge Barbier’s ruling on the BP settlement,
please go to: http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/22/us/bp-spill-settlement/
index.html
To check out our Sept. 12 post detailing our objections to the $7.8
billion deal, please read: http://www.stuarthsmith.com/we-object-whybps-8-7-billion-deal-is-a-failed-settlement/
To read the Dec. 17 blog post about Dr. Michael Robichaux and
medical objections to the settlement, check out: http://
www.stuarthsmith.com/gulf-doctor-bp-settlement-wont-help-my-sickpatients/
Black Liberation/Civil Rights:
Labor:
Economy:
The Lies of Big Oil and Coal
U.S. Energy Independence is a Sham
by
Joshua Frank
Whether it is the hucksters pushing for the Keystone XL pipeline to
cut across the Heartland, or the coal barons who are ramping up their
exploits in Powder River Basin, a familiar refrain can be heard echoing
throughout their propaganda: America must produce its own energy and

stop relying on “terrorist” countries to keep our homes heated, cars
running and economy kicking.
“The United States consumes 15 million barrels of oil per day and
imports 11 million,” Russell K. Girling of the TransCanada Corporation,
which is to build the Keystone pipeline, wrote in The Hill. “Keystone XL
offers Americans the choice of receiving their oil from a friendly, secure
supplier in Canada, instead of importing crude from unstable, volatile
foreign nations such as Venezuela, Libya and other areas of the Middle
East.”
Despite popular belief, Keystone XL, which is to transport tar sands
from Alberta, Canada to Port Arthur, Texas, will not be used domestically.
Refiners based in Port Arthur, where the oil will end up, are focused on
exporting oil to Europe and Latin America. The majority of the heavy tar
sands oil extracted in Alberta will never end up being burned in the United
States.
“To issue a presidential permit for the Keystone XL, the
administration must find that the pipeline serves the national interest,”
says Stephen Kretzmann, executive director of Oil Change International.
“An honest assessment shows that rather than serving U.S. interests,
Keystone XL serves only the interests of tar sands producers and shippers,
and a few Gulf Coast refiners aiming to export the oil.”
Additionally, Valero, which is to be one of Keystone XL’s main
customers, purchasing 76 percent of initial production, has detailed to its
investors that the crude it is to buy is mainly set for export. To top it off,
Port Arthur, where the dirty oil is to be refined, is in a Foreign Trade Zone,
where the company can operate without paying any U.S. taxes. Valero’s
contract is to last until 2030 and the company is to take around 100,000
barrels of tars sands per day.
Despite an outpouring of opposition to the proposed pipeline, which
culminated in over 1,200 arrests in late August and early September 2011
outside the White House and ongoing protests in Texas, the Obama
administration is slowly moving forward with the deal. President Obama’s
jobs advisers are lending support for the pipeline and he is also likely

getting pressure from within his own party to give the project a green
light.
In 2008 Paul Elliot, who now serves as TransCanada’s chief
Washington lobbyist for Keystone XL, served as a national campaign
manager for Hillary Clinton’s presidential race. Additionally, as was
discovered by anti-Tar Sands activists from Nebraska as they prepared for
hearings on the matter at the State Department, the hearings were being
held by a company called Cardno Entrix. It turns out that Cardno Entrix is
contracted to run the environmental-review for the Keystone XL pipeline,
but lists TransCanada as one of its major clients on its website.
“The pipeline company recommended the firm they wanted to review
them, a firm that listed the pipeline company as one of their major
clients,” writes Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein. “Perhaps–just perhaps–
that explains why the review found that Keystone XL would have ‘limited
adverse environmental impacts,’ a finding somewhat at odds with the
conclusion of 20 of the nation’s top scientists who wrote the president this
summer to say it would be an environmental disaster.”
It appears that TransCanada is doing all it can to impact the Obama
administration’s decision on the matter by hiring a former Democratic
campaign manager, and has certainly pushed Obama’s State Department to
hire a company with close ties to the very company it is supposed to
independently review. Additionally, some have criticized the job numbers
for the project. In 2010, TransCanada said that, “During construction,
Keystone XL would create 13,000 jobs and further produce 118,000 spinoff
jobs.” But a report from Cornell University says these numbers are
inflated, writing that the project will create no more than 2,500-4,650
temporary construction jobs for two years based on the data TransCanada
has given the State Department.
Not only will hundreds of thousands of jobs not be created, and not
only will tax revenue not help the country get back on track, the majority
of the oil from the tar sands will end up not even being used in the United
States. Debunking these myths are just one part of the fight for a clean
energy future.

And it is not just the tar sands and the Keystone XL pipeline facts
that need to be straightened out; the coal industry is currently on a major
PR push to pressure the public into believing that locally produced coal is
a crucial part of the U.S.’s energy independence. The U.S. is the fourth
largest coal exporter in the world and companies are working hard to
increase production and shipments.
“America’s abundant coal reserves — and our continued use of coal
to generate electricity — also promote greater U.S. energy security,” said
American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, a front group that is made
up of over 40 coal industry companies. “The reason is simple: The coal we
rely upon is found right here at home, and we have a more than 200-year
supply based upon today’s rate of usage.”
While it may be true that the U.S. has some of the world’s largest
reserves, along with Canada a total of 29 percent of the globe’s
recoverable coal, major companies like Peabody and Arch Coal are
looking more and more at oversees markets and mines to turn a profit.
They know the jig is up here at home, where dozens of new coal plant
proposals are being tossed in the trash. As such, Asian countries are
increasingly coming into play, as China continues to build two mid-size
power plants a week. In 2007 the Energy Watch Group reported that China
could reach maximum production by 2015, which means they will have to
get much of their coal from elsewhere.
This is why companies operating in the coal-rich Powder River Basin
are increasingly eyeing potential coal export facilities up and down the
West Coast. There are only two coal terminals that ship coal to Asia; one
in Seward, Alaska and another major terminal in Vancouver, B.C. Coal
exports from the U.S. to Asian markets during the first six months of 2010
increased almost 400 percent compared to the entire year of 2009. It’s one
of the only shimmering lights on the horizon for the struggling coal
industry, which is facing increased opposition in the U.S. as old power
plants are shuttered and new proposals are being met with stiff resistance.
This hasn’t stopped the Obama administration from pumping
hundreds of millions into “clean coal” projects or from allowing the
Bureau of Land Management from opening up public lands in the Powder

River Basin for coal mining. Nonetheless, as awareness of coal’s
contribution to global warming and human health impacts grows,
American coal companies are going to fight to keep the mines operating
and the coal burning. Even it if means helping to fuel one of our country’s
main economic rivals, China. Read More
Quantitative Easing is a Bust
What’s Wrong with the Economy?
by
Mike Whitney
The reason the US economy is still sluggish 4 years after Lehman
Brothers defaulted, is of lack of demand. Demand dropped off after the
housing bubble burst and has never really recovered. Economist Dean
Baker calculates that hit to demand is somewhere in the neighborhood of
$1 trillion per year, a sum that’s been impossible to replace. Here’s how
Baker breaks down the costs in terms of GDP and weak consumption:
“We saw a sharp falloff of residential construction as we went from a
near record boom, with construction exceeding more than 6.0 percent of
GDP at the 2005 peak, to a bust where it fell below 2.0 percent of GDP.
This meant a loss in annual demand of more than $600 billion a year.
We also saw a large falloff in consumption due to the loss of $8
trillion in housing wealth. The housing wealth effect is one of the oldest
and most widely accepted concepts in economics. It is generally estimated
people spend between 5 and 7 cents each year per dollar of housing
wealth. This means that the collapse of the bubble would be expected to
cost the economy between $400 billion and $560 billion in annual
demand.
There is no mechanism that would allow the economy to easily
replace the combined loss of between $1 trillion and 1.2 trillion in demand
that would be predicted from the collapse of the housing
bubble.” (“Underwater Homeowners Cannot Explain the Weak Recovery,
Dean Baker, CEPR)
So, while household indebtedness, off-shoring of jobs and so called
“onerous” regulations may have dampened overall activity, the proximate

cause of the slowdown is the housing bubble which blasted a trillion dollar
hole in demand.
The Obama administration tried to address the situation in 2009 by
implementing the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).
The $800 billion fiscal stimulus package narrowed the output gap, reduced
unemployment and raised GDP, but it failed to produce the strong and
sustainable recovery that was promised. That said, the ARRA did lift the
economy out of recession and put 3 million people back to work, which is
certainly a step in the right direction. The administration used the budget
deficits exactly as British economist John Maynard Keynes suggested they
be used, to sustain activity when the private sector had dramatically cutback
on spending and investment. When the businesses and consumers
cannot sustain demand, then government must increase its spending or the
economy will slip into a long-term slump. (Compare the recovery in the
US to developments in the eurozone where discredited contractionary
“austerity” policies have pushed the 17 member monetary union deeper
into recession and social malaise.)
Of course there are other factors that have weighed heavily on
demand, too, like high unemployment (7.7 percent) and wage stagnation..
According to economist Jared Bernstein, the real “pretax” earnings of
middle wage workers have never grown more slowly than they have in
2012. (See chart here.) Also, the Commerce Department reports that
employee pay is a smaller share of the economy today than it has been
since the government started collecting wage and salary data. (which dates
back to 1929.) Naturally, if wages are shrinking and unemployment is
high, then demand is going to be weak and the economy is going to
underperform. And that’s exactly what’s happening.
And then, there is growing inequality. Check this out from Pam
Martens at Wall Street on Parade:
“A study conducted by Edward N. Wolff for the Levy Economics
Institute of Bard College in March 2010 made the following findings:
‘The richest 1 percent received over one-third of the total gain in
marketable wealth over the period from 1983 to 2007. The next 4 percent
also received about a third of the total gain and the next 15 percent about a

fifth, so that the top quintile collectively accounted for 89 percent of the
total growth in wealth, while the bottom 80 percent accounted for 11
percent.
Debt was the most evenly distributed component of household
wealth, with the bottom 90 percent of households responsible for 73
percent of total indebtedness.
Wealth concentration in too few hands while the general populace is
saddled with too much debt to buy the goods and services produced by the
corporations, is a replay of the conditions leading to the crash of 1929 and
the ensuing Great Depression.” (“Consumers Have Powerful Weapons
Against Wall Street’s Bad Practices”, Pam Martens, Wall Street on Parade)
While the upward distribution of wealth speaks to the implicit
unfairness of the system, its impact on demand can be offset by increases
to government spending vis a vis fiscal stimulus. Unfortunately,
policymakers have abandoned fiscal policy altogether and transferred de
facto control of the economy to the Central Bank. The Fed is not just
calling all the shots, it’s doing so in a way that reflects its bias towards big
finance. This is why the recovery has been so abysmal, because the policy
has focused on boosting profits for Wall Street instead of revitalizing the
broader economy. Even so, Fed chairman Ben Bernanke has
acknowledged that the real reason unemployment is still so high, is not
“structural”, (as conservatives argue) but lack of demand. Here’s what he
said in a recent appearance before Congress:
“Is the current high level of long-term unemployment primarily the
result of cyclical factors, such as insufficient aggregate demand, or of
structural changes, such as a worsening mismatch between workers’ skills
and employers’ requirements? … I will argue today that, while both
cyclical and structural forces have doubtless contributed to the increase in
long-term unemployment, the continued weakness in aggregate demand is
likely the predominant factor.”
Bernanke’s admission is further underscored by a McKinsey survey
of corporate managers from around the world which found that “the single
greatest fear among executives everywhere is weak consumer demand for
their companies’ products and services.” (CBS News)

So the question we should be asking ourselves is this: Why is so hard
to get a second round of fiscal stimulus when Keynesian remedies have
been used for more than 60 with great success? What’s changed?
What changed is the orientation of the people in power, most of
whom are either closely-aligned to or former employees of Wall Street.
Today’s political class is a subsidiary of the financial oligarchy. And that
goes double for the Fed who invariably puts the interests of the big
investment banks and brokerages above those of ordinary working people.
Proof of “regulatory capture” is evident in the manner that the recovery
has been managed. (or mismanaged!) Trillions of dollars in loans and
bailouts have been showered on the banks and financial institutions while
homeowners, consumers and working stiffs have been asked to cut back
on vital social programs for the sick, elderly, and unemployed. These
policies are largely responsible for today’s anemic, sputtering recovery, a
condition that’s ideal for restructuring the economy in a way that better
serves the interests of the big corporations and Wall Street. Read More
World:
Carnage in the Congo
Murder, Mayhem and the UN
by
Thomas C. Mountain
The UN has condemned Rwanda’s role in the carnage in the Congo
for supplying arms and aid to the M23 rebels fighting the Congolese army
in northern Congo yet provides the Rwandan military ten$ of million$ in
arms and aid for the thousands of Rwandan “peacekeepers” operating
under UN control in Dafur.
The UN gives arms to the Rwandan military, which in turn gives
arms to Tutsi rebels of the M23 warlords and then the UN condemns
Rwanda but orders its peacekeepers in the Congo, who in the past
bombarded the M23 rebels, to stand aside as the M23 captures the
strategically critical town of Goma in eastern Congo. Doesn’t make much
sense does it?

Murder, mayhem and the UN in the Congo, it goes back almost two
decades and is probably one of the least understood conflicts in the world,
so lets start with the two major players in the conflict, Uganda and
Rwanda.
Rwanda has a president named Paul Kagame who twenty years ago
was the head of the Ugandan CIA under President Musuveni and Rwanda
and Uganda remain pretty much joined at the hip.
Both Musuveni and Kagame are dependent on the hundred$ of
million$ of under the table royaltie$ they are making off the illegal mining
they “protect” in north and eastern Congo and both countries have
“peacekeepers” funded by the UN in Somalia.
So the UN is giving both countries lots of weapons and cash and then
doesn’t like it when such ends up supporting local warlords on behalf of
the Musuveni/Kagame mafia?
And in the mean time millions of Congolese die, millions more live
in desperate conditions fleeing the fighting and millions more dollars each
day are looted from the Congo, a country that meets the definition of a
failed state if there is one.
Think about it, what is the UN going to do when it depends on
Rwanda and Uganda to enforce its diktats in Dafur and Somalia when
Rwanda and Uganda openly defy all UN proclamations when it comes to
the Congo?
One can see just who is really behind the scenes when both the
“President” of the Congo, Joseph Kabila (jr) and his sworn enemy Paul
Kagame of Rwanda sit down together in…Kampala, the capital of
Uganda, under the watchful eye of the USA’s second string Godfather in
east Africa, Pres. Musuveni.
Deals have to be made, business is business, divide up the loot and
lets get back to making money is the story of the day, only Kabila is not to
thrilled with the short end of the deal. But then M23 might just decide to
march on Kinshasa, capital of the Congo, kick Kabila out and install their
own man of the hour, sort of like Musuveni did when he sent the Rwandan
rebel army he funded and armed and headed by his CIA director Kagame
into Rwanda in 1994.

The plot thickens as the Obama White House and its hit woman UN
Ambassador Susan Rice is stirred in, for Musuveni is their boy and Kabila,
a Francophone and closer to the French than the USA, has been heard
muttering words of working with China, or whomever would take a
chance investing in his parts.
Susan Rice has a lot invested in Musuveni and Kagame, covering up
crimes going back to her days in the cabinet under Clinton and the
Rwandan massacre in 1994 and has protected them at the UN so far.
With the USA’s other enforcer in the east Africa, Meles Zenawi, dead
and Ethiopia heading for disintegration Musuveni and Kagame is the best
the Obama regime still has and is certain to continue to allow the carnage
to continue in the Congo.
As for the UN it remains little more than a front for US foreign policy
and crisis management is the USA’s policy in Africa, as in create a crisis
and then manage the chaos to better loot and plunder, so one should expect
business as usual as in the UN, murder and mayhem in the Congo.
Thomas C. Mountain is the most widely distributed independent
journalist in Africa, living and reporting from Eritrea since 2006. He can
be reached at thomascmountain@yahoo.com.
Health, Education, Science and Welfare:
Study Shows Rapid Warming On the West Antarctic Ice Sheet

Researchers have determined that the central region of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet
(WAIS) is experiencing twice as much warming as previously thought. Their analysis
focuses on the temperature record from Byrd Station (indicated by a star), which provides
the only long-term temperature observations in the region. Other permanent research
stations with long-term temperature records (indicated by black circles) are scattered
around the continent. On this map, the color intensity indicates the extent of warming
around Antarctica. (Credit: Image by Julien Nicolas, courtesy of Ohio State University)
Dec. 23, 2012 — In a discovery that raises further concerns about the
future contribution of Antarctica to sea level rise, a new study finds that
the western part of the ice sheet is experiencing nearly twice as much
warming as previously thought.
The temperature record from Byrd Station, a scientific outpost in the
center of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS), demonstrates a marked
increase of 4.3 degrees Fahrenheit (2.4 degrees Celsius) in average annual
temperature since 1958 -- that is, three times faster than the average
temperature rise around the globe.
This temperature increase is nearly double what previous research
has suggested, and reveals -- for the first time -- warming trends during the
summer months of the Southern Hemisphere (December through
February), said David Bromwich, professor of geography at Ohio State
University and senior research scientist at the Byrd Polar Research Center.
The findings were published online this week in the journal Nature
Geoscience.
"Our record suggests that continued summer warming in West
Antarctica could upset the surface mass balance of the ice sheet, so that
the region could make an even bigger contribution to sea level rise than it
already does," said Bromwich.
"Even without generating significant mass loss directly, surface
melting on the WAIS could contribute to sea level indirectly, by
weakening the West Antarctic ice shelves that restrain the region's natural
ice flow into the ocean."
Andrew Monaghan, study co-author and scientist at the National
Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), said that these findings place
West Antarctica among the fastest-warming regions on Earth.
"We've already seen enhanced surface melting contribute to the
breakup of the Antarctic's Larsen B Ice Shelf, where glaciers at the edge

discharged massive sections of ice into the ocean that contributed to sea
level rise," Monaghan said. "The stakes would be much higher if a similar
event occurred to an ice shelf restraining one of the enormous WAIS
glaciers."
Researchers consider the WAIS especially sensitive to climate
change, explained Ohio State University doctoral student Julien Nicolas.
Since the base of the ice sheet rests below sea level, it is vulnerable to
direct contact with warm ocean water. Its melting currently contributes 0.3
mm to sea level rise each year -- second to Greenland, whose contribution
to sea level rise has been estimated as high as 0.7 mm per year.
Due to its location some 700 miles from the South Pole and near the
center of the WAIS, Byrd Station is an important indicator of climate
change throughout the region.
In the past, researchers haven't been able to make much use of the
Byrd Station measurements because the data was incomplete; nearly one
third of the temperature observations were missing for the time period of
the study. Since its establishment in 1957, the station hasn't always been
occupied. A year-round automated station was installed in 1980, but it has
experienced frequent power outages, especially during the long polar
night, when its solar panels can't recharge.
Bromwich and two of his graduate students, along with colleagues
from NCAR and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, corrected the past
Byrd temperature measurements and used corrected data from a computer
atmospheric model and a numerical analysis method to fill in the missing
observations.
Aside from offering a more complete picture of warming in West
Antarctica, the study suggests that if this warming trend continues, melting
will become more extensive in the region in the future, Bromwich said.
While the researchers work to fully understand the cause of the
summer warming at Byrd Station, the next step is clear, he added.
"West Antarctica is one of the most rapidly changing regions on
Earth, but it is also one of the least known," he said. "Our study
underscores the need for a reliable network of meteorological observations

throughout West Antarctica, so that we can know what is happening -- and
why -- with more certainty."
This research was funded by the National Science Foundation.

Daily News Digest December 23-24, 2012
Quote of the Day:
(Note: The following statement was released by the
Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan on the recent shooting
at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut)
It is terrible to witness what we just witnessed in the
slaying of these children. Every life has a purpose. Innocent
life is more valuable in the Sight of God, so when innocent
life is sacrificed: What “lesson” should we learn from such a
tremendous sacrifice, tremendous suffering, tremendous
pain?
Why should our president, a father, shed tears over the
precious lives that were torn away from their parents and
friends? It’s to help a nation see that guns, and the weapons
of war, cannot bring about the joy, happiness and peace that
was robbed from the people of Newtown.
And hopefully, the president of the United States,
sending drones into Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan
and other places, killing men, women and children—and the
word says “collateral damage,” and we go on killing…
Could it be that these precious lives lost, and the pain
that it has caused every one of us who shares the pain of
those parents, and those loved ones who lost those precious
children and the lives of the teachers who taught them…
Could it be that God wants us to see that until you can feel
the pain and suffering of others that has been inflicted upon
them on the basis of a lie, and America’s reach for the
resources of that area of the world, then maybe you will
understand that this may be “chickens coming home to
roost.” “For as thou hast done”—the Book says—“so shall it
be done unto you.”
— Minister Farrakhan's statement on Newtown Massacre

Video of the Day:
It's Official: The War on Drugs is a Fraud
Drug dollars prop up the banking system
Blue Xmas (To Whom It May Concern)
by
Miles DavisBob Dorough
Merry Christmas
I hope you have a white one, but for me it's blue
Blue Christmas, that's the way you see it when you're feeling blue
Blue Xmas, when you're blue at Christmastime
you see right through,
All the waste, all the sham, all the haste
and plain old bad taste
Sidewalk Santy Clauses are much, much, much too thin
They're wearing fancy rented costumes, false beards and big fat phony grins
And nearly everybody's standing round holding out their empty hand or tin cup
Gimme gimme gimme gimme, gimme gimme gimme
Fill my stocking up
All the way up
It's a time when the greedy give a dime to the needy
Blue Christmas, all the paper, tinsel and the fal-de-ral
Blue Xmas, people trading gifts that matter not at all
What I call
Fal-de-ral
Bitter gall.......Fal-de-ral
Lots of hungry, homeless children in your own backyards
While you're very, very busy addressing
Twenty zillion Christmas cards
Now, Yuletide is the season to receive and oh, to give and ahh, to share
But all you December do-gooders rush around and rant and rave and loudly blare
Merry Christmas
I hope yours is a bright one, but for me it bleeds
Asa Hutchinson: Federal cover up artist for Mena
Guns, drugs, and money laundering

Former U.S. Attorney for Fort Smith-based
Western District of Arkansas (Mena)
Image of the Day:
End Wall Street’s Wars!
Occupy Wall Street!
Occupy Wall Street is the Only Organization
That Identifies The Enemy —
The 1% That Own and Control The Wealth!
1960s The Realist — One Nation Under God/1%
(Unlike The Trade Union Misleaders
Nor The Misleaders Of The Oppressed
Who Strive To Be In ‘Partnership’ With The 1%)
1960s The Realist — One Nation Under God/1%
(Unlike The Trade Union Misleaders
Nor The Misleaders Of The Oppressed
Who Strive To Be In ‘Partnership’ With The 1%)
FBI Documents Reveal Secret Nationwide Occupy Monitoring
See the released documents here
FBI documents just obtained by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund
(PCJF) pursuant to the PCJF’s Freedom of Information Act demands
reveal that from its inception, the FBI treated the Occupy movement as a
potential criminal and terrorist threat even though the agency

acknowledges in documents that organizers explicitly called for peaceful
protest and did “not condone the use of violence” at occupy protests.
The PCJF has obtained heavily redacted documents showing that FBI
offices and agents around the country were in high gear conducting
surveillance against the movement even as early as August 2011, a month
prior to the establishment of the OWS encampment in Zuccotti Park and
other Occupy actions around the country.
“This production, which we believe is just the tip of the iceberg, is a
window into the nationwide scope of the FBI’s surveillance, monitoring,
and reporting on peaceful protestors organizing with the Occupy
movement,” stated Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, Executive Director of the
Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF). “These documents show that
the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are treating protests
against the corporate and banking structure of America as potential
criminal and terrorist activity. These documents also show these federal
agencies functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and
Corporate America.”
“The documents are heavily redacted, and it is clear from the
production that the FBI is withholding far more material. We are filing an
appeal challenging this response and demanding full disclosure to the
public of the records of this operation,” stated Heather Benno, staff
attorney with the PCJF.
• As early as August 19, 2011, the FBI in New York was meeting
with the New York Stock Exchange to discuss the Occupy Wall
Street protests that wouldn’t start for another month. By
September, prior to the start of the OWS, the FBI was notifying
businesses that they might be the focus of an OWS protest.
• The FBI’s Indianapolis division released a “Potential Criminal
Activity Alert” on September 15, 2011, even though they
acknowledged that no specific protest date had been scheduled in
Indiana. The documents show that the Indianapolis division of the
FBI was coordinating with “All Indiana State and Local Law
Enforcement Agencies,” as well as the “Indiana Intelligence

Fusion Center,” the FBI “Directorate of Intelligence” and other
national FBI coordinating mechanisms.
• Documents show the spying abuses of the FBI’s “Campus Liaison
Program” in which the FBI in Albany and the Syracuse Joint
Terrorism Task Force disseminated information to “sixteen (16)
different campus police officials,” and then “six (6) additional
campus police officials.” Campus officials were in contact with
the FBI for information on OWS. A representative of the State
University of New York at Oswego contacted the FBI for
information on the OWS protests and reported to the FBI on the
SUNY-Oswego Occupy encampment made up of students and
professors.
• Documents released show coordination between the FBI,
Department of Homeland Security and corporate America. They
include a report by the Domestic Security Alliance Council
(DSAC), described by the federal government as “a strategic
partnership between the FBI, the Department of Homeland
Security and the private sector,” discussing the OWS protests at
the West Coast ports to “raise awareness concerning this type of
criminal activity.” The DSAC report shows the nature of secret
collaboration between American intelligence agencies and their
corporate clients - the document contains a “handling notice” that
the information is “meant for use primarily within the corporate
security community. Such messages shall not be released in either
written or oral form to the media, the general public or other
personnel…” (The DSAC document was also obtained by the
Northern California ACLU which has sought local FBI
surveillance files.)
• Naval Criminal Investigative Services (NCIS) reported to the
DSAC on the relationship between OWS and organized labor for
the port actions. The NCIS describes itself as “an elite worldwide
federal law enforcement organization” whose “mission is to
investigate and defeat criminal, terrorist, and foreign intelligence
threats to the United States Navy and Marine Corps ashore, afloat

and in cyberspace.” The NCIS also assists with the transport of
Guantanamo prisoners.
• DSAC issued several tips to its corporate clients on “civil unrest”
which it defines as ranging from “small, organized rallies to largescale
demonstrations and rioting.” It advised to dress
conservatively, avoid political discussions and “avoid all large
gatherings related to civil issues. Even seemingly peaceful rallies
can spur violent activity or be met with resistance by security
forces. Bystanders may be arrested or harmed by security forces
using water cannons, tear gas or other measures to control
crowds.”
• The FBI in Anchorage reported from a Joint Terrorism Task Force
meeting of November 3, 2011, about Occupy activities in
Anchorage.
• A port Facility Security Officer in Anchorage coordinated with
the FBI to attend the meeting of protestors and gain intelligence
on the planning of the port actions. He was advised to request the
presence of an Anchorage Police Department official to also
attend the event. The FBI Special Agent told the undercover
private operative that he would notify the Joint Terrorism Task
Force and that he would provide a point of contact at the
Anchorage Police Department.
• The Jacksonville, Florida FBI prepared a Domestic Terrorism
briefing on the “spread of the Occupy Wall Street Movement” in
October 2011. The intelligence meeting discussed Occupy venues
identifying “Daytona, Gainesville and Ocala Resident Agency
territories as portions …where some of the highest unemployment
rates in Florida continue to exist.”
• The Tampa, Florida FBI “Domestic Terrorism” liaison
participated with the Tampa Police Department’s monthly
intelligence meeting in which Occupy Lakeland, Occupy Polk
County and Occupy St. Petersburg were discussed. They reported
on an individual “leading the Occupy Tampa” and plans for travel

to Gainesville for a protest planning meeting, as well as on
Veterans for Peace plans to protest at MacDill Air Force Base.
• The Federal Reserve in Richmond appears to have had personnel
surveilling OWS planning. They were in contact with the FBI in
Richmond to “pass on information regarding the movement
known as occupy Wall Street.” There were repeated
communications “to pass on updates of the events and decisions
made during the small rallies and the following information
received from the Capital Police Intelligence Unit through JTTF
(Joint Terrorism Task Force).”
• The Virginia FBI was collecting intelligence on the OWS
movement for dissemination to the Virginia Fusion Center and
other Intelligence divisions.
• The Milwaukee division of the FBI was coordinating with the
Ashwaubenon Public Safety division in Green Bay Wisconsin
regarding Occupy.
• The Memphis FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force met to discuss
“domestic terrorism” threats, including, “Aryan Nations, Occupy
Wall Street, and Anonymous.”
• The Birmingham, AL division of the FBI sent communications to
HAZMAT teams regarding the Occupy Wall Street movement.
• The Jackson, Mississippi division of the FBI attended a meeting
of the Bank Security Group in Biloxi, MS with multiple private
banks and the Biloxi Police Department, in which they discussed
an announced protest for “National Bad Bank Sit-In-Day” on
December 7, 2011.
• The Denver, CO FBI and its Bank Fraud Working Group met and
were briefed on Occupy Wall Street in November 2011. Members
of the Working Group include private financial institutions and
local area law enforcement.
• Jackson, MS Joint Terrorism Task Force issued a
“Counterterrorism Preparedness” alert. This heavily redacted
document includes the description, “To document…the Occupy
Wall Street Movement.”

You can read the FBI - OWS documents below where we have
uploaded them in searchable format for public viewing.
The PCJF filed Freedom of Information Act demands with multiple
federal law enforcement agencies in the fall of 2011 as the Occupy
crackdown began. The FBI initially attempted to limit its search to only
one limited record keeping index. Recognizing this as a common tactic
used by the FBI to conduct an inadequate search, the PCJF pressed
forward demanding searches be performed of the FBI headquarters as well
as FBI field offices nationwide.
The PCJF will continue to push for public disclosure of the
government’s spy files and will release documents as they are obtained.
Read More
Occupy Wall Street — ‘We Are The 99%’
The resistance continues at Liberty Square:
Occupy Denver Calls On All Available Occupy Networks to Mobilize
Against Keystone XL Pipeline January 7th
Tags: denver, environment, tar sands blockade

Occupy Denver stands in solidarity with The Tar Sands Blockade,
and is calling for national and international mobilization and solidarity
actions against the construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline. Tar sands
giant TransCanada has begun construction on the southern leg of the
Keystone XL. Leading NASA Climate Scientist James Hansen has called
the Keystone XL “game over” for the climate, and Americans are already
feeling the heat. The pipeline will make TransCanada rich while
encroaching on ranch lands, poisoning Texas’ working class communities,
and destroying the environment that makes the lone star state so beautiful.
Kick off the new year by demonstrating your resistance to Keystone
XL!
Join us for another mass action in Southeast Texas on Monday,
January 7th, including a 3 day training camp leading up to the big event.
Our trainings and events are open and include roles for everyone ready to
defend our homes from toxic tar sands.
RSVP right now so we can know how many people to expect.
tarsandsblockade.org/jan7/
SCHEDULE (Jan. 3rd – 8th):
Thursday, Jan. 3rd – Travel & Arrival
Friday, Jan. 4th – Day 1: Direct Action Training Camp
Saturday, Jan. 5th – Day 2: Direct Action Training Camp
Sunday, Jan. 6th – Day 3: Direct Action Training Camp
Monday, Jan. 7th – Mass Action to Stop Keystone XL
Tuesday, Jan. 8th – Debrief and Depart
Questions? Contact: 972-439-5310, TSBComms@riseup.net
Tar Sands Blockade is a coalition of Texas and Oklahoma landowners
and climate justice organizers using peaceful and sustained civil
disobedience to stop the construction of TransCanada’s Keystone XL tar
sands pipeline.
As a grassroots campaign, we are funded entirely by the generosity of
individual donors. Meaning that every dollar of your contribution goes
directly into stopping TransCanada and the Keystone XL tar sands
pipeline where it matters most. The Tar Sands Blockade is one of the most

important resistance actions in the nation. If you can’t join us, you can still
help. Please consider donating.
Wish List tarsandsblockade.org/donate-3/wishlist/
WePay wepay.com/donations/tsbdonate
And please join our E-Action to help continue to spread awareness
and support our people on the ground.
U.S.:
Free trade in Medicare benefits:
the best idea you won't hear in Washington
An international free market in healthcare would solve America's
Medicare funding problem, but deficit hawks just want cuts
Dean Baker
The US could save billions of dollars per year allowing Medicare patients to buy
cheaper care abroad. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
Washington policy debates are chock-full of rich people telling poor
and middle-class people that they will have to tighten their belts. In fact, in
the crazy, upside-down world of Washington, this passes for "courage".
Cutting back Medicare is one of the favorite forms of belt-tightening
being pushed by the elites. Many of the advocates of deficit reduction
argue for raising the age of eligibility for Medicare from 65 to 67. Another
favorite among this group is to require larger premium payments for
Medicare from middle-class beneficiaries.

Of course, many Republicans would simply privatize Medicare and
replace it with a voucher, which almost certainly would not be sufficient to
cover the cost of healthcare.
It is striking in this discussion that no one advocating Medicare cuts
ever proposes taking advantage of the lower-cost healthcare systems in
other countries. As every policy analyst knows, the problem of Medicare
costs stems almost entirely from the fact that our healthcare system is
incredibly inefficient. We pay more than twice as much per person for our
healthcare as people in other wealthy countries – even though we have
almost nothing to show for it in the way of better health outcomes.
This enormous gap in costs suggests an easy opportunity for massive
gains from trade. If people in the United States could get their healthcare
from other countries, there would be huge savings.
While it may impractical for most of the population to go to another
country for most of their healthcare needs, this is not true for Medicare
beneficiaries, the vast majority of whom are retired. Many retirees have
friends and/or family in other countries. If they opted to move to another
country to get their healthcare, there could be enormous savings that they
could share with the government.
To take a simple example, the Medicare trustees project that the cost
to the program for an average beneficiary in 2020 will be close to $16,000.
Suppose the cost of providing care in the United Kingdom is half as much,
or $8,000 a year. If Medicare paid for a beneficiary to get care in the UK
instead of the United States, the savings would be $8,000 a year.
Medicare could pay half of this money, or $4,000 a year, to the
beneficiary and still save $4,000 for each beneficiary who opted to go to
the UK to get care. If 1 million beneficiaries (@2% of beneficiaries) opted
to take advantage of this sort of deal, the savings would be $4bn a year. If
5 million beneficiaries took advantage of this opportunity, the savings
would be $20bn a year.
Over a longer horizon, the gains would be projected to get much
larger, as US healthcare costs are projected to hugely outstrip the increase
in costs in other countries. As a result, the savings from going to the UK,
or elsewhere, could easily exceed $16,000 a year by 2030. This would

mean both that the government's savings would be increasing for each
person that took advantage of this deal and also that many more
beneficiaries would likely opt to get their care from other countries.
Once we go out 20 years, for many beneficiaries, their share of the
projected savings would more than double their income. The projected gap
in healthcare costs are so enormous than the US government could even
pay a premium of 10-20% above the cost of healthcare in other countries
and still have enough money left over to allow large payments to
beneficiaries and huge savings to the government.
The point is simple. The story of those incredibly scary long-term
deficit projections is a story of exploding healthcare costs. If these
projections of exploding healthcare costs prove accurate, then the country
would enjoy enormous savings by having Medicare beneficiaries get their
healthcare from the more efficient healthcare systems in other countries.
If we were having an honest policy debate, this sort of proposal for
free trade in healthcare services would be front and center on the national
agenda. After all, which is a better way to save money on Medicare:
making people wait until age 67 to qualify for benefits or giving
beneficiaries the option to get healthcare in another country and to put
some money in their pockets?
However, you won't hear about free trade in healthcare in the
Washington policy debates. The Washington policy elites love trade when
it can be used to beat down the wages of auto workers or truck drivers. But
when trade might jeopardize the income of the pharmaceutical and the
insurance industries, and highly-paid medical specialists, they don't even
want it to be part of the discussion.
And since the elites control the Washington policy debate, folks can
expect to wait until age 67 for their Medicare and/or pay higher premiums.
Obama Will Ride to the Rescue ... for Republicans
By
Cenk Uygur

Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com/spirit of america
The Republicans have put themselves in a holy mess with this Plan B
debacle. They now have less than zero leverage. They are a national
laughingstock. A majority of the country now thinks they are"too
extreme." [3] They just got walloped in the election. And with the tax cuts
set to expire the laws are rigged against them as well.
There is only one person who can rescue the Republican Party now --
Barack Obama. And he will.I have been saying for over two years [4] now
that President Obama is dying to do the Grand Bargain. He will do it at
any cost. In fact, he actively wants to cut Social Security and Medicare.
He can't wait for that pat on the back from the establishment when they
finally call him post-partisan, above party politics, and a statesman for
screwing over his own voters. This is by far his greatest wish.
I couldn't believe that people couldn't believe that President Obama
offered to cut Social Security again in this round of negotiations. What are
you still surprised at? The man has offered to cut these so-called
entitlements every time. When are you going to get it through your head --
he wants to cut them!
Ok, I'm raining on everyone's parade here because this is the moment
when the partisans are supposed to be reveling in Republican failure. The
Republican Party is split and in tatters. Yes, but to what end? In order for
that to be relevant, the Democrats would now have to offer a very different
deal where the terms are changed in our favor. If they do and they get a
deal where taxes are actually raised on people making above $250,000 and

Social Security and Medicare are protected, then I will be dead wrong. I
will be wrong now andI will have been wrong for all of these years. [5]
You can rub my face in it. And since the Democratic partisans are now
feeling triumphant, get that crow ready for me to eat.
But it's not going to happen. I'm telling you this even in the
Republican Party's darkest hour, the president will still give them most of
what they want. My guess is that liberals will be stunned at the
concessions President Obama makes even when he had the Republicans in
a corner and totally defeated. Here's what you have to understand -- it's
because he doesn't want to "win." Winning is different for him than it is
for me and you. To us, winning is passing progressive priorities. To him,
it's passing a deal where he seems like he is above party politics. In order
to do that, he must cut entitlements (and corporate taxes, too, by the way).
We're going to find out who is right soon enough. I just wanted to
make sure you knew what was coming ahead of time, so that you
understand President Obama's real motivation. Understand that next time
around, and remember he's still here for another four years, asking the
president politely doesn't get you anything. He isn't a progressive in his
heart, he is an establishment pleaser. The only way he acts like a
progressive is if you make him. Next time, instead of applauding so much,
put all of the pressure on the world on him. That's what Republicans do all
of the time and it is what will allow them snatch victory from the jaws of
defeat. Mark my words.
I think we can all at least agree that if ever there was a time to press
progressive priorities this would be it. So, this will be a true test of who he
is and what he believes. Let's see what he does. You shall know him by his
works.
How Syria is Being Ripped Apart by Foreign
Meddling and Sectarian War
By
Issa Khalaf

An image grab taken from a video uploaded on YouTube shows Syrian children waving
the pre-Baath former national flag during an anti-regime protest in the northwestern Idlib
province.
Everything about Syria is steeped in miasma: is this conflict
politically and sociologically definable as a civil war? Has it become a
sectarian war? How strong and widespread is the Salafist (and global
Jihadi) presence? Was militarization wise or did the opposition have no
choice in this regard? Are the armed groups able to defeat the regime’s
forces or will there be a perpetual, bloody stalemate whose only certainty
is Syria’s complete physical destruction and long-term division? Is a
negotiated outcome, that is, a political solution the only possibility, or is it
uninformed to speak of political solutions at this stage of the conflict?
Despite this fog, there are, in my mind, several certainties. One, Syria
is not a clear-cut case of bad regime versus good society, for that society is
not at one regarding the violent overthrow of the state. This is not a mass,
democratic revolution but a Sunni rebellion. Any spontaneity to its
genesis, including the goal of non-violent resistance, came to a speedy
end, provided with a significant impetus by the flow of foreign arms,
money, and intelligence, including from the US. A substantial ‘silent’
majority desperately wishes to avoid Syria’s disintegration because they
simply love their country, not the regime or armed rebels, and prefer
reform and a negotiated settlement.
Two, it is false to equate, as the regime portrays it, every Syrian’s
opposition to the Ba’athi state with acting on behalf of Zionists and

imperialists, and equally false to suggest that advocating a negotiated
settlement equates to buying into the regime’s self-narrative of an
indispensable anti-imperialist frontline.
Three, foreign powers, especially Washington, several of its NATO
allies, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, the latter essentially monarchic
police states, are violating international law in pursuing subversion and
violent regime change, and share primary responsibility for the
radicalization, destabilization, and horrific violence inflicted on the people
of Syria. Washington is interested in regime change, not in ensuring that
neither side prevails to force a settlement.
Four, the fundamental truth is the Syrian people’s case for dignity and
freedom, rights brutally denied and violated for so long by fearsome
regimes such as the Syrian Ba’ath. The revolt against the Ba’athist regime,
despite its now tainted nature, is not a conspiracy.
Five, despite Syria’s social diversity and divided loyalties, the fact
that the regime has many supporters, and that a majority desires peaceful
change, calls for the Syrian socio-political system to become no less than a
civil, human rights-respecting, citizenship-based state. Still, Syria’s
internal complexity and regional role requires special care and objective
realism. Take Aleppo as a microcosm of Syrian complexity, the largest
Syrian city containing some 82% Sunnis. Listening to the western, Qatari,
or Saudi media, one would think that the city erupted into spontaneous
rebellion and from the beginning was fighting a heroic war against the
regime’s military and security forces. By objective accounts, however,
Aleppo’s denizens supported the Damascus government by a large
majority, many of them paying the price of Free Syrian Army reprisals.
Now, since the penetration of armed groups and the violent zealotry of
Salafists and foreign Jihadis, with their suicide bombings, kidnappings,
and beheadings, looting and rape, as well as heavy, indiscriminate
government firepower leading to the slow obliteration of this great historic
and commercial city - one wonders what has happened to its people and
their loyalties.
We only know that government forces and loyalists still hold the city,
minus a couple of districts, as they do most of the country. Countless

people have fled, many of their empty homes looted and ransacked by
their would-be liberators, fearful of returning to rebel reprisals. Aleppo’s
Islamist leaning al-Tawhid Division, ostensibly part of the FSA, contains
numerous-armed factions, including many Salafi Islamists, who,
themselves, are varied, ranging from Brotherhood types to al-Qaida-like
extremists. There is also quite noticeable and significant Salafi literalist
influence among the armed rebels generally. The disparate factions that
make up the FSA are largely Islamist-dominated. Its battalions contain
thousands of fighters of the Salafi/Jihadi group, Jabhat al-Nusra, a
mainstay of the al-Tawhid in Aleppo.
In a situation of decentralized and disparate commands, such people
are there at the front lines. All these groups, including the FSA, have an
uneasy, distrustful relationship with the newly minted National Coalition
of Syrian Revolution and Opposition Forces, as they previously did with
the now discarded Syrian National Council, and as they have with the
western powers. Fortunately, Syria does not have a tradition of extremist
political Islam. On the contrary, given its pluralist diversity, its
geostrategic location, and secular nationalist history, Jihadi-type
extremism does not fit in Syria.
The chaos and physical destruction, the ever-present danger of the
regime-Sunni war transmuting into a sectarian civil war are deeply
worrying, and the Salafists thrive on such an environment. No question,
though, in its militarist, violent manifestations, this is essentially a
rebellion of the Sunni Muslims, at core from the regions of Hama and
Homs, and battle-tested foreigners, including Salafis, supported by the
Sunni autocracies and wealthy donors of the peninsula. It is unlikely that a
literalist Salafist regime will come to power, much less global Jihadis, but
likely that a Sunni-Brotherhood dominated regime, sidelining the National
Coalition, will.
The defunct National Council’s main obsession was arming without a
clear political programme. The new National Coalition has got itself
political recognition as a sort of provisional government—even as Syria
remains a member state of the UN led by the al-Assad government—from
Qatar, Saudi Arabia, France, Britain, and Turkey, followed by the US,

which, however, consigned one rebel group, the Jabha, to its terrorist
blacklist. (This prompted all the rest of the armed rebel groups to declare
their support for the Jabha.)
Western support is predicated on the promise that the Coalition will
unify the opposition, at least act as an umbrella, and be a better watchdog
that presumes to undertake the impossible, even inane, task of vouching
for and endorsing those groups deserving of armed support, which
Washington reckons amounts to two-thirds of the fighting groups and their
commanders. These parties essentially cajoled through the expansion of
the new Coalition’s membership to three times the previous Council’s size
and which includes most of the old Council’s members. The new body’s
composition is a safeguard to dilute Islamist influence.
Washington in particular rejected the Brotherhood-dominated
Council because it could not deliver unity, or control or exclude extremist
Islamists, even though Council members did what the US wanted most of
all: they talked about peace and good relations with Israel.
Whether the US is willing to advocate a negotiated solution is in my
view not an open question. Its apparent caution in providing advanced, or
heavy, weaponry, unlike the reckless monarchic allies it shakily controls,
is due to its fear of uncontrolled, unmanaged violence leading to an
incompliant, even hostile, Islamist regime. The Obama administration’s
ambivalence stems from the tension between aggressive regional allies
and its recognition of several realities: the proliferation of extremist
groups, the possibility of a bloody stalemate that will destabilize the
region, and the potential that an armed group will get its hands on
chemical weapons.
Thus, Washington’s most urgent and immediate goal, when not
obstructing UN peace and dialogue missions, is to pressure the Coalition
to construct a centralized military command and political unity and ferret
out the extremists, supposedly one-third of the armed rebels. Its version of
a negotiated solution is not genuine internal talks between Damascus and
the rebels, but Assad’s departure, which Washington defines as a
‘transition’, but which is actually a precondition. Read More

Environment:
Global Toll of Air Pollution: Over 3 Million Deaths Each Year
Posted December 14, 2012 by David Pettit in Curbing Pollution,
Environmental Justice
Tags: airpollution, diesel, particulatematter, particulatepollution
We have long known that many people die from air pollution. What
is surprising is how high the public health toll is and that it is largely
preventable. A new study in The Lancet, developed by an international
group of...continued→
Supporting Home Rule Over Fracking in NY: NRDC Files Brief on
Behalf of Environmental and Non-Profit Orgs
Posted December 11, 2012 by Daniel Raichel in Environmental
Justice, Health and the Environment
Tags: fracking, gasdrilling, homerule, newyork, zoning
Yesterday, NRDC filed an amicus, or “friend of the court,” brief in
the appeals of the Dryden and Middlefield decisions rendered earlier this
year. The brief—filed on behalf of Catskill Mountainkeeper; Delaware
Riverkeeper Network; Gas Drilling Awareness for Cortland County;
Otsego...continued→
Dynamic Ridesharing: Turning Empty Seats Into Affordable
Transportation
Posted December 21, 2012 by Lucian Go in Curbing Pollution, Health
and the Environment, Living Sustainably, Moving Beyond Oil,
Solving Global Warming
Tags: HOV3, lyft, millenials, newyorkcity, NYC, publictransit,
ridesharing, sidecar, VMT, zimride
With much of New York City’s public transit system crippled by
flooding and debris due to Superstorm Sandy this past October, Mayor
Bloomberg mandated high-occupancy vehicle (HOV 3) lanes on most

idges and tunnels going into Manhattan, recognizing that
operational...continued→
Our Lagging Preparedness for Public Health Emergencies
Posted December 21, 2012 by Steve Fleischli in Health and the
Environment, Solving Global Warming
Tags: climateandwater, climatechange, climatehealth, hurricanesandy,
naturaldisaster, preparedness
When Hurricane Sandy comes up in public conversations these days,
it’s often in the context of Congress arguing about how much money
should be allocated to deal with the devastating impacts. No surprise,
there’s a lot of partisan posturing. What...continued→
Naughty is too nice a word for Big Oil this holiday season
Posted December 21, 2012 by Susan Casey-Lefkowitz in Curbing
Pollution, Moving Beyond Oil, Saving Wildlife and Wild Places,
Solving Global Warming
Tags: biogems, climatechange, international, keystonexl, oil, oilsands,
tarsands
December is traditionally a time to reflect on the past year’s events.
Looking back I see wildfires sweeping across the west, droughts plaguing
our breadbasket, a first time “derecho” storm taking out east coast
electricity amidst soaring temperatures, and...continued→
Burlington City Council passes resolutions opposing tar sands oil: the
beginning of a groundswell against tar sands in New England
Posted December 20, 2012 by Elizabeth Shope in Curbing Pollution,
Moving Beyond Oil, Solving Global Warming
Tags: biogems, dirtyfuels, enbridge, exxonmobil, international,
oilsands, pipeline, resolution, tarsands, tarsandsfreene, vermont
This blog was jointly written with NRDC Senior Consultant Shelley
Kath. Big Oil has a plan that will put communities at risk in New England
and Eastern Canada. The Portland-Montreal Pipeline – a very old oil
pipeline owned mostly by...continued→
European Commission Holds Firm, Rejects Daimler's Push to Block
New Climate-Friendly Refrigerant

Posted December 21, 2012 by David Doniger in Curbing Pollution,
Solving Global Warming, U.S. Law and Policy
Tags: cleanairact, climatechange, daimler, EPA, europeancommission,
HFCs, mercedes-benz, SAE, supergreenhousegases
Good news today from Brussels, as the European Community holds
firm and rejects last-minute pressure from by Daimler, maker of
Mercedes-Benz, to block the introduction of a climate-friendly refrigerant
in car air conditioners. As I’ve written here and here, the...continued→
Fracking:
Nuclear Fallout: Ongoing Tragedy/Disaster In Japan:
EnergyNews:
01:13 PM EST on December 23rd, 2012 | Leave a comment
Resident to Mayor on NHK: Fukushima plant spewed across Japan,
don’t you dare make promises about safety — I don’t want to listen
anymore, you’re wasting my time (VIDEO)
09:41 AM EST on December 23rd, 2012 | 11 comments
Tepco finds bent, damaged spent fuel assemblies in multiple fuel pools
at Japan nuclear plant — Concern about prompt moderated
criticality
11:32 PM EST on December 22nd, 2012 | 4 comments
Report: Freaky mutant bugs found — Likely a first, says expert —
Prefecture bordering Fukushima (PHOTOS)
01:56 PM EST on December 22nd, 2012 | 38 comments
UPDATE: Plutonium measured in 3/11 disaster debris
10:31 AM EST on December 22nd, 2012 | 4 comments

Death toll estimate from Chernobyl now around 1.5 Million -Expert
(VIDEO)
06:40 AM EST on December 22nd, 2012 | 12 comments
AP: People flee Japan nuclear disaster — Some can’t get away, I feel
so sorry for them
05:01 PM EST on December 21st, 2012 | 4 comments
Gundersen: Damage to Fukushima Unit 3 fuel racks could be from
prompt moderated criticality, not objects falling in pool — What does
Tepco know that they haven’t yet shown photos of?
Ongoing Gulf of Mexico Oil Disaster:
Oil Spill Attorney Stuart Smith’s Blog:
Weekend Environmental Must-Reads – December 22-23, 2012
Alberta Finds Mismanagement of Errors Causes Fracking Water
Contamination
“There is no amount of regulation that can overcome human error,”
said Alberta’s Energy Resources Conservation Board (ERCB) spokesman
Darin Barter. ERCB released an investigation report that cites inadequate
management of risks as one of the main causes of a September 2011
accident that contaminated groundwater with toxic hydraulic fracturing
chemicals, including the cancer causing agent known as BTEX (benzene,
toulene, ethylbenzene, and xylene).
Fracking poses threat to countryside, warns National Trust
The National Trust has joined the ranks of groups concerned by the
Government’s support for fracking, the controversial gas-exploration
technique linked to minor earthquakes in the North of England last year.
No. 9: Gas pipeline explosion rocks Sissonville
A massive explosion Dec. 11 of a natural gas transmission pipeline
near Sissonville is raising questions about natural gas pipeline safety in
West Virginia and elsewhere.

US issues framework of fracking and water pollution study
The Obama administration issued the framework on Friday of a longterm
study on whether fracking for natural gas pollutes drinking water, but
will not make conclusions until 2014 about the controversial technique
that is helping to fuel a domestic drilling boom.
BP settlement over Deepwater Horizon oil spill approved by
federal judge
Company estimates it will pay $7.8bn to 100,000 people and business
who lost money because of April 2010 well blowout
Judge Gives Final Approval to BP’s Oil Spill Settlement
A federal judge gave final approval on Friday to BP’s settlement with
people who lost money and property in the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
The order only addressed economic and property damage claims, not
separate medical benefits claims for cleanup workers and others. BP has
estimated that it will pay $7.8 billion to settle more than 100,000 claims in
the class-action litigation. Judge Carl Barbier of Federal District Court in
New Orleans initially approved the deal in May, but held a hearing in
November to weigh objections from about 13,000 claimants who
challenged the settlement.
Louisiana environmental officials investigating Chalmette source
of sulphur dioxide cloud that affected ferry passengers
The state continues on Saturday to investigate the source of sulphur
dioxide that is blamed for complaints of eye and throat irritation by
passengers aboard a ferry crossing the Mississippi River just below New
Orleans, a DEQ spokesman said.
Co. denies it’s source of Friday cloud over river
A Chalmette industrial plant said it was not the source of a cloud of
sulphur dioxide gas that hovered over the Mississippi River on Friday
evening. The gas was blamed for complaints of eye and throat irritation by
passengers aboard a ferry crossing the river below New Orleans.
Chalmette company denies it is source of gas that sickened
Mississippi River ferry passengers Friday
A Chalmette industrial plant on Saturday denied that it was the source
of a cloud of sulphur dioxide gas that hovered over the Mississippi River

Friday evening and was blamed for complaints of eye and throat irritation
by passengers aboard a ferry crossing the river below New Orleans.
A Progress Report on Fracking and Water Safety
The federal Environmental Protection Agency released a progress
report on Friday about its national study of the potential impacts of
hydraulic fracturing on drinking water supplies. In nearly 200 pages, the
agency lays out data, case studies and a summary of research into issues
like spills and the treatment and disposal of wastewater.
EPA offers details of its controversial fracking study
The public and the energy industry got their first glimpse Friday of a
long-awaited study on the possible correlation between water pollution
and fracking, but Obama administration officials said the full results and
definitive findings of their study won’t be released until 2014.
EPA updates on water testing in fracking study
The Environmental Protection Agency gave an update on its fracking
study Friday, releasing details on water testing progress in the Marcellus.
Leaked fracking fluid contaminated groundwater near Grande
Prairie: ERCB
Leaked fracking fluid has contaminated groundwater after a “serious”
incident at a well site near Grande Prairie in September 2011, according to
an investigation by the Energy Resources Conservation Board which
regulates the energy industry.
Calgary-based Crew Energy “inadvertently” released toxic fluids at
too shallow a level in a natural gas well and then failed to realize the leak
was occurring underground, said the ERCB report released Thursday.
EPA’s fracturing study on track for late 2014
The federal government is on track to release in late 2014 its study on
whether natural gas drilling and hydraulic fracturing pollute drinking
water, the Environmental Protection Agency said Friday in a progress
report on the closely watched analysis.
Does Fracking Contaminate Drinking Water?
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) today provided an
update on its ongoing national study currently underway to better

understand any potential impacts of hydraulic fracturing on drinking water
resources.
How Money in Politics Impacts Fracking
In the 2012 election cycle, pro-fracking interests contributed a
combined total of nearly $400,000 to candidates for state legislature and
county executive in New York’s Southern Tier.
Authorities: 1.8 million gallons of water leaked at drilling site
A water spill estimated at 1.8 million gallons occurred this week at
the Hilcorp oil and gas exploration site in rural El Paso County east of
Colorado Springs, officials revealed Friday afternoon.
Two above-ground freshwater storage tanks failed “late Sunday or
early Monday,” said senior assistant county attorney Diana May.
BP Gulf Oil Spill Judge Approves $7.8 Billion Settlement
BP Plc (BP/) and the lead lawyers representing victims of the 2010
Gulf of Mexico oil spill won approval of the economic and environmental
loss portion of a proposed $7.8 billion partial settlement of claims.
Judge approves settlement in BP class action suit over 2010 Gulf
oil spill
A federal judge on Friday gave final approval to BP PLC’s settlement
with businesses and people who lost money because of the 2010 oil spill
in the Gulf of Mexico.
Federal judge OKs $7.8 billion settlement in BP oil spill class
action suit
A federal judge on Friday gave final approval to BP PLC’s settlement
with businesses and people who lost money because of the 2010 oil spill
in the Gulf of Mexico.
Gulf of Mexico platform fire burn victims to be discharged from
Baton Rouge General
Three men who were severely burned in a oil-platform fire that
occurred 25 miles southeast of Grand Isle, will be released from the
hospital, according to a Baton Rouge General Medical Center press
release.
Remaining oil rig burn victims released from hospital

The three remaining burn victims from the Nov. 16 explosion on an
oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico will be discharged from Baton Rouge
General Medical Center in time for the holidays, hospital officials said in a
news release.
Study Finds Flaws in Pipeline Leak Detection Systems
A forthcoming federal report on pipeline safety has found that
members of the general public are more likely to identify oil and gas spills
than the pipeline companies’ own leak detection systems.
Bighorn River could close for pipeline removal
Phillips 66 is removing an oil pipeline from beneath a popular
southeast Montana river after the line had to be abandoned because it was
increasingly exposed by erosion.
U.S. ruling on Keystone pipeline could slip again – report
A top risk-management analyst warned on Friday that a decision by
Washington on TransCanada Corp’s (TRP.TO) Keystone XL pipeline
could get delayed again into next summer, adding more pressure to
already deeply discounted Canadian oil prices.
Japanese flee Fukushima nuke disaster to faraway Okinawa,
plan class-action against radiation
Okinawa is about as far away as one can get from Fukushima without
leaving Japan, and that is why Minaho Kubota is here.
Petrified of the radiation spewing from the Fukushima Dai-ichi
nuclear plant that went into multiple meltdowns last year, Kubota grabbed
her children, left her skeptical husband and moved to the small
southwestern island. More than 1,000 people from the disaster zone have
done the same thing.
NRC Chairman writes about enhancing safety after a visit to
Fukushima, Japan
On December 21, 2012, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission
(NRC) blog posted a letter from Chairman Macfarlane titled A Visit to
Japan: Reflections from the Chairman. She has recently returned from a
trip to Japan and a visit to the evacuated areas near the Fukushima Daiichi
nuclear power station.
A Visit to Japan: Reflections from the Chairman

This past weekend I had the honor of leading a delegation of U.S.
officials to an international conference in Japan designed to keep up the
global momentum of enhancing nuclear safety after the Fukushima
accident.
We met in Koriyama City, some 30 miles west of the scenic Japanese
coast, where recovery work continues on the four Fukushima Dai-ichi
reactors that were damaged by tsunami-induced flooding and the
explosive force of pent-up hydrogen.
Engineers warn: Two US nuclear plants may cause new
Fukushima
Nuclear engineers have warned the Senate of the threats facing two
US nuclear power facilities, which could result in enormous explosions or
a Fukushima-like meltdown if natural phenomena or weather conditions
cause the facilities to fail.
-Senator Joe Lieberman is the current chairman of the Senate
Committee on Homeland Security & Government Affairs, but will retire in
2013. Two nuclear engineers have asked him to spend his last days in
Congress investigating the threats posed by two nuclear power facilities.
Seawater leak shuts down Swedish nuclear reactor
Swedish authorities have ordered the shutdown of a reactor at its
largest nuclear power plant near Gothenburg following a seawater leak.
The leak is the latest in a string of similar incidents that have plagued the
Swedish nuclear industry.
Black Liberation/Civil Rights:
Labor:
Economy:
World:
Egypt in Light of the Iranian Revolution:
The Restoration of a Dictatorship?
Araz Bagban

Anti-Morsi protests in Tahrir Square.
The new constitution submitted to referendum by Mohamed Morsi,
the president of Egypt elected with the support of the Freedom and Justice
party, i.e. the political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, in
addition to its properties of attacking working-class achievements as well
as women's and minorities’ rights, is preparing the legal ground for the
Brotherhood to seize the whole political power in the country. The powers
proposed for the president in the constitution, not subject to any
supervision, are leading Egypt toward dictatorship.
This picture in Egypt is perhaps not precisely the same with what
happened in Iran after the 1979 revolution, but by looking at Iran we can
clearly see how the restoration of a dictatorship took place. The only
important difference might be that the people of Egypt have detected the
prospect of such a restoration and are trying to defend the achievements of
the revolution without any hesitation.
Although the continuous protests of religious minorities and women
(despite all the attempts of the supporters of president Morsi such as
sexual harassment and physical assaults) as well as those of political
organizations forced the president to make concessions on the content of
the constitutional declaration related to the powers granted to the
president, Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood have gone on to complete
the constitutional referendum, denying any delay requested by protesters
and opposition.

Morsi gave the oversight of the security of the referendum to the
army by allowing the army to arrest protesters. As a response to this
unnamed state of emergency-like situation the masses chanted “we are not
afraid, we will not surrender, because we are used to plastic bullets.” In
another attempt Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood tried to reduce the
protests to anti-religious rallies, and the conflict to one between the
religious and the secular. The attempt was not too effective because of the
presence of many religious people and also some clerics from Al Azhar
University in the protests.
The Iranian Revolution
The people of Egypt have shown that they are eager to defend the
achievements of the 2011 revolution, but let us remember what happens if
there is not such a resistance on the basis of the restoration of the
dictatorship in the Iranian experience after the 1979 revolution.
On another 11th of February but in 1979, the Iranian revolution
declared its victory. There was an important difference from the Egyptian
revolution: the presence of a charismatic leader. Although the revolution
was the result of a permanent struggle of the masses and also of political
organizations, the achievements of the revolution were amassed in the
hands of this leader. In the early days of the revolution Khomeini, the
charismatic leader of the revolution, was claiming that he would secure all
the rights and freedoms, but it only took a few months to explore his real
face and aim and the political line he represented.
Only two months after the revolution a referendum took place asking
people to choose between the new system and the old, but without
defining the new system or giving any details. Before going to referendum
and just after the revolution Khomeini ordered to remove and cancel the
law protecting the family. According to this law men were not allowed to
choose a second wife until they have permission from their first wife and
also a woman had the right to divorce in case her husband was marrying a
second wife. This law was canceled only two weeks after the 11th of
February. On March 9, the women's right to judge was removed and on
March 11 the Hijab (the head and body covering in Islamic fashion)
became compulsory. Women organized the largest protest by women in the

history of Iran on March 8 against the orders of Khomeini. Tehran hosted
a weak of rallies and protests, regarding which the progressive forces and
the intellectuals remained silent.
In a two-choice referendum of accepting the new regime of the
Islamic Republic or the old regime of the Shah, having already overthrown
the old regime, the people naturally were obliged to accept the new form
of the state. A major feature of this referendum was the lack of
transparency about the details of the new form of the state, i.e. the Islamic
Republic. Khomeini defined the Islamic republic as a state in which all
would enjoy their rights. The prime minister of the interim government
responsible for organizing the referendum said, in response to a question
of a journalist asking “what is the Islamic Republic?,” “it is a nice thing.”
He also added that women's rights shall be secured under the new regime.
People voted in the referendum in favor of the Islamic Republic whereas
they didn't know what it really was. According to the official records, 98
per cent of the electorate participated in the referendum and 99 per cent of
them said “yes” to the Islamic Republic.
The dictatorship was going to be built step by step but there was no
serious objection to it. Leftist organizations, which called the March 8
movement a petty-bourgeois demand, boycotted the referendum because
of the Islamic Republic's undefined character. The boycott was not
supported by all leftist organizations and the Tudeh Party (the Iranian
communist party) supported the new form of the state. The People's
Mujahedin of Iran, a radical Islamist organization conditionally accepted
the Islamic Republic and declared that if the people's interests are secured
in the future they will support the new regime unconditionally, otherwise
they will cut their support completely.
The Islamist liberals inside the interim government under the
leadership of the prime minister defended the idea of a republic without
any qualifications, but gave support to the Islamic Republic after
Khomeini's rigid reaction of “only Islamic Republic, no more, no less.”
The referendum didn't face any mass opposition and because of that the
new regime's supporters called the opposition “the 2 per cent.” It is true
that organizing the masses against such a charismatic leader would not be

easy, but the only chance to move the people had already been lost during
the March 8 incident. Read More
Health, Education, Science and Welfare:
Bats May Hold Clues to Long Life and Disease Resistance
Black flying-fox, Australia. (Credit: © EcoView / Fotolia)
Bats are amazing creatures. They've been around for at least 65
million years, and in that time have become one of the most abundant and
widespread mammals on Earth.
The Bat Pack, a team of researchers at the Australian Animal Health
Laboratory (AAHL) in Geelong, conduct a wide range of research into
bats and bat borne viruses, and their potential effects on the human
population, as part of the effort to safeguard Australia from exotic and
emerging pests and diseases.
Their paper, published today in the journal Science, provides an
insight into the evolution of the bat's flight, resistance to viruses, and
relatively long life.
The Bat Pack, in collaboration with the Beijing Genome Institute, led
a team that sequenced the genomes of two bat species -- the Black Flying
Fox, an Australian mega bat, and the David's Myotis, a Chinese micro bat.
Once the genomes were sequenced, they compared them to the
genomes of other mammals, including humans, to find where the
similarities and differences lay.

Chris Cowled, post-doctoral fellow at AAHL says the research may
eventually lead to strategies to treat, or even prevent disease in humans.
"A deeper understanding of these evolutionary adaptations in bats
may lead to better treatments for human diseases, and may eventually
enable us to predict or perhaps even prevent outbreaks of emerging bat
viruses," Dr Cowled said.
"Bats are a natural reservoir for several lethal viruses, such as
Hendra, Ebola and SARS, but they often don't succumb to disease from
these viruses. They're also the only mammal that can fly, and they live a
long time compared to animals similar in size."
Flying is a very energy intensive activity that also produces toxic byproducts,
and bats have developed some novel genes to deal with the
toxins. Some of these genes, including P53, are implicated in the
development of cancer or the detection and repair of damaged DNA.
"What we found intriguing was that some of these genes also have
secondary roles in the immune system," Dr Cowled said.
"We're proposing that the evolution of flight led to a sort of spill over
effect, influencing not only the immune system, but also things like ageing
and cancer."
The research was a global effort involving the Beijing Genome
Institute in Shenzhen, China; Australia's national science research agency,
the CSIRO; the University of Copenhagen; Wuhan Institute of Virology at
the Chinese Academy of Sciences; the Naval Medical Research Center and
Henry M. Jackson Foundation in the USA; Uniformed Services
University, USA; and the Graduate Medical School at the Duke-National
University of Singapore.
Daily News Digest December 22, 2012
In Today’s World Laissez-faire Capitalism Has Become A Parasitic
DiseaseUpon Humanity As It Pauperizes The World
As It Destroys The Habitat For Humanity!

Welcome to Gilded Age 2.0, a time when government has become an
appendage to the super-rich, used by industrialists, financiers and
corporate robber barons to monopolize the economy and strip
regular citizens of power and money.
PG&E Is A Good Example Of This Process
The Robber Barron Government/Energy Companies:
Citizens of California To Pay For PG&E Pipeline Explosion
News Item: PG&E customers get bill for gas rebuild
San Bruno Blast Regulators say customers to pay 65%, no profit cut
Jaxon Van Derbeke
Pacific Gas and Electric Co. customers will pay nearly two-thirds of
the $1.8 billion it will cost to upgrade the company's natural-gas pipelines,
which were exposed as potentially unsafe by the 2010 explosion in San
Bruno, the California Public Utilities Commission decided Thursday. Read
More
PG&E misleads on rate increases
Editor’s Note: This is Part 2 of two. Part 1 is here.
By
Katy Grimes Nov. 27, 2012
PG&E has openly misled about rate increases. In February 2011,
PG&E announced the utility expected its electric rate to remain steady
into 2011. Then it was revealed that PG&E’s 2011-2013 General Rate
Case would bring more rate increases.

As I wrote in February, “The game was clever: While decreasing the
rates by 0.8 percent on January 1, 2011, and increasing rates again by 1.5
percent on March 1, the net result was an increase of 0.7 percent. PG&E
got its rate increase.”
Every three years, General Rate Cases provide the California Public
Utilities Commission a chance to perform an exhaustive review of utility
company revenues, expenses, and investments into utility infrastructure.
And every three years, PG&E requests rate increases, and the CPUC
approves them.
Remember that PG&E charged its customers $5 million to fix a gas
pipeline under San Bruno, Calif. in 2009, but delayed the work, citing
other priorities. The company then spent $5 million on executive bonuses.
The subsequent 2010 San Bruno gas pipeline explosion killed eight,
injured more than 100 and destroyed 38 homes.
High rates
PG&E’s rates are already among the highest in the United States and
are higher than almost all municipal providers. In General Rate Cases,
PG&E has repeatedly double-dipped, and tried to charge customers
millions in deferred maintenance, on which repairs may or may not be
done.
The CPUC has failed miserably at any oversight of the utility giant,
as well as at the enforcement of necessary maintenance to gas lines.
According to the Independent Review Panel report following the
deadly San Bruno gas pipeline explosion, PG&E management had
focused primarily on compensation and investments, instead of leading
pipeline safety and integrity in the industry, despite warnings.
The damning report also identified several factors contributing to a
dysfunctional culture at PG&E: excessive levels of management, lack of
expertise within management, appearance-led strategy setting, insularity
and overemphasis on financial performance.
It would appear to anyone that the CPUC has allowed PG&E to
operate with little accountability, and perhaps only cursory
oversight. State government has not applied its own laws, rules and

egulations evenly, and appears to have allowed the largest utilities to get
away with gross negligence.
Whose charity?
PG&E not only pays counties hefty property taxes. The utility also
makes charitable contributions to local food banks, chambers of
commerce, health programs, and “underserved communities.”
In 2011, PG&E made more than $23 million in charitable
contributions. According to PG&E, “More than 75 percent of PG&E’s
community investments provided assistance to underserved communities
in 2010. This funding supported projects and organizations assisting
people with low incomes, communities of color, women, veterans, senior
citizens, people with disabilities, and members of the lesbian, gay,
bisexual and transgender community.”
“[PG&E] officers sit on the boards of a diverse group of nonprofits,
such as California State Parks Foundation, United Negro College
Fund and Leadership California.”
Also, “We worked with the Association of Bay Area
Governments, Association of Monterey Bay Area Governments, Great
Valley Center and Sierra Business Council to help compile greenhouse
gas inventories for more than 60 local governments. These are expected to
be completed in 2011 and we plan to get started on roughly 60 more.”
The counties become news when agencies spoke out in favor of
PG&E’s corporate interests. But ratepayers shouldn’t have to fund any of
PG&E’s charitable or political spending. Ratepayers can choose to make
such contributions on their own.
Ratepayers pay
PG&E has argued that the shareholders pay for these expenditures.
But all of PG&E’s revenues first come from ratepayers. Shareholders
make their money off of the ratepayers.
The CPUC looked at PG&E’s last rate hike request and apparently
had a difficult time with the justification, according to one utility expert
who asked to remain anonymous. He said the dividends paid to
shareholders should be closer to 5 to 7 percent, as for most utilities, not
more than 11 percent.

“Going back five years, PG&E never reduced the dividends, even as
rates were increased,” said the utility expert.
The CPUC has historically allowed utility companies continually to
increase rates, resulting in California becoming the most expensive state in
the entire country for utility rates.
Time To Nationalize The “Privately owned ‘Public’ Utilities”!
Instead of Nationalizing Their Debts— Nationalize Their Assets!
By
Roland Sheppard
“Under federal law, pipeline operators must
examine records about an urban gas line’s
characteristics and history to determine all the risks it
might face. They must then address the risks with
inspections and, if necessary, repairs.
“Despite the pipeline’s apparent history of weld
problems, and despite the company’s inability to find
records showing where the pipe came from, PG&E
never checked the line for problem welds.
“‘How can you apply integrity management
without knowing what you had in the ground?’ asked
Richard Kuprewicz, a pipeline consultant in Redmond,
Wash., who has followed the San Bruno investigation.
“Pipeline record-keeping problems have become a
national issue. About a third of the federal audits done
on pipeline operators in the last five years have found
deficiencies in record keeping and failures to properly
assess multiple risks, records show.” . . .
“Royce Don Deaver, a former pipeline industry
engineer who has investigated transmission line failures
for lawsuit plaintiffs, said he can ‘guarantee’ that key
pipeline records are missing on half-century-old
transmission lines coast to coast. More than half the

nation’s inventory of transmissions is at least 50 years
old.”
— Excerpt from the August 29, 2011 San Francisco
Chronicle Article, At probe’s end, San Bruno pipe’s
origin is unknown
WASHINGTON—Pipeline operators nationwide,
and their customers, will face major changes and a
hefty price tag if the National Transportation Safety
Board can persuade federal and state regulators to
implement recommendations it issued Tuesday in
response to the San Bruno disaster.
“Top among the recommendations is the
elimination of ‘grandfathering’ loopholes in federal and
state laws that ave allowed companies to run thousands
of miles of the nation’s oldest and most vulnerable
natural gas pipelines without subjecting them to the
kinds of high-pressure water tests that are required on
modern pipelines”.
— Excerpt from the August 31, 2001 San Francisco
Chronicle Article, San Bruno reforms are likely to be
costly
From coast to coast, it is clear that the for profit utility companies’
policy of ‘differed maintenance’ has resulted in a crumbling infrastructure.
Under the Clinton era ‘deregulation’ policies they have been allowed
to ‘regulate’ themselves. This has led to lawless companies who violate
federal, state, and local laws in their quest for profits.
We now have laissez-faire unregulated capitalism, with giant cartels
and monopolies openly in control of government and regulation agencies
— they are the regulators/’deciders’!
The first ‘fruit’ of deregulation was the “2000-2001 Enron/Energy
Crisis” that occurred as, under deregulation, the Energy Companies
formed corporations and energy cartels, who used their monopoly of the
power production, to price fix and then charged their subsidiary
companies higher wholesale energy prices for electricity. When the energy

companies then went bankrupt, the phony public utility commissions
allowed the companies to add a surcharge to John Q Public’s monthly
energy bill, so that the company could afford to pay off their debt to their
parent organization (themselves). In California, Pacific Gas and Electric
Corporation has profited from the debts of its subsidiary, Pacific Gas and
Electric Company. Thus the public was robbed by the the “Robber Baron”
PG&E corporation.
The following is from my essay that I wrote, at that time, Return of
the “Robber Barons” Energy Cartels Rip Off California:
History Repeats Itself Again! From The Robber Barons of the Middle
Ages, To The Robber Barons of The 1870s To Today’s Robber barons!
Originally, a “Robber Baron” was a noble who robbed travelers who
passed through his land, in the latter part of the 19th century, this term was
ascribed to U.S. capitalists or industrialist considered to have become
wealthy by exploiting natural resources, corrupting legislators, or other
unethical means.”
The energy monopolies were the foremost “Robber Barons”. Their
price gouging led to many government officials to demand statification of
electricity. A compromise was reached with the power companies to
induce government regulation. Since then, energy costs were relatively
controlled, the creation of “public utilities” stemmed the tide for public
power, which still, where it is in place, provides cheaper and more reliable
electricity and gas than private investor owned utilities.
In 1996, in a unanimous bi-partisan vote by the California politicians,
amply funded by the the energy cartels, “deregulated” the power industry.

This freed the energy cartels to revert to their natural “Robber Baron”
instincts. As the crisis has deepened, the governor and the legislature have
worked out a scheme to give these robbers billions of dollars, partly with
rate increases and tax dollar bailouts from the budget surplus and partly
with borrowed money. Those who are gouged the most, the working
people of California, through taxes and rate increases, will pay out billions
to the energy companies and more billions to the banks in interest costs.
The end result will be less public funds for schools, hospitals and
other needed programs, because the money will have gone to the energy
give-away. So far, the power robber barons have reaped in more than $40
billion (and counting). in windfall profits.
After torturing the public with intermittent blackouts, the California
Public Utilities Commission has approved a 160% Increase in monthly
utility bills to feed the insatiable drive for increased profits by the energy
cartels. Everyone in California knows there is no real power shortage. The
Los Angeles public power companies and other public power companies
have no shortage of power and lower rates for power.
The real reason for the rolling blackouts is that the energy companies
are refusing to send power unless they can get what the traffic can bear!. . .
Now the it is time for ‘Peter to pay Paul’ for the years of
deregulation, differed maintenance, and crumbling pipes, etc.. We must
oppose al schemes for us to pay a “hefty price tag” for the differed
maintenance brokered by the energy corporations. It is time to nationalize
the Energy Cartels so that they can’t rob from us anymore!
IT IS TIME TO STOP THE ROBBER BARONS!
WE SHOULD DEMAND:
• No Bailouts, No Rate Increase! Reduce the rates to pre-crisis
levels. The companies that created this crisis must not profit
from it!
• Power for use—not for Profit! End regressive power rates—
the rich and the corporations pay less for power! Since
energy has become essential for everyday living and the
pursuit of happiness, everyone has a right to power!

• Rates should be progressive and be based on income with no
charge for households with less than $50,000 per year
income!
• Make the Robber Barons pay back what they stole—tax
their profits 100%!
• Open the books of all companies that supply or sell energy
to California! The people of California have a right to know
how they are being ripped off!
• State Take-Over of Electricity! We must utilize eminent
domain powers to seize ALL privately-owned energy
generation plants and distribution grids and run them as a
Public Power Authority to insure a steady power supply!
(This means seizing the assets of the power companies/
corporation!)
• The $40 billion that the energy companies have ALREADY
stolen is more than enough compensation!
• Democratic Control of the Local/State/National
PowerAuthority!
• The new Power Authority must be run by representatives
democratically elected by power workers and the public.
The politicians have already betrayed us once—the solution
is direct democratic control. The workers whoproduce the
power and the majority of the people, the working class, are
the ones who should be running the power system!
• Urge trade unions and community organizations to adopt
resolutions embodying the basic points advocated here. To
work together with everyone opposed to fighting this
robbery to arrive at a common set of demands that unites all
working people and the poor!
• Together We Can and Will Win!
— 2011

Quote of the Day:
Video of the Day:
Haiti: United Nations source of deadly cholera
Image of the Day:
End Wall Street’s Wars!
Occupy Wall Street!
Occupy Wall Street is the Only Organization
That Identifies The Enemy —
The 1% That Own and Control The Wealth!
1960s The Realist — One Nation Under God/1%
(Unlike The Trade Union Misleaders
Nor The Misleaders Of The Oppressed
Who Strive To Be In ‘Partnership’ With The 1%)
1960s The Realist — One Nation Under God/1%
(Unlike The Trade Union Misleaders
Nor The Misleaders Of The Oppressed
Who Strive To Be In ‘Partnership’ With The 1%)
Occupy Wall Street — ‘We Are The 99%’
The resistance continues at Liberty Square:

U.S.:
The Punishment and the Crime: Banks Don’t Go to Prison
by
Christopher Brauchli
It was just an unfortunate coincidence that the reports were almost
juxtaposed-the reports of the punishment given Stephanie George and that
given HSBC and UBS. Stephanie, of course, was not the first.
William James Rummel has been imprisoned since the late 1970s and
will be there for the rest of his life. That is because he was convicted of
three crimes. He used a credit card to obtain $80 worth of goods and
services, a crime for which he served 3 years in jail. When he got out he
passed a forged check in the amount of $23.86 which bought him 4 years
in jail. He ended his career as an air conditioning repairman, charging a
customer $120.75 for a repair with which the customer was not satisfied.
He refused to return the money and was convicted of obtaining money
under false pretenses. Since that was his third conviction he was
sentenced to life in prison. In reviewing his sentence the U.S. Supreme
Court said his life sentence did not constitute cruel and unusual
punishment. Commenting on the Court’s finding Justice Rehnquist said:
“We all of course, would like to think that we are ‘moving down the road
toward human decency. . . .’ Within the confines of this judicial
proceeding, however, we have no way of knowing in which direction that
road lies.” Some legal cartographers could probably have helped the
Justice out.
On December 12, 2012 the New York Times described the plight of
Stephanie George. Her boyfriend stashed a lockbox with a half-kilogram
of cocaine in her attic and when the police found it she was charged with
its possession even though she claimed not to have known of its presence
in her house. The judge said he thought the sentence unreasonable but he
was compelled by governing statutes to sentence Ms. George to life in
prison. In contemplating their fates Ms. George and Mr. Rummel (and
many others) may well wonder how things could have come out
differently for them. The answer is, they should have been banks. Banks

don’t go to prison even though they are persons and even when their
offenses involve billions of dollars.
On the same day that Ms. George’s plight was described, HSBC
agreed to pay $1.92 billion for worse things than failing to properly repair
an air conditioning unit or store a bit of coke. According to the Senate
Subcommittee on Investigations in a report issued in July 2012, the bank
“exposed the U.S. financial system to a wide array of money laundering,
drug trafficking, and terrorist financing risks due to poor anti-money
laundering controls.” The banks’ conduct enabled Mexican drug cartels to
launder tainted money through the American financial system, and the
bank worked closely with Saudi Arabian banks linked to terrorists.
The bank is a person for purpose of making political contributions to
assorted candidates but it is not a person for purposes of being charged
with criminal wrongdoing or going to jail. A criminal indictment of either
the bank person or a human person, we are told, might place the
institution at risk of collapse. Critics can take comfort in knowing that the
bank did not get off scot-free. In addition to paying $1.92 billion to settle
the charges against it, it will enter into a deferred prosecution agreement
that suggests if it or a human person doesn’t mend its ways criminal
charges might yet be brought. Lanny Breuer, the head of the Justice
Department’s criminal division said that: “HSBC is being held
accountable for stunning failures of oversight-and worse-that led the bank
to permit narcotics traffickers and others to launder hundreds of millions
of dollars through HSBC subsidiaries, and to facilitate hundreds of
millions more in transactions with sanctioned countries.” Having
described its actions he nonetheless defended the punishment saying it
was a “just, very real and very powerful result.” He’s right. $1.92 billion
is a lot of money and it means that instead of HSBC having a 2011 profit
of $22 billion it will only have a profit of about $20 billion.
December 19 we learned that UBS had settled with U.S. and British
regulators for having manipulated LIBOR rates. (LIBOR is the interest
rate banks charge each other for inter-bank loans. Depending on what
time period one is examining the bank was either reporting artificially
high rates or artificially low rates in order to deceive regulators and/or

make money.) According to the Wall Street Journal, its review of a federal
report suggests Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac may have lost more than $3
billion as a result of the manipulation of LIBOR. UBS is not facing
criminal charges since they might endanger its stability. Its Japanese
branch “has agreed to enter a plea to one count of wire fraud relating to
the manipulation of certain benchmark interest rates, including Yen Libor.”
The bank is not going to jail for the same reason HSBC is not going to jail.
Federal Regulators said if criminal charges were brought the bank’s
stability would be threatened.
Mr. Rummel and Ms. George greatly regret the fact that they were
not in the banking business. Their incarceration has greatly affected their
stability.
Christopher Brauchli is an attorney based in Boulder, Colorado. He
can be reached at: brauchli.56@post.harvard.edu.
Democrats, Social Security and the Fiscal Cliff
A Web of Convenient Fictions
by
Rob Urie
With democrats ecstatic that political dysfunction has postponed their
cutting the social insurance programs that Americans have paid for and
count on for a few weeks, discussion of the intricacies of ‘chained
CPI’ (Consumer Price Index) versus other measures of inflation used to
adjust Social Security can now apparently wait for the New Year. Still, this
probably isn’t a bad time to ask: why? Why cut Social Security? The
program is currently solvent, is expected to remain solvent for decades to
come, and projected shortfalls in the future could be better addressed by
raising the incomes of the people who pay into the program, not by cutting
payments to those who depend on them. What is to be gained by ‘solving’
a problem that isn’t?
If cutting Social Security isn’t necessary, why then is it being
proposed? Barack Obama provided copious evidence in prior proposals,
television interviews and speeches that doing so is his
intent. Congressional democrats and labor leaders quickly acceded to his

proposal to do so, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi going so far as to
actively lie that proposed cuts will ‘strengthen’ the program. And given the
cuts will eventually put tens of millions of Americans into dire poverty
from a program they paid into for all of their working lives, what rationale
could possibly justify doing so?
The reason I ask is a coalition of democrats, labor, liberals and
progressives just re-elected Mr. Obama and democrats in Congress to what
—cut Social Security? Mr. Obama created the ‘fiscal cliff’ to first push his
stacked (in favor of cutting social insurance programs) ‘deficit
commission’ to develop a plan to cut government spending and second, to
force the issue to be revisited immediately after the election if no plan was
agreed to. And Republican threats to refuse to raise the debt ceiling for
leverage to ‘force’ spending cuts are idiotic—George W. Bush and
congressional Republicans just led the largest increase in government
spending in modern history. And that is not a difficult point to make. (And
had it been on beneficial programs, it would have been laudable).
Ultimately the entire ‘debate’ is nonsense—the U.S. doesn’t fund
spending directly from taxes. As the Federal Reserve is in the process of
demonstrating with its QE (Quantitative Easing) programs, it can buy an
unlimited quantity of government debt with money it ‘creates’ –the ‘debt
limit’ is an arbitrary misdirection. This isn’t to argue that there is no
relationship between economic production and money creation, but it is to
point out that the ‘Federal budget’ is a convenient fiction. So, given his
repeated analogy of the Federal budget to a family budget, is Mr. Obama
ignorant of government finances or does he understand them and is
purposely using the misleading analogy to further unstated goals?
The ‘Fix the Debt’ committee of politicians, corporate executives and
connected financiers claiming to be concerned about the Federal deficit
isn’t discussing eliminating the ‘carried interest’ deduction that benefits
billionaire hedge fund managers, raising effective corporate tax rates that
are currently the lowest in modern history, materially cutting end-ofempire
levels of military spending and raising personal income tax rates
on the titans of finance who would be begging for change in the street
were it not for Federal government largesse in the (ongoing) bank bailouts.

But they are deeply concerned about the Federal deficit, as are Mr. Obama
and congressional democrats.
But again, why? The web of convenient fictions currently in play
amongst both democrats and republicans in Washington—corporate tax
cuts promote economic growth and job creation, government spending
‘crowds out’ more productive private sector spending, ‘excessive’
government debt will cause a financial market rebellion (bond vigilantes)
and handing social insurance programs to private market profiteers is
beneficial to the insured, are all demonstrably nonsense with only a
cursory look at ‘the evidence.’
Effective corporate tax rates are the lowest in modern history and job
creation, even before the economic calamity began in 2008, is the weakest
since the 1930s. As global warming caused by largely private production
and the predatory, dysfunctional private sector demonstrate on a daily
basis, the ‘efficiencies’ of private production come from cost shifting, not
by levels of human motivation intrinsic to capitalism. As QE is
demonstrating, the Federal Reserve can control both short and long term
interests rates—the ‘bond vigilantes’ are only in control when they provide
cover for private interests. And Barack Obama didn’t choose the ‘least
bad’ option with his healthcare ‘reform,’ he chose the private option to
which he is ideologically committed.
Without apparent irony, these convenient fictions are straight from
the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and World Bank playbooks circa
1980. While couched in the language of ‘economic development,’ IMF
policies were / are extractive, designed to exert control over political
economies and were / are tools of economic imperialism. The ‘austerity’
of IMF policies, cutting social spending to divert funds to service external
debt, was rarely accompanied by even the pretense it benefited those
whose social insurance programs were being looted. Cut to Mr. Obama
and Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi mirroring the Vietnam Warism that
to strengthen Social Security we must weaken it. Welcome to neo-Colonial
America.
Also without apparent irony, the neo-Keynesian wing of the
Democratic Party claims to have correctly analyzed current economic

travails and prescribed the necessary and sufficient solutions if only Mr.
Obama and the DC democrats would listen. In the first, this leaves the
great mystery of why they haven’t listened and have actively articulated
the policies of the radical right instead? In the second, Keynesian solutions
imply that ‘we are all in this together,’ economically speaking, decades
after official Washington and America’s plutocracy made it abundantly
clear they believe they are responsible for their lot and we for ours, except
when they need a few trillion dollars for a bailout. Finally, the ‘we’re all in
this together’ monetary policies of the neo-Keynesians have benefited
America’s richest 10% who own financial assets alone. (For explanations
see Minsky’s essays on inflation and Marx’s Capital, Volume II).
With no respect whatsoever, this leads to the observation that Mr.
Obama and his co-conspirators in the Democratic Party haven’t ‘caved,’
‘capitulated,’ ‘relented,’ ‘given in,’ ‘submitted’ or ‘yielded’ by agreeing to
cut social insurance programs. Mr. Obama’s far-right-of-center policies of
his first term were just affirmed by the coalition that re-elected him. He
will propose cutting Social Security again in just a few weeks. And
democrats, labor, liberals and progressives will again be sincerely debating
the merits of chained CPI versus other measures of inflation by which to
cut Social Security. But while the effects of cuts will be real, the ‘debate’
won’t be. Put another way, the goal is to cut Social Security, not to
‘strengthen’ it.
In his speech at the Hamilton Project launch (link above) in 2006 Mr.
Obama articulated the ‘slippery slope’ argument he believed was the ‘left’
position against ‘modernizing’ America’s social insurance programs. He
argued supporters of these programs feared minor ‘adjustments’ were a
pretext for the wholesale cuts desired by the radical right. But what this
explanation leaves out is context. Were the ‘discussion’ taking place as the
economic prospects of the poor and working classes were dramatically
rising– rapid income gains, increasing income security, rising food
security and income and wealth distribution resembling economic
democracy, interpreted intent might be benign. But with Mr. Obama and
congressional democrats several decades into giving voice to the desires

and policies of the radical right, it would require a fool to believe benign
intent today.
Hopefully I am underestimating the political pushback proposed cuts
will engender. But given the propensity of democrats, labor, liberals and
progressives to sincerely debate irrelevancies while giving unwavering
support to the increasingly debased policies of their leaders, I doubt it. The
bourgeois of these constituencies will likely break with the poor and
working class and accede to the bogus rationale that the programs must be
weakened so they may be strengthened, calculating that they’ll be all right
in any case. And the pundit class will do the narrow calculus of cutting
this program to save that without noticing the unwavering trajectory
toward neo-liberal hell of the last forty years. To the folks who support the
Democratic Party without apparently knowing what their policies are,
good luck with that Social Security thing and all. To everyone else, we
didn’t ask for this, but it’s coming our way anyhow.
Rob Urie is an artist and political economist in New York.
Is Our Republic Ending? 8 Striking Parallels Between the Fall of
Rome and U.S.
By
Steven Strauss
Lawrence Lessig'sRepublic Lost [3] documents the corrosive effect
of money on our political process. Lessig persuasively makes the case that

we are witnessing the loss of our republican form of government, as
politicians increasingly represent those who fund their campaigns, rather
than our citizens.
Anthony Everitt'sRise of Rome [4] is fascinating history and a great
read. It tells the story of ancient Rome, from its founding (circa 750 BCE)
to the fall of the Roman Republic (circa 45 BCE).
When read together, striking parallels emerge — between our failings
and the failings that destroyed the Roman Republic. As with Rome just
before the Republic's fall, America has seen:
1. Staggering Increase in the Cost of Elections, with Dubious
Campaign Funding Sources:Our 2012 election reportedly cost
$3 billion. All of it was raised from private sources - often
creating the appearance, or the reality, that our leaders are
beholden to special interest groups. During the late Roman
Republic, elections became staggeringly expensive, with equally
deplorable results.Caesar [5] reportedly borrowed so heavily for
one political campaign, he feared he would be ruined, if not
elected.
2. Politics as the Road to Personal Wealth: During the late Roman
Republic period, one of the main roads to wealth was holding
public office, and exploiting such positions to accumulate
personal wealth. As Lessig notes: Congressman, Senators and
their staffs leverage their government service to move to private
sector positions - that pay three to ten times their government
compensation. Given this financial arrangement, "Their focus is
therefore not so much on the people who sent them to
Washington. Their focus is instead on those who will make them
rich." (Republic Lost)
3. Continuous War: A national state of security arises,
distracting attention from domestic challenges with foreign
wars. Similar to the late Roman Republic, the US - for the past
100 years — has either been fighting a war, recovering from a
war, or preparing for a new war: WW I (1917-18), WW II
(1941-1945), Cold War (1947-1991), Korean War (1950-1953),

Vietnam (1953-1975), Gulf War (1990-1991), Afghanistan (2001ongoing),
and Iraq (2003-2011). And, this list is far from
complete.
4. Foreign Powers Lavish Money/Attention on the Republic's
Leaders: Foreign wars lead to growing influence, by foreign
powers and interests, on the Republic's political leaders — true
for Rome and true for us. In the past century, foreign embassies,
agents and lobbyists have proliferated in our nation's capital. As
one specific example: A foreign businessman donated $100
million toBill Clinton [6]'s various activities. Clinton "opened
doors" for him, and sometimes acted in ways contrary to stated
American interests and foreign policy.
5. Profits Made Overseas Shape the Republic's Internal
Policies:As the fortunes of Rome's aristocracy increasingly
derived from foreign lands, Roman policy was shaped to facilitate
these fortunes. American billionaires and corporations
increasingly influence our elections. In many cases, they are only
nominally American - with interests not aligned with those of the
American public. For example, Fox News is part of international
media group News Corp., with over $30 billion in revenues
worldwide. Is Fox News' jingoism a product of News Corp.'s non-
U.S. interests?
6. Collapse of the Middle Class: In the period just before the
Roman Republic's fall, the Roman middle class was crushed —
destroyed by cheap overseas slave labor. In our own day, we've
witnessed risingincome inequality [7], a stagnating middle class,
and the loss of American jobs to overseas workers who are paid
less and have fewer rights.
7. Gerrymandering: Rome's late Republic used various methods to
reduce the power of common citizens. The GOP has so
effectivelygerrymandered [8] Congressional districts that, even
though House Republican candidates received only about 48
percent of the popular vote in the 2012 election — they ended up
with the majority (53 percent) of the seats.

8. Loss of the Spirit of Compromise: The Roman Republic, like
ours, relied on a system of checks and balances. Compromise is
needed for this type of system to function. In the end, the Roman
Republic lost that spirit of compromise, with politics increasingly
polarized betweenOptimates (the rich, entrenched elites) and
Populares (the common people) [9]. Sound familiar? Compromise
is in noticeably short supply in our own time also.For example
[10], "There were more filibusters between 2009 and 2010 than
there were in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s combined."
Environment:
Fracking:
Nuclear Fallout: Ongoing Tragedy/Disaster In Japan:
EnergyNews:
12:22 PM EST on December 21st, 2012 | 7 comments
Study: X-ray like images show radioactive contamination spread
through leaves and grass collected from Fukushima to Tokyo
(PHOTOS)
11:29 AM EST on December 21st, 2012 | 18 comments
Fukushima Worker: Rats now being found in many places around
plant — Concern about biting cables, tripping electrical systems,
spreading high level contamination
10:29 AM EST on December 21st, 2012 | 18 comments
Tepco: Fuel assemblies could be damaged from shock in Fukushima
Unit 3 pool
08:55 AM EST on December 21st, 2012 | 19 comments

Mother: Child with severe nose bleeds, full body rash after playing in
Fukushima contaminated water — So much blood, thought head was
cut open — Fingers covered in open sores
07:56 AM EST on December 21st, 2012 | Leave a comment
Floating pier comes ashore in Washington — If experts don’t get to it
today, next chance is early January (VIDEO)
06:49 PM EST on December 20th, 2012 | 9 comments
Tepco admits link between death and Fukushima disaster for 1st time
03:05 PM EST on December 20th, 2012 | 18 comments
New Official Map of Giant Sinkhole: “Visible evidence of subsidence
further west” — “Heavy gas bubble activity” recently observed
(PHOTO)
Ongoing Gulf of Mexico Oil Disaster:
Oil Spill Attorney Stuart Smith’s Blog:
Fracking and politics: A toxic mix in Pa.
The exploitation of Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale has epitomized
everything that’s can go wrong with fracking. Drilling companies have run
roughshod over a state that has little modern experience with the oil and
gas industry. Drilling companies have polluted streams with waste —
some of it radioactive — and numerous residents have abandoned their
wells. As Josh Fox showed in the much lauded film “Gasland,” some rural
residents are now able to light their tap water on fire.
Meanwhille, Pennsylvania’s government has been all but invisible.
Cases of pollution or rig explosions caused by shoddy practices have been
overlooked by state regulators. And things have gotten worse since the
election in 2010 of Republican Gov. Tom Corbett, who received more than
$900,000 in oil-and-gas campaign contributors and promised that he

would turn Pennsylvania into “the Texas of natural gas drilling.” He’s
OK’ed putting rigs on the state’s universities as a scheme to raise money.
Meanwhile, he rejected pleas for his cash-strapped state to impose a
severance tax on fracking — something that’s done in every other drilling
state, including Texas., finally agreeing to just a minor “impact fee.”
That’s why it’s not so shocking to see the other side of the coin: Tom
Corbett’s all too cozy ties with drillers:
Gov. Tom Corbett and his wife accepted a Rhode Island
vacation last year from a businessman even as regulators from
the state Department of Environmental Conservation were
looking into his firm’s operation of a natural-gas waste transfer
station without a permit.
The StateImpact Pennsylvania project is reporting that the
governor just last month amended his original 2011 ethics filing
to add that John Moran Jr. of Moran Industries had paid $1,422
to fly Corbett and his wife to a hotel in Rhode Island and put
them up in a hotel for a long weekend in July of that year.
The Philadelphia Inquirer is also reporting that Moran has given more
than $125,000 in campaign contributions to Corbett since 2009. As the
same time, the businessman — whose main background is in trucking —
plunged himself head-long in Pennsylvania’s fracking boom, calling it “a
gift from God.”
Meanwhile, the state regulators who work for Corbett have been
trying to decide what to do about an unpermitted waste-transfer station
operated by Moran, which has infuriated local residents:
In December of last year — or five months after Moran
paid for the Corbetts’ vacation — the Natural Resources Defense
Council, or NRDC, reported that Pennsylvania regulators had
been investigating for more than a year Moran’s operation of the
Sunbury, Pa., waste-transfer site . The facility had been shipping
drilling waste by rail to a landfill in Ohio without a permit. It
said that Moran had claimed he didn’t need a permit because of
a loophole in federal railroad law.

Local residents had angrily complained about Moran’s
operation, according to the website Pennsylvania From Below,
raising questions about strong chemical odors coming from
trucks entering the facility and asking what exactly was in
the drill-cutting waste from Marcellus Shale fracking sites that
were being transported there.
Look, at the end of the day, this is all about access. Natural gas
drillers have bought and paid for Corbett’s campaign, and now they
hobnob with these frackers on swank vacations. It’s little wonder that the
governor does almost everything they ask for. Do you think that a farmer
with flaming tap water gets that’s kind of access?
To read about Gov. Corbett’s free vacation from a gas-industry
entreprenuer in the Philadelphia Daily News, go to: http://
www.philly.com/philly/blogs/attytood/Natural-gas-exec-paid-for-
Corbett-2011-vacation.html
To read more from the Philadelphia Inquirer, please read: http://
www.philly.com/philly/news/politics/
20121221_Corbett_defends_trips_he_accepted_for_free.html
For a report on Corbett allowing gas drilling on college campuses,
please go to: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/10/pennsylvaniafracking-law-opens-drilling-college-campuses
Environmental Must-Reads – December 21, 2012
Louisiana Governor Jindal, Bayou Corne Sinkhole and Santa
Ever-so-busy Governor Bobby Jindal, where are you?
For months, political watchers in Louisiana have wondered why
Governor Jindal has failed to visit or speak out about a peculiar sinkhole
in Bayou Corne which has received national attention for a variety of
reasons including the evacuation of over 150 families.
Mystery Sheen Recurs Near Deepwater Horizon Oil Well
Officials with the U.S. Coast Guard and petroleum giant BP are
baffled by a mysterious sheen that keeps appearing on the surface of the

Gulf of Mexico near the site of the April 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil
spill.
Burning Pipeline Fire Sign of Nigeria’s Woes
The gasoline pipeline burns unstopped near a village close to
Nigeria’s sprawling megacity of Lagos, shooting flames into the air as
leaking fuel muddies the ground. All around it, the ground is littered with
plastic jerry-cans, used by those who hacked into the line to steal the fuel
within.
Keystone XL Pipeline Protesters Stuck in Texas Jail
Protesters sitting in trees or blocking equipment used to build
TransCanada’s (TRP) Keystone XL oil pipeline are learning that
environmental activism in East Texas sometimes has big consequences.
Matthew Almonte, Glen Collins, and Isabel Brooks landed in jail in Tyler
on Dec. 3, charged with misdemeanor criminal trespass, resisting arrest,
and illegal dumping after they entered an unlaid pipe at a construction site
near Winona, Tex., and tried to stop work on the $7.6 billion project. Once
completed, the pipeline will bring products of the Alberta tar sands to
Houston-area refineries.
Judge delays hearing with Texas landowner,TransCanada on
Keystone pipeline
A Texas landowner battling TransCanada Corp. says a judge has
declined for now to hear arguments on whether to temporarily stop work
on the property.
Michael Bishop says a Nacogdoches County judge put off a hearing
scheduled for Wednesday until he can determine whether the matter
should be in state court.
Keystone falling short of strictest safety standards
The Keystone XL pipeline sparked a political firestorm late in 2011
and into this year, after environmental groups and concerned local
residents started a campaign to prevent its approval. As TransCanada, the
company constructing the pipeline, continues forward with what parts of
the project that it can, more objections are being raised about potential
safety and environmental concerns.
ExxonMobil, DEQ still argue rulings

The state Department of Environmental Quality and ExxonMobil
Corp. are in the process of dispute resolution discussions involving a June
14 naphtha release at the Baton Rouge chemical plant.
Shrimp season brings challenges for fishermen
Although the shrimp catch has improved in many state waters,
problems from the 2010 BP oil spill still linger, shrimpers said.
The market for Gulf shrimp outside of Louisiana is still down since
the spill. And shrimp are still scarce in parts of the Barataria Basin near
Grand Isle, which was hit hard by the spill, shrimp processors and dealers
said.
Burlington City Council passes resolutions opposing tar sands
oil: the beginning of a groundswell against tar sands in New England
Big Oil has a plan that will put communities at risk in New England
and Eastern Canada. The Portland-Montreal Pipeline – a very old oil
pipeline owned mostly by ExxonMobil – may be reversed to enable dirty
corrosive tar sands oil to be pumped through Vermont’s Northeast
Kingdom en route to Portland, Maine, part of a broader project including
the reversal of an Enbridge pipeline through Eastern Canada. But not if
Vermont communities have a say. On Monday night, Burlington, Vermont
took a bold and important step toward taking Vermont – and New England
– on the path to being “tar sands free.”
Tiny Armies of Microsubmarines Could Clean Up Oil Spills
Back in May, we covered a cool new technology looking into how
microsubmarines could be the future of cleaning up oil spills in the ocean.
Megan wrote, “The tiny machines are able to absorb and transport oil
droplets in water, meaning they could be our next go-to solution for
cleaning up oil spills…[T]he microsubmarines were based on microtube
engines that were created to deliver medicine through the bloodstream of
the human body. The submarines are eight micrometers long — ten times
smaller than the width of a human hair — and are propelled by an inner
layer of hydrogen peroxide that reacts with the liquid they’re submerged in
to produce bubbles and shoot them forward.”
Next In Line For A Fracking Boom, California Looks At The
Rules

The controversial drilling technique known as hydraulic fracturing
has created an oil and gas boom around the country. In states like Texas,
Pennsylvania and Colorado, there’s been heated debate about rules that
protect groundwater and public health.
California Fracking Rules Slammed By Environmentalists As
Shale Oil Boom Threatens To Remake State
Just below California’s surface lies enough shale oil to fundamentally
transform the state’s entire economy.
And for the first time in the state’s history, California regulators have
seriously started to grapple with how the state deals with the controversial
practice of hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” in order to retrieve that oil.
Fracking industry worried Matt Damon’s ‘Promised Land’ will
be hatchet job
Matt Damon is throwing his two cents into the debate about fracking
with his upcoming film “Promised Land,” but critics are worried it will be
nothing more than a hatchet job on the entire fracking industry.
“Promised Land,” which Damon co-wrote with “The Office’s” John
Krasinski, explores the much-debated gas extraction method.
Canadian authorities: Fracking operation contaminated
groundwater
Today the Canadian Energy Resources Conservation Board (ERCB)
released a report on its investigation into a September, 2011 hydraulic
fracturing incident that led to groundwater contamination. The ERCB is an
independent quasi-judicial agency that regulates all energy development in
the province of Alberta.
Wawarsing passes fracking ban
The Wawarsing Town Board is the latest to adopt a ban on hydrofracking
to extract natural gas from shale formations.
The unanimous vote came Thursday night. A public hearing was held
prior to the vote with no one supporting the process.
Upstate Community Continues Fracking Court Fight
An Upstate New York town is continuing its legal battle to preserve
its way of life, filing a brief today in a court case over whether an oil and

gas company should be allowed to overturn local zoning laws limiting
industrial oil and gas development.
California’s fracking regulations found lacking
The California Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources has
released a preliminary draft of regulations that for the first time would
require oil and gas drilling companies in the state to report where they are
using hydraulic fracturing technology and disclose what chemicals they
are using.
American Academy of Pediatrics Endorses Cell Phone Safety Bill
The Environmental Working Group applauds the decision by the
influential American Academy of Pediatrics to support pending legislation
that would require new research into the safety of cell phone radiation,
especially for children, require safety standards that protect children and
other vulnerable populations, and impose new labeling requirements for
the ubiquitous devices.
MRI Could Solve Cellphone Radiation Problems
Years of studies to determine whether cellphones can cause brain
tumors have yielded one popular consensus: More studies are needed. One
important piece that has been missing from researchers’ arsenals is a way
to see what happens to cellphone radiation that is absorbed by the human
brain. Two scientists have now developed a magnetic resonance imaging
(MRI) technique that they say could solve that problem. This could be an
important tool for researchers who are trying to discover whether
extensive cellphone use can cause brain tumors or other health problems.
NRA says fault lines under third nuclear plant most likely active
A panel of scientists from Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority
(NRA) stated on Thursday that the just discovered fault lines found under
the Higashidori nuclear plant in Aomori Prefecture are most likely active.
This goes against the argument from the plant’s operator, Tohoku Electric
Power Co., who claimed, to no surprise, that the facility was safe.
Black Liberation/Civil Rights:
Lincoln, the Movie

y
William Loren Katz
Like just about everyone who has seen it, I was enthralled by
"Lincoln," the Hollywood film directed with authority and creative license
by Stephen Spielberg, smoothly scripted by Tony Kushner and crowned by
a veritable feast of brilliant acting. But in my case, as the author of 40
books on African American history and editor of 212 library reference
volumes (most address Civil War era issues and personalities), I watched
with an additional set of eyes.
Spielberg begins his story in January 1865, and on the right foot: Two
former slaves, now Union soldiers, approach America's most venerated
President to inform him of their battle experiences and of the reality that if
captured they would be immediately executed. One soldier adds, "our pay
is half of what white soldiers get, and we have to pay for our own
uniforms."
Perhaps this scene is meant to evoke the little known truth that by the
Civil War's end 178,958 African Americans — one fifth of black male
adults under 45, a tenth of the Union army — had proven their courage in
449 engagements and 39 major battles, earning 22 Medals of Honor.
Another 29,511 constituted a fourth of the (integrated!) Union Navy. And
Black volunteers enlisted when the Confederacy had no reserves, faced
mounting desertions, frontline casualties and bread riots at home. As early
as August 1864, Lincoln had written that without his African American
soldiers he would have been "compelled to abandon the war in three
weeks."
Audiences are soon presented with a series of intense and
consequential political discussions. A cautious Lincoln (Daniel Day
Lewis), his hand resting on the white public's pulse, duels amicably with
Congressman Thaddeus Stevens the grim-faced Chair of the powerful
House Ways and Means Committee. As Stevens, Tommy Lee Jones steals
every scene he is in as a cantankerous advocate of equality whose tongue,
the film maintains, only Lincoln can tame.
Stevens, one of history's most maligned figures, had the power to
infuriate and a tongue that reduced political foes to quivering self-doubt.

On two occasions he had to fend off knife-wielding fellow Congressmen.
In 1863 Jubal Early detoured his Confederate cavalry from Gettysburg so
they could burn down his iron foundry in Chambersburg. [See Fawn
Brodie's Thaddeus Stevens (1959, 1966)].
Also Hollywood twice damned Stevens as a Benedict Arnold-grade
"race traitor." The racist blockbuster, Birth of a Nation (1915) caricatured
him as a snarling foe of white supremacy and champion of "race mixing."
In Tennessee Johnson (1942) he is played as a conniving, evil, fanatic.
The real Stevens stood with abolitionists pledged to "fight against
slavery until Hell freezes over and then continue the battle on the ice." He
defended fugitive slaves in court, used his home as an Underground
Railroad station, and was a staunch egalitarian. He also practiced what he
preached: he worked with African Americans, had an African American
common law wife, and asked to be buried in Lancaster's only integrated
cemetery. He and Senator Charles Sumner led Congress's effort to free
slaves, grant them equal pay as soldiers, and pass the 13th Amendment. In
1867
Stevens, father of the 14th Amendment, died short of his life's goal: a
democratic South's ruled not by a planter elite but former slave and poor
white voters owning "40 acres and a mule."
Once "Lincoln" concentrates on the 13th Amendment important
details beg for inclusion but, unfortunately, are absent. Senator Charles
Sumner is mentioned once and Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady
Stanton and Susan B. Anthony — who led campaigns to win over the
public's hearts and minds — do not appear. Only Lincoln is left
standing . . . the sole hero.
Also missing is the vital, rarely revealed, back-story. For two years
Lincoln struggled only "to save the Union." Not only did he refuse to
challenge slavery, but he also ordered Union officers to deny a haven to
runaway slave families whose members had fled to Union lines.
Then the ground beneath the President shifted. The sight of U.S.
troops triggered slave stampedes to freedom, rebuking the planters' myth
of the happy, loyal, slave and igniting clashes between soldiers in Union
camps and the Confederate officers who arrived to brutally reclaim

unaways. Indeed, the Black urge for liberty turned the Confederacy's
greatest asset into its worst nightmare: an enemy within. "To see a black
face was to find a true heart," reported Union soldiers caught behind
enemy lines.
The actions of slaves began to dismantle the plantation system. The
Confederacy was left without the thousands of slave laborers upon whose
backs the agricultural oligarchy had rested. Abolitionist agitators used this
news to broadcast a louder wake-up call to white northerners.
Meanwhile, Lincoln's officers reported "contrabands" in their camps
wanted to help as nurses, cooks, servants, construction workers,
launderers, and blacksmiths. Some were eager to serve as spies and
soldiers. This news also reached a war-weary northern public fearful they
would find the names of their drafted fathers, brothers and uncles in the
weekly Union casualty lists.
The most dramatic changes came first in the West. In the Indian
Territory, only months after Fort Sumter, 10,000 African Americans,
Native people and some southern whites battled Confederate armies.
Survivors then fought their way to Kansas, where the young men among
them joined unofficial Union units. Commanding those units were
abolitionist officers who had gained military training a few years before
riding with John Brown in Kansas. In the West, a multicultural Union
army fought a type of war Lincoln had not ordered: They liberated
enslaved people in Missouri.
The Deep South faced new problems. In May 1862 in Charleston,
South Carolina enslaved seaman Robert Smalls was
thinking that his Confederate battleship, Planter, "might be of some
use to Uncle Abe." One night, after the white officers had left, Smalls and
his enslaved crew led their families aboard, sailed out of Charleston harbor
and surrendered to the Union fleet. Smalls became Captain of the Planter,
now a ship of the U.S. Navy. In light of fast-moving events white people
began to reconsider their assumptions.
In 1862, Congress took note of the runaways' offers of help and
abolitionist pressure with two Confiscation Acts. These laws opened the
door to emancipation and the service of black troops. Finally, President

Lincoln acted. As a "military necessity," he announced, "We must free the
slaves or be ourselves subdued." On January 1, 1863 Abraham Lincoln
became "The Great Emancipator" — by performing one of history's great
catch-ups. Four months later he admitted as much: "I claim not to have
controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me."
Read More
Labor:
Economy:
World:
Health, Education, Science and Welfare:
Daily News Digest December 21, 2012
Joe Glenton: Insider attacks and public rejection, hese are the reasons
we're withdrawing from Afghanistan
An Afghanistan veteran who refused a second tour says maybe now
our politicians can accept this war is lost - and its cost, as ever, too
high
(Joe Glenton refused to serve a second tour in Afghanistan on legal and moral grounds, later
spending five months in military prison. He has written for the Guardian, the Mirror, and New
Internationalist. His documentary The Soldier Myth will appear on Sky soon.)

Contrary to the spin regarding the capabilities of the Afghan security
forces, withdrawal of British troops from the country is being driven
solely by insider attacks and opposition at home.
The exit strategy for the ISAF had been getting Afghan security
forces to fend for themselves, so that control of the country could be
continued by proxy. This task, by all credible accounts, has not been
achieved. Rather, the insider attacks have scuppered the training program,
and now we are seeing the onset of the “cut and run” that politicians have
talked up for so long.
Think what you will of the politics of the resistance, but even if you
mischaracterise all, or even most, of the opponents of occupation as
Islamist, the strategy of “insider” attacks has an undeniable Tet quality to
it. It should also be noted that a resistance on any scale, let alone the scale
of the insurgency in Afghanistan, needs support and sanction by the
population to go anywhere.
An insurgent relies on the people for support, intelligence, shelter and
political approval, even for extra firepower. Attacks on ISAF patrols in
Afghanistan in the past have been supported, quite spontaneously at times,
by locals coming from miles around to take pot-shots at the intruders, as
was reported in David Kilcullen’s excellent book The Accidental
Guerrilla.
The long game

Likewise, it’s easy to refute claims by a leading US general that a
lack of fighting in Helmand – leading to the boredom of marines –
constitutes a sign of progress. To make that argument you would have to
ignore, firstly, the seasonal nature of fighting in Afghanistan - did anyone
tell the general it is winter? Secondly, you’d have to miss the nature of the
war itself; what insurgent would blunder into a province flooded with US
Marines? The Afghans have played the long game. It has served them
today as it has in previous occupations.
The only way out for ISAF was for the constituent militaries to train
their way free, so the whole program had come to rest on this, and the
threat of insider killings has made that plan politically untenable. For good
measure, even our own side consider the ISAF presence an “occupation”.
The other major factor in this is, of course, the rejection of the war at
home. Though not because the public do not grasp Afghanistan’s
complexities, as has been suggested in the past – rather, it’s precisely
because people do understand. The occupation has become a
conversational punch-bag, it seems, everywhere except Westminster;
though one suspects that in some quarters it is a grim in-joke there as well.
At the same time as people support servicemen on a human level and
condemn their betrayal by successive governments, the war has been a
waddling tragedy since 2006.
It is an insult to talk of withdrawal in terms of the cost in pounds, as
some do, when the cost in mutilation and death is what cuts us the most. I
do not count these deaths as lightly as the government; I have seen a
number of familiar faces appear on television, accompanied by words like:
“Today, another soldier…”
What is clear is that the Afghans, portrayed as feckless and needy
each time the occupation needed to be re-justified, are still, as ever,
capable of controlling their own territory and their own lives and driving
occupiers out of both. Defeat has been a steady drip-drip for the west, but
it is defeat nonetheless.
Objection
Like Iraq, Afghanistan has a reasonably pliable government for now,
but arguably the greatest collection of military power in history has been

ground down by ordinary people with no planes, no armour, no drones and
no illusions about why Afghanistan was invaded.
Even very recently in the Kabul Bank saga, it has been clear that
capital flows out of the country and I would expect that to increase in the
coming months. I also expect to see prominent public figures rushing to
catch up with their loot in Dubai and similar sanctuaries.
More conventional attempts at robbery are being employed at home
to escape a grim fate in Afghanistan. Only this week Private Stephen
Evans, 20, of the Royal Welsh Regiment was convicted for attempting an
armed robbery in order to escape of a third tour of Afghanistan. The judge
took into account his “suffering post-traumatic stress disorder following
his tour of Afghanistan”.
A bizarre route to take, but not totally inexplicable when you realise
the average reading age of a soldier joining the infantry is ten and most
other ways to get treatment or air objections are obscured or denied.
This young man may have been expressing a conscientious objection;
which soldiers have a legal, contractual right to have recognised. It is a
hard road, but it is better than being the last man to die for hubris.
Quotes of the Day:
“Adopting the chained consumer price index for Social
Security benefits will take $112 billion out of the pockets of
current Social Security beneficiaries in the next 10 years
alone, and is neither fair nor warranted.
“Social Security is currently the principal source of
income for nearly two-thirds of older American households,
and roughly one third of those households depend on Social
Security for nearly all of their income. Half of those 65 and
older have annual incomes below $18,500. Every dollar of
the average Social Security retirement benefit of about
$14,800 is absolutely critical to the typical beneficiary. —
AARP to Congress and the President: Don’t Cut Social
Security

Nationwide, about 900,000 veterans and their families
have been waiting about nine months for a decision on their
claims, with those in America’s major urban areas waiting
the longest. As of October, the most recent month for which
numbers are available, the average wait time for a veteran
was 15 months in Chicago, 16 months in New York and a
year and a half in Los Angeles. — Number of veterans who
die waiting for benefits claims skyrockets
Image of the Day:
And what do those war profiteers do for the returning Veterans after
they’ve made their profits off the war?
What is the HUMAN cost that gets ignored?
Video of the Day:
Haiti: United Nations source of deadly cholera
End Wall Street’s Wars!
Occupy Wall Street!
Occupy Wall Street is the Only Organization
That Identifies The Enemy —

The 1% That Own and Control The Wealth!
1960s The Realist — One Nation Under God/1%
(Unlike The Trade Union Misleaders
Nor The Misleaders Of The Oppressed
Who Strive To Be In ‘Partnership’ With The 1%)
1960s The Realist — One Nation Under God/1%
(Unlike The Trade Union Misleaders
Nor The Misleaders Of The Oppressed
Who Strive To Be In ‘Partnership’ With The 1%)
Occupy Wall Street — ‘We Are The 99%’
The resistance continues at Liberty Square:
U.S.:
Will Obama Cry for Inner City Youth?
New America Media, Commentary, David Muhammad

Like President Obama and many others across the country, I too
wiped away tears as I watched the horrifying news coverage of the tragic
shootings in Newton, Conn. I immediately called my children who were
still in school. I sat watching the television trying to fathom how I would
respond if I got a call that a shooting had occurred at my children’s school.
This brought on more tears. But for the parents of 20 children and six
other families in Newton, it wasn’t an exercise; it was an excruciating
reality.
I then watched and listened to our President, and like parents around
the world, the shooting had affected him emotionally as well. Twenty
children gunned down. He struggled to hold back tears.
It was then that my phone buzzed. I quickly grabbed it to see if it was
one of my children calling back. But it wasn’t. It was a colleague in
Chicago. I had emailed her the day before asking for research into one of
the mentoring programs in the city’s schools for youth with the highest
risk of being shot.
She provided me with the information I was seeking. Then she
included a P.S.: “What a devastating horrible day in CT. But frankly I wish
people cared this much when it was children on the south and west sides
of Chicago.”
I was snapped back into reality with the email. The tragedy in
Newtown was truly horrific. But there is similar carnage carried out every
day in the streets of America’s cities, especially in the President’s
hometown of Chicago, where I work in Oakland, in Philadelphia, and
many other cities across the nation.
In 2010, nearly 700 Chicago school children were shot and 66 of
them died. Last year, Mayor Rahm Emanuel attended a memorial for 260
school children who had been killed in just the previous three years. On
several occasions in the past year, tens of people have been shot in a single
weekend on the streets of the city. The worst three-day stretch saw 10
killed and 37 wounded in gun fire. But Google the term “Chicago
weekend shootings” and the results are far too many deadly weekends to
count.

Oakland, Calif. has seen a huge increase in shootings. Last year, three
small children were murdered in shootings. The youngest victim hadn’t
yet turned 2. Oakland has become the first city in the country to have its
police force taken over by a federal court. Because of a lack of resources,
the city has one of the lowest police to resident ratios in the country.
Gun violence in America is a pandemic, but there is no round-theclock
news coverage. No national address from the President with tears.
No pledge for urgent change.
Why? Is it because the children who die on the streets of America’s
cities are black and brown? Is it because they are poor? What makes the
victims of everyday inner-city gun violence expendable?
Like the horrendous shooting in Newton, easy access to guns and the
challenges of mental illness contribute to the violence on America’s
streets. Like the calls for change in guns laws that have been heard
following this massacre, so too do we need tighter gun control because of
the death and destruction that touches the hearts of mourning mothers in
American cities every day.
Speaking at a prayer vigil in Newton, Obama said, “Can we honestly
say that we're doing enough to keep our children, all of them, safe from
harm? The answer is no, we're not doing enough. And we'll have to
change.”
Mr. President, this is so very true. But it is not only these one-day
mass shootings that cause us to cry out for the need to change, but also the
daily gun violence that plagues our cities.
“We will be told that the causes of such violence are complex, and
that is true,” Obama said. “No single law, no set of laws, can eliminate evil
or prevent every act, but that can't be an excuse for inaction. Surely, we
can do better than this.”
We can do better in Chicago, in Oakland, in Philadelphia, and in
every city in America.
(David Muhammad is the former Chief Probation Officer of Alameda
County in California and the former Deputy Commissioner of Probation in

New York City. He now consults with philanthropic foundations on
juvenile justice issues.)
The Art of Obama's Wars
Manlio Dinucci
The United States can no longer afford to launch major wars like
Korea, Vietnam or Iraq. Obama prefers to intensify secret military action.
Manlio Dinucci lays out the plan.
President Obama does not like war. Not because he is a Nobel Peace
prize-winner, but because open aggressive action would reveal US
strategy and the interests upon which it is based. So he has launched a
grand plan which, as the Washinton Post notes, "reflects the Obama
administration’s affinity for espionage and covert action over conventional
force." [as CIA men are trained to do; Obama - CIA trained and installed -
is fulfilling his mission...]
This plan is intended to restructure and reinforce the Defense
Intelligence Agency, which until now has been concentrated on the wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq, so that it can operate on a global scale as a "spy
service focused on emerging threats and more closely aligned with the
CIA and elite military commando units."
The first step will be to expand the organigram of the DIA, whose
personnel has been doubled over the last decade, and now numbers some
16,500 members. A "new generation of clandestine operatives" will be
formed, ready to be sent overseas. They will be trained by the CIA in its

centre in Virginia, known as "The Farm", where secret agents are groomed
– a number of new posts will be created for the DIA pupils, totalling about
20% of the Farm’s turnover.
The ever closer collaboration between these two agencies is born out
by the fact that the DIA has adopted a few of the CIA’s internal structures,
amongst others, a unit dubbed "Persia House", which co-ordinates secret
operations inside Iran.
The new DIA agents will also take a specialisation course directed by
the Commander of Special Operations. Apart from training recruits to
eliminate the enemy, he also teaches "non-conventional warfare" to be
conducted by exterior forces who are specially trained for this purpose;
"counter-insurrection", to help allied governments to repress rebellion;
and "psychological operations" intended to influence public opinion so
that the population comes to support US military action.
Once their training is complete, these new DIA agents, about 1,600 at
first, will be assigned by the Pentagon to missions all over the world. The
State Department will provide them with false identities, introducing some
of them into embassies - but since the embassies are already full of CIA
agents, the DIA agents will be given other false identities, for example, as
university staff or business executives.
Thanks to their military experience, the DIA agents are reputed to be
more appropriate for the recruitment of informers capable of providing
data of a military nature, for example, information concerning the new
Chinese fighter plane. And the development of their organigram will
enable the DIA to expand the range of targets for drone strikes and actions
by special forces.
This is the new way of making war, preparing and accompanying
open attacks by secret action intended to weaken the target country from
inside, as was done in Libya, or undermine it internally, as is being
attempted in Syria. This is the direction taken by the restructured DIA,
launched by President Obama.
We don’t know if the candidate for Prime Minister Pier Luigi
Bersani [1], who holds Obama in great esteem, has already congratulated
him for this action. However, he has recently visited Libya in order to

"pick up the thread of a strong Italian presence in the Mediterranean".
Meaning the thread of war against Libya, in which Italy participated under
US orders, while Bersani rejoiced, exclaiming "it’s about time".
Manlio Dinucci is a geographer and geopolitical scientist. His latest
books are Geograficamente. Per la Scuola media (3 vol.), Zanichelli
(2008); Escalation. Anatomia della guerra infinita, DeriveApprodi (2005).
The ‘Lesser Evil’ Strikes Senior Citizens:
AARP to Congress and the President: Don’t Cut Social Security
Association urges Congress not to include a cut via Chained CPI in
budget deal
From: Press Center
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
December 18, 2012
CONTACT:
Josh Rosenblum or Tiffany Lundquist
202-434-2560 or media@aarp.org
AARP to Congress and the President: Don’t Cut Social Security
Washington, DC – AARP Executive Vice President Nancy LeaMond
today reiterated the Association’s opposition to including a cut to the
benefits of current and future Social Security recipients as part of a yearend
budget deal via a formula change known as Chained CPI. She offered
the following statement:
“Adopting the chained consumer price index for Social Security
benefits will take $112 billion out of the pockets of current Social Security
beneficiaries in the next 10 years alone, and is neither fair nor warranted.
“Social Security is currently the principal source of income for nearly
two-thirds of older American households, and roughly one third of those
households depend on Social Security for nearly all of their income. Half
of those 65 and older have annual incomes below $18,500. Every dollar
of the average Social Security retirement benefit of about $14,800 is
absolutely critical to the typical beneficiary.

“The Chained CPI is a stealth benefit reduction that will compound
over time and cut thousands of dollars in retirement income for current
beneficiaries. A typical 80-year-old woman will lose the equivalent of 3
months worth of food annually. The greatest impact of Chained CPI would
fall on the oldest, eventually resulting in a cut of one full month’s benefit
annually. This dramatic benefit cut would push thousands more into
poverty and result in increased economic hardship for those trying
desperately to keep up with rising prices.”
AARP is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization, with a membership of more than 37
million, that helps people 50+ have independence, choice and control in ways that are beneficial
to them and society as a whole. AARP does not endorse candidates for public office or make
contributions to either political campaigns or candidates. We produce AARP The Magazine, the
definitive voice for Americans 50+ and the world's largest-circulation magazine; AARP
Bulletin, the go-to news source for the 50+ audience; AARP VIVA, a bilingual lifestyle
multimedia platform addressing the interests and needs of Hispanic Americans; and national
television and radio programming including My Generation and Inside E Street. The AARP
Foundation is an affiliated charity that provides security, protection, and empowerment to older
persons in need with support from thousands of volunteers, donors, and sponsors. AARP has
staffed offices in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin
Islands. Learn more at www.aarp.org.
Johnny Comes Marching Home To Be Treated Like Cannon Fodder:
Number of veterans who die waiting for benefits claims skyrockets
Aaron Glantz
James Alderson is shown in a Yuba City nursing home in September,
a few days before his death. Credit: Courtesy of Kale Alderson

After seven months of delay, the Department of Veterans Affairs
finally approved World War II veteran James Alderson’s pension benefits
last week.
But it was not a cause for celebration or relief for Alderson, whose
life’s work was the farm supply store he founded near Chico after
returning home from the Battle of the Bulge.
The 89-year-old veteran had died three months earlier in a Yuba City
nursing home.
“My father was a very proud person,” Alderson’s son, Kale, said.
“Whenever I saw him, he would ask if I’d heard from the VA and whether
his money would hold up. It really took a toll on him.”
The VA’s inability to pay benefits to veterans before they die is
increasingly common, according to data obtained by the Center for
Investigative Reporting. The data reveals, for the first time, that long wait
times are contributing to tens of thousands of veterans being approved for
disability benefits and pensions only after it is too late for the money to
help them.
In the fiscal year that ended in September, the agency paid $437
million in retroactive benefits to the survivors of nearly 19,500 veterans
who died waiting. The figures represent a dramatic increase from three
years earlier, when the widows, parents and children of fewer than 6,400
veterans were paid $7.9 million on claims filed before their loved one’s
death.
These veterans range from World War II veterans like Alderson who
die of natural causes without their pensions to Iraq war veteran Scott
Eiswert, who committed suicide after his disability claim for posttraumatic
stress disorder was denied.
The ranks of survivors waiting for these benefits also have surged,
from fewer than 3,000 in December 2009 to nearly 13,000 this month.
Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., chairman of the House Committee on
Veterans’ Affairs, said the data confirmed the worst fears of many veterans
and members of Congress.

“The common refrain we hear from many veterans is, ‘Delay, deny,
wait till I die,’ ” said Miller, who called the burgeoning backlog of benefits
claims a “national embarrassment.”
Nationwide, about 900,000 veterans and their families have been
waiting about nine months for a decision on their claims, with those in
America’s major urban areas waiting the longest. As of October, the most
recent month for which numbers are available, the average wait time for a
veteran was 15 months in Chicago, 16 months in New York and a year and
a half in Los Angeles.
But in a conference call with CIR, VA officials said that while the
long delays generally were unacceptable, the growth in posthumous
payments was not disturbing.
“It’s a good thing that the VA pays benefits to honor the service of
veterans and the sacrifices of their family members despite the fact that a
veteran has unfortunately died,” said Dave McLenachen, director of the
agency’s pension and fiduciary service.
Some veteran advocates say the number of survivors being approved
for retroactive payments represents a fraction of the veterans who die
waiting because grieving families must file paperwork with the agency to
keep a claim from expiring with the veteran.
“You’re just so exhausted and drained with the grief of losing a loved
one that sometimes it’s hard just to wake up in the morning, let alone
navigate a complicated bureaucracy,” said Bonnie Carroll, founder of the
Washington-based nonprofit Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors.
A White House liaison to the VA under President George W. Bush,
Carroll serves on the agency’s Advisory Committee on Disability
Compensation, which helps the VA draft rules governing disability
benefits.
“It’s beyond tragic,” Carroll said. When a veteran dies without his or
her benefits, she said, families face not only the financial burden of
medical bills and burial costs, but also emotional distress from the “loss of
connection to the military that their loved one served and sacrificed for.”
Delays tied to Agent Orange

In November, more than a year after Vietnam veteran John Conrad
died of leukemia, the VA sent his widow a letter acknowledging his cancer
was caused by exposure to the toxic defoliant Agent Orange.
The decision marked a reversal for the agency, which had denied
Conrad’s claim for disability benefits for three years while the former
Army specialist was still alive. The denials had come despite supporting
medical opinions from a series of doctors, including the VA’s own
oncologist.
“He was incredibly sick for so long, but their response was always
the same,” Linda Conrad said in an interview at her home outside Phoenix.
“We went through our savings and our retirement money. And then, after
he died, they said they made a mistake and sent a check for $79,000. We
could have used that money to keep him alive.”
By the time the VA reversed itself, the family home was in
foreclosure. Linda Conrad, who had quit her job as a paralegal to care for
her husband during his last days, found her efforts to secure a new job
thwarted by the recession. Read More
Why Was Libor Rate Rigging Committed
Over the Bloomberg Terminal
By
Pam Martens
New York City's Billionaire Mayor, Michael Bloomberg

It is close to five years since the Commodity Futures Trading
Commission referred the Libor rate rigging matter to the U.S. Department
of Justice. Yesterday was the first time the Justice Department brought a
criminal charge in the matter – not against a U.S. bank where it would
have a smoother road to prosecution, but against a Japanese subsidiary of
the Swiss banking giant, UBS, and two of its former traders, Tom Hayes
and Roger Darin.
The UBS subsidiary has received a deferred prosecution agreement,
meaning it won’t be criminally prosecuted if it abides by the terms of the
agreement, which includes not disputing the charges and continued
cooperation. UBS paid global fines of $1.5 billion in the matter with the
bulk of that money going to the U.S. Department of Justice. Hayes and
Darin have been criminally charged in a complaint filed December 12,
2012 in Federal court in Manhattan. The complaint was unsealed
yesterday. Read More
The Effects of Diplomacy as Subversion
The State Department’s “Report” on the Attack in Benghazi
by
Maximilian Forte
Almost immediately after the armed attack in Benghazi, Libya, on
September 11, 2012, which resulted in the death of U.S. Ambassador
Christopher Stevens, along with Sean Smith, Tyrone Woods, and Glen
Doherty, added to the destruction and looting of the U.S. facility in
Benghazi, various columnists immediately took to issuing
pronouncements on what had happened in Libya and what it meant. They
all sounded so certain. Yet, the only certainty has been the deliberate
production of uncertainty, with multiple layers of obfuscation, questions
asked and never answered, and some questions not even asked yet. This is
largely the case even now, four months after the attack and with the
December 18 release of the findings of a State Department investigation
into the attack. The report was produced by the “Accountability Review
Board” convened by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton herself, and is thus
lacking the impartiality of an independent body without ties to the Obama

administration or the vested interests of those in charge of the State
Department. The investigation was led by Thomas R. Pickering (a former
U.S. ambassador to El Salvador during the height of its dirty war against
opposition movements and guerrillas tied to the FMLN), and Admiral
Michael Mullen.
As someone with a background in ethnohistory and archival research
of colonial documents, plus seeing that this report is “unclassified” and is
thus being circulated to various media, it struck me that the intent of this
release was to produce not answers to a problem, but rather the State
Department’s preferred version of events as the party to a conflict in Libya
that the U.S. internationalized, widened and escalated since February
2011. There is actually little that is new in the report that has not already
been presented and debated and left unsettled in the public sphere. Indeed,
the report itself ultimately reduces everything to a need for more security
measures and better training. This report is a very stark contrast to what
some journalists were promising us would be a “State Department
bombshell.” Well it’s a dud.
The Untold Story
Imagine this: a government that regularly executes alleged enemies
abroad, using drone strikes based on supposed “intelligence,” that
routinely claims to kill “terrorist” leaders and prevent “impending”
attacks, is still not able—not even four months later—to identify the group
responsible for the attack in Benghazi. Not able, or perhaps not willing.
Instead, this report refers us to the FBI, which still has an investigation
underway. This is the same FBI that was too frightened to send agents to
Benghazi to investigate the attack, even weeks after the attack, and well
after the “crime scene” had been extensively looted and “degraded.”
Instead, this is the state of U.S. intelligence on Benghazi: “the key
questions surrounding the identity, actions and motivations of the
perpetrators remain to be determined by the ongoing criminal
investigation” (p. 2). Even if we take the report at face value, this missing
element—who are the attackers—should give anyone reason enough for
lengthy pause. The U.S. government is claiming to not know which group
attacked its staff in Benghazi, let alone the identities of the individual

attackers. This says something about the state of U.S. “knowledge” of
Libya. If we do not take the report at face value, then it reads like a
deliberate attempt to cover up what the U.S. does not want the public to
know.
In this regard, there are many possibilities, and no certainties. The
report itself offers passing acknowledgment of the “continued presence of
pro-Qaddafi supporters” (p. 15)—but does not even for a moment consider
who might have a motive to attack the U.S. facility in Benghazi. The
report does not even once mention the presence of CIA agents in its socalled
“Special Mission Compound” in Benghazi, even though multiple
reports surfaced that the attack had targeted a CIA base, exposing the
presence of CIA personnel in significant numbers, and delivered a huge
blow to CIA efforts in Libya—and to efforts to illicitly send arms to
Syrian rebels via Turkey. And what was the CIA doing there? Reportedly
their work focused on “securing” weaponry looted from Libyan
government arsenals during the NATO war, such as surface-to-air missiles,
the SA-7’s. It was also reported that Ambassador Chris Stevens’ work in
Benghazi involved the transshipment of heavy weapons from Libya and
into the hands of jihadists fighting to overthrow the government of Syria.
Is it just a coincidence then that Syrian rebels have started using SA-7’s
that they never had before? A CIA operation such as this would thus not
only be violating international law, it would also reveal the lie that is
Obama’s claim that the U.S. is not supplying Syrian rebels with weapons.
This again widens the options concerning the motives of possible
attackers, including those who might want to put a stop to such covert
operations against Syria.
What is not clear is why “Islamists” in Libya would want to attack
the Benghazi “mission.” After all, these would be some of the same people
who benefitted from NATO’s air cover, for which they pleaded, and from
Western weapons shipments during the war to overthrow the Libyan
government, and who are reportedly benefitting again by being supported
by the U.S. and its NATO partner, Turkey, in sending weapons to Syria,
with some Libyans already active in that war. How would they gain

anything, and would they not lose a great deal in launching such an
inexplicable attack against their own partners?
Unmentionable Friends
Indeed this is a major conceptual shortcoming of the report: how it
abruptly converts “militias” into “terrorists” (see p. 4). For all of the report
writers’ insistence that their job is not to identify the attackers, the report
speaks of the activities and nature of Al Qaeda and its affiliates (p. 2). But
then a question arises: if “Islamists” and “jihadists” are a problem, why
does the U.S. work with them in Libya? Likewise, if they are as “anti-
American” as is commonly assumed, why do some actively collaborate
with the U.S.? How among what the report acknowledges is a dizzying
array of militias, do U.S. officials determine which are the good
“Islamists” and which are the bad ones? The report itself provides some
interesting answers. Read More
Environment:
Fracking:
Nuclear Fallout: Ongoing Tragedy/Disaster In Japan:
EnergyNews:
01:38 PM EST on December 20th, 2012 | Leave a comment
Expert: ‘Small blips’ of Hydrogen Sulfide detected in aquifer near
giant sinkhole (VIDEO)
11:18 AM EST on December 20th, 2012 | 11 comments
More Fukushima nuclear pollution to hit U.S. starting in 2015 —
Study: Impact strength of Cesium-137 on West Coast to be as high as
4 PERCENT
10:25 AM EST on December 20th, 2012 | 4 comments

Nuclear fuel rods in Common Pool to be inspected for ‘soundness’ at
Fukushima plant (PHOTO)
07:39 AM EST on December 20th, 2012 | 7 comments
Kyodo: Steel beam removed from Fukushima plant’s No. 3 pool after
falling on fuel racks — Another steel beam found soon after
(PHOTOS)
10:26 PM EST on December 19th, 2012 | 20 comments
Tepco concerned about liner of No. 3 Spent Fuel Pool at Fukushima
plant? (PHOTOS)
06:16 PM EST on December 19th, 2012 | 15 comments
New flyover of giant sinkhole — Only low resolution footage made
available, no HD (VIDEOS)
04:45 PM EST on December 19th, 2012 | 3 comments
Physician: Public health crisis in the Gulf after BP Deepwater
Horizon disaster — Thousands suffering chronic problems
03:37 PM EST on December 19th, 2012 | 25 comments
State Experts: We don’t know where the oil and gas is coming from
below giant sinkhole — “That’s really something that we really need
to understand” — Sample didn’t match Big Hum crude (VIDEO)
12:04 PM EST on December 19th, 2012 | 21 comments
Geologist: 50 to 100 million cubic feet of gas in aquifer near giant
sinkhole (VIDEO)
10:57 AM EST on December 19th, 2012 | 38 comments
Japan Experts: Active fault runs underneath MOX fuel plant —
Warnings of massive quake
Ongoing Gulf of Mexico Oil Disaster:

Oil Spill Attorney Stuart Smith’s Blog:
They’ll be home for Christmas in Bayou Corne —
but only in their dreams
There can be something magical about Christmas in the Louisiana
bayou. But not this year — not in the small community of Bayou Corne,
some 70 miles west of New Orleans. Here. some 150 families have been
forced out of their homes since the brutally hot dog days of summer, back
in August — and they still don’t know when they’re coming back. Efforts
to fix the environmental crisis that’s caused a massive sinkhole in the town
are now revealing major problems with methane and other pollution, and
people are getting frustrated.
Earlier in the meeting, one resident shouted at Bruce
Martin, Texas Brine vice president of operations — first from
afar and then in his face — challenging Martin’s statement that
he, Martin, had been in the community since shortly after the
sinkhole was found on Aug. 3.
Tapping the shoulders of other residents sitting in the
audience, Gary Metrejean, 47, a Bayou Corne evacuee now
living in Belle Chasse, asked Martin, one-by-one, if he knew
those people.
“If you have been involved since day one, why don’t you
know these people? I’m serious. Why you don’t know these
people? Does Texas Brine have any compassion for the people
that they affect?” Metrejean wanted to know.
Martin assured Metrejean he did know the residents.
Metrejean disagreed.
“I don’t believe you do. I don’t believe you do. I believe
it’s the bottom line. It’s the money,” Metrejean said.
It’s little surprise that residents of Bayou Corne aren’t filled with
Christmas cheer. They had filed into a community meeting on Tuesday
night to get an update from the Texas Brine Co. and government officials
on the ongoing effort to stabilize the massive collapsing salt cavern — that
not only caused the sinkhole but led to earth tremors and has polluted

the region’s air. They were shocked to learn that displaced residents may
not be able to go home until the middle of 2013.
In addition, the extent to which homes have been rendered
uninhabitable by methane is still not known. The Advocate is reporting
that local Police Jury President Martin “Marty” Triche urged Texas Brine
Co. to consider buyouts for the beleaguered homeowners as he criticized
the handling of methane venting from the collapsed cavern. An
environmental expert working with the state said “that not only slabfoundation
homes are at risk from methane gas rising from underground
sources, but also some homes elevated on piers. He said a recent review
by an indoor toxicology expert Shaw Environmental has hired indicated
that residences and mobile homes on piers, in which the crawl spaces
beneath the floors are enclosed, may be at more risk than slab-foundation
homes from gas accumulation.”
State officials who ignored warnings nearly two years ago that there
were serious potential problems with the Texas Brine Co. cavern are now
racing to penalize the company — in a serious case of too little and too
late:
The Louisiana Office of Conservation has levied an
additional $160,000 fine against Texas Brine Co. LLC. over a
massive sinkhole.
Commissioner James Welsh said the fine levied Dec. 17 is
for continued failure to comply with his directives for an 8-acre
sinkhole and oil and methane releases in northern Assumption
Parish.
Welsh fined the Houston company $80,000 for failing to
install a containment system around the brine-filled, oil-tinged
sinkhole near Bayou Corne, and another $80,000 for failing to
install in-home methane monitors and home ventilation systems
in slab foundation structures in the area.
The Advocate reports the new fines come in addition to
$100,000 in fines Welsh issued on Dec. 1 and bring total
company fines in relation to the sinkhole response to $260,000.

These fines are the proverbial drop in the bucket when compared to
the havoc that’s been wreaked on this unfortunate working-class
community. As I’ve said before, these homeowners need legal help,
because this mess is going to take years — and a lot of expertise and hard
work — to unravel. Let’s pray that they will be able to celebrate Christmas
in their own home — next year.
For the Advocate’s coverage of angry residents learning they may not
return home until 2013, check out: http://theadvocate.com/news/
ascension/4718520-123/monitoring-projections-of-sinkhole-draw
To read the Insurance Journal article about additional fines levied by
the state of Louisiana, please go to: http://www.insurancejournal.com/
news/southcentral/2012/12/19/274660.htm
Environmental Must-Reads – December 20, 2012
Battle expected over disclosure of ‘fracking’ chemicals
Under pressure from state lawmakers and environmentalists, Gov.
Jerry Brown’s administration released draft regulations for hydraulic
fracturing, or “fracking,” the controversial drilling process driving the
nation’s oil and gas boom.
Fracking fight fraught with uncertainty
With a moratorium and calls for a voter-backed ban on new oil and
gas development, Fort Collins is wading into a chaotic regulatory
landscape.
Former Colorado governor advises state’s fracking commission
North Carolina’s fracking commissioners picked up some pointers on
public safety and public relations from a former governor of Colorado
who five years ago oversaw that state’s overhaul of its fracking rules.
Fracking regulations in Calif. still up to a year away
Proposed regulations announced Tuesday to monitor hydraulic
fracturing in California may still be a year or more from implementation.
Under pressure from environmental groups and legislators in recent
months, the Brown Administration has issued proposed guidelines to
oversee fracking by oil companies.
California to Require Disclosure 10 Days Before Fracking

California regulators will require oil and natural gas companies to
disclose plans to use hydraulic fracturing 10 days in advance, under draft
regulations released today.
If the regulations are adopted, the Division of Oil, Gas, and
Geothermal Resources will post well locations three days before fracturing
begins, according to a statement posted on the agency’s website today. The
state doesn’t currently require companies to reveal fracking plans.
Prehistoric Flowback Adds Fresh Trouble To Fracking Woes
A group of researchers from Penn State University has uncovered a
new issue for fracking, the natural gas drilling method that involves
pumping a pressurized mix of water, chemicals, and other substances
thousands of feet underground. Until now, one major focus of concern has
been fracking water contamination from chemicals in the original fluid.
The new twist, according to the research team, is that the spent fluid
comes back laden with a brine containing elements that have been locked
beneath the earth for hundreds of millions of years dating back to the
Paleozoic era. With elements like barium and radium in the mix, the end
result could be costly new regulations for the transportation and disposal
of fracking brine, and new headaches for the fracking industry.
Gas well flowback matches Paleo brines
Brine water that flows back from gas wells in the Marcellus Shale
region after fracking is many times saltier than seawater, with high
contents of various elements, including radium and barium.
Fracking Wastewater Injection Wells Linked to Earthquakes
Scientists presented evidence tying the disposal of wastewater from
shale gas hydrofracking to an increased occurrence of earthquakes.
The scientists presented their findings at the American Geophysical
Union fall meeting. Some US states, like Oklahoma, Texas, and Colorado
have experienced a significant rise in seismic activity in the last few years,
coinciding with a recent boom in fracking, a process that forces gas from
harder to reach underground deposits by injecting water and chemicals
into shale rock.
Local Government Takes Steps to Ban Use of Fracking Waste

On December 10, the Westchester County Board of Legislators
unanimously approved legislation that bans the sale, application and
disposal in the county of waste from natural gas drilling operations.
Penalties for violations, which are unclassified misdemeanors, will include
fines upwards to $25,000 and/or imprisonment up to 30 days.
Alberta to post hydraulic fracturing information on FracFocus.ca
Public disclosure of what chemicals have been used in hydraulic
fracturing of wells in Alberta will soon be available on a public website.
The regulator, the Energy Resources Conservation Board, announced
Wednesday it has decided to follow British Columbia’s lead and will post
reports required under Directive 59 on the fracfocus.ca website.
Group Sues Obama Administration Over Offshore Oil And Gas
Leasing Program
A lawsuit has been filed against the Obama administration over the
economic claims that the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM)
made in their 5-year plan to open up new areas around the United States to
offshore oil and gas leasing. The suit, filed by the Center for Sustainable
Economy (CSE), says that the administration not only grossly exaggerated
the economic benefits of increased energy exploration, but also that they
failed to take all costs into account.
Gulf Oil Sheen Near BP’s Deepwater Horizon Rig Remains A
Mystery
The source of an oil sheen in the Gulf of Mexico near BP’s
Deepwater Horizon rig wreckage remains a mystery after a study by the
company and the Coast Guard was inconclusive.
Officials stated on Tuesday that the sheen is persistent and located
near the Deepwater Horizon rig, but that inspections by both sides have
confirmed the company’s Macondo well isn’t leaking, reports The
Huffington Post.
Mystery leak from gulf oil rig wreckage
The U.S. Coast says an “unidentified substance inconsistent with oil”
is leaking from some areas of BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig wreckage in the
Gulf of Mexico.
Source of persistent Gulf sheen remains a mystery

Underwater inspections at the site of BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig
disaster have failed to identify the source of a persistent sheen on the
surface of the Gulf of Mexico, officials said Tuesday.
Gulf Shores gearing up for BP grants as 2012 oil cleanup tops 1.7
million pounds
More than 1.7 million pounds of oil material have been collected
along the north Gulf Coast this year, with 21 percent of that found on
Alabama beaches.
LSU AgCenter researchers testing oil cleanup chemical toxicity
LSU AgCenter scientists are working with researchers at Columbia
University and Iowa State University on an environmentally friendly
substance that could be used to clean up oil spills.
Transocean seeks dismissal of spill-related punitive damage
claims
Transocean, which owned the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig
destroyed in the deadly blowout that led to the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil
spill, has asked a judge to dismiss certain private and government claims
arising from the disaster.
Brazil’s Rio State Plans to Fine Chevron for Oil Spill –Official
Brazil’s Rio de Janeiro state will seek damages from U.S. oil
company Chevron Corp. ( CVX ) in addition to the $149 million the
company has offered to settle two civil lawsuits brought by federal
prosecutors, the state’s environment secretary said Wednesday at a press
conference.
Top 20 Major Oil Spills Since 1967
Maritime accidents have chronicled the existence of shipping
operations throughout ages alongside the innumerable successes of the
domain. Though technological advancements in the construction of
vessels have made ships safer, several other factors have resulted in
crippling negative effects on the marine environment and ecosystem.
Michael Bishop Faces TransCanada In Texas Keystone Pipeline
Challenge
A Texas landowner and TransCanada Corp. are taking their argument
over whether tar sands are crude oil before a judge.

Nacogdoches County Court-at-Law Judge Jack Sinz will hear
arguments Wednesday. Landowner Michael Bishop wants all pipeline
work on his 20-acre property to stop until the judge rules on whether the
product TransCanada plans to carry through it is crude oil.
The Keystone XL tar sands pipeline faces a wide ranging sea of
opposition
The State Department has indicated that it will soon release a
Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement for the proposed Keystone
XL tar sands pipeline. My colleague Anthony Swift blogged last week
about the key pieces that this environmental review should contain –
including proper consideration of the climate impacts of developing the tar
sands, the pipeline company’s poor environmental record, and the fact that
the pipeline will be detrimental to communities and to U.S. energy
security. Over the last two and half years, opposition to the pipeline has
stemmed from a variety of issues and concerns, but environmental and
climate impacts are a major worry.
Keystone blockaders outmaneuvered but not defeated
Following news that TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline
construction crew had outflanked the tree-sit blockaders, protesters say
they’re more resolved to fight on – and not just in the trees.
Louisiana Levies More Fines Against Texas Brine over Sinkhole
The Louisiana Office of Conservation has levied an additional
$160,000 fine against Texas Brine Co. LLC. over a massive sinkhole.
Council opposes cavern expansion
The Iberia Parish Council voted unanimously Wednesday to oppose
any further expansion of the salt dome gas storage caverns under Lake
Peigneur.
Parish council Chairman Bernard Broussard said concern has grown
about plans to expand salt cavern storage capacity at the lake ever since a
sinkhole formed in Ascension Parish that authorities have linked to a salt
cavern storage facility.
Black Liberation/Civil Rights:

Labor:
Economy:
Libor Scandal Made Simple: It’s About Illegal Proprietary Trading
By
Pam Martens: July 18, 2012
With so much press attention going to the transatlantic finger
pointing by Washington and London, it’s easy to lose sight of the depth of
the Libor scandal and what it means to the pocketbooks of average
workaday folks here in the U.S. and around the globe. It’s also easy
to overlook that we’re also talking about what the public has long
suspected: that proprietary trading, where big banks and Wall Street firms
trade for the house, is corrupt to its core.
Libor is an interest rate index that impacts the family budget in
significant ways. It controls approximately $10 trillion in consumer loans
around the globe, including adjustable rate mortgages, credit cards
and student loans here in the U.S. According to emails obtained by
prosecutors, in some cases prior to 2007, Libor was rigged higher, which
would have caused higher interest rates on consumer loans tied to Libor.
Libor is also the index used to establish cash payments on interest
rate swaps sold to our state, county, and city municipal governments and
school districts across America and around the globe. According to
prosecutors, from at least the financial crisis in 2008 and years thereafter,
Libor was rigged lower. This caused municipalities and schools to receive
many billions less than they should have in interest payments. That may
have forced unnecessary layoffs, school closings, and cutbacks in public
services. It may have also forced municipalities to raise property taxes or
other taxes to compensate for the shortfall.
Libor is overseen by the British Bankers Association in London. A
Libor interest rate is produced for ten currencies over 15 maturity periods
from overnight to one year. Every morning, 8 to 16 banks, depending on
the currency, submit rates based on this official gauge: “At what rate could
you borrow funds, were you to do so by asking for and then accepting

inter-bank offers in a reasonable market size just prior to 11:00 a.m.
(London time)?” Once rates are submitted, the highest 25 percent and
lowest 25 percent are discarded and the remaining submissions are
averaged. The final calculations are released each day at about 11:30 a.m.
One of the questions that Congressional hearings need to address is
why the American consumer’s financial welfare is based on an interest rate
index they’ve never heard of, set on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean
and overseen by a decidedly biased trade association, the British Bankers
Association.
The opportunity to illegally profit by rigging Libor is mammoth.
According to the key regulator for futures and derivatives here in the U.S.,
the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), “…approximately
$350 trillion of notional swaps and $10 trillion of loans are indexed to
LIBOR. LIBOR also is the basis for settlement of interest rate futures and
options contracts on many of the world’s major futures and options
exchanges, including the three-month and one month Eurodollar contracts
on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME). The total traded volume of
the CME Eurodollar contract had a notional value of over $437 trillion in
2009 and $564 trillion in 2011.”
If a traders knows, or suspects, where Libor is to be set, he can make
enormous trading profits for the proprietary trading desk (the desk that
bets for the house) at big Wall Street firms and other global banks.
And here is a small sampling of the email evidence that prosecutors
have released so far, showing that making profits for the house was at the
core of this rigged game. The emails below were coming from traders on
the proprietary desks of the firms who were supposed to be behind the socalled
Chinese Wall, barred from knowing or instructing on what Libor
rates would be submitted by other bank personnel. (The small “m” in the
emails means “month.”)
“WE HAVE TO GET KICKED OUT OF THE FIXINGS
TOMORROW!! We need a 4.17 fix in 1m (low fix) We need a 4.41 fix in
3m (high fix)” (November 22, 2005, Senior Trader in New York to Trader
in London);

“You need to take a close look at the reset ladder. We need 3M to stay
low for the next 3 sets and then I think that we will be completely out of
our 3M position. Then its on. [Submitter] has to go crazy with raising 3M
Libor.” (February 1, 2006, Trader in New York to Trader in London);
“Your annoying colleague again … Would love to get a high 1m Also
if poss a low 3m … if poss … thanks” (February 3, 2006, Trader in
London to Submitter);
“This is the [book's] risk. We need low 1M and 3M libor. PIs ask
[submitter] to get 1M set to 82. That would help a lot” (March 27, 2006,
Trader in New York to Trader in London);…
“Hi Guys, We got a big position in 3m libor for the next 3 days. Can
we please keep the lib or fixing at 5.39 for the next few days. It would
really help. We do not want it to fix any higher than that. Tks a
lot.” (September 13, 2006, Senior Trader in New York to Submitter)…”
U.S. prosecutors have admitted that the goal of this rigging was to
engage in insider trading for the proprietary desks of some of the largest
banks in the world. But interestingly, you do not see any headlines using
the words “insider trading” or “proprietary trading.”
The CFTC’s order against the only firm to be charged thus far,
Barclays, reads in part:
“During the period from at least mid-2005 through the fall of 2007,
and sporadically thereafter into 2009, Barclays based its LIBOR
submissions for U.S. Dollar (and at limited times other currencies) on the
requests of Barclays’ swaps traders, including former Barclays swaps
traders, who were attempting to affect the official published LIBOR, in
order to benefit Barclays’ derivatives trading positions; those positions
included swaps and futures trading positions…These Barclays Euro swaps
traders agreed to ask, and did ask, the Barclays submitters for rates that
benefited the trading positions of the traders at the other banks…”
This was not just Libor rigging, this was an international banking
cartel of insider traders. It makes the Republicans on the Senate Banking
and House Financial Services committees, who are trying to restrict the
so-called Volcker Rule against proprietary trading look like uninformed
sycophants for Wall Street. Read More

World:
Health, Education, Science and Welfare:
Persistent pollutants slow the time to pregnancy in couples.
Buck Louis, GM, R Sundaram, EF Schisterman, AM Sweeney, CD
Lynch, RE Gore-Langton, J Maisog, S Kim, Z Chen and DB Barr.
Context
Human and animal studies suggest a link between exposure
to persistent environmental chemicals and decreased fertility.
These chemicals include a number of synthetic compounds used
in industrial and agricultural settings as insulators, lubricants,
pesticides and fungicides.
Many of the worst are called persistent organic pollutants
(POPs). Most POPs were banned from use decades ago under
the worldwide Stockholm Convention. These "dirty dozen"
chemicals remain in the environment because they degrade
slowly, accumulate in fat tissues, and can biomagnify – or
concentrate – in the food chain.
Other types of persistent chemicals are still used in
products and industrial settings. Flame retardants – known as
PBDEs – slow burning of clothes, furniture, electronics and
other household items. Perfluorinated compounds – commonly
called PFCs – repel stains and water. Some chemicals in both
groups are being voluntarily phased out because of health
concerns.
People, however, continue to be exposed to these chemicals
in daily life. In fact, these persistent chemicals are routinely
detected in human blood, urine and even within the reproductive
tract (Jirsová et al. 2010; DeFelip et al. 2004).
Couples exposed to high levels of certain persistent organic
pollutants took about 20 percent longer to get pregnant than couples with
lower exposures. This study, which followed couples from Michigan and

Texas, is one of the first to show that men's chemical exposures may be
more important than women's in determining fertility issues. For men,
links were found between 12 chemicals and longer time to pregnancy,
while for women, it was five chemicals. PCBs, organophosphate
pesticides and perfluorinated compounds were associated with this effect,
which could be a sign of fertility problems.
POPs have been associated with altered menstrual cycles, reduced
ovulation, pregnancy loss and reduced follicle count, which is indicative
of reduced egg supply (Nicolopoulou-Stamati and Pitsos 2001). More
specifically, exposure to PFC stain repellents, PBDE flame retardants and
the industrial chemicals PCBs were associated with a longer time to
pregnancy in women.
However, most of these studies measured chemical exposures during
pregnancy, which, by nature, exclude women who are unable to become
pregnant.
Time to pregnancy is a sensitive measure of fertility and reproductive
success and is a calculation of the number of menstrual cycles it takes for
a couple to achieve a pregnancy. Most studies assessing male fertility have
not used this measure and instead rely on semen quality and hormone
levels that are only correlated to fecundity and cannot accurately measure
the time to a successful pregnancy. A longer time to pregnancy can suggest
sub-fertility problems (if longer than six months of trying) or infertility (if
longer than 12 months).
Over the past few decades fertility rates, as indicated by declining
male semen quality, are decreasing. Many scientists believe early exposure
to estrogen-like chemicals is contributing to fertility decline, while others
believe that lifestyle changes over the same period may have a stronger
contribution.
What did they do?
Between 2005 and 2007 researchers recruited 501 couples from
Michigan and Texas who were trying to conceive. The couples were
followed until they became pregnant or for up to 12 months of trying,
which is clinically defined as infertility. The participants were in their 20s

and 30s, and were not using birth control, were not getting infertility
treatments and were actively trying for a successful pregnancy.
Studies of this kind are prospective, meaning that the environmental
exposures were measured early before any measure of fecundity was
taken.
Blood and urine samples from the men and women were taken during
the preconception period. They were analyzed for 63 organic pollutants
including nine pesticides, one polybrominated biphenyl (PBB), 10
polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), 36 polychlorinated biphenyls
(PCBs), and seven perfluorochemicals (PFCs).
In addition to blood samples, the couples were asked to keep daily
records on sexual activity, menstrual cycles and other factors like
smoking, diet and exercise. Age, use of tobacco and other lifestyle factors
were taken into account during the statistical analysis.
What did they find?
During the study, 347 couples became pregnant while 154 couples
did not become pregnant or dropped out of the study.
The strongest effects on fecundity were found in the men. Twelve
chemicals were associated with increased time to pregnancy in men while
only five were associated in women. This shows the importance of
including both members of the couple in fertility and fecundity studies.
The time to pregnancy decreased with increased PCBs, but the type
of PCB congener associated with the declines was different between males
and females. In men, fecundability decreased 17 - 29 percent with DDE
and PCBs 138, 156, 157, 167, 170, 172 and 209. In women, there was an
18 - 21 percent reduction in fecundity with relative increasing
concentrations of PCB 118,167 and 209 and the perfluorochemical
PFOSAs.
Overall, measured concentrations of the pollutants were lower than
those reported by the Centers for Disease Control in the U.S. population
for the same time period.
The findings corroborate previous studies in which one class of
persistent organic pollutants – PCBs – reduced fecundity. Many of these
associated PCBs have dioxin-like properties. Dioxins are another group of

persistent chemicals known to decrease fertility by affecting hormone
signaling and increasing time to pregnancy.
When the models accounted for prior pregnancies, the findings still
remained.
What does it mean?
Higher exposure to a variety of persistent pollutants in both men and
women is associated with a longer time to get pregnant – one measure of
fertility. The pollutants studied represent a variety of chemical classes,
including PCBs, perfluorinated compounds and organochlorine pesticides.
The strongest associations were found in men. This study is one of
the first to show that men's chemical exposures are just as important – if
not stronger – than women's in determining fertility issues.
The results are an important first step that shows the exposure to
chemical pollutants in both men and women can strongly affect fecundity.
The study design used in this study is important because it looks at
couples trying to get pregnant rather than assessing exposure effects after
pregnancy occurs. Prospectus studies like this one can get at the "chicken
and egg" – or which came first – issue. Exposure levels are known for
each couple before fertility issues are found, so it is more likely that the
increased chemical exposure is causally related to fecundity.
This study corroborates previous findings that PCBs reduce
fecundity. The results also confirm earlier findings for a lack of
association between fecundity in women and exposure to DDT and its
metabolite DDE. In men, DDE was associated with decreased time to
pregnancy.
Importantly, the magnitude of decreased fecundity – about 20 percent
longer – reported by this study is comparable to other factors known to
cause fertility problems such as male and female age, body mass index
and cigarette smoking. The authors adjusted for these factors in this study,
so they do not contribute here. But the findings underscore the large
impact that environmental pollutants can have on time to pregnancy.
Daily News Digest December 20, 2012

Victory for Alex Sanchez: Charges dropped!
By
Staff
Los Angeles, CA - Alex Sanchez won a major victory against
government repression, Dec. 17, when the U.S. Attorney main office
dropped the outrageous conspiracy to murder and other charges.
Sanchez and his attorney presented a legal motion to drop the latest
charge. The U.S. attorney asked for more time to respond and finally
agreed to drop the charges.
Sanchez had already spent about a year in jail awaiting trial, with
extremely high bail. When he finally made bail, he resumed his work as
Executive Director of Homies Unidos and took up the fight against the
false charges.
The phony charges stemmed from efforts by Sanchez to promote
peace among members of the gang MS-13.
Alex Sanchez has been a courageous fighter for peace and justice all
his adult life. He has worked for years tirelessly with gangs promoting
peace, worked for immigrants’ rights and supported the peace movements
of gangs in El Salvador and in the U.S. Sanchez has been through this
before, when the LAPD Ramparts Division and ICE tried to jail and then
deport him, but he won then and continued his work here in Los Angeles.
Sanchez is part of the movement for equality for Central Americans
living within the U.S. He’s always spoken out for our communities -
especially for those that others are willing to ‘throw under the bus’ when it
comes to reforms. Sanchez has also been active in supporting others
targeted by government repression, like Carlos Montes. Sanchez attended
Montes’ court hearings and spoke out on his behalf.
The community rallied and supported Sanchez by attending court
with him to protest the false charges.
Quote of the Day:
“Give A Man A Gun And He Can Rob A Bank.

Give A Man A Bank And He Can Rob The World.”
Video of the Day:
The Great American Killing Machine
First class brainwashing (Go to 7:20)
Image of the Day:

The LIBOR Scandal Explained in One Simple Infographic
Illustration: Latuff
The Capitalist Crisis and the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall
End Wall Street’s Wars!
Occupy Wall Street!
Occupy Wall Street is the Only Organization
That Identifies The Enemy —
The 1% That Own and Control The Wealth!
1960s The Realist — One Nation Under God/1%
(Unlike The Trade Union Misleaders
Nor The Misleaders Of The Oppressed
Who Strive To Be In ‘Partnership’ With The 1%)

1960s The Realist — One Nation Under God/1%
(Unlike The Trade Union Misleaders
Nor The Misleaders Of The Oppressed
Who Strive To Be In ‘Partnership’ With The 1%)
Occupy Wall Street — ‘We Are The 99%’
The resistance continues at Liberty Square:
A Message From Slovenia to the World:
We Take Responsibility for Each Other!
Tags: europe, slovenia, solidarity
WE DEMAND THAT THE IRRESPONSIBLE AND THE
UNPUNISHED GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS, BANKERS AND
CEO’S WITHDRAW FROM THE DEMOCRATIC PROCESS WE
ARE CREATING AT THIS MOMENT IN SLOVENIA.
We know exactly what we don’t want. Let us speak to each other
what we want; what we desire as individuals, what we desire as a
community. We need to open all the possibilities, all channels, all flows to
talk about pain, oppression, violence, as well as hopes and visions. We
need to listen to each other and to know that we are able to take the steps

and enter the path of building such a democratic society, where even the
weakest voice is heard, and one’s pain everyone’s pain.
Violence, injustice, intimidation and arrogance can no longer find
refuge in our country. Theft and economic looting must be punished, and
undue oppression of the people put to an end. We have to put the concepts
of equality, reciprocity, fairness and dignity into action. Only through
action and activity we can find our way to where we want to go and how
to get there. Strategy and vision development can not be generated or
delegated by the few; we must all make an effort to determine our
collective future.
We have risen! We have conquered fear. In exactly two weeks,
Slovenia has had a total of 54 uprisings in 28 cities: Maribor, Ljubljana,
Ptuj, Gornja Radgona, Jesenice, Kranj, Bled, Koper, Nova Gorica, Novo
mesto, Velenje, Ajdovščina, Trbovlje, Celje, Dravograd, Ravne na
Koroškem, Krško, Brežice, Izola, Murska Sobota, Bohinjska Bistrica,
Lendava, Trebnje, Slovenske Konjice, Litija, Kočevje, Radenci. Over
77,500 people took the streets, according to reports from all over Slovenia,
though of course media, police and politicians counted our numbers
several thousand less. They trivialize our fight and they will continue to do
that. They can’t hide our numbers, because the streets belong to those who
care about the country and want to change what has been forced upon us
over the last 20 years. In order not to lose the future, we have to take back
the freedom and power of our votes!
Repressive authorities have detained 254 people in Slovenia, some of
them still remain in custody. Young people are locked in jail because
Minister of Interior Gorenak claims they will return to the protests.
Thousands return regardless, for we are not all in jail! We are the mothers
of the arrested children, we are all the friends, families and supporters who
will return to the streets and participate in the uprisings until we achieve
change. As long as there are children confined, no one is free! Young
people can not be criminalized by the very people who have stolen all the
prospects of their future, by those that violently choke the protests that are
the only channel available for the people to express their collective will.
The never ending violence of capitalism goes unchecked, and meanwhile

the attacks of rulers and marshals continue in impunity, without
responsibility or accountability. What they call riots have emerged from
the state of fear and poverty, into which we as citizens were pushed. We
demand tears of joy, not tear gas!
Longest Running Occupy Encampment
Wins Restraining Order Against Honolulu, HI
Tags: honolulu
On Wednesday, December 12th, members of (de)Occupy Honolulu
filed a lawsuit against the City & County of Honolulu, Wesley Chun
(Director & Chief Engineer of Department of Facilities Maintenance),
Trish Morikawa (County Housing Coordinator), and Sergeant Larry
Santos (Honolulu Police Department), over deprivation of civil rights
during raids on the encampment, in the U.S. District Court for the District
of Hawai`i. On Monday, December 17th, a Temporary Restraining Order
has been issued, until the Preliminary Injunction hearing in a month,
dealing with raids of Thomas Square. All defendants have either quit their
jobs or retired since the last raid at Thomas Square, the day before
Thanksgiving.
The lawsuit focus on the city & county’s abuse of Ordinance 10-29
(AKA Bill 39), which limits the use of sidewalks after pushing (de)
Occupy to the sidewalk, and Ordinance 11-029 (AKA Bill 54), which
allows the Department of Facility Maintenance, Housing, Parks, and HPD
to traumatize, steal, and brutalize the vulnerable houseless population
Since the (de)Occupy camp was established on November 5, 2011,
the movement has been fighting against Ordinance 11-029, which was
used as a tool to repress freedom of speech within hours of being signed

into law. City ordinances like Bill 39 and Bill 54 criminalize the houseless.
The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals stated in Tony Lavan v. City of Los
Angeles, “For many of us, the loss of our personal effects may pose a
minor inconvenience. However, . . . the loss can be devastating for the
homeless.”
“Houseless rights are human rights. We have been standing vigil 24/7
for over a year. During that time the city has repeatedly stolen and
destroyed our collective and personal property, including car registrations,
medications, and bedding of protesters and the houseless alike,” says
Sugar Russell, plaintiff. “The city has humiliated people using
intimidation and violence. This is what the government does to people
who are willing and able to stand up and document abuse and inequality.”
“The fight is not over until the peoples’ voice means more than
corporate money! (de)Occupy Honolulu is determined to shut down the
unconstitutional ordinances of Bill 39 and Bill 54 throughout the County
of Honolulu. Prioritizing programs like job placement, rehabilitation, and
housing first will show a better return in value for both the community,
and the thousands of houseless on the island,” says plaintiff Christopher
Nova Smith. “Restructuring the assistance housing funds to mirror Hawaii
County’s plan could offset the financial strain on the community. By
investing in the value of people, the City and County of Honolulu can save
taxpayers millions of dollars while promoting equal civil rights and
community sustainability.”
U.S.:
Obama’s Man In Chicago:
Document shows Emanuel administration
had detailed school closing plans
By
Noreen S. Ahmed-Ullah and John Chase
An internal Chicago Public Schools document obtained by the
Tribune shows for the first time that the Emanuel administration has

weighed how many elementary and high schools to close in which
neighborhoods and how to manage the public fallout.
Labeled a "working draft," the Sept. 10 document lays out the costs
and benefits of specific scenarios — revealing that the administration has
gone further down the path of determining what schools to target than it
has disclosed.
While schools are not listed by name, one section of the document
contains a breakdown for closing or consolidating 95 schools, most on the
West and South sides, as well as targeting other schools to be phased out
gradually or to share their facilities with privately run charter schools.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his top school leaders have said they are
in the early stages of making difficult decisions and that the city cannot
afford to keep operating deteriorating schools with dwindling student
populations in the face of a billion-dollar budget deficit. The document
goes well beyond what the administration has outlined to the public.
Amid a September teachers strike, the Tribune reported that the
Emanuel administration was considering plans to close 80 to 120 schools,
most in poor minority neighborhoods. Administration officials have
repeatedly denied they have such a figure.
"Unless my staff has a hidden drawer somewhere where they've got
numbers in there, we don't have a number," schools CEO Barbara Byrd-
Bennett said in November.
At Wednesday’s school board meeting, Byrd-Bennett said that she
will make and “own” all decisions related to closings, and “whatever has
been floated does not reflect what I endorse or support.”
“I need to reiterate to the board that there is no list of schools to be
closed,” she told the board.
But the internal document, prepared at a time when school leaders
faced a December deadline to make their decisions public, lays out
multiple scenarios for closing neighborhood schools and adding privately
run charters — a key component of Emanuel's plans for improving public
education. Chicago Teachers Union members, aldermen and other charter
school critics have accused the administration of favoring the charters
while depriving schools in poor neighborhoods of needed improvements.

The document discusses how to deal with public reaction to school
closing decisions, with ideas ranging from establishing "a meaningful
engagement process with community members" to building a "monitoring
mechanism to ensure nimble response to opposition to proposed school
actions."
It is unclear how closely the administration is following the ideas in
the 3-month-old document; sources told the Tribune the school closing
plans are being constantly updated and subsequent proposals have been
kept under close wraps.
The detailed document obtained by the Tribune comes from a time
when a Chicago teachers strike interrupted the beginning of the school
year and Jean-Claude Brizard was still Emanuel's schools chief; the
embattled Brizard quit soon after. Byrd-Bennett was a top education
official at CPS under Brizard and was named by Emanuel to succeed him.
CPS spokeswoman Becky Carroll said Tuesday that "this plan was
proposed by past leadership at CPS and is not supported by CEO Byrd-
Bennett."
"In terms of whatever document you have, I don't care when it's
dated, as of today there's no list and there's no plan," Carroll said. "Maybe
there were multiple, different scenarios passed around at some point, I
don't know, but there's no list of schools.
"When CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett took this position, she made it
very clear that we were going to do this differently than how it's been done
in the past," which is why she appointed a commission to take public input
on school closings, Carroll said.
But under Byrd-Bennett's tenure, at least one of the proposals
outlined in the secret document has come to pass — the idea of a five-year
moratorium on further school closings after this school year.
First mention: The September document raises the idea of a
moratorium that would extend beyond Emanuel's first term in office as
part of the rollout of school closings. But the mayor's first public mention
of a moratorium came in November, when he offered it as a sweetener that
helped persuade state lawmakers to extend the December deadline for
announcing school closings to March. Read More

Environment:
State levies more fines against Texas Brine
Conservation Office cites lack of compliance with its orders
By
David J. Mitchell, River Parishes bureau
Bayou Corne Sinkhole
Bayou Corne residents weigh in on Texas Brine $100k fine
The Louisiana Office of Conservation commissioner levied another
$160,000 in fines against Texas Brine Co. LLC on Monday for continued
failure to comply with his directives for an 8-acre sinkhole and oil and
methane releases in northern Assumption Parish.
Commissioner James Welsh fined the Houston company $80,000 for
failing to install a containment system around the brine-filled, oil-tinged
sinkhole near Bayou Corne, and another $80,000 for failing to install inhome
methane monitors and home ventilation systems in slab foundation
structures in the area, Office of Conservation officials said in a news
release.
The new fines come in addition to $100,000 in fines Welsh issued
against Texas Brine on Dec. 1 and bring total company fines in relation to
the sinkhole response to $260,000, Conservation officials said.
Missed deadlines for sinkhole containment and methane detection
prompted about $90,000 of the $100,000 in fines levied Dec. 1,
Conservation officials have said. The directives stem from a Nov. 12
order.

The containment system is intended to keep contaminants from
spreading outside the sinkhole, where oil retardant boom is already
installed.
Work related to methane detection and ventilation is intended to limit
the risk that the invisible, explosive gas could accumulate unseen in
residents’ homes and sheds, Conservation Office officials and contract
scientists have said.
Welsh said his office’s goal is to protect the public and the
environment and get evacuated Bayou Corne residents back home as soon
as possible.
“If monetary penalties are what is required to provide Texas Brine
with the same sense of urgency Conservation feels in addressing the
problems caused by the failure of the company’s cavern, then we’ll
continue to make clear to the company the cost of its inaction,” he said in
the statement.
Patrick Courreges, spokesman for the Louisiana Department of
Natural Resources, which includes Conservation, said Texas Brine has not
paid the first round of fines.
The fines are legal debts and the company is obligated to pay them
under the state regulations allowing it operate, Courreges said in an
interview.
Welsh notified the company Monday that it had to pay the new fines,
comply with the directives immediately and could face further fines with
continued failure.
Scientists believe the sidewall of an abandoned Texas Brine salt
cavern failed deep underground. This failure, scientists say, set in motion a
series of events that created the sinkhole, released methane and crude oil
into the sinkhole and cavern, and unleashed methane also in a
underground aquifer and into surface waterways in the area.
The sinkhole is located between the Bayou Corne and Grand Bayou
communities south of La. 70 South on property leased by Texas Brine
from Occidental Petroleum Corp. Texas Brine supplies brine to the Los
Angeles-based company.

About 150 households in Bayou Corne and Grand Bayou were
evacuated Aug. 3 after the sinkhole was found. The evacuation remains in
place, more than four months later.
A Texas Brine spokesman said Monday they have been working on
the orders but the work is taking time, including lining up landowner
agreements for the monitor installation and doing the engineering,
permitting and separate landowner agreements to design and build a
containment system in the swamp surrounding the sinkhole.
“Texas Brine has been working in good faith and as quickly as we
can to respond to the order,” said Sonny Cranch, spokesman for Texas
Brine.
He noted the company collected 51 access forms from residents who
have slab foundation structures. Scientists have said it is these buildings,
not those on piers, that are at risk from methane accumulation.
Forty-five homeowners initially granted access but seven of them
have since withdrawn permission, Cranch said.
He said the access agreements are used to determine where best to
install ventilation systems and monitors, which he said are not off-theshelf
products and must be installed by contractors.
Cranch said that by the end of the week, Texas Brine will have 20
homes inspected. He said some homeowners have asked to hold off on
assessments until after the holidays.
Welsh noted in the statement Monday that Texas Brine also has been
unable to comply with the third directive that prompted fines on Dec. 1,
two new methane vent wells near its facility.
But Welsh did not fine the company again on Monday. He noted that
Texas Brine reported that it has not been able to get landowner access.
Fracking:
Nuclear Fallout: Ongoing Tragedy/Disaster In Japan:
EnergyNews:

09:39 AM EST on December 19th, 2012 | 4 comments
Sinkhole Experts: “We’ve got to look at all the caverns in the area
folks” — We don’t know what’s happening — “We know there was
concern, it’s been on the blogs… We’re working on it” (VIDEO)
08:07 AM EST on December 19th, 2012 | One comment
Giant sinkhole now over 14 acres in total area — Geologist: It’s
changing all the time… things are coming up, gas and oil are coming
up (VIDEO)
05:50 AM EST on December 19th, 2012 | 5 comments
Kyodo: Level 1 incident at Japan nuclear plant — Deformed fuel rods
stuck together in pool
04:13 PM EST on December 18th, 2012 | 7 comments
Professor: Japan’s radioactive crops being shipped to cleaner
areas and mixed into food supply? (VIDEO)
02:37 PM EST on December 18th, 2012 | 4 comments
Japan Officials: Ground subsidence spreading after quake —
Concern about sinking buildings being damaged — Only an inch can
jeopardize stability (VIDEO)
Ongoing Gulf of Mexico Oil Disaster:
Oil Spill Attorney Stuart Smith’s Blog:
Environmental Must-Reads – December 19, 2012
Fracking Health Impact Study Details Requested By New York
Environmental Groups
A coalition of environmental groups called on New York state
officials Tuesday to release details of a health impact study for shale gas
drilling and high-volume hydraulic fracturing.

Representatives of a dozen prominent organizations signed a letter to
Health Commissioner Nirav Shah and Environmental Conservation
Commissioner Joseph Martens. They asked them to make public the
health impact study being evaluated by a scientific panel, and called for
public hearings and a 60-day public comment period on the health study.
California oil regulators release draft of fracking rules
Under pressure from state lawmakers and environmentalists, Gov.
Jerry Brown’s administration on Tuesday released draft regulations for
hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” the controversial drilling process
driving a national oil and gas boom.
Brown administration proposes rules for hydraulic fracturing
The Brown administration today released draft regulations that would
require oil companies for the first time to disclose where in California they
use hydraulic fracturing, a controversial but little regulated method of oil
extraction.
California releases draft fracking regulations
After decades of oil drilling, California has released draft regulations
for hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.
The proposed rules were posted online Tuesday by the state’s oil
regulators. California currently oversees oil well construction but it has
not required disclosure of fracking practices.
City in Colorado Is Sued Over a Drilling Ban
A group representing oil and gas companies says that the city of
Longmont, Colo. had no right to ban hydraulic fracturing.
Fracking Fudged: Looking at Illinois Chamber of Commerce’s
Job and Economic Numbers
On Thursday, the Illinois Chamber of Commerce released a pretty,
remarkably rosy sounding report, speculating on the potential impacts that
fracking might have on Illinois’ economy. It is, as I say, remarkable stuff.
Natural gas development could create more than 45,000 jobs according to
the “first comprehensive look at Illinois jobs” that could be created when
fracking comes.
Shell Abandons Fracking Plans For BC’s Sacred Headwaters

Shell Canada announced that the company will immediately abandon
plans to frack for natural gas in an area of British Columbia known as the
Sacred Headwaters on Tahltan Nation traditional territory. The province of
BC says it will issue a permanent moratorium on oil and gas tenures in the
area.
Poll purporting fracking support is flawed
The headline reading “Polls find unexpected fracking support” on the Dec.
10 article regarding a Siena College poll with a sample size of only 822
people is misleading.
New York State Opens Public Comment Period for Fracking
Regulations
A few months ago, we detailed the fracked up process underway in
New York State to determine the health impacts from fracking. Since the
results of the health study are not ready for release, the state had to open a
public commenting period to extend the rule-making process. Until
January 11th at 5pm, the general public can submit their comments on the
proposed regulations. The DEC insists that it will not take any final
decision on fracking until the health review is complete and it can
guarantee that fracking can be done safely in New York State.
Fracking at what cost to the public?
An article in the Nov. 28, 2012 online edition of Crain’s Detroit
Business “Natural Gas is key to Snyder’s energy policy” sounds good for
Michigan in terms of economic growth and meeting green energy, but I
find it lacking in real protection for Michigan citizens.
5 Fatal Flaws in California’s New Fracking Regulations
Proposed regulations meant to govern fracking in California would
do little to protect the state’s environment, wildlife, climate and public
health, according to an analysis by the Center for Biological Diversity.
Fracking—currently unmonitored in California—uses huge volumes of
water mixed with dangerous chemicals to blast open rock formations and
extract oil and gas. Hundreds of wells have been fracked in California in
recent years. Today’s draft proposal by California’s Division of Oil, Gas,
and Geothermal Resources was supposed to be the first step in explicitly
regulating this controversial practice.

Will Toxic Fracking Wastewater Be Transported by Barge?
The shale gas drilling industry wants to move its wastewater by barge
on rivers and lakes across the country. But the U.S. Coast Guard, which
regulates the nation’s waterways, must first decide whether it’s safe.
Two Arrested at Fracking Protest in North Carolina
North Carolinians, with the grassroots group Croatan Earth First!,
organized a mobile protest this morning at the Department of Environment
and Natural Resources (DENR) Headquarters—217 W. Jones St. in
Raleigh, NC—and marched to the Archdale building—512 N. Salisbury
St.—where the NC Mining and Energy Commission is holding a meeting.
Protestors carrying banners, signs and drums led chants to vocalize their
opposition to the dangerous energy extraction process known as fracking.
Two local North Carolinians have locked themselves to the front of the
Archdale building’s front doors in protest of the state’s continued
movement towards legalizing hydraulic fracturing. There have been two
arrests so far this morning, neither in connection with the lockdown.
Over a dozen groups join NRDC in calling on NYS to open
fracking health review to public input
Earlier today, NRDC, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on behalf of the
Waterkeeper Alliance, and a dozen other national and statewide groups
sent a letter to the Cuomo Administration calling on it to open the ongoing
review of the potential health risks of proposed new fracking to
public review and comment.
BP set to join shale drilling rush in eastern Ohio
BP Plc (NYSE:BP) has started moving into its new operations center
in the Youngstown area, signaling that the world’s mega-oil companies are
coming to Ohio to drill for oil and natural gas in the Utica shale play.
Monitoring projections of sinkhole draw outbursts
Emotions flared Tuesday during a community meeting on an 8.5-acre
sinkhole in northern Assumption Parish as people in the audience realized
that attempts by experts to understand the sinkhole’s cause and deal with
its long-term aftermath would likely extend into the middle of 2013 or
beyond.
LA office fines company again over sinkhole

Louisiana officials said an additional $160,000 in fines have been
issued to the company that owns the salt dome near the site of a giant
sinkhole.
BP, Coast Guard say 4-day inspection of Macondo well,
Deepwater Horizon debris turns up no oil
A fourth underwater inspection of the BP Macondo well and the
underwater debris field from the Deepwater Horizon explosion and fire
found no signs of oil, news releases issued Tuesday by BP and the U.S.
Coast Guard say. The four-day survey by remotely operated vehicles of the
sea floor, triggered by repeated sightings of oil sheen on the surface at the
well site 50 miles southeast of Venice, was conducted by contractors for
BP and Transocean, the owner of the Deepwater Horizon drillship, under a
plan approved by the Coast Guard.
Coast Guard: “Unidentified substance” leaking from BP’s
Deepwater Horizon
An “unidentified substance inconsistent with oil” is emitting from several
areas of BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig wreckage, but no sources of leaking
oil were identified. That’s according to the Coast Guard, which oversaw
BP’s recent week-long mission to inspect the undersea wells and wreckage
from the 2010 explosion.
Gulf Oil Spill: Two Years Later, Scientists Still Unsure of Eco-
Impact
Newly published paper concludes a variety of mistakes compounded
health impacts—with much left to learn.
Source of persistent Gulf sheen remains a mystery
Officials say underwater inspections at the site of BP’s Deepwater
Horizon rig disaster have failed to identify the source of a persistent sheen
on the surface of the Gulf of Mexico.
Judge delays BP manslaughter trial
Two BP rig supervisors charged with manslaughter over the death of
11 workers on the Deepwater Horizon will not go on trial until 2014.
US District Judge Stanwood Duval put off the trial of Robert Kaluza
and Donald Vidrine until January 13, 2014.

Rig worker’s dad says BP should pay $45 billion fine for Gulf
blast
The father of one of the 11 drilling rig workers killed in the
Deepwater Horizon explosion in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 tells a federal
judge that British oil giant BP should be forced to pay at least $45 billion
to resolve manslaughter and other criminal charges stemming from the
disaster.
Baton Rouge ExxonMobil seeks expansion permit that would
increase emissions
The Baton Rouge ExxonMobil chemical plant is requesting
permission to perform expansion projects that will ultimately lead to
higher emissions levels, according to a public notice released Monday
from the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality.
Federal judge to consider BP plea agreement in Gulf oil spill
A federal judge on Tuesday scheduled a hearing for Jan. 29 in New
Orleans to consider a plea agreement by BP Exploration and Production
Inc. in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, in which the company will plead
guilty to 14 felony counts, including manslaughter and obstruction of
Congress, and pay a record fine.
More than 150,000 gallons of oil and water recovered since oil
spill in Kill Van Kull, Coast Guard says
More 156,000 gallons of oil and water mixture have been recovered
since the Friday night spill that dumped oil from a barge into the Kill Van
Kull and washed up on Bayonne and Staten Island shores, according to
officials.
15 Birds Stained By Oil Spill Off Staten Island As Clean Up
Continues
An oil spill off the coast of Staten Island has affected at least 15
birds, but authorities say the damage has largely been contained. “Tri-state
bird and wildlife experts are walking the beaches on Shooters Island to
survey the birds that have been impacted, and so far only 15 out of the
nearly 3,000 birds that have been sighted have been stained by oil,” Coast
Guard spokesman Mike Hanson said this morning. “The oil might stain
the bird, but it has no significant impact on its life.

ConocoPhillps Settles With State and Federal Government Over
Oil Spills
U.S. and Alaska environmental officials have reached an agreement
with ConocoPhillips to settle environmental claims in the state from spills
in 2006 and 2007.
Both spills were from corroded flow lines in the Kuparuk Unit
petroleum facility.
Ecology adopts new rules enhancing protection from major oil
spills
The Washington Department of Ecology (Ecology) has formally
adopted changes to two state rules that will enhance protection of the
state’s environment, economy and cultural resources from the impacts of a
potential major spill.
Keystone Pipeline: Secretary Of State Pick Shouldn’t Affect
Decision, TransCanada CEO Claims
The prospect of a new U.S. secretary of state favoring tougher carbon
policy should not worsen the odds of the Keystone XL oil pipeline being
approved, the chief executive of TransCanada Corp, the contentious
project’s proponent, said on Monday.
Keystone pipeline condemnation ruling appealed
A group of Southeast Texas property owners are appealing a ruling to
the Texas Supreme Court a ruling allowing condemnation of private land
for a planned Canada-to-Gulf Coast oil pipeline.
TransCanada outmaneuvers Keystone XL pipeline blockaders
A bit of bummer news from East Texas, and this time there’s no
pepper spray involved. Protesters are still tweeting and blogging per usual,
but it appears the Keystone XL pipeline blockade may actually be over.
TransCanada apparently realized back in October that while it might not
be able to go through the tree-sitters, it could easily go around them.
Fukushima conference wraps up on a positive note
International nuclear experts want to learn lessons from the
Fukushima disaster but there is still a long way to safety.
Video: Toshiba Develops Fukushima Robot

After the March 2011 tsunami and earthquake and the Fukushima
nuclear power disaster, the Japanese government was embarrassed to have
to ask for robots from other countries to help assess the damage. Japan is
well known for its advances in robot technology, but not for these types of
applications.
Now Toshiba has designed and built a four-legged robot to conduct
investigative and recovery work in a number of locations that are too
dangerous for humans, such as the reactor buildings of the Fukushima
Dai-Ichi No. 1 nuclear plant.
Calif. Utility, NRC Spar on Nuke Monitors
The utility that runs California’s idled San Onofre nuclear power
plant faced sharp questions Tuesday from federal regulators about a
retooled monitoring system for its damaged steam generators.
Southern California Edison said in its October proposal to restart the
Unit 2 reactor that the redesigned system, which relies on sensitive
monitors to detect unusual vibrations, could help operators learn if any
parts broke loose in the huge generators.
Fukushima Watch: Getting Political Traction for the Anti-Nuke
Movement
Even before the results of Sunday’s national election rolled in, many
anti-nuclear activists were already doing some soul-searching about what
went wrong.
Fukushima Accident Updates
Black Liberation/Civil Rights:

Did Bloody Hands,
Not Black Womanhood Sink Susan Rice Nomination?
by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

Did Susan Rice step down on her own or did she do so at the
insistence of the White House. Did Republican oppostion doom her
nomination, or was the Obama administration too afraid to have such a
bare knuckled champion of disaster capitalism and African dictators as
Secretary of State, lest its real Africa policy be more closely
examined? Read more
Freedom Rider: Killing Children
• white supremacy | mass murder | gun control | 2nd Amendment
Freedom Rider: Killing Children
If America fails to finally find compassion for the legions of “other
people’s” children it has killed, then it will never comprehend why its
own, internal massacres occur with such frequency. “Indiscriminate
violence made America what it is today.” Read more
The Ultimate Logic of a Society Built on Mass Murder
• U.S. foreign wars | White supremacy | lynching | gun control | 2nd
Amendment

A Black Agenda Radio commentary
by
Glen Ford
“A culture that celebrates the annihilation of whole peoples, casually
and without guilt or introspection, is devoid of human values at its very
core.” Ultimately, such a society turns against itself. It’s not a sudden
madness, but a long history of mass murder come full circle. Read more
Obama’s Historic Assault on Social Security
• austerity | social security | Obamarama | Democrats

A Black Agenda Radio commentary
by
Glen Ford
After four years of maneuvering, President Obama finally has his
White Whale, Social Security, within harpooning distance. “Obama has
largely neutered Social Security’s traditional congressional defenders, who
know perfectly well what their president is up to, but will not directly
oppose him.” Read more
The Real And Racist Origins of the Second Amendment
• US History | Native Americans | genocide | Second Amendment

A Black Agenda Radio commentary
by
BAR managing editor
Bruce A. Dixon
The “well-regulated militia” that the US Constitution's second
amendment refers to were slave patrols, land stealers and Indian killers, all
quite necessary as the amendment's language states “to the security of a
free state” built with stolen labor upon stolen land. Unless and until we
acknowledge that history, we cannot have an honest discussion about gun
control. Read more
Susan Rice and Africa’s Unholy Trinity
• Yoweri Museveni genocide | Rwanda genocide | Paul Kagame
genocide | Meles Zenawi dies | M23 | Ethiopian dictatorship |
Susan Rice withdraws name

y
Alemayehu G Mariam
Susan Rice’s career has been a love affair with military strongmen
and dictators – three in particular: Paul Kagame of Rwanda, Yoweri
Museveni of Uganda and the late Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia. “She has
shielded the ‘Fearsome, Threesome’ from legal and political
accountability, deflected from them much deserved criticism and thwarted
national and international scrutiny and sanctions against them.” Read more
Did Susan Rice Give Osama bin Laden a Get Out of Jail Free Pass?
• War on Terror | Osama bin Laden | M23 | Congo genocide | Susan
Rice Removes Name

y
Jean Damu
Years before 9/11, the Sudanese government offered to turn Osama
bin Laden over to the Saudis for transfer to the U.S. Instead, the U.S.
refused the offer, and later attacked a Sudanese pharmaceuticals factory.
“Why did Rice and Clarke really turn their backs on the Sudanese?” Read
more
Shocking Decline in Ethiopian Israeli Birthrate
• Ethiopia | Israeli apartheid | Israel-Palestine | Ethiopian Jews

y
Renee Ghert-Zand
Jewish Ethiopian women were given contraceptive injections before
immigrating to Israel and after arrival. The result: a 50 percent decline in
birthrate, and a ‘missing generation’ of Ethiopian children.” Read more
Remember All the Children, Mr. President
• Newtown Massacre | Iraq Massacres | Gaza Massacre | Drone
Massacres | child abuse | Afghanistan Massacres

y Bill Quigley
Including those whose lives were destroyed by United States policies,
actions and inaction. Read more
Dear Black America: It's Past Time to Wake Up
• Obama Wars in Africa | Imperial wars | racist Republicans | racist
Democrats | Malcolm X | gentrification | Dixiecrats | Ballot or
Bullet | charter schools

y
Solomon Comissiong
Black people in the U.S. “are locked in struggle with white
supremacy, institutional racism and oppression.” At the same time,
however, they embrace the brown face of the ultimate front man for
Power: Barack Obama. This is a formula for community incoherence and
defeat. Read more
My Wise Country Cousin On Hillary Clinton...
• Nancy Pelosi goes Right | Hillary Clinton faints

y
Raymond Nat Turner
Country Cousin’s take on Hillary’s neural afflictions and Nancy’s
Republi-con leanings. Read more
Labor:
Economy:
Libor Conspiracy Expands: UBS Reaches $1.5 Billion Settlement in 5-
Year Scheme Involving Bribes and Payoffs
By
Pam Martens
UBS, the global banking behemoth based in Switzerland, has agreed
to settle charges over rigging the international interest rate benchmark
known as Libor with U.K., U.S. and Swiss authorities. The total
settlement with all regulators will total approximately $1.5 billion.

Later this morning, the U.S. Department of Justice and the
Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which levied the bulk of the
fines, will announce their findings. The U.K.’s Financial Services
Authority (FSA) earlier today revealed the details of an expansive
conspiracy to rig rates that involved traders, managers, chat rooms,
standing orders, at least 2,000 documented efforts to rig rates, and bribes
and payoffs to other brokers. Read More
For More Information on the Libor Scandal Read:
The $800 Trillion Scandal: How Banks' LIBOR Lies Affected You
World:
Haiti's New Dictatorship
Justin Podur
What constitutes a dictatorship? Haiti had an election in 2006, which
the popular candidate won. It had an election in 2011, which had one of
the lowest turnouts in recent history and which was subject to all kinds of
external manipulation. Given these elections, is it unfair to call Haiti, a
country that suffered 30 years of classic dictatorship under the Duvaliers
from the 1950s to the 1980s, a dictatorship today?
When the institutions that govern Haiti today are examined, it is clear
that the label ‘dictatorship’ applies. Haitians have no effective say over

their own economic and political affairs. Their right to assemble and
organize politically is sharply limited. Human rights violations are routine
and go unpunished. Popular political parties are effectively banned from
running.
How is Haiti Governed?
Since 2004, the armed force in Haiti has been controlled by the
United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti, MINUSTAH. Haiti's police
are trained, and effectively supervised, by a subset of MINUSTAH, a
mission called CIVPOL (usually commanded by Canadians). The current
president of Haiti, Michel Martelly, wants to bring back the Haitian Army,
but when that army existed, it was also an instrument of another country
(the U.S.) and its foreign policy – bringing back the Haitian Army would
be no boost to sovereignty or democracy in Haiti.
Force is controlled from outside. What about finance? MINUSTAH
has a budget of about $676-million. Since the 2010 earthquake, the big
charities have spent about the same (around $600-million) in 2010 and
2011. Haiti's own government budget this year is based on $1.1-billion in
aid and $1.25-billion in taxes. Perhaps most importantly, Haiti's economy
is also supported by about $1.5-billion in remittances from the Haitian
diaspora, year after year, one of the largest contributions to Haiti's $7.3billion
GDP.
These figures contain a few surprises. In terms of taxes and GDP,
most of the contribution to Haiti's economy is by Haitians. Presented as an
international basket-case, Haiti is actually more self-sufficient than its
donors believe. And the aid – whether in the form of budget support, relief
and reconstruction aid, or NGO expenditure – buys control. By
contributing a fraction of what Haitians contribute, foreign donors
purchase control over the direction of Haiti's economy, including the
determination of an export- and foreign-investment driven model that
keeps wages low and denies any protection to the country's agriculture, let
alone any local infant industries. Haiti's private sector is a subcontracting
sector, featuring low-wage assembly plants and import-export monopolies,
but little prospect of increasing productivity or long-term development.

Haiti's social services sector is controlled by non-governmental
organizations. These NGOs are better described, using Peter Hallward's
phrase, as “other-governmental,” since they are financed by, and beholden
to, foreign donor countries. With daily welfare in the hands of a totally
decentralized NGO economy, there is no prospect of any sort of national
or regional coordination. This has real, and deadly consequences.
Hurricane Sandy in 2012 provides an example. Cuba's early warning
system and national government enabled that country to evacuate a huge
hurricane-affected area before the storm hit, with hundreds of thousands of
people being efficiently moved out of danger and back to their homes after
the storm passed. With every NGO in the world, and half of the world's
countries participating in MINUSTAH, the international community could
not manage such an orderly evacuation in Haiti. This is one of the reasons
Haiti, under international tutelage, loses more lives than sovereign
countries do every hurricane season and why it lost more lives during the
2010 earthquake than countries like Chile or China (that were hit with
severe earthquakes around the same time).
A final feature of dictatorships is impunity, a situation in which
crimes committed by the regime go unpunished. There is now irrefutable
scientific evidence that the United Nations brought cholera to Haiti, and
that cholera has killed over 7500 people since it was introduced.
MINUSTAH's initial position was to claim that there was no proof. Now
that there is proof, MINUSTAH insists that it is not to blame because it
was not done on purpose, even though no one ever claimed it was. But if
the effective government of a country causes thousands of deaths and
insists that no one is to blame, shouldn't it raise questions about how the
country is governed? Read More
Health, Education, Science and Welfare:
Labs could contaminate rivers with antibiotic resistance genes.
Environment: Researchers find evidence of antibiotic resistance genes
used in molecular biology experiments in Chinese rivers
By

Deirdre Lockwood
Researchers report that antibiotic resistance genes used in
molecular biology and genetic engineering experiments may have
reached the environment. In six Chinese rivers, researchers found bacterial
DNA carrying these synthetic genes (Environ. Sci. Technol., DOI:
10.1021/es302760s). Still experts call for more studies to confirm the
results and pinpoint specific sources of the genes.
Credit: Shutterstock
Source Of Resistance?Antibiotic resistance genes used in molecular biology experiments
may have left the lab and reached the environment, according to a new study.
Heavy use of antibiotics in hospitals and on farms has polluted the
environment with bacteria carrying genes that confer resistance to the
drugs. Once in the environment, the microbes can quickly transfer the
genes to other bacteria, leading to antibiotic-resistant strains that can cause
severe and sometimes untreatable infections.
But these resistance genes also are cheap, powerful tools for
biologists. In so-called molecular cloning studies, researchers introduce
the genes into synthetic versions of plasmids, which are small, circular
molecules of DNA found in bacteria. The synthetic plasmids also include
another gene that the scientists want to study. By treating the bacteria with
the antibiotic, the researchers can ensure that the microbes that survive
contain both the resistance gene and their gene of choice.
To make sure that the plasmids don’t escape the lab, academic
institutions in the U.S. follow special procedures to treat waste from the

experiments before disposing of it: They kill any remaining microbes with
high heat and sometimes then incinerate the waste.
Credit: Environ. Sci. Technol.
All Over Researchers sampled six rivers (A through F) throughout eastern China and
found synthetic antibiotic resistance genes in all of them.
Industrial scientists have also used molecular cloning to engineer
crops and bacteria for biofuel production and environmental remediation.
To prevent the spread of antibiotic resistance, however, most genetically
modified crops are now produced without these genes.
But because this technique is still commonly used in molecular
biology labs, some researchers have been concerned that these
experiments could release resistance genes into the environment. To
search for antibiotic-resistance genes introduced by synthetic plasmids,
Jun-Wen Li at the Institute of Health and Environmental Medicine, in
Tianjin, China, and his colleagues took water samples from six Chinese
rivers downstream of densely populated cities. They extracted plasmids
from the samples and transferred the DNA into Escherichia coli. Then

they screened the bacteria for a gene commonly used in academic and
industrial labs that confers resistance to the antibiotic ampicillin. To
determine if a gene in a sample came from a manmade source, they used
polymerase chain reaction to look for sequences unique to several
synthetic plasmids.
The researchers found synthetic resistance genes in all six rivers. Of
all of the ampicillin-resistance plasmids they found in the rivers, about
27% had the synthetic vector-sourced gene.
Justin J. Donato, a biochemist at the University of St. Thomas, in
St. Paul, Minn., says the study provides the first definitive evidence that
genetic constructs from the lab have reached the environment. Given that
no one previously had reported observing these synthetic plasmids in the
environment, Donato is surprised by how prevalent they are. He says the
study requires replication especially to rule out the possibility of sample
contamination from plasmids already in Li’s laboratory.
Anders Janzon, a postdoctoral fellow in microbiology at Cornell
University, is also cautious about how to interpret the study’s findings. He
hopes subsequent studies will investigate pristine environments to ensure
that the synthetic plasmid sequences don’t already exist there.
“If future studies support these findings, this will be a concern that
scientists will have to seriously address during the design and
implementation of their experiments,” Donato says.
Chemical & Engineering News
ISSN 0009-2347
Copyright © 2012 American Chemical Society
Daily News Digest December 19, 2012
Labour unions support hunger striker Theresa Spence,
urge federal government to meet
Tags: Indigenous rights [10] labour [11]
By
rabble staff

Theresa Spence is on Day 7 of her hunger strike. (Photo: Regina Southwind)
Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence has now been on hunger strike
for nearly a week, and she has still received no direct response to her
demand for a meeting with Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Many people
have written, demonstrated and fasted to show their solidarity with Chief
Spence. Yesterday, the Assembly of First Nations issued an urgent open
letter [9] to the prime minister, calling for a meeting. Today, two of the
larger labour unions in Canada have written the following letter of
support.
Negotiate First Nations treaty rights,
labour leaders urge, in support of Chief Theresa Spence
Two of the country's largest private sector unions are calling on the
federal government to meet with Attawapiskat Chief Theresa
Spence immediately, leading into a formal treaty meeting with First
Nations.
The Canadian Auto Workers union and the Communications, Energy
and Paperworkers Union are expressing concern for Chief Spence's safety
as she goes into her second week of a hunger strike, demanding a meeting
with Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Governor General David
Johnston. The unions urge the federal government to use a collective
bargaining approach with the First Nations people over treaty rights.
"For our entire existence as a country, the federal government has
abused the rights of the First Nations people," said CAW
National President Ken Lewenza. "This is no more apparent than in Chief

Spence's community of Attawapiskat where a year later, the town is still
without adequate housing and infrastructure as the winter sets back in."
Lewenza said that he and many others have been deeply moved by
the courage and tenacity shown by Chief Spence, who is in the seventh
day of the hunger strike. The union leaders are adding their voices to the
legions of supporters through the emerging #Idlenomore movement.
During the hunger strike, Chief Spence is living in a teepee on Victoria
Island in the Ottawa River, near the Supreme Court of Canada and the
House of Commons.
"Chief Theresa Spence's fight for her people is similar to that labour
movement and so many other groups - the fight for dignity, respect, and
equality," said CEP National President Dave Coles. "It is urgently
necessary that the government reach an equitable agreement with the First
Nations people. As a country, we know all too well the reality of centuries
of colonization, inequality and abuse.
"On behalf of more than 300,000 working women and men
across Canada, we are urging the federal government to live up to its
responsibility to aboriginal people and meet with Chief Theresa
Spence and other aboriginal leaders," said Coles.
Quote of the Day:
Oil companies have gained control over billions of
gallons of water from Western rivers in preparation for
future efforts to extract oil from shale deposits under the
Rocky Mountains, according to a new report by an
environmental group that opposes such projects.
The group, Western Resource Advocates, used public
records to conclude that energy companies are collectively
entitled to divert more than 6.5 billion gallons of water a day
during peak river flows. The companies also hold rights to
store, in dozens of reservoirs, 1.7 million acre feet of water,
enough to supply metro Denver for six years. — Wall Street

Journal, Stephanie Simon, Oil, Water Are Volatile Mix in
West, 2009
Video of the Day:
Unarmed citizens
What it means when you disarm law abiding people
Dangerous food additive: Brominated vegetable oil
Image of the Day:
End Wall Street’s Wars!
Occupy Wall Street!
Occupy Wall Street is the Only Organization
That Identifies The Enemy —
The 1% That Own and Control The Wealth!
1960s The Realist — One Nation Under God/1%
(Unlike The Trade Union Misleaders
Nor The Misleaders Of The Oppressed
Who Strive To Be In ‘Partnership’ With The 1%)
1960s The Realist — One Nation Under God/1%
(Unlike The Trade Union Misleaders
Nor The Misleaders Of The Oppressed
Who Strive To Be In ‘Partnership’ With The 1%)

Occupy Wall Street — ‘We Are The 99%’
The resistance continues at Liberty Square:
U.S.:
Remember All the Children, Mr. President
By
Bill Quigley
December 17, 2012 "Information Clearing House" - Remember
the 20 children who died in Newtown, Connecticut.
• Remember the 35 children who died in Gaza this month from
Israeli bombardments.
• Remember the 168 children who have been killed by US drone
attacks in Pakistan since 2006.
• Remember the 231 children killed in Afghanistan in the first 6
months of this year.
• Remember the 400 other children in the US under the age of
15 who die from gunshot wounds each year.
• Remember the 921 children killed by US air strikes against
insurgents in Iraq.
• Remember the 1,770 US children who die each year from
child abuse and maltreatment.
• Remember the 16,000 children who die each day around the
world from hunger.
These tragedies must end.
Bill Quigley is Associate Director of the Center for Constitutional
Rights and a law professor at Loyola University New Orleans. He
volunteers with the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH)
and the Bureau de Avocats Internationaux (BAI) in Port au Prince.
Contact Bill at quigley77@gmail.com
America Invades Africa: The Resource War and the Conquest of Mali
By Timothy Alexander Guzman

The United States African Command (AFRICOM) was created in
2007 under then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in the Bush
Administration as a Military Command center that covers the entire
continent of Africa. They wanted to create a permanent footprint in Africa
to maintain the peace and security it desires that is deemed beneficial for
US interests.
In a White House Press Release on Feb 6, 2007 the Bush
Administration announced that a new centralized US command will be
present in the African Continent through AFRICOM:
“This new command will strengthen our security cooperation with
Africa and create new opportunities to bolster the capabilities of our
partners in Africa. Africa Command will enhance our efforts to bring
peace and security to the people of Africa and promote our common goals
of development, health, education, democracy, and economic growth in
Africa”.
The interesting words used in the press release are development and
economic growth. There are a number of elements that involves
AFRICOM and its mission. The first being the competition it will
encounter with China and other countries who deal with African states
through diplomatic negotiations and business deals concerns the United
States, especially western powers such as France and Great Britain who
colonized Africa for centuries whether by signing treaties with African
leaders who saw it as a benefit or by military force.

The US and its Western Allies use military force, whether by an
invasion or by creating a coup d’état within the country of interest.
AFRICOM’s goal is to eliminate China and other countries influence in
the region. Africa’s natural resources is another important element to
consider because it includes oil, diamonds, copper, gold, iron, cobalt,
uranium, bauxite, silver, petroleum, certain woods and tropical fruits. Just
to get an idea what’s at stake for US corporate interests, West Africa alone
provides about 20 percent of the US supply of hydrocarbons. The US
corporate interest in Africa needs natural resources to feed its appetite for
profits, a fact that should not be ignored. The US would create conflicts to
justify their presence in the resource rich continent by any means
including a way to generate a crisis within their targeted area of interest.
As Rahm Emanuel, the former Chief of Staff to US President Barack
Obama once said “no crisis should go to waste” is a motto that
Washington is obviously using.
In the beginning of 2012, the Tuareg Rebellion took place in the
northern Mali conflict that involved several wars of independence against
the Malian government in the Sahara desert region of Azawad. The Malian
government lost its northern region to the Tuareg secessionists as a result.
The Tuareg is a faction of nomadic people that live in the northern part of
the country along with a local Islamist militant group called the the Ansar
Dine. However, the Anser Dine was aligned with Islamic Maghreb
(AQIM) an element of Al Qaeda who eventually displaced the Tuareg and
imposed Sharia law. Mali’s Timbuktu eventually became a ghost town as
the Ansar Dine and the Islamic Maghreb gained power. Ironically, both
groups obtained weapons from Libya after the US/NATO led invasion.
The crisis began when the democratically-elected government of
Amadou Toumani Touré of Mali was overthrown on in the southern
capital on March 21 st due to his mismanagement of the crisis. The leader
of the military coup was Captain Amadou Haya Sanogo who was trained
by the United States on “several occasions” according to a Washington
Post article on March 23, 2012. It is obvious that Washington was behind
the action undertaken by Sanogo.

Now the United States wants an invasion for “Humanitarian
intervention” purposes. But as we all should know “Humanitarian
Intervention” only means “Economic Intervention” because the criteria for
such an intervention will lead to a vast of wealth including gold mining,
oil and agricultural commodities that the US and other Western powers
would want to exploit. The Western controlled United Nations (UN) wants
sanctions imposed on Northern Mali because of its ties to terrorism. That
is the first step of a coming intervention by the West. AFRICOM’s true
purpose is to seek and destroy African nations and install puppet regimes
that are obedient to Washington. How do they achieve such an outcome?
Create the crises and offer the remedy. AFRICOM will be the answer.
Obama Signals Four More Years of
Bad Relations With Latin America
President Obama's crass comments about newly-elected Chavez only
serve to further alienate himself from Latin America.
Mark Weisbrot
Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
Many in Latin America pray for a healthy recovery for
Venezuela's Chavez, who is undergoing cancer treatment [EPA
President Obama went too far in throwing gratuitous insults at
President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela on Friday in an interview in Miami.
By doing so, he not only offended the majority of Venezuelans, who voted
to re-elect their president on October 7, but even many who did not.
Chávez is fighting for his life, recovering from a difficult cancer

operation; in Latin America, as in most of the world, this wholly
unnecessary vilification of Chávez by Obama is a breach not only of
diplomatic protocol but also of ordinary standards of civility.
Perhaps even more importantly, Obama’s ill-timed aspersions sent an
unpleasant message to the rest of the region. While Obama can get away
with anything in the major media outlets, you can be sure that his remarks
were noticed by the presidents and foreign ministries of Brazil, Argentina,
Ecuador, Bolivia and others. The message was clear: Expect four more
years of the same failed Cold War policies toward Latin America that
President George W. Bush championed and Obama continued in his first
term.
These presidents see Chávez as a close friend and ally, someone who
has helped them and the region; like millions of Venezuelans they are
praying for his recovery. They also see Washington as responsible for the
bad relations between the U.S. and Venezuela (as well as the hemisphere
generally), and these unfortunate remarks are additional confirmation. At
the 2012 Summit of the Americas, Obama found himself as isolated as
George W. Bush was at the notorious 2005 summit. It was a sea change
from the 2009 Summit, where everyone – including Chávez – greeted
Obama warmly and saw in him the potential for a new era of U.S.-Latin
American relations.
To these governments, Obama’s broadsides about Chávez’s
“authoritarian policies” and “suppression of dissent” have a bad smell,
even ignoring the offensive timing. Venezuela just had an election in
which the opposition, which has most of the income and wealth of the
country, as well as most of the media, mobilized millions of voters. The
turnout was 81 percent of registered voters, with about 97 percent of the
voting-age population registered. The government did not “suppress
dissent,” nor has it done so in other elections; or even when the dissenters
shut down the oil industry and crippled the economy in 2002-2003 –
actions that would have been illegal and blocked by the force of the state
in the United States. Peaceful protestors in Venezuela are far less likely to
get beaten or tear-gassed or shot with rubber bullets, by security forces,
than they are in Spain, and probably most other democracies.

Yes, there have been abuses of authority in Venezuela, as in all of the
hemisphere -- as President Obama should know. It was Obama who
defended the imprisonment without trial for more than two-and-a-half
years, and abuse in custody, of Bradley Manning, which was
condemned by the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on Torture. It is
Obama who has refused to grant freedom to Native American activist
Leonard Peltier, widely seen throughout the world as a political prisoner,
now in a U.S. prison for 37 years. It is Obama who claims the right, and
has used it, to kill American citizens without arrest or trial. Read More
The Fiscal Cliff is a Diversion
The Derivatives Tsunami and the Dollar Bubble
by
Paul Craig Roberts
The “fiscal cliff” is another hoax designed to shift the attention of
policymakers, the media, and the attentive public, if any, from huge
problems to small ones.
The fiscal cliff is automatic spending cuts and tax increases in order
to reduce the deficit by an insignificant amount over ten years if Congress
takes no action itself to cut spending and to raise taxes. In other words,
the “fiscal cliff” is going to happen either way.
The problem from the standpoint of conventional economics with the
fiscal cliff is that it amounts to a double-barrel dose of austerity delivered
to a faltering and recessionary economy. Ever since John Maynard
Keynes, most economists have understood that austerity is not the answer
to recession or depression.
Regardless, the fiscal cliff is about small numbers compared to the
Derivatives Tsunami or to bond market and dollar market bubbles.
The fiscal cliff requires that the federal government cut spending by
$1.3 trillion over ten years. The Guardian reports that means the federal
deficit has to be reduced about $109 billion per year or 3 percent of the
current budget. More simply, just divide $1.3 trillion by ten and it comes
to $130 billion per year. This can be done by simply taking a three month
vacation each year from Washington’s wars.

The Derivatives Tsunami and the bond and dollar bubbles are of a
different magnitude.
Last June 5 I pointed out that according to the Office of the
Comptroller of the Currency’s fourth quarter report for 2011, about 95%
of the $230 trillion in US derivative exposure was held by four US
financial institutions: JP Morgan Chase Bank, Bank of America, Citibank,
and Goldman Sachs.
Prior to financial deregulation, essentially the repeal of the Glass-
Steagall Act and the non-regulation of derivatives–a joint achievement of
the Clinton administration and the Republican Party–Chase, Bank of
America, and Citibank were commercial banks that took depositors’
deposits and made loans to businesses and consumers and purchased
Treasury bonds with any extra reserves.
With the repeal of Glass-Steagall these honest commercial banks
became gambling casinos, like the investment bank, Goldman Sachs,
betting not only their own money but also depositors money on uncovered
bets on interest rates, currency exchange rates, mortgages, and prices of
commodities and equities.
These bets soon exceeded many times not only US GDP but world
GDP. Indeed, the gambling bets of JP Morgan Chase Bank alone are equal
to world Gross Domestic Product.
According to the first quarter 2012 report from the Comptroller of the
Currency, total derivative exposure of US banks has fallen insignificantly
from the previous quarter to $227 trillion. The exposure of the 4 US banks
accounts for almost of all of the exposure and is many multiples of their
assets or of their risk capital.
The Derivatives Tsunami is the result of the handful of fools and
corrupt public officials who deregulated the US financial system. Today
merely four US banks have derivative exposure equal to 3.3 times world
Gross Domestic Product. When I was a US Treasury official, such a
possibility would have been considered beyond science fiction.
Hopefully, much of the derivative exposure somehow nets out so that
the net exposure, while still larger than many countries’ GDPs, is not in
the hundreds of trillions of dollars. Still, the situation is so worrying to the

Federal Reserve that after announcing a third round of quantitative easing,
that is, printing money to buy bonds–both US Treasuries and the banks’
bad assets–the Fed has just announced that it is doubling its QE
3 purchases.
In other words, the entire economic policy of the United States is
dedicated to saving four banks that are too large to fail. The banks are too
large to fail only because deregulation permitted financial concentration,
as if the Anti-Trust Act did not exist.
The purpose of QE is to keep the prices of debt, which supports the
banks’ bets, high. The Federal Reserve claims that the purpose of its
massive monetization of debt is to help the economy with low interest
rates and increased home sales. But the Fed’s policy is hurting the
economy by depriving savers, especially the retired, of interest income,
forcing them to draw down their savings. Real interest rates paid on CDs,
money market funds, and bonds are lower than the rate of inflation.
Moreover, the money that the Fed is creating in order to bail out the
four banks is making holders of dollars, both at home and abroad, nervous.
If investors desert the dollar and its exchange value falls, the price of the
financial instruments that the Fed’s purchases are supporting will also fall,
and interest rates will rise. The only way the Fed could support the dollar
would be to raise interest rates. In that event, bond holders would be
wiped out, and the interest charges on the government’s debt would
explode.
With such a catastrophe following the previous stock and real estate
collapses, the remains of people’s wealth would be wiped out. Investors
have been deserting equities for “safe” US Treasuries. This is why the Fed
can keep bond prices so high that the real interest rate is negative.
The hyped threat of the fiscal cliff is immaterial compared to the
threat of the derivatives overhang and the threat to the US dollar and bond
market of the Federal Reserve’s commitment to save four US banks.
Once again, the media and its master, the US government, hide the
real issues behind a fake one. The fiscal cliff has become the way for the
Republicans to save the country from bankruptcy by destroying the social

safety net put in place during the 1930s, supplemented by Lyndon
Johnson’s “Great Society” in the mid-1960s.
Now that there are no jobs, now that real family incomes have been
stagnant or declining for decades, and now that wealth and income have
been concentrated in few hands is the time, Republicans say, to destroy the
social safety net so that we don’t fall over the fiscal cliff.
In human history, such a policy usually produces revolt and
revolution, which is what the US so desperately needs.
Perhaps our stupid and corrupt policymakers are doing us a favor
after all.
Paul Craig Roberts is a former Assistant Secretary of the US
Treasury and Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. His latest
book, Wirtschaft am Abgrund (Economies In Collapse) has just been
published.
Robert Fisk:
Finucane, Sami al-Saadi and Khaled el-Musri: will we once again just
'move on' from the murky conduct of MI6 and the CIA?
Last week was a bad week for our Protectors. It kicked off with the
shameful details of the De Silva report, which concluded that the Belfast
solicitor Pat Finucane had been murdered with British state collusion. It’s
something that all who knew Finucane had long suspected. Sir Desmond
de Silva concluded that “a series of positive actions by employees of the

state (ie MI6) actively furthered and facilitated his murder” and that there
was afterwards “a relentless attempt to defeat the ends of justice”.
In other words, it was a set-up.
Our Protectors helped the Protestant UDA “loyalist” militia to knock
off this troublesome lawyer just after a Tory Home Office minister – the
very same Douglas Hogg who years later thought he could get the
taxpayer to clean his moat – was used as a patsy in Parliament where he
announced, three weeks before the Finucane murder, that a number of
Northern Ireland solicitors were “unduly sympathetic to the cause of the
IRA”. There is no suggestion that Mr Hogg was involved in the Finucane
case.
At virtually the same moment as the De Silva report was published
last week, our Government agreed to pay £2.2m to the family of Sami al-
Saadi, who was “renditioned” to Libya with the help of our Protectors in
2004 and subsequently was tortured most savagely in Gaddafi’s dungeons.
We have to thank Human Rights Watch for this information, by the way –
no government inquiry was set up into this outrage – and HRW was only
able to finger our Protectors because of correspondence between the CIA
and Gaddafi’s goons in Tripoli.
Mr al-Saadi, “kidnapped” with the help of our own goons in Hong
Kong not long after Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara had done his kissy thing
with Gaddafi in the desert, emerged from his Libyan torture chamber last
year “close to death”. Another of his fellow opponents of Gaddafi still
plans – quite rightly – to sue our Protectors.
But then bingo. Again, on the very same day last week, the European
Court of Human Rights stated that CIA agents tortured – and sodomised –
Khaled el-Musri, a German of Lebanese origin who was supposedly
“linked to terrorism”. Now I don’t know if our chaps get up to sodomy
during their role as our security Protectors, but the European court was
also much exercised by the fact that Macedonian state agents watched as
poor old el-Musri endured his beating, shackling and sodomisation in
2003. It was “simply unnacceptable”, said James Goldston of the Open
Society Justice Initiative, for the US government to avoid serious scrutiny
of CIA activities. A long bellow of laughter here, I’m afraid.

The Strasbourg court added that Macedonia had been responsible for
Mr el-Musri’s “torture and ill-treatment both in the country itself and after
his transfer to the US authorities in the context of an extra-judicial
‘rendition’.” So what, I wonder, does all this mean? That the CIA lads (for
they must be lads, mustn’t they?) sodomise prisoners – or that they get the
Macedonians to carry out sexual assaults on their behalf? Read More
Environment:
Fracking:
Nuclear Fallout: Ongoing Tragedy/Disaster In Japan:
EnergyNews:
10:41 AM EST on December 18th, 2012 | 3 comments
Report: Black substance with over 40,000,000 Bq/kg of cesium in
Fukushima
09:24 AM EST on December 18th, 2012 | 2 comments
Gov’t Experts: No knowledge of what state melted fuel is in at
Fukushima plant — Don’t know where it’s located — Persistent
danger surrounds reactors — Collapses of facilities a threat
08:48 PM EST on December 17th, 2012 | 8 comments
Report: Photographs “doctored” at multiple US nuclear power plants
(VIDEO)
06:12 PM EST on December 17th, 2012 | 13 comments
Gundersen: Top of containment believed to have opened up after
Fukushima Daiichi Unit 3 exploded
04:43 PM EST on December 17th, 2012 | 10 comments

New Fairewinds Video: Tepco reveals “detonation shock wave” during
massive explosion at Fukushima Unit 3 (PHOTO & VIDEO)
01:56 PM EST on December 17th, 2012 | 3 comments
WSJ: Use of the Internet was forbidden during Japan’s election
campaign — No tweeting, Facebook, website updates by candidates
Ongoing Gulf of Mexico Oil Disaster:
Oil Spill Attorney Stuart Smith’s Blog:
Environmental Must-Reads – December 18, 2012
Republican Groups Tell Obama To Back Off Fracking Rules
The Republican Governors Association (RGA) along with the
Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) sent a letter to
President Obama today [PDF], telling him that the federal government
should abandon a Bureau of Land Management (BLM) proposal to create
more transparency for natural gas fracking operations.
Industry sues to stop Longmont fracking ban
The Colorado Oil and Gas Association is seeking to overturn a
fracking ban that was approved by voters in November.
The Denver Post reports the industry filed a lawsuit Monday in Weld
County district court to overturn the ban. Voters on Nov. 6 approved
changes to the city’s charter to prohibit fracking, or hydraulic fracturing,
and the storage of fracking waste within city limits.
Will expanded fracking drain much water from the Missouri
River?
Nationwide, the hydraulic fracturing – or “fracking” – process for
capturing oil and gas is now using billions of gallons of water a year – by
one estimate, the equivalent of what a million Americans consume
annually.
Protesters rally against fracking as oil industry claims it is ‘safe’

Just two days after a big oil lobbyist and former “marine guardian”
proclaimed in the Sacramento Bee that hydrofracking in California is
“safe,” dozens of protesters rallied outside a federal auction in Sacramento
against plans to lease more than 17,000 acres of California public land to
oil companies for drilling and fracking.
Fracking lobbyists prepare case against Matt Damon’s Promised
Land
Energy in Depth prepares ‘cheat sheet’ of pro-fracking talking points
before release of Gus Van Sant drilling-rights drama
Fracking Deadline Looms for British Columbia’s Sacred
Headwaters
Energy developers, environmental groups, First Nations, local
businesses and sportsmen are all anxiously watching and waiting as lastminute
negotiations continue before the December 18, 2012 expiration of
a four-year-long fracking ban for the Klappen Coalbed Methane project in
northern British Columbia, Canada.
University of Tennessee Wants To Start Fracking
The University of Tennessee wants to get into the fracking business.
It hopes to lease thousands of acres of University-owned forest land
to an oil and gas company so it can drill for natural gas.
U.T. says it’s a research project, that will help the state, but some
environmental groups question whether money is motivating factor.
Wyoming considers adding fossil fuels to school curriculum — with
the industry’s help
The state of Wyoming likes the fossil fuel industry. A lot. So much so
that it wants to make sure its kids know everything there is to know about
energy development.
Fracking companies want to ship wastewater by barge, since
boats never spill
Over the summer, ProPublica revealed that the wastewater produced
through the fracking process — primarily water mixed with salt and whoknows-what
chemicals — was often stuffed into over-pressure wells, and
that an unknown number of those wells are leaking. Fracking companies
stroked their chins and said, “Hm,” and came up with a proposal: Well

then, why don’t we ship the wastewater in barges on rivers before we stuff
it into the ground?
Huge Flaws Exposed in Natural Gas Export Report
According to a press release from U.S. Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), a
report submitted to the Department of Energy on the impacts of natural
gas exports uses two-year-old data and makes other key missteps. Rep.
Markey, Ranking Member of the Natural Resources Committee, pointed
this out in a comprehensive critique of the study sent to DOE Secretary
Steven Chu.
Drinking water for Denver also threatened by nearby fracking
In a recent post I blogged about the risks to drinking water sources
for the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, western Colorado
communities, and Athens, Ohio. We think these and other important
watersheds should be off limits to fracking for oil and gas. But if any oil
and gas development is allowed, it should be regulated under the strongest
possible rules. The watersheds at risk are subject to federal oil and gas
leases, with rules set out by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). The
BLM is in the process of updating its rules, which is a good thing. But the
agency’s proposal is too weak, and needs to go farther to protect essential
drinking water sources.
Fracking offers a risky salvation for America’s hard-pressed
heartlands
For those living above fuel deposits and prepared to live with fears
over gas leakage and water pollution, the prospect of jobs and money is
very real.
State levies more fines against Texas Brine
The Louisiana Office of Conservation commissioner levied another
$160,000 in fines against Texas Brine Co. LLC on Monday for continued
failure to comply with his directives for an 8-acre sinkhole and oil and
methane releases in northern Assumption Parish
Sinkhole prompts study for alternative road
State highway officials say they’ll start a six-month study early next
year into the feasibility of an alternative route around an eight-acre
sinkhole in northern Assumption Parish.

Technip to build pipe in Gulf of Mexico
Engineering company Technip announced Tuesday it secured a
contract to build two pipelines in Gulf of Mexico.
The French company said it secured the deal from U.S. venture
Discovery System for management, engineering, transport and installation
of a 9-mile, 12-inch pipeline and an 8-mile, 30-inch pipeline. The
pipelines are slated for construction between installations in the South
Timbalier block of the Gulf of Mexico in waters depths of 272-800 feet.
BP finishes latest search for Gulf oil leaks
The subsea mission to see if BP’s Deepwater Horizon site is leaking
oil ended on Saturday, but no results have yet been announced.
Sarasota County makes BP oil money wish list
A nearly $2 million proposal to buy land along Lemon Bay for
environmental preservation and restoration is at the top of the county’s
wish list for projects that be paid for as a result of a settlement from the
Gulf oil spill.
Louisiana farmer featured in USDA video about BP Deepwater
Horizon-spurred initiative
A Louisiana farmer is featured in a USDA Natural Resources
Conservation Service video highlighting one of many conservation
programs spurred by the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster.
The video focuses on conserving, or “recycling,” water to help control
sediment and nutrient runoff into the Gulf of Mexico.
Scientists, Coastians to share knowledge on oil spill
Scientists and locals are teaming up to learn and share information
about the effects of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on Gulf seafood.
Recruitment will begin by the new year for COAST team members.
The Community Outreach for Accurate Science Translation project will
allow Coastal residents to review scientific research and even run their
own experiments to learn about how oil affects blue crab and shrimp.
Massive Oil Spill Off Staten Island “Confined,” But Threat To Bird
Sanctuary Unknown
The Coast Guard believes the oil spill that started in the waters
between Staten Island and New Jersey on Friday morning has largely been

contained, but it’s still unclear how much oil leaked out. The spill began as
a leaky barge owned by Boston Marine Transport carrying 147,000
gallons of fuel transferred its oil to another barge, and “tens of thousands
of gallons” of oil gushed out, causing visible slicks as many as 11 miles
away. While a Coast Guard spokesman told the AP that the bulk of the oil
is “pretty much confined” to the Kill Van Kull, which connects the
Newark Bay to the Upper New York Bay, the Times reported that the oil
has reached the Shooters Island bird sanctuary.
Coast Guard identifies source of fuel oil spill in the Kill Van Kull,
which separates Bayonne and Staten Island
The Coast Guard has identified the source of a fuel oil spill in the Kill
Van Kull, according to a news release it issued this evening.
The Kill Van Kull is the body of water that separates Bayonne and
Staten Island.
ConocoPhillips agrees to fines for Kuparuk oil spills on Alaska’s
North Slope
ConocoPhillips has agreed to pay state and federal environmental
regulators $312,000 in penalties and other costs related to a pair of oil
spills at the Kuparuk Unit facility on Alaska’s North Slope.
Chevron offers to $150 million to settle Brazil oil spill lawsuits
Brazilian prosecutors say Chevron Corp. has offered to pay $150
million to settle two civil lawsuits stemming from an offshore oil spill.
The lawsuits seek $20 billion in damages.
Mont. land board approves Keystone pipeline lease
Montana on Monday approved easements to let the Keystone XL
pipeline cross state-owned land, including the Missouri and Yellowstone
rivers.
Keystone XL will not use advanced spill protection tech
In 1998, activists in Austin, Texas filed a lawsuit to protect their local
aquifer from a proposed gasoline pipeline. By the time the project was
built, the operator had been forced to add $60 million in safety features,
including sensor cables that could detect leaks as small as three gallons a
day. Some say the Longhorn pipeline is the safest pipeline in Texas, or
perhaps the nation.

Judge refuses Keystone hearing due to paperwork problem
A federal judge declined Monday to hear testimony in a landowner’s
bid to stop construction of part of TransCanada Corp.’s Keystone XL
pipeline because the property owner didn’t correctly file legal papers.
A Big, and Risky, Energy Bet
Sasol, a South African company, plans to take advantage of a glut of
cheap gas to make diesel and other refined products at competitive prices
in Louisiana.
A new way to measure mobile phone ‘hot spots’ in the brain
Researchers have found a novel, non-invasive technique for
measuring brain hot spots caused by electromagnetic radiation from
mobile phones, according to a study published today.
UN atomic agency and Japan’s Fukushima prefecture to cooperate on
nuclear safety
An agreement between the United Nations International Atomic
Energy Agency (IAEA) and administrators from Japan’s Fukushima
prefecture was signed over the weekend, ushering in a new era of
emergency preparedness and radiation monitoring for the beleaguered
Japanese prefecture.
Fukushima plant situation ‘volatile,’ a year after cold shutdown
declared
Workers are nowhere close to determining the state of melted fuel at
the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, a year after the government declared
the damaged reactors were in a “cold shutdown” state.
Radiation no respecter of borders — Fukushima conference
AN independent, effective and expert regulator must be heard in case
of a nuclear emergency, delegates at the Fukushima Ministerial
Conference on Nuclear Safety heard on Monday.
Black Liberation/Civil Rights:
Listen to Black Agenda Radio on the Progressive Radio Network,
with Glen Ford and Nellie Bailey – Week of December 17, 2012

• Vietnam War Martin Luther King | Israeli Aggression | Oliver
Stone Haiti petition | UN healthcare resolution | tax loopholes |
offshore havens | fiscal cliff farce
Fiscal Cliff is Diversion from Corporate Tax Avoidance
“To some extent, the fiscal cliff debate is a farce,” said Eric
LeCompte, executive director of Jubilee USA Network, which estimates
that corporations and wealthy individuals avoid paying $150 billion a year
to the U.S. Treasury through loopholes and offshore havens. “If we were
to close the corporate offshore tax loopholes, not only would the fiscal
cliff debate be over, but we would have more revenue than we would
know what to do with,” said LeCompte. The fiscal cliff “gap” represents
only $109 billion.
UN Urges All Nations Provide Universal, Affordable Healthcare
The United States joined in a United Nations resolution calling on
member countries to establish “universal” and “affordable” healthcare
systems. However, “the United States has actually taken us in the opposite
direction,” said Dr. Margaret Flowers, of Physicians for a National
Healthcare Program. Obamacare “further privatizes health care,” said
Flowers. “Every industrialized nation that has an effective, universal
national healthcare program uses a publicly-financed, not a market-based,
approach.”
UN Sets Goals for Haiti Cholera, But Avoids Culpability

At least 7,000 people have signed a petition, backed by filmmaker
Oliver Stone, to pressure the United Nations to accept responsibility for
the cholera epidemic that has killed 8,000 Haitians and sickened half a
million more. The UN announced plans to raise a $2.27 billion anticholera
war chest, but fails to admit that the disease was brought to Haiti
by UN soldiers, or to ensure that “this kind of disaster doesn’t happen
again in another country where there are peacekeepers,” said Beatrice
Lindstrom, staff attorney for the Institute for Justice and Democracy in
Haiti. The Institute filed suit on behalf of cholera victims, a year ago.
“The people of Haiti never asked for UN troops,” said Robert
Naiman, policy director for Just Foreign Policy. Naiman said pressure
should be brought on the United States and France, which backed a 2004
coup in Haiti and then called in UN troops to stabilize the coup regime.
Post-Election Debate in Philly
Attorney and talk show host Michael Coard faced off against veteran
activist and professor of African American studies Anthony Monteiro, in a
debate at Temple University. Coard attacked Monteiro’s revolutionary
politics, saying: “If you despise what President Barack Obama has done,
you should despise even more what Mitt Romney” and fellow Republicans
would do. Dr. Monteiro pointed out that Martin Luther King Jr. broke with
President Lyndon Johnson “in principle over the war in Vietnam,” and
would surely break with Obama’s wars if he were alive, today.
Israelis “On Thin Ice”
Israel’s aggressive policies will backfire in the new conditions that
prevail “in this Islamist Spring that is spreading throughout the region,”
said Dr. Gerald Horne, of the University of Houston. “The Israelis aren’t
going to be very pleased with their new neighbors, and their new
neighbors will not be very pleased with the Israelis, either. So the Israelis
would be advised to negotiate while there’s still time,” he said. Dr. Horne
spoke on Regent Radio, in Toronto, Canada. Read more
Labor:
Economy:

Housing Up, Home Ownership Down
The Mysterious New Housing Bubble
by
Mike Whitney
What's Holding the Economy Back? The Collapsed Housing Bubble, End of Story
The rebound in housing is now in full swing. Housing starts are up,
existing home sales are gaining pace, inventory is down, and prices are on
the rise. According to a recent report by Corelogic “House prices are up
6.3% year-over-year in October, the largest increase since 2006 and the
eighth consecutive increase in home prices nationally on a year-over-year
basis.” Many experts are now predicting that 2013 will be even better, in
fact, J.P. Morgan thinks that prices could gain another 10 percent in the
next 12 months. Here’s the story from the Wall Street Journal:
“J.P. Morgan Chase Co. expects U.S. home prices to rise 3.4% in its
base-case estimate and up to 9.7% in its most bullish scenario of economic
growth. Standard and Poor’s, which rates private-issue mortgage bonds,
on Friday said it expects a 5% rise in 2013.” (“Home Prices Could Jump
9.7% in 2013, J.P. Morgan Says”, Wall Street Journal)
And the housing boom is having an impact on Wall Street, too, where
prescient investors who loaded up on mortgage-backed securities (MBS)
are cashing in bigtime via the Fed’s new MBS-buying program dubbed
QE3. Fed chairman Ben Bernanke is paying top-dollar for financial
derivatives that, in real terms, are probably worth just pennies on the
dollar.

Despite the increasingly positive signs of market strength, there are
reasons to be skeptical, after all, this is the second time that prices and
sales rallied since the bottom fell out in 2006. The first rebound took place
in 2009, when President Barack Obama initiated his Firsttime Homebuyer
program which provided lavish incentives for potential buyers to sign on
the bottom line. The program sparked a frenzy of activity that reversed the
direction of the market, but quickly petered out in a matter of months.
Could today’s sudden surge in prices be another “false start” or is it the
real deal? Only time will tell. But it’s worth noting that the market has
never really cleared and that normal supply-demand dynamics have never
been allowed to work as one would expect in a free market. In fact,
housing is arguably the most maligned and manipulated market of all time.
Mortgage rates are artificially low due to Fed intervention (QE3).
Inventory is artificially low due to the banks withholding of distressed
backlog. Down payments are so minuscule (FHA=3.5%) that homebuyers
end up leveraged at a 30 to 1 ratio, the same as the big Wall Street
investment banks prior to the Crash of ’08. And, finally, governmentbacked
mortgage modifications (HAMP) provide generous refinancing to
high-risk “underwater” applicants with LTV at 125%, a process that makes
subprime mortgages look like a model of prudent lending. So much is fake
about today’s housing market, that it’s a stretch to call it a market at all.
Even so, there are anomalies in the data that don’t support the
media’s storyline that “Housing Is Back”. For example, did you know that
the homeownership rate is still falling?
But how can that be, you ask? After all, if housing is recovering, then
more people must be moving into homes, right?
Wrong. Check out this illuminating post from Sober Look:
“Some readers have been asking how one can reconcile positive signs
in the housing market with declining rates of homeownership. Indeed,
homeownership is falling at an even faster pace than during the 08-10
period….The explanation is that so far a great deal of net demand growth
in housing has been in rental units. …This demand for rentals is in fact
one of the factors supporting the housing market – for every renter there is
a landlord who buys a home. Read More

World:
Patrick Cockburn: Persecution of the Christians:
Syrian minority fear the end of fighting more than war itself
In his final dispatch from Syria, Patrick Cockburn reports from
Maloula on the plight of the country's Christian minority, who fear an
end to the fighting more than the war itself
Two masked men armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles tried to
kidnap a businessman called George Alumeh in the ancient Christian town
of Maloula, north-west of Damascus, last week. It was not the first kidnap
attempt on richer members of the Christian community here and Mr
Alumeh was prepared. He fought back, first drawing a pistol, hurling his
car keys away so his car could not be stolen, and then trying to escape. He
got away, but was hit by a burst of gunfire from the kidnappers which has
sent him to hospital with stomach, leg and hand wounds.
Father Mata Hadad, the priest of the Convent of St Tikla built into the
mountain wall that towers over Maloula, tells the story to illustrate how
life has become more dangerous for Christians, particularly for those
thought to have money. The 10 per cent of the Syrian population who are
Christians are debating with trepidation the likely outcome of the Syrian
crisis and its effect on them.

The omens are not good. Every country in the Middle East seems to
be becoming more Islamic and more sectarian. Syrian Christians have
seen since 2003 how an outcome of the invasion of Iraq was the
destruction of Christian communities in Iraq that had survived for almost
2,000 years. If the opposition National Coalition, recognised by 130
countries as the legitimate government of Syria, does ultimately take
power then its most effective fighting force will be Jadhat al-Nusra, with
an ideology similar to al-Qa'ida. It is prospects like this that fill Syrian
Christians with alarm.
Maloula is a good place to talk about these fears. It is an hour's drive
from Damascus, some 20 miles from Lebanon, and occupies a spectacular
site in a cleft in the mountains. Its rocky defiles have always been a place
of refuge. It was here that St Tikla, fleeing imperial soldiery, took refuge
in a cave high up in the cliffs.
Maloula's isolation helped preserve its Christianity and also gave it
the distinction of being the only place where Western Aramaic, the
language of Jesus, is still spoken by Christians.
There is a mood of uncertainty about the future. So far there have
been four kidnappings that the Syrian army post just beyond the entrance
to the town has not been able to do much to prevent. Religious tourism has
disappeared. "I used to sell guide books and souvenirs," says Samir Shakti,
gesturing towards his small shop, "but now I sell fruit and vegetables".
Another sign of edginess is the bursts of anger against foreigners, in
the present case myself, as a symbol of European powers accused of
arming Islamic fundamentalists. Even the Mother Superior of the Convent,
Pelagia Sayaf, demanded to know why the Europeans were aiding "people
who kill with the knife". She said many people were leaving the town
(though this was denied by some others in Maloula).
Mother Superior Pelagia looked strained. She has been at her post for
23 years, ruling over 14 nuns and 33 orphans from Christian families all
over the Middle East. The orphans wear a red uniform and tartan caps,
giving them a surprisingly Scottish appearance. "It is going to be a sad
Christmas in Maloula," the Mother Superior said. "Sanctions are
punishing the people, not the government."

Christians may feel more frightened than other Syrians, but
everybody feels vulnerable. There was no fighting on the road from
Damascus to Maloula, but there are many wrecked buildings from battles
in the past couple of months. Once the main road to Homs was crowded
with car showrooms, but these are now closed and their plate glass
windows are protected from blast damage by hurriedly built walls of
concrete blocks.
Better-off Christians are able to escape abroad, but for those with
little money this is a difficult option. One Armenian, who did not want his
name published, said "we can go to Lebanon, but it is expensive to stay
there, jobs are difficult to get and Lebanese don't like Syrians much
because our army was there for so long". He himself was seeking
Armenian citizenship.
As with others in Damascus the degree of danger felt depends on
precise location. Many Christians live in Jaramana district that is now
dangerous from snipers and bombers. The Christian parts of the Old City
are safer, but there are electricity cuts and a shortage of diesel. So far the
sufferings of the Christians of Syria are no worse than those of the
Muslims, but they feel that whatever the outcome of the civil war, their
future will most likely be worse than their past.
Patrick Cockburn: Syria: The descent into Holy War
World View: The world decided to back the rebels last week, but this
is no fight between goodies and baddies

It is one of the most horrifying videos of the war in Syria. It shows
two men being beheaded by Syrian rebels, one of them by a child. He
hacks with a machete at the neck of a middle-aged man who has been
forced to lie in the street with his head on a concrete block. At the end of
the film, a soldier, apparently from the Free Syrian Army, holds up the
severed heads by their hair in triumph.
The film is being widely watched on YouTube by Syrians, reinforcing
their fears that Syria is imitating Iraq's descent into murderous warfare in
the years after the US invasion in 2003. It fosters a belief among Syria's
non-Sunni Muslim minorities, and Sunnis associated with the government
as soldiers or civil servants, that there will be no safe future for them in
Syria if the rebels win. In one version of the video, several of which are
circulating, the men who are beheaded are identified as officers belonging
to the 2.5 million-strong Alawite community. This is the Shia sect to
which President Bashar al-Assad and core members of his regime belong.
The beheadings, so proudly filmed by the perpetrators, may well convince
them that they have no alternative but to fight to the end.
The video underlines a startling contradiction in the policy of the US
and its allies. In the past week, 130 countries have recognised the National
Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces as the legitimate
representatives of the Syrian people. But, at the same time, the US has
denounced the al-Nusra Front, the most effective fighting force of the
rebels, as being terrorists and an al-Qa'ida affiliate. Paradoxically, the US

makes almost exactly same allegations of terrorism against al-Nusra as
does the Syrian government. Even more bizarrely, though so many states
now recognise the National Coalition as the legitimate representative of
the Syrian people, it is unclear if the rebels inside Syria do so. Angry
crowds in rebel-held areas of northern Syria on Friday chanted "we are all
al-Nusra" as they demonstrated against the US decision.
Videos posted on YouTube play such a central role in the propaganda
war in Syria that questions always have to be asked about their
authenticity and origin. In the case of the beheading video, the details look
all too convincing. Nadim Houry, the deputy director for Human Rights
Watch in the Middle East and North Africa, has watched the video many
times to identify the circumstances, perpetrators and location where the
killings took place. He has no doubts about its overall authenticity, but
says that mention of one district suggests it might be in Deir el-Zhor (in
eastern Syria). But people in the area immediately north of Homs are
adamant the beheadings took place there. The victims have not been
identified. The first time a version of the film was shown was on progovernment
Sama TV on 26 November, but it has been widely viewed on
YouTube in Syria only over the past week.
The film begins by showing two middle-aged men handcuffed
together sitting on a settee in a house, surrounded by their captors who
sometimes slap and beat them. They are taken outside into the street. A
man in a black shirt is manhandled and kicked into lying down with his
head on a concrete block. A boy, who looks to be about 11 or 12 years old,
cuts at his neck with a machete, but does not quite sever it. Later a man
finishes the job and cuts the head off. The second man in a blue shirt is
also forced to lie with his head on a block and is beheaded. The heads are
brandished in front of the camera and later laid on top of the bodies. The
boy smiles as he poses with a rifle beside a headless corpse.
The execution video is very similar to those once made by al-Qa'ida
in Iraq to demonstrate their mercilessness towards their enemies. This is
scarcely surprising since many of the most experienced al-Nusra fighters
boast that they have until recently been fighting the predominantly Shia
government of Iraq as part of the local franchise of al-Qa'ida franchise.

Their agenda is wholly sectarian, and they have shown greater enthusiasm
for slaughtering Shias, often with bombs detonated in the middle of
crowds in markets or outside mosques, than for fighting Americans.
The Syrian uprising, which began in March 2011, was not always so
bloodthirsty or so dominated by the Sunnis who make up 70 per cent of
the 23 million-strong Syrian population. At first, demonstrations were
peaceful and the central demands of the protesters were for democratic
rule and human rights as opposed to a violent, arbitrary and autocratic
government. There are Syrians who claim that the people against the
regime remains to this day the central feature of the uprising, but there is
compelling evidence that the movement has slid towards sectarian Islamic
fundamentalism intent on waging holy war.
The execution video is the most graphic illustration of deepening
religious bigotry on the part of the rebels, but it is not the only one.
Another recent video shows Free Syrian Army fighters burning and
desecrating a Shia husseiniyah (a religious meeting house similar to a
mosque) in Idlib in northern Syria. They chant prayers of victory as they
set fire to the building, set fire to flags used in Shia religious processions
and stamp on religious pictures. If the FSA were to repeat this assault on a
revered Shia shrine such as the Sayyida Zeinab mosque in Damascus, to
which Iranian and Iraqi pilgrims have flooded in the past and which is
now almost encircled by rebels, then there could be an explosion of
religious hatred and strife between Sunni and Shia across the Middle East.
Iraqi observers warn that it was the destruction of the Shia shrine in
Samarra, north of Baghdad, by an al-Qa'ida bomb in 2006 that detonated a
sectarian war in which tens of thousands died.
The analogy with Iraq is troubling for the US and British
governments. They and their allies are eager for Syria to avoid repeating
the disastrous mistakes they made during the Iraqi occupation. Ideally,
they would like to remove the regime, getting rid of Bashar al-Assad and
the present leadership, but not dissolving the government machinery or
introducing revolutionary change as they did in Baghdad by transferring
power from the Sunnis to the Shia and the Kurds. This provoked a furious

counter-reaction from Baathists and Sunnis who found themselves
marginalised and economically impoverished.
Washington wants Assad out, but is having difficulty riding the Sunni
revolutionary tiger. The Western powers have long hoped for a split in the
Syrian elite, but so far there is little sign of this happening. "If you take
defections as a measure of political cohesion, then there haven't been any
serious ones," said a diplomat in Damascus.
Syria today resembles Iraq nine years ago in another disturbing
respect. I have now been in Damascus for 10 days, and every day I am
struck by the fact that the situation in areas of Syria I have visited is
wholly different from the picture given to the world both by foreign
leaders and by the foreign media. The last time I felt like this was in
Baghdad in late 2003, when every Iraqi knew the US-led occupation was
proving a disaster just as George W Bush, Tony Blair and much of the
foreign media were painting a picture of progress towards stability and
democracy under the wise tutelage of Washington and its carefully chosen
Iraqi acolytes.
The picture of Syria most common believed abroad is of the rebels
closing in on the capital as the Assad government faces defeat in weeks or,
at most, a few months. The Secretary General of Nato, Anders Fogh
Rasmussen, said last week that the regime is "approaching collapse". The
foreign media consensus is that the rebels are making sweeping gains on
all fronts and the end may be nigh. But when one reaches Damascus, it is
to discover that the best informed Syrians and foreign diplomats say, on
the contrary, that the most recent rebel attacks in the capital had been
thrown back by a government counteroffensive. They say that the rebel
territorial advances, which fuelled speculation abroad that the Syrian
government might implode, are partly explained by a new Syrian army
strategy to pull back from indefensible outposts and bases and concentrate
troops in cities and towns.
At times, Damascus resounds with the boom of artillery fire and the
occasional car bomb, but it is not besieged. I drove 160 kilometres north to
Homs, Syria's third largest city with a population of 2.3 million, without
difficulty. Homs, once the heart of the uprising, is in the hands of the

government, aside from the Old City, which is held by the FSA.
Strongholds of the FSA in Damascus have been battered by shellfire and
most of their inhabitants have fled to other parts of the capital. The
director of the 1,000-bed Tishreen military hospital covering much of
southern Syria told me that he received 15 to 20 soldiers wounded every
day, of whom about 20 per cent died. This casualty rate indicates sniping,
assassinations and small-scale ambushes, but not a fight to the finish.
This does not mean that the government is in a happy position. It has
been unable to recapture southern Aleppo or the Old City in Homs. It does
not have the troops to garrison permanently parts of Damascus it has
retaken. Its overall diplomatic and military position is slowly eroding and
the odds against it are lengthening, but it is a long way from total defeat,
unless there is direct military intervention by foreign powers, as in Libya
or Iraq, and this does not seem likely.
This misperception of the reality on the ground in Syria is fuelled in
part by propaganda, but more especially by inaccurate and misleading
reporting by the media where bias towards the rebels and against the
government is unsurpassed since the height of the Cold War. Exaggerated
notions are given of rebel strength and popularity. The Syrian government
is partially responsible for this. By excluding all but a few foreign
journalists, the regime has created a vacuum of information that is
naturally filled by its enemies. In the event, a basically false and
propagandistic account of events in Syria has been created by a foreign
media credulous in using pro-opposition sources as if they were objective
reporting.
The execution video is a case in point. I have not met a Syrian in
Damascus who has not seen it. It is having great influence on how Syrians
judge their future, but the mainstream media outside Syria has scarcely
mentioned it. Some may be repulsed by its casual savagery, but more
probably it is not shown because it contradicts so much of what foreign
leaders and reporters claim is happening here.
Health, Education, Science and Welfare:

Daily News Digest December 18, 2012
I am Adam Lanza’s Mother
It's time to talk about mental illness
Liza Long
"Michael" with butterfly"
Friday’s horrific national tragedy—the murder of 20 children and six
adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in New Town, Connecticut—has
ignited a new discussion on violence in America. In kitchens and coffee
shops across the country, we tearfully debate the many faces of violence in
America: gun culture, media violence, lack of mental health services,
overt and covert wars abroad, religion, politics and the way we raise our
children. Liza Long, a writer based in Boise, says it’s easy to talk about
guns. But it’s time to talk about mental illness.
Three days before 20 year-old Adam Lanza killed his mother, then
opened fire on a classroom full of Connecticut kindergartners, my 13-year
old son Michael (name changed) missed his bus because he was wearing
the wrong color pants.
“I can wear these pants,” he said, his tone increasingly belligerent,
the black-hole pupils of his eyes swallowing the blue irises.
“They are navy blue,” I told him. “Your school’s dress code says
black or khaki pants only.”
“They told me I could wear these,” he insisted. “You’re a stupid
bitch. I can wear whatever pants I want to. This is America. I have rights!”

“You can’t wear whatever pants you want to,” I said, my tone affable,
reasonable. “And you definitely cannot call me a stupid bitch. You’re
grounded from electronics for the rest of the day. Now get in the car, and I
will take you to school.”
I live with a son who is mentally ill. I love my son. But he terrifies
me.
A few weeks ago, Michael pulled a knife and threatened to kill me
and then himself after I asked him to return his overdue library books. His
7 and 9 year old siblings knew the safety plan—they ran to the car and
locked the doors before I even asked them to. I managed to get the knife
from Michael, then methodically collected all the sharp objects in the
house into a single Tupperware container that now travels with me.
Through it all, he continued to scream insults at me and threaten to kill or
hurt me.
That conflict ended with three burly police officers and a paramedic
wrestling my son onto a gurney for an expensive ambulance ride to the
local emergency room. The mental hospital didn’t have any beds that day,
and Michael calmed down nicely in the ER, so they sent us home with a
prescription for Zyprexa and a follow-up visit with a local pediatric
psychiatrist.
We still don’t know what’s wrong with Michael. Autism spectrum,
ADHD, Oppositional Defiant or Intermittent Explosive Disorder have all
been tossed around at various meetings with probation officers and social
workers and counselors and teachers and school administrators. He’s been
on a slew of antipsychotic and mood altering pharmaceuticals, a Russian
novel of behavioral plans. Nothing seems to work.
At the start of seventh grade, Michael was accepted to an accelerated
program for highly gifted math and science students. His IQ is off the
charts. When he’s in a good mood, he will gladly bend your ear on
subjects ranging from Greek mythology to the differences between
Einsteinian and Newtonian physics to Doctor Who. He’s in a good mood
most of the time. But when he’s not, watch out. And it’s impossible to
predict what will set him off.

Several weeks into his new junior high school, Michael began
exhibiting increasingly odd and threatening behaviors at school. We
decided to transfer him to the district’s most restrictive behavioral
program, a contained school environment where children who can’t
function in normal classrooms can access their right to free public
babysitting from 7:30-1:50 Monday through Friday until they turn 18.
The morning of the pants incident, Michael continued to argue with
me on the drive. He would occasionally apologize and seem remorseful.
Right before we turned into his school parking lot, he said, “Look, Mom,
I’m really sorry. Can I have video games back today?”
“No way,” I told him. “You cannot act the way you acted this
morning and think you can get your electronic privileges back that
quickly.”
His face turned cold, and his eyes were full of calculated rage. “Then
I’m going to kill myself,” he said. “I’m going to jump out of this car right
now and kill myself.”
That was it. After the knife incident, I told him that if he ever said
those words again, I would take him straight to the mental hospital, no ifs,
ands, or buts. I did not respond, except to pull the car into the opposite
lane, turning left instead of right.
“Where are you taking me?” he said, suddenly worried. “Where are
we going?”
“You know where we are going,” I replied.
“No! You can’t do that to me! You’re sending me to hell! You’re
sending me straight to hell!”
I pulled up in front of the hospital, frantically waiving for one of the
clinicians who happened to be standing outside. “Call the police,” I said.
“Hurry.”
Michael was in a full-blown fit by then, screaming and hitting. I
hugged him close so he couldn’t escape from the car. He bit me several
times and repeatedly jabbed his elbows into my rib cage. I’m still stronger
than he is, but I won’t be for much longer.
The police came quickly and carried my son screaming and kicking
into the bowels of the hospital. I started to shake, and tears filled my eyes

as I filled out the paperwork—“Were there any difficulties with… at what
age did your child… were there any problems with.. has your child ever
experienced.. does your child have…”
At least we have health insurance now. I recently accepted a position
with a local college, giving up my freelance career because when you have
a kid like this, you need benefits. You’ll do anything for benefits. No
individual insurance plan will cover this kind of thing.
For days, my son insisted that I was lying — that I made the whole
thing up so that I could get rid of him. The first day, when I called to check
up on him, he said, “I hate you. And I’m going to get my revenge as soon
as I get out of here.” Read More
Connecticut Shooting Reveals Deeper Illness in Society
By Mark Rahman
Half flag all over connecticut today - Picture: Nooccar
The tragic shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown,
Connecticut has prompted a public outcry and heartfelt mourning across
the country. The gunman killed 26, including 20 young children, before
turning the gun on himself. The media will surely be flooded with every
minute detail of the killer’s life in the coming weeks, and the issue of gun
control will once again come to the fore. But what will not be seriously
discussed is the root cause of shootings like this, and why they have
become so commonplace. It seems that only shootings with a high death
toll get national coverage at all, as dozens of smaller incidents have just
become “business as usual.”

Even before the identity of the shooter was known, questions were
already being asked: How did this person attain firearms? Should this
person have had the right to legally own firearms? Atrocities like the
recent shootings in Oregon, Colorado, and Wisconsin have naturally
prompted a national discussion on gun control.
There is, no doubt, good cause for concern. Since 1982, there have
been at least 61 mass murders in the U.S. involving firearms, and in most
of these cases, the guns were obtained legally. The United States ranks far
ahead of any other nation in the world in crimes of this sort. Many are
quick to point out that the U.S. also ranks highest in per-capita gun
ownership, but other nations with similar gun laws and similar levels of
gun ownership don’t seem to have such a high incidence of crimes of this
sort.
Regardless of what the gun laws are, people who want firearms can
acquire them—by illegal means if necessary. And if guns are unavailable,
other weapons can be used to wreak havoc on society. Just hours before
the shooting in Connecticut, there was a knife attack at a secondary school
in China (where private gun ownership is outlawed), where 23, including
many children, were wounded.
Is there something "wrong" with people in the United States that
makes them prone to commit these types of atrocities? Michael Moore
asked that question in Bowling for Columbine, though he failed to give an
adequate answer. However, in his later films, SICKO, and Capitalism: A
Love Story, which dealt with the health care system in the U.S., and the
capitalist system itself, he came much closer to answering that question.
So what is it that is unique about the United States? For one, we don’t
have a universal health care system to provide quality mental health
facilities. Nearly 50 million Americans are without any type of health care
whatsoever, and those that are insured often have very limited access.
Mental health care in particular is often given short-shrift, as the insurance
giants cut every corner possible to increase profits.
There are concrete reasons why the American labor movement failed
to win universal health care, chief among them, the lack of an independent
political party of the working class based on the trade unions, and the

narrow policy of the trade union leaders in the 1930s and during the postwar
boom, who fought for health benefits for their workers, instead of
fighting for quality health care for all workers. But what does this have to
do with the shooting in Connecticut?
The circumstances surrounding the gunman’s motivations have yet to
surface, and perhaps will never be known. However, the discussion around
how he obtained his weapons is far less important than discussing what
leads people to commit these atrocities in the first place. Improved access
to mental health care would go a long way toward preventing these kinds
of incidents from happening.
For example, the expression “going postal” has its origins in a
number of incidents at post offices starting in the early 80s, involving
disgruntled employees who killed or attacked co-workers, supervisors, and
others. In response to two events in 1993, the USPS created 85 positions
for Workplace Environment Analysts, given the task of improving
workplace conditions and thereby preventing violence. Presumably this
worked as such incidents were greatly reduced, with just two on public
record since then. However, in 2009, coinciding with the austerity attacks
on the USPS generally, these positions were eliminated. Everyone can
sympathize with anger and frustration at work, and while very few would
carry out such rash acts of violence, there are now no services in place at
the USPS to provide people with an outlet or a way to resolve these
frustrations. In workplaces and schools around the country, cuts and
austerity will inevitably lead to a dearth of such services.
Nationalizing the hospitals, pharmaceutical and medical machine
industries, and the assets of the health insurance behemoths—to be
democratically administered by the health industry workers and by the
public as a whole—would lay the basis for the creation of a health care
system that could provide everyone with quality care. Such health care
would include counseling and therapy for all who seek or need it; from
those suffering from minor workplace stresses, to those suffering from
much worse. Removing the profit motive from health care would lead to a
complete transformation in the way mental health is viewed and dealt
with.

So what else is unique about the United States? Many people living
in the U.S. long-enjoyed a higher standard of living than most of the rest
of the world. This, in part, contributed to the limited scope of our social
safety net. Throughout the post-World War II boom, there was a blunting
of the class struggle, as the pie was getting bigger, and the capitalists were
able to give the working class a few extra crumbs, fearing a return of the
mass movements of the 1930s and 1940s.
As a result, many of the reforms won by the labor movements of
other countries simply don’t exist here for most workers—paid vacation
time, maternity leave, universal health care, and so on. These reforms,
although still extremely limited, provide a certain level of stability in
many countries. The capitalist system can no longer provide crumbs like
those won in the past, and internationally we see vicious attacks on these
gains. Read More
Quote of the Day:
This creates a dilemma for these clients. The maximum
compensation available to them will probably be in the
$60,000 range. However, that remains to be seen, as many of
these individuals who are severely affected by this dilemma
do not have the far less significant symptoms that qualify
for compensation.
Another dilemma is the fact that many of these patients
will be affected by their disease for the rest of their lives.
How can $60,000 come even close to compensating these
people for an illness that has completely disrupted their lives
and will affect them for as long as they live?
— Dr. Michael Robichaux,
Gulf doctor: BP settlement won’t help my sick patients
Manufacturers can legally add brominated vegetable oil
(BVO) to citrus-flavored beverages in the United States and
Canada in controlled amounts (no more than 15 parts per

million (ppm) by weight). However, BVO is banned in more
than 100 countries. The US Food and Drug Administration
classifies it as “suspect.” In 1990, the United Kingdom
banned bromate in bread, and in 1994, Canada did the same.
Brazil also recently outlawed bromide in flour products.
Bromine is extracted from sea water and is deadly in
either liquid or vapor form. Bromines are endocrine
disruptors and are part of the halide family of elements,
which also includes fluorine, chlorine, and iodine. If you are
exposed to a lot of bromine, the body cannot retain iodine as
it should. According to some experts, this iodine deficiency
causes an increased risk for cancers of the breast, thyroid
gland, ovary, and prostate.
— Brominated Vegetable Oil (BVO)
Video of the Day:
Dangerous food additive: Brominated vegetable oil
Image of the Day:
End Wall Street’s Wars!
Occupy Wall Street!
Occupy Wall Street is the Only Organization
That Identifies The Enemy —
The 1% That Own and Control The Wealth!
1960s The Realist — One Nation Under God/1%
(Unlike The Trade Union Misleaders
Nor The Misleaders Of The Oppressed
Who Strive To Be In ‘Partnership’ With The 1%)

1960s The Realist — One Nation Under God/1%
(Unlike The Trade Union Misleaders
Nor The Misleaders Of The Oppressed
Who Strive To Be In ‘Partnership’ With The 1%)
Occupy Wall Street — ‘We Are The 99%’
The resistance continues at Liberty Square:
U.S.:
The New World Order Genocide:
Rain Forest for Sale
Demand for oil is squeezing the life out of one of the world’s wildest
places.
By
Scott Wallace
Photograph by Steve Winter

The leaves are still dripping from an overnight downpour when
Andrés Link slings on his day pack and heads out into the damp morning
chill. It’s just after daybreak, and already the forest is alive with hoots and
chatter—the deep-throated roar of a howler monkey, the hollow rat-a-tattat
of a woodpecker, the squeal of squirrel monkeys chasing each other
from branch to branch. A strange, ululating chant starts up in the distance,
fades out, then builds again.
“Listen!” says Link, grabbing my arm and cocking an ear. “Titi
monkeys. Can you hear? There are two of them, singing a duet.” He
imitates the high-pitched, rhythmic cry of one of the monkeys, then the
other. Only then can I distinguish the two separate strains that make up the
counterpoint chorus.
This raucous celebration is the daily background music for Link as he
heads out on his morning commute through what may be the most
biodiverse spot on Earth. Link, a primatologist from Universidad de los
Andes, is researching the white-bellied spider monkey, and he’s on his
way to a salt lick a half hour’s walk away, where a group often
congregates.
Giant kapok and ficus trees with sprawling buttress roots soar like
Roman columns straight into the canopy, their bifurcating branches draped
with orchids and bromeliads that sustain entire communities of insects,
amphibians, birds, and mammals. Strangler figs coil around their trunks in
a tightening embrace. There is so much life here that tiny killifish are
wriggling in a shallow puddle created by animal tracks.
We turn down a slope into a forest studded with bizarre-looking
Socratea trees, commonly called walking palms, with four-foot-high stilt
roots that allow the trees to shift location slightly in a quest for light and
nutrients. It’s one of the untold millions of evolutionary adaptations
unfolding all around the Tiputini Biodiversity Station (TBS), a facility
operated by the Universidad San Francisco de Quito on 1,600 acres (650
hectares) of pristine jungle on the edge of Yasuní National Park, which
encompasses nearly 3,800 square miles (9,800 square kilometers) of prime
rain forest habitat in eastern Ecuador.

“You could spend your entire life here and be surprised by something
every day,” Link says. There are ten primate species in the forest around
TBS, and a greater variety of birds, bats, and frogs than almost anywhere
else in South America. There are as many insect species in a single hectare
of the rain forest here as are known in all of the U.S. and Canada
combined.
Yasuní’s location nurtures this abundance. The park sits at the
intersection of the Andes, the Equator, and the Amazon region, an
ecological bull’s-eye where extremely rich communities of plants,
amphibians, birds, and mammals in South America converge. Downpours
are a near daily occurrence throughout the year, and there are few
discernible changes of season. Sunlight, warmth, and moisture are
constants.
This part of the Amazon is also home to two indigenous nations, the
Kichwa and the Waorani, who live in settlements scattered along the roads
and rivers. The first peaceable contact between the Waorani and Protestant
missionaries took place in the late 1950s. Today most Waorani
communities participate in trade and even tourism with the outside world,
as do their former tribal enemies, the Kichwa. But two groups of Waorani
have turned their backs on such contact, preferring to wander the upland
forest in a so-called Zona Intangible—Untouchable Zone—set up to
protect them. Unfortunately, this zone, which overlaps the southern sector
of Yasuní, does not include the entirety of their traditional range, and the
nomadic warriors have attacked settlers and loggers both inside and
outside the zone, some as recently as 2009.
Far beneath the ground, Yasuní harbors yet another treasure that
poses an urgent challenge to the precious web of life on the surface:
hundreds of millions of barrels of untapped Amazon crude. Over the years,
oil concessions have been drawn over the same territory as the park, as
economic interests have trumped conservation in the struggle over
Yasuní’s fate. At least five active concessions blanket the park’s northern
section, and for a poor country like Ecuador the pressure to drill has been
almost irresistible. Half of the nation’s export earnings already come from
oil, nearly all of it from its eastern provinces in the Amazon.

In a proposal first put forward in 2007, President Rafael Correa has
offered to leave indefinitely untouched an estimated 850 million barrels of
oil inside Yasuní’s northeastern corner in a tract known as the ITT Block
(named for the three oil fields it contains: Ishpingo, Tambococha, and
Tiputini). As payment for preserving the wilderness and preventing an
estimated 410 million metric tons of fossil fuel-generated carbon
emissions from entering the atmosphere, Correa has asked the world to
ante up in the fight against global warming. He is seeking $3.6 billion in
compensation, roughly half of what Ecuador would have realized in
revenues from exploiting the resource at 2007 prices. The money would be
used, he says, to finance alternative energy and community development
projects.
Hailed by supporters as a milestone in the climate change debate
when it was first proposed, the so-called Yasuní-ITT Initiative has been
hugely popular in Ecuador. National polls consistently show a growing
awareness of Yasuní as an ecological treasure that should be protected. But
the international response to the initiative has been tepid. By mid-2012
only about $200 million had been pledged. In response Correa has issued a
succession of angry ultimatums, leading detractors to liken his proposal to
blackmail. With the initiative stalled and Correa warning that time is
running out, activity on the oil frontier continues to advance through
eastern Ecuador, even within Yasuní’s limits. Every day, another bit of the
wilderness succumbs to the bulldozers and backhoes. Read More
Environment:
Pig farm pollution linked to higher blood pressure.
Wing S, RA Horton and KM Rose. 2012. Air pollution from industrial
swine operations and blood pressure of neighboring residents.
Environmental Health Perspectives http://dx.doi.org/10.1289/ehp.
1205109.
Synopsis by
Virginia T. Guidry and Wendy Hessler

Jeff Vanuga, NRCS/flickr
Air pollution and strong odors emanating from large-scale swine
operations may affect blood pressure of people who live nearby, according
to new research. Twice a day for two weeks, people in the study sat
outside their North Carolina homes, then measured their own blood
pressure and rated the strength of odors. When the odors were the
strongest, their blood pressure rose slightly. It also rose with levels of
hydrogen sulfide measured in the air near their homes. High blood
pressure is a risk factor for stroke and other cardiovascular diseases. Many
pig operations in North Carolina are disproportionately located in lowincome
communities of color, where residents already are at increased risk
of these diseases.
What did they do?
For two week periods during 2003-2005, 101 adults living within 1.5
miles of industrial swine facilities sat outside twice a day – once in the
morning and once in the evening – for 10 minutes. While outside, they
filled out a diary and rated the strength of the odor and their stress level.
They then went inside and measured their blood pressure using an
automated device.
Researchers measured blood pressure, because it is a good indicator
of potential heart effects and disease.
While participants collected data, air pollution monitors near their
homes measured levels of hydrogen sulfide – the chemical in
decomposing manure that smells like a rotten egg – and particulate matter
– dust that comes from industrial swine facilities as well as other sources.

Participants were trained to collect their own data to facilitate
frequent measurements at their homes, where the air pollution exposures
occurred. Each participant served as his or her own control, as the
researchers compared each participant's blood pressure during times of
high and low air pollution. This approach eliminates the possibility that
age, sex, race or other difference among participants can cause differences
in the results.
What did they find?
The reports of odors were associated with elevated diastolic blood
pressure (DBP). DBP is the bottom number in a blood pressure reading
and measures pressure on the arteries between heartbeats.
DBP increased by almost 2 millimeters of mercury (mmHg) during
periods of very strong odor compared to no odor.
Hydrogen sulfide was associated with elevated systolic blood
pressure (SBP). SBP is the top number in a blood pressure reading and
measures the pressure on the arteries when the heart beats.
A 10 part per billion (ppb) increase in hydrogen sulfide resulted in an
increase of nearly 3 mmHg for systolic pressure.
Levels of particulate matter were not associated with increases in
blood pressure.
Odor effects were largest among men and participants over 53.7 years
old. The effects of hydrogen sulfide were greatest among those who
struggled to cope with stress and did not take blood pressure medication.
Medication is expected to minimize effects since the drugs partially
control blood pressure changes. Blood pressure levels were also linked
with reported levels of stress at the time of measurement.
What does it mean?
Airborne hydrogen sulfide and strong smells from animal feeding
operations can affect blood pressure in those who live nearby. Both
physiologic responses to the chemical pollution and the stress of living
with chronic and frequent unpleasant odors may contribute to changes
seen in blood pressure following low and high pollution incidents.
This is the first study to examine the health effects of air pollution
exposures from industrial livestock facilities on blood pressure. Blood

pressure readings jumped two points with the strongest smells and three
when hydrogen sulfide increased by levels of 10 ppb. Previous studies
have linked other environmental exposures to elevated blood pressure.
The small changes in blood pressure observed in this study could
have important public health implications. First, high blood pressure is a
risk factor for chronic hypertension, stroke, and cardiovascular disease.
Second, these exposures occur frequently for a large number of people
who live near large-scale swine facilities and for those near sewage
treatment plants, landfills and oil refineries that emit similar malodorous
air pollutants, including hydrogen sulfide.
Finally, industrial swine facilities are an environmental justice issue
in North Carolina, where the operations are concentrated in poor
communities of color, which already have substantial impacts from
cardiovascular disease.
Oil Politics in Ecuador: Saving Yasuní,
Without Chevron’s Blood Money
Credit: World Resources Institute
In Ecuador, an historic environmental initiative to save the Yasuní
rainforest and a landmark class action lawsuit against the Chevron Oil

Company for environmental damages recently found their fates potentially
intertwined.
In early December, the Ecuadoran government announced [3] that its
initial $100 million goal for the Yasuní project had been met. Under a
novel scheme launched by leftist president Rafael Correa in 2007, the
government has pledged [4] to leave close to a billion barrels of crude
under the ground indefinitely in this Amazonian paradise, in exchange for
receiving $3.6 billion—50% of the oil’s market value—from wealthy
nations and corporations. The donated funds, to be held in trust by the
United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and fully contributed by
2024, will be earmarked for renewable energy and sustainable
development initiatives, as well as social programs in Ecuador’s
impoverished Amazon region.
Located at the intersection of the Amazon rainforest, the Andean
mountains, and the equator, the 3,800 square mile Yasuní National Park is
one of the world’s most biodiverse regions. A designated World Biosphere
Reserve, it is also home to two native communities living in voluntary
isolation. Read More
Fracking:
Nuclear Fallout: Ongoing Tragedy/Disaster In Japan:
EnergyNews:
12:01 PM EST on December 17th, 2012 | Leave a comment
“Shocking”: Officials make it mandatory to use Fukushima rice in
school lunches
10:34 AM EST on December 17th, 2012 | 6 comments
Kaku: Fukushima reactors “a ticking time bomb” — “Catastrophe
beyond comprehension” if major pipe break or quake (VIDEO)
12:27 AM EST on December 17th, 2012 | 11 comments

TV: Massive oil sheen around BP Deepwater Horizon site in Gulf of
Mexico (VIDEO)
11:19 PM EST on December 16th, 2012 | 24 comments
Engineer: “Much more problem” — Destroyed Fukushima Unit 3 to
never be reinforced over next 40 years (VIDEO)
Ongoing Gulf of Mexico Oil Disaster:
Oil Spill Attorney Stuart Smith’s Blog:
Gulf doctor: BP settlement won’t help my sick patients
Dr. Michael Robichaux is frustrated. Since the earliest days of the
Deepwater Horizon spill, Dr. Robichaux — based in Mathews, La. — has
done little else besides treating fishermen, cleanup workers and
coastal residents who’ve been make sick by their exposure to the oil or the
toxic dispersant that was sprayed in the Gulf. In recently months,
Robichaux has looked closely as the $7.8 billion settlement that’s on the
table between BP and local residents and small businesses, and he believes
the deal is grossly unfair to thousands suffering chronic health problems.
Before the hearing that was held before U.S. District Judge Carl
Barbier this fall, Dr. Robichaux filed a letter of objection to the pending
settlement. His primary objections to the medical provisions of the deal
are two-fold: It favors workers and others who suffered acute, short-term
exposure to the spill while failing to properly acknowledge the chronic,
long-term illnesses that many now face in coastal communities. What’s
more, the low financial ceilings on the payments to claimants in the case
won’t be nearly enough to cover medical bills that some will be facing for
the rest of their lives.
Late last month, Dr. Robichaux sent a second letter to Judge Barbier
that re-states his objections, adding his frustration with what he believes
are misrepresentations made to the court about the medical issues for those
exposed to toxic pollution in the wake of the 2010 catastrophe. He spells
out — in very specific terms — the severe conditions such as frequent

headaches, severe stomach pain or fatigue that his patients are coping
with, and he voices his worry that the settlement terms will obscure the
true nature of the health crisis in the Gulf for good.
“It appears that the interests of a large, foreign corporation has
superceded the needs of thousands of Americans who reside along the
coast of the Gulf of Mexico,” Dr. Robichaux told Judge Barbier. ”Equally
as important to me, as a physician, is the fact that this settlement will
result in a permanent record that completely ignores the truly significant
illnesses that have resulted from this tragic event.”
Dr. Robichaux wrote that he’s treated 113 patients who were exposed
to toxic pollution from the BP oil spill, and about 100 of them have had
severe chronic health effects, to the point that many of them are unable to
work because of constant headaches or fatigue and are unable to work,
relying instead on Social Security, Medicaid or other social programs.
Of the 113 patients that he’s treated, Dr. Robichaux said that the most
common symptoms are headaches (93), memory loss (89), fatigue (85),
irritability (63), vertigo (60), nausea (49) and blurred vision (43), with
others suffering from insomnia, persistent cough, or rashes. Of the 20 who
experienced some sort of stomach pain, many reported it was severe. He
writes:
While many of the people we treated at our facility
experienced amazing improvements in their symptoms, we were
to later to realize that they often became ill once again when
they returned to their home environments.
Ordinary household chemicals, petroleum products,
perfumes, deodorants, etc. often become extremely noxious to
patients who have had toxic exposures and prevent them from
leading normal lives.
Two of my fishermen patients, a husband and wife team,
had extraordinary results from their detox treatment. When they
returned home to resume fishing, the wife became extremely ill
as soon as she began working on their boat. Her husband
resumed working and he too developed problems and has been
unable to work since that time.

As a layperson discussing what is largely a legal issue, I am
certainly at a disadvantage in making a case for my patients.
However, I do not see any other health professionals rushing to
the aid of these victims, and I feel obligated to do the best that I
can to assist them with their dilemma. The irony of this
situation is that while I am a physician traversing the legal
universe, the attorneys in this situation have decided to play
doctor and to make decisions based on symptoms that are
significantly less common and less serious than those that
actually exist.
In the letter, Dr. Robichaux said he was frustrated with the medical
testimony that he heard in court on behalf of the Plaintiffs’ Steering
Committee. He said that the physician advising lawyers from the PSC
seemed to get their information largely over the telephone from other
doctors — but it bore little resemblance to the actual patients he’s treated
along the Gulf.
The result, he argues, is a settlement that not only is unfair to those
seeking medical compensation but in fact creates a false record of what
should be widely acknowledged as a public health crisis in the Gulf. This,
he correctly notes, is a grave injustice. For those who do qualify as
medical claimants, he adds, the proposed compensation is not adequate:
This creates a dilemma for these clients. The maximum
compensation available to them will probably be in the $60,000
range. However, that remains to be seen, as many of these
individuals who are severely affected by this dilemma do not
have the far less significant symptoms that qualify for
compensation.
Another dilemma is the fact that many of these patients will
be affected by their disease for the rest of their lives. How can
$60,000 come even close to compensating these people for an
illness that has completely disrupted their lives and will affect
them for as long as they live?
My friend and legal colleague Robert McKee made similar arguments
to the court objecting to the proposed medical compensation. McKee

pointed out, for example. that a worker who bagged oil-soaked items may
have passed out on the job and thus qualifies for a settlement, while a
boom operator who suffered chronic exposure and didn’t report anything
at the time — but now experiences significant symptoms, would not be
covered.
Dr. Robichaux and I agree on one fundamental point: It is far more
important to do this BP settlement right, and to do it fairly, than it is to do
quickly. For far too many people suffering from serious, chronic illnesses,
they have all the time in the world.
To read the full text of Dr. Robichaux’s letter to the court, please go
to: http://www.stuarthsmith.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/11-26-12-
MRR-to-Barbier-BP-PSC-Proposed-Settlement-Hearing.doc
Here is my Nov. 12 blog post about my verbal objections to the $7.8
billion BP settlement: http://www.stuarthsmith.com/arbitrary-andcapricious-bp-settlement-needs-a-do-over/
To read my Sept. 12 post recording our written objections to the $7.8
billion settlement, please read: http://www.stuarthsmith.com/we-objectwhy-bps-8-7-billion-deal-is-a-failed-settlement/
To read the earlier declaration to the court by Dr. Robichaux, please
read http://www.stuarthsmith.com/wp-content/uploads/
2012/09/120906Robichaux1.pdf and also http://www.stuarthsmith.com/
wp-content/uploads/2012/09/120906Robichaux2.pdf
Environmental Must-Reads – December 17, 2012
Sinkhole prompts study for alternative route for Louisiana 70 in
Assumption Parish
State highway officials say they’ll start a six-month study early next
year into the feasibility of an alternative route around an eight-acre
sinkhole in northern Assumption Parish.
Geologist details failure factors
The sidewall of a Texas Brine Co. LLC salt cavern inside the
Napoleonville Dome was dissolved through the dome’s outer edge,
bringing the cavern into contact with surrounding sediment layers outside
the dome before the cavern failed, an LSU geologist said Friday.

BP oil spill cleanup at seashore shifting gears
The U.S. Coast Guard is exploring the possibility of scaling back the
oil spill cleanup operations in the Gulf Islands National Seashore in the
spring, three years after the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster.
Louisiana looms large in oil spill case
BP has negotiated settlements with thousands of individuals harmed
in the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, and cut a plea bargain on federal
criminal charges.
Yet a plaintiff looms that could demand and possibly win civil
damage payments that would dwarf the billions BP already has paid or
committed: The state of Louisiana.
Ouch! Sharp Lessons From Deepwater Horizon
The science journal PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences) has published a Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Special Feature
taking a look back 20 months after the explosion that killed eleven people
and upended countless lives along the Gulf Coast. Specifically at what
happened, what we learned, and what could be done better the next time
around. The introduction is authored by Jane Lubchenco, administrator of
NOAA, and Marcia McNutt, director of the USGS, among others.
Keystone XL critics now calling for more in-depth climate change
study
With President Obama poised to decide whether to allow construction
of the Keystone XL Pipeline — based on a second, more environmentallysensitive
path — critics now appear focused on derailing the project over a
climate change study.
Keystone XL Pipeline Decisions Before the Land Board
The Montana Land Board is set to vote today on state land easements
for the Keystone XL Pipeline. It’s a vote that Jim Jensen, the Montana
Environmental Information Center’s executive director, says is premature
because the environmental analysis for the project hasn’t been finalized.
And, there’s more.
Brigadier General On Keystone XL Pipeline: ‘All Americans
Should Be Outraged’

In an interview with HuffPost Live Thursday, former U.S. Army
Brigadier General Steven M. Anderson spoke out against the building of
the Keystone XL pipeline, warning that “all Americans should be
outraged” about the national security implications of the project.
Keystone Pipeline Land Leased
The Montana Land Board is set to lease state land to Canada. In order
to move forward with the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline.
The state land is being leased to a Canadian company so the proposed
Keystone XL Pipeline can cross several rivers in Montana. The board will
meet monday to consider selling 50-year easements to Transcanada for
more than $700,000.
Grave concerns over oil spill response capability
Increasing transport of oil through Danish waters coupled with an out
of date environmental response ships are dangerous mix that leaves
Denmark vulnerable to a major disaster
Lawsuit to challenge U.S. plans for selling offshore leases
Environmentalists on Monday are set to file a lawsuit challenging the
Obama administration’s plans to sell offshore drilling leases over the next
five years, with a novel argument: that the government overlooked the
value of waiting to harvest oil and gas from those coastal waters.
U.S. wants Chevron to justify new pipe
Responding to concerns raised by federal investigators looking into
the August fire at Chevron’s Richmond refinery, company officials say
replacement pipe being installed at the plant will resist the type of
corrosion that led to the blaze.
Medical And Scientific Experts Urge Halting Fracking Rush
Until Medical Unknowns Are Better Understood
This week, the group Physicians, Scientists, and Engineers for
Healthy Energy (PSE) declared they would submit a petition to the White
House signed by 107 experts to urge the administration to slow down and
consider the health effects of natural gas fracking before allowing any new
permits. They want the government to consider the two ethical principles
adhered to by physicians: “do no harm” and that of “informed consent.”

Hollywood tapping into fracking fears
New movie “Promised Land” exploits concerns about gas-drilling
technique.
Mark Hume: Say no to fracking in the Sacred Headwaters
Four years after the British Columbia government surprisingly
announced a temporary ban on coal bed methane development in the
Sacred Headwaters, the stage is set for a dramatic reprise.
On Tuesday the moratorium that has kept Shell Canada from drilling
in the 4,000-hectare tenure expires.
Safety concerns raised over natural gas pipelines
A massive natural gas pipeline explosion in West Virginia last week is
highlighting safety concerns about pipeline accidents, as new pipelines are
laid across the country to service burgeoning shale gas development.
While the West Virginia pipeline accident didn’t cause any injuries or
fatalities, the U.S. Transportation Department’s Pipeline and Hazardous
Materials Safety Administration data show pipeline accidents have caused
the deaths of 68 people nationwide in the past five years, 21 of them
pipeline workers.
Shale drillers want to move wastewater on barges
The shale gas drilling industry wants to move its wastewater by barge
on rivers and lakes across the country. But the U.S. Coast Guard, which
regulates the nation’s waterways, must first decide whether it’s safe.
Wyoming lawmakers OK development of energy curriculum for
schools
State officials and representatives of the energy industry will be
asked to develop a course of study focusing on the energy industry and
natural resources to be taught in Wyoming schools under a bill approved
Thursday by the Legislature’s Joint Education Committee.
Black Liberation/Civil Rights:
Labor:

Economy:
World:
Venezuela regional elections: PSUV candidates win 20 out of 23 states
by
Jorge Martin
Candidates of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) won
the governor elections on December 16 in 20 out of the country’s 23
states, including in 5 which were ruled by the opposition MUD. The
reactionary opposition’s only consolation was that it kept the important
Miranda state where their defeated presidential candidate Henrique
Capriles Radonski beat former vice president Elias Jaua.
The regional elections came after the victory of Hugo Chávez in the
October 7 presidential elections. Clearly, the defeat of the opposition on
October 7, when they had convinced themselves they could win, had a
demoralising effect amongst their ranks.
Bolivarian candidates won by large margins in Apure (62% to 23%),
Cojedes (62 – 37), Delta Amacuro (75 – 22), Falcón (50 – 36), Guárico
(73 – 26), Portuguesa (53 – 21, with another revolutionary candidate
getting 23%), Sucre (59 – 36), Trujillo (81-17), Yaracuy (60-38) and
Vargas (73 – 25).
Very significant were the victories for PSUV candidates in 5 states
which were ruled by the opposition. This included Zulia, the country’s
most populous state which had been ruled by the opposition since 2000;

the key industrial state of Carabobo, the country’s 3 rd most populous
which was ruled by local oligarch and top opposition figure Salas Feo; and
Táchira, in the very strategic border region with Colombia. In oil rich
Monagas, PSUV candidate Yelitza Sanataella defeated incumbent José
Gregorio “Gato” Briceño, the local governor elected on a Bolivarian ticket
only to jump ship and join the opposition.
In Nueva Esparta (Margarita island), opposition governor Morel
Rodriguez who had ruled it since 2004, was clearly defeated by the PSUV
candidate by 54% to 45%. The only two states where the opposition won
in the October 7 presidential elections were now won by PSUV
candidates.
Meanwhile, the opposition won in the sparsely populated state of
Amazonas where the governor had been elected on a Bolivarian (PPT)
ticket but subsequently joined the opposition and renewed his mandate on
Sunday. The only significant victories for the opposition were in Lara,
where again the governor Henri Falcón had been originally elected on a
PPT ticket with Chávez’s support and now won against PSUV candidate
Reyes Reyes (56 – 43) and Miranda where, as we said, Capriles Radonski
beat Elias Jaua (52-47). Even here, the PSUV will have a majority in the
state legislative council.
The sum of the total votes of official PSUV candidates was 4.5
million, while the opposition received 3.5 million.
The rate of abstention is usually higher in regional elections than it is
in presidential elections. This time the turnout was 53%, as opposed to
64% in 2008 when the opposition mobilized all its forces, and 44% in
2004 with a demoralized opposition which had just been beaten in the
presidential recall referendum. It is clear that abstention was higher
amongst opposition voters, demoralized by the October 7 elections.
The defeat of the opposition – for that is what it is – will further
aggravate the internal contradictions amongst the amalgam of parties
which compose it, particularly now that they might be forced to select a
new presidential candidate for a possible early election in 2013. A report
in the Venezuelan News Agency (AVN) graphically described the somber
and demoralized mood in the opposition headquarters as the results were

eing announced: “So, at the end of the day, this country is
chavista” ("Osea, qué arrecho, ¡este país es chavista!") complained those
present.
The reactionary Spanish newspaper ABC, known for its hatred of
Chávez and the Bolivarian revolution, did not mince its words: “These
results reveal widespread popular support for ‘chavismo’, despite the
absence of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez… On the contrary, these
election results represent a serious blow to the Venezuelan opposition
which hoped that Chavez’s frail health would mean a bigger share of
power for the MUD”.
Some opposition commentators now complain that the PSUV
benefited from the “sympathy” vote for Chavez who was undergoing
cancer treatment in Cuba as the elections took place. This might be the
case, but still does not explain why people feel sympathy for Chavez: it is
because he represents the Bolivarian revolution! In any case when Chavez
announced he was to undergo surgery again, the opposition complained
that “he had hidden his real state of health in order to win the presidential
elections” and now they are complaining that his real state of health
helped the PSUV win the regional elections. The truth is that the
Bolivarian revolution still commands overwhelming support amongst the
Venezuelan masses and the so-called “democratic” opposition has been
defeated… again.
However, it would be dangerous to fall into empty triumphalism. Not
all is well in the Bolivarian camp. As we have warned before, there has
been a growing current of discontent among the revolutionary masses
against the bureaucracy and the reformists within the movement. This was
particularly the case with the way candidates for governors were chosen:
from above, without any involvement of the rank and file.
In a number of states we have already seen governors elected as
“revolutionaries”, with the support of president Chávez, jumping over to
the opposition (in Lara, Amazonas, Aragua, Monagas, etc.). In the case of
the Andean state of Trujillo, the “Bolivarian” governor Cabezas had
become so unpopular that he had to be removed as a candidate by
president Chávez as there was a near uprising amongst the revolutionary

masses in the state when the decision was announced. The new PSUV
candidate, Rangel Silva was seen as closer to the will of the people and
got an amazing 81% against the opposition’s 17%. Read More
Health, Education, Science and Welfare:
Most doctors don't warn pregnant patients about environmental risks
When Dr. Darragh Flynn sits down with her pregnant patients at her
San Francisco office, she preaches healthy habits: Don’t smoke or
drink, eat nutritious foods and take vitamins. She also advises them to
avoid gasoline fumes, pesticides, certain types of fish and some
household cleaners and cosmetics. “It's only for nine months,” she
tells them. “Let someone else put gas in the car.” But Flynn is in the
minority. A new nationwide survey of 2,600 obstetricians and
gynecologists found that most do not warn their pregnant patients
about chemicals in food, consumer products or the environment that
could endanger their fetuses. More than half said they don’t warn
about mercury, and hardly any of them give advice about lead,
pesticides, air pollution or chemicals in plastics or cosmetics. Many
doctors say their priority is to protect pregnant women from more
immediate dangers, and that warning them about environmental risks
may create undue anxiety. Some say they don't feel confident in their
ability to discuss the topics. “As a society, we have a lot of work to do
in terms of informing women of dangers,” said Dr. Naomi Stotland,
lead investigator for the survey.
By
Jane Kay
Environmental Health News

purpleglobetrotter/flickr
Fish, a low-calorie protein rich in omega-3 fatty acids critical for a baby’s brain
development, can also be contaminated with high levels of methylmercury.
When Dr. Darragh Flynn sits down with her pregnant patients, she
preaches healthy habits: Don’t smoke or drink, eat nutritious foods and
take vitamins.
She also advises them to avoid gasoline fumes, pesticides, certain
types of fish and some household cleaners and cosmetics.
“It's only for nine months,” she tells them. “Let someone else put gas
in the car.”
But Flynn is in the minority. A new nationwide survey of 2,600
obstetricians and gynecologists found that most do not warn their pregnant
patients about chemicals in food, consumer products or the environment
that could endanger their fetuses. More than half said they don’t warn
about mercury, and hardly any of them give advice about lead, pesticides,
air pollution or chemicals in plastics or cosmetics.

Many doctors say their priority is to protect pregnant women from
more immediate dangers, and that warning them about environmental risks
may create undue anxiety. Some say they don't feel confident in their
ability to discuss the topics.
“We're worrying about pre-term labor, obesity and hypertension,”
said Dr. Jeanne A. Conry, an ob/gyn at Kaiser Permanente in Roseville,
Calif., and incoming president of a national medical society. “Obesity
trumps almost everything. We put our time and energy there, and don't
dwell on some of the other things we should be aware of.”
More than 100 chemicals
Virtually all pregnant women have chemicals in their bodies that
might harm fetal development.
Monitoring of pregnant women found about 100 different chemicals,
with 43 of them in all women tested. Lead, mercury, toluene, perchlorate,
bisphenol A, flame retardants, perfluorinated compounds, organochlorine
pesticides and phthalates are among the chemicals, according to the U.S.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's nationwide testing program.
Studies suggest that for many these compounds, low-level exposures
in the womb seem to disrupt development of the brain or reproductive
systems. Others may raise the risk of birth defects, or lead to cancer,
immune problems, asthma, fertility problems or other disorders later in
life.
Yet that information is not reaching most women who are pregnant or
may become pregnant.
Almost all of the doctors in the new, nationwide survey, conducted by
University of California, San Francisco researchers, said they routinely
discussed smoking, alcohol, diet and weight gain. Eighty-six percent also
said they discuss workplace hazards, and 68 percent warn about secondhand
smoke.
“We're worrying about pre-term labor, obesity and
hypertension. Obesity trumps almost everything. We put our time and
energy there, and don't dwell on some of the other things we should be
aware of.” -Dr. Jeanne A. Conry, Kaiser Permanente

But only 19 percent said they talk to their pregnant patients about
pesticides and only 12 percent discuss air pollution. Forty-four percent
said they routinely discussed mercury with pregnant women. Eleven
percent said they mention volatile organic compounds, which are fumes
emitted by gasoline, paints and solvents.
Even fewer physicians warned their patients about two chemicals in
consumer products that are often in the news: bisphenol A (BPA) at 8
percent and phthalates at 5 percent. Nine percent of the doctors told their
patients about polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), industrial compounds
often found in fish.
The results show a disconnect between environmental health research
and what the physicians do – and do not – tell their patients, said Patrice
Sutton, a research scientist at University of California, San Francisco's
Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment who helped design
the survey. The goal of the study, which was discussed at a recent
conference but is not yet published, was to try to break down obstacles
that keep health messages from pregnant women.
For instance, even though the dangers of mercury are well
established, only four out of every 10 doctors said they discuss the
contamination with pregnant women.
Since 2004, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Food
and Drug Administration have warned pregnant women to avoid eating
high-mercury fish such as swordfish and shark and to limit consumption
of albacore tuna. In addition, the American Congress of Obstetricians and
Gynecologists issues statements to its members on the importance of
patients avoiding mercury in fish.
Yet an estimated 300,000 newborns each year – one out of every 14 – are
exposed to levels of methylmercury that exceed the guidelines that the
EPA set to avoid neurological effects in fetuses. Mercury in the womb has
been tied to reduced IQs and other effects on developing brains.
Dr. Naomi Stotland said warnings over mercury could result in
women eating less fish, which is a low-calorie protein rich in omega-3
fatty acids critical for a baby’s brain development.

“Mercury in fish is a tricky one,” said Stotland, who practices at San
Francisco General Hospital and was lead investigator on the survey. “Fish
is such a good protein source for women, and they're probably not eating
enough of it. I give out printed materials that direct them to fish with
lower levels of mercury,” such as sardines, herring, pollock, shrimp and
scallops.
“Most of my patients don't even read food labels. Are they carrying
around the fish list? I worry, and I know other colleagues worry, that
women will replace fish with processed hamburger. I don't think it's such a
simple message.”
Dr. Jane Hightower, who practices internal medicine in San
Francisco, agreed that the warnings are confusing but said ob/gyns should
take more time to learn about food and contaminants.
“Most of my patients don't ask me about environmental
exposures. They don't ask about cosmetic products, bisphenol A or
organic foods. Most don't have high-speed Internet access, and don't
read articles and get alerts.” -Dr. Naomi Stotland, San Francisco
General Hospital
“To make ends meet, there are too many patients crammed into the
schedule. Food science literature and environmental toxicant literature are
difficult to sort out, and the doctors are not being taught about nutrition or
contaminants in school,” said Hightower, who has authored a book and
several scientific journals reports about unhealthful levels of mercury in
fish.
Despite evidence that environmental factors contribute to many
health problems, medical students report fewer than six hours of
environmental health training, according to University of Texas School of
Medicine researchers.
“The whole medical establishment needs to look at themselves and
start evaluating old practices that might not be so safe for the patient in the
long run," Hightower said.
Class differences

Flynn holds pre-pregnancy counseling sessions with her patients,
who are mostly middle-to-upper class women living in San Francisco. She
gets a lot of questions about environmental chemicals, sometimes from
prospective mothers and sometimes from the mothers of young patients.
She said the role of the ob/gyn is changing as environmental chemicals are
gaining more attention as agents of defects and disease. Read More
Daily News Digest December 17, 2012
Quote of the Day:
World Health Organization Fukushima Cover Up:
BERLIN — A German doctor and member of a Nobel
Peace Prize-winning physicians' group has criticized a
World Health Organization report on the Fukushima
nuclear catastrophe for underestimating its impact on
human health.
In a research paper, Alex Rosen said the WHO report,
published in May this year on estimated radiation doses
received by residents near the crippled Fukushima No. 1
nuclear plant, was compiled mainly by officials related to the
International Atomic Energy Agency, which promotes the
use of atomic energy for peaceful purposes. — World Health
Organization (WHO) downplayed health effects of nuclear
crisis on Fukushima residents: German physician
Image of the Day:
Videos of the Day:
For the freedom of Palestinians Roger Waters at the UN
Gold price manipulation? Who's messing with it and why?

War: Big Government's Best Friend: The biggest killers on the planet
Mumia Abu Jamal - Stateless State
Just days after U.S. made Israeli F-16’s bombed homes and buildings
in Gaza, verbal bombs have been launched at the West Bank – Palestine’s
other half – for daring to go to the UN to try to gain a stepping stone to
statehood.
The Palestinian political representatives from the West Bank,
including former PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) head,
Mahmoud Abbas, won the designation of a “non-member state” in the UN,
the closest thing they’ve come to statehood since the Israeli occupation
began in 1967.
The United Nations voted 138 in support, 9 against, and some 40
states abstaining. The US and Israel political and media classes
immediately damned the vote, claiming it was an impediment to the socalled
‘peace process’.
In fact, it was the peace process that was all but dead, moribund after
decades of talks that strengthened Israel while leaving Palestinian lands
broken, walled and under a wave of repression that barely allows it to
breathe.
The UN vote showed how most of the world’s nations couldn’t bring
themselves to vote against Palestinian efforts. Again, only 9 countries, the
US, Israel, Canada and islands like Micronesia voted against the
resolution.
Despite the US-Israeli downplaying of it, this was a political win for
the Palestinians –even if their day to day life couldn’t be more disastrous.
But those are the perils of the Occupation, and the lebensraum
(German for ‘living room’ – as in land hunger) of the Zionist, settler state.
Over 60 years ago, shortly after Israel’s founding, the influential
Israeli newspaper, Ha’aretz, wrote an editorial outlining why Israel was
supported by the US (and other Western powers). The editorial read:
Therefore, strengthening Israel helps the Western powers to
maintain equilibrium and stability in the Middle East.

Israel is to be a watchdog….if for any reason the Western
powers should sometimes prefer to close their eyes, Israel could
be relied on to punish one or several neighboring states whose
discourtesy toward the West went beyond the bounds of the
permissible.
These words were published in 1951. It’s a new century – and same
old plan.
That’s why the US stood, now almost alone, against Palestine.
End Wall Street’s Wars!
Occupy Wall Street!
Occupy Wall Street is the Only Organization
That Identifies The Enemy —
The 1% That Own and Control The Wealth!
1960s The Realist — One Nation Under God/1%
(Unlike The Trade Union Misleaders
Nor The Misleaders Of The Oppressed
Who Strive To Be In ‘Partnership’ With The 1%)
1960s The Realist — One Nation Under God/1%
(Unlike The Trade Union Misleaders
Nor The Misleaders Of The Oppressed
Who Strive To Be In ‘Partnership’ With The 1%)
Occupy Wall Street — ‘We Are The 99%’
The resistance continues at Liberty Square:

U.S.:
US judge prompts outrage after saying:
‘If she didn’t want sex, her body should have just shut down’ i
n rape case, and reducing sentence of attacker by ten years
Judge Johnson was making the comments in the case of a man who
threatened to mutilate the face and genitals of his ex-girlfriend with a
heated screwdriver
Rob Williams
A US judge has prompted outrage after saying that a rape victim
didn't put up a fight during her assault and that if someone doesn't want
sex, the body 'will not permit that to happen.'
Judge Derek Johnson's comments, which echo those of outgoing U.S.
representative Todd Akin, who used the phrase 'legitimate rape' and said
women who are the victims of rape rarely get pregnant, have drawn
widespread condemnation.
The states Commission on Judicial Performance has also attacked the
the judge for taking ten years off the recommended sentence for the rapist
in the case, imposing a six-year sentence instead.
"In the commission's view, the judge's remarks reflected outdated,
biased and insensitive views about sexual assault victims who do not 'put
up a fight.' Such comments cannot help but diminish public confidence

and trust in the impartiality of the judiciary," wrote Lawrence Simi, the
commission's chairman.
Judge Johnson was making the comments in the case of a man who
threatened to mutilate the face and genitals of his ex-girlfriend with a
heated screwdriver. The man also beat her with a metal baton and made
violent threats before committing rape and forcing oral copulation.
According to police reports Judge Johnson said: 'I’m not a
gynecologist, but I can tell you something, if someone doesn’t want to
have sexual intercourse, the body shuts down. The body will not permit
that to happen unless a lot of damage in inflicted, and we heard nothing
about that in this case.
'That tells me that the victim in this case, although she wasn’t
necessarily willing, she didn’t put up a fight.'
The commission, which stated it only learnt of the remarks in May,
10 to 0 that Johnson deserved his public admonishment.
The judge, who has been with Orange County Superior Court since
2000 also said the rape was 'technical' and not 'a real, live criminal case.'
To treat this case like the rape cases that we all hear about is an insult
to victims of rape,'the judge is reported to have told the LA Times.
He is also reported to have said: 'I think it’s an insult. I think it
trivializes a rape.'
Judge Johnson has since apologised for his comments.
Private Prison Companies
Profit Off Laws that Define Immigrants as Criminals
by
Laura Carlsen

How a nation uses its power to deny a person’s freedom has always
been a critical measure of authoritarian rule. Massive incarceration based
on race, ethnic origin or nationality, political beliefs, class, sexual
orientation, age or other inherent characteristics is a form of tyranny.
Yet few people realize that this is happening on an enormous scale
here, in the United States of America. Immigrants make up the latest
market for a booming private prison industry.
The U.S. locks up the highest percentage of its population in the
world—730 per 100,000, nearly two and a half million people. Although it
has only 5% of the population, 25% of the world’s prison population is
behind bars in the U.S.
It wasn’t always like this. This huge growth in the prison population
has taken place just over the past two decades, when the imprisonment
rate per capita surged by 45%.
It’s not that the U.S. experienced a major crime wave. The opposite is
true. Crime and especially violent crime steadily decreased over the same
period. Two factors–the lock-up of mostly poor, black or Latino
recreational drug users and of immigrants–now account for more than
80% of people behind bars in our country. Draconian drug prohibitionist
policies and new laws that criminalize undocumented immigrants have
flooded the nation’s prisons.
In other words, while actual behavior in society improved overall, the
U.S. government broadened the criteria for depriving people of their most

fundamental liberties. This wide net now traps more men, women and
children than at any other time in history.
There’s a reason for that.
For-Profit Prisons and the Criminalization of Immigrants
In the mid-eighties, the U.S. government began to outsource jailing
people. The first contract, in 1984, went to Corrections Corporation of
America (CCA), still the largest for-profit prison company in the country.
Private prisons moved into communities left behind by the globalized
economy. Heavily subsidized by taxpayer money even before receiving
public contracts, they built thousands of cells throughout the country.
Then they had to fill those cells. How do you drum up business if
you’re a for-profit prison industry? By making sure there’s a steady stream
of prisoners. For every human being sent behind their bars, CCA or the
second giant in the industry GEO Group, make approximately $122 a day,
per head. CCA reported $1.7 billion in gross revenue last year, nearly half
from government contracts.
That’s a powerful incentive to lock people up. In recent years, the
most effective strategy for “market expansion” in the private prison
industry has been to criminalize immigrants.
Latinos, the New Prison Majority
A series of recent laws have redefined undocumented immigration
from an administrative infraction to a felony led to the creation of scores
of migrant detention centers, built and run by the private prison industry.
Operation Streamline, a policy begun in 2005, mandates that nearly all
undocumented immigrants crossing the Southern border in certain areas be
prosecuted through the federal criminal justice system.
A Grassroots Leadership report on Operation Streamline shows that
federal districts along the Texas-Mexico border have spent more than $1.2
billion on the criminal detention and incarceration of border-crossers since
the program began in 2005, with more than 135,000 migrants criminally
prosecuted in these two border districts under two sections of the federal
code that make unauthorized entry and re-entry a crime. The report found
a 2,722% increase in prosecutions for entry, and a 267% increase in
prosecutions for re-entry, compared to corresponding data for 2002.

The round-up of immigrants means that half of immigrant detainees
spend time in prison compared to just a quarter a decade ago. This human
bounty hunting shatters lives and families and costs taxpayers billions of
dollars, much of it paid to the private prison industry.
Lobbying for Lock-up
It’s not surprising that for-profit prison companies have lobbied hard
in Congress to maintain their cash cows—the drug war and the
criminalization of immigrants. The CCA 2010 Annual Report clearly
states the need for criminalization to continue by warning its investors:
“The demand for our facilities could be adversely affected by the
relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction or parole
standards and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of
certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws. For
instance, any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or
illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted
and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional
facilities to house them.”(p.19)
The report notes that three federal governmental agencies accounted
for 43% of total revenues in fiscal year 2010 ($717.8 million)—the Bureau
of Prisons (15%), Immigration and Customs Enforcement-ICE (12%) and
the US Marshalls Service (16%). It concludes, “We are dependent upon
the governmental agencies with which we have contracts to provide
inmates for our managed facilities.”
An AP story found that the private prison companies spent more than
$45 million in lobbying and campaigns in the last decade. According to a
Justice Policy Institute report, CCA spent an average of $900,000 a year
on federal lobbying over the past decade. That figure doesn’t count state
lobbying, where private prisons participate actively, or campaign
contributions. Read More
Environment:
Bolivia at UN talks: The climate is not for sale!

“We did not come here to turn the climate into a business, or to
protect businesses of them who want to continue aggravating the
climate crisis, destroying Mother Earth. We came here to protect the
future of humanity.”
Statement by Jose Antonio Zamora Gutierrez, Minister of
Environment and Water for the Plurinational State of Bolivia, at the UN
Conference on Climate Change (COP18) in Doha. C&C thanks Bolivia
Rising for the translation.
Mr. President of the COP, distinguished Heads of State of countries
of the world, Ministers, Officials, delegates and representatives of social
organizations, indigenous peoples and communities and farmers of the
world, receive a greeting from the Plurinational State of Bolivia and our
President Evo Morales Ayma.
The planet and humanity are in serious danger of extinction. The
forests are in danger, biodiversity is in danger, the rivers and the oceans
are in danger, the earth is in danger. This beautiful human community
inhabiting our Mother Earth is in danger due to the climate crisis.
The causes of the climate crisis are directly related to the
accumulation and concentration of wealth in few countries and in small
social groups, excessive and wasteful mass consumption, under the belief
that having more is living better, polluting production and disposable
goods to enrich wealth increasing the ecological footprint, as well as the
excessive and unsustainable use of renewable and non-renewable natural
resources at a high environmental cost for extractive activities for
production.
A wasteful, consumerist, exclusionary, greedy civilization generating
wealth in some hands and poverty everywhere, has produced pollution and
climate crisis. We did not come here to negotiate climate. We did not come
here to turn the climate into a business, or to protect businesses of them
who want to continue aggravating the climate crisis, destroying Mother
Earth. We have come with concrete solutions.
The climate is not for sale, ladies and gentlemen.
Mr. President, the withdrawal of some developed countries of the
Kyoto protocol and avoiding of their commitments is an attack on the

Mother Earth and to life. The problem of climate crisis will not be solved
with political declarations, but with specific commitments.
We will not pay the climate debt of developed countries to
developing countries. They, developed countries, must fulfill their
responsibility. While some developed countries do their best to avoid their
commitments to solve the climate crisis, developing countries are making
greater efforts to reduce emissions, and paying the price of a climate crisis
and that everyday leaves droughts, floods, hurricanes, typhoons, etc.
The climate crisis leaves us poorer, deprives us of food, destroys our
economy, creates insecurity, and creates migration. Climate change will
make the poor poorer. Poor and developing countries have a great
challenge: the eradication of poverty. And we’ll have to face a climate
crisis for which we are not guilty.
In addition to adapting to climate change we must ensure security,
education, health, energy for the population, provision of water and
sanitation services, delivery communication and infrastructure services,
job creation, provision of housing, reconstruction due to loss and damage
caused by extreme weather events, adaptation actions, among others.
Mr. President, We denounce to the whole world the pressure from
some countries for the approval of new carbon market mechanisms,
although these have shown to be ineffective in the fight against climate
change, and that only represent business opportunities. This is a climate
change conference, not a conference for carbon business. We did not come
here to do business with the death of Mother Earth betting on the power of
markets as a solution. We are here to protect our Mother Earth, we came
here to protect the future of humanity.
Yesterday forests were turned into carbon markets businesses, and the
same was done with the land, they tried to oceans and, worse, to
agriculture. Agriculture is food security, employment, life, and culture.
Agriculture is along with the land, mountains and forests, the house and
the food of our indigenous and peasant communities.
We will not allow the replacement of the obligations of developed
countries with carbon markets. The planet is not for sale, nor our life.

It is essential that developed countries take the lead with mitigation
actions with concrete results and high ambitions and that developing
countries do their part within their respective capabilities, and according to
financial and technological transfers, solving problems of poverty.
Mr. President, In Bolivia we have the vision of Living Well as a new
approach for civilization and cultural alternative to capitalism, and in this
context we focus our efforts to create a balance and harmony between
society and nature.
Bolivia, presented here concrete proposals to strengthen the global climate
system. We have proposed the creation of the Joint Mechanism for
Mitigation and Adaptation for integrated and sustainable management of
forests, not based on markets, to strengthen community, indigenous and
peasant management of our forests, which can promote climate mitigation
actions without transferring the responsibilities of developed countries to
developing countries.
Also, we promote consistently the creation of an international
mechanism to address loss and damage resulting from natural causes and
impacts of climate change in developing countries. Our country will not
promote carbon market mechanisms such as REDD, and will respect and
strengthen community management of forests.
Mr. President, We will not allow the people of the world to pay the
bill for the irresponsibility and greed. It’s time to give concrete answers to
humanity and Mother Earth. Let’s be careful of the intentions of some
developed parties to make us feel resigned in front of this terrible reality,
and admit the inertia and inaction of those countries that are historically
responsible of global warming, sending us a message that is better to have
a “pragmatic” attitude, which of course will condemn to cook planet and
the extinction of the humanity.
Mr. President, brothers and sisters of the world, take these words as a
commitment to life and Mother Earth. With this conviction we will be
guided to meet the challenge we have in this conference, the challenge of
saving the planet, and not to negotiate our climate. Thank you Mr.
President.

Mr. President, brothers and sisters of the world, take these words as a
commitment to life and Mother Earth. With this conviction we will be
guided to meet the challenge we have in this conference, the challenge of
saving the planet, and not to negotiate our climate. Thank you Mr.
President.
Fracking:
Nuclear Fallout: Ongoing Tragedy/Disaster In Japan:
A Mitigation Con Game: The Rape of Fukushima Dai-Ichi
by
Russell D. Hoffman
Dressed all in white from head to toe (including a respirator), it was a
shotgun wedding. Or worse, a rape. But one way or the other, U. S.
Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials were out to force themselves
and their radiation on a helpless Japan — again. Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
1945. More than a hundred thousand dead, perhaps as many born
deformed, or stillborn. Then there was Monju in 1995, and Tokaimura in
1997, and again in 1999. And then Fukushima Dai-ichi, 2011.
And now they’re back. The NRC delegation wants Japan to restart
more of its nuclear reactors. They’ve been pushing Japan for more than a
year, but the citizens of Japan have been opposing restart vehemently.
American nuclear officials toured the stricken Fukushima Dai-ichi
nuclear power plant. NRC Chairman Allison Macfarlane, who led the
delegation, praised the “courage” of the Japanese nuclear workers at the
Fukushima Dai-ichi and nearly-as-damaged Fukushima Dai-ni nuclear
power plants. The delegation took an elevator to the top of the spent fuel
pool at Fukushima Dai-ichi Unit 4, the most dangerous place on earth.
They called the accident a tragedy, and said all countries need independent
regulators, who need to operate in an “open and transparent manner.”
We, the citizens of California who live near the also-not-operating
San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant, can tell the Japanese people exactly
what that will mean.

We’ve been fighting for “open and transparent” nuclear regulation,
and independent regulators, for decades. So we can tell the Japanese
people that the #1 obstacle we have faced in achieving that — is the NRC
itself!
And although MacFarlane hasn’t been in office long, there’s no
reason to expect a change. No changes appears in the offing here in
California, where the next NRC meeting about San Onofre will be held
with the pubic in absentia — 2700 miles away, in Maryland.
The NRC continues to work in collusion with the nuclear industry to
keep old, dilapidated nuclear power plants open forever — 20 year
licenses automatically become 40, then 60, then who-knows-what. It
doesn’t seem to matter to the NRC that everywhere they look, reactors are
leaking tritium. It doesn’t seem to matter that there is a “waste
confidence” issue that federal judges have ruled needs to be resolved. And
it doesn’t seem to matter than all over America, nuclear power plants are
crumbling due to age. Parts are rusting out and failing abruptly (Davis-
Besse’s “hole in the reactor pressure vessel head” in 2002 is a classic
example, and Vermont Yankee’s collapsed cooling system in 2007 is
another). Major components have failed at numerous nuclear power
plants, and it’s only a matter of time before there’s a U. S. meltdown. Will
it be San Onofre?
And what will Macfarlane and the NRC do when there is a U. S.
meltdown?
Mitigate! Mitigate?
What does THAT mean? Those who have been following nuclear
issues for decades (like myself) know it means NOTHING. After a
nuclear accident, the poisons blanket the area, thousands of lethal doses
per square mile, maybe tens of thousands, maybe millions.
Accidents permanently displace people and contaminate the land.
Hundreds of square miles around Fukushima Dai-ichi are no longer
inhabitable. So what does “mitigation” mean? Nothing.
Imagine if we were to lose ALL of Southern California due to ONE
industrial accident! That’s what happened in Japan. San Onofre could
make Los Angeles AND San Diego, and all points in-between,

uninhabitable for generations in just a few hours. Fukushima is still
spewing poisons into the air and water — hence the white suits and
respirators for the visitors and workers. San Onofre can do the same
thing.
Macfarlane said the Fukushima accident “profoundly changed the
nuclear safety landscape and brought a new urgency to improving nuclear
safety worldwide.” But here in Southern California, the NRC won’t force
San Onofre to stop trying to restart a broken, old, dilapidated, nuclear
reactor! And there is NO transparency, no openness, no independence!
Citizens cannot speak to regulators in an adjudicatory process, that is:
They can be lied to. No official records of the meetings and hearings are
kept, no one is under oath. Promises are made and broken. Nothing
changes.
Macfarlane said we’ve “learned a considerable amount” since the
3/11/11 accident. Have we? Here in California is a perfect opportunity to
shut down a dangerous old reactor near numerous earthquake faults AND
in a tsunami inundation zone. But instead the utility is trying to spend
billions of dollars (of ratepayer’s money) to keep San Onofre operating.
And meanwhile, the utility actively blocks or delays numerous renewable
energy projects in order to appear to “need” San Onofre. And the state
regulators have no shame: They give San Onofre everything it needs.
Friday Macfarlane will meet with Japanese regulators and then, this
weekend, with officials from around the “global nuclear regulatory”
community. Let’s hope when she gets back to America, she converts lip
service into action.
Russell D. Hoffman lives in Carlsbad, California. He is an
educational software developer and bladder cancer survivor, as well as a
collector of military and nuclear historical documents and books. He is the
author and programmer of the award-winning Animated Periodic Table of
the Elements. He can be reached at: rhoffman@animatedsoftware.com
EnergyNews:
06:41 PM EST on December 16th, 2012 | One comment

NHK Fukushima Documentary: “It’s like being in jail” — “It’s like
we did something wrong and got locked up” (VIDEO)
04:07 PM EST on December 16th, 2012 | 4 comments
Gundersen on New Video Exposé: We now have the evidence that
Fairewinds was right — “Containments can blow-up” (AUDIO)
03:26 PM EST on December 16th, 2012 | 5 comments
New highway may be constructed around giant sinkhole — Official:
Could be built if La. 70 is “compromised”
09:44 PM EST on December 15th, 2012 | 14 comments
Jiji: Cover-up of true radiation levels Fukushima residents were
exposed to? WHO accused of underestimating disaster’s impact on
human health
07:19 PM EST on December 15th, 2012 | 10 comments
New Images of NY Oil Spill — Coast Guard obscuring slick?
(PHOTOS)
02:09 PM EST on December 15th, 2012 | 7 comments
Top Expert: Fears Napoleonville salt dome to continue to break up
below giant sinkhole; “An underground Mt. Everest” — Over 50
caverns inside, some with explosive gas
12:50 PM EST on December 15th, 2012 | 8 comments
Kyodo: M10 quake possible, says study — An hour of shaking —
Tsunami lasting for several days
Ongoing Gulf of Mexico Oil Disaster:
Oil Spill Attorney Stuart Smith’s Blog:
Weekend Environmental Must-Reads – December 15-16, 2012

California Prepares First Fracking Regulations, Joining
Nationwide Debate
The controversial drilling technique known as hydraulic fracturing
has created an oil and gas boom around the country – and that’s left state
governments grappling with how to regulate it.
Alto Pass board bans fracking
Although unlikely to occur in Alto Pass, village board members took
a symbolic stand against hydraulic fracturing this week by unanimously
approving a ban against the practice.
Pa. fracking has been a disaster
All those bucolic scenes of gas wells set against a blue sky are
fantasies. I know because I have a farm in upstate Pennsylvania in Tioga
County. Nearby there are many dirty, polluting gas wells. They spew out
carcinogenic chemicals, some radioactive. Tons of methane gas, 20 times
worse than carbon dioxide, contribute to greenhouse gas, according to the
EPA. Children near gas wells in Texas had three times the rate of asthma
as those in other parts of the state.
The Number of Fracking Trade Secrets in Texas Will Likely
Surprise You
What’s in the water? Or, to be precise, what’s in the mix of water,
sand and chemicals that oil and gas drillers are sending deep underground
in the drilling process known as hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking?”
Taking a hard look at fracking from the ground up
Your coverage of the fracking conference held by Maryland
environmental, faith and health organizations (“Activists rally for fracking
conference”, Dec. 9) states that activists met “to organize a push for a
legislative ban” on fracking. The focus of the discussion was actually to
put a legislative “pause” or moratorium on fracking into law that would
allow science, open debate and democracy to ultimately decide the fate of
fracking in Maryland.
Fracking’s Lure, Trap And Endless Damage
Say what you will about Yoko Ono’s art, there is no denying that she
is unique. Who else will put several $100,000 full-page notices in The
New York Times displaying only the word “Peace” or “Imagine Peace” in

small type with the rest of the page blank? No elaboration, no examples of
the ravages of war or mention of people “waging peace” around the
country and world. Inscrutable, yes. Effective, who knows, except maybe
Yoko Ono?
Fracking Fudged: Looking at Illinois Chamber of Commerce’s
Job and Economic Numbers
The Illinois Chamber of Commerce yesterday released a pretty,
remarkably rosy sounding report, speculating on the potential impacts that
fracking might have on Illinois’ economy. It is, as I say, remarkable stuff.
“Natural gas development could create more than 45,000 jobs” according
to the “first comprehensive look at Illinois jobs” that could be created
when fracking comes. The Chamber’s spokesman has even invoked the
“Beverly Hillbillies” in conjunction with the promise of fracking. It is
interesting to bring up fictional characters to promote a supposedly realitybased
report. None the less, as a native of Southern Illinois, I was
intrigued.
Eco-group hails Westchester County for fracking wastewater ban
A coalition of health and environmental groups gathered in White
Plains today to congratulate the Westchester County Board of Legislators
for unanimously voting to prohibit the sale, application and disposal of
waste products from natural gas drilling anywhere in the county. The new
law, which applies to all wastewater treatment plants and all roads within
the County, bans the sale of fracking waste, the processing of fracking
waste at wastewater treatment plants, and the spreading of fracking
wastewater on roads including applications for de-icing and dust control
purposes. The groups are urging County Executive Rob Astorino to sign
the bi-partisan legislation immediately.
Deep disposal well fight comes to small town
A signature battle of the energy boom, a public fight over a wastewater
deep disposal well, plays out amid scientific uncertainty over safety
in a small town.
This fracking fantasy is the delusion of fossil fuel addiction

Shale gas may possibly offset the decline in the UK’s North Sea
supplies. But David Cameron and George Osborne’s dreams of an energy
revolution are a dangerous hallucination
Sinkhole prompts road study
State highway officials plan to start early next year with a six-month
study into the feasibility of an alternative route around an 8-acre sinkhole
in northern Assumption Parish.
Telling truth may land BP employee in jail
If the government has its way, Kurt Mix will go to jail for telling the
truth.
That’s the only conclusion that can be drawn by comparing the
government’s claims in two separate criminal cases related to the
Deepwater Horizon – one against BP filed last month and one against Mix,
the rank-and-file BP engineer who had nothing to do with the accident
itself.
Louisiana river project sparks contentious debate
To coastal scientists, releasing thousands of gallons of fresh water
into southern Louisiana’s briny swampland would help revitalize wetlands
that have vanished over the years.
To St. Bernard Parish oysterman Sam Slavich, the thought is like a
noose tightening around his livelihood. Freshwater diversions that were
opened to repel crude from the 2010 BP oil spill may have contributed to
70% of his oyster harvests dying.
Oil Spill Threatens Bird Sanctuary Off Staten Island
Oil from a barge spilled into the waters off Staten Island, spreading to
a bird sanctuary on an island in Newark Bay, the Coast Guard said on
Saturday.
The spill was detected shortly after 11 p.m. Friday at May Ship
Repair, said Petty Officer Erik Swanson, a Coast Guard spokesman. Petty
Officer Swanson said that fuel oil was being transferred from a barge
called Boston 30 to another barge, DBL 25, when workers noticed that it
was also darkening the water between the vessels.
Chevron to pay $155 million for Brazil oil spill

US oil giant Chevron has agreed to pay 310 million reales ($155
million) to Brazil for an oil spill last year that fouled beaches in Rio de
Janeiro, officials said Saturday.
Pingpong robots could clean up oil spills
If one robot can accomplish a singular task, then much more could be
done with hundreds of them, including cleaning up huge oil spills, shows a
study.
Pipeline leaked more than 2,000 gallons of gasoline in
Hillsborough
More than 2,000 gallons of gasoline spilled last week from a pipeline
at the intersection of Route 206 and New Amwell Road, according to
officials from Buckeye Pipe Line Co. L.P. on Saturday.
That is a significant increase from the company’s original estimate of
25 gallons.
Worries follow pipeline route through Pawnee’s ancestral
grounds
Landowners who want the Keystone XL pipeline off the ground
where they live often speak on behalf of generations of Nebraska families.
Montana reviews oil pipeline easement request
The Montana Land Board is preparing to sell easements to a
Canadian company so that the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline can run
through the state as it crosses some of Montana’s most important rivers.
Texas Landowner Gabe Cordova Says Keystone Pipeline Forces
Him To Give Up Land
The Keystone Pipeline may be held up in Congress, but the private
sector’s moving forward. Just ask Gabe Cordova, a Texas landowner who
says Trans Canada is pushing him off his land.
International nuclear safety meet starts in Fukushima
A three-day international conference aimed at ensuring nuclear plant
safety–in the wake of the nation’s worst nuclear accident last year–kicked
off Saturday in Koriyama, Fukushima Prefecture.
IAEA, Fukushima Prefecture sign agreement to cooperate on
decontamination, radiation monitoring

The International Atomic Energy Agency and the Fukushima
Prefectural Government agreed Saturday to closely cooperate on
decontamination and radiation monitoring in view of last year’s nuclear
crisis.
No Japan revival unless Fukushima recovers: Minister
Without the recovery of Fukushima, the Japanese prefecture hit by a
devastating earthquake, a tsunami and a nuclear disaster in March last
year, there will be no revival of Japan, the Asian country’s foreign
minister, Koichiro Gemba, has said.
WHO downplayed health effects of nuclear crisis on Fukushima
residents : German physician
A German doctor and member of a Nobel Peace Prize-winning
physicians’ group has criticized a World Health Organization report on the
Fukushima nuclear catastrophe for underestimating its impact on human
health.
Why Japan’s ‘Fukushima 50′ remain unknown
Entering the exclusion zone around the crippled Fukushima nuclear
power plant is an unnerving experience.
It is, strictly speaking, also illegal. It is an old cliché to say that
radiation is invisible. But without a Geiger counter, it would be easy to
forget that this is now one of the most contaminated places on Earth.
Nuclear regulator admits errors in radiation projects all over
Japan
The Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA)’s projections for spread of
radiation showed numerous mistakes in the data of all atomic power plants
in Japan after thorough review, it said Thursday. The NRA carefully
examined in detail all data to make sure that no further mistakes will show
in the projections. With this information, it is expected that the local
governments will restructure its plans or make new ones for the
preparation of nuclear disasters.
Radiation forecast maps corrected again for all nuke plants
The Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) on Dec. 13 released
corrections to all of its radiation forecast maps, which show the likely

spread of radioactive substances from a serious accident at 16 nuclear
power plants across Japan.
Worsening radiation levels at SC nuclear dump go without
cleanup
Radioactive pollution is getting worse on parts of South Carolina’s
nuclear-waste dump near Barnwell, but state regulators say cleaning up the
contaminated groundwater isn’t in their plan.
Black Liberation/Civil Rights:
THIS STRUGGLE NOW
[col. writ. 12/5/12] © ’12 Mumia Abu-Jamal
Friends, comrades, Brothas & Sistas—
We are at a new phase of this struggle; due to your work, I am no
longer on Death Row; I am on ‘slow death row.’
A new place, yes – but, more importantly, a new phase of the struggle
for freedom.

The challenge before us is not to say that which is easy to say; it is to
build the Movement that makes freedom not only possible – but
inevitable.
This, I am convinced, we can do.
We have more than enough tools to reach and touch others; more than
enough to build this Movement; more than enough to break free from the
shackles and chains of legalized bondage.
Let us do so!
Join us! Build a Movement that shakes the earth!
Think about this. What the system has done isn’t about me.
It’s about you!
They want to destroy, weaken or scare you off. They want to stop
you, from organizing, from building, from being.
That’s because you are all examples of Resistance.
You are all examples of the simple power of people saying, “No!”
Never underestimate that power!
So, say “no!” to the Death Penalty!
Say “No!” to Slow Death Row!
Say “No!” to the Prison Industrial Complex!
Back in September, I told you all that We Are the People!
We are the People that can roll back mass incarceration!
We are the people that can roll back the growth –and abolish—
solitary confinement!
We are the People that can change the world as it is; to the world that
we need to come into being!
Join us!
Build the Movement!
Ona Move! Long Live John Africa!
Long Live the Struggle to Bring Change!
Love,
Your brotha,
Mumia
Labor:

Economy:
World:
Israel Immigration Solution — Forced Contraception!:
Shocking Decline in Ethiopian Israeli Birthrate
By
Renee Ghert-Zand
The birthrate among Ethiopians in Israel decreased by a dramatic
50% in the last decade, and Israeli journalist Gal Gabai wanted to know
why. She investigated the issue for “Vacuum,” her documentary series on
Israeli Educational Television, and she discovered some things that left her
very uncomfortable — and will surely leave others equally so.
Educational Television posted Gabai’s 25-minute report, titled
“Where did the children disappear to?” on YouTube on December 6, two
days before it was scheduled to air on channel 23.
In her attempt to find out what the story was behind the shocking
statistic, Gabai interviewed Ethiopian women immigrants and learned
from them that they were given Depo-Provera (a contraceptive injection
containing the hormone progestin administered once every three months)
against their will. While some did not understand what the shots were for,
others felt pressured into taking them in response to alleged threats that
they would otherwise not be allowed to immigrate to Israel. The shots
began in the refugee camps in Gondar, continued in the transition camps in
Addis Ababa, and continued on after their arrivals in Israel. According to
the women’s testimony, this continuity appears to have been a coordinated
effort between the medical staff at the clinics in Ethiopia run by the JDC
and doctors in Israeli hospitals and clinics.
The women, it seems, were never given proper family planning
counseling outlining the various birth control methods, nor were they
given the chance to choose the one with which they felt most comfortable.
What were they given? The clear message that life would be very hard for
them if they were to have large families in Israel.

Some of the women interviewed said they were told that birth control
pills were not suitable for them because they were not capable of
remembering to take them daily. Video shot with a hidden camera during
an Israeli health clinic visit by an Ethiopian immigrant, during which she
gets a Depo-Provera shot, indeed documents healthcare providers
expressing this exact opinion of Ethiopian women.
Gabai interviewed a female gynecologist who expressed shock at
hearing that just about all Ethiopian women are given Depo-Provera shots,
saying that it is rarely prescribed and usually recommended only for
women who are institutionalized or developmentally disabled (in other
words, women who cannot be relied upon to practice other methods
responsibly). A male medical expert, however, said Depo-Provera is no big
deal and that he had heard that it was the primary means of birth control in
Ethiopia in general.
An Ethiopian man who works for the Absorption Ministry denied
knowledge of any program to suppress the Ethiopian birthrate, and three
kessim, or Ethiopian Jewish religious leaders, emphasizing that all is
God’s will, also claimed to know nothing about the alleged forced family
planning practices.
A women who works to absorb Ethiopian children and families into
Israeli society expressed her astonishment at perceiving a “missing
generation” of Ethiopian children and asked why this particular group has
been targeted in this way. “We have other disadvantaged populations in
Israeli society, like the Haredim and Arabs, and no one ever thought to
impose a birthrate suppression plan on them,” she said.
As would be expected, the Health Ministry, the Education Ministry
the Jewish Agency, and the JDC all responded to Gabai’s findings with
letters denying any intervention in family planning issues among the
Ethiopian immigrants.
Gabai proposed a number of motives that could be behind what she
uncovered. It could have been “an intention to do good, to prevent
poverty, and to help with the adjustment to Western urbanized living.” Or,
it could have involved “economic calculations to reduce immigration and

absorption costs… or in the worst case, an attitude that looks at Ethiopian
children as unworthy.”
“This story reeks of racism, paternalism and arrogance. It’s a story to
be ashamed of,” Gabai concluded.
Clearly, more digging needs to be done to get to the bottom of this
story. What remains to be seen is whether or not Gabai has actually blown
the lid off it. Gabai and her bosses obviously care about the issue — but
will enough other Israelis and Jews?
MK Ilan Gilon (Meretz), for one, does care. Following the airing of
Gabai’s report, he submitted an official request to Israel’s attorney general
Yehuda Weinstein for the launching of a criminal investigation. Gilon
emphasized that the women were exposed to drug and hormone related
side effects, of which they were not made aware. “It cannot be that the
serious news of this invasive interference with the rights of Ethiopian
immigrant women’s control over their own bodies will go without
redress,” he wrote.
Health, Education, Science and Welfare:
An Extraordinary Success: Medical Internationalism in Cuba
by
John M. Kirk
“What is the secret of our approach? It lies in the fact that human
capital can achieve far more than financial capital. Human capital implies
not only knowledge but also-crucially important- political awarenes,.
ethics, a sense of solidarity, truly human feelings, a spirit of sacrifice,
heroism and the capacity to do a lot with very little”
Fidel Castro Ruz, at the first graduation of ELAM students, August
2005
The often-repeated quotation, allegedly from Máximo Gómez that
“los cubanos, o no llegan, o se pasan” certainly applies to the programme
of Cuban medical internationalism. 1 Cuba certainly “se ha pasado” in
terms of this policy: as of April 2012 there were 38,868 Cuban medical
professionals working in 66 countries–of whom 15,407 were doctors

(approximately 20% of Cuba’s 75,000 physicians). 2 In Africa some 3,000
Cuban medical personnel are currently working in 35 of the continent’s 54
countries, while in Venezuela alone there are approximately 30,000. 3 But
that is only part of the story, since there are many other significant facets
to Cuban medical internationalism. In all cases it can be argued that
“human capital” is the most important common denominator.
This article, based upon seven years of research and some 70
interviews with Cuban medical personnel, both in Cuba and abroad, seeks
to provide a broad overview of the importance of Cuban medical
internationalism. There are several, very different, programmes of medical
cooperation that have been employed, and this article offers basic data on
their evolution and impact, as well as providing some analysis of the
rationale for their development.
Medical internationalism is not a recent phenomenon, and in fact can
be traced back to 1960–when Cuba’s first medical delegation flew to Chile
following a major earthquake there. The assistance was significant
because Cuba had strained diplomatic relations with the right-wing
Alessandri government at that time, emphasizing clearly the humanitarian
nature of the mission. A larger medical delegation was sent in 1963, when
Cuban medical personnel helped to establish the public health system of
Algeria, following its independence from France. Again, the historical
context is worth noting, since approximately one half of Cuba’s 6,000
physicians had left the country, mainly heading for Miami. In addition
France, under President Charles de Gaulle, was one of Cuba’s few
remaining allies at that time—highlighting Cuba’s commitment to
humanitarianism rather than political gain. The significance of the Cuban
contribution at the time was well emphasized by the Cuban Minister of
Health, Dr. José Ramón Machado Ventura: “Era como un mendigo
ofreciendo ayuda, pero sabíamos que el pueblo argelino la necesitaba
incluso más que nosotros, y que la merecía”. 4 Human capital, as defined
by Fidel Castro, was even at this formative stage of the revolutionary
process once again the fundamental basis for the decision to provide
medical support.

The record of medical collaboration has continued, particularly in
developing and underdeveloped countries, and to date almost 135,000
health workers have participated in overseas missions. To put this in
context, Cuba currently has more medical personnel working abroad on
medical cooperation missions than all of the G-8 nations combined, an
astonishing record.
There are three basic stages in medical internationalism employed by
Cuba–the early years of the revolutionary process (best typified by the
sending of missions to Chile in 1960 and Algeria in 1963); the mid-1970s
(when Cuba, supported by the former Soviet Union and socialist countries
of Europe, developed a particularly strong programme of collaboration in
sub-Saharan Africa); and finally the period beginning in 1990 after the
nuclear meltdown in Chernobyl. This was followed by a major increase in
medical cooperation in the late 1990s, especially in Latin America and the
Caribbean, following the havoc caused by Hurricanes George in Haiti and
Mitch in Central America. This most recent stage has resulted in numerous
international health initiatives, ranging from integrated health programmes
(used in dozens of Third World countries) and providing basic access to
healthcare to millions of people who often had never received any
attention to the extremely successful “Henry Reeve” Emergency Medicine
Contingents which have been employed in natural disasters.
While the record of medical internationalism is a long and
honourable one, the vast majority of Cuba’s contributions have been since
the late-1980s, the focus of this essay. One example is the support given to
victims of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor meltdown in 1986. In all some
26,000 victims (mainly children) have been treated at the Tarará facilities
since the first children arrived in March of 1990 (when they were received
by President Fidel Castro, emphasizing the importance given the initiative
by the government). All medical treatment for patients was provided at no
cost to the patients, as was their accommodation and food. This major
humanitarian gesture is particularly noteworthy since it was initiated just
as the Soviet Union was imploding, resulting in the loss of some 80% of
Cuba’s trade, a decline in GDP of some 30%–and the onset of the “Special
Period” and its many difficulties. From the Cuban perspective, the timing

could not have been worse. For many nations faced with such a profound
crisis, it would not have been surprising if the government had swiftly
terminated such a broad (and expensive) programme. Yet Cuba did not,
again displaying its human capital–and the commitment made to the
children of Chernobyl was respected.
From several visits to the facility and meetings with the patients and
Cuban medical staff it is clear that the attention given to the children was
excellent, and the facility–ably managed by Dr. Julio Medina–has done an
extraordinary job in difficult circumstances. At its height some 350 people
worked at the Tarará facility, which has a small hospital, hundreds of
buildings to house the patients, as well as offering educational and
recreational programmes for patients. The children were first examined by
Cuban medical personnel in their home country, and usually stayed for 45day
periods, although children with more serious ailments were treated by
medical staff in various specialized hospitals in Cuba. The objective was,
quite simply, to offer high quality medical and humanitarian support to
children whose lives had been badly affected by the impact of the nuclear
meltdown. In all 21,874 children and 4,240 adults were treated in Cuba, of
whom 19,497 were younger than 14, and the most common ailments were
related to skin, endocrinological and digestive problems. 5 (At the time of
writing Ukrainian President Victor Yankovich had agreed in late 2011 to
start paying for those costs, but to date has not initiated payment, and
sadly the programme has been placed on hold). Read More
Flesh-Eating Fungus
Responsible for Five Deaths in Wake of Massive Tornado
A fast growing, flesh-eating fungus killed 5 people following a
massive tornado that devastated Joplin, Mo., according to two new studies
based on genomic sequencing by the Translational Genomics Research
Institute (TGen) and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
(CDC).
Health officials should be aware of infections caused by the fungus
Apophysomyces, according to the studies, which tracked 13 people
infected by the pathogen during the Class EF-5 tornado -- the most

powerful category -- whose 200-plus mph winds plowed through Joplin on
May 22, 2011, initially killing 160 and injuring more than 1,000.
The common fungus -- which lives in soil, wood or water -- usually
has no effect on people. But once it is introduced deep into the body
through a blunt trauma puncture wound, it can grow quickly if the proper
medical response is not immediate, the studies said. Five of the 13 people
infected through injuries suffered during the Joplin tornado died within
two weeks.
"Increased awareness of fungi as a cause of necrotizing soft-tissue
infections after a natural disaster is warranted … since early treatment
may improve outcomes," concluded one study published Dec. 6 in The
New England Journal of Medicine.
Using whole genome sequencing, which decoded the billions of
chemical letters in the fungus' DNA, TGen scientists concluded that the
Joplin infections represented the largest documented cluster of
Apophysomyces infections, according to a study published Nov. 27 in the
journal PLOS One.
"This is one of the most severe fungal infections that anyone's ever
seen," said David Engelthaler, Director of Programs and Operations for
TGen's Pathogen Genomics Division. Engelthaler was the senior author of
the PLOS One study, and a contributing author of the NEJM study.
"We're able to apply the latest in science and technology to explore
these strange and dangerous pathogens, like we've never been able to
before," said Engelthaler, adding that this is the latest in a series of
collaborations between CDC and TGen. "This is the first peek into the
genome of this dangerous fungus."
Dr. Benjamin Park, chief of the Epidemiology Team at the CDC's
Mycotic Diseases Branch, said the victims were infected when their
injuries from the tornado were contaminated with debris from the storm,
including gravel, wood and soil, as well as the aerosolized fungus.
Without the multiple and deep wounds caused the by the storm, cases
involving fungal infection are rare, said Dr. Park, the senior author of the
NEJM study and a contributing author of the PLOS One study. "A typical
hospital might normally see one case in a year."

Engelthaler said Apophysomyces infections rapidly ravage the body,
quickly sealing off capillaries, shutting off the blood supply and leaving
tissue to rot. Physicians try to get ahead of the infection by surgically
removing sections of dead, damaged or infected tissue, a process called
debridement.
For example, Engelthaler said, one victim who suffered a deep
wound to the upper right chest required a new titanium rib cage after the
fungus rapidly destroyed skin and bones.
"It's unlike anything you've ever seen before," said Engelthaler, a
former State of Arizona Epidemiologist and former Arizona Biodefense
Coordinator. "It's unreal. It looks like there is no way this person can be
alive."
The studies show the need for rapid and accurate identification of the
exact mold causing an infection, since only two FDA-approved drugs --
amphotericin B and posaconazole -- are commonly used against
mucormycetes, the group of molds that includes Apophysomyces and
causes mucormycosis.
"It is not known whether the outcomes for these case patients would
have been different if mucormycete-active agents had been used initially,"
said the NEJM study. "The timely diagnosis of mucormycosis is essential
for guiding therapy, because the early initiation of appropriate anti-fungal
medication and aggressive surgical debridement are associated with
improved outcomes."
Both the NEJM and PLOS One studies said whole genome
sequencing could lead to better diagnosis and a better understanding of
this pathogen.
TGen's DNA sequencing identified Apophysomyces in all 13 of the
Joplin cases. The DNA analysis also established that several strains of
Apophysomyces were involved in the outbreak, giving scientists further
clues that this fungus was well established in the area, and probably had
been so for a long time.
"These disasters put us at risk for exposure to organisms that are
around us, but don't normally cause disease," Engelthaler said. "There's
clearly an entire world out there that we're not seeing on a regular basis. It

takes a severe event like this tornado for us to come face-to-face with
some of the more dangerous pathogens out there."
Daily News Digest December 16, 2012
Editorial: Connecticut School Tragedy:
We should not be shocked by the recent events in Connecticut. As
a nation, the United States is the most violent nation in the history of
the world.
It now has the stated insane policy to strike first, based upon lies.
We see the mass media cheer as the President send drones for mass
worldwide civilian killings and murder, in the quest to establish a
‘New World Order’ (United States Über Alles) — the world’s main
bully. We live in a bully society. (See Below)
Is it any wonder that similar killings come home to roost.?
Especially when the government and the media applaud the
worldwide illegal acts of mayhem?
Chicago Teachers Union:
Click here to RSVP
Tell the Fat Cats: Get Your Paws Off Our Public Schools
Tuesday Dec. 18
4 pm – 6 pm
125 S. Clark

Brief March & Action
Click here to RSVP
Rich people always seem to think they know best. When it comes
to our schools, all their brilliant ideas have only made things worse.
Rahm listens to them about the future of our schools, but parents,
teachers and students are shut out.
The Fat Cats say schools are “underutilized” and should be
closed, but they push at the same time to open new charter schools
that they control. They cut from students and teachers to save money,
but their companies are still taking tax breaks, contracts, and TIFs
that broke the budget to begin with. Stand up: Tell them to keep their
paws off our schools!
Quote of the Day:
Globalist kingpin Henry Kissinger has stated that the
main task of Barack Obama will be to create a New World
Order, suggesting that the chaos unfolding around the world
is an opportunity rather than a crisis.
— Kissinger: Obama Will Create A New World Order
The United States is becoming an ex-con nation.
According to preliminary estimates by researchers
Christopher Uggen, Melissa Thompson, and Jeff Manza, 5
million Americans are serving or have served prison
sentences. That translates into 5 percent of American men,
and 15 percent-20 percent of black men. They also estimate
that 13 million people-including one-third of black men-have
been convicted of a felony.
— David Plotz, Ex-Con Nation
Image of the Day:

The Horrific New World Order Master Plan
That Has Full UN approval
Videos of the Day:
New World Order Being Taught In Schools!
Farmer to farmer
Monsanto undermines farmer independence & finances
Oil and War
A stage show by Robert Newman
Afghan War reality check
End Wall Street’s Wars!
Occupy Wall Street!
Occupy Wall Street is the Only Organization
That Identifies The Enemy —
The 1% That Own and Control The Wealth!

1960s The Realist — One Nation Under God/1%
(Unlike The Trade Union Misleaders
Nor The Misleaders Of The Oppressed
Who Strive To Be In ‘Partnership’ With The 1%)
1960s The Realist — One Nation Under God/1%
(Unlike The Trade Union Misleaders
Nor The Misleaders Of The Oppressed
Who Strive To Be In ‘Partnership’ With The 1%)
Occupy Wall Street — ‘We Are The 99%’
The resistance continues at Liberty Square:
#BlockTheBoat - Stop Walmart Profits From Workers' Deaths!
Newark #D18
Tags: #d18, direct action, walmart

On November 25th, 112 workers burned to death in a factory fire in
Bangladesh producing garments for Walmart. The Port of Newark is a
major entryway for Walmart garments coming from Bangladesh. Walmart
is going to profit off of the garments these workers died to make.
Unless we block the boat.
Walmart - the world's largest employer and 1% corporation - refuses
to take responsibility, compensate the families, or take any action to
prevent needless deaths like this from happening again. The 1% must not
profit from the workers' deaths in Bangladesh!
On Tuesday December 18th, buses will be leaving at 6am from Canal
and Broadway in Manhattan to head to the port.
If you’re not taking the bus, the staging ground location will be the
IKEA parking lot in Elizabeth, NJ at 7am. Timing is critical.
We're calling on Occupiers near all East Coast ports to be on alert if
the cargo ship is re-routed to dock at another port.
https://www.facebook.com/events/456899241034741/
#D18 #OccupyThePort #BlockTheBoat.
12/16: #StrikeDebt Holiday Open House
Tags: nyc, strike debt

When: Sunday, Dec. 15 @ 2:00pm until 6:00pm
Where: 55 Walker Street, New York NY 10013
RSVP on Facebook
Open house & holiday festival hosted by Strike Debt NYC and
featuring special guests Silvia Federici, George Caffentzis, David Graeber,
and more!
Come one, come all: friends, families, faith groups, community
organizations, artists, students, Occupy Sandy, Northeast Strike Debt
Affiliates...
We will have report-backs, speak-outs, collective visioning, food,
drinks, art, music, radical children's area, and more!
U.S.:
The Bully Society by Jessie Klein
By
ADMIN

Why Have Cruelty and Violence
Become a Normal Part of Our Children’s Education?
School Shootings and the Crisis of Bullying in America’s Schools
Twelve years after the Columbine High School massacre, school
shootings have gone from a rare, shocking aberration to a frequent, yet
still shocking, tragedy. Despite ubiquitous zero-tolerance policies, school
violence continues. Even if they’re not getting beat up or shot at, students
routinely endure verbal assaults and merciless torment from other students
—often as teachers look the other way, or worse, join in. For many
children and teens across the country, school feels like a hostile,
oppressive, and dangerous place.
Why has vicious bullying become commonplace in school? In The
Bully Society: School Shootings and the Crisis of Bullying in
America's Schools (New York University Press; March 2012; $29.95
Cloth; ISBN: 0814748880), sociologist Jessie Klein delves into the roots
of school violence in all its forms, from “everyday” bullying to shooting
rampages to the alarming rise in adolescent depression and suicide. As
Klein makes clear, bullying among young people is provoked by larger
economic and cultural trends, reinforcing the values of high social status
as well as values associated with masculinity—such as dominance and
aggression. “To make schools safe,” Klein stresses, “we need to examine
the pervasive forces that turn them into gender police training grounds.”
To get to the core of bullying, Klein draws on extensive studies and
firsthand interviews with victims in schools from rural, inner-city, and
wealthy suburban communities, along with her twenty-plus years of
experience in education. Throughout, she shares the stories of men,

women, and children who suffered—emotionally, psychologically, and
physically—because of the norms of school culture.
Backed by hard-hitting statistics and haunting personal accounts, THE
BULLY SOCIETY reveals:
• How students feel pressure to conform to rigid gender
expectations and learn to practice gender policing, correcting their
own and one another’s behaviors, attitudes, and dress according to
their perceived expectations of what makes a boy “manly” and a
girl feminine.
• How students get the message, from the media, as well as their
parents and teachers, that status and power are everything—and
then ridicule and attack boys who don’t fit the ideal or appear to
be gay, geeky, nerdy, poor, or different.
• How boys learn from an early age to assert manhood by not only
being popular with girls, but also by wielding power over them—
physically, emotionally, and sexually— perpetuating sexual
harassment and dating violence.
• How girls are increasingly pressured to be “tough,” to use
violence as a means of proving themselves, as well as driven to
conform to superficial and destructive standards of beauty, body
type, and attractiveness to the opposite sex.
• How “gay-bashing,” “slut-bashing,” and other types of
denigration of students by students are aggravated through text
messages and in cyberspace, and
• How teachers often contribute to the bullying problem—and how
adult role models, including parents, inadvertently or explicitly
play out the same conflicts relating to wealth, race, looks, and
sexuality, and bully not only one another, but also children.
What can concerned educators and parents do to stop this deeply
hurtful yet widely accepted pattern of behavior? In THE BULLY
SOCIETY, Klein calls for a radical transformation of the standard school
culture. Going beyond inspiring ideas, she cites actual examples of schoolbased
efforts, where teachers are working to bond with students and to
help students reach across ethnic, economic, social, cultural, and gender

divides to bond with one another. Rather than focusing on identifying a
“troubled teen,” Klein shifts the goal to diagnosing disturbing values
affecting the entire school and then committing to building a new culture
of acceptance, where students of all kinds can become self-actualized and
contributing people.
“I believe that change is possible in our schools,” Klein affirms.
“Together we can move from a destructive one-size-fits-all bully society to
more compassionate communities—where students, families, and
community members can, instead, thrive.”
America’s Two-Tiered Neoliberal Future
City on a Hill, Slum in the Valley
by
Jason Hirthler
All through the fall, you could hear them chanting their glib
platitudes, each candidate posturing as a champion of hardworking
Americans. Now, as the country lists toward our season of mass
consumption, you can listen to the publicans gravely intone the perils of
the “fiscal cliff.” Or see the venality of double-tongued Congressmen who
pose as social saviors, but aim a scythe at our safety nets. But behind the
rhetorical swordplay you can just glimpse the neoliberal blueprint the
hyperbole is designed to hide: the economic destruction of the state, which
elegantly precedes—like a set of collapsing dominos—the decimation of
the 99 percent for whom the state still offers meager sanctuary.
The formula is notorious: downsize government; privatize its assets
and outsource its core functions; and simultaneously dismantle regulatory
frameworks to free up speculative finance. The rhetorical euphemism is to
clamor for the removal of barriers to free trade. When capitalists say this,
the barrier is the state, and free trade is the exploitation of you and me. In
one fell ideological swoop, the nation is strip-mined of its ecological
patrimony, and the people fleeced by predatory finance and ubiquitous
transaction fees. In the neoliberal game plan, only the one percent wins.
The dichotomy between the haves and the have nots is easy to spot—
any economic index will lay it plain. On the one hand, abundance. On the

other, want. The latter always proportionally dwarfs the former. Gated
communities engulfed by shantytowns. Capital gains gurus floating on an
ocean of debt peonage. Luxury towers peering out over pastures of cheap
rental housing. But it is such a ubiquitous reality that it sometimes feels as
though injustice itself is prosaic. We see the favela mudslide on page one,
and it hardly registers as we swipe to page two. Indeed, no index better
represents the impact of neoliberal reform that the income gap between
top and bottom.
But who’s on the inside looking out and who’s on the outside looking
in? That’s easy.
Insiders are white collar. They sit in cushy Aeron chairs in Goldman
Sachs, where they turn government funds intended for loans into fresh
derivatives and outsized bonuses. Insiders wear Hugo Boss shirts to their
jobs at giant REITs, where they purchase huge chunks of our shadow
housing inventory for pennies on the dollar. They pace corner suites in
cloud-capped towers and build rate swap treasure chests and later petition
Washington for sweetheart bailouts.
Insiders are unpatriotic. They take 3.5 million manufacturing jobs in
a single decade and offshore them to low-wage countries with businessfriendly
labor laws—once called a “favorable business climate.” Any mix
of despots and peasants will do. The products the proles produce are
shipped off to high-dollar economies where addicted consumers overpay
for them. Profits are quickly rerouted to offshore tax havens to avoid
contributions to a tax base that would benefit outsiders.
Insiders are populist grandstanders. They pose on plywood platforms
draped in the colors of hope and issue populist stump speeches to
credulous voters. Insiders grease the political machinery of the status quo
with lobbyist funds, guaranteeing the profits of faceless petroleum
multinationals, depression-lifting pharmaceutical firms, and brokerages
that portray retirement as one long globetrotting vacation for aging pair
bonds. Even though these same firms have helped sink half the life
savings of millions of Boomers.
When they speak, insiders counsel caution and advise against rash
action. Insiders prefer the incremental and warn against making the perfect

the enemy of the good. Insiders feel your pain, but pragmatically
recognize the glacial pace of change. And now—thanks to the wonders of
market innovation—insiders can digitally donate to the local food bank
from the comfort of their Martha’s Vineyard porch, even as they peruse the
timeless wisdom of Atlas Shrugged. Insiders are never all evil, but are
rarely half good.
Insiders sit atop mountains of wealth. When they check their bank
accounts, insiders find they own 42% of America’s wealth, even though
they comprise just 1% of its population. Insiders also happily concede they
gleaned 93% of our economic profits in 2010, capturing almost all the
benefits of the stimulus. Heavily invested insiders are thrilled to report that
the Dow Jones Industrial Average and Nasdaq Composite Index have
nearly doubled since 2009. On the inside, things are getting better. On the
inside, we are in the midst of a miraculous recovery that lines that
frontings of Wall Street with boughs of holiday cheer as another calendar
year closes with more record-setting Q4 profits.
While insiders get ahead, outsiders get by. Some of the time. Usually
thanks to high debt, artificially inflated assets and longer working hours.
What they didn’t inscribe at the foot of Lady Liberty was that once the
huddled masses are welcomed into America, they mostly remain in their
huddled mass. Upward mobility in America is the lowest among
developed industrial nations. Less than 20% of us even own individual
stock—those who do are mostly insiders, or outsiders who hope to build
mountains out of financial molehills. Outsiders own 1% of America’s
wealth, even though they are 50 times larger than that tiny tribe that owns
nearly half of it. Fifty-seven million outsiders are out of food. Fifty million
outsiders are out of money. Twenty-three million outsiders are outside the
workplace. Ninety million outsiders spent this election outside the voting
booth.
Some would quite fairly protest the existence of a third class, the
middle class. But in neoliberal social order—as seen from its track record
from Chile to Russia to South Africa—the middle class rapidly becomes
indistinguishable from the lower orders. The trope of the taxi-driving
economist is no lie. The undoing of the middle is well underway. Median

household incomes—a barometer of the middle—have been declining for
decades, and now hover below $50,000 a year. The middle’s share in our
economic output has been in steep decline as well, and fewer households
are earning those declining middle-class incomes.
At the same time, the cost of staple middle-class goods has
skyrocketed. The cost of college. The cost of a home. The cost of
healthcare. Once our most salient symbols of middle-class status, these
goods have become debt collars that saddle the stressed finances of twoincome
families struggling to keep up appearances.
In a paradoxical neoliberal world, outsiders are driven further into
dependency on the state, while insiders work to eliminate the state that
serves the dependent. There’s now bipartisan agreement inside the beltway
to slash hundreds of billions of dollars from the few services that keep
outsiders afloat. The core bipartisanship consensus—that vile unanimity of
the spineless and the soulless—is that the New Deal must be eviscerated to
enable higher corporate profits. The day of our demise will surely be
marked by record gains in the precincts of power.
Some day tourists may flock to America to take snapshots of the ruins
of the New Deal, lying idle like some economic Acropolis, an empty
architecture amid a farrago of urban destitution.
Jason Hirthler is a writer, strategist, and 15-year veteran of the
corporate communications industry. He lives and works in New York City.
He can be reached at jasonhirthler@gmail.com.
Environment:
Alaska Natives Take on Fossil Fuel Disinformation in Kivalina
A Climate Change Story
by
Christine Shearer

For the Inupiat peoples of Kivalina in the Arctic of Alaska, the price
of further climate change denial could be the complete devastation of their
lives and culture. Their crumbling village must be relocated to survive.
But neither the government, nor the fossil fuel giants who have helped
speed up the destruction of their village seem to willing to take
responsibility.
In her compelling new book Kivalina: A Climate Change Story,
published by Haymarket Books, Christine Shearer traces the history of
corporate greed and government compitulation and connects it to the
plight of this ancient Eskimo community by the Chukchi Sea coast. A grim
forewarning of what could soon be the plight of coastal communities
across the world if we don’t act now.
We are proud to publish the introduction to her book for you here. –
Jeffrey St. Clair & Joshua Frank
***
In February 2008, a tiny Alaska Native village named Kivalina filed
suit against twenty-four fossil fuel companies for contributing to the
village’s erosion through large greenhouse gas emissions, and for creating
a false debate around climate change. The lawsuit was filed in conjunction
with environmental justice and indigenous rights organizations as one of

several steps in a broader push for climate justice, aiming to help Kivalina
residents draw attention to their situation and call for action from
government and corporate officials that had so far largely ignored them.
The media gave the lawsuit brief attention that quickly faded, and the
judge’s ruling was issued with little discussion or notice outside of certain
legal circles. Meanwhile, the people of Kivalina are still in danger from
the effects of climate change, in a situation that is going to become more
common throughout the world.
For roughly the past ten thousand years we have enjoyed a relatively
stable climate that has allowed for the development of agriculture and
civilization. Such stability is the exception, not the norm, when it comes to
the earth’s 4.54 billion-year history. The Earth has oscillated between long
periods of cooling (glaciations) and shorter periods of warming
(interglacials), sometimes undergoing radical climate variations within the
span of a century or even a decade. Evidence suggests that later
glaciations correspond with periodic shifts in the earth’s orbit, tilt, and
precession (movement of the axis), which can reduce the amount of
energy received at the poles. This small temperature perturbation, in turn,
can kickstart a glaciation through feedbacks: as ice builds, greenhouse
concentrations within the oceans are sequestered and reduced in the
atmosphere, and the ice reflects a greater amount of sunlight back to space
(the “albedo effect”). These processes maintain the cooling, and can create
the conditions for layer upon layer of cumulative ice sheets.
Glaciations then give way to warmer interglacial periods, which have
been correlated to increases in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere—trace
gases like carbon dioxide and methane that capture heat and can amplify
the initial orbital forcings. The sun’s light rays that are absorbed by
oceans, land, and vegetation are eventually given off as infrared radiation,
or heat energy. Due to their molecular structure (having three or more
atoms), greenhouse gases vibrate at frequencies that allow them to absorb
and emit this infrared radiation, sending a portion of that energy back to
the Earth’s surface. During certain periods this increased heat can hasten
the melting of glaciers, with the newly exposed landscape absorbing more
heat and releasing more greenhouse gases, potentially leading to an

interglacial period. The most recent warming shift occurred 11,700 years
ago, the beginning of a relatively long and mild interglacial period known
as the Holocene.
Some have argued that the Holocene epoch has been supplanted by
an Anthropocene, or human-influenced climate, beginning with large-scale
agriculture and accelerating rapidly with the Industrial Revolution and the
widespread use of fossil fuels. For the past two centuries we have been
digging up and burning fossilized carbon from earlier eras — coal, oil, and
natural gas — at an accelerating rate, and greatly increasing the amount of
greenhouse gases in our atmosphere. While we need greenhouse gases to
absorb heat and sustain life, their increasing concentration is steadily
turning the furnace up on our lower atmosphere and altering our climate.
Scientists are concerned not only because the effects are already apparent,
such as melting glaciers, rising sea levels, and increased water vapor in the
atmosphere, but because the ultimate consequences are so disturbing.
What the historic evidence suggests is that the earth has certain feedback
mechanisms that can tip the planet toward extreme cooling as well as
extreme heating, and that those mechanisms can be very hard if not
impossible to reverse once they hit a certain threshold.
As of 2011, carbon dioxide levels are about 390 parts per million
(ppm), substantially higher and more rapidly built up than at any time in
the eight hundred thousand years’ worth of records from air bubbles
trapped in ice cores. And there is a potential warning on the horizon:
numerous glaciers are melting faster than many had predicted, and the
thawing permafrost—the frozen subsoil beneath the ice—can release
stores of carbon dioxide and also methane, a greenhouse gas with a high
and rapid heat absorption much stronger than that of carbon dioxide. The
most pressing question is what large amounts of greenhouse gases will do
to an already warm interglacial period, with some scientists predicting
events such as the melting of glaciers and the resulting steady release of
methane could bring about a “tipping point,” setting off a cascade of
warming feedbacks over which we would no longer have any control.
Other scientists believe we are already at or very near that tipping point,

and need to begin clamping down on greenhouse gas emissions
immediately. Read More
Switchboard: Natural Resource Defense Council Blog
We Can All Breathe Easier Thanks to the EPA's Updated Soot
Standard
Frances Beinecke – President of NRDC
Posted December 14, 2012 in Curbing Pollution, Health and the
Environment
Tags: airpollution, asthma, breastcancer, carbon, carbonstandards,
cleanairact, coalfiredpowerplants, EPA, heartattacks,
particulatematter, smokestacks, soot
Most of us have loved ones whose quality of life is diminished or
even endangered by breathing dirty air. My son-in-law has asthma, several
family members suffer from heart disease, and I had breast cancer. Each
one of these conditions...continued
A Glacial Pace: the FDA Lets Decades Go By without Acting on Own
Health Warnings
Peter Lehner – Executive Director
Posted December 14, 2012 in Health and the Environment
Tags: agriculture, antibacterial, antibiotics, bacteria, BPA, estabrook,
factoryfarms, FDA, food, hormonedistruptors, infections, triclosan
In the past few years, Americans have grown concerned about the
risks of pumping farm animals with antibiotics. Recent reports of
antibiotic-resistant superbugs jumping from livestock to people have
inspired consumers to demand antibiotic-free meat from grocery stores
and restaurant...continued
Fracking Fudged: Looking at Illinois

Chamber of Commerce's Job and Economic Numbers
Henry Henderson – Director, Midwest Program NRDC
Posted December 14, 2012
Tags: beverlyhillbillies, fracking, illinois, illinoischamberofcommerce,
jobnumbers, kasich, ohio
The Illinois Chamber of Commerce yesterday released a pretty,
remarkably rosy sounding report, speculating on the potential impacts that
fracking might have on Illinois’ economy. It is, as I say, remarkable stuff.
“Natural gas development could create more than 45,000...continued
|
Solving the Carp Crisis: Moving from Courts to Collaboration
Meleah Geertsma – Staff Attorney, Midwest Program
Posted December 14, 2012 in Curbing Pollution, Health and the
Environment, Living Sustainably, Saving Wildlife and WIld Places
Tags: armycorps, Asiancarp, carp, Chicago, chicagoriver, greatlakes,
invasivespecies, lakemichigan, water
Back in 2010, a group of Great Lakes states led by Michigan sued
the Army Corps of Engineers (“Corps”) and Metropolitan Water
Reclamation District of Greater Chicago to permanently close the locks of
the Chicago Area Waterways System in...continued
Cleaning Up Power Plant Carbon Pollution
Without Getting Bloated on Gas
Dan Lashof – Program Director, Climate & Clean Air
Posted December 14, 2012 in Curbing Pollution, Solving Global
Warming
Tags: carbon, carbonpollution, carbonpollutionstandard, cleanairact,
climate, fracking, gasdrilling, hydraulicfracturing, hydrofracking,
naturalgas, powerplants, powerplantstandards
This post written with Kate Sinding Last week NRDC released a
groundbreaking report showing how the Obama Administration can use
the Clean Air Act to take a big bite out of carbon pollution from power
plants, America’s biggest climate polluters....continued

Grim News For Western Water, But Proven Solutions Exist
Theo Spencer – Senior Advocate
Posted December 14, 2012 in Curbing Pollution, Health and the
Environment, Solving Global Warming
Tags: global warming pollution, hurricanesandy, pnp
The Interior Department earlier this week released a long-awaited
study on future water supplies from the Colorado River Basin. The news
was not good. The Colorado River Basin Water Supply and Demand Study
found average water demand will outstrip supply...continued
|
Global Toll of Air Pollution: Over 3 Million Deaths Each Year
David Pettit – Director, Southern California Air Program
Posted December 14, 2012 in Curbing Pollution, Environmental
Justice
Tags: airpollution, diesel, particulatematter, particulatepollution
We have long known that many people die from air pollution. What
is surprising is how high the public health toll is and that it is largely
preventable. A new study in The Lancet, developed by an international
group of...continued
Update: World Auto Makers Back New Refrigerant,
Rebuffing Daimler
David Doniger – Policy Director, Climate and Clean Air Program
Posted December 14, 2012 in Curbing Pollution
Tags: cleanairact, climatechange, daimler, EPA, europeancommission,
HFCs, mercedes-benz, SAE, supergreenhousegases
I wrote earlier this week about Daimler's push to block European
requirements to replace the "super greenhouse gas" HFC-134a now used
in car air conditioners, by raising dubious last-minute safety issues with
the alternative, HFO-1234yf, which has a 360-fold lower impact on
the...continued
Michigan Utilities Smash Energy Efficiency Targets:
Customers, Economy, Environment Reap the Rewards

Rebecca Stanfield – Senior Energy Advocate
Posted December 14, 2012 in Solving Global Warming
Tags: energy, energyefficiency, Michigan
The data is in, and once again, Michigan utilities blew away their
energy efficiency goals, saving money for their customers, creating jobs
for Michiganders, and reducing the need for generating power in polluting
and expensive power plants. Earlier this month,...continued
Good news for hellbenders: test-tube snot otters!
Ann Alexander – Senior Attorney
Posted December 13, 2012 in Curbing Pollution, Health and the
Environment
Tags: arkansas,, biogems,, endangeredspecies,, fishandwildlifeservice,,
fws,, missouri,, ozarkhellbender
These days wildlife work can be a bit depressing. Climate change and
disappearing habitat have a lot of species on the ropes. But occasionally,
we get good news. Here’s some on a species I have blogged about in
the...continued
Yellowstone Wolves Killed
Matt Skoglund – Wildlife Advocate
Posted December 13, 2012 in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places
Tags: montanawolfhunt, montanawolves, wolves,
yellowstonewolfhunt, yellowstonewolves
Several wolves from Yellowstone National Park have been killed in wolfhunts
in the Northern Rockies this fall. Of the wolves killed, many wore
radio collars, which researchers and wildlife managers use to monitor
wolves and collect scientific data about them. Not...continued
Court Kills Zombie Power Plant Case
David Doniger – Policy Director, Climate and Clean Air Program
Posted December 13, 2012 in Curbing Pollution, Solving Global
Warming, U.S. Law and Policy

Tags: carbonpollution, CleanAirAct, CourtofAppeals, EPA,
powerplants
How do you kill a zombie power plant lawsuit? It’s easier than
shooting it in the head. You just grant the motions to dismiss. That’s what
the Court of Appeals in Washington did today, issuing a one-paragraph
order dismissing the...continued
See this movie. Then act on it.
John Steelman – Climate Program Manager
Posted December 13, 2012 in Solving Global Warming
Tags: arctic, carbon, ChasingIce, climate, climatechange,
globalwarming, greenhousegas, pollutionstandards
Last night I saw a truly amazing cinematic event, the new
documentary film, Chasing Ice, which chronicles acclaimed
environmental photographer James Balog’s heroic multi-year effort to
capture the retreat of the world’s glaciers in the era of climate
change. . . . continued
Fracking:
Nuclear Fallout: Ongoing Tragedy/Disaster In Japan:
EnergyNews:
11:44 AM EST on December 15th, 2012 | One comment
Large oil spill in New York City area harbor — Feds: Damaged barge
is carrying almost 10,000,000 gallons — 158,000 gallons reported
released so far
03:06 AM EST on December 15th, 2012 | 14 comments
Intense M5 quakes hit near Fukushima (MAPS & VIDEO)
06:15 PM EST on December 14th, 2012 | 17 comments

Official Map: Giant sinkhole now just 1200 feet from highway —
Appears even closer in recent flyover (PHOTOS)
04:47 PM EST on December 14th, 2012 | 49 comments
Gov’t Health Expert: Salad oil is more dangerous than radioactive
waste below giant sinkhole (VIDEO)
03:42 PM EST on December 14th, 2012 | 3 comments
New Study: “Depopulation with Rapid Aging” after Fukushima
Daiichi disaster
02:23 PM EST on December 14th, 2012 | 8 comments
Crackdown: Japanese professor’s arrest “extremely unjust” —
Publicly opposed burning of radioactive debris
Ongoing Gulf of Mexico Oil Disaster:
Oil Spill Attorney Stuart Smith’s Blog:
The national media notices that BP is leaking fresh oil in the Gulf
Nothing will ever make right BP’s negligence that caused the 2010
Deepwater Horizon disaster. But there’s been a flurry of recent news that
authorities are finally listening to some of our pleas for both justice and
for more aggressive investigation here on the Gulf Coast. The steep
criminal penalties imposed on the oil giant — and the prospect of stiffer
civil fines — have been a giant step in the right direction.
And now there’s this: Both law enforcement and the national media
are taking a serious look at a story that we broke on this site more than a
year ago: Oil sheens pointing to the alarming fact that fresh oil is
somehow leaking into the Gulf, some 32 months after the rig explosion.
The U.S. Coast Guard has ordered BP to go back underwater with a
robotic device to try to locate the source of the pollution, and now the
story has been spread nationally on the CBS Morning News.

CBS News has learned that BP is set to embark Thursday
on the fifth day of a little-known subsea mission under Coast
Guard supervision to look for any new oil leaking from the
Deepwater Horizon disaster.
The BP oil rig exploded in 2010, killing 11 workers and
sending a total estimated 206 million gallons of oil gushing into
the Gulf of Mexico for three months before it was capped.
In September, a new oil sheen was spotted about 50 miles
off the Louisiana coast. Tests confirmed the oil came from the
infamous Macondo well underneath the Deepwater Horizon.
BP’s underwater vehicle observed oil seeping from the well’s
containment dome and, after a remote operation, declared the
leaks plugged on October 23. The company and the Coast Guard
said it wasn’t feasible to clean up the slick, and that it didn’t
pose a risk to the shoreline.
But more oil continues to surface. Slicks and sheens of
varying sizes and shapes have been documented by satellite
photos, as well as aerial video recorded by the non-profit
environmental group “On Wings of Care.” It’s suspected that an
unknown amount of oil trapped in the containment dome, and in
the wreckage and equipment from 2010, could be seeping out.
A couple of points here. First of all, while it’s a travesty that new oil
is still polluting the Gulf after all this time, it’s fantastic to see Bonny
Schumaker and On Wings of Care receive national credit for the amazing
work that they do. In fact, the CBS piece was illustrated with some of
Bonny’s photos that revealed BP’s new pollution. They were pictures that
neither BP or the authorities wanted people to see, and Bonny Schumaker
showed great courage in obtaining these images and releasing them to the
public. The hidden story of Deepwater Horizon is the effort that many
private citizens have undertaken to reveal the truth of the spill and its
severe impacts on the ecology of the Gulf Coast and on human health.
Second, Rep. Ed Markey of Massachusetts — who has been steadfast
on the issue of holding BP accountable — told CBS that BP is still not
being honest or transparent in this new leak, and that he is worried that

“substantial” amounts of oil are leaking from the site. Said Markey: “This
is the same crime scene, and the American public today is entitled to the
same information that BP was lying about in 2010 so that we can
understand the full dimension of the additional environmental damage.”
I could not agree more. We need answers, and we need them before
any of the pending settlements — the $7.8 billion deal for residents and
small business, as well as the looming governmental penalties — are
finalized. We have to hold BP’s feet to the fire on this. What’s more, how
can we access the final damages when the damage is still ongoing.
To read and watch the CBS News report about the new investigation
into the BP leak, go to: http://www.cbsnews.com/
8301-505263_162-57558916/oil-may-be-seeping-from-deepwaterhorizon-site/
Here’s my Dec. 4 post on the new investigation of the Deepwater
Horizon site: http://www.stuarthsmith.com/were-keeping-the-pressure-onbp-to-stop-spilling-more-oil-into-the-gulf/
To check out the original of U.S. Magistrate Judge Sally Shushan’s
order for BP and Transocean inspections of the Deepwater Horizon site,
please read: http://www.stuarthsmith.com/wp-content/uploads/
2012/12/53251575_8060.pdf
Read my Aug. 17 , 2011 post that broke the story of the “new
Macondo leak”: http://www.stuarthsmith.com/oil-rising-again-frommacondo-well-bp-hires-fleet-of-40-shrimp-boats-to-lay-boom-around-olddeepwater-horizon-site
To check out my post from last November about the 2011 leaks at the
Macondo field, check out: http://www.stuarthsmith.com/breakthrough-inthe-macondo-mystery-bp-admits-to-new-activity-at-deepwater-horizonsite/
Here is our report from Oct. 3 of this year about another fresh oil
sheen in the Gulf: http://www.stuarthsmith.com/breaking-news-new-oilsheen-near-site-of-deepwater-horizon-disaster/
To read Bonny Schumaker’s report of her most recent flyover filed on
Dec. 2, please go to: http://www.onwingsofcare.org/protection-a-

preservation/gulf-of-mexico-oil-spill-2010/gulf-2012/334-20121202slicks-macondo-area.html
Black Liberation/Civil Rights:
Black jobless rate is twice that of whites
By
Michael A. Fletcher
(The article uses the bureau of labor statics which does not include those
who who are are no longer collecting Unemployment Insurance or who have
never entered the workforce which includes a good portion of the 4.33 million
black men who have been convicted of a felony.)
In the quarter-century that Armentha Cruise has run her Silver Spring
staffing firm, the nation has made strides toward racial equality. Voters
have twice elected a black president, African Americans shine among
Hollywood’s brightest stars, and the number of blacks who graduate from
college has tripled.
But this stubborn fact remains: The African American jobless rate is
about twice that of whites, a disparity that has barely budged since the
government began tracking the data in 1972. In last week’s jobs report, the
black unemployment rate was 13.2 percent, while the white rate stood at
6.8 percent.
Discrimination has long been seen as the primary reason for this
disparity, which is evident among workers from engineers to laborers. But
fresh research has led scholars to conclude that African Americans also
suffer in the labor market from having weaker social networks than other
groups.
Having friends and relatives who can introduce you to bosses or tell
you about ripe opportunities has proved to be one of the most critical
factors in getting work. Such connections can also help people hold onto
their jobs, researchers say.
“It is surprising to many people how important job networks are to
finding work,” said Deirdre A. Royster, a New York University
sociologist. “The information they provide help people make a good first
impression, get through screening and get hired.”

Cruise, who is black, said that in her early years in business she
struggled to place her mostly minority clientele. Part of the problem, she
suspected, was whites were more often in a position to hire and “tend to
hire people who look like them.”
“African Americans are constantly fighting to overcome a perception
of being less-than,” she said. “You have the president of the United States,
you have Oprah, you have all the people who have done phenomenal
things. But they are seen as the exception.”
Several studies show that black workers tend to lack these
connections.
In her research, Royster followed the experiences of a group of
similarly situated black and white men, all graduates of the same
vocational school and who sought jobs in the same areas. She screened the
men for things that might normally affect their employability: values,
work ethic and performance. It turned out that the white men did much
better getting jobs, which she said grew in part from their access to a more
robust network of contacts.
“It just happens to be the case that if you are a white guy you are
more likely to know people who have access to a certain set of jobs,” she
said. “It has to do with becoming part of a network of reciprocity.”
Recent research also shows immigrants have active networks that
help new arrivals navigate the country, and trading information about jobs
is an important part of that.
That is one reason that Hispanics — more than a third of whom are
foreign born — have lower jobless rates than African Americans despite,
on average, having fewer educational credentials.
“Immigrants have to use their networks for a larger variety of
activities than other people,” Royster said.
Researchers are quick to add that bias — both conscious and
unconscious — continues to be the most significant obstacle confronting
black job-seekers.
The racial gap in the unemployment rate defies educational
attainment and occupational endeavor. African Americans with at least a

achelor’s degree had a 7.1 percent jobless rate in 2011, while the white
rate was 3.9 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Similarly, black workers with only a high school education had a
jobless rate of 15.5 percent, while similarly educated white workers had an
unemployment rate of 8.4 percent.
Black workers in computer and mathematical occupations — which
job-training officials say are hard to fill — had an 8.1 percent jobless rate
last year, while for whites the rate was 4.1 percent. Among construction
workers, who were hard hit by the recession, the black jobless rate was
30.4 percent, compared with 15.3 percent for whites.
“The 2-to-1 gap in the unemployment rate is one of the most
pronounced signs of the presence of discrimination in our society,” said
William A. Darity, a professor at Duke University. “That disparity, I think,
is an index of discrimination.”
A 2009 study published in the Journal of Labor Economics,
supported that point. After examining more than two years of personnel
data from a large retail chain, researchers found that white, Hispanic and
Asian managers tend to hire fewer blacks and more whites than did black
managers.
In addition, racial audit tests of employers consistently find that when
identically credentialed people apply for jobs, whites are much more likely
to be contacted for an interview and hired.
Keith A. Owens, 54, has been looking for work since losing his job
last year as communications director for the Wayne County treasurer’s
office in Michigan. A former award-winning journalist, he has applied for
“40 or 50 or 60 jobs” with no luck. He has managed to scrape by playing
guitar with a band and working with his wife’s firm, Writing It Right for
You. Read More
Labor:
Economy:
Latest eurozone summit ends in stalemate

Two-day summit was supposed to lay out a grand plan and timetable
for reforming and stabilising the euro regime
Ian Traynor in Brussels
Photograph: JULIEN WARNAND/EPA
European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso (L) holds a news
conference with European Council President Herman Van Rompuy (R) at the
end of the first day of the European Council meeting at the European Council
headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, 14 December 2012.
European leaders wound up their final summit of 2012 on Friday in
much the same manner as they started the year – kicking the euro crisis
can down the road, playing for time, crossing their fingers, hoping the
worst is behind them.
In almost three years since the Greek drama erupted in February 2010
and spread quickly around the fringes of the eurozone, the leaders have
never quite managed to get ahead of the curve despite 22 summits and
countless meetings of eurozone finance ministers.
This week's two-day summit in Brussels repeated the pattern. It was
supposed to lay out a grand plan and timetable for reforming and
stabilising the euro regime through a battery of federalising political and
fiscal moves. In the event, the documents from the EU council president,
Herman Van Rompuy, were shredded amid more clashes over
fundamentals between Berlin and Paris, while an even more ambitious
blueprint from the Commission president, José Manuel Barroso, was
simply ignored.
"One wonders how these two gentlemen will enjoy Christmas,"
quipped Andrew Duff, the Liberal Democrat MEP and ardent European
federalist.

Van Rompuy, who has had a very bad month, was told to come back
in the middle of next year with a better, more modest plan. The mood was
darkened further by German Chancellor Angela Merkel dismissing claims
that the worst was over for the eurozone and stressing that the bloc faced
two years of painful reforms, slow growth and high unemployment.
"The changes we are going through are very difficult and painful,"
she said. "We have tough times ahead of us that cannot be solved with one
big step."
Despite the stalemate and the seeming complacency, leaders
concluded their summit keen to list the year's achievements. And they do
have things to brag about.
A year ago Greece's days in the euro looked numbered. This week it
got €34.4bn (£28bn) in bailout funds, albeit six months late. There will be
no departure from the euro soon. "Grexit is dead," crowed the Greek prime
minister, Antonis Samaras.
The bailout fund, the European Stability Mechanism, an embryo
European monetary fund, is up and running. There is agreement it can be
used to rescue failing banks without adding to government debt – though
there is no deal on whether, and when, to do that.
Despite Bank of Italy figures showing Italian public debt had risen
above €2tn for the first time in October, borrowing costs for Italy and
Spain have fallen sharply from highs in the late spring, taking the edge off
the crisis. The big shift this week was the deal on the start of a single
supervisor for the eurozone banking sector, with authority vested in the
European Central Bank in Frankfurt. This looks like a euro glass that is
half full and gives the leaders reasons to cheer. But a half-full glass is also
half empty.
The real fights over the banking supervisor, involving money and
who pays to shore-up or wind-up failing banks and guarantee depositors,
are still to come and will be vicious. The Germans – mainly, but not only –
are not interested in having their banks taxed to create a fund that could
then be spent, say, to mitigate the impact of a bad Portuguese bank, which
is how the so-called common resolution regime is supposed to work.

"The Germans are fighting a brilliant delaying campaign to hollow
out the banking union," said a senior diplomat. "They want to avoid all
mutualisation. All common pots of money are off the table until after the
German election."
The election is next September when Merkel will run for a third term.
All action on the euro crisis will be minimised pending that outcome. It is,
by some margin, Europe's biggest political event next year. The biggest
event this year was the French election and the victory of President
François Hollande. At every EU summit since May, including early on
Friday morning, Hollande and Merkel have clashed over policy framed
broadly as German austerity and rigour versus French expansionism and
pooled spending. The result has been stalemate and lowest common
denominator policy-making.
"When France and Germany don't get along, things are very bad,"
said a senior EU official. "When they come to a summit without a deal,
very little can happen."
The other newcomer who has arguably had the biggest impact has
been Mario Draghi, the ECB president. Within weeks of taking office at
the start of the year he was flooding Europe's banks with €1tn in cheap,
short-term credit. That bought a little time, did not really work, but by the
summer in London he pledged to do "whatever it takes" to save the euro,
amplifying that promise in September with new policy of unlimited bondbuying
in the financial markets, albeit tied to stringent conditions.
It was a gamechanger, the single biggest shift that relieved pressure
on Spain and Italy and took the heat off the eurozone's leaders, even
though the bond-buying has not yet been tried. But Draghi, said the senior
EU official, is worried his actions have encouraged the politicians to relax,
triggering the current complacency and time-wasting. He is also worried
that the ECB's new role as eurozone banking supervisor could hurt the
bank's reputation and credibility if the new regime is rendered toothless by
German resistance.
The contrast in fortunes between the two key leaders, Merkel and
Hollande, is striking at year's end. More than four out of five Germans, in
a poll on Friday, were satisfied with Merkel's conduct, while Hollande's

popularity has slipped every month since he was elected to 41% last
month, a level half that of the German leader's. Merkel's electoral
calculations could still be upset by the need for a Spanish bailout in the
spring, predicted by senior people in Brussels, or by political and market
turbulence around the same time in Italy.
With unemployment soaring across Europe – albeit not in Germany –
and years of austerity impacting on European societies, the sense among
senior policy-makers and diplomats in Brussels is that something will have
to give, that economic shrinkage rather than deficits and debt is the bigger
problem, that German rigour will need to be relaxed, that it is time for
French expansionary policy. There is little sign the Germans are listening.
World:
Health, Education, Science and Welfare:
Daily News Digest December 15, 2012
Two Years of Cablegate as Bradley Manning
Testifies for the First Time
By
Julian Assange
Editor-in-Chief and Founder, WikiLeaks
Thursday, November 29th, Bradley Manning testified for the first
time since his arrest two and a half years ago in Baghdad. Today also
marks the two-year anniversary of the first front pages around the world
from Cablegate, an archive of 251,287 U.S. State Department diplomatic
cables -- messages sent between the State Department and its embassies,
consulates and diplomatic missions around the world. In collaboration
with a network of more than 100 press outlets we revealed the full
spectrum of techniques used by the United States to exert itself around the
world. The young intelligence analyst Bradley Manning was detained as
an alleged source.

WikiLeaks came under attack, with American politicians and rightwing
pundits calling for all of us to be designated as terrorists, some even
calling for my assassination and the kidnapping of our staff. Speaking on
Meet The Press, Vice President Joe Biden referred to me as a "high-tech
terrorist," while Senator Joe Lieberman demanded that we be prosecuted
under the U.S. Espionage Act. The Department of Justice spokesperson
Dean Boyd admitted as recently as July 2012 that the Department of
Justice investigation into WikiLeaks is ongoing, and the Pentagon renewed
its threats against us on September 28th, declaring our work an "ongoing
crime." As a result, I have been granted political asylum and now live in
the Ecuadorian embassy in London, surrounded by armed police while the
FBI portion of the "whole of government" investigation against us,
according to court testimony, had reached 42,135 pages as of December
last year.
Earlier this week, WikiLeaks released European Commission
documents showing that Senator Lieberman and Congressman Peter T.
King directly influenced decisions by PayPal, Visa and MasterCard to
block donations to WikiLeaks, which has blocked 95 percent of our donors
since December of 2010. Last week the European Parliament expressed its
will that the Commission should prevent the arbitrary blockade of
WikiLeaks.
Bradley Manning, who is alleged to be a source of the cables, started
testifying on Thursday about his pre-trial treatment, which UN Special
Rapporteur Juan Mendez said was "at a minimum cruel, inhuman and
degrading treatment in violation of Article 16 of the Convention against
Torture." Captain William Hoctor, the government psychiatrist with 24
years of experience who evaluated Manning at Quantico base in Virginia,
testified that brig commanders had ignored his recommendations for
Manning's detention, something he had not even experienced in his work
at Guantánamo bay prison.
Bradley Manning has been detained without trial for 921 days. This is
the longest pre-trial detention of a U.S. military soldier since at least the
Vietnam War. U.S. military law says the maximum is 120 days.

The material that Bradley Manning is alleged to have leaked has
highlighted astonishing examples of U.S. subversion of the democratic
process around the world, systematic evasion of accountability for
atrocities and killings, and many other abuses. Our archive of State
Department cables have appeared in tens of thousands of articles, books
and scholarly works, illustrating the nature of U.S. foreign policy and the
instruments of U.S. national power. On the two-year anniversary of the
start of Cablegate, I want to highlight some of the stories that have
emerged.
A War of Terror
The United States' War on Terror has claimed hundreds of thousands
of lives, inflamed sectarian violence, and made a mockery of international
law. Victims and their families struggle to have their stories
acknowledged, and the U.S.' systematic avoidance of accountability for
war crimes implicitly denies their right to be considered human beings.
Moreover, as the U.S. increasingly relies on clandestine military
operations conducted outside the scrutiny of government oversight, the
execution of this expanding War on Terror becomes increasingly
uncoupled from the democratic process. While President Obama had
promised the American people in 2008 that he would end the Iraq War,
U.S. troops were only withdrawn when information from a cable revived
international scrutiny of abuse occurring in Iraq, resulting in a refusal to
grant continued immunity to U.S. troops in 2012 or beyond.
In 2007 the U.S. embassy in Baghdad obtained a copy of the Iraqi
government's final investigation report on the massacre of 17 civilians on
September 16th, 2007 in Nisour Square. The report concluded that the
incident was an unprovoked attack on unarmed civilians, asked for $8
million in compensation for each death and $4 million for each injury, and
demanded that the private security firm Blackwater be replaced within six
months. Blackwater continued to operate in Iraq for two years afterwards,
and the U.S. Embassy compensated victims with $10,000 for each death
and $5,000 for each injury. Five years later, the offending Blackwater
mercenaries have escaped from accountability to Iraq, and attempts to
bring them to justice in the U.S. have resulted in a long chain of dismissed

cases and one undisclosed settlement. WikiLeaks' Iraq War Logs release of
391,832 U.S. Army field reports uncovered 14 additional cases where
Blackwater opened fire on civilians, along with numerous other incidents
of abuse. The Iraq War Logs also showed how the United States handed
over prisoners to be tortured in gruesome detail -- stories of electrocution,
mutilation and of victims being attacked with drills.
The fact that, five years on, the victims of the Nisour Square
Massacre have seen no meaningful accountability is an atrocity. But it is
unfortunately no surprise that the U.S. claims immunity for its forces in
other countries, then fails to administer justice at home.
These events -- and in particular one cable detailing the summary
execution of 10 Iraqi civilians, including four women and five children --
by U.S. soldiers and a subsequent airstrike to cover up the evidence,
forced the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq in 2011. The story of handcuffed
execution and cover-up sparked outrage around the world in the midst of
negotiations to extend U.S. troop presence into 2012 and, in response to
international coverage, Iraq revived its investigation into the incident. Iraq
ultimately refused to grant immunity to U.S. troops in 2012, forcing the
U.S. to withdraw in December 2011.
This systemic violence and cover-up extends to the war in
Afghanistan. When news emerged that a midnight bombing campaign on
the Afghan village of Granai in 2009 had possibly resulted in the death of
up to 100 civilians, U.S. officials publicly asserted that most of the dead
had been Taliban fighters. A State Department cable written shortly after
the event summarizes a meeting between the Red Cross' Afghanistan chief
Reto Stocker and U.S. Ambassador Carl Eikenberry in which they
discussed findings from an investigation of the event. In the cable, Stocker
is referred to as "one of the most credible sources for unbiased and
objective information in Afghanistan." The Red Cross report estimated
that 89 of the dead and 13 injured were in fact civilians. Neither the U.S.
government nor the Red Cross publicly revealed these figures.
WikiLeaks and the Arab Spring
The Tunisian cables describe the extreme corruption and lack of
transparency of the Ben Ali regime. The Ben Ali extended family are

described as the worst offenders, their lavish life accompanied by "a widerange
of corrupt schemes," including "property expropriation and
extortion of bribes." We also learned that Ben Ali family assets included
an airline, several hotels and a radio station. One cable describes state
censorship of Tunisia's only private broadcast satellite TV station, and a
surprise tax judgment against the station of almost $1.5 million.
In its 2011 annual report, Amnesty International praised WikiLeaks
and its media partners for catalyzing the revolution in Tunisia:
"While the 'Jasmine Revolution' in Tunisia would not have happened
without the long struggle of brave human rights defenders over the last
two decades, support for activists from outside the country may have been
strengthened as people scrutinized the WikiLeaks documents on Tunisia
and understood the roots of the anger. In particular, some of the documents
made clear that countries around the world were aware of both the
political repression and the lack of economic opportunity, but for the most
part were not taking action to urge change."
When Tunisia's president Moncef Marzouki spoke with me on The
World Tomorrow, he thanked WikiLeaks for its work, saying, "I am very
grateful for all that you have done for promoting human rights, truth, and I
admire and support your efforts." Read More
Quote of the Day:
Here is the estimate of the tons of DU the US used in
Iraq: 1000-2000 tons - more than three times the amount
used in the first Gulf War. . . . only this time it was primarily
spread in Iraq's cities, not on the battlefield.
The uranium and its radioactive decay products will
remain toxic for over 4 billion years...and will slowly destroy
the genetic future of the Iraqi people.
But the death and destruction will not be contained
within the borders of Iraq. Winds will spread it throughout
the Middle East and beyond. The US has carried out its

homicidal plan now on Afghanistan and Iraq. . . . what
country is next?
Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Kuwait, the Gulf States, and
Iran will breathe the invisible war too... and they will share
the fate of the Iraqi people, the caretakers of the cradle of
civilization. — Leuren Moret, 1,000-2,000 TONS DU Spread
Over Iraq's Cities, 2003
Image of the Day:
Robber Barons Terrorizing Americans
Videos of the Day:
Afghan War reality check
End Wall Street’s Wars!
Occupy Wall Street!
Occupy Wall Street is the Only Organization
That Identifies The Enemy —
The 1% That Own and Control The Wealth!
1960s The Realist — One Nation Under God/1%
(Unlike The Trade Union Misleaders
Nor The Misleaders Of The Oppressed
Who Strive To Be In ‘Partnership’ With The 1%)

1960s The Realist — One Nation Under God/1%
(Unlike The Trade Union Misleaders
Nor The Misleaders Of The Oppressed
Who Strive To Be In ‘Partnership’ With The 1%)
Occupy Wall Street — ‘We Are The 99%’
The resistance continues at Liberty Square:
U.S.
James Petras: The Great Social Security Robbery
Introduction:
The leaders of both major parties, Congress, the White House, the
editorial writers, journalists of all the principle newspapers and most
academic economists claim that Social Security and Medicare need to be
‘reformed’ in order to reduce the “unsustainable” fiscal deficit and avoid
the bankruptcy of these social programs.
An important aspect of this elite propaganda campaign is the perverse
manipulation of the nature of those two programs. They are dubbed
“entitlement programs”, implying some sort of government handout or
individual privilege. In fact social security is a form of social insurance
paid for through payroll tax deductions throughout the working life of the
contributors, which usually approximates a half-century.
The “entitlement” rhetoric claims that the lifetime contributions are
insufficient and that several regressive ‘reforms’ are necessary to “save the
systems” – at the expense of the beneficiaries. The so-called “Grand

Compromise” proposed by President Obama and the “Fiscal Reforms”
proposed by the Congressional Republicans are all aimed at robbing
working class contributors of their pension savings through various
specific regressive changes.
The “Grand Compromise” as Legalized Theft
For decades only a small fraction of Social Security contributions are
used to pay recipients, the bulk is transferred into the general treasury to
pay for current expenditures – mostly hundreds of billions of dollars in
war spending, payments on bonds and T-notes; subsidies to agro-business,
bailouts to Wall Street speculative investment banks and other elite
economic interests. Over the decades the Treasury robbed several trillions
in SS funds, exchanging them for IOUs (never reimbursed) in order to
provide a kind of “social insurance” for the military-industrial-Wall
Street-police state power elite. If the accumulated payments to SS had
remained in a special account instead of being siphoned off to cover the
deficits incurred by military spending and overseas wars, SS finance
would be in sound condition at least till the end of the 21st century. The
Social Security Administration (SSA) would be able to adjust payments
upward to real rates of inflation (about double the rate of adjustment now
jiggered by the Government). The SSA could begin full payments at age
62 for most and at a lower age for those citizens working in hazardous
occupations.
Even if we take account of the past Treasury heist, the SS fund could
be fully replenished if the cap was eliminated on incomes above $110,000
and if the SS tax was made progressive. As is well known, self-employed
billionaires and millionaires pay an average of $11,450 a year to the SS
fund. If the cap was lifted, those earning a billion would pay a minimum
of $100 million a year at the current rate, the millionaires $100 thousand a
year. If a moderately progressive rate was in place, payments would
double, pretty much ending the threat to SS.
There is no “entitlement crises” today. There is a crisis in the
regressive payments and tax systems which finance the social insurance
programs. The problem is elite tax evasion not the ‘aging of the

population’. The problem is the use of SS payments to fund the power
elite-robbing Peter (SS) to pay Paul (imperial wars).
The robbing of SS contributors-turned-beneficiaries is repeated in a
multitude of forms every day and in every way.
The construction of the ‘index’ to measure the rate of inflation and
yearly adjustment is deeply flawed to the detriment of the beneficiaries.
The cost of living index excludes the high rates of inflation in such key
items as gasoline, medical costs, food and other essential items in retirees’
budget thus halving the real loss of purchasing power. In other words, over
the period of a decade, between 9% - 11% of real purchasing power of SS
recipients is robbed through deliberate state manipulation of the index –
amounting to hundreds of dollars.
In contrast, Medicare payments by SS recipients have increased
because of real rising rates of inflation in medical costs. In effect real
inflation rates apply to increase costs to SS recipients and deflated rates
apply to lower payment to SS beneficiaries. A multi-billion dollar annual
robbery! Read More
U.S./Israel Nuclear Warfare In Gaza
U.S. to replenish Israel's munitions stocks following Gaza offensive
"Bunker Buster" Bomb Containing Depleted-Uranium Warheads
JERUSALEM, Dec. 11 (Xinhua) -- The United States will sell Israel
munitions to renew its inventory in the wake of a recent offensive in the
Gaza Strip, local media outlets reported Tuesday.

The U.S. Department of Defense on Monday notified Congress of the
647 million U.S. dollar deal to provide the Israel Air Force ( IAF) with
precision munitions depleted during the "Operation Pillar of Defense" in
Gaza last month.
The IAF reportedly used up much of its high-precision munitions in
more than a thousand bombing sorties against Hamas rocket- launching
crews, weapons caches and other assets of militant groups operating in the
coastal enclave, in order to minimize civilian casualties and collateral
damage.
The U.S. Department of Defense said the deal includes the supply of
some 7,000 Joint Attack Munitions kits, which convert " dumb" bombs
into satellite-guided "smart" munitions, as well as an equal number of
BLU-109 and GBU-39 bunker-buster bombs, the Ha' aretz daily said on its
website.
It was not clear whether bunker-buster bombs, intended for striking
heavily-fortified underground targets, were used during the eight-day
campaign to halt incessant rocket fire toward Israel.
Noam Chomsky: America, Moral Degenerate
Noam Chomsky and Eric Bailey of Torture Magazine [1] discuss
America's human rights record under President Obama, and the military
intervention policies that have seen increased use during the Arab Spring.

Eric Bailey: The last four years have seen significant changes in
American federal policy in regards to human rights. One of the few
examples of cooperation between the Democratic and Republican parties
over the last four years has been the passing of the National Defense
Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2012. This bill has given the United States
military the power to arrest American citizens, indefinitely, without
charge, trial, or any other form of due process of law and the Obama
administration has and continues to fight a legal battle in federal court to
prevent that law from being declared unconstitutional. Obama authorized
the assassination of three American citizens, including Anwar al-Awlaki
and his 16-year-old son, admittedly all members of Al Qaeda -- all without
judicial review.
Additionally, the Guantanamo Bay prison remains open, the Patriot
Act has been extended and the TSA has expanded at breakneck speeds.
What is your take on America's human rights record over the past four
years and can you contrast Obama's policies with those of his predecessor,
George W. Bush?
Noam Chomsky: Obama's policies have been approximately the
same as Bush's, though there have been some slight differences, but that's
not a great surprise. The Democrats supported Bush's policies. There were
some objections on mostly partisan grounds, but for the most part, they
supported his policies and it's not surprising that they have continued to do
so. In some respects Obama has gone even beyond Bush. The NDAA,
which you mentioned, was not initiated by Obama (when it passed
Congress, he said he didn't approve of it and wouldn't implement it), but
he nevertheless did sign it into law and did not veto it. It was pushed
through by hawks, including Joe Lieberman and others.
In fact, there hasn't been that much of a change. The worst part of the
NDAA is that it codified -- or put into law -- what had already been a
regular practice. The practices hadn't been significantly different. The one
part that received public attention is what you mentioned, the part that
permits the indefinite detention of American citizens, but why permit the
indefinite detention of anybody? It's a gross violation of fundamental
human rights and civil law, going all the way back to the Magna Carta in

the 13th century, so it's a very severe attack on elementary civil rights,
both under Bush and under Obama. It's bipartisan!
As for the killings, Obama has sharply increased the global
assassination campaign. While it was initiated by Bush, it has expanded
under Obama and it has included American citizens, again with bipartisan
support and very little criticism other than some minor criticism because it
was an American. But then again, why should you have the right to
assassinate anybody? For example, suppose Iran was assassinating
members of Congress who were calling for an attack on Iran. Would we
think that's fine? That would be much more justified, but of course we'd
see that as an act of war.
The real question is, why assassinate anyone? The government has
made it very clear that the assassinations are personally approved by
Obama and the criteria for assassination are very weak. If a group of men
are seen somewhere by a drone who are, say, loading something into a
truck, and there is some suspicion that maybe they are militants, then it's
fine to kill them and they are regarded as guilty unless, subsequently, they
are shown to be innocent. That's the wording that the United States used
and it is such a gross violation of fundamental human rights that you can
hardly talk about it.
The question of due process actually did arise, since the US does
have a constitution and it says that no person shall be deprived of their
rights without due process of law -- again, this goes back to 13th-century
England -- so the question arose, “What about due process?” The Obama
Justice Department's Attorney General, Eric Holder, explained that there
was due process in these cases because they are discussed first at the
Executive Branch. That's not even a bad joke! The British kings from the
13th century would have applauded. “Sure, if we talk about it, that's due
process.” And that, again, passed without controversy.
In fact, we might ask the same question about the murder of Osama
Bin Laden. Notice I use the term “murder.” When heavily armed elite
troops capture a suspect, unarmed and defenseless, accompanied by his
wives, and then shoot him, kill him, and dump his body into the ocean
without an autopsy, that's sheer assassination. Also notice that I said

“suspect.” The reason is because of another principle of law, that also goes
back to the 13th century -- that a man is presumed innocent until proven
guilty. Before that, he's a suspect. In the case of Osama Bin Laden, the
United States had never formally charged him with 9/11 and part of the
reason was that they didn't know that he was responsible. In fact, eight
months after 9/11 and after the most intensive inquiry in history, the FBI
explained that it suspected that the 9/11 plot was hatched in Afghanistan
(didn't mention Bin Laden), and was implemented in the United Arab
Emirates, Germany, and of course, the United States. That's eight months
after the attack and there's nothing substantive that they've learned since
then that does more than increase the suspicion.
My own assumption is that the suspicion is almost certainly correct,
but there's a big difference between having a very confident belief and
showing someone to be guilty. And even if he's guilty, he was supposed to
be apprehended and brought before a court. That's British and American
law going back eight centuries. He's not supposed to be murdered and
have his body dumped without an autopsy, but support for this is very
nearly universal. Actually, I wrote one of the few critical articles on it and
my article was bitterly condemned by commentators across the spectrum,
including the Left, because the assassination was so obviously just, since
we suspected him of committing a crime against us. And that tells you
something about the significant, I would say “moral degeneration,”
running throughout the whole intellectual class. And yes, Obama has
continued this and in some respects extended it, but it hardly comes as a
surprise.
The rot is much deeper than that. Read More
Matt Taibbi: You Can Go to Prison for Pot, While Big Banks Get
Away With Laundering Drug Cartel Cash
By
Matt Taibbi [2], Amy Goodman [3], Juan Gonzalez [4]
The banking giant HSBC has escaped indictment for laundering
billions of dollars for Mexican drug cartels and groups linked to al-Qaeda.

Despite evidence of wrongdoing, the U.S. Department of Justice has
allowed the bank to avoid prosecution and pay a $1.9 billion fine. No
top HSBC officials will face charges, either. We’re joined by Rolling
Stone contributing editor Matt Taibbi, author of "Griftopia: A Story of
Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American
History." "You can do real time in jail in America for all kinds of
ridiculous offenses," Taibbi says. "Here we have a bank that laundered
$800 million of drug money, and they can’t find a way to put anybody in
jail for that. That sends an incredible message, not just to the financial
sector but to everybody. It’s an obvious, clear double standard, where one
set of people gets to break the rules as much as they want and another set
of people can’t break any rules at all without going to jail."
Amy Goodman: For more on the latest bank scandals, we’re joined
by Taibbi. Now, how did Forbes put it, Matt? "What’s a bank got to do to
get into some real trouble around here?"
MATT TAIBBI: Exactly, exactly. And what’s amazing about that is
that’s Forbessaying that. I mean, universally, the reaction, even in—
among the financial press, which is normally very bank-friendly and gives
all these guys the benefit of the doubt, the reaction is, is "What do you
have to do to get a criminal indictment?" What HSBC has now admitted to
is, more or less, the worst behavior that a bank can possibly be guilty of.
You know, they violated the Trading with the Enemy Act, the Bank
Secrecy Act. And we’re talking about massive amounts of money. It was
$9 billion that they failed to supervise properly. These crimes were so
obvious that apparently the cartels in Mexico specifically designed boxes
to put cash in so that they would fit through the windows of HSBC teller
windows. So, it was so out in the open, these crimes, and there’s going to
be no criminal prosecution whatsoever, which is incredible.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And emails found where bank officials were
instructing officials in Iran and in some other countries at how best to hide
their efforts to move money into their system?
MATT TAIBBI: Exactly, yeah, and that’s true at HSBC, and
apparently we have a very similar scandal involving another British bank,
Standard Chartered, which also paid an enormous fine recently for

laundering money for—through Iran. This, again, comes on the heels of
the Libor scandal, which has already caught up two major British banks—
the Royal Bank of Scotland and Barclays. So, you have essentially all of
the major British banks now are inveigled in these enormous scandals. We
have a couple of arrests, you know, today involving low-level people in
the Libor thing, but it doesn’t look like any major players are going to be
indicted criminally for any of this.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And this whole argument that the bank is too
big to indict because of the threat to the world financial system, most
people don’t know thatHSBC stands for Hong Kong and Shanghai
Banking Corporation. It’s a British bank that goes back to the early days of
British colonialism in Asia.
MATT TAIBBI: Sure.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And is it too big to be indicted?
MATT TAIBBI: The amazing thing about that rationale is that it’s
exactly the opposite of the truth. The message that this sends to everybody,
when banks commit crimes and nobody is punished for it, is that you can
do it again. You know, if there’s no criminal penalty for committing even
the most obvious kinds of crimes, that tells everybody, investors all over
the world, that the banking system is inherently unsafe. And so, the
message is, this is not a move to preserve the banking system at all. In
fact, it’s incredibly destructive. It undermines the entire world confidence
in the banking system. It’s an incredible decision that, again, is met with
surprise even with—by people in the financial community.
AMY GOODMAN: On Tuesday, Thomas Curry, head of the Office
of the Comptroller of the Currency, the lead regulator for HSBC in the
U.S., defended the settlement.
THOMAS CURRY: These actions send a strong message to the
bank and to the financial services industry to make compliance with the
law a priority to safeguard their institutions from being misused in ways
that threaten American lives.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Thomas Curry, head of the Office of the
Comptroller of the Currency. It seems like a lot of people who are in
prison right now—low-level thieves, criminals, drug launderers, people

who have been accused of working with al-Qaeda—perhaps could appeal
their convictions now and get out of jail.
MATT TAIBBI: Right. Right, yeah, exactly. I was in court
yesterday, in criminal court in Brooklyn. I saw somebody come out of—
come into court who had just been overnight in jail for walking from one
subway car to another in front of a policeman. You can do real time in jail
in America for all kinds of ridiculous offenses, for taking up two subway
seats in New York City, if you fall asleep in the subway. People go to jail
for that all the time in this country, for having a marijuana stem in your
pocket. There are 50,000 marijuana possession cases in New York City
alone every year. And here we have a bank that laundered $800 million of
drug money, and they can’t find a way to put anybody in jail for that. That
sends an incredible message not just to the financial sector but to
everybody. It’s an obvious, clear double standard, where one set of people
gets to break the rules as much as they want and another set of people
can’t break any rules at all without going to jail. And I just don’t see how
they don’t see this problem. Read More
Environment:
Fracking:
Nuclear Fallout: Ongoing Tragedy/Disaster In Japan:
EnergyNews:
01:30 PM EST on December 14th, 2012 | 2 comments
Radiation levels rise for 5th month straight in Fukushima city
(PHOTO)
12:03 PM EST on December 14th, 2012 | 9 comments

Strong earthquakes hit off California coast — Initially thought to be
M6.4 and M6.1 back-to-back — 190 miles from San Onofre nuclear
plant (VIDEO)
03:23 AM EST on December 14th, 2012 | 20 comments
Newspaper: Headaches, nausea, eye irritation reported from giant
sinkhole; Worries emerge about residents with cancer — Official
Downplays Concerns: “My opinion… is the facts”
02:13 AM EST on December 14th, 2012 | 28 comments
BBC: “One of the most contaminated places on Earth” — Silence is
deafening 10 miles from Fukushima plant — Nuclear power’s lie has
been so tragically exposed
10:54 AM EST on December 13th, 2012 | 5 comments
CBS: Oil may be seeping from Deepwater Horizon site — Coast
Guard cancels interview — “My concern is that substantial amounts
of oil could still be leaking” -Congressman (VIDEO)
10:04 AM EST on December 13th, 2012 | 8 comments
Tepco: Bent rod found in spent fuel pool — Nuclear fuel rods touching
— “Serious fuel failure accident” risked at Japan plant
Ongoing Gulf of Mexico Oil Disaster:
Oil Spill Attorney Stuart Smith’s Blog:
Environmental Must-Reads – December 14, 2012
7 states want to sue for fracking-related air quality
As many states reap the benefits of fracking, others increasingly are
lining up against it.

Led by New York, seven Atlantic states this week threatened to sue
the Environmental Protection Agency, seeking harsher air quality rules on
the oil and gas industry and its most effective drilling method.
Seven states, led by New York, sue EPA over methane from oil
and gas drilling
One of the benefits of being an elected official in a bright blue state, a
state so blue that it casts a pale blue glow over its neighbors, is that you
can be pretty aggressively liberal. New York state has a proud tradition of
such politicians (as well as some less aggressive ones) — particularly
those politicians ensconced as state attorney general.
Frack Waste Fears
New York State’s cautious approach to permitting hydraulic
fracturing of the Marcellus shale for natural gas, and the disposal of
potentially hazardous waste from such operations, is of little comfort to
residents of this Chautauqua County community.
Fracking battle continues to brew
The battle lines are being drawn. One side says fracking could create
47 thousand jobs just in Illinois, most of those in the south, and nearly 10
billion dollars.
But another group says it’s not worth the risk to the environment and
banned hydraulic fracturing from their village.
With Controls, Britain Allows Hydraulic Fracturing to Explore
for Gas
The British government gave the go-ahead Thursday for exploratory
hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, to extract natural gas from shale-rock
deposits.
Because of the environmental concerns about the controversial
technique, which include the risk of water pollution, the government
called for stringent controls on fracking. But the decision nonetheless
potentially opens the door for a shale gas industry to begin developing in
Western Europe, even though many governments on the Continent remain
wary. Poland has already allowed big energy companies to do exploratory
drilling.
The Boom And Bust Of Fracking

Some places have banned fracking, a controversial type of natural gas
drilling. Critics say the process contaminates groundwater. But proponents
say it creates jobs and energy independence. Host Michel Martin is joined
by NPR’s Jeff Brady and reporter Scott Detrow from NPR’s StateImpact
project in Pennsylvania. They discuss the boom and bust of fracking.
Solving fracking’s biggest problem
A Georgia company called Ecologix thinks it has found a way to
reduce the amount of water used to extract gas.
German Lawmakers Reject Ban on Shale-Gas Fracking in
Parliament
Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government won votes that will permit
fracking to continue in Germany, saying the technique may help the
country’s energy supply security.
Merkel’s coalition government defeated motions from the Green
Party and Left Party that called for banning hydraulic fracturing, or
fracking, after the opposition argued the technique is harmful to the
environment. The vote was 309 against the Green Party’s motion, 259 in
favor and two abstentions. There was no count for the second motion.
Boulder County adopts new fracking guidelines
Boulder County Commissioners unanimously adopted controversial
new oil and gas guidelines Thursday, which will allow fracking on county
land.
Boulder County says a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing, or
fracking, will eventually be lifted, but it will most likely be extended first
so the regulations can be put in place.
PA Agency Fails to Share Fracking and Drinking Water Info with
Homeowners
This fall I spoke to people in Pennsylvania who live next door to
fracking operations. The question on nearly everyone’s mind was what
fracking was doing to their drinking water. People have industrial drill
pads and massive wastewater pits near their homes, and some have
watched their tap water turn brown or catch fire. It’s not surprising they
are concerned about the health and safety of their families.
Look out for fracking (and how to stop it)

There’s enough oil (maybe) under Central California to make petro
companies vastly rich, and to keep people driving around in their carbonspewing
private cars for many years to come. Only problem is you have to
use hydrofracking to bust up the shale deposits to get at it. And that
involves toxic chemicals and possible contamination of water supplies.
No Alarm Sounded When The West Virginia Pipeline Exploded
When the 20-inch gas pipeline next to Interstate 77 in West Virginia
first ruptured on Tuesday, nobody at pipeline operator, Columbia Gas
Transmission, knew it.
Now, the National Transportation Safety Board is trying to find out
why. NTSB member Robert Sumwalt says no warning went off in the
operating company’s control center in nearby Charleston, so investigators
are going there to interview staffers and review data.
Millions of Acres of Public Lands at Risk from Fracking
The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is currently considering
regulations and guidelines for unconventional oil and gas development on
millions of acres of public land, and SkyTruth believes that public
disclosure must be an integral part of these new rules. The BLM has
already indicated that they are strongly considering FracFocus.org as the
platform for disclosure, however, there are a number of transparency
issues which are not currently addressed by the industry-funded website.
Don’t Frack Denver’s Water
What has separated the fracking wars in the Eastern U.S. from the
Western U.S. is that New York City’s and Pittsburgh’s watershed—the
place where these cities get their drinking water—is proposed to be
fracked. As you can expect, when millions of people learn that potentially
cancer-causing chemicals are going to be injected into the ground near
their drinking water, they get very riled up.
Sinkhole health fears discussed
Louisiana’s state epidemiologist said Thursday that, in his view, the
air in Bayou Corne is better than the air in Baton Rouge.
Texas judge lifts order on TransCanada pipeline
TransCanada can resume oil pipeline work on a private Texas
property for now, a judge said Thursday, at least until a hearing next week

meant to determine whether the product the company wants to transport is
in fact crude oil.
Landowner’s Temporary Restraining Order Against Keystone
Pipeline Dissolved By Nacogdoches County Judge
Two days after a Nacogdoches County man won a temporary
restraining order against TransCanada, halting construction of the
controversial, 1,200-mile Keystone XL pipeline across his land, the judge
threw it out, citing a dearth of evidence indicating the company had
defrauded him.
Texas Judge Changes Course, Allows Keystone XL Construction
to Move Forward
In a blow to landowner’s rights, Texas communities’ waterways and
the climate, a county judge in Texas this morning ruled to allow
construction of the toxic Keystone XL tar sands pipeline to continue on a
landowner’s property until a hearing on Dec. 19. Nacogdoches County
Court at Law Judge Jack Sinz reversed the Temporary Restraining Order
(TRO) he granted to landowner Michael Bishop from Douglass, TX
earlier this week by dissolving the TRO at the behest of TransCanada.
KeyStone-XL Pipeline’s Fate Could Be Shortly Decided By
Regulators
Starting Tuesday, U.S. regulators will hold regular meetings on oil
and natural gas pipeline safety standards. A series of pipeline issues,
ranging from a deadly gas pipeline explosion in California, to a massive
oil spill in Michigan, have brought pipeline safety to the forefront of the
American energy debate. The safety meetings, scheduled in Virginia, come
days after environmental regulators in Nebraska end a public comment
period for Keystone-XL, one of the most contentious U.S. pipeline issues.
David Vitter Says BP Should Hire Louisiana Firms For Oil
Company’s Contracts
BP Plc should hire more Louisiana companies to work on its project
to expand an oil platform to show the oil company meant what it said in
advertisements pledging to “make this right” for the state after the 2010
Gulf oil spill, U.S. Senator David Vitter said on Thursday.

Vitter accuses BP of creating image in ads that doesn’t match
reality
Noting that BP continues to spend lots of money on advertising about
its post-2010 oil spill commitment to “make things right,” Sen. David
Vitter, R-La., Thursday said the company is doing more to help Europe
than Louisiana. In a sarcastic letter to Lamar McCay, chairman and
president of BP America Inc., Vitter suggests the image the company
presents in ads isn’t consistent with its record.
Oil may be seeping from Deepwater Horizon site
CBS News has learned that BP is set to embark Thursday on the fifth
day of a little-known subsea mission under Coast Guard supervision to
look for any new oil leaking from the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
Report: Oil may be seeping from Deepwater Horizon site
BP is conducting undersea tests in the Gulf of Mexico to determine if
more oil is leaking from the site of the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe,
according to CBS News.
The network said today is the fifth day that BP, under supervision by
the U.S. Coast Guard, was using submersible vehicles to look for oil
around the containment dome at the Macondo well site.
Report: Judge approves BP’s $525M settlement with SEC
A federal court finalized BP’s $525 million settlement with the
Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for low-balling the amount of
oil spilled during its 2010 Gulf of Mexico explosion.
Judge approves $525M oil spill securities deal
A federal judge has approved a $525 million settlement between BP
PLC and the Securities and Exchange Commission over statements the
company made during the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
In documents signed Monday, U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier in
New Orleans approved the deal, which was tied to BP claims about the
volume of oil spewing from its busted Macondo well.
Oil company to plead guilty to lying about amount of oil spilled
in Gulf
Another oil company is poised to plead guilty to falsifying the
amount of oil it spilled into the Gulf of Mexico.

It’s nothing on the order of the 2010 BP spill, in which BP admitted
to lying about how much oil was spilling, but the charges against W&T
Offshore show there are others trying to pull one over on the pollution
police.
New JIP Seeks to Explores Arctic Oil Spill Response Technology
A number of research projects into Arctic oil spill response
technology are underway thanks to a joint industry program (JIP) that
officially launched in January of this year.
The Arctic Oil Spill Response JIP, under the auspices of the
International Association of Oil and Gas Producers, will conduct research
over a four-year period in six areas related to oil spill response
preparedness, including dispersants, environmental effects, trajectory
modeling, remote sensing, mechanical recovery and in-situ burning.
Research projects being conducted under the JIP include the fate of
dispersed oil under ice, dispersant testing under realistic conditions, and
oil spill detection and mapping in low visibility and ice.
Minister: Oil spill probe continues
The probe into the oil spill at Lucayan Harbour last week is ongoing
and the relevant officials continue to monitor the shoreline for
contamination, Transport and Aviation Minister Glenys Hanna-Martin
confirmed yesterday in the House of Assembly.
Long, uncertain path ahead for Gulf restoration after oil spill
In the coming years, unprecedented billions will be spent on
restoration in the Gulf of Mexico, a vital American ecosystem damaged by
the most catastrophic oil spill in U.S. history.
Fukushima operator Tepco admits culpability
Japanese nuclear plant accepts lack of safety culture and bad habits
contributed to world’s worst nuclear accident in 25 years
Insight: Japan largely excludes foreign firms in Fukushima
clean-up
Nearly two years after a massive earthquake and tsunami caused
meltdowns at the Fukushima nuclear plant, Japan is failing to keep a
pledge to tap global expertise to decommission its crippled reactors,
executives at nuclear contractors from the United States and Europe say.

Japan to host nuclear safety conference in Fukushima
An international conference will be held in Japan’s Fukushima region
over the weekend to discuss nuclear safety following last year’s atomic
crisis, Tokyo said Thursday.
Mistakes found in all radiation projections
The Nuclear Regulation Authority said Thursday a thorough review
of its mistake-plagued projections for the spread of radiation turned up
errors in the data for every atomic power plant in Japan.
Tougher rules due for nuclear evacuations
A panel of the Nuclear Regulation Authority reached broad
agreement Thursday to set standards tougher than international guidelines
for triggering an evacuation order in the event of a nuclear disaster.
EPA Finds Excessive Radiation at Boeing Site
The site of a nuclear reactor in the Santa Susana Mountains that
partially melted down more than 50 years ago has soil radiation that
exceeds standard limits, according to new data released by the
Environmental Protection Agency.
American Academy of Pediatricians Endorses Cell Phone Safety
Legislation
The American Academy of Pediatricians (AAP) which represents
“60,000 primary care pediatricians, pediatric medical subspecialists, and
pediatric surgical specialists dedicated to the health, safety and well-being
of infants, children, adolescents, and young adults” has endorsed H.R.
6358, the Cell Phone Right to Know Act.
There’s noise pollution and then there’s distortion
Make no mistake — in New Orleans, we’ve always loved our
jazzmen…from Louis Armstrong to Professor Longhair to Winton
Marsalis to dozens of great stompers and shouters that you’ve probably
never heard of.
But I’ll tell you one kind of person we don’t stand for in the Crescent
City: A strawman.
This other day, a distinguished — or once-distinguished, anyway —
scholarly journal called the Oxford American published a major essay on

the noise pollution controversy in New Orleans called, bizarrely, “The
Anxiety of Authenticity.” The author is a Duke University professor
named Duncan Murrell. Last time I checked, Durham, N.C., was about
850 miles as the crow flies from the Big Easy, and while I guess maybe
Mr. Murrell has been to our city at some point in time, his pompously
written piece comes off like he phoned it in — very naïve, uninformed and
one-sided.
It’s a total strawman article. Not long ago, a group of us who actually
live and work in the heart and soul of New Orleans formed a group called
Hear the Music, Stop the Noise because we were tired — not of the city’s
great music tradition, which is what has attracted or kept many of us in the
city in the first place. No, we’ve urged the city to step up its enforcement
of the city’s noise ordinances because we’re tired of folks who contribute
little or nothing to the city’s cultural heritage — nuisance bars that open
their doors into the street at all hours of night. itinerant foreign musicians
who thoughtlessly set up a sidewalk loudspeaker under someone’s
apartment window. We love live music, and when a quality club runs afoul
of the decibels standards, we want to work with them on a noise abatement
plan that works for everyone.
Duncan Murrell doesn’t know any of this, nor does he seem to care.
From his lofty academic tower, he authored a hit piece that called citizens
who’ve been assaulted by unwarranted noise pollution the “haute
bourgeoisie” which is a Marxist term and implies that folks who want
reasonable enforcement of the law are people who want to mute the Dirty
Dozen Brass Band or set Dr. John’s piano on fire. I mean….c’mon, give
me a break.
Here’s a reality check. No one who lives in the Quarter, or any
neighborhood, is against those things that define the city. In any area of
NOLA, infact, any resident lives near a neighborhood bar or encounters a
second line parade or jazz funeral…and thus has to deal with issues that
accommodate such events. Noise is one of the issues. When does music
become noise?
Noise in this instance happens when: 1. it is overly amplified
ELECTRONICALLY; 2. it isn’t live music but DJs or canned; 3. it is

heard outside the entertainment areas of Bourbon Street, Marigny or other
areas at time families are sleeping 4. it violates existing zoning, licensing
and noise ordinances which were passed for people’s health and safety
We don’t want the city to stop being New Orleans. but there is no
reason to believe New Orleans is synonymous with subwoofers and
tweeters at 3 a.m. That’s just rude behavior — and it’s unlawful — no
matter where it takes place. Many of us believe in great music, but we also
believe in science. And researchers have found time and time again that
exposure to excessive, unwarranted noise can cause serious health
problems – not just hearing damage but even problems such as high blood
pressure and even heart disease over a prolonged period.
Of course, you won’t learn any of that in this so-called professor’s
surprisingly ill-informed rant. Indeed, the piece in the Oxford American is
a classic case of what we call a strawman argument, building a case
around a reality that doesn’t actually exist. And that’s an insult to those of
who live in New Orleans and are trying to build a better city — where the
world’s best live music can peaceably co-exist with respect for neighbors,
and for good health. Musical distortion was great when it came from Jimi
Hendrix’s fuzzy guitar, but coming from Duncan Murrell it’s just pointless
feedback. I would like him to visit with a client who has to put ear plugs in
her and her children’s ears every night since an illegal bar started having
live entertainment. Nuff said.
If you must read the Oxford American piece, it’s at: http://
www.oxfordamerican.org/articles/2012/dec/10/anxiety-authenticity/
To read my Sept. 28 essay on music and noise pollution in New
Orleans, go to: http://www.stuarthsmith.com/new-orleans-memo-you-canstill-have-great-music-without-noise-pollution/
To keep informed about the battle for balance in New Orleans, visit
the “Hear The Music Stop the Noise” website – and sign our petition:
http://hearthenolamusic.org
Please visit and “like” our Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/
HeartheNolaMusic

To read my Aug. 3 blog post about noise pollution from New Orleans
to New York, please check out: http://www.stuarthsmith.com/from-newyork-to-new-orleans-noise-pollution-terrorizes-the-public/
Check out my Feb. 9 blog post about New Orleans noise pollution at:
http://www.stuarthsmith.com/when-the-party-gets-too-loud-new-orleansresidents-wither-under-noise-pollution
Black Liberation/Civil Rights:
Labor:
Economy:
World:
Ireland: Pat Finucane murder – report points finger at state collusion
by
Gerry Ruddy
Pat Finucane mural in Belfast. Photo: Paul Joseph
British Prime Minister, David Cameron uses words such as
“shocking” to refer to the activities of his own security forces then you
know something is up. He was responding to the publication of the de
Silva report, a review of the papers accumulated from different
investigations carried out by different agencies of the British state into the
death of Pat Finucane, which show that there was indeed collusion
between the British state and those who murdered him back in 1989.

However, in an attempt to play down the role of the state, the same
report states that there was “no overarching state conspiracy”. That is
laughable as part of the same report points out that there had been "a
wilful and abject failure by successive Governments." The de Silva report
enumerated the following points, which confirms that the state played a
role far beyond what they would like to admit:
• Employees of British state organisations played a key role in the
murder of Pat Finucane.
• There was a failure to properly investigate the murder, and a
failure to arrest and interview key loyalist paramilitaries.
• Senior British Army Officers deliberately lied during
investigations.
• The Royal Ulster Constabulary seriously obstructed the
investigation.
• 85% of loyalist paramilitaries ‘intelligence’ originated from the
British security forces.
• There were extensive ‘leaks of police information to loyalist
paramilitary organisations.
• MI5 new of the threats against Finucane’s life but failed to protect
him. Read More
Crisis and Resistance in Portugal
Mark Bergfeld

A day before the right wing coalition government in Portugal was to
vote through its 2013 budget, the German finance minister Wolfgang
Schäuble met his Portuguese counterpart Vitor Gaspar and proclaimed,
“Portugal is on the right path and is, for all of us in the Eurozone, a
brilliant example that the approach we have been following to stabilize the
Euro is correct.” Schäuble went on to praise the “exceptional job” being
performed by the Portuguese government. But recent events have shown
that the austerity measures insisted on by the ‘Troika’ of the European
Union, European Central Bank and IMF are creating serious fissures
inside the ruling coalition, growing resistance at the base of society and
widespread debate inside of the parliamentary and extra-parliamentary
left.
The ruling coalition is made up of the Social Democrats (PSD),
which despite its name is a right wing party, and the Conservatives (CDS).
While the implementation of the Troika's austerity measures may have
earned Portugal the label of “the good pupil of the Eurozone,” Portugal's
deficit still stands €1.4-billion away from reaching the Troika's target for
2012.
Since the €78-billion heavy bail-out package in 2011 the government
has embarked on what the Economist magazine called a “brutal” austerity
course, equivalent to a “fiscal atomic bomb.” Civil servants' salaries over
€1,500 have been slashed by up to 10 per cent, those earning over €1,000
have had their holiday pay scrapped and more than 600,000 public sector
workers (around four out every five public sector workers) are at risk of
losing their jobs.
Unemployment and Emigration
These attacks on workers' contracts and conditions have been part of
Portuguese capital's long-term strategy for reducing labour costs, creating
high employment and boosting competitiveness inside of the Eurozone so
as to attract foreign investment. As a consequence almost 50 per cent of
the Portuguese workforce are on temporary contracts.
The unemployment rate lies above 15 per cent and is predicted to rise
further next year. Unlike other southern European countries where youth
unemployment exceeds 50 per cent in Portugal it ‘only’ amounts to 27 per

cent as large numbers of young people have been forced to emigrate. More
than 10,000 under 25 year olds have migrated in the last four months
alone, many of them have moved to countries such as Germany and
Britain, while others have headed to Portugal's former colonies in Angola,
Mozambique and Brazil. Recently prime minister Passos Coelho even told
a group of teachers faced with unemployment to emigrate if they couldn't
find jobs.
The €3.5-billion cuts to healthcare, social security and education
announced in the budget for 2013 will only plunge Portugal deeper into
crisis and recession. The hard-line approach led by the Social Democrats
has allowed its coalition partner the Conservatives to pose as the more
moderate force.
While they continue to vote through the austerity measures
prescribed by the Troika, the Conservatives' verbal distance from Coelho
and Gaspar's more radical reforms have created tensions inside the
government. As unlikely as a break-up of the coalition may seem it did
take the intervention of the Portuguese president to lower the temperature
inside the coalition faced with a by-election next year.
Wrapped in the language that calls for the “re-foundation” of the
Portuguese state, the current austerity policies threaten to uproot the gains
made by the revolution in 1974-75, when a coup by a group of left wing
military officers against the fascist Salazar regime led to a wave of popular
and workers' power. While other European countries received their first
taste of neoliberalism in the late 1970s and 1980s, Portugal was
establishing a welfare state as part of the post-revolution settlement.
A deepening recession, the grim prospect of more bail-outs and the
potential for EU budgetary targets to be missed all point toward the
possibility of further fracture lines developing at the top of Portuguese
society over the coming months.
The weekend before the 14 November general strike one such
fracture appeared when 10,000 active and retired members of the military
in civilian dress marched against austerity through the capital, Lisbon.
Some officers complained that their salaries have been cut by as much as
25 per cent. One banner read “The military is unhappy, the people are

unhappy.” Given the role that radical officers played in the 1974-75
Revolution, many people supported the military's protest. Later on
television, one member of the military went on to say, “We will do
everything so that the indignation of the people will not be suppressed.”
Sparks of Resistance
On 15 September a demonstration was called by a group of artists,
intellectuals and public figures under the banner of “Screw the Troika!
(Que Se Lixe a Troika!) We want our lives!” From small villages in the
Azores to the Algarve, to the industrial cities of Lisbon and Porto, more
than 600,000 people took to the streets against the government's proposal
to increase workers' social security contributions by 7 per cent (some
reports put the turnout on the protests as high as one million, out of a
population of just 10.5 million). Read More
Health, Education, Science and Welfare:
Daily News Digest December 14, 2012
Email From Norine Gutekanst, CTU Organizing Coordinator:
This Week: Key Events to Save Our Schools
Organize to Stop the Attacks on Our Public Schools
The Mayor and Board of Education have closed or taken over
dozens of schools every year, targeting Black and Latino
neighborhoods. These closings take resources that our students
deserve, destabilize our neighborhoods, and increase racial inequity at
CPS. The Board of Ed is now considering closing dozens more schools,
taking even more from the communities that have lost the most! They
plan to close schools in part to pay for more “charter schools”
controlled by the Mayor’s supporters—taking our community’s
schools, jobs, and VOICE.
See below for upcoming events:
WED DEC 12
Hands Off Horace Mann: Why the Policy of Closing Public Schools
Doesn't Work

5:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.
St. Thomas Lutheran Church
80th & Jeffery
Download the flyer
THU DEC 13
Charter Expansion
Public Hearing
5:00 p.m.
CPS Headquarters
125 S. Clark
Click here for more information
FRI DEC 14
School Closings Commission Public Hearing
7:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m.
Horner Park
2741 W. Montrose
Click here for more information
SAT DEC 15
School Closings Commission Public Hearing
1:00 p.m.–3:00 p.m.
Mt. Vernon Baptist Church
2622 W. Jackson
Click here for more information
MON DEC 17
School Closings Commission Public Hearing
7:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m.
Metropolitan Apostolic Church
4100 S. King Dr.
Click here for more information
TUE DEC 18
Tell the Fat Cats: Get Your Paws Off Our Schools
4:00 p.m.
Brief March and Action targeting a top Fat Cat
Meet at 125 S. Clark Street

WED DEC 19
Board of Education Monthly Meeting
Arrive at 9:00 a.m.
125 S. Clark Street
Click here to sign up
If you want to speak, please email the Organizing Dept.
(requires early arrival).
Image and Quote of the Day:
From Big Oil Fracking California:
. . . Our rights are being Facked by Big Oil and
Their Federal, State, and Local Governments
Most people don’t know that the big energy companies
control most of the water in the San Joaquin Valley. Now,
with fracking profitable in California due to the high price
of fuel, they want to frack California and our water
resources required by the fracking process. (As they are
trying to do in the rest of the country.) This table if from
pages 133-135 of Two Californias: the truth about the splitstate
movement by Michael DiLeo, Eleanor Smith:

“At the peak of California production in 1985, Kern
County producers needed roughly four-and-a-half barrels of
water to produce a single barrel of oil.
“Today, that ratio has jumped to almost eight barrels of
water per barrel of oil. This use has been sanctioned despite
the three-year drought that has ravaged the valley, causing
reductions in the water delivered by the State and Central
Valley projects canals. Not only are farmers generally short
of water, dozens of small poor agricultural hamlets —
including Alpaugh, Seville, East Orosi and Kettleman City
— have been forced to tap groundwater. And that
groundwater is often contaminated with agricultural
pollutants, including arsenic and nitrates.” — Oil and
Water Don’t Mix with California Agriculture . . .
Videos of the Day:
End Wall Street’s Wars!
Occupy Wall Street!

Occupy Wall Street is the Only Organization
That Identifies The Enemy —
The 1% That Own and Control The Wealth!
1960s The Realist — One Nation Under God/1%
(Unlike The Trade Union Misleaders
Nor The Misleaders Of The Oppressed
Who Strive To Be In ‘Partnership’ With The 1%)
1960s The Realist — One Nation Under God/1%
(Unlike The Trade Union Misleaders
Nor The Misleaders Of The Oppressed
Who Strive To Be In ‘Partnership’ With The 1%)
Occupy Wall Street — ‘We Are The 99%’
The resistance continues at Liberty Square:
U.S.
On the road to Destruction — Frack Baby Frack!
Feds auction prime Calif land for oil development
by Associated Press in Oil

(AP Photo/San Francisco Chronicle, Michael Macor)
This Sept. 6, 2012 photo shows the vineyards and rolling hills of Hames Valley
near Bradley, Calif., where the battle for mineral rights is underway. The federal
government auctioned off nearly 18,000 acres of oil leases on prime public lands
on Wednesday in Central California, home to prized vineyards, several
endangered species and one of the largest deposits of shale oil in the country.
Eight different groups ? including oil companies ? bid for the leases involving 15
parcels of land up for auction in rural stretches of Monterey, San Benito and
Fresno counties, Bureau of Land Management spokesman David Christy said.
SAN FRANCISCO — The federal government auctioned off nearly
18,000 acres of oil leases on prime public lands on Wednesday in Central
California, home to prized vineyards, several endangered species and one
of the largest deposits of shale oil in the country.
Eight different groups — including oil companies — bid for the
leases involving 15 parcels of land up for auction in rural stretches of
Monterey, San Benito and Fresno counties, Bureau of Land Management
spokesman David Christy said. The agency plans to announce the winners
within 24 hours.
Numerous environmental groups who saw the auction as a sign that
California is next in line for an oil and gas boom protested outside the
auction in Sacramento, with some activists donning hazmat suits.
The auction attracted a normal turnout of bidders, and about half the
parcels went for just $2.50 an acre, much less than the typical price in
nearby Kern County, an oil-rich basin along a mountain range north of Los
Angeles.
Winning bidders would still need to be granted an additional permit
from the bureau in order to start drilling using traditional technologies, or

hydraulic fracturing, a technique to extract hard-to-reach gas and oil by
pummeling rocks deep underground with high-pressure water, sand and
chemicals.
Democratic Rep. Sam Farr had asked the agency to put the auction on
hold over concerns that the bureau wasn’t doing enough to monitor the
potential impacts of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.
“Fracking is not something that we have yet accepted as a proven
technology,” Farr said. “The oil lies deep and the water is shallow and in
the Salinas Valley, healthy water is more important than oil. It’s our
economic base for agriculture.”
The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimated last year that
California’s Monterey Shale formation contains more than 15 billion
barrels of “technically recoverable shale oil,” more than the amount
contained in the Bakken oil fields of Montana and North Dakota, where
oil-producing rock is sandwiched between layers of shale about two miles
under the ground.
Industry officials say hydraulic fracturing is one of many techniques
used since the 1940s, and concerns are overblown, especially since
companies are still determining whether it is economically viable to
develop the Monterey Shale.
“The Monterey Shale is a huge potential energy resource in
California, but there is still a fair amount of exploration going on amongst
our members about whether or how or if it can be developed,” said Tupper
Hull, a spokesman for the Western States Petroleum Association, whose
members produce 80 percent of the state’s oil.
The parcels — which Christy said have never been drilled before —
include scenic stretches of southern Monterey County, where cattle
ranchers and wine grape growers rely on tight water supplies to irrigate
their pasturelands and vineyards. The area is also part of the historic range
of the endangered California condor, whose global population was
recently estimated at less than 400 birds.
The Center for Biological Diversity filed suit against BLM over a
smaller lease auction held in roughly the same region last year, claiming

the bureau had failed to properly review the environmental risks
associated with increased oil and gas development.
“Fracking is not only intensifying oil and gas development in areas
that were in production before, but it’s opening up some beautiful, wild
places where you previously didn’t have drilling,” said attorney Kassie
Siegel, adding that the group ultimately may file another lawsuit over
Wednesday’s auction.
Obama’s ‘Bipartisan’ Austerity/Pauperization Evangelists:
The Bowles-Simpson Traveling Circus Is Just a Distraction
By
Dean Baker
Co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research
The government has implemented a wide array of policies over the
last three decades that have led to a massive upward redistribution of
income. As a result, most workers have seen little benefit from the
economic growth over this period.
Not surprisingly, the wealthy people who have benefitted from the
policies that have redistributed income upward, for example NAFTA-type
trade deals, Wall Street bailouts, and anti-union labor policies, don't want
the public talking about them. This is why we have the Erksine Bowles
and Alan Simpson speaking tour.y
For those who somehow have missed it, Morgan Stanley director
Erskine Bowles and former Senator Alan Simpson were the co-chairs of
President Obama's 2010 deficit commission. While they were unable to
produce a report that had the support necessary to win approval from the

commission, they have made a career out of promoting their own proposal
which they misleadingly imply was a report of the commission.
A Traveling Cash Cow
According to the New York Times, Bowles and Simpson get $40,000
each for speaking engagements where they push their agenda. This price
tag tells us everything we need to know about what is going on here.
While $40,000 might not be big money among the people with whom
Mr. Bowles and Mr. Simpson socialize, it sure is to the rest of us. This is a
couple of thousand dollars more than the typical worker earns in a year. It
is a bit less than three times the average annual Social Security benefit.
And Bowles and Simpson get this money for spending an hour or so
giving their tirade about the desperate need for reducing the deficit.
The incredible irony of these sorts of fees is that the substance of the
Bowles-Simpson tirade is that paying for Social Security and Medicare
will bankrupt our children and grandchildren. The two of them are running
around the country telling people that Social Security checks to retirees
that average $15,000 a year and providing health care insurance to seniors
who have spent their lives working will have our children and
grandchildren living in poverty.
Behind the Fees
To sell this line, Bowles and Simpson must be betting that they have
some really poorly educated young people in their audience. If they
learned their grade school arithmetic, they would quickly recognize these
two for the hucksters they are.
The Social Security Trustees project that real wages, that means the
growth in wages after adjusting for inflation, will grow on average by
more than 40 percent over the next 30 years. This means that if a typical
worker is making $38,000 in 2012, then a typical worker would be earning
more than $53,200 in 2042, in today's dollars.
By comparison, the trustees report tells us that if we want to have
Social Security fully funded for the rest of the century, it would take a tax
increase of 1.3 percent on both the worker and the employer. This assumes
that we make up the projected shortfall entirely by raising the payroll tax,
as opposed to say, raising the cap on wages (currently around $110,000)

that are subject to the tax. It also assumes no cuts whatsoever in scheduled
benefits.
In this extreme case, the necessary tax increase, combining the
employer and employee side, is just 6 percent of projected wage growth
over this period. Yet Bowles and Simpson want to tell us that this tax
increase will have our children and grandchildren living in poverty.
The story changes little even if we add in the projected shortfall in
the Medicare program of 1.35 percent of payroll, half of which would be
applied to the employee and half to the employer. Again, assuming no
other changes and we make the program fully funded based exclusively on
payroll tax increases, the combined tax hit for Social Security and
Medicare is just 10 percent of projected wage growth over the next three
decades.
Of course people will object that they have not been seeing wage
increases because the rich have been getting all the gains from growth
over the last three decades. This is exactly right.
A Huge Distraction
The well-being of our children and grandchildren will be determined
by the extent to which people like Erskine Bowles, Alan Simpson and
their rich friends will be able to continue to extract all the gains from
growth. If they can make the next three decades like the last three decades
then our children and grandchildren will be screwed even if they stopped
paying Social Security and Medicare taxes altogether. (Of course then they
would be doubly screwed since they also wouldn't have Social Security
and Medicare benefits when they retire.)
In short, the whining about the deficit that Bowles and Simpson are
pedaling is a huge distraction from the factors that will actually determine
the well-being of the vast majority of our children and grandchildren. And
the truly wealthy are prepared to pay Bowles and Simpson lots of money
for this distraction.
Dean Baker is an economist and co-director of the Center for
Economic and Policy Research. He has written extensively on a wide
range of topics, including the housing bubble. His most recent book is The

End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive (free
download available here).
Environment:
Fracking:
Nuclear Fallout: Ongoing Tragedy/Disaster In Japan:
EnergyNews:
10:57 PM EST on December 12th, 2012 | 54 comments
Unreported: “It appears we may have taken another burp” at giant
sinkhole — Oil later filmed covering surface, then more land
swallowed — All events were on west side of collapse zone (PHOTOS)
07:43 PM EST on December 12th, 2012 | 21 comments
TV: Giant Louisiana sinkhole swallows more land
07:43 PM EST on December 12th, 2012 | One comment
TV: Giant Louisiana sinkhole swallows more land
02:13 PM EST on December 12th, 2012 | 20 comments
NBC: Japan tsunami debris may be impacting U.S. food supply
(VIDEO)
12:47 PM EST on December 12th, 2012 | 22 comments
Mystery: Dozen miles of dead squid wash ashore in California —
Researchers have no idea why (PHOTO & VIDEO)
Ongoing Gulf of Mexico Oil Disaster:
Oil Spill Attorney Stuart Smith’s Blog:

Environmental Must-Reads – December 13, 2012
Britain Approves Fracking for Shale Gas Exploration
The British government gave the go-ahead Thursday for exploratory
hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for shale gas, subject to stringent
controls — a decision that potentially opens the way for a shale gas
industry to begin developing in Western Europe.
Ban on ‘fracking’ to be lifted despite earthquakes
It is surrounded by rolling hills, sunken country lanes and ancient
woods in one of the most sought after corners of the South East. Now, the
residents of Balcombe, in West Sussex, are about to become unwilling
hosts to the next fracking hotspot.
Fracking Green Light Sends Shockwaves Across UK
Today the Britain’s government lifted its ban on fracking allowing
companies to continue their exploration of shale gas reserves. Energy
Secretary Edward Davey said the decision was subject to new controls to
limit the risks of seismic activity.
Fracking Communities—Now Add Crime to the Laundry List of
Problems Drilling Brings to Your Town
The fracking boom that is remaking the face of North Dakota has
attracted thousands of workers to the state as people who cannot find jobs
elsewhere pursue the lucrative wages in the new northern oil path.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the state gained more than 11,000
residents between 2010 and 2011, putting North Dakota’s population at an
all-time high of 684,000 people. While some people celebrate the boom,
with the increased population has come a problem that no one likes: an
increase in crime.
Long Road, Continued: Fracking in N.Y.
As the administration of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo inches toward a
decision on whether to allow fracking in New York State, it has opened a
30-day period for public comment on proposed regulations that would
govern fracking.
Boulder County sheriff to provide security for commissioners’
fracking vote

After anti-fracking protesters loudly disrupted a Boulder County
commissioners’ hearing last week, sheriff’s officials say they’ll provide
security Thursday afternoon when the elected leaders reconvene to make a
decision on whether to allow oil and gas drilling on county lands.
Fracking Pioneer Encourages More Regulation
The public radio show Marketplace, recently aired an interview with
the Godfather of fracking, George Mitchell. Mitchell talks about how the
birth of modern hydraulic fracturing for shale gas began with an act of
desperation. But perhaps even more significant is what Mitchell says
about his fracking colleagues at the very end of the piece.
The Oklahoman Disregards Mounting Evidence Linking
Fracking To Earthquakes
The Oklahoman relied on the “absence of compelling evidence” and
the comments of a single geologist to conclude that the largest recorded
earthquake in Oklahoma’s history was not tied to fracking, despite
mounting evidence that indicates otherwise. In doing so, the paper
dismissed mounting evidence linking underground injection of wastewater
to earthquakes at large, continuing its attempt to cast doubt on science and
shut down policy debates that could affect the paper’s owner, billionaire
oil and gas tycoon Philip Anschutz.
Fracking fights back
Most of the legal news about Colorado these days revolves around
whether or not the federal government will try to use the courts to prevent
the state from implementing its new marijuana law. That’s certainly an
important story, but arguably just as important is the impending — and
possibly precedent setting — legal battle here over the future of oil and
gas drilling after the city of Longmont voted to ban hydraulic fracturing
(aka “fracking”) within its boundaries.
Neither side happy with draft fracking rules
Hydro fracking in New York was first put on hold in 2008. Since
then, the state’s environmental regulators have been crafting regulations to
oversee the controversial drilling practice.
Maryland Residents Call for Moratorium on Hydraulic
Fracturing of Natural Gas

Mike Tidwell, Executive Director of the Chesapeake Climate Action
Network (CCAN), greeted a roomful of concerned citizens at the
University of Baltimore. The event they were attending was called
Drilling Down: A Conference on Fracking Risks and Action in Maryland.
In the school’s Langsdale Auditorium, residents from all over Maryland
and parts of Pennsylvania participated for a full day of education on
what’s at stake with the introduction of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) for
the extraction of natural gas to the state of Maryland
A Red Flag On Disclosure Of Hydraulic Fracturing Chemicals
It’s not often that a new regulatory idea becomes so popular that one
or more states per month climb on the bandwagon. But that is precisely
what has happened with the push to disclose which chemicals are pumped
into the ground to stimulate oil and natural gas production during the
process known as hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.”
West Virginia gas pipeline explosion – just a drop in the disaster
bucket
The fireball explosion Tuesday of an interstate natural gas
transmission line in West Virginia, which left behind a huge jet of flame
that burned for more an hour and melted four lanes of I-77, is just one of
scores of accidents and explosions involving natural gas lines this year,
federal data show.
Giant Louisiana sinkhole swallows more land
Texas-Brine, the company that owns the cavern that is suspected of
being the cause of the sinkhole in Assumption Parish, reports that a small
slough-in happened Tuesday night on the Southwest side of the sinkhole.
The Bayou Corne Sinkhole: A massive oil and gas disaster you’ve
probably never heard of
Earlier this spring, residents of a rural community in Louisiana’s
Assumption Parish noticed mysterious bubbles rising to the surface in
some bayous. Shortly thereafter, a series of small earthquakes shook the
area, prompting state officials to investigate. But in Early August, the
ground suddenly opened up and gave way — swallowing up acres of
swamp forest. In its place there is now a gaping sinkhole filled with water,
underground brines, oil, and natural gas. But this was no natural disaster,

say geologists. It was the consequence of mining activities conducted by
the oil and gas service company, Texas Brine.
Texas Brine tackles hydrogen sulfide issue
Texas Brine Co. LLC installed equipment Wednesday designed to
restart collection of crude oil and gas from a failed company salt cavern in
the Bayou Corne area and to prevent the release of potentially dangerous
hydrogen sulfide gas in the process, company officials said.
Restoration Panel Plans to Split BP Settlement
The Gulf Coast Ecosystem Restoration Council has announced plans
to split civil penalties from BP’s upcoming federal court trial.
Al.com reports the council is unsure of how much money they’ll have
to work with. Officials say 80 percent of civil penalties from the 2010
Deepwater Horizon oil spill will be split among five Gulf Coast states.
Some rig workers’ kin to oppose BP plea deal in Gulf disaster
Relatives of some of the 11 men killed in the 2010 Gulf of Mexico rig
explosion want a federal judge to reject British oil giant BP’s multibilliondollar
settlement of criminal charges stemming from the disaster.
The dissent is unlikely to block the deal, but it could prompt the
judge to modify the terms, a legal expert says.
Gulf oil spill: BP rig supervisors seek trial delay
Two BP rig supervisors have asked a federal judge to postpone their
trial on manslaughter charges in the April 2010 deaths of 11 workers.
Their trial is set to begin Feb. 5. In a court filing Tuesday, attorneys
for BP well site leaders Robert Kaluza and Donald Vidrine ask for more
time to prepare. The defense lawyers say Justice Department prosecutors
aren’t opposed to a delay.
BP cleanup at Seashore winding down
Dan Brown, Gulf Islands National Seashore superintendent, says BP
oil spill cleanup could wrap up in the seashore by spring, nearly three
years after the April 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster.
NOAA chief says she will leave in February

The woman who was a key figure in the federal government’s
response to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 said Wednesday she
will leave her post at the end of February.
West Coast oil tanker spill clean-up could cost $9.6B
A new study says the cost of cleaning up a major oil spill on the
North Coast of B.C. could hit $9.6 billion, wiping out any economic
benefits from the Northern Gateway Pipeline project for the region.
Nantucket Company Faces Penalty for Violations of Oil Pollution
Prevention Regulations
Harbor Fuel Oil Corp., a fuel storage and distribution company on
Nantucket Island in Massachusetts faces penalties of potentially up to
$177,500 for alleged violations of the federal Clean Water Act.
Long, uncertain path ahead for Gulf restoration after oil spill
In the coming years, unprecedented billions will be spent on
restoration in the Gulf of Mexico, a vital American ecosystem damaged by
the most catastrophic oil spill in U.S. history.
Gulf states, especially Louisiana, will see billions of dollars devoted
to restoring habitat and coastline hurt not just by the 2010 BP oil spill, but
also by decades of oil and gas exploration, U.S. agricultural practices and
the management of the Mississippi and the rivers that drain into it on its
way to the Gulf of Mexico.
Coast Guard conducts oil spill response exercise near Honolulu
The Coast Guard did an oil spill response exercise offshore of Oahu
Wednesday.
Members from the 14th District Response Advisory Team and the
Coast Guard’s Deployable Operations Group worked with crewmembers
aboard of the Coast Guard Cutter Walnut to test the Spilled Oil Recovery
System.
Keystone’s ‘dilbit’ problem
“Dilbit” — drop the word in casual conversation and listeners might
think you’re talking about the comic strip engineer who can’t get a date.
But dilbit actually stands for “diluted bitumen,” a heretofore obscure oil
industry term that may soon be trending on your search engine as
controversy deepens over the Keystone XL pipeline, a project to carry oil

from the Alberta tar sands to refineries in Texas that has become the
nation’s most contentious battle between conservative fossil fuel backers
and liberal environmentalists.
Judge holds hearing on TransCanada pipeline halt
An East Texas judge is to hear arguments from the Keystone XL oil
pipeline developer to lift a temporary halt on construction on a private
property.
Feds auction prime Calif land for oil development
The federal government auctioned off nearly 18,000 acres of oil
leases on prime public lands on Wednesday in Central California, home to
prized vineyards, several endangered species and one of the largest
deposits of shale oil in the country.
5 major issues that the Keystone XL environmental review must
include
It’s deja vu all over again. The State Department is gearing up to
release its analysis of the environmental impacts of the Keystone XL tar
sands pipeline. The first one, you might remember, didn’t include a
substantive evaluation of the huge climate impacts of the pipeline; and
State contracted with Cardno Entrix, a company that had ties to
TransCanada, the company seeking a permit for the 1,700-mile project.
Why Do American Taxpayers Give Away Minerals to Mining
Companies?
As Washington struggles to address the country’s growing deficit, a
new report released today finds that the federal government has lost its
grip on finances in a different way.
Black Liberation/Civil Rights:
Top Ten Signs That Let Me Know
Americans Have Transcended Racism!

10. When a young neighbor’s late evening parties continue well into
the morning, and I, the Black tenant below, receive no response from the
management, but the neighbor teasingly invites me to join the youthful
gathering: “Hey, you know I’m a nice guy! I’m German!”
9. When a white woman informs me she is of Dutch stock, and adds,
she is sure I know that “the Dutch had nothing to do with slavery.”
8. When a white woman from Wisconsin returns from a trip to New
York City and announces to me: “There are Black people with dreads in
New York!”
7. When whites are predominantly in attendance at an event or at a
gathering for “any” and “everyone,” and each one introduces themselves
to me with the #1 “liberal” slogan since Ronald Reagan’s inaugural” “I’m
not a racist!”
6. When a white male, fellow doctoral student, asks me: “Are you an
American!”
5. When a taxi driver, an older woman in a tiny town in Wisconsin,
tells me: “You look like Whoopi Goldberg! I’ve got Whoopi Goldberg in
my taxi!”
4. When I tell a young white librarian that my computer has chewed
some music from my Real Player Playlist and I need help locating the CDs
I borrowed from the library, and she, placing me in front of a computer,
bends over my shoulder to inform me: “About that problem with your
computer. You’ll have to call your cable company”!
3. When a white woman visits my house and gingerly steps around
my cat’s toys and asks: “Are those real mice?”
2. When a white woman comes to my door, sees my cat is all white
and ask: “Does he know you’re Black?”

And the #1 sign that let’s me know that Americans have transcended
racism
1. When I hear that President Barrack Obama represents the legacy
of the Black Radical Tradition — from Angela Davis!
Barack Obama Destroying the Legacy of Black America's Struggle
Barack Obama does not "identify" with the "black radical tradition"
of struggle in this nation. He is, in fact, the antithesis of it.
Pertaining most especially to the mentality of the corporate/military
power elite that runs and controls the United States, Dr. Martin Luther
King, Jr. noted that, "Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power.
We have guided missiles and misguided men."
Barack Obama, who is the current predator drone missile president of
this nation, and also the first nominally black U.S. Head of State and
Commander-in-Chief of the military forces of the United States has given
a renewed horrible significance to Dr. King's above quoted words.
In addition to Barack Obama's unceasing and bloody (overt and
covert) military attacks on the sovereign nations and peoples of
Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia (East Africa), and Libya (North
Africa), etc., in egregious violation of international law; the articulate
corporate owned Obama has, in real terms, shredded the U.S. Constitution
- particularly as it pertains to the civil liberties of the everyday Black,
White, Brown, Red, and Yellow of the United States. Notwithstanding

his subterfuge, obfuscation, and double-speak rhetoric, Obama's actions in
these regards, have sent and are sending, all young people of this nation
(and most especially black youth) the message that hypocrisy, greed, and/
or military might are what they should be pursuing if they want to
'succeed' in their lives. It is a message that is absolutely and unequivocally
false and dangerous! Moreover, Obama's de facto message of hypocrisy,
greed, and military war mongering negates, distorts, and destroys in the
historical vision of our youth, the principles and supreme sacrifices made
by persons of all colors in this nation, including Black American freedom
fighters such as Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois,
Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King, Fred Hampton, and so very many
others. Barack Obama is, in essence destroying the legacy of struggle on
the part of all freedom and justice loving people, and in particular of Black
America. This cannot be over-emphasized and it must be reversed.
Barack Obama is the cynical beneficiary of the sacrifices and legacy
of this struggle, but he is utterly devoid of the principles, which were and
remain an integral part of this ongoing everyday people's struggle in this
nation and throughout Mother Earth. For example, in the year 1968, when
Obama was seven years old, not only was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (and
others) brutally murdered by this corporate government - but there were
also intense rebellions on college/university campuses and communities
throughout this nation - calling for an end to the U.S. war of aggression in
Vietnam and simultaneously struggling for ethnic studies, etc. Yet, Barack
Obama - though a shameless beneficiary of and from these historical
struggles and sacrifices made by many persons, has learned nothing from
these struggles other than how to cynically and rhetorically rhetorically
pimps said struggles - even as he today makes war (using his "guided
[drone] missiles" and other assorted weapons of mass destruction) upon
the peoples of Africa, Asia, and the 'Middle East' today.
Utilizing his infamous bait-and switch tactics, and working covertly
with his corporate owners, Barack Obama is also waging a less obvious
but extremely devastating war upon the ordinary everyday Black, White,
Brown, Red, and Yellow people of this nation. His obfuscating,
hypocritical, and double-speak rhetoric is belied by his cynical, well-

honed, bait-and-switch tactics and actions which he adroitly uses against
the ordinary people of this land.
We must not allow Barack Obama and other systemic
misleaders to subvert, distort, and/or otherwise destroy our precious
and important history…
We must not allow Barack Obama and other systemic misleaders to
subvert, distort, and/or otherwise destroy our precious and important
history - for in the words of Malcolm X, "Of all our studies, history is best
qualified to reward our research." And as Howard Zinn put it, "If you
don't know history, it's as if you were born yesterday, and anybody up
there in a position of power can tell you anything and you have no way of
checking upon on it." Contrary to an assertion made earlier this year by a
heretofore iconic member of the black intelligentsia; Barack Obama does
not "identify" with the "black radical tradition" of struggle in this nation.
He is, in fact, the antithesis of it.
This is urgent. Black America must reclaim its history and legacy of
struggle in this nation and in so doing rejoin the collective struggle alongside
our sisters and brothers of all colors in this nation and throughout
Mother Earth.
Remember: Each one, reach one. Each one, teach one. Onward, then,
my sisters and brothers. Onward!
BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member and Columnist,
Larry Pinkney, is a veteran of the Black Panther Party, the former Minister
of Interior of the Republic of New Africa, a former political prisoner and
the only American to have successfully self-authored his civil / political
rights case to the United Nations under the International Covenant on
Civil and Political Rights. In connection with his political organizing
activities in opposition to voter suppression, etc., Pinkney was interviewed
in 1988 on the nationally televised PBS News Hour, formerly known as
The MacNeil / Lehrer News Hour. For more about Larry Pinkney see the
book, Saying No to Power: Autobiography of a 20th Century Activist and
Thinker, by William Mandel [Introduction by Howard Zinn]. (Click here
to read excerpts from the book.) Click here to view Larry’s interview of
October 26, 2012. Click here to contact Mr. Pinkney.

Labor:
Economy:
At Last We Know How Hedge Funds Are Making All That Money
By
Pam Martens
The ink was barely dry on the $1.9 billion get-out-of-jail-free card
that those corporate lawyers that now head up the U.S. Department of
Justice handed global bank, HSBC, on Tuesday when long-overdue
outrage erupted from the media. There was so much attention to the
HSBC stench that a potentially more fascinating and equally smelly deal
from the Justice Department went down with little attention the very next
day. More on that in a moment.
On the Justice Department’s decision to add part of the drug money
laundered by HSBC to its own coffers and call it a day without
prosecuting HSBC or any of its employees, CNN quoted Notre Dame law
professor, Jimmy Gurulé, an international expert on criminal law. Gurulé
said the settlement “makes a mockery of the criminal justice system,”
adding that “there appears to be an exception for employees of large banks
that have engaged in particularly serious and egregious violations of the
law. That’s an insane policy.”
CNBC quoted a statement on the HSBC deal issued by Global
Witness, the human rights nonprofit group, which said “Fines alone are

not going to change banks’ behavior: the chances of being caught are
relatively small and the potential profits from accepting dodgy clients are
too big. Fines are seen as a cost of doing business.” Read More
The Great Game in the Arctic
by
Frederik Ohsten
Climate change, melting icecaps and new opportunities for access to
valuable resources have reawakened a struggle for power in the Arctic.
The Great powers are jockeying for control of the region.
On the 6 th of August 2012, Russia announced that it plans to build a
string of naval infrastructure hubs along the Arctic's Northern Sea Route.
According to the report, Security Council chief Nikolai Patrushev
confirmed that, “[A]uthorities have drafted a list of 'key double-purpose
sites in remote areas of the Arctic seas along the Northern Sea Route' to
enable the 'temporary stationing of Russian Navy warships and vessels
operated by the Federal Security Service's Border Guard Department'”.
This is just one of the latest incidents of sabre-rattling in the Arctic
region. Canada and the United States are also involved in this struggle for
control of this strategic region. So are smaller states such as Norway and
Denmark. A relatively new development is the entry of China on the stage.

In August, China sent its first ship across the Arctic to Europe and it
is lobbying intensely for permanent observer status on the Arctic Council,
the loose international body of eight Arctic nations that develops policy
for the region, arguing that it is a “near Arctic state”. Read More
World:
UN Unable To Cure The Cholera* Epidemic
Cholera Plagues Haiti As UN Appeals For Relief Funds
*In most cases, cholera can be successfully treated with oral rehydration therapy
(ORT), which is highly effective, safe, and simple to administer.[5] Rice-based solutions
are preferred to glucose-based ones due to greater efficiency
By
Ryan Villarreal
The U.N. has requested $2.2 billion to battle a cholera epidemic in
Haiti that has killed nearly 8,000 people since 2010.
Working with the Haitian government, the U.N. has outlined a 10year
plan to improve water and sanitation systems and provide treatment
to those affected by the life-threatening disease.
“The new initiative will invest in prevention, treatment and education
-- it will take a holistic approach to tackling the cholera challenge,” U.N.
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Tuesday in a press conference.
“The main focus is on the extension of clean drinking water and
sanitation systems -- but we are also determined to save lives now through
the use of an oral cholera vaccine.”
Mr. Ban seeks to raise $500 million for the first phase of the plan
over the next two years. He said that slightly less than half of that amount
had already been raised.
“Today I am pleased to announce that $215 million in existing funds
from bilateral and multilateral donors will be used to support the initiative.
I thank the donor community for this generous commitment,” Mr. Ban
said.

“The United Nations will do its part. We are committing $23.5
million, building on the $118 million the U.N. system has spent on the
cholera response to date.”
An additional $1.7 billion will be sought during the next eight years
to eliminate the disease.
Haiti was struck by a cholera outbreak that killed roughly 7,000
people several months after a devastating 2010 earthquake killed an
estimated 250,000 people.
It has become increasingly evident that the cholera pathogen was
introduced to Haiti via U.N. peacekeepers from Nepal, where scientists
have identified the original strain.
"We now know that the strain of cholera in Haiti is an exact match for
the strain of cholera in Nepal," said Dr. Danielle Lantagne, a cholera
expert employed by the U.N., the BBC reported.
In the area surrounding Port-au-Prince, the country's capital and most
populous city, underdeveloped water and sanitation systems, many of
which were damaged in the earthquake, are believed to have contributed to
the spread of the waterborne pathogen.
While the U.N. has acknowledged that scientific evidence supports
the idea that its employees may have introduced the cholera bacteria, it has
avoided claiming responsibility for the outbreak, saying that it was not the
fault of “any group or individual,” according to the Guardian.
A recent spike in cholera-related deaths has put the Haitian
government on high alert, particularly in the wake of heavy rains from
Hurricane Sandy, which passed through in October.
“This will not be a short-term crisis,” Mr. Ban said. “Eliminating
cholera from Haiti will continue to require the full cooperation and
support of the international community.”
Syria, Egypt, and Beyond: Unmasking the Muslim Brotherhood
by
Eric Draitser
The complexities of the Arab Spring and the struggle for political
freedom throughout the Arab world should not obscure what has now

ecome an absolutely essential understanding for all anti-imperialists: the
Muslim Brotherhood is one of the most powerful weapons of the Western
ruling class in the Muslim world. While that may be a difficult pill for
some to swallow for emotional or psychological reasons, one need look no
further than the insidious role the organization is playing in Syria and the
abuses of power and human rights of the government of Egypt. In the US-
NATO sponsored war against the Assad government, the Muslim
Brotherhood has emerged as the leading western-sanctioned force, the
avant-garde of the imperialist assault. While, in Egypt, President Morsi
and the Brotherhood government seek to destroy what had been, little
more than a year ago, the promise of the revolution.
Muslim Brotherhood in Syria
This week’s establishment of the Supreme Military Command, in
charge of all military aid and coordination to the rebels, demonstrates
unequivocally the leadership role of the Muslim Brotherhood in the drive
for regime change in Syria. As Reuters reported, “The unified command
includes many with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and to Salafists…it
excludes the most senior officers who have defected from Assad’s
military.” i This command structure, formed at the behest and under the
sponsorship of the US, UK, France, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey
among others, does not simply include members of the Muslim
Brotherhood, it is, in fact, dominated by them. Is it possible that the
Western imperial powers simply did not notice that the group they were
forming was comprised of these elements? To suggest so would be to
accuse some of the leading “statesmen” of the world (Hillary Clinton,
William Hague, Laurent Fabius, Ahmet Davutoglu, etc.) of being stupid.
Alas, they are not so. Instead, these individuals have collaborated to create
a Muslim Brotherhood proxy force in Syria, one that can be controlled and
depended on to do the bidding of the West.
However, it is not enough to say that the Muslim Brotherhood is
heading this new military structure, for that would be to imply that they
have not been playing a critical role all along. Rather, the organization has
been central to the destabilization of Syria since the beginning of the
armed conflict. The Syrian National Council, originally the face of the

Western-backed “opposition” was itself dominated behind the scenes by
the Muslim Brotherhood. As former Muslim Brotherhood leader Ali
Sadreddine stated regarding the SNC, “We chose this face, accepted by the
West…We nominated [former SNC head Burhan] Ghalioun as a front for
national action. We are not moving now as the Brotherhood but as part of
a front that includes all currents.” ii Essentially then we see that the
organization has, from the very beginning, maintained a large degree of
control of the foreign-based opposition, as distinctly different from the
indigenous opposition of the National Coordinating Councils and other
groups. The Muslim Brotherhood, an international political and
paramilitary machine, has come to lead the battle against Assad.
In fact, the Muslim Brotherhood has provided many forms of
leadership and assistance to the foreign-based, foreign-backed opposition
beyond simply direct leadership. From providing diplomatic and political
cover, to on-the-ground tactical support such as weapons smuggling,
fighter recruitment, and other necessary responsibilities, the organization
has come to permeate every aspect of what we in the West conveniently
refer to as the “rebels”.
As early as May 2012, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the center
of the organization, was already providing the political and diplomatic
support the rebels needed to topple the Assad regime. As they were poised
to win the Egyptian elections, the Brotherhood was busy making public
comments about the need for Western military intervention in Syria. The
organization’s spokesman, Mahmoud Ghozlan stated, “The Muslim
Brotherhood calls on Arab, Islamic, and international governments to
intervene…to bring down the [Assad] regime.” iii This brazen public
statement flies in the face of all arguments which claim that the Muslim
Brotherhood is somehow anti-imperialist, that they stand in opposition to
Western dominance of the Arab world. On the contrary, though they may
posture themselves as opposing the West, they are, in fact, tools of the
imperial powers used to destroy independent nations which stand in
opposition to US hegemony in the Middle East.
This political and diplomatic backing is merely one aspect of the
Brotherhood’s involvement in the destruction of Syria. As the New York

Times reported in June of 2012, “CIA officers are operating secretly in
Southern Turkey helping allies decide which Syrian opposition fighters
across the border will receive arms…by way of a shadowy network of
intermediaries including Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood.” iv The use of the
Muslim Brotherhood to smuggle arms to the rebels in Syria should come
as no surprise considering the fact that it is the Sunni monarchies of the
region (Saudi Arabia and Qatar primarily) who have been the most
vociferous voices championing regime change in Syria by any means
necessary. The relationship between these monarchies and the Muslim
Brotherhood is self-evident: they share similar religious convictions and
are avowed enemies of all forms of Shiism. Moreover, they have been part
and parcel of the system of US hegemony that has kept the entire region
under its vice grip for decades.
Many have argued in the past that, though they share identical
ideologies and “brand”, the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood is
somehow independent of the Muslim Brotherhood proper. This
preposterous claim is countered by the simple fact that every public
position the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood has taken has been in direct
alignment with the public statements from Cairo. As the Carnegie Middle
East Center’s article The Muslim Brotherhood in Syria demonstrates,
“Since the beginning of the revolution, the Brotherhood has maintained
that foreign intervention is the only possible solution to the crisis in Syria.
In October 2011, it also called on Turkey to intervene and establish
protected humanitarian zones in Turkish territory.” v When two entities
bear the same name, have the same sponsors, and take the same positions,
it is an exercise in willful ignorance to argue that they are somehow not
the same entity or, as is more accurate, taking orders from the same
masters. But who are these masters? Read More
Venezuela’s State Elections: When Winning Comes before Revolution
By
Tamara Pearson

Supporters rally for PSUV candidate for Merida, Alexis Ramirez. Their placards say
“Alexis – governor, loyalty always” (YVKE Mundial).
“We’ll deal with it when the state elections are over,” a comrade said
to me.
“Ah, but then there’s the mayoral elections in April,” I replied.
Internal debate and criticism of the PSUV and its current state
election campaign, as well as proper grassroots involvement would be put
off, and put off, because in this incredibly democratic country there is
always some kind of election coming up. Yet for how long will such
sacrifices be made in the name of defeating the capitalist opposition?
Aram Aharonian, writing in Rebelion last week, was right when he
argued that this Sunday’s state elections aren’t just “one election, they’re
23 different elections”, because each state has its own socio-economic
characteristics and different types of candidates running -from
bureaucrats, to an indigenous minister, to the military, to the well known
and the unknown.
However, all of the 23 PSUV candidates were chosen by President
Hugo Chavez and the national PSUV executive. The PSUV is a national
“machine”, as we are prone to call it here, and despite some regional
differences, its state campaigning has been conducted according to
national lines and a national strategy. So, although this article will focus
on experiences in Merida state, the problems discussed of treating PSUV
members like voters rather than activists, of isolating political parties and
movements that are not aligned to the PSUV and so on, are problems that

are across the board, and though more pertinent in this election campaign,
can be said to be general problems in the PSUV.
Chavez’s candidates
Not only one of the main election slogans, (here in Merida: “Alexis
Ramirez, candidate of Chavez!”) the idea that the PSUV governor
candidates are associated with, and chosen by Chavez is a key political
strategy the PSUV has been using over the last few months.
It’s a stance that suggests the party leadership are unconfident their
candidates have merit on their own, and also that the PSUV’s objectives of
socialism, justice, economic and land reform and so on, have merits on
their own. It’s a dependence on the guaranteed victory the character of
Chavez brings, but it has also been used as a way to make the PSUV the
only “real” Chavista party, and to delegitimise other revolutionary, pro-
Chavez organisations and parties which haven’t dissolved into the PSUV,
such as the Venezuelan Communist Party (PCV), the Tupumaros
movement, and even unions and the Great Patriotic Pole (GPP).
As a member of the PSUV national executive, and also head of the
national assembly, Diosdado Cabello told the press yesterday, “Chavez has
just one candidate in each state. We can’t impose any candidate on our
allies, but what we ask of them is that they don’t say they are candidates of
Chavez, because they aren’t.” He also made the exaggerated claim that
“Socialist candidates [PSUV] will win in all 23 states on Sunday”.
The tactic aims at preventing a divided vote; as Chavez said before he
left for Cuba on Sunday, “Unity, Unity, Unity”, yet it is a unity that
excludes anyone who isn’t in the PSUV.
And then there is the big question of why, during a revolution, are
these candidates Chavez’s candidates and not the people’s candidates? For
Merida state, Chavez and the PSUV national executive, based far away in
Caracas, picked the unknown Alexis Ramirez for the candidate for
governor. Then they chose Rafael Ramirez, energy minister and president
of PDVSA and not at all familiar with Merida; an agricultural state and not
an oil one, in charge of the campaign. There was no consultation of PSUV
membership. While perhaps primary elections are not the best road, since
many registered members of the PSUV actually support the opposition,

there was no reason not to call state wide meetings of the active
membership of the PSUV and even other organisations, to both elect
candidates and decide on campaigning platform, and strategy.
“Loyalty” to a person rather than to a program or to proposals
Two more words or slogans that have been thrown around a lot
during the PSUV campaigning, both at the state and national levels, are
“loyalty” and “discipline”. Yet the discipline doesn’t refer to good,
serious, revolutionary organisation, nor to waging a hard campaign, nor to
combating bureaucracy and corruption, but rather to unquestioning
support for the handpicked candidates.
Here in Merida, we were given Alexis Ramirez, a young geographer,
a local legislator, who in the last five years I have never seen in any of the
political marches or rallies or events, or even when Chavez spoke here a
few weeks before the presidential elections. There is also evidence that
Ramirez committed serious acts of corruption as a legislator, and it is felt
that he is largely a puppet and that there will be other people behind the
scenes, people we don’t know, governing for him.
One comrade said to me, “Those who don’t support Alexis
[Ramirez], are called traitors...I have to be “loyal” to Chavez by lying to
him and telling him his candidate is the best, no I can’t do that. This
electoral campaign has been about persecution and fear”.
The comrade said he will vote for Florencio Porras, the candidate the
PCV has put up. Porras, who was governor of Merida from 2000-2008 and
is “revolutionary light” (that is, a pro-Chavez reformist) will likely get a
significant vote, though he won’t win. PSUV members have stuck up
posters around the city calling Porras a traitor. One poster has modified the
PCV’s symbol, the red rooster, to be a rooster with crutches, labelled a
“gallo cojo” or lame rooster, a message that is disrespectful of people
with disabilities. Another PSUV poster shows Lester Rodriguez, the
opposition candidate, taking off a mask that is Porras’ face.
The PSUV communication committee has also posted graphics
around Facebook with quips such as “You say you’re more revolutionary
than me, but you’re campaigning for a candidate that’s not one of
Chavez’s?” and “In battle, division is betrayal”.

Even though Chavez has gone to great pains to encourage and
legitimise criticism and self-criticism and the denouncing of bureaucracy
and corruption, clearly any PSUV bureaucrats hoping to be in power are
not going to do the same. Read More
Health, Education, Science and Welfare:
More Ice Loss Through Snowfall On Antarctica
(Credit: M. Martin/PIK)
Ricarda Winkelmann, lead-author of the new study, on a research trip to Antarctica with
"Polarstern" of the Alfred-Wegener-Institute for Polar and Marine Research.
Dec. 12, 2012 — Stronger snowfall increases future ice discharge
from Antarctica. Global warming leads to more precipitation as warmer air
holds more moisture -- hence earlier research suggested the Antarctic ice
sheet might grow under climate change. Now a study published in Nature
shows that a lot of the ice gain due to increased snowfall is countered by
an acceleration of ice-flow to the ocean. Thus Antarctica's contribution to
global sea-level rise is probably greater than hitherto estimated, the team
of authors from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK)
concludes.
"Between 30 and 65 percent of the ice gain due to enhanced snowfall
in Antarctica is countervailed by enhanced ice loss along the coastline,"
says lead-author Ricarda Winkelmann. For the first time, an ensemble of
ice-physics simulations shows that future ice discharge is increased up to
three times because of additional precipitation in Antarctica under global

warming. "The effect exceeds that of surface warming as well as that of
basal ice-shelf melting," Winkelmann says.
Snow piling up exerts pressure on the ice,
thus it flows faster to the coast
During the last decade, the Antarctic ice-sheet has lost volume at a
rate comparable to that of Greenland. "The one certainty we have about
Antarctica under global warming is that snowfall will increase,"
Winkelmann explains. "Since surface melt might remain comparably small
even under strong global warming, because Antarctica will still be a pretty
chilly place, the big question is: How much more mass within the ice sheet
will slowly but inexorably flow off Antarctica and contribute to sea-level
rise, which is one of the major impacts of climate change."
Since snowfall on the ice masses of Antarctica takes water out of the
global water cycle, the continent's net contribution to sea-level rise could
be negative during the next 100 years -- this is what a number of global
and regional models suggest. The new findings indicate that this effect to a
large extent is offset by changes in the ice-flow dynamics. Snow piling up
on the ice is heavy and hence exerts pressure -- the higher the ice the more
pressure. Because additional snowfall elevates the grounded ice-sheet but
less so the floating ice shelves, it flows more rapidly towards the coast of
Antarctica where it eventually breaks off into icebergs and elevates sea
level.
"Sea-level is rising -- that is a fact"
A number of processes are relevant for ice-loss in Antarctica, most
notably to sub-shelf melting caused by warming of the surrounding ocean
water. These phenomena explain the already observed contribution to sealevel
rise.
"We now know that snowfall in Antarctica will not save us from sealevel
rise," says second author Anders Levermann, research domain cochair
at PIK and a lead author of the sea-level change chapter of the
upcoming IPCC's 5th assessment report. "Sea level is rising -- that is a
fact. Now we need to understand how quickly we have to adapt our coastal
infrastructure; and that depends on how much CO2 we keep emitting into
the atmosphere," Levermann concludes.

Daily News Digest December 13, 2012
The Capitalist World Is More Corrupt Than The Roman Empire In
Its Last Days
Wind and Solar Power Paired With Storage
Could Power Grid 99.9 Percent of the Time
A combination of wind power, solar power and storage
could be a cost-effective solution to energy demands. (Credit: Lisa Tossey)
Renewable energy could fully power a large electric grid 99.9 percent
of the time by 2030 at costs comparable to today's electricity expenses,
according to new research by the University of Delaware and Delaware
Technical Community College.
A well-designed combination of wind power, solar power and storage
in batteries and fuel cells would nearly always exceed electricity demands
while keeping costs low, the scientists found.
"These results break the conventional wisdom that renewable energy
is too unreliable and expensive," said co-author Willett Kempton,
professor in the School of Marine Science and Policy in UD's College of
Earth, Ocean, and Environment. "The key is to get the right combination
of electricity sources and storage — which we did by an exhaustive search
— and to calculate costs correctly."
The authors developed a computer model to consider 28 billion
combinations of renewable energy sources and storage mechanisms, each
tested over four years of historical hourly weather data and electricity

demands. The model incorporated data from within a large regional grid
called PJM Interconnection, which includes 13 states from New Jersey to
Illinois and represents one-fifth of the United States' total electric grid.
Unlike other studies, the model focused on minimizing costs instead
of the traditional approach of matching generation to electricity use. The
researchers found that generating more electricity than needed during
average hours — in order to meet needs on high-demand but low-wind
power hours — would be cheaper than storing excess power for later high
demand.
Storage is relatively costly because the storage medium, batteries or
hydrogen tanks, must be larger for each additional hour stored.
One of several new findings is that a very large electric system can be
run almost entirely on renewable energy.
"For example, using hydrogen for storage, we can run an electric
system that today would meeting a need of 72 GW, 99.9 percent of the
time, using 17 GW of solar, 68 GW of offshore wind, and 115 GW of
inland wind," said co-author Cory Budischak, instructor in the Energy
Management Department at Delaware Technical Community College and
former UD student.
A GW ("gigawatt") is a measure of electricity generation capability.
One GW is the capacity of 200 large wind turbines or of 250,000 rooftop
solar systems. Renewable electricity generators must have higher GW
capacity than traditional generators, since wind and solar do not generate
at maximum all the time.
The study sheds light on what an electric system might look like with
heavy reliance on renewable energy sources. Wind speeds and sun
exposure vary with weather and seasons, requiring ways to improve
reliability. In this study, reliability was achieved by: expanding the
geographic area of renewable generation, using diverse sources,
employing storage systems, and for the last few percent of the time,
burning fossil fuels as a backup.
During the hours when there was not enough renewable electricity to
meet power needs, the model drew from storage and, on the rare hours
with neither renewable electricity or stored power, then fossil fuel. When

there was more renewable energy generated than needed, the model would
first fill storage, use the remaining to replace natural gas for heating
homes and businesses and only after those, let the excess go to waste.
The study used estimates of technology costs in 2030 without
government subsidies, comparing them to costs of fossil fuel generation in
wide use today. The cost of fossil fuels includes both the fuel cost itself
and the documented external costs such as human health effects caused by
power plant air pollution. The projected capital costs for wind and solar in
2030 are about half of today's wind and solar costs, whereas maintenance
costs are projected to be approximately the same.
"Aiming for 90 percent or more renewable energy in 2030, in order to
achieve climate change targets of 80 to 90 percent reduction of the
greenhouse gas carbon dioxide from the power sector, leads to economic
savings," the authors observe.
Images of the Day:
Demonstration Against Michigan’s Union-Busting Legislation

HSBC Money Laundering
Decay, corruption and immorality all rear their ugly heads in today’s society.
Some say this is a predicator to the fall of American or Western civilization as
we know it, just like the Roman Empire fell centuries ago. But is it really that
simple? Are we mirroring the path of one of the greatest modern civilizations?
Is America Doomed to Fall Like the Roman Empire?
Quote of the Day:
Money Laundering Is “Two Big to Fail”
There is a consensus among U.S. Congressional
Investigators, former bankers and international banking
experts that U.S. and European banks launder between $500

illion and $1 trillion of dirty money each year, half of which
is laundered by U.S. banks alone. As Senator Carl Levin
summarizes the record: "Estimates are that $500 billion to
$1 trillion of international criminal proceeds are moved
internationally and deposited into bank accounts annually. It
is estimated that half of that money comes to the United
States"— James Petras, "Dirty Money" Foundation of
USGrowth and Empire, Size and Scope of Money
Laundering by US Banks, 2001
Videos of the Day:
Government war on small business
The perils of not being "too big to fail"
End Wall Street’s Wars!
Occupy Wall Street!
Occupy Wall Street is the Only Organization
That Identifies The Enemy —
The 1% That Own and Control The Wealth!
1960s The Realist — One Nation Under God/1%
(Unlike The Trade Union Misleaders
Nor The Misleaders Of The Oppressed
Who Strive To Be In ‘Partnership’ With The 1%)
1960s The Realist — One Nation Under God/1%
(Unlike The Trade Union Misleaders

Nor The Misleaders Of The Oppressed
Who Strive To Be In ‘Partnership’ With The 1%)
Occupy Wall Street — ‘We Are The 99%’
The resistance continues at Liberty Square:
U.S.
How Did Drug Money Laundering Become a Non-Prosecutable
Crime: The Stench Spreads on the HSBC Settlement
By
Pam Martens
Yesterday, Lanny Breuer, the Assistant U.S. Attorney General for the
criminal division of the Justice Department, appeared on CNBC to defend
the deferred prosecution agreement with the global banking giant, HSBC –
a deal which settled drug money laundering and other crimes for $1.9
billion without prosecuting any HSBC employee.
What Breuer was effectively defending was the five years that his
former law partner, John Dugan, was HSBC’s primary banking regulator
and did nothing to rein in the outrageously lawless behavior at the bank.
Dugan headed the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC),
which regulates all national banks, from August 4, 2005 through August
14, 2010. During that period, according to the Senate Permanent
Subcommittee on Investigations, the OCC turned a blind eye to abuses at
HSBC. In fact, it was not until Dugan left the OCC that a report was
issued in September 2010, detailing five years of alarming conduct at
HSBC that went unpunished.
U.S. Attorney General, Eric Holder, Assistant U.S. Attorney General,
Lanny Breuer, and former OCC head, John Dugan, all hailed from the
corporate law firm, Covington & Burling. When Dugan, who also
functioned as a bank lobbyist prior to heading the OCC, stepped down
from the Federal agency in 2010, he returned to Covington & Burling’s
Washington, D.C. office and now chairs the firm’s Financial Institutions

Group, providing legal counsel to many of the same banks he supervised
badly for five years. Read More
HSBC: Too big to indict
Money-laundering to the tune of $60 trillion in 2010
By
Richard Becker
For a real jaw dropper, the lead paragraph of a Dec. 10 New York
Times article would be hard to beat:
“State and federal authorities decided against indicting HSBC in a
money-laundering case over concerns that criminal charges could
jeopardize one of the world’s largest banks and ultimately destabilize the
global financial system.”
So, there it is: The big banks, no matter how blatant their crimes,
must be protected. They and their executives are free to steal, defraud and
loot without fear of facing prison time.
Despite massive evidence that HSBC had been operating as a
criminal enterprise, the Department of “Justice” opted for another slap-onthe-wrist
fine.
Not that this is anything really new. Since their wild and often
fraudulent schemes led to the bank crash and public bailout in 2008—and
helped trigger the “Great Recession”—not one Wall Street bank executive
has faced criminal prosecution for their crimes.
In lieu of any of their present or former executives being prosecuted,
HSBC has admitted its guilt and agreed to pay $1.9 billion. That might
sound like a lot of money but consider that the federal Office of the
Comptroller of the Currency found that HSBC had $60 trillion in
potentially illegal transactions in 2010.
Despite its own 2010 finding, the OCC, which is supposedly a bank
regulator, did not even fine HSBC at that time.
The real drug kingpins
While it appears that a small percentage of the charges against HSBC
have to do with countries under sanctions by the U.S., including Iran and
Cuba, a huge part of the laundered money came from the drug trade.

HSBC is not unique in this especially profitable form of money
laundering. As the Party for Socialism and Liberation pamphlet “The
Myth of Democracy and the Rule of the Banks” documents, Wachovia
Bank laundered $378 billion in Mexican drug cartel proceeds between
2004-07.
In a 2010 settlement, Wells-Fargo, which had taken over Wachovia in
2008, agreed to a settlement of $160 million with the government. And, as
in the HSBC case, there were no criminal prosecutions of Wachovia
executives.
“Martin Woods, the director of Wachovia’s anti-money laundering
unit quit the bank after Wachovia executives repeatedly ignored his
documentation of drug dealers laundering funds through the bank. Woods
told Bloomberg: ‘It’s the banks laundering money for the cartels that
finances the tragedy [in Mexico.’” (The Myth of Democracy and the Rule
of the Bank, p. 17)
Large-scale drug trafficking is impossible without the kind of largescale
money laundering that only the big banks can facilitate. In the
Wachovia case: “The cartels used laundered money funneled through a
‘legitimate’ bank to buy large planes for the transport of hundreds of
millions of dollars worth of cocaine.”
The DOJ charged that the Sinaloa cartel of Mexico and the Norte del
Valle cartel from Colombia laundered $881 million through HSBC’s U.S.
affiliate. But that’s just the start.
The Mexican affiliate of HSBC “transported $7 billion in physical
U.S. dollars to HBUS [HSBC’s U.S. affiliate] from 2007 to 2008,
outstripping other Mexican banks, even one twice its size.” (Majority
Media report on Senate hearing, July 16, 2012)
In order to facilitate much larger drug money laundering, HSBC
ranked Mexico as having “standard” risk, the lowest of four categories,
and between 2006-2009 assigned only one or two compliance officers. In
2007 it froze staffing in its anti-money laundering department to “cut costs
and increase the bank’s return on equity.” (Market Watch, Dec. 11, 2012)
The ranking and lack of staffing allowed unmonitored wire transfers
from Mexico of $670 billion between 2006 and 2009 alone.

In those same years, according to the DOJ, HSBC carried out over
$200 trillion in unmonitored wire transfers from countries that HSBC
considered to be of “standard” or “medium” risk, collecting hefty fees all
along the way.
Money laundering is far from the only crimes of the banks and HSBC
is far from being the only culprit. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank
of America, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup and more have been charged on
numerous occasions with fraud. But invariably the charges are civil, not
criminal. The banks pay a fine and promise to “never do it again.”
A 2011 analysis of such cases showed just what those promises were
worth. Over 15 years, there were at least 51 cases in which 19 Wall Street
firms had broken the same anti-fraud laws they had agreed never again to
violate. (NYT, Nov. 7, 2011, quoted in “Myth of Democracy,” p. 21)
The HSBC case reaffirms two fundamental truth about contemporary
capitalist society:
1) While the government and its repressive apparatus rules over the
people, the banks rule over the government.;
2) It can’t be reformed — the great wealth of society must be taken
out of the hands of the biggest criminals, the bankers, and used to
meet the needs of the people.
Environment:
Fracking:
Nuclear Fallout: Ongoing Tragedy/Disaster In Japan:
EnergyNews:
11:49 AM EST on December 12th, 2012 | Leave a comment
University Study: Wind and solar can fully power the electric grid
99.9% of time… at same cost we pay now — “These results break the
conventional wisdom” -Professor

09:44 AM EST on December 12th, 2012 | 7 comments
Asahi: Tepco can’t find where huge amount of highly radioactive
water is leaking at Reactor No. 2 — ‘Fractures’ in containment vessel
suspected
09:03 PM EST on December 11th, 2012 | Leave a comment
TV: Gas pipeline inferno levels homes in W. Virginia — “Burned so
hot it actually melted a highway” — Possibility of secondary explosion
(VIDEO)
04:59 PM EST on December 11th, 2012 | 8 comments
Latest flyover footage of giant sinkhole released: Oil surfacing in new
area — Surrounding land now inundated (VIDEOS)
03:08 PM EST on December 11th, 2012 | 86 comments
Fukushima Worker: Concrete reinforcement of Spent Fuel Pool No. 4
is terribly deteriorating… now in a “dangerous state” — Cooling
system stopped working, men helicoptered in
12:59 PM EST on December 11th, 2012 | 54 comments
“Shocking Video”: Methane bubbling up near giant sinkhole — Dead
fish all over the place out here now, this is not good (VIDEO)
Ongoing Gulf of Mexico Oil Disaster:
Oil Spill Attorney Stuart Smith’s Blog:
Environmental Must-Reads – December 12, 2012
Poisoning the Well: How the Feds Let Industry Pollute the
Nation’s Underground Water Supply
Federal officials have given energy and mining companies
permission to pollute aquifers in more than 1,500 places across the
country, releasing toxic material into underground reservoirs that help
supply more than half of the nation’s drinking water.

U.S. delays final fracking rules for federal lands
The U.S. government has delayed finalizing rules that expand its
oversight of natural gas drilling on public lands because officials must
evaluate a torrent of public comment on the proposals, the Obama
administration said on Tuesday.
Colleges re-evaluate industry funding ties after shale report
controversies
As scrutiny increases over the relationship between oil and gas
industry funding and academic research, universities are likely to take a
second look at their conflict-of-interest guidelines.
NYT Excerpt: Is Fracking A Blessing Or A Curse?
In his New York Times Magazine column this week, Adam Davidson
writes about fracking, the new technique for extracting natural gas that has
suddenly become a huge — and controversial — deal in this country.
If there is an uneasy equilibrium, right now, between environmentally
concerned citizens and pro-fracking industrial groups, what will the
political balance be like in a decade? What pressures will be on state
legislatures and regulators if the projections are true and millions of
workers in Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia and maybe New York will
owe their jobs to fracking. There will be trillions of dollars of new wealth.
Will environmental and health concerns have any chance against that
juggernaut?
Fracking in N.Y. poses dilemma for Gov. Cuomo
Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who could be squaring off with Hillary Clinton
for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, is stuck between shale
and a hard place on the question of whether to allow fracking in the state.
Regulators Under Fire for Keeping Fracking Pollution Test
Results Under Wraps
Residents living in the shadow of fracking rigs say they’ve suffered
from headaches, nosebleeds and other health effects since drilling began in
their communities. Meanwhile, state agencies refuse to release the results
of air and water pollution tests.
New Fracking Frontier Outside Illinois State Park ‘Makes People
Question The Whole Deal’

Susan and Merlin Calhoun’s rural Illinois land is full of the same
bluffs, canyons, waterfalls, bald eagles and barred owls that entice more
than 2 million visitors to the adjacent Starved Rock State Park every year.
U.S. delays final fracking rules for federal lands
The U.S. government has delayed finalizing rules that expand its
oversight of natural gas drilling on public lands because officials must
evaluate a torrent of public comment on the proposals, the Obama
administration said on Tuesday.
Newspapers Can Argue to Open Records in Fracking Suit
Advocates for greater openness for Pennsylvania’s natural gas
industry are heartened by a state appeals court’s decision to allow two
newspapers to press for the unsealing of records in a lawsuit brought
against the industry by a western Pennsylvania couple.
Supporting Home Rule Over Fracking in NY: NRDC Files Brief
on Behalf of Environmental and Non-Profit Orgs
Yesterday, NRDC filed an amicus, or “friend of the court,” brief in
the appeals of the Dryden and Middlefield decisions rendered earlier this
year. The brief—filed on behalf of Catskill Mountainkeeper; Delaware
Riverkeeper Network; Gas Drilling Awareness for Cortland County;
Otsego 2000; the Preservation League Of New York State; Riverkeeper;
Theodore Gordon Flyfishers; Vestal Residents For Safe Energy; and
NRDC itself—supports both the fracking bans enacted by the towns of
Dryden and Middlefield and also the right of municipalities everywhere to
use local control to determine if and where fracking occurs within their
communities.
Yoko Ono, Sean Lennon launch anti-fracking video contest
Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon have launched the #DontFrackNY video
contest and placed a full-page ad in Monday’s New York Times to amplify
the call on New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to ban fracking for gas in
the state.
Nisource gas pipeline explodes near Charleston, West Virginia
A natural gas pipeline exploded in flames near Charleston, West
Virginia, on Tuesday, setting nearby buildings on fire and injuring several
people, authorities said.

Crosstex moving ahead with pipeline
Dallas-based Crosstex Energy LP is moving ahead with the second
phase of a natural gas liquids pipeline project in Louisiana that will allow
the partnership to move 50,000 additional barrels of liquids a day.
BP emails reveal the company underreported the 2010 Gulf spill
If you were around way back in 2010, you may remember that an oil
platform owned by a certain company (it was called “BP”) exploded,
killing 11 people and initiating a massive, months-long spill.
You may also remember that the company (again, BP, or “British
Petroleum”) repeatedly seemed to underestimate how much oil was being
spilled. See, for example, this article from May of that year, “BP’s
estimate of spill rate is way low, engineer suggests.”
The engineer was right, and BP knew it.
Billions at stake in wake of BP oil spill in Gulf of Mexico
In the coming years, unprecedented billions will be spent on
restoration in the Gulf of Mexico, a vital American ecosystem damaged by
the most catastrophic oil spill in U.S. history.
Gulf oil spill: BP rig supervisors seek trial delay
Two BP rig supervisors have asked a federal judge to postpone their
trial on manslaughter charges in the April 2010 deaths of 11 workers.
Long, uncertain path ahead for Gulf restoration after oil spill
In the coming years, unprecedented billions will be spent on
restoration in the Gulf of Mexico, a vital American ecosystem damaged by
the most catastrophic oil spill in U.S. history.
Jan. date to rule on BP $4.5B plea deal over spill
A federal judge will decide next month whether to accept a plea deal
that calls for BP PLC to pay a record $4.5 billion in penalties for its role in
a deadly 2010 rig explosion and the massive oil spill it triggered in the
Gulf of Mexico.
Oil Spill Restoration
Photos
Gulf of Mexico blue crabs and shrimp focus of Savannah, Ga.,
study

The 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill is the impetus behind a
research project at the Skidaway Institute of Oceanography in Savannah,
Ga., that will analyze the effects of spilled oil on blue crabs and grass
shrimp. The researchers will examine the species growth under various
conditions to see if the genes that regulate molting may have been
affected.
Oil spill costs could outweigh rewards: study
The financial costs of a worst-case scenario tanker spill off the north
coast of British Columbia could outweigh the economic rewards of the
proposed Northern Gateway pipeline for the region, says a study by the
UBC Fisheries Centre.
Judge temporarily halts Keystone XL pipeline in Texas
A Texas judge has temporarily stopped oil company TransCanada
from building a pipeline designed to carry tar sands oil from Canada
through eastern portions of the state to the Gulf Coast.
Michael Bishop, Keystone XL Opponent, Challenges Pipeline
Work In Texas
A Texas judge has ordered TransCanada to temporarily halt work on a
private property where it is building part of an oil pipeline designed to
carry tar sands oil from Canada to the Gulf Coast, the latest legal battle to
plague a project that has encountered numerous obstacles nationwide.
Texas judge halts TransCanada oil pipeline
A Texas judge has ordered TransCanada to temporarily halt work on a
private property where it is building part of an oil pipeline designed to
carry tar sands oil from Canada to the Gulf Coast, the latest legal battle to
plague a project that has encountered numerous obstacles nationwide.
Northern Gateway Pipeline Hearing Exposes Gaps in Enbridge
Evidence
It looks like islands aren’t the only thing Enbridge overlooks these
days.
A report released today by ForestEthics Advocacy summarizes all of
the information missing from Enbridge evidence brought before the Joint
Review Panel in the Northern Gateway Pipeline hearing. The ongoing

hearings, which began in September, address the proposed project’s
economics, construction plans, operations, environmental impacts, risks to
marine life and First Nations’ rights.
Gulf Coast recovery council meets today in Mobile
Federal and state officials will be in Mobile today for the initial
meeting the Gulf Coast Ecosystem Restoration Council, charged with
developing a plan to restore the environment and the economy of the five
Gulf states following the 2010 Deepwater Horizon catastrophe.
Oil companies polluting aquifers with EPA’s blessing
Oil companies: They’re kind of like pet cats, it turns out. They don’t
care what you want, they’re only out for themselves, and they love to bury
their waste wherever they feel like it. And thanks to the Environmental
Protection Agency, they’re able to bury it via aquifer injection at hundreds
of sites across the country where the EPA says the water is not “reasonably
expected” to be used for drinking.
Drought hits Colorado ranchers, and polluting oil drillers deliver
another blow
As of last week, 95 percent of Colorado was under severe drought
conditions.
Allocation of BP civil penalties subject of initial meeting of Gulf
Coast recovery council
The Gulf Coast Ecosystem Restoration Council, a multi-state panel
charged with helping the Gulf region recover from the 2010 Deepwater
Horizon catastrophe, held its initial public meeting before an audience of
about 500 today in Mobile.
Mandeville oil exec pleads guilty to state pollution charges
Lobdell Percy Brown III, of Mandeville, owner and chief executive
officer of T & F Oil Co., on Tuesday pleaded guilty Tuesday in a Cameron
Parish court to illegally discharging pollutants into state waters. Brown,
his company and his brother, T & F field technician Carr Brown of
Vidalia, La., were indicted in October 2011 by a Cameron Parish grand
jury on charges stemming from illegal discharges of oil and chlorides —
salt compounds — into state waters, along with five other spills that were
unreported at sites in the Little Chenier oil field.

BP settlement administrators say missing documents delay
payments
About half the claims for economic damages processed under a
proposed settlement arising from the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill are
incomplete and can’t be paid without additional documentation, a courtappointed
administrator reported Tuesday.
Judge delays trial for former BP exec charged in Gulf disaster
case
A federal judge has postponed the trial of a former BP executive
charged with obstruction of Congress stemming from statements he made
about the amount of oil that was flowing from a blown-out well following
the deadly 2010 Gulf of Mexico disaster.
Texas Judge Asks If Bitumen is Crude Oil
News flash. A Texas judge just put a hold on construction of a portion
of the southern section of the controversial Keystone XL tar sands pipeline
in response to a landowner’s pushback against eminent domain claims on
his land. Michael Bishop has been given a temporary restraining order to
prevent pipeline work on his Nacogdoches County property. Interestingly,
one of the cases hinges on a question NRDC has posed previously… Is
bitumen, or tar sands oil, the same as crude oil. It seems like a silly
question, but in fact, the industry has spoken out of both sides of its mouth
on the issue.
Enbridge Pipeline Faces Scallop-Farmers Fight
A line of yellow buoys marking the boundaries of a scallop farm
outside Prince Rupert, British Columbia presents the biggest challenge
Enbridge Inc. (ENB) may face in its bid to connect Canada’s oil sands to
Asia.
Robot ‘race’ to fix damaged Fukushima nuclear plant
Japanese company Mitsubishi has unveiled a radiation-resistant robot
aimed at cleaning up the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant.
TEPCO unable to locate source of leak in Fukushima reactor
The operator of the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant is
grappling to locate the source of a leak of highly radioactive water in the

crippled No. 2 reactor, and will continue trying to pinpoint the cause next
week.
Experts fear more nuke reactors may be sited over active faults
More nuclear power plants could be found to be sited over active
fault lines as the Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) conducts safety
reviews of facilities, experts say.
Black Liberation/Civil Rights:
The Unsilenced Voice of a ‘Long-Distance Revolutionary’
by
Chris Hedges
I am sitting in the visiting area of the SCI Mahanoy prison in
Frackville, Pa., on a rainy, cold Friday morning with Mumia Abu-Jamal,
America’s most famous political prisoner and one of its few authentic
revolutionaries. He is hunched forward on the gray plastic table, his
dreadlocks cascading down the sides of his face, in a room that looks like
a high school cafeteria. He is talking intently about the nature of empire,
which he is currently reading voraciously about, and effective forms of
resistance to tyranny throughout history. Small children, visiting their
fathers or brothers, race around the floor, wail or clamber on the plastic
chairs. Abu-Jamal, like the other prisoners in the room, is wearing a brown
jumpsuit bearing the letters DOC—for Department of Corrections.
Abu-Jamal was transferred in January to the general prison
population after nearly 30 years in solitary confinement on death row and

was permitted physical contact with his wife, children and other visitors
for the first time in three decades. He had been sentenced to death in 1982
for the Dec. 9, 1981, killing of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner.
His sentence was recently amended to life without parole. The misconduct
of the judge, flagrant irregularities in his trial and tainted evidence have
been criticized by numerous human rights organizations, including
Amnesty International.
Abu-Jamal, who was a young activist in the Black Panthers and later
one of the most important radical journalists in Philadelphia, a city that a
few decades earlier produced I.F. Stone, has long been the bête noire of
the state. The FBI opened a file on him when he was 15, when he started
working with the local chapter of the Black Panthers. He was suspended
from his Philadelphia high school when he campaigned to rename the
school for Malcolm X and distributed “black revolutionary student power”
literature.
Stephen Vittoria’s new film documentary about Abu-Jamal, “Long
Distance Revolutionary,” rather than revisit the case, chronicles his
importance and life as an American journalist, radical and intellectual
under the harsh realities of Pennsylvania’s death row. Abu-Jamal has
published seven books in prison, including his searing and best-selling
“Live From Death Row.” The film features the voices of Cornel West,
James Cone, Dick Gregory, Angela Davis, Alice Walker and others. It
opens in theaters Feb. 1, starting in New York City. In the film Gregory
says that Abu-Jamal has single-handedly brought “dignity to the whole
death row.”
The late historian Manning Marable says in the film: “The voice of
black journalism in the struggle for the liberation of African-American
people has always proved to be decisive throughout black history. When
you listen to Mumia Abu-Jamal you hear the echoes of David Walker,
Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and the sisters and
brothers who kept the faith with struggle, who kept the faith with
resistance.”
The authorities, as they did before he was convicted, have attempted
to silence him in prison. Pennsylvania banned all recorded interviews with

Abu-Jamal after 1996. In response to protests over the singling out of one
inmate in the Pennsylvania correction system, the state simply banned
recorded access to all its inmates. The ban is nicknamed “the Mumia rule.”
“I was punished for communicating,” Abu-Jamal says.
Cornel West says in the film: “The state is very clever in terms of
keeping track, especially [of] the courageous and visionary ones, the ones
that are long-distance runners. You can keep track of them, absorb ’em,
dilute ’em, or outright kill ’em—you don’t have to worry about opposition
to ’em.”
“If you tell them the truth about the operation of our power this is
what happens to you,” he goes on. “Like Jesus on the cross. This is what
happens to you.”
During my four-and-a-half-hour conversation with Abu-Jamal I was
not permitted a pencil or paper. I wrote down his quotes after I left the
prison. My time with him mirrors the wider pattern of a society where the
poor and the destitute are rendered invisible and voiceless.
The breadth of his reading, which along with his writing and 3,000
radio broadcasts has kept his mind and soul intact, is staggering. His own
books are banned in the prison. In conversation he swings easily from
detailed discussions of the Opium Wars between 1839 and 1860 to the
Black Panthers to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to the series of legislative
betrayals of the poor and people of color by Bill Clinton, Barack Obama
and the Democratic Party. He cites books by Frederick Douglass, W.E.B.
Du Bois, Huey P. Newton, Assata Shakur, Eric Foner, Gore Vidal, Cornel
West, Howard Zinn, James Cone and Dave Zirin. He talks about Nat
Turner, Gabriel Prosser, “Cinque,” Harriet Tubman, Charles
Deslondes, Denmark Vesey and Sojourner Truth. He is reading “Masters
of War” by Clara Nieto, “How the World Works” by Noam Chomsky,
“The Face of Imperialism” by Michael Parenti and “Now and Then” by
Gil Scott-Heron. He wonders, as I do, what shape the collapse of empire
will take. And he despairs of the political unconsciousness among many
incoming prisoners, some young enough to be his children.
“When I first got out in the yard and I heard groups of men talking
about how Sarah was going to marry Jim or how Frank had betrayed

Susan, I thought, ‘Damn, these cats all know each other and their families.
That’s odd,’ ” he says. “But after a few minutes I realized they were
talking about soap operas. Television in prison is the great pacifier. They
love ‘Basketball Wives’ because it is ‘T and A’ with women of color. They
know how many cars Jay-Z has. But they don’t know their own history.
They don’t understand how they got here. They don’t know what is being
done to them. I tell them they have to read and they say, ‘Man, I don’t do
books.’ And that is just how the empire wants it. You can’t fight power if
you don’t understand it. And you can’t understand it if you don’t
experience it and then dissect it.” Read More
Black Misleadership Class Pretends It’s Ready to Fight the Power
• Voting Rights | Racial Equality | Mass incarceration | Marc Morial
Urban League | Ben Jealous | Al Sharpton | Obamacare

y
BAR executive editor
Glen Ford
Established Black organizations now claim they are ready to make
demands of the First Black President. But are they serious? “What Marc
Morial of the Urban League, Ben Jealous of the NAACP, Al Sharpton and
others have outlined are issue-based suggestion boxes for the president’s
perusal.” They're not about to “demanding” anything. Read more
Hatership VS Black Leadership in the Age of Obama
• Black Misleadership Class | Obamarama
by
BAR managing editor

Bruce A. Dixon
When you criticize black leadership, and especially the president
from the left, the establishment has no answer, they call you “a hater.” But
has our current black leadership outlived its usefulness? And if so, what's a
“hater” to do?
• Bruce A. Dixon's blog Login or register to post comments Read more
Freedom Rider: Susan Rice and American Evil
• Project for a New American Century | Susan Rice Secretary of
State | NDAA | McCain racist | Condoleezza Rice | Colin Powell
by
BAR editor and senior columnist
Margaret Kimberley
Some African Americans associate racial progress with Black people
achieving “the right to perform the evil acts which were once the reserve
of whites.” The ascension of Black secretaries of state marks “the first
time that black Americans began to look the other way and excuse their
government’s inhumanity.” Read more
CNN's Black In America: What Happens When Popeye's Teaches
Chickens History & Current Events
• corporate news media | corporate media

A Black Agenda Radio
commentary by
Bruce A. Dixon
Comedian Lily Tomlin once said that no matter how cynical you get, it's
impossible to keep up. CNN's latest installment of “Black In America”
with its focus on the “tragic mulatto” proves her right. CNN's version of
history erases the actual origin of North America's “one drop rule.”
16 Years of U.S. Genocide in Congo
• oil and resource wars | Rwanda | Congo
A Black Agenda Radio commentary
by
Glen Ford
The U.S. tells the world it can’t figure out how six million people
died in the Democratic Republic of Congo – while Washington writes the

checks and arms the perpetrators to the teeth. Like Mafia Dons pretending
to be honest businessmen, successive U.S. administrations subsidize and
direct the worst genocide since World War Two. Read more
China to be Number One in 2030 – But Who Will be Top Gun?
• National Intelligence Council report | US economic decline |
China top economy 2030
A Black Agenda Radio commentary
by
Glen Ford
The U.S. and Europe produce less and less of what the world wants,
and will be eclipsed by Asia by the year 2030, according to America’s own
National Intelligence Council. But the NATO allies account for 70 percent
of the world’s military budget. The task between now and 2030, is to
prevent the decaying powers “from holding the productive forces and
nations of the world hostage by force of arms.” Read more
US Africa Policy Will Remain Imperialistic
• War in Yemen | War in Pakistan | War in Afghanistan | War
Against Libya | War Against Gaza | Intervention in Haiti | Libya |
Uganda | Ethiopia | Rwanda | Somaila | MAli | Arab Spring | Haiti

y
Abayomi Azikiwe
U.S. imperialism is escalating its aggressions around the world,
especially in Africa. A system in general crisis tends to lash out in all
directions. Read more
American Militarism Threatening To Set Off World War III
• War Against Libya | Spanish American War | Philippines genocide
| Nuremberg Trials | Geneva Conventions | AFRICOM | Impeach
Obama | human rights | government lawlessness | civil resistance
by
Professor
Francis A. Boyle

Massive lawlessness by the U.S. government, at home and abroad,
requires a response of civil resistance. “Today’s civil resisters are acting
for the express purpose of upholding the rule of law, the U.S. Constitution,
human rights, and international law.” The resistance is lawful. “The U.S.
government officials are the outlaws!” Read more
Why Is Cuba’s Health Care System the
Best Model for Poor Countries?
• revolutionary health care | ELAM | Cuban health care
by
Don Fitz
Cuba has become a world-class medical powerhouse with very
limited resources, while “the US squanders perhaps 10 to 20 times what is
needed for a good, affordable medical system.” As a result, the Cuban
infant mortality rate is “below that of the US and less than half that of US
Blacks,” and Americans can hardly claim to have a health care system.
Read more
Roots of Evil: Capitalism
• socialism | feudalism | capitalism

y
Herbert Salit
“All Western societies are based on large-scale oppression and
systematic theft, much of that dependent on the use of, and the threat of
the use of, force, that is, armed robbery.” So, why all the fuss and worry
about the decline of the West? Read more
February 30th Movement
• Fletcher Step'n to Fletch'it

y Raymond Nat Turner
“You put your right
Hand out, your right
Foot out, bow, scrape
Do de turnabout
Grab coattails of
De CEO...”
Read more
Why Couldn't Unions Stop RIght To Work Legislation in Michigan?
In a stealth maneuver last week, the Michigan legislature passed right
to work legislation, intended to strip the nation's few remaining unions of
their ability to hire staff and be politically active. The Real News Network
interviews Jane McAlevey, a successful union organizer to explain how
this happened & what it means. Read more
Listen to Black Agenda Radio on the Progressive Radio Network,
with Glen Ford and Nellie Bailey – Week of December 10, 2012
• Wal-Mart-Free Newark | Wal-Mart Obamacare | Wal-Mart low
wages | Wal-Mart Bengladesh fires | Demos study Wal-Mart |
Strike Debt study | preventive detention | NDDA | Hurricane
Sandy relief | disaster relief loans

Wal-Mart-Free Newark
As “the leader in the retail industry in paying its workers the lowest
wages,” Wal-Mart should be barred from doing business in Newark, New
Jersey, said Larry Hamm, chairman of the People’s Organization for
Progress. “We need living wage jobs,” said Hamm. “The minimum wage
is a slave wage.”
Wal-Mart Exploits Obamacare
President Obama’s health care legislation has been a special boon to
Wal-Mart, the world’s biggest corporation. “What changes with
Obamacare is that anybody making up to 133 percent of the federal
poverty level now qualifies for Medicaid,” said journalist Mary Wheeler.
In recent months, Wal-Mart has cut the hours of large numbers of workers.
“There’s a big incentive for Wal-Mart to make sure that as many of their
employees are below the federal poverty level” as possible, said Wheeler.
Multinationals Super-Exploit Third World Workers
Labor unions, elected officials and grassroots activists in New York
demanded that multinational corporations be made accountable for
working conditions at factories in the developing world. “We must push
them to sign the international Fire Safety Act and follow international
labor laws,” said Fazi Foezia, a member of DRUM – Desis Rising Up and
Moving – and a Bengladesh national. “They exploit our workers and don’t
pay taxes to our governments.” Garment factory fires in Bengladesh and
Pakistan have killed hundreds in recent months.

Raising Retail Wages Would Boost Economy
A study by Demos finds that “raising wages in the retails sector at the
largest employers to a threshold of $25,000 a year for full-time, yearround
workers would bring a million and a half people out of poverty,
generate between $11 and $15 billion in GDP, and create between 100,000
and 132,000 new jobs.” Corporations would benefit, too, from a more
loyal work force and greater consumer spending power.
Disaster Officials Offer Loans, Not Aid
Federal officials are more concerned with generating loans to fatten
the $1 billion a year disaster loan service industry, than in providing direct
aid to victims of Hurricane Sandy, according to a study by Strike Debt, an
offshoot of the Occupy Movement. Credit-worthiness, rather than need,
becomes the watchword, said Strike Debt spokesperson Pamela Brown.
“By using the lens of debt, they are exacerbating any kinds of inequalities
that are already existing” in disaster-struck areas, “putting renters and
minority communities” in additional jeopardy.
No Charge, No Trial, No Justice
Civil and human rights activists gathered at Central Connecticut State
University, at New Britain, for a conference on preventive detention, last
weekend. President Obama’s preventive detention law, part of the National
Defense Authorization Act, was designed to target “those who are engage
in dissent,” said conference organizer Daniel Adams. Activists should also
oppose more recent legislation that might exempt U.S. citizens from
detention without charge or trial. “It’s got to be all of us or none of us,”
said Adams.
Labor:
Economy:
Cuban state grudgingly cedes ground to business cooperatives
By
Marc Frank

HAVANA (Reuters) - Communist-run Cuba legalized nonagricultural
cooperatives on Tuesday as the state continued to pull back slowly from its
centrally planned economy in favor of private initiative and market forces.
The move was just the latest reform under President Raul Castro,
who wants to transform the country's Soviet-style command economy into
one more in line with Asian Communism where political control remains
absolute, while allowing more space for the private sector.
Castro's reform push began after he took over ruling the Caribbean
island from his ailing brother, Fidel, in 2008.
"The initial stage calls for the establishment of more than 200
associations of this kind (cooperatives) across the country, in sectors such
as transportation, food services, fishing, personal and domestic services,
recycling and construction and production of construction materials," the
Communist Party daily, Granma, said on Tuesday.
The newspaper said that the cooperatives would operate on an
experimental basis through 2013, before becoming more generalized.
The new law, published in the Official Gaceta, allows for an
unlimited number of members and use of contracted employees on a threemonth
basis.
Granma said the new law and regulations for the cooperatives took
into account the experience of more than 1,000 private farming
cooperatives established in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as a similar
number of cooperatives that began leasing land from the state in the
1990s.
"Law and legitimacy go hand in hand: presumably, and with the
future development of a serious wholesale market and access to credit, and
a functioning transportation infrastructure, this new law will broaden
economic opportunity across the board," said Julia Sweig, a senior fellow
on Latin America at the Washington-based Council on Foreign Relations.
Cuban authorities began discussing more than two years ago how to
transform bankrupt small and medium sized-state businesses - plagued by
pilfering, embezzlement and general inefficiency - into cooperatives.
The Communist Party adopted a sweeping five-year plan to "update"
the economy last year, which included moving more than 20 percent of the

state labor force of 5 million people into a new "nonstate" sector of private
and cooperative businesses.
Raul Castro has already taken steps to deregulate in part small private
businesses in the retail sector, lease small state shops and taxis to
individual employees and fallow state lands to would-be small farmers in
search of improved production and efficiency.
Castro, in a speech to the National Assembly a few months ago, said
the new measures would "permit the state to forget about the
administration of a set of secondary services and productions and
concentrate on improving the management of the basic means of
production which will remain as socialist state companies."
The "nonstate" sector, excluding farming, now amounts to some
400,000 small entrepreneurs and their employees.
Granma said the cooperatives could be formed by interested
individuals who could rent state property or by the transfer of state
businesses to their employees.
The cooperatives will function independently of state entities and
businesses, set prices in cases where they are not fixed by the state,
operate on a democratic basis, divide profit as they see fit and receive
better tax treatment than individually owned businesses, Granma said.
The cooperatives' potential should not be underestimated despite the
myriad of obstacles still presented by the state-dominated Cuban economy,
according to Richard Fineberg, a nonresident senior fellow of the
Washington-based Brookings Institution and author of its recently released
report, "The New Cuban Economy: What Roles for Foreign Investment?"
"This opens the door to exciting social innovations, potentially
creating a large sector of the economy that would be neither entirely
capitalist nor state-socialist but uniquely Cuban - grassroots, democratic,
and productive," he said.
World:
Egypt's IMF loan deal postponed after
Mohamed Morsi scraps tax increases

Political crisis deepens as judges refuse to oversee referendum
on new constitution proposed by president
Abdel-Rahman Hussein in Cairo
Photograph: Petr David Josek/AP
Protesters gather in front of the presidential palace in Cairo.
An International Monetary Fund loan to Egypt has been delayed until
next month, intensifying the political crisis gripping the country.
The delay, announced on Tuesday, came as judges voted decisively
against overseeing the referendum on the controversial new constitution.
Ahmed El Zend, the head of the judges club, an unofficial body with
most of Egypt's judges among its members, said 90% had decided not to
supervise the referendum. However, the high elections commission, the
judicial body supervising the referendum, said there were enough judges
on board to oversee the voting but only by staging the referendum in two
phases, on 15 December and 22 December.
In a further sign of the seriousness of the country's political
stalemate, the defence minister, Abdel-Fatah el-Sissi, called for a "national
dialogue meeting" to try to find consensus between the Muslim
Brotherhood and opposition groups.
The delay in the $4.8bn (£3bn) loan, which was agreed last month,
occurs amid mounting protests against the government, which has faced
accusations that it is behaving in an authoritarian fashion by issuing
decrees and attempting to push through a new constitution.
As rival factions gathered in Cairo for more demonstrations, the
finance minister, Mumtaz al-Said, said the delay in the loan agreement
was intended to allow time to explain a heavily criticised package of

economic austerity measures to the Egyptian people. "Of course the delay
will have some economic impact, but we are discussing necessary
measures [to address that] during the coming period," he told Reuters. "I
am optimistic … everything will be well, God willing."
On Monday, Egypt's president, Mohamed Morsi, withdrew planned
tax increases, which are seen as vital for the loan to go ahead.
Opposition groups, already angry over other measures taken by
Morsi, greeted the tax measures, which included duties on alcoholic
drinks, cigarettes and a range of goods and services, with furious criticism.
The main opposition bloc, the National Salvation Front (NSF), is to
decide on Wednesday whether to boycott the referendum or campaign for
a no vote.
The latest unrest has claimed seven lives in clashes between the
Muslim Brotherhood and opponents, who are also besieging the
presidential palace.
The elite Republican Guard, which protects the palace, has yet to use
force to keep protesters away from the graffiti-daubed building, now
ringed with tanks, barbed wire and concrete barricades.
The army has told all sides to resolve their differences through
dialogue, saying it would not allow Egypt to enter a "dark tunnel".
For the period of the referendum, the army has been granted police
powers by Morsi, allowing it to arrest civilians.
However, in the latest reversal for Morsi, the presidency yesterday
was forced on Tuesday to clarify that anyone arrested by the militaryarmy
would face civil rather than military courts.
The military has portrayed itself as the guarantor of the nation's
security but so far it has shown no appetite for a return to the
bruisingfrontline political role it played after the fall of the country's
former leader Hosni Mubarak, which severely damaged its standing.
Morsi and his key allies in the Muslim Brotherhood have stumbled
through a series of worsening crises since he was praised for his key role
in mediating a ceasefire in Gaza between Israel and Hamas.
In the immediate aftermath Morsi granted himself sweeping new
powers that saw the biggest demonstration in Egypt since the revolution

almost two years ago sweptthat ousted the country authoritarian former
leader Hosni Mubarak.
In continuing street violence yesterday, masked men attacked a sit-in
in the early hours of theTuesday morning, firing bird-shot at the protesters.
Mass protests against referendum on new Egyptian constitution
By
Chris Marsden
Over a hundred thousand people demonstrated in Cairo and tens of
thousands more rallied in other Egyptian cities yesterday against a
referendum scheduled for December 15 on an Islamist constitution.
Championed by President Mohamed Mursi and the Muslim Brotherhood,
the new constitution enshrines the authority of the military.
Last weekend, a declaration issued by Mursi affirmed that the vote on
the constitution would go ahead.
Protesters in Cairo breached a concrete barrier erected by the army
outside the presidential palace. They toppled the concrete blocks with
chains while hundreds of soldiers fell back closer to the palace walls. In
Alexandria, thousands protested, and rival demonstrations were staged by
supporters of Mursi in both cities.
Anti-Mursi protests were also held in Suez, Mahalla and Port Said.
Muslim Brotherhood headquarters in Alexandria and Mansoura were
ransacked and, in the case of Mansoura, set on fire. The Brotherhood
formally requested the military to protect its main headquarters in Cairo.
Fighting raged in Mahalla, a centre of the Egyptian textile industry,
between Brotherhood supporters and anti-Mursi protesters, resulting in
300 injuries. There were also clashes in Port Said.
Police repeatedly fired tear gas near Tahrir Square as protesters
continued to arrive in large numbers.
The British Guardian newspaper quoted Haytham Mohamedeen of
the Egyptian Revolutionary Socialists as saying the protests were “to
overthrow oppression and stand up to the new dictatorship of Morsi.”
While this spokesman of the pseudo-left Revolutionary Socialists stopped
short of calling for Mursi’s overthrow, other demonstrators did not. The

chant of the 2011 revolution that brought down the US-backed dictator
Hosni Mubarak, “The people want to bring down the regime,” resounded
in Cairo and other cities, including Alexandria and Suez.
Recent weeks have seen increasingly violent repression carried out
jointly by Muslim Brotherhood thugs and the police and security services.
Early Tuesday morning, dozens of masked gunmen attacked anti-Mursi
protesters in Tahrir Square, wounding nine with birdshot. Two protesters
were wounded in the chest and one in the groin. Petrol bombs were also
thrown. Police cars surrounded the square in central Cairo.
Conflicts outside the presidential palace last week led to hundreds of
injuries and five deaths, as military-style units of the Brotherhood beat
demonstrators and fired shots during 15 hours of street battles. The
Associated Press cited reports of 12,000 Mursi supporters attacking a few
thousand protesters. A detention facility was set up, under the eye of the
police, in a lean-to on the very walls of the palace. Nearly 140 anti-Mursi
protesters were detained and tortured to extract false confessions of being
paid agents of Israel.
On Monday, a major step towards the formal imposition of military
rule was taken when a presidential decree—Law 107—came into effect
giving the military authority to arrest civilians and protect “vital facilities
of the state” until the result of Saturday’s referendum is known. The
decree grants the military “all the authorities of judicial officers,” echoing
the provision in Mursi’s constitution allowing for the military trial of
civilians for crimes that “harm the Armed Forces.”
Even with military backing, Mursi is in a precarious position given
the mounting opposition to his regime. That is why he was forced to
temporarily renege on his promise to impose the sweeping spending cuts
and tax hikes demanded by the International Monetary Fund in exchange
for a $4.8 billion loan expected December 19 and an additional $2 billion
from the World Bank.
The move will no doubt raise concerns within the United States and
other imperialist powers on which Mursi depends no less than he depends
upon the Egyptian military.

Mursi and the Brotherhood are considered key allies of Washington
in the Middle East, as shown in the role they have already played in
Tunisia, Libya and Syria. They are seen to be a key political mechanism
for policing and suppressing the working class in Egypt.
A major element of Mursi’s appeal to the United States and other
Western powers is his commitment to economic reforms that will benefit
Egypt’s global investors. He calls his proposals to encourage private
control of the economy, “limit the role of the state” and slash social
subsidies his “Renaissance programme.”
On Sunday, the first step in this “Renaissance” was announced in the
form of a presidential decree imposing tax rises on more than 50 goods,
including fuel, electricity, steel, cement, cigarettes and alcohol. But the
very next day Mursi suspended the tax increases via a 2 a.m.
announcement on his Facebook page in a bid to quell political dissent
because, Mursi wrote, he had “felt the pulse of the streets and is aware of
how much the Egyptian citizen is burdened in these tough economic
times.”
On Tuesday, the IMF announced that the planned loan would be
delayed for a month, but stressed that this was in response to a request
from Egypt. Finance Minister Mumtaz al-Said said the delay, not
cancellation, of the “necessary measures” was intended to allow time to
explain the bitterly opposed austerity measures to the Egyptian people.
The US has not abandoned Mursi by any means. This week the
Obama administration faced off Republicans opposing its intention to
honour a US commitment to provide 20 F-16 fighter jets as part of a
billion dollar aid package agreed before the downfall of Hosni Mubarak
and scheduled for January 2013.
Pentagon spokesperson Col. Wesley Miller said the move was
essential given that the US-Egypt defence relationship “has served as the
cornerstone of our broader strategic partnership for over thirty years.”
State Department official Andrew Shapiro added, “We have
continued to rely on Egypt to support and advance US interests in the
region, including peace with Israel, confronting Iranian ambitions,
interdicting smugglers, and supporting Iraq.”

The opposition National Salvation Front, led by bourgeois figures
such as Mohamed ElBaradei and Amr Moussa, has declared that it will
boycott the vote on the new constitution. But it wants nothing more than
an accommodation with the Brotherhood and the military that will ensure
that the big business layers for which it speaks will enjoy a position of
authority within the state apparatus and a share in the exploitation of the
working class.
That is why the Front’s official statement complained that Mursi’s
move would “cause further division and polarisation,” rather than stressing
its anti-democratic implications. ElBaradei went on TV to urge only that
the referendum be postponed for a couple of months.
Even as demonstrators were massing in Tahrir Square and outside the
presidential palace, Egyptian news reports began circulating that the army
had called for talks between Mursi and the opposition with the aim of
ending protests and ensuring that the referendum proceeds Saturday.
Colonel General Abdel Fattah al-Sissi, defence minister and
commander in chief of the armed forces under Egypt’s militarist interim
constitution, was cited on the military’s Facebook page as declaring, “The
chief of the military and defence minister calls for a meeting for the sake
of Egypt that will bring together national partners in the presence of the
president of the republic.”
Those urged to attend talks at 4:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Air-
Defence Hall in Egypt’s Olympic Village in the New Cairo district include
the government, judges and “all political forces.”
Hamdeen Sabahy of the Nasserist Dignity Party, desiring not to
appear to be abandoning opposition to the referendum, raised concerns
that without a clear agenda there was a danger the talks would be a public
relations exercise. He put off a final decision on attending until today.
At the same time he declared, “The Egyptian army is a great army
and highly valued among all Egyptians. We respect it and its efforts.”
There was clearly concern that such talk, under the auspices of the
military and just three days before the referendum, would provoke an
angry response from the millions of workers and youth opposing Mursi
but presently being corralled behind the National Salvation Front. This

prompted Egypt’s official news agency MENA to stress that the talks
would be a non-political “dialogue among all the nation’s partners” and “a
message to comfort the Egyptian people.”
Health, Education, Science and Welfare:

Daily News Digest December 12, 2012
Image of the Day:
Artists Against Fracking
Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon placed a full-page ad in the Dec. 10 New
York Times, calling on Governor Cuomo to “Imagine There’s No Fracking
… give clean energy a chance.” The ad illustrates and describes how
cement in wells at such great depths leaks, poisoning drinking water with
gases and toxic chemicals.
“No amount of regulation can ever make fracking safe,” the ad reads.
“No one can be sent thousands of feet under the Earth to make repairs
once the cement fails—and it will. The enormous pressure and
temperature changes at those depths guarantee it.”
The ad continues, “Fracked gas is not climate friendly. Methane is a
powerful greenhouse gas that leaks from the failed wells, fractured rock
and pipelines … New York can become the Clean Energy Empire State.
With an economy bolstered by insulating all buildings. This way we could
save far more energy and create FAR more jobs than fracking, plus save

consumers money forever. And let’s scale up solar and wind power with a
smart grid for truly clean, economical energy.”
Imagine There’s No Fracking … Give Clean Energy a Chance
Quote of the Day:
Videos of the Day:
Antibiotics in chicken causing new infections
A bacon sundae? Really? How low can they go?
End Wall Street’s Wars!
Occupy Wall Street!
Occupy Wall Street is the Only Organization
That Identifies The Enemy —
The 1% That Own and Control The Wealth!
1960s The Realist — One Nation Under God/1%
(Unlike The Trade Union Misleaders
Nor The Misleaders Of The Oppressed
Who Strive To Be In ‘Partnership’ With The 1%)
1960s The Realist — One Nation Under God/1%
(Unlike The Trade Union Misleaders
Nor The Misleaders Of The Oppressed
Who Strive To Be In ‘Partnership’ With The 1%)

Occupy Wall Street — ‘We Are The 99%’
The resistance continues at Liberty Square:
Starbucks Occupied Across Britain
Tags: austerity, occupation, starbucks, uk uncut, united kingdom
Last weekend, anti-austerity activists including UK Uncut targeted
the U.S. corporation Starbucks for tax avoidance while making a point
about the disproportionate impact of austerity on women. Over 40 protests
occurred across the UK at Starbucks shops, UK Uncut's biggest day of
action yet. Protesters staged sit-in occupations and transformed Starbucks
cafes into refuges, crèches, libraries, and homeless shelters in protest
against the impact of the government's cutting of services ranging from
subsidies for single mothers to rape crisis centers. Occupy Wall Street
stands in solidarity with this brilliant action to attack austerity and
demonstrate the alternatives of mutual aid and resistance, while also
calling attention to the inherent hypocrisy of governments' allowing
multinational corporations to avoid taxes while cutting services to the
poor. This issue is by no means limited to the UK only; these actions stand
as an inspiration and one possible model for resistance movements
fighting austerity across the world.
via UK Uncut:
Growing public anger at Starbucks was clear today as over 40 of their
shops across the UK- including in Liverpool, Cardiff, Bristol and

Shrewsbury- were targeted today by the anti-cuts direct action network,
UK Uncut.
In central London a creche and women's refuge were set up in
Starbuck's flagship stores, and in Birmingham people slept in sleeping
bags on the floor to highlight homelessness. In Barnet, activists turned
Starbucks into a library, while in York protesters handed out free tea and
coffee in store.
The group took action to confront the company over its tax avoidance
and highlight the impact of the government's cuts on women.[1] Read
More...
Times Square,Dec. 6:
Rise Up New York! Smash Austerity! Support Workers!
Tags: austerity, fast food forward, labor, nyc
Mass Rally at Thursday 5PM Times Square!
Direct Actions and Marches to Follow
RSVP on Facebook
Last week, 200 workers at Wendy's, McDonald's, Burger King,
Domino's and Taco Bell went on strike and joined workers at Car Washes,
Supermarkets, and Airports throughout NYC in demanding better pay
working conditions.
On December 6th we’re standing up to protect the right to organize!

Too many low wage workers rely on public assistance to get by in
our economy. While workers throughout the city are making near or below
minimum wage or are fighting to protect their wages and benefits, CEOs
are making record incomes and their lobbyists are pushing our elected
officials to cut spending on social programs and extend tax cuts for the
richest 2%.
We won't stand for this. We won't stand policies that prioritize tax
cuts for millionaires over funding programs that working families rely on.
And we are telling workers who are struggling at work that we've got their
back.
Stand with workers as they come together to demand better wages
and working conditions and economic policy that’s good for all of us.
More info: NY Workers Rising | @ny_rising | #fastfoodfwd |
#riseupny
#D6: Occupy Our Homes Kicks Off Year Two with National Day of
Action
Tags: #d6, eviction defense, foreclosures, occupy our homes
#D6: RECLAIM OUR HOMES, RECLAIM OUR FUTURE
On Thursday December 6th 2012, communities around the country
are turning the spotlight on the crisis that continues to hold our
neighborhoods and our economy hostage as part of the Occupy Our
Homes movement’s national day of action to Reclaim Our Homes and
Reclaim Our Future.
Tomorrow, Occupy activists and housing justice allies are taking
action to mark the first anniversary of this movement to defend our

homes, hold Wall Street accountable, and affirm the human right to
housing.
Actions will be taking place in Atlanta, Minneapolis, Chicago, St.
Louis, Denver, Baltimore, Detroit, San Francisco, Sacramento, Los
Angeles, Oakland, San Diego, Richmond CA, Lake Worth FL, Greensboro
NC, Mendham NJ, and other cities, to be announced.
“Occupy Our Homes began with the simple idea of bringing the bold
energy of the Occupy movement into communities facing housing crisis to
build power through victories for the 99%,” said Nick Espinosa, an
organizer with Minneapolis-based Occupy Homes MN. “Over the last
year, we’ve fought back against the banks, stopping evictions and winning
homes, churches and community landmarks, while relieving debt and
reclaiming land.”
December 6th Actions will vary from community to community, but
include:
• Eviction defenses/home occupations
• Reclaiming vacant homes for the homeless
• Establishing foreclosure and eviction-free zones
• Marches and protests at big banks
On December 6, 2011, scores of groups around the country
participated in a day of action for housing justice, launching the
Occupy Our Homes movement. Since then, homeowners, housing
justice activists, homeless advocates, and occupy groups have come
together to fight back under the banner of Occupy Our Homes.
“All over the country, activists have declared housing a human right
and come together in solidarity,” said Shab Bashiri, an organizer with
Occupy Our Homes Atlanta, “We’re occupying our homes to prevent
eviction, disrupting foreclosure auctions, restoring vacant homes to
community use, and putting the spotlight on the banks that caused this
mess in the first place.”
Occupy Our Homes has showed time and again
that when people fought for their homes, they could win.
But the fight is far from over. Despite dozens of victories for
homeowners around the country, banks are still choosing to foreclose

instead of taking payments, refusing to negotiate in good faith with
families, still using fraudulent tactics like robo-signing to speed through
illegal foreclosures. And bank-owned houses continue to sit empty and
untended, destroying property values and pushing more families
underwater.
Follow live updates throughout the day on OccupyOurHomes.org,
and on Twitter with @OccupyOurHomes and the hashtags #D6 and
#occupyhomes
U.S.
The Best –and Worst – of Times
[col. writ. 11/23/12] © ’12 Mumia Abu-Jamal
The elections (thank goodness!) are over, and a vast sigh of relief has
engulfed millions, that the man of their choice has prevailed, and perhaps
more importantly, the man they opposed – the man they feared –lost.
As several days have passed, new questions arise, which beg
answers.
If you feel you’ve won, what have you won?
How does your victory transform your life?
Are you freer?
Are any in your family freer?
Is your community in any way bettered by election results?
These aren’t mere rhetorical questions, but things to ponder.
Are you better?
These aren’t questions that politicians particularly want you to either
ask – or answer.
But they’re there. And they beg answers.
For most people vote for something; something concrete.
The most loyal, most dedicated sector of the Democratic electorate
has been Black Americans, and aside from symbolism, what have they
received?
Why are Black lives so short, so brutal, so truncated?

That’s because millions of Black Americans, who work at some of
the worst jobs available (when they can get ‘em!), whose children attend
the worst performing schools, who live in some of the most wretched
housing in America, who suffer the lion’s share of police violence, seem to
be content with the power of symbols: dark faces in high office.
May we someday demand more. — © ’12 maj
Obamacare Pre-Existing Condition Fee
To Cost Companies $63 Per Person
By
Ricardo Alonzo-Zaldivar
WASHINGTON -- Your medical plan is facing an unexpected
expense, so you probably are, too. It's a new, $63-per-head fee to cushion
the cost of covering people with pre-existing conditions under President
Barack Obama's health care overhaul.
The charge, buried in a recent regulation, works out to tens of
millions of dollars for the largest companies, employers say. Most of that
is likely to be passed on to workers.
Employee benefits lawyer Chantel Sheaks calls it a "sleeper issue"
with significant financial consequences, particularly for large employers.
"Especially at a time when we are facing economic uncertainty,
(companies will) be hit with a multi-million dollar assessment without
getting anything back for it," said Sheaks, a principal at Buck Consultants,
a Xerox subsidiary.
Based on figures provided in the regulation, employer and individual
health plans covering an estimated 190 million Americans could owe the
per-person fee.

The Obama administration says it is a temporary assessment levied
for three years starting in 2014, designed to raise $25 billion. It starts at
$63 and then declines.
Most of the money will go into a fund administered by the Health and
Human Services Department. It will be used to cushion health insurance
companies from the initial hard-to-predict costs of covering uninsured
people with medical problems. Under the law, insurers will be forbidden
from turning away the sick as of Jan. 1, 2014.
The program "is intended to help millions of Americans purchase
affordable health insurance, reduce unreimbursed usage of hospital and
other medical facilities by the uninsured and thereby lower medical
expenses and premiums for all," the Obama administration says in the
regulation. An accompanying media fact sheet issued Nov. 30 referred to
"contributions" without detailing the total cost and scope of the program.
Of the total pot, $5 billion will go directly to the U.S. Treasury,
apparently to offset the cost of shoring up employer-sponsored coverage
for early retirees.
The $25 billion fee is part of a bigger package of taxes and fees to
finance Obama's expansion of coverage to the uninsured. It all comes to
about $700 billion over 10 years, and includes higher Medicare taxes
effective this Jan. 1 on individuals making more than $200,000 per year or
couples making more than $250,000. People above those threshold
amounts also face an additional 3.8 percent tax on their investment
income.
But the insurance fee had been overlooked as employers focused on
other costs in the law, including fines for medium and large firms that
don't provide coverage.
"This kind of came out of the blue and was a surprisingly large
amount," said Gretchen Young, senior vice president for health policy at
the ERISA Industry Committee, a group that represents large employers
on benefits issues.
Word started getting out in the spring, said Young, but hard cost
estimates surfaced only recently with the new regulation. It set the per
capita rate at $5.25 per month, which works out to $63 a year.

America's Health Insurance Plans, the major industry trade group for
health insurers, says the fund is an important program that will help
stabilize the market and mitigate cost increases for consumers as the
changes in Obama's law take effect.
But employers already offering coverage to their workers don't see
why they have to pony up for the stabilization fund, which mainly helps
the individual insurance market. The redistribution puts the biggest
companies on the hook for tens of millions of dollars.
"It just adds on to everything else that is expected to increase health
care costs," said economist Paul Fronstin of the nonprofit Employee
Benefit Research Institute.
The fee will be assessed on all "major medical" insurance plans,
including those provided by employers and those purchased individually
by consumers. Large employers will owe the fee directly. That's because
major companies usually pay upfront for most of the health care costs of
their employees. It may not be apparent to workers, but the insurance
company they deal with is basically an agent administering the plan for
their employer.
The fee will total $12 billion in 2014, $8 billion in 2015 and $5
billion in 2016. That means the per-head assessment would be smaller
each year, around $40 in 2015 instead of $63.
It will phase out completely in 2017 – unless Congress, with
lawmakers searching everywhere for revenue to reduce federal deficits –
decides to extend it.
The JOBS Act
Should Be Re-Named the Jumpstart Investor Fraud Act
By
Pam Martens

Outgoing Chair of the SEC, Mary Schapiro, Who Plans to Step Down December 14, 2012
This past Friday, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)
brought an enforcement action against an alleged Miami fraudster,
Claudio Osorio, and his accountant, Craig Toll, whom it charged with
swindling $16.8 million from five duped investors based on a series of
outrageous lies about their startup company. Now, thanks to Congress and
its second worst financial idea since the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in
1999, things just got a lot easier for stock charlatans.
In April, President Obama signed into law the Jumpstart Our
Business Startups Act (JOBS Act). The title of the legislation tells you all
you really need to know: this Congress will pass the most horrific piece of
anti-consumer, anti-investor legislation if it has a flag-waving title and
enough special interest money backing it.
The goal of the legislation is in keeping with the grotesque mindset of
Washington: in the midst of the lingering effects of the worst economic
crisis since the Great Depression — caused by the deregulation of Wall
Street; the answer is to deregulate Wall Street further.
Under the new legislation, men like Osorio would be able to engage
in private placements of stock offerings via general solicitations to the
public, such as telemarketing, and through advertising via media and the
internet. In other words, instead of defrauding just five investors, as the
SEC charged in the Osorio case, because legislation barred him from
being able to advertise broadly to potential investors, stock charlatans will
now be able to jumpstart their frauds and reach thousands of
investors. Read More

HSBC’s $1.9 Billion Settlement and the Men on the Hill
By
Pam Martens
On July 17 of this year, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on
Investigations released a 330-page report on banking giant HSBC,
together with 100 documents and internal emails, evincing a culture
of hubris and potentially criminal actions when it came to U.S. banking
laws.
Today, the U.S. Department of Justice and multiple other U.S.
regulators will tie all that up with a tidy red bow for a settlement of $1.921
billion; a small nick in HSBC’s profits of $22 billion last year. HSBC
released a statement saying it was “profoundly sorry.” Read More
New York City police arrest artist who created drone satires
By
Sandy English
A satirical poster on the potential use of drones by the NYPD
Last week, The New York Police Department (NYPD) arrested
Essam Attia, an artist who had designed and surreptitiously placed satirical
posters dealing with the NYPD’s potential use of pilotless drone aircraft.
Attia and a team posed as maintenance workers who routinely replace
advertisements in plastic cases at bus stops and other public locations. The
posters simulated NYPD public service announcements and depict drones
firing missiles at fleeing civilians. One of the posters says, “NYPD drones:
Protection when you least expect it.” An NYPD logo appears at the bottom
of the image.

In what amounts to a political vendetta against Attia for daring to
criticize the police, the artist has been charged on 56 criminal counts,
including grand larceny, possession of stolen property and a weapons
charge for possession of an antique, unloaded .22 caliber handgun. The
NYPD appears to have put some effort into hunting the artist down.
Officers were seen dusting the poster-boxes for fingerprints in September,
shortly after the posters began to appear.
In a video interview posted on animalnewyork.com in September,
Attia—his voice disguised and face hidden—said that he posted the
images “to create a conversation about the deployment of drones in
American airspace. We have to remember that right now, internationally,
they are being used to kill people. They’re armed: they shoot missiles.
We’re fighting an illegal war in Pakistan and no one seems to want to talk
about it.”
A US Army veteran who served as a geo-spatial analyst in Iraq, Attia
added, “We know some [police] departments in Texas have them. It’s only
a matter of time before New York has them. … Weaponized drones used to
kill American citizens coming to New York City? I’m not sure I’m cool
with that.”
In February, Congress approved legislation that would allow 30,000
drones in American airspace by 2020. Predator drones, the same aircraft
that the US military uses in Pakistan and Yemen, already patrol the US-
Mexican border and were used last year by police in North Dakota. The
environmental Protection Agency has reportedly been using drones to spy
on cattle ranchers in Nebraska.
The sheriff’s office in Alameda County, California, was recently
forced to suspend the purchase of a surveillance drone after a public
outcry.
In New York City, a memo released under the Freedom of
Information Act earlier this year revealed discussions between the NYPD
and the Federal Aviation Administration in which the NYPD stated it was
“investigating the possible use of UAV's [unmanned aerial vehicles] as a
law enforcement tool.”

Drones can carry sophisticated surveillance equipment, including
heat sensors, high-resolution cameras and advanced radar. Drones can stay
in the air for up to 20 hours, much longer than manned aircraft.
The NYPD's deployment of drones would be one more escalation of
a broad and sophisticated spying operation, often against groups and
individuals who presented no criminal threat, especially since the terrorist
attacks of 2001. Its intelligence division has thousands of members and is
run by former Central Intelligence Agency deputy director for operations,
David Cohen.
For the last ten years the NYPD has engaged in illegal “stop-andfrisk”
actions, primarily against minority, working-class youth. It has
collected information on over a million of these youth and stored it an
electronic database. Although it has been prevented from using
computerized databases by law, the department continues to collect
information from those whom it stops.
Last year an investigation by the Associated Press revealed that the
NYPD conducted a major surveillance operation against Muslims in the
New York City area and across the east coast of the US. It placed
informants in over 50 “mosques of concern,” infiltrated student clubs at
several universities, and spied on businesses. A secret team called the
“Demographics Unit” was dispatched to these investigations. The unit
never discovered a single terrorist plot in its six-year history.
The NYPD also maintained close surveillance on Occupy Wall Street
activists last year at demonstrations, including raids on activists’
residences for outstanding warrants on minor violations.
The most notorious use of drones has been that of the Bush and
Obama administrations in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere
where they have been used not only for surveillance but to kill over 2,500
civilians as part of an effort to assassinate a smaller number of individuals
that the president deems to be terrorist. Several American citizens have
been killed in these operations, including Anwar al-Awalki, targeted by a
CIA drone in Yemen by presidential order in September last year.
That the public should have a sharper and more critical knowledge
about the use of drones in New York is undoubtedly of major concern to

the NYPD, particularly since the department polices a city in which social
tensions have reached a breaking point.
An video concerning Attia’s posters can be found here.
The author also recommends:
The “rule of law” and state killings
New York police defend illegal spying operation against Muslims
Environment:
Fracking:
Fracking corporation turns Louisiana bayou country into
toxic sinkhole
By
Mike Ludwig, Truthout
Photo: Jeffrey Dubinsky / Louisiana Environmental Action Network
"This place is no longer fit for human habitation, and will forever
be," shouted one frustrated evacuee at a recent community
meeting in Assumption.
For residents in Assumption Parish, the boiling, gas-belching bayou,
with its expanding toxic sinkhole and quaking earth is no longer a
mystery; but there is little comfort in knowing the source of the littleknown
event that has forced them out of their homes.

Located about 45 miles south of Baton Rouge, Assumption Parish
carries all the charms and curses of southern Louisiana. Networks of
bayous, dotted with trees heavy with Spanish moss, connect with the
Mississippi River as it slowly ambles toward the Gulf of Mexico.
Fishermen and farmers make their homes there, and so does the oil and
gas industry, which has woven its own network of wells, pipelines and
processing facilities across the lowland landscape.
The first sign of the oncoming disaster was the mysterious
appearance of bubbles in the bayous in the spring of 2012. For months the
residents of a rural community in Assumption Parish wondered why the
waters seemed to be boiling in certain spots as they navigated the bayous
in their fishing boats.
Then came the earthquakes. The quakes were relatively small, but
some residents reported that their houses shifted in position, and the
tremors shook a community already desperate for answers. State officials
launched an investigation into the earthquakes and bubbling bayous in
response to public outcry, but the officials figured the bubbles were caused
by a single source of natural gas, such as a pipeline leak. They were
wrong.
On a summer night in early August, the earth below the Bayou Corne,
located near a small residential community in Assumption, simply opened
up and gave way. Several acres of swamp forest were swallowed up and
replaced with a gaping sinkhole that filled itself with water, underground
brines, oil and natural gas from deep below the surface. Since then, the
massive sinkhole at Bayou Corne has grown to 8 acres in size.
On August 3, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal declared a statewide
emergency, and local officials in Assumption ordered the mandatory
evacuation of about 300 residents of more than 150 homes located about a
half-mile from the sinkhole. Four months later, officials continue to tell
residents that they do not know when they will be able to return home. A
few have chosen to ignore the order and have stayed in their homes, but
the neighborhood is now quiet and nearly vacant. Across the road from the
residential community, a parking lot near a small boat launch ramp has

een converted to a command post for state police and emergency
responders.
The Bayou Corne sinkhole is an unprecedented environmental
disaster. Geologists say they have never dealt with anything quite like it
before, but the sinkhole has made few headlines beyond the local media.
No news may be good news for Texas Brine, a Houston-based drilling and
storage firm that for years milked an underground salt cavern on the edge
of large salt formation deep below the sinkhole area. From oil and gas
drilling, to making chloride and other chemicals needed for plastics and
chemical processing, the salty brine produced by such wells is the
lifeblood of the petrochemical industry.
Geologists and state officials now believe that Texas Brine's
production cavern below Bayou Corne collapsed from the side and filled
with rock, oil and gas from deposits around the salt formation. The
pressure in the cavern was too great and caused a "frack out." Like Mother
Nature's own version of the controversial oil and gas drilling technique
known as "fracking," brine and other liquids were forced vertically out of
the salt cavern, fracturing rock toward the surface and causing the ground
to give way.
"In the oil field, you've heard of hydraulic fracturing; that's what
they're using to develop gas and oil wells around the country ..."What is a
frack-out is, is when you get the pressure too high and instead fracturing
where you want, it fractures all the way to the surface," said Gary Hecox,
a geologist with the Shaw Environmental Group, at a recent community
meeting in Assumption Parish. Texas Brine brought in the Shaw group to
help mitigate the sinkhole.
As the weeks went by, officials determined the unstable salt cavern
was to blame for the mysterious tremors and bubbling bayous. Texas Brine
publically claimed the failure of the cavern was caused by seismic activity
and refused to take responsibility for the sinkhole, but the United States
Geological Survey (USGS) has since determined that the collapsing
cavern caused the tremors felt in the neighborhood, not the other way
around.

Documents obtained by the Baton Rouge newspaper, The
Advocate, revealed that in 2011, Texas Brine sent a letter to the Louisiana
Department of Natural Resources (DNR) to alert its director, Joseph Ball,
that the cavern had failed a "mechanical integrity test" and would be
capped and shut down. The DNR received the letter but did not require
any additional monitoring of the well's integrity.
Despite this letter, regulators apparently did not suspect the brine
cavern to be the source of the bubbles until a few days before the sinkhole
appeared, The Advocate reported. The letter raised ire among local
officials, who did not hear about the failed integrity test until after Bayou
Corne became a slurry pit. Read More
Nuclear Fallout: Ongoing Tragedy/Disaster In Japan:
EnergyNews:
11:42 AM EST on December 11th, 2012 | 4 comments
“It’s Complicated”: Japan aftershock upgraded to M7.4 — Gov’t now
says it was 2 quakes at same time
10:44 AM EST on December 11th, 2012 | 8 comments
Official Updates: Giant sinkhole started bubbling up around edges,
now it’s coming from center
09:42 AM EST on December 11th, 2012 | 2 comments
Gundersen: M7 quake likely caused damage to spent fuel racks at
Fukushima Daiichi (VIDEO)
12:07 AM EST on December 11th, 2012 | 12 comments
Plant Chief: Fukushima 10 times worse than Chernobyl if
containment vessel exploded
10:47 PM EST on December 10th, 2012 | 7 comments

Fukushima Evacuee: Many kids in region with symptoms of health
damage — Abnormal changes began to occur on my son; Stomatitis,
eczema, fever, epistaxis
09:00 PM EST on December 10th, 2012 | Leave a comment
Japan nuclear plant will likely be scrapped — All gov’t experts say
it’s on top of active fault
07:44 PM EST on December 10th, 2012 | One comment
Gundersen: I’m sure there’s a lot of damaged nuclear fuel in
Fukushima spent fuel pools — The tubes are cracked — May be
completely severed (VIDEO)
03:56 PM EST on December 10th, 2012 | 27 comments
Giant Sinkhole: Hydrogen Sulfide is in the oil — Residents reporting
“really acute health impacts” (AUDIO)
02:23 PM EST on December 10th, 2012 | Leave a comment
Gundersen: Fukushima Daini Unit 1 had pressure increase after
quake — Reactor has already suffered core damage (VIDEO)
12:13 PM EST on December 10th, 2012 | 4 comments
Gundersen: I don’t believe what Tepco said — Some indications of a
problem in Unit 1 at Fukushima Daiichi after quake — Hydrogen
levels up dramatically (VIDEO)
Ongoing Gulf of Mexico Oil Disaster:
Oil Spill Attorney Stuart Smith’s Blog:
Environmental Must-Reads – December 11, 2012
Top 3 Catastrophes Linked to Natural Gas Fracking

Thanks to hydraulic fracturing, often referred to as fracking, there’s a
ton of natural gas available on the market right now. Those in the industry
hail the practice as a blessing, allowing gas companies to access deposits
locked in previously impenetrable rock. Although many have trumpeted
the resulting decline in gas prices as proof that fracking needs to continue,
they’ve kept details of its undesirable consequences closer to the chest.
Look Close at Fracking and You’ll Say “No Way”
The more you learn about fracking, the less you’re going to like it.
Fracking comment period to open Wednesday
Supporters and opponents of hydraulic fracturing are gearing up for
what could be the public’s last chance to be heard on the state’s review of
shale-gas drilling.
U.K. Dash for Shale Gas a Test for Global Fracking
The starting gun has sounded for the United Kingdom’s “dash for
gas,” as the media here have dubbed it.
As early as this week, a moratorium on shale gas production is
expected to be lifted. And plans to streamline and speed the regulatory
process through a new Office for Unconventional Gas and Oil were
unveiled last week in the annual autumn budget statement by the
chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne.
Father of fracking Mitchell urges regulators get tough on drillers
George Mitchell, the de facto “father” of fossil fuel fracking, has
some unlikely policy stances when it comes to drilling regulation.
Couple caught up in fracking debate
A rural Williamson County couple was surprised to learn that the
rights they own for oil and gas on their property may not protect them
from the possibility of fracking on their land.
Westchester lawmakers unanimously ban fracking fluid
The Westchester County the Board of Legislators voted unanimously
on Monday to ban fracking fluids from the county.
America wants to unleash its gas on other countries
Guys, thanks to fracking, we have so much natural gas. So much.
Like, if you filled up party balloons with the natural gas America produces

in a year, you’d have enough to fill your whole house, I assume.* Also: Do
not smoke near that.
Rural America: Poorer, less populous, less powerful — but now
with fracking!
It is the best of times and the worst of times for rural America. On the
one hand, they’re the only ones among us who’ve been getting richer
lately. Thanks, fracking!
Imagine There’s No Fracking … Give Clean Energy a Chance
Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon placed a full-page ad in the Dec. 10 New
York Times, calling on Governor Cuomo to “Imagine There’s No Fracking
… give clean energy a chance.” The ad illustrates and describes how
cement in wells at such great depths leaks, poisoning drinking water with
gases and toxic chemicals.
Interview with Ecologist and Anti-Fracking Activist Sandra
Steingraber
Sandra Steingraber’s gentle voice belies her fierce outrage at the
destruction of Earth and human life, a rage that has driven her to devote
herself to combating the chemical contaminants that endanger our wellbeing.
An ecologist, cancer survivor, poet, and mother, Steingraber has
authored three critically acclaimed books that explore the environmental
toxins that permeate our land, air, water and food.
Colorado Water Struggles Highlight Impact of Fracking on
Farming
Fracking—known more formally as hydraulic fracturing—produces
roughly 25 percent of the U.S. natural gas supply. This increasingly
common practice uses pressurized fluid to release trapped oil or natural
gas from a well, and has been praised for lowering energy prices. But
concerns about fracking’s impacts on human health and the environment
have caused many to question its expansion. And now, according to a
recent article by Jack Healy of the New York Times, the debate has
become even more contentious in the state of Colorado.
Fracking corporation turns Louisiana bayou country into toxic
sinkhole

For residents in Assumption Parish, the boiling, gas-belching bayou,
with its expanding toxic sinkhole and quaking earth is no longer a
mystery; but there is little comfort in knowing the source of the littleknown
event that has forced them out of their homes.
The Climate Post: Scientific Papers Share Lessons Learned From
the BP Oil Spill
A collection of papers now out in the journal Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) looks at the response to the
Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill in 2011, examining whether it was successful
and how it could be improved. The release of the reports comes just days
after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) suspended BP from
obtaining new U.S. contracts due to its “lack of business integrity”
following the Deepwater Horizon accident that killed 11 workers. After
the explosion, the rig’s Macondo well began gushing crude oil, a leak that
would continue for nearly three months. Uncertainty surrounding the flow
rate of the leaking oil was a key problem during the disaster, prompting
these U.S. government scientists to recommend that future drilling permits
require mechanisms to assess the flow rate.
The Cover Up: E-mails Show BP Lied to Authorities on The
Deepwater Horizon Spill
BP has always claimed that it shared all information with the public
and with the federal government about the extent of the Deepwater
Horizon oil spill, and the rate of flow of the leaking oil. BP has stated that
it never knew of the true quantity of oil escaping the well until a few
months after the blowout, however emails that are soon to be released
seem to suggest otherwise.
Emails: BP Lied About Extent of Oil Spill
Emerging evidence may support accusations that BP initially lied
about the extent of its devastating 2010 oil spill, reports the Huffington
Post. Former BP engineer Kurt Mix, charged with destroying spill-related
text messages, plans to defend himself by releasing emails that show BP
knew about the true extent of the leak almost immediately. Mix’s lawyers
say he warned a supervisor that the fatal rig explosion could leak up to

146,000 barrels per day—but just two days later, BP executives were
estimating the leak at 1,000 barrels per day.
UL researchers studying Deepwater Horizon oil spill impact
Researchers at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette are studying
the effects of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. One team of scientists
will examine how razor clams and ghost shrimp affect the way oil is
distributed and ultimately broken down by bacteria along the coast. The
other will try to to uncover the possible impact of the spill on blue crabs
by looking at their genes.
Chronic oil a greater risk than tanker spill, Nature Canada tells
pipeline panel
Chronic, ship-source discharges of oily effluent pose a larger problem
than large-scale catastrophic oil spills, lawyers for Nature Canada told the
panel weighing the Northern Gateway pipeline.
Brazil Chevron case makes offshore oil workers hard to find
Oil companies are having trouble hiring foreign workers crucial to
Brazil’s booming offshore oil industry because of criminal and civil cases
against Chevron Corp. and Transocean Ltd. employees, the head of an
industry association said on Monday.
Citizen science more than a century later: Ordinary people go
online to track Gulf oil spill
In the summer of 1854 a doctor named John Snow tracked London’s
deadly outbreak of cholera to contaminated water coming from a public
well — the now famous Broad Street pump. But Snow’s observations had
to wend their way through the annals of science and took years to make an
impact on the public health. Now, more than a century later, ordinary
people can go online and report observations about public health problems
and disasters in real time. In a just-published study a researcher at the
George Washington University School of Public Health and Health
Services (SPHHS) reports on this new form of “citizen science,”
concluding that it can help modern-day public health officials assess
health and environmental threats, such as those posed by the 2010 Gulf oil
disaster. The researcher studied reports to an online Oil Spill Map and
discovered that citizen science can red-flag potential hazards quickly and

offers very specific local information that often fails to make it into
official scientific reports.
Half of World’s Oil Spills Happens in Russia – Greenpeace
More than 20,000 oil spills, or half the world’s annual total, take
place in Russia, a senior official of the country’s branch of Greenpeace
said.
Black Elk Energy issues incident update
There is no ongoing spill from the site of a mid-November explosion
on a rig in the Gulf of Mexico and sheen reported was minor, Black Elk
Energy said.
Enbridge announces $2.5B pipeline expansion from North
Dakota to Superior
Enbridge Energy has notified stockholders that it will proceed with a
$2.5 billion pipeline expansion running 600 miles from the booming North
Dakota Bakken oil fields to its Superior facility.
We got a copy of the subpoena Chevron sent a rebellious
shareholder
Chevron has a lot of money. Which is a good thing, because lawyers
are expensive, and Chevron has developed quite an affinity for lawyers.
And if you’re a Chevron shareholder who dares speak out, expect to hear
from them.
Keystone Review Meaningless Without Climate Assessment
The U.S. environmental assessment of a new Keystone XL pipeline
route from Canada will be meaningless unless it considers the effect
mining of oil sands has on climate change, opponents of the project said.
Black Elk launches probe of fatal platform fire
Black Elk Energy is conducting an internal investigation into what
caused an explosion on one of its Gulf of Mexico oil platforms last month,
killing three workers and inuring others.
Japanese nuclear plant ‘sitting on active fault line’
The operator of Japan’s Tsuruga nuclear power plant may be ordered
to decommission the facility after seismologists confirmed that it sits
directly atop an active fault line.

UPDATE: Tsuruga nuclear plant may have to be decommissioned
as active fault found
Japan Atomic Power Co. may have to decommission one of its
reactors after seismologists concluded the plant is sitting over an active
fault line, potentially the first permanent shutdown of a nuclear unit in
Japan since the Fukushima disaster last year.
AP Interview: Japan utility head admits murky hiring, says
workforce key to nuke plant cleanup
The head of the utility behind Japan’s nuclear crisis acknowledged
Monday that hundreds of workers at the contaminated Fukushima Dai-ichi
plant were mobilized through a murky hiring system.
Book reveals human drama in Fukushima No. 1 crisis
Experts and journalists have written a number of reports, some even
running several hundred pages, about the cause of the triple meltdown
crisis at the Fukushima No. 1 power plant and the chain of events that
followed.
But little has come to light about the human drama of how the plant
workers who came to be dubbed the “Fukushima 50,” fought against
incredible odds to avert catastrophic reactor explosions that would have
led to the contamination of all eastern Japan.
Hitachi robot to tackle Fukushima rubble
A new robot is set to join the Fukushima Daiichi cleanup effort.
Hitachi’s newly unveiled ASTACO-SoRa compact heavy-duty robot will
start work removing rubble at the site from 2013.
Ministerial conference on nuclear safety to be held in Fukushima
The Fukushima Ministerial Conference on Nuclear Safety, hosted
jointly by the Japanese government and the International Atomic Energy
Agency (IAEA), will begin December 15 in Koriyama City, Fukushima
Prefecture. During the three-day conference running until December 17,
speeches by representatives from IAEA member states and meetings of
experts will be held with the objective of strengthening future nuclear
safety. The conference will be attended by ministers and other officials
from about 120 countries and organizations.
Japanese government reclassifies Fukushima evacuation zone

The Nuclear Emergency Response Headquarters of the Japanese
government has, as of December 10, lifted the evacuation order for
Okuma Town, where the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plants are
located. According to the JAIF Atoms in Japan news service, the
government has reclassified the town into three new areas: one in which
evacuation orders will eventually be lifted, one that is still restricted to
residents, and one where residents will find it difficult to return home for a
long time.
Environmental Must-Reads – December 10, 2012
New York Fracking Rules: Regulators Taking Public Comments
On Revised Gas Drilling Regulations
New York regulators will begin taking public comments on revised
gas-drilling rules this week, though an extensive environmental review
outlining the basis for those rules remains incomplete, and neither drillers
nor environmentalists are happy lately with the state’s work on the issue.
Environmental activists rally for fracking conference
Environmental activists met Saturday at the University of Baltimore
to organize a push for a legislative ban on the natural gas drilling
technique known as hydraulic fracturing — or fracking — casting the
issue as a fight pitting the little guys versus the lobbyists.
Fracking surveys find support in unexpected places
Many people in New York and Pennsylvania have voiced concerns
about the safety of hydraulic fracturing for natural gas, or fracking. But
two new surveys found that many people who live in New York City and
the suburbs approve of drilling in parts of that state, and that Pennsylvania
residents who live in an area of heavy drilling feel the benefits outweigh
the risks.
Fracking for Foreigners? New Report From Feds Backs More
Natural Gas Exports
How times have changed. Ten years ago the United States was
looking at importing natural gas via massive liquefied natural gas (LNG)
terminals, yet to be built. Now the country appears to be getting ready to
significantly increase exports of LNG.

Fracking Boom Byproduct: Air Quality Decline
With the fracking boom in places like Colorado’s Weld County and
across the nation, there’s another byproduct: bad air. A study to be
published in the Journal of Geophysics Research finds that fumes from oil
and gas development are a big reason the Front Range has unhealthy
levels of ozone, especially in the summertime.
Texas Regulators Prepare Major Drilling Rule Changes
Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, the controversial process of
shooting water, sand and chemicals underground to access oil or natural
gas trapped in shale rock, has made plenty of headlines in recent years.
But the drilling process involves many other steps beyond breaking up
rock, and several opportunities for things to go wrong.
Drilling spills reaching Colorado groundwater; state mulls test
rules
Oil and gas have contaminated groundwater in 17 percent of the
2,078 spills and slow releases that companies reported to state regulators
over the past five years, state data show.
Fissures appear in scientists’ assurances about safety of fracking
When the research team from the University of Texas at Austin took
the stage at the Vancouver Convention Centre early this year, they knew
they had a big audience.
Journalists from around the world were attending the prestigious
American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting
and many of them had come to the press conference, where a new study
on the environmental impacts of fracking was to be released.
Environment: Traces of Deepwater Horizon oil causes
deformities, swimming deficencies in Gulf fish
FRISCO — In yet another sign that BP’s spilled Deepwater Horizon
may have long-lasting impacts on Gulf ecosystems, a team of researchers
said last week that even low-level, short-term exposure to traces of oil
remnants causes deformities and impairs the swimming ability of fish.
Lawmakers seek inquiry on sheen near spill site

Two Democratic lawmakers are asking the Coast Guard to investigate
a sheen that appeared last week on the Gulf of Mexico surface near the site
of the BP well that blew out and caused the 2010 oil spill.
U.S. Reps. Henry Waxman of California and Edward Markey of
Massachusetts, both of whom led investigations of BP after the disaster off
the Louisiana coast, sent a letter to the Coast Guard asking it to find out
more about the source of the sheen. They contended that BP has refused to
provide information.
Report urges oil investors to hold companies to account over
responsibility
Oil investors could be exposed to “serious financial risk” if they fail
to challenge multinational firms over their responsibility, a report by the
University of Essex has said.
BP in hot seat for Gulf of Mexico sheen
U.S. lawmakers said they were turning to the U.S. Coast Guard to get
information about sheen from the Deepwater Horizon.
Arctic Shipping is a Disaster Waiting to Happen
When the Malaysian freighter Selendang Ayu grounded in Alaska’s
Aleutian Islands eight years ago this week, it was a tragic reminder of the
growing risks of northern shipping. While in-route from Seattle to China,
in a fierce Bering Sea winter storm with 70-knot winds and 25-foot seas,
the ship’s engine failed. As it drifted toward shore, there were no adequate
ocean tugs available to take it in-tow, and it grounded off Unalaska Island
on December 8, 2004. Six crewmen were lost, the vessel broke in half,
and its entire cargo and over 335,000 gallons of heavy fuel spilled oil into
waters of the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge (Alaska Maritime
National Wildlife Refuge). Like other large marine spills, this spill was
not contained, and it killed thousands of seabirds and other marine
wildlife, closed fisheries, and contaminated many miles of shoreline.
Shipping risks already threaten Aleutians; let’s act now
It’s axiomatic in the cleanup business that the best plan for dealing
with an oil spill is to prevent one. But Alaska has thousands of vessels
regularly passing by our shores that do not meet U.S. oil spill planning
requirements.

Alberta Pipeline Safety Review Too Industry-Influenced:
Greenpeace
A review of pipeline safety commissioned by the Alberta government
after a series of high-profile accidents was heavily influenced by industry
and designed more to quiet public concern than improve the system, say
Greenpeace campaigners.
Fossil Free’ Campaign By 350.org’s Bill McKibben Aims To
Convince Colleges Not To Invest In Oil
Among environmental scribes, Bill McKibben is a legend. That’s not
only because he had a knack, in such books as The End of Nature (1989),
The Age of Missing Information (1992) and his most recent Eaarth (2011),
of telling an important story before anybody else, but also because he is a
mensch, and so darned helpful reviewing and blurbing books for other
writers. Including at least one of mine.
That’s why it got attention when McKibben largely stopped writing
and became a climate activist, best known as the founder of 350.org. The
reasons for that are in an article he wrote for Rolling Stone last summer.
“The official position of planet Earth at the moment is that we can’t raise
the temperature more than two degrees Celsius,” he wrote. “It’s become
the bottomest of bottom lines. Two degrees.” And we’re already three
quarters of the way to overshooting that target.
Oil spill panel makes recommendations to Mont. Gov
A council appointed to come up with pipeline safety improvements in
Montana following last year’s Yellowstone River crude spill has offered its
recommendations to the governor’s office.
Black Liberation/Civil Rights:
Labor:
Economy:
The Brookings Institution:The New Cuban Economy:
What Roles for Foreign Investment?

By
Richard Feinberg
The Cuban revolution defined itself in large measure in terms of
what it was not: not a dependency of the United States; not a
dominion governed by global corporations; not a liberal, marketdriven
economy. As the guerrilla army made its triumphal entry into
Havana and the infant revolution shifted leftward, a hallmark of its
anti-imperialist ethos became the loudly proclaimed nationalizations
of the U.S.-based firms that had controlled many key sectors of the
Cuban economy, including hotels and gambling casinos, public
utilities, oil refineries, and the rich sugar mills. In the strategic conflict
with the United States, the “historic enemy,” the revolution
consolidated its power through the excision of the U.S. economic
presence.
For revolutionary Cuba, foreign investment has been about more than
dollars and cents. It’s about cultural identity and national sovereignty. It’s
also about a model of socialist planning, a hybrid of Marxist-Leninism and
Fidelismo, which has jealously guarded its domination over all aspects of
the economy. During its five decades of rule, the regime’s political and
social goals always dominated economic policy; security of the revolution
trumped productivity.
Fidel Castro’s brand of anti-capitalism included a strong dose of antiglobalization.
For many years, El Comandante en Jefe hosted a large
international conference on globalization where he would lecture
thousands of delegates with his denunciations of the many evils of
multinational firms that spread brutal exploitation and dehumanizing
inequality around the world.
Not surprisingly, Cuba has received remarkably small inflows of
foreign investment, even taking into account the size of its economy. In
the 21st century, the globe is awash in transborder investments by
corporations, large and small. Many developing countries, other than those
damaged by severe civil conflicts, receive shares that significantly bolster
their growth prospects. The expansion of foreign direct investment (FDI)
into developing countries is one of the great stories of recent decades,

ising from $14 billion in 1985 to $617 billion in 2010.1 While FDI2
cannot substitute for domestic savings and investment, it can add
significantly to domestic efforts and significantly speed growth.
Today’s ailing Cuban economy, whose 11.2 million people yield the
modest GNP reported officially at $64 billion3 (and possibly much less at
realistic exchange rates), badly need additional external cooperation—
notwithstanding heavily-subsidized oil imports from Venezuela. As with
any economy, domestic choices made at home and by Cubans will largely
determine the country’s fate. Yet, as Cubans have been well aware since
the arrival of Christopher Columbus, the encroaching international
economy matters greatly; it can be a source of not only harsh punishments
but also great benefits. In the Brookings Institution monograph Reaching
Out: Cuba’s New Economy and the International Response, I explored the
modest contributions already being made by certain bilateral and regional
cooperation agencies and the larger potential benefits awaiting Cuba if it
joins the core global and regional financial institutions— namely the
International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Inter-American
Development Bank, and the Andean Development Corporation. This
sequel explores the contributions that private foreign investments have
been making, and could make on a much greater scale, to propel Cuba
onto a more prosperous and sustainable growth path.
Download » (PDF)
World:
Health, Education, Science and Welfare:
Daily News Digest December 11, 2012
Image of the Day:

Democratic Despots
Quote of the Day:
And The Beat/Deceit Goes On:
The scientist named to oversee the research arm of
Louisiana’s massive Gulf restoration project left behind a
major ethics scandal at the University of Texas, where a
panel has blasted his role in authoring a deeply flawed profracking
paper without disclosing that he’s been paid $1.5
million over five years as a board member of a drilling
company. — Stuart Smith, Scientist behind tainted fracking
study now heading major Gulf restoration project
Videos of the Day:
End Wall Street’s Wars!
Occupy Wall Street!
Occupy Wall Street is the Only Organization
That Identifies The Enemy —
The 1% That Own and Control The Wealth!
1960s The Realist — One Nation Under God/1%
(Unlike The Trade Union Misleaders

Nor The Misleaders Of The Oppressed
Who Strive To Be In ‘Partnership’ With The 1%)
1960s The Realist — One Nation Under God/1%
(Unlike The Trade Union Misleaders
Nor The Misleaders Of The Oppressed
Who Strive To Be In ‘Partnership’ With The 1%)
Occupy Wall Street — ‘We Are The 99%’
The resistance continues at Liberty Square:
U.S.
Susan Rice and Africa’s Despots
By
Salem Solomon
On Sept. 2, Ambassador Susan E. Rice delivered a eulogy for a man
she called “a true friend to me.” Before thousands of mourners and more
than 20 African heads of state in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Ms. Rice, the
United States’ representative to the United Nations, lauded the country’s
late prime minister, Meles Zenawi. She called him “brilliant” — “a son of
Ethiopia and a father to its rebirth.”
Few eulogies give a nuanced account of the decedent’s life, but the
speech was part of a disturbing pattern for an official who could become
President Obama’s next secretary of state. During her career, she has
shown a surprising and unsettling sympathy for Africa’s despots.
This record dates from Ms. Rice’s service as assistant secretary of
state for African affairs under President Bill Clinton, who in 1998

celebrated a “new generation” of African leaders, many of whom were exrebel
commanders; among these leaders were Mr. Meles, Isaias Afewerki
of Eritrea, Paul Kagame of Rwanda, Jerry J. Rawlings of Ghana, Thabo
Mbeki of South Africa and Yoweri K. Museveni of Uganda.
“One hundred years from now your grandchildren and mine will look
back and say this was the beginning of an African renaissance,” Mr.
Clinton said in Accra, Ghana, in March 1998.
In remarks to a subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Foreign
Relations that year, Ms. Rice was equally breathless about the continent’s
future. “There is a new interest in individual freedom and a movement
away from repressive, one-party systems,” she said. “It is with this new
generation of Africans that we seek a dynamic, long-term partnership for
the 21st century.”
Her optimism was misplaced. In the 14 years since, many of these
leaders have tried on the strongman’s cloak and found that it fit nicely. Mr.
Meles dismantled the rule of law, silenced political opponents and forged a
single-party state. Mr. Isaias, Mr. Kagame and Mr. Museveni cling to their
autocratic power. Only Mr. Rawlings and Mr. Mbeki left office willingly.
Ms. Rice’s enthusiasm for these leaders might have blinded her to
some of their more questionable activities. Critics, including Howard W.
French, a former correspondent for The New York Times, say that in the
late 1990s, Ms. Rice tacitly approved of an invasion of the Democratic
Republic of Congo that was orchestrated by Mr. Kagame of Rwanda and
supported by Mr. Museveni of Uganda. In The New York Review of
Books in 2009, Mr. French reported that witnesses had heard Ms. Rice
describe the two men as the best insurance against genocide in the region.
“They know how to deal with that,” he reported her as having said. “The
only thing we have to do is look the other way.” Ms. Rice has denied
supporting the invasion.
More recently, according to Jason K. Stearns, a scholar of the region,
Ms. Rice temporarily blocked a United Nations report documenting
Rwanda’s support for the M23 rebel group now operating in eastern
Congo, and later moved to delete language critical of Rwanda and Uganda
from a Security Council resolution. “According to former colleagues, she

feels that more can be achieved by constructive engagement, not public
censure,” Mr. Stearns wrote recently on Foreign Policy’s Web site.
Ms. Rice’s relationship with Mr. Meles — which dates from 1998,
when she was a mediator in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to prevent
war between Eritrea and Ethiopia — also calls her judgment into question.
In fairness, in her eulogy, Ms. Rice said she differed with Mr. Meles
on questions like democracy and human rights. But if so, the message did
not get through; under Mr. Meles during the past 15 years, democracy and
the rule of law in Ethiopia steadily deteriorated. Ethiopia imprisoned
dissidents and journalists, used food aid as a political tool, appropriated
vast sections of land from its citizens and prevented the United Nations
from demarcating its border with Eritrea.
Meanwhile, across multiple administrations, the United States has
favored Ethiopia as an ally and a perceived bulwark against extremism in
the region. In 2012 the nation received $580 million in American foreign
aid.
Eritrea is no innocent. It has closed itself off, stifled dissent and
forced its young people to choose between endless military service at
home and seeking asylum abroad. But I believe that the Security Council,
with Ms. Rice’s support, went too far in imposing sanctions on Eritrea in
2009 for supporting extremists.
President Obama has visited sub-Saharan Africa just once in his first
term — a brief stop in Ghana. One signal that he plans to focus more on
Africa — and on human rights and democracy, not only economic
development and geopolitics — in his next term would be to nominate
someone other than Susan Rice as America’s top diplomat.
Salem Solomon is an Eritrean-American journalist who runs Africa
Talks, a news and opinion Web site covering Africa and the global African
diaspora.
Environment:
There Is No Stopping Climate Change
Unless We Can Mobilize Against Plutocracy

By
George Monbiot
Greenpeace activists and supporters along with other non-governmental
organizations protest outside the Global Business Day conference in Durban.
World talks on climate change struggled to overcome a rift on the future of
the Kyoto Protocol with less than three days left to secure a deal.
Humankind’s greatest crisis coincides with the rise of an ideology
that makes it impossible to address. By the late 1980s, when it became
clear that manmade climate change endangered the living planet and its
people, the world was in the grip of an extreme political doctrine, whose
tenets forbid the kind of intervention required to arrest it.
Neoliberalism, also known as market fundamentalism or laissez-faire
economics, purports to liberate the market from political interference. The
state, it asserts, should do little but defend the realm, protect private
property and remove barriers to business. In practice it looks nothing like
this. What neoliberal theorists call shrinking the state looks more like
shrinking democracy: reducing the means by which citizens can restrain
the power of the elite. What they call “the market” looks more like the
interests of corporations and the ultra-rich(1). Neoliberalism appears to be
little more than a justification for plutocracy.
The doctrine was first applied in Chile in 1973, as former students of
the University of Chicago, schooled in Milton Friedman’s extreme
prescriptions and funded by the CIA, worked alongside General Pinochet
to impose a programme that would have been impossible in a democratic

state. The result was an economic catastrophe, but one in which the rich –
who took over Chile’s privatised industries and unprotected natural
resources – prospered exceedingly(2).
The creed was taken up by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. It
was forced upon the poor world by the IMF and the World Bank. By the
time James Hansen presented the first detailed attempt to model future
temperature rises to the US Senate in 1988(3 [3]), the doctrine was being
implanted everywhere.
As we saw in 2007 and 2008 (when neoliberal governments were
forced to abandon their principles to bail out the banks), there could
scarcely be a worse set of circumstances for addressing a crisis of any
kind. Until it has no choice, the self-hating state will not intervene,
however acute the crisis or grave the consequences. Neoliberalism protects
the interests of the elite against all comers.
Preventing climate breakdown – the four, five or six degrees of
warming now predicted for this century by green extremists like, er, the
Wo r l d B a n k , t h e I n t e r n a t i o n a l E n e r g y A g e n c y a n d
PriceWaterhouseCoopers(4 [4],5 [5],6 [6]) – means confronting the oil,
gas and coal industry. It means forcing that industry to abandon the fourfifths
or more of fossil fuel reserves that we cannot afford to burn(7 [7]). It
means cancelling the prospecting and development of new reserves –
what’s the point if we can’t use current stocks? – and reversing the
expansion of any infrastructure (such as airports) that cannot be run
without them.
But the self-hating state cannot act. Captured by interests that
democracy is supposed to restrain, it can only sit on the road, ears pricked
and whiskers twitching, as the truck thunders towards it. Confrontation is
forbidden, action is a mortal sin. You may, perhaps, disperse some money
for new energy; you may not legislate against the old.
So Barack Obama pursues what he calls an “all of the above” policy:
promoting wind, solar, oil and gas(8 [8]). Ed Davey, the British climate
change secretary, launched an energy bill in the Commons last week
whose purpose was to decarbonise the energy supply. In the same debate

he promised that he would “maximise the potential” of oil and gas
production in the North Sea and other offshore fields(9 [9]).
Lord Stern described climate change as “the greatest and widestranging
market failure ever seen”(10 [10]). The useless Earth Summit in
June; the feeble measures now being debated in Doha; the energy bill(11
[11]) and electricity demand reduction paper(12 [12]) launched in Britain
last week (better than they might have been but unmatched to the scale of
the problem) expose the greatest and widest ranging failure of market
fundamentalism: its incapacity to address our existential crisis.
The 1000-year legacy of current carbon emissions is long enough to
smash anything resembling human civilisation into splinters(13 [13]).
Complex societies have sometimes survived the rise and fall of empires,
plagues, wars and famines. They won’t survive six degrees of climate
change, sustained for a millennium(14). In return for 150 years of
explosive consumption, much of which does nothing to advance human
welfare, we are atomising the natural world and the human systems that
depend on it.
The climate summit (or foothill) in Doha and the sound and fury of
the British government’s new measures probe the current limits of political
action. Go further and you break your covenant with power, a covenant
both disguised and validated by the neoliberal creed.
Neoliberalism is not the root of the problem: it is the ideology used,
often retrospectively, to justify a global grab of power, public assets and
natural resources by an unrestrained elite. But the problem cannot be
addressed until the doctrine is challenged by effective political
alternatives.
In other words, the struggle against climate change – and all the
crises which now beset both human beings and the natural world – cannot
be won without a wider political fight: a democratic mobilisation against
plutocracy. I believe this should start with an effort to reform campaign
finance: the means by which corporations and the very rich buy policies
and politicians. Some of us will be launching a petition in the UK in the
next few weeks, and I hope you will sign it.

But this is scarcely a beginning. We must start to articulate a new
politics: one that sees intervention as legitimate, that contains a higher
purpose than corporate emancipation disguised as market freedom, that
puts the survival of people and the living world above the survival of a
few favoured industries. In other words, a politics that belongs to us, not
just the super-rich. Read More
Fracking:
Nuclear Fallout: Ongoing Tragedy/Disaster In Japan:
EnergyNews:
9:28 AM EST on December 10th, 2012 | Leave a comment
Japan media reported spike in radiation releases at nuclear fuel plant
after recent M7.3 quake (VIDEO)
07:18 PM EST on December 9th, 2012 | 40 comments
Worst case at giant sinkhole? “Great fear it could explode” — Area to
be sacrifice zone? — Very degrading situation (VIDEO)
06:19 PM EST on December 9th, 2012 | One comment
NYTimes: Bags of radioactive waste sitting along Fukushima coastline
— “There isn’t going to be another tsunami” says worker
02:09 PM EST on December 9th, 2012 | 6 comments
Fairewinds: Some reports of damage at Fukushima plant after quake,
spent fuel pools seem to be intact
01:11 PM EST on December 9th, 2012 | 8 comments
Journalist: Trouble reported at Fukushima Daiichi after M7.3 quake
— Gov’t and Tepco officially saying ‘no problem’
11:37 AM EST on December 9th, 2012 | 22 comments

Japan Times column on nuclear mutations: Professor seeing ‘increase
in negative effects’ from Fukushima since last year — Report of insect
with leg growing from head (PHOTO)
Ongoing Gulf of Mexico Oil Disaster:
Oil Spill Attorney Stuart Smith’s Blog:
Scientist behind tainted fracking study now heading major Gulf
restoration project
The scientist named to oversee the research arm of Louisiana’s
massive Gulf restoration project left behind a major ethics scandal at the
University of Texas, where a panel has blasted his role in authoring a
deeply flawed pro-fracking paper without disclosing that he’s been paid
$1.5 million over five years as a board member of a drilling company.
Charles “Chip” Groat — also a former director of the U.S.
Geological Survey — was announced as February as the incoming first
president of the non-profit The Water Institute of the Gulf, or TWIG,
which has received $1 million in taxpayer funding from Louisiana and
additional support from the Baton Rouge Area Foundation. The group’s
mission is to provide the scientific underpinnings as officials prepare to
spend more than $17 billion to restore the Gulf Coast, with some of the
funding expected from settling claims against BP for the 2010 spill.
But the same month that Groat’s appointment was announced, a
major academic scandal began brewing over his work as director of the
Center for International Energy and Environmental Policy at the
University of Texas in Austin. Groat was the primary author of a report —
which received widespread media attention – claiming no link between
hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for natural gas and groundwater
contamination. Although it contained caveats, the paper was seen as a
boost for the oil-and-gas industry at a time when increasing episodes of
water and air pollution from fracking, as well as a possible link to
earthquakes, were making headlines.

But questions emerged about the report — as well as criticism —
almost immediately. In July, a watchdog group called the Public
Accountability Initiative revealed that not only was the report’s evidence
for lack of a pollution link seriously flawed, but that Grout had failed to
disclose his ties to a major fracking company. It was learned that the Texas
professor had been paid an estimated $1,5 million in cash and stock as a
director of Plains Exploration and Production Company, a major drilling
firm. The group noted that Groat’s 2011 compensation of $400,000 was
double what he had received from the university — yet Groat’s industry
ties were not disclosed in the report, nor were they known to his boss at
the school’s Energy Institute.
In August, the University of Texas commissioned an independent
three-member panel to review both Groat’s paper and the circumstances
behind it. Its report was issued late last week, and it is a scathing
indictment of what some critics called “Frackademia” — growing
conflicts of interest with industry-backed or tainted research — and of
Groat’s ethical conflicts in this instance. In addition to blasting the
professor’s failure to disclose his industry ties, the independent analysis
outlines a number of fundamental flaws in the research, including:
1 Because of “inadequacy” in conflict of interest policies
at UT at the time, “conflict of interest and disclosure
policies were largely ignored.”
2 The report itself was presented as having scientific
findings, but much of it was in fact “based on literature
surveys, incident reports and conjecture.” The review
goes so far as to say that “the term ‘fact-based’ would
not apply to such an analysis” and it lacked a
“rigorous, independent review” of its findings.
3 The summary of the study, which was widely
distributed and trumpeted by a UT press release, failed
to include many of the caveats within the actual report.
Some of the conclusions were “tentative,” the review
says, and the press release and presentation of the report
at a scientific conference in February was

“inappropriately selective” and “seemed to suggest that
public concerns were without scientific basis and
largely resulted from media bias.”
4 The study was also not ready for distribution, as Public
Accountability Initiative noted in July. The drafts in the
study “were not subjected to serious peer review and
therefore were not ready to be considered for public
release as fact-based work.”
The report finds that Groat’s research is so badly tainted it should be
completely withdrawn, and it calls for new procedures at the University of
Texas to make sure something like this doesn’t happen again. Meanwhile,
Groat — who initially only took a leave of absence from the university —
has now resigned, although he claims that’s because of his new job in
Louisiana and not because of the scandal. The head of the Energy Institute
has also resigned.
What does Groat have to say for himself?
Chip Groat, the UT professor at the center of the
controversy, says in an email to StateImpact Texas that he
should have made a disclosure. ”However, I continue to be
disturbed by the assumption by many that a university faculty
member with financial connections to industry cannot be
unbiased,” Groat writes. “This blanket indictment isn’t fair to
most faculty members or most industries. I am also concerned
that my retirement is being linked to controversies related to the
report. My retirement is linked to my very fulfilling position in
Louisiana, which began February 1 when I took leave from the
university, before any controversy emerged. Since I am no
longer affiliated with UT, I will leave this unpleasant episode
behind me.”
Seriously? Look, this is a lot worse than just an “unpleasant episode,”
and it is heavy baggage that Chip Groat will carry with him for the rest of
his career.
In the big picture, this “episode” shows that the rise of
“Frackademia” needs to come to a crushing halt, that our top independent

esearch universities need to say ‘no” to the corrupting influence of easy
cash from Big Oil and Gas. This was not an isolated incident — a
similarly tainted report also emerged this year from the State University of
New York at Buffalo — and people who want a clean environment and
good health need to stay vigilant to prevent or expose similar conflicts.
Closer to home, Chip Groat has demolished his credibility to guide
the very important The Water of the Gulf project. He needs to resign his
position, or else the project’s directors need to replace him immediately.
The Gulf Coast has been battered in the last decade, first by Hurricane
Katrina and then by BP’s negligence; it’s critical that the dollars that have
been freed up to restore the coastline and our quality of life be spent as
wisely, and as ethically, as possible. Groat is not up to that task.
To read coverage from NOLA.com about the formation of The Water
Institute of the Gulf, please check out: http://www.nola.com/environment/
index.ssf/2012/02/the_water_institute_of_the_gul.html
To read news coverage from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram about the
Groat-authored report, go to: http://www.star-telegram.com/
2012/02/16/3741872/ut-study-finds-no-direct-link.html
The Public Accountability Initiative’s work on “Frackademia” can be
found here: http://public-accountability.org/
Last week’s report from StateImpact Texas on the independent report
critical of Groat and the University of Texas can be found here: http://
stateimpact.npr.org/texas/2012/12/06/review-of-ut-fracking-study-findsfailure-to-disclose-conflict-of-interest/
Black Liberation/Civil Rights:
Labor:

The seasonally-adjusted SGS Alternate Unemployment Rate reflects
current unemployment reporting methodology adjusted for SGS-estimated
long-term discouraged workers, who were defined out of official existence
in 1994. That estimate is added to the BLS estimate of U-6 unemployment,
which includes short-term discouraged workers.
The U-3 unemployment rate is the monthly headline number. The U-6
unemployment rate is the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) broadest
unemployment measure, including short-term discouraged and other
marginally-attached workers as well as those forced to work part-time
because they cannot find full-time employment.
Alternate Unemployment Charts
The Perverse Forces of Labor Competition:
The U.S. Jobs Crisis and the Reserve Army of Labor
by
Ben Schreiner
The U.S. unemployment situation—despite Washington’s
indifference—remains rather abysmal. The November jobs report offers
just the latest evidence.
Although the unemployment rate dipped to 7.7 percent in November,
it did so due to a decline of 350,000 in the labor market. In other words,
the drop in the official unemployment rate was due to the fact that over a
quarter million Americans simply gave up on finding a job. In fact, the
latest employment report found nearly 7 million Americans not counted as
being in the labor force (and thus not counted as officially unemployed)
actually desire work, but are simply too discouraged to search.

Meanwhile, the ongoing tragedy of the long-term unemployed shows
no end, with the number of Americans having gone without work for 27
weeks or longer remaining near 5 million. At the current pace of job
growth it will take a full decade to attain full employment. (This, of
course, barring any return to recession over the next ten years.)
The squandered human potential, not to mention human suffering,
behind all such numbers is, needless to say, truly immense.
In Washington, however, the jobs crisis remains off the agenda. The
bipartisan fetish of debt reduction, having been spurred by the orchestrated
crisis of the so-called “fiscal cliff,” now trumps any concerns over the
unemployment maelstrom. And thus in lieu of a serious jobs program, the
political elite busily ready a harsh dose of the austerity elixir to be
administered in the name of “shared sacrifice.”
One might reasonable wonder, though, why Washington remains
uninterested in the jobs crisis. After all, a clear majority of Americans
favor Congressional action on jobs over the deficit.
As Paul Krugman argues, the silence on jobs can’t be attributed to a
matter ideology or a lack of resources, but instead boils down to a matter
of class. “Influential people in Washington aren’t worried about losing
their jobs,” Krugman writes, “by and large they don’t even know who’s
unemployed.”
There is no doubt some merit to this, as the offices on Capitol Hill are
not only dominated by those willing to do the bidding of the financial
elite, but are increasingly occupied by the very elite themselves. That
being said, the indifference to the jobs crisis isn’t simply a matter of an out
of touch political class. Don’t hate the players, we might say, hate the
game.
Indeed, what Krugman (along with most other liberal commentators)
fails to account for is the functional role of mass unemployment; namely,
its ability to suppress wages and ensure continued profitability. After all,
without a mass reserve army of labor to decrease the demand for labor and
bully the active workforce into a more pliant state of submission,
profitability becomes imperiled by the threat of enhanced worker power

and the ensuing demand for higher wages. This is a process one can
clearly see in the wake of the present crisis.
Since the crisis broke out in 2007, sending over 8 million Americans
into the ranks of the reserve army of labor, corporate profits have not only
rebounded, but soared to new heights. In fact, the third quarter of 2012
saw corporate profits assume a greater percentage of GDP than ever
before. Conversely, as we are to expect, worker wages have fallen to
historic lows. Such are the true splendors of the “opportunity society”
proffered by our “free enterprise system.”
Of course, the role of mass unemployment in suppressing wages and
ensuring continued profitability necessarily extends to the global capitalist
system as a whole. And as John Bellamy Foster and Robert McChesney
argue in their latest book, The Endless Crisis, a massive global reserve
army of labor remains a defining feature of the world economy.
In 2011, for instance, Foster and McChesney report that the global
reserve army of labor stood at some 2.4 billion people, as opposed to the
1.4 billion found in the active labor market. That is, the global reserve
army of labor stood 70 percent larger than the active world labor market.
“The existence of an enormous global reserve army of labor forces
income deflation on the world’s workers,” Foster and McChesney explain,
“beginning in the global South, but also affecting the workers of the global
North, who are increasingly subjected to neoliberal ‘labour market
flexibility’…labor everywhere is on the defensive.”
And where labor is on the defensive, capital is on the offensive.
Hence, amid rising corporate profits we see a vicious and varied global
attack on labor—stretching from the state house in Lansing, Michigan to
the garment factories of Bangladesh and beyond.
A serious effort to attain full and dignified employment in such a
world, then, actually requires nothing short of an international struggle
against the forces of capital. Such a struggle must be international since
failure to do so would necessarily expose one to the perverse forces of
labor competition meted out by the global reserve army of labor.

Absent such a struggle, the jobs crisis in the U.S. and the world over
shall continue forth. The creative and productive potential of billions
worldwide left to languish in the reserve army.
Ben Schreiner is a freelance writer based in Wisconsin. He may be
reached at bnschreiner@gmail.com or via his website.
Economy:
Economists and the One-Percent: Reality Economics
By
Michael Hudson
“Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.” And if they
would destroy economies, they first create a wealthy class on top, and let
human nature do the rest. The acquisition of power soon leads to its abuse,
to economic and social hubris. By seeking to protect its gains, perpetuate
itself and make its wealth hereditary, the emergence of a power elite locks
in its position in ways that exclude and injure those below. The wealthy
indebt them, shift the tax burden onto the less powerful, and turn
government into an oligarchy.
It is an ancient tale. The Greeks got matters right in seeing how
power leads to hubris, bringing about its own downfall. Hubris is the
addiction to wealth and power, an arrogant over-reaching that involves
injury to others. By impoverishing economies it destroys the source of
profits, interest, capital gains, and even recovery of the original savings
and debt principal.
This abusive character of wealth and power is not what mainstream
economic models describe. That is why economic theory is broken. The
concept of diminishing marginal utility implies that the rich will become
more satiated as they become wealthier, and hence less addicted to power.
This idea of progressive satiation returns gets the direction of change
wrong, denying the basic thrust of the past ten thousand years of human
technology and civilization.
Today’s supply and demand approach treats the economy as a
“market” in a crudely abstract way, as quantities of goods (already

produced), labor (with a given productivity) and capital (already
accumulated, no questions asked) are swapped and bartered with each
other. This approach does not inquire deeply into how some people get the
capital to “swap” for “labor.” To top matters, this approach gets the
direction of technological growth and basic business experience wrong, by
assuming conditions of diminishing returns and diminishing marginal
utility. The intellectual result is a parallel universe, whose criterion for
economic excellence is merely the internal constituency of its abstract
assumptions, not their realism.
In their new book Economists and the Powerful, Norbert Häring and
Niall Douglas show that the economics discipline did not get this way by
accident. They are leading organizers of the World Economic Association,
which emerged from the Post-Autistic-Economic movement intended to
provide an alternative to mainstream neoclassical and neoliberal
economics. (Häring is co-editor of the World Economic Review.) Toward
this end they provide a wealth of references tracing how economics was
turned into a propaganda exercise for financiers, landlords, monopolists,
insiders, fraudsters and other rent-seeking predators whom classical
economists sought to tax and regulate out of existence. This state of affairs
reflects the century-long drive of these free lunchers to fight back against
classical economics by sponsoring self-serving fictions that depict them as
earning their fortunes not in predatory and extractive ways, but by
contributing to output as “job creators.”
Any given distribution of wealth and income is treated as an
equilibrium reflecting voluntary choice, without examining the
organizational and social structures of workplace hiring, production and
distribution. The authors provide an antidote to this tunnel vision by
pointing to the real invisible hands at work: insider dealing, anti-labor and
anti-union maneuvering, and outright looting and fraud. What they mean
by power is employers hiring strikebreakers, lobbying for special favors
and insider deals, and backing the election campaigns of lawmakers
pledged to act on behalf of the one-percent.
Criticizing the textbook theory of the firm, they point out that that
most production has increasing returns. Unit costs fall as fixed capital

investment is spread over more output. As a producer with nearly zero
marginal cost, for instance, Microsoft obtains a rising intellectual property
rent on each program sold. On an economy-wide level, raising the
minimum wage would enable most firms to benefit from increasing
returns, by increasing demand.
Firms use political leverage to make sure that anti-labor referees are
appointed to the courts and arenas that arbitrate disputes about
employment, working conditions and firing. Capital-intensive industries
outsource low-skill jobs to small-scale providers using non-union labor.
Privatizing public utilities also aims largely at breaking labor union power.
Marginalist supply and demand theory implies that each additional worker
that is hired increases wage rates, prompting business to oppose full
employment policies in order to keep wages low, even though this limits
the market for their output.
So technology and diminishing terms are not the reason why wages
have been pressed down – or why financial and other non-production costs
have been rising for most Western economies. These cost increases are
headed by debt charges for leveraged buyouts and corporate raiding, plus
CEO salaries, bonuses and stock options. Labor also faces high costs of
living as a result of the soaring mortgage debt Read More
World:
Morsi's Failure of Leadership: The Battle for Sovereignty in Egypt
by
Paul Sedra
The lines are now drawn. Five months ago, when Muhammad Mursi
presented himself as a revolutionary to Tahrir, there was still room to
conceive that he might take up the principles for which hundreds of
Egyptians had given their lives since 25 January 2011 – bread, freedom,
and social justice. When he claimed that he was an Egyptian just like the
Egyptians in the square, and that he derived his authority only from the
people, there was still room to conceive that Egypt was finally on a starkly
different path from that of the sixty years prior.

At that time, back in June, the president was given a remarkable
opportunity. Despite the enormous challenges that the country faced and
still faces, not least in the economic sphere, he had received a mandate
from the people – the first democratic mandate that Egyptians have had
the opportunity to deliver in their lifetimes. With this mandate, he was
empowered not merely to appoint a new government, but in an important
sense, to forge a new polity – to cultivate, alongside Egyptians, a new
relationship between the people and the political realm.
Much to his credit, the president succeeded in largely extricating the
military from governance and thus fulfilling one of the central demands of
the revolution. This was substantive change – a stark reversal of course for
a government that had, for sixty years, remained led by military men.
One can well understand the frustrations that the president faced in
dealing with the courts. In particular, the decision of the Supreme
Constitutional Court to dissolve Egypt’s first democratically elected
parliament seemed regressive in the face of the movement towards popular
sovereignty. That the court was populated by appointees from the Mubarak
era hardly gave one confidence that the best interests of revolutionary
Egypt motivated the decision. Further, the failure of the prosecutor-general
and the judicial system as a whole to deliver what the families of the
revolution’s martyrs could regard as ‘justice’ only heightened these
frustrations.
Nevertheless, in spite of the apparent resistance from the courts, and
in spite of the skeptics who doubted the Muslim Brotherhood’s capacity to
rule, the all-important opportunity to forge a new polity remained – and
there was no venue more important to this task than the Constituent
Assembly. In contrast to Egypt’s past constitutions, drafted behind closed
doors to contain rather than promote political participation, this was a
constitution that might finally have meaning and impact.
But rather than foster a national dialogue about the central issues this
constitution would address – the bounds of Egyptian citizenship, for
instance – debate was vouchsafed exclusively to the members of the
assembly. Leaks and rumors emerged at times from the deliberations, but
there was no sustained effort to engage Egyptians about what they wanted

in their constitution. As a result, in the place of a potentially
transformative, indeed revolutionary, constitution-drafting project,
Egyptians were left as spectators to a process that remained deliberately
opaque throughout.
If the president indeed believed that he was an Egyptian like all the
rest who were in Tahrir on 29 June when he took his memorable symbolic
oath of office, if he believed that the people were the only source of
sovereignty in Egypt, one wonders why he failed to spearhead this
national dialogue himself. Why not lead Egypt through a constitutionwriting
process that would transform the country as much as the
revolution had – a process that would value the contributions not merely
of the ‘expert’ or the ‘technocrat,’ but of the countless Egyptians who had
confronted Mubarak in the streets in February 2011?
Regrettably, we got the answer to this question this past week.
Despite the fact that the revolution seems forever on the president’s lips,
the principles of the revolution weigh very little on his decision-making.
In handing down his constitutional declaration, the president professed
that he sought merely to ‘protect’ the revolution. But of course, in making
his rule immune to oversight from all who might challenge and criticize
him, he made himself no less a dictator than Mubarak was.
The president insisted that the declaration was only a temporary
measure. And we have now discovered why: The Constituent Assembly
would press ahead to pass the existing constitutional draft, approving
article after article with each passing minute. This constitutional draft,
written behind closed doors, with the input of scarcely the 100 members of
the assembly let alone the millions of Egyptians who made the revolution,
would be presented to the nation as a fait accompli.
The lines are now drawn. Five months ago, Muhammad Mursi
presented himself as a revolutionary to Tahrir. Now, we know better. Now,
we know that he is not committed to the change that millions of Egyptians
demanded in the revolution. Now, we know that his idea of sovereignty is
much like Mubarak’s, and a world away from the truly popular
sovereignty of which he spoke on 29 June.

Paul Sedra is Associate Professor in the Department of History
at Simon Fraser University.
Mursi calls on military in Egypt crisis
By
Patrick Martin
Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi issued a decree Sunday giving
army officers the authority for the next week to make arrests with a view
to “maintaining public order.” Calling in the military to supplement the
police is an indication of the reactionary preparations taking place behind
the scenes as the political crisis deepens in Egypt.
The new Law 107 puts the military in control of security measures
during the week leading up to a December 15 referendum on a new
constitution for Egypt, drafted by a commission controlled by Mursi’s
Freedom and Justice Party, the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood,
the group that represents the Islamist faction of Egyptian big business.
The decree follows a constitutional declaration issued by Mursi a day
earlier, which reaffirmed the December 15 vote on the Islamist-backed
constitution. The declaration nominally rescinded Mursi’s November 22
decree, which provoked mass protests throughout the country because it
claimed all legislative, judicial, constitutional and executive powers and
placed the president above any judicial or legal restraint.
The new constitutional declaration effectively reasserted the absolute
power claimed in the November 22 declaration, however, by reiterating
that the new decree itself, and other such constitutional declarations, could
not be reviewed or overturned by the judiciary.
The Mursi aide who read out the constitutional declaration Saturday
night at a press conference said, “The declaration is not intended to protect
the president’s decisions against legal appeals, but rather to protect the
constitutional declarations. This is an act of sovereignty granted to the
president.”
According to an English translation of Saturday’s decree published
by Ahram Online, Mursi voided his November 22 declaration while

insisting that “all its consequences remain in effect.” The most important
such consequence is the December 15 referendum on the new constitution.
The new constitutional declaration provides that if the Egyptian
population votes down the draft constitution, the president will call an
election of a new constituent assembly within three months.
Opposition groups that had organized protests against the Mursi
power grab immediately rejected the new declaration, but remained silent
on whether they would call for a boycott of the December 15 referendum,
seek to disrupt it with protests, or call on the people to participate in the
referendum and vote down the proposed constitution.
The National Salvation Front (NSF), which includes many of the
bourgeois liberal opposition groups, said that Mursi’s rescinding of the
November 22 decree had “fallen short of expectations.” An NSF official
said, “One of our major demands is to postpone the vote on the
constitution. Failing to respond to this will lead to more confrontation.”
The spokesman, Khaled Dawood, said Mursi’s action was “relatively
meaningless,” explaining, “The key issue of securing the process of
adopting of the constitution is done.” At the same time, Dawood said that
ousting Mursi from power “is definitely not in our agenda at all.” He
continued, “Our agenda is basically limited to having a new draft
constitution that everybody is satisfied about before going to a
referendum.”
Leaders of the NSF boycotted a meeting called by Mursi for
Saturday, December 8, under the title of “National Dialogue,” to discuss
the political crisis. Former presidential candidates Hamdeen Sabbahi, a
Nasserist, and Amr Moussa, foreign minister under Mubarak, refused to
attend the meeting, along with the former head of the International Atomic
Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei.
The National Salvation Front and the pseudo-left groups that trail
behind it, such as the Revolutionary Socialists, have called for renewed
mass protests on Tuesday in Cairo and other Egyptian cities. The Muslim
Brotherhood has issued its own call for pro-Mursi protests on the same
day, potentially setting the stage for new confrontations and new
bloodshed, which could give the military a pretext for open intervention.

The political deadlock between rival factions of the Egyptian ruling
elite prompted an ominous statement from the military Saturday, warning
of potential “disastrous consequences.” It was the military’s first public
declaration since Mursi’s consolidation of power in August, when he sent
the leading generals, including defense minister Mohammed Tantawi, into
retirement.
The statement declared: “Dialogue is the best and only way to reach
consensus. The opposite of that will bring us to a dark tunnel that will
result in catastrophe and that is something we will not allow.” It warned
that failure to reach an agreement over the constitutional referendum was
“in the interest of neither side. The nation as a whole will pay the price.”
Underscoring the decisive role of the military brass in the political
crisis, state radio and television interrupted programs Saturday to read the
statement from the leadership of the armed forces. Muslim Brotherhood
representatives welcome the “balanced” line of the statement.
Military units began to put these words into practice, as troops were
mobilized to seal off the area around the presidential palace to prevent
demonstrators from reaching it. Tanks, armored vehicles and barbed wire
were deployed.
The Los Angeles Times quoted an Egyptian political analyst, Ammar
Ali Hassan, to the effect that the US government was playing a key role in
the political crisis behind the scenes. “There are agreements between the
armed forces, the US and the Brotherhood,” he told the Times. “They’ve
agreed to stability because the US absolutely needs stability in Egypt.”
Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, who is well connected to
the US military-intelligence apparatus, was even more emphatic about the
Obama administration’s role in backing Mursi, in a scathing column
published Saturday under the headline, “Our Man in Cairo.”
He wrote: “[L]et’s be honest: The Obama administration has been
Morsi’s main enabler. US officials have worked closely with him on
economic development and regional diplomacy. Visiting Washington last
week, Morsi’s top aides were touting their boss’s close contacts with
President Obama and describing phone calls between the two leaders that
led to the Gaza cease-fire.” Read More

Health, Education, Science and Welfare:
Let’s Gang Up on Killer Bugs
By
Carl F. Nathan
Carl F. Nathan is chairman of the department of
microbiology and immunology at Weill Cornell Medical College.
I hope you never have this experience: a loved one is hospitalized.
Her doctors tell you her infection is resistant to antibiotics. She dies. More
than 60,000 American families go through that experience each year —
and the number is almost certain to rise.
Multidrug-resistant organisms are showing up in top-flight hospitals
— like the klebsiella found in the National Institutes of Health’s Clinical
Center this year, which may have led to the deaths of seven patients. Even
infections that used to be a breeze to treat, like gonorrhea, are becoming
incurable.
In much of the world, of course, bacterial disease is a routine cause of
tragedy. Tuberculosis alone kills 1.4 million people a year. One reason for
this staggeringly high figure is that most people in the world are too poor
to pay for most medicines. But another reason is that some strains of
tuberculosis bacteria have become resistant to most of the drugs we have.
Even after two years of toxic treatment, drug-resistant tuberculosis has a
fatality rate of about 50 percent.
What makes the rapid loss of antibiotics to drug resistance
particularly alarming is that we are failing to make new ones. We are
emptying our medicine chest of the most important class of medicines we

ever had. And the cause can be traced, for the most part, to two profound
problems.
The first is economic. Historically, the drug industry thrived on
antibiotics. But if an antibiotic is useful against only one type of
bacterium, relatively few people need it during its patent life. And if an
antibiotic is “broad spectrum,” meaning it works on many different types
of bacteria, wider use shortens its commercial life because it quickens the
pace at which bacteria develop resistance. Moreover, antibiotics are
designed to cure an acute disease — not to palliate a chronic one — so
people need them only for a limited time. Compared with drugs that are
used for years to treat widespread conditions like high cholesterol or
asthma, antibiotics pale as a corporate investment.
The second challenge stems from the nature of bacteria. Though
brainless, they are brainy, enjoying a highly effective collective
intelligence. Large numbers of independently mutating bacteria test
adaptations to group problems, like how to survive antibiotics. What
works — like modifying the bacterial proteins to which antibiotics would
otherwise bind — wins. As bacteria become more adept at evading
antibiotics, it has become much harder to find drugs that can beat them
back.
Merge these two problems — scientific and economic — and the
result is a drug-development disaster: the prospects are so discouraging
that few companies bother to try anymore.
How can we confront the critical shortage of new antibiotics when
both the scientific approach and the economic model are letting us down?
We can change both paradigms.
Drug makers survive by selling what people or governments buy in
amounts and at prices that maximize profit. Monopoly protects the ability
to set price for profit. Patents allow monopoly. Secrecy protects
intellectual property until it is patented.
But what if we take a page out of the pathogen playbook? Many
pathogens exchange DNA, sharing what they learn. Drug makers can
operate in the same way: they can do science “open lab”-style, working in
teams with academic and government scientists and other drug companies

to share what they learn and to bring fresh scientific ideas and
technological tools to bear. Relaxing the traditional insistence on secrecy
allows collaboration, and with it, innovation.
Did I hear you say, “It’ll never happen”? It already has.
GlaxoSmithKline opened its campus at Tres Cantos, Spain, to outside
academic, government and biotech scientists in order to collaborate on
finding antibiotics for neglected infectious diseases. The independent Tres
Cantos Open Lab Foundation selects the projects and helps cover visiting
researchers’ expenses.
In another version of the open lab concept, the Bill and Melinda
Gates Foundation organized a TB Drug Accelerator program that brings
together research teams from seven major companies (Abbott
Laboratories, AstraZeneca, Bayer, Eli Lilly, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck and
Sanofi) with scientists from four academic and government institutions.
The companies have exchanged more than a thousand compounds and
provided the academic and government scientists with access to millions.
These experiments show that even competing research teams can
share knowledge, risk and reward in anti-infective drug development, test
diverse approaches and avoid redundant efforts. (I’m involved in both of
these projects.)
Philanthropic efforts have financed these open labs, but they can’t
substitute for market forces. Nor can the current economic model give
antibiotic development a permanent, prominent place in drug company
portfolios.
There are, however, other ways for drug makers to profit beyond
using monopoly to protect prices. As Thomas Pogge of Yale and Aidan
Hollis of the University of Calgary have pointed out, an intergovernmental
fund for drug discovery could reward drug makers for products in
proportion to their impact in reducing the loss of healthy years of life. The
lower the cost of a lifesaving drug, the greater the number of people who
could use it; the more lives protected, then, the greater the monetary
reward. An investment of $20 billion a year could encourage more openlab
collaborations to find new medicines in challenging settings like
antibiotic discovery and make them accessible to all who need them.

If we don’t make new antibiotics, we will lose the ability to practice
modern medicine. A new collaborative model for drug discovery can help
make sure this doesn’t happen.
Patrick Cockburn: The demise of the asylum and
the rise of care in the community
The treatment of the mentally ill measures the health of any society
Henry Cockburn was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 2002. Before
that he was a heavy cannabis user.
His father, Patrick Cockburn, The Independent’s award-winning
foreign correspondent, has seen – at first hand – the dramatic changes in
the way we treat the mentally ill over recent decades. Today, in the second
of his groundbreaking four-part series, he explains how psychiatric care in
Britain went wrong – while Henry reveals his experiences as a
schizophrenic marooned in the system.
The treatment of the mentally ill measures the health of any society
because they are the most vulnerable and the least able to defend
themselves against cruelty and neglect. It is an issue that affects the lives
of a large part of the population. At any one time some seven million
people in England and Wales over the age of 16 – one in six of the adult
population – are suffering from a significant psychiatric problem. At least
one-third of all families have a member who will at some stage be
mentally ill.
Mental illness may be pervasive but it remains a largely hidden
plague. Despite significant progress over the past decade, knowledge of
psychiatric disorders lags far behind that of physical illnesses. Neatsounding
categories such as schizophrenia, bi-polar depression and
schizoid-affective are not distinct diseases like TB or polio, but names
given to a psychosis on the basis of symptoms evident when a patient sees
a psychiatrist. As these symptoms change – as they often do – so does the
diagnosis.
In the 1950s medications were discovered that could control, but not
cure, mental disorders, and it is still not known exactly how they work.
Only last month it was revealed that big pharmaceutical companies have

largely stopped the search for new drugs to treat mental illnesses after
spending billions of dollars in the search. They had found that not enough
was known about the human brain and its ills for them to have a
reasonable prospect of success.
Given the uncertainty about the nature of mental illness, it is
extraordinary that governments in Britain and across the world should
have revolutionised the treatment of those suffering from it. In the years
since the mental asylums created by the Victorians were first denounced in
the UK as relics of a past era – by Enoch Powell as Minister of Health in
1962 – the great majority of them have been closed. Between the 1950s
and today the number of beds available for psychiatric patients in Britain
has declined spectacularly from 150,000 to 27,000.
The asylums were supposed to be replaced by “Care in the
Community”, a cuddly-sounding approach that one Labour minister
derided as “couldn’t care less in the community”. The crime novelist P D
James, who worked as an administrator in the NHS and whose husband
was a long-term patient in a mental hospital, commented bitterly that
community care “could be described more accurately as the absence of
care in a community still largely resentful or frightened of mental illness”.
Half a century ago every British city had at least one mental asylum
on its outskirts, but these were rapidly closed down and sold off, often to
become luxury flats or the site of a supermarket. It was one of the most
radical changes in the British institutional landscape since the dissolution
of the monasteries in the 16th century. As with the monasteries, the
motives leading to the demise of the asylums combined a genuine belief
that the system was wrong with an ideological hostility to their existence
and a keen sense of the financial advantages stemming from their demise.
The psychiatric hospitals were caught in a pincer movement from
right and left. The left saw the asylums as being like prisons, whose
inhabitants were primarily the victims of an authoritarian system. Films
like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest propagated this attitude. On the
right, such views were welcome because they provided respectable
reasons for spending less money on the mentally ill and reduced the role
of public welfare.

What followed this revolutionary change is still a subject of angry
dispute among doctors and former patients. Many things were wrong with
the old asylums, which could be brutal and uncaring, but they were also a
place of refuge for people who desperately needed one and had nowhere
else to go. Barbara Taylor, a historian who spent time as a patient in the
late 1980s in the Friern mental hospital in north-east London, formerly
known as Colney Hatch, recalls in an essay that “for me Friern was truly
an asylum. I entered it on my knees: I could no longer do ordinary life,
and giving up the struggle was an incalculable relief. My home in the
hospital was a locked acute ward with a deservedly violent reputation: a
Dickensian barrack of crumbled brickwork and peeling walls, reeking of
fag smoke and teeming with ghosts; but for me it was sanctuary.”
The end of the asylums came not just in Britain but across the world
and is still going on. In the United States the number of beds available for
psychiatric patients fell from 558,000 in 1955 to 53,000 in 2005.
Some of the slogans of the anti-asylum movement in Britain and the
US are chilling in their covert or unintentional cruelty. One of them was
“de-institutionalisation”, as if healthy people, and not just the mentally ill,
are not themselves dependent on institutions where they work, such as a
school or an office. The institutional needs of the mentally ill are often
very simple, described by one social worker as being “a place where you
can go and sit and chat and have a cuppa, and lunch”.
But even this is sometimes denied them on the grounds that it makes
them part of a “dependency culture”. A carer, lamenting the closure of a
day centre in Wales, says “often people are very withdrawn, lonely or low,
or in another world, others have lost most of their personality and are
referred to as being burnt out. These people don’t want or need anything
very demanding, just coming to the centre and getting out of the house is
enough, and a blessing for carers.”
The disastrous impact of “care in the community” was being
recognised in the 1990s and more sophisticated community care became
available such as the Early Intervention in Psychosis units that aim to help
young people suffering their first psychosis by detecting and treating it in
its early stages. But the closure of so many mental asylums in the past

continues to have a negative impact because almost all those now inside
are there by compulsion. Psychiatrists say they are becoming increasingly
like an 18th-century Bedlam, with locked rooms like cells and an
emphasis on preventing escape. Dr Humphrey Needham-Bennet, a
consultant psychiatrist, says “they are more like a prison than a hospital”.
Paradoxically, mental health care in Britain since the closure of the
asylums has moved in two different and contradictory directions. One,
motivated by media and public fears, is to treat mentally ill people as
potential axe murderers to be closely incarcerated. The other approach,
equally exaggerated, is to understate the gravity of a chronic mental illness
and pretend sufferers can live “in the community” as if they were not ill.
Daily News Digest December 10, 2012
In My Opinion This Is One of Arrogant Capitalism’s Mottos, On The
Eve Of Capitalism’s Destruction Of The Habitat For Humanity:
Frank Baby Frack!
Pollute Baby Pollute!
Warm Climate Warm!
Images of the Day:
Protesters In Egypt Slam Obama

Photo: AP / AP
Egyptian army soldiers stand on top of their tank as the sun sets outside the
presidential palace, background, in Cairo, Egypt, Saturday, Dec. 8, 2012. Egypt's
military warned Saturday of 'disastrous consequences' if the crisis that sent tens of
thousands of protesters back into the streets is not resolved, signaling the army's
return to an increasingly polarized and violent political scene.
New Egypt protest call after Morsi sticks to draft
Quote of the Day:
The Medici family motto in 16th century Florence still
has at least some relevance today: "Money to get power, and
power to guard the money."
— Why the rich get the most tax goodies
Videos of the Day:
The Rise and Fall of the Welfare State
Market implosion soon? "Reset inevitable"
TV that watches and listens to YOUWhat will they think of next
The surveillance state on a roll. Verizon has filed a patent for a cable
box equipped with a microphone and motion sensors to record what
its customers are doing. That means the television will be watching the

viewers watching it. The idea was that Verizon could target
advertisements to what their customer are doing while watching TV.
End Wall Street’s Wars!
Occupy Wall Street!
Occupy Wall Street is the Only Organization
That Identifies The Enemy —
The 1% That Own and Control The Wealth!
1960s The Realist — One Nation Under God/1%
(Unlike The Trade Union Misleaders
Nor The Misleaders Of The Oppressed
Who Strive To Be In ‘Partnership’ With The 1%)
1960s The Realist — One Nation Under God/1%
(Unlike The Trade Union Misleaders
Nor The Misleaders Of The Oppressed
Who Strive To Be In ‘Partnership’ With The 1%)
Occupy Wall Street — ‘We Are The 99%’
The resistance continues at Liberty Square:
U.S.
WikiLeaks reveals US, Israel lies on Iran
By
Linda Pearson

Cartoon by Carlos Latuff.
A major theme of this year’s US presidential election campaign was
the threat to world peace allegedly posed by Iran’s nuclear program.
Democrat President Barack Obama and Republican candidate Mitt
Romney competed to take the hardest line.
Obama boasted of organising the “strongest coalition and the
strongest sanctions against Iran in history” and promised to “take all
options necessary” to force Iran to abandon its nuclear program.
This narrative relies on the false assertion that Iran is developing
nuclear weapons with which to attack Israel and the US. It casts the US
and Israel as defenders of international peace and security, when a military
strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities would constitute an illegal act of
aggression.
While the hype about Iran continues, negotiations on a proposal that
could actually reduce the threat of nuclear conflict in the region ― the
establishment of a Middle East Nuclear Weapons Free Zone ― have been
sidelined.
A conference on the proposal set to take place in Finland in
December this year, to which Iran agreed, has reportedly been cancelled
by the US and Israel.
Potential for nuclear weapons-free Middle East
The proposal to establish a Middle East Nuclear Weapons Free Zone
has garnered international support since the United Nations General
Assembly (UNGA) passed a resolution, sponsored by Iran and Egypt,

endorsing the idea in 1974. However, no substantive progress has been
made towards establishment of the zone.
After years of pressure from Arab states, modest practical step were
agreed upon at the 2010 Nuclear Non-Proliferation (NPT) Review
Conference to take the proposal forward.
The Middle East resolution outlined a plan “to convene a conference
in 2012, to be attended by all States of the Middle East, on the
establishment of a Middle East zone free of nuclear weapons and all other
weapons of mass destruction”. The resolution also called upon Israel to
join the NPT, and was hailed as a breakthrough.
However, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denounced the
resolution saying “Israel is not obligated by the decisions of this
Conference, which has no authority over Israel”.
The head of Israel's Atomic Energy Commission said in September
this year that Israel will not take part in the conference, rejecting it as an
attempt to impose a Middle East Nuclear Weapons Free Zone “from
outside”.
This position reflects a double-standard on the part of Israel, which
chooses to remain outside the NPT so it can maintain its “position of
nuclear ambiguity” — allowing it to keep its nuclear weapons without
being subject to the same scrutiny as NPT nuclear weapons states. Israel is
also free from the Treaty's Article VI obligation to disarm.
It cannot take part directly in NPT negotiations, but Israel exerts
considerable influence in negotiations on nuclear matters through its
membership of the IAEA, and through the diplomatic weight carried by its
ally, the US.
No ‘concrete deliverables’
In 2004, the IAEA planned to hold a forum to discuss the
establishment of a Middle East Nuclear Weapon Free Zone. A cable from
the US Embassy in Tel Aviv published by WikiLeaks revealed Israel was
keen to ensure that the forum would not produce any “concrete
deliverables” towards achieving a Middle East Nuclear Weapons Free
Zone.

The cable reports that “Israel has urged the IAEA to view the forum
as ‘a one-time educational event’” with a purely “intellectual” outcome.
The Israelis objected to the inclusion of representatives of the Arab
League as observers, as "not consistent with the learning process".
When agreement could not be reached on the form the forum would
take, it was postponed. The idea was revived by the US in 2007 in an
attempt to “head off” the inclusion of an “Israeli Nuclear Threat” (INT)
item on the agenda for that year's IAEA General Conference. The US
consistently opposes language in IAEA, NPT and UN resolutions on
nuclear issues in the Middle East that refers specifically to Israel, even
though Israel is the only nuclear weapons power in the region.
The INT item was proposed by the Arab group of IAEA member
states, partly due to their frustration with the lack of progress on
establishing a Middle East Nuclear Weapon Free Zone, and called upon
Israel to accede to the NPT and place all its nuclear facilities under
comprehensive IAEA safeguards.
According to a July 2007 cable from the US Ambassador to the
IAEA, Israeli Ambassador Israel Michaeli agreed that “US pressure to
agree to a Forum” could be a “joint of leverage” to persuade Egypt to use
its influence within the Arab group to drop the proposed INT agenda item.
The cable reports that Michaeli said that the Israeli “government
would not be ‘very happy’ about a Forum” but if it was “based on known
elements meaning the agreed 2004 agenda, Israel could countenance it”.
In the end, a forum on "Experience of Possible Relevance to the
Creation of a Nuclear-Weapons-Free Zone in the Middle East" took place
last year. The forum produced a document that concluded with four
general proposals for taking the process forward, but no specific or
binding measures.
Since the establishment of a Middle East Nuclear Weapon Free Zone
would require Israel to declare and ultimately give up its nuclear arsenal,
Israel and the US have preferred to focus on the threat allegedly posed by
Iran’s nuclear program.
While Israel’s official “red line” is Iran having the ability to make
what Israel deems to be enough weapons grade uranium to make a bomb,

it appears that Iran crossed a red line when it chose to move ahead with its
nuclear program after the revolution of 1979.
As a signatory to the NPT, Iran has a legal right to produce nuclear
energy for peaceful purposes. Its announcement in 1974 of a plan to build
23 large nuclear reactors was supported by the West. Construction of
Iran’s first nuclear power plant at Bushehr was originally contracted to a
German firm in 1975. Read More
When Police Are Encouraged to Abuse, Not Protect
By
Robert Gangi
While the harmful effects of the NYPD’s stop and frisk tactic tactic
have received the most public attention, this practice does not represent
the most serious problem with current policing policy in NYC. It is not the
true dark heart of the beast. That honor goes to an agency wide quota
system that police brass use to evaluate the performances of officers on the
street and that drives a harsh, aggressive approach to law enforcement
which, in a misguided effort to keep a lid on crime, results in the targeting
and abusive treatment of our city’s most vulnerable groups.
Every day the City’s police engage in objectionable practices that
waste government resources and that result in more, rather than less, social
disorder. Black and brown young men stopped and frisked for no apparent
reason, at times arrested and ticketed for trespass while standing in front
of their own buildings; drivers pulled over and ticketed for not wearing a
seat belt even though they were using the device; people in psychiatric
crisis, clearly disoriented and confused, thrown to the ground, handcuffed,
and locked up; LGBT persons called derogatory names, questioned rudely
and inappropriately touched as they enter a local community center or
gather in a group on a neighborhood street corner; sex workers arrested for
simply carrying condoms or forced to provide sex in return for their
release; street vendors hassled, fined and arrested for violating minor rules
that are arbitrarily enforced; homeless people roughed up – their
belongings often destroyed – and apprehended for begging on the subway
or sleeping on a park bench; officers apologizing to people they are

handing a summons explaining that they are under pressure to fill their
quota.
NYPD officials use the term "productivity goals" as a poorly veiled
euphemism for the Department's quota system, as a thin cover for the
pressure placed on street officers to make an expected number of arrests,
or to issue a sufficient number of summonses. The department denies its
use of such measures because they are illegal under state law, a law which,
over six years ago, a state arbitrator concluded that the NYPD had
violated. The state arbitrator found, among other things, that "one
officer . . . was singled out by at least one of his supervisors for his high
number of felony arrests, (but) was nonetheless given low marks on
performance evaluations for not writing traffic and 'quality of life'
summonses."
An officer told a PROP representative: "If I break up a fight between
two boys and send them home, I don't get credit. If I help deliver a baby in
an emergency, I get no credit. But I score points if I issue a seat belt
summons or record two stop and frisks."
A flustered New Yorker reported the words of an officer who just
gave him a summons for moving between two subway cars while the train
was stopped. "Sorry, but it's the 26th of the month and I have to hit my
number."
The Patrolmen's Benevolent Association (PBA) has taken an
aggressive public stance against the Department's quotas. The police
officers union has urged its members to complete a notarized affidavit
whenever a supervising officer threatens them with a penalty for not
meeting specified quotas. The sanctions may include reassignments,
adverse evaluations, or denials of promotion or overtime.
While the quota system clearly creates problems for the officers
pressured to meet them, the main victims are the citizens of New York
who bear the brunt of the ill effects of this law enforcement approach.
When a NYPD representative, a precinct captain or lieutenant, directs
officers to satisfy specific numerical goals regarding arrests and
summonses, then deploys the officers in particular neighborhoods,
everyone in those communities becomes a potential criminal even if their

criminality is fabricated by officers to fill monthly "productivity goals."
The subsequent indiscriminate ticketing, false arrests, illegal stop and
frisks, and other harassment techniques undermine officers' relationship
with communities and result in policing that is unfair and unsuccessful.
As a consequence, our city's citizens do not feel safe in their own
neighborhoods, on their own streets, or in their own apartment buildings.
Community members do not see the police as a source of protection — in
fact, a comment we have heard frequently reflects an opposing belief: "We
feel we have to protect ourselves from them" — and lose faith in a legal
system which unjustly singles out and punishes them at its earliest stages
and with its most public arm.
PBA President Patrick Lynch stated recently that quotas are " . . .
ineffective in fighting crime and serve as a tremendous source of friction
with the communities that our members are sworn to protect. Eliminating
unnecessary and counterproductive quotas will allow police officers to
keep New York City safe while winning back the support of its citizens."
Letter from the US: Undocumented youth demand sweeping
immigration reform
By Barry Sheppard, San Francisco
Participants in the United We Dream conference reflect in silence.
In the recent elections, Latinos, Asians and Blacks voted against the
extreme racist policies and rhetoric of the Republicans.
A central plank in the Republican onslaught has been attacks on
immigrants who lack documents. Romney said he would make life so
miserable for them they would “self-deport”.

In the aftermath of the elections, immigrant youth without papers
have remobilised to fight for their own rights and for citizenship for all of
up to 12 million undocumented migrants working in the US.
A spirited conference of 600 undocumented youth defied deportation
threats to gather for a three-day conference in Kansas City, Missouri on
November 30-December 2. At the last day of the conference, they
unanimously vowed to mobilise in support of a fight to win citizenship for
all the undocumented.
This puts pressure on President Barack Obama and Congress to enact
sweeping immigration reform.
They took chances just attending the conference. Some participants
from California came by plane, passing security with state-issued identity
documents, flying for the first time. Others came from places such as
Texas, New York and Florida, in cars driven by the few among them who
have drivers’ licenses.
California did once issue drivers’ licenses to undocumented workers,
but stopped doing so in the face of a racist campaign a few years ago.
It was a sign of their new confidence that the leaders of the United
We Dream network held its conference in the convention center in
downtown Kansas City, a conservative state known for its hostility to
immigrant rights.
Last Northern hemisphere spring, many of these same young people,
proudly wearing T shirts with “I Am Undocumented” printed on them,
staged sit-ins at Obama campaign headquarters, demanding he take a
stand.
In June, embarrassed by these actions as he was trying to win Latino
votes, Obama announced two-year reprieves from deportations and work
permits for hundreds of thousands of young immigrants without papers.
They had been brought into the US as children by their parents.
The Obama administration has deported nearly 1.4 million people for
the “crime” of not having papers since he took office, far more than his
predecessor. This has broken-up families and created unnecessary
hardships for this important sector of the US working class.

These youth saw the reprieve as a victory a step forward. In the
aftermath of the election, Obama says he will do something on
immigration reform. In this area, as in others, Obama can point to
Republican hostility as an excuse to water down any action.
Now United We Dream has upped the ante, saying they will mobilise
in the broader community to not only make the two-year reprieve
permanent for young people, but win full rights for all the undocumented,
their parents included.
A New York Times reporter at the conference said in a December 2
article: “Their decision to push for legal status for their families was
intensely emotional.
“When they were asked at a plenary session how many had been
separated by deportation from a parent or family member, hundreds of
hands went up ...”
The NYT article quoted Regem Corpuz, a 19-year-old student at the
University of California, who was born in the Philippines, as saying:
“When Obama is deporting all these people, separating all of our families,
I’m sick and tired of that.”
The point was underscored on the last day of the conference. Six
undocumented immigrant parents of those present joined a “coming out”
ceremony where they spoke in public for the first time, as many of their
children have done this past year.
The NYT said: “One father, Juan Jose Zorrilla, 45, who is from
Mexico, recounted how he had entered the United States several times by
swimming across the Rio Grande.
“‘For parents, there is no sacrifice so large that we won’t make it for
our children,’ Mr Zorrilla said. A mass of youths jumped up from their
chairs to embrace Mr. Zorrilla and the other parents.”
By demonstrating openly as undocumented youth this past year, and
now holding an open conference, these young people are engaging in a
mass civil disobedience campaign. They are challenging the authorities to
arrest and deport them.

This tactic relies on the fact that they were brought into the country
as children to many citizens, even those who are taken in by the antiimmigrant
racism, this means they are here by "no fault of their own".
It seems especially heartless to deport them, and so far the
administration has not dared to do so.
These courageous youth are utilising the election results in a clever
way. They are not relying on Obama to “do something” for them and their
communities, nor are they waiting on him.
At the conference some also pointed to the disarray among
Republicans about why they lost so heavily among Latinos and Asians as
indicating they are on the defensive too, and the time is ripe to strike.
By raising the stakes through a campaign to mobilise to fight for
legalisation of the status of all the undocumented workers, these young
people are showing the way forward: independent mass action.
It is to be hoped that Blacks, women, LGBTI people and trade unions
can take a page from this positive example in the months ahead and
emulate it.
[Barry Sheppard was a long-time leader of the US Socialist Workers
Party and the Fourth International. He recounts his experience in the SWP
in a two-volume book, The Party — the Socialist Workers Party
1960-1988, available from Resistance Books. Read more of Sheppard's
articles.]
Environment:
World's Big Trees Are Dying: Alarming Increase in Death Rates
Among Trees 100-300 Years Old
The largest living organisms on the planet, the big, old trees that
harbour and sustain countless birds and other wildlife, are dying.

(Credit: Photo by Bill Laurance)
Baobab trees, like this giant in Tanzania, are under threat from land clearing, droughts,
fungal pathogens, and overharvesting of their bark for matweaving by local villagers.
The largest living organisms on the planet, the big, old trees that
harbour and sustain countless birds and other wildlife, are dying.
A report by three of the world's leading ecologists in today's issue of
the journal Science warns of an alarming increase in deathrates among
trees 100-300 years old in many of the world's forests, woodlands,
savannahs, farming areas and even in cities.
"It's a worldwide problem and appears to be happening in most types
of forest," says lead author Professor David Lindenmayer of the ARC
Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions (CEED) and Australian
National University.
"Large old trees are critical in many natural and human-dominated
environments. Studies of ecosystems around the world suggest
populations of these trees are declining rapidly," he and colleagues
Professor Bill Laurance of James Cook University, Australia, and
Professor Jerry Franklin of Washington University, USA, say in their
Science report.
"Research is urgently needed to identify the causes of rapid losses of
large old trees and strategies for improved management. Without… policy
changes, large old trees will diminish or disappear in many ecosystems,
leading to losses of their associated biota and ecosystem functions."

Prof. Lindenmayer says they were first tipped off to the loss of big
old trees while examining Swedish forestry records going back to the
1860s. Then a 30-year study of Mountain Ash (Eucalyptus regnans) forest
in Australia confirmed not only that big old trees were dying en masse in
forest fires, but also perishing at ten times the normal rate in non-fire years
— apparently due to drought, high temperatures, logging and other causes.
Looking round the world, the scientists found similar trends at all
latitudes, in California's Yosemite National Park, on the African
savannahs, in the rainforests of Brazil, the temperate forests of Europe and
the boreal forests of the far north. Losses of large trees were also
pronounced in agricultural landscapes and even cities, where people make
efforts to preserve them.
"It is a very, very disturbing trend. We are talking about the loss of
the biggest living organisms on the planet, of the largest flowering plants
on the planet, of organisms that play a key role in regulating and enriching
our world," says Professor Bill Laurance of James Cook University.
"Large old trees play critical ecological roles. They provide nesting
or sheltering cavities for up to 30% of all birds and animals in some
ecosystems. They store huge amounts of carbon. They recycle soil
nutrients, create rich patches for other life to thrive in, and influence the
flow of water within landscapes and the local climate.
"Big trees supply abundant food for numerous animals in the form of
fruits, flowers, foliage and nectar. Their hollows offer nests and shelter for
birds and animals like Australia's endangered Leadbeater's Possum
(Gymnobelideus leadbeateri) — and their loss could mean extinction for
such creatures.
"In agricultural landscapes, large old trees can be focal points for
vegetation restoration; they help connect the landscape by acting as
stepping stones for many animals that disperse seeds and pollen," he says.
The alarming decline in old trees in so many types of forest appears
to be driven by a combination of forces, including land clearing,
agricultural practices, man-made changes in fire regimes, logging and
timber gathering, insect attack and rapid climatic changes, says Prof. Jerry
Franklin.

"For example, populations of large old pines in the dry forests of
western North America declined dramatically over the last century
because of selective logging, uncharacteristically severe wildfires, and
other causes," he adds.
The researchers liken the global loss of big trees to the tragedy that
has already befallen the world's largest mammals, such as elephants,
rhinos, tigers and whales, cautioning that almost nowhere do conservation
programs have the time-frames lasting centuries, which are needed to
assure the survival of old trees.
"Just as large-bodied animals such as elephants, tigers and cetaceans
have declined drastically in many parts of the world, a growing body of
evidence suggests that large old trees could be equally imperilled," they
warn.
They call for an urgent world-wide investigation to assess the extent
of big tree loss, and to identify areas where big trees have a better chance
of survival.
Their paper "Rapid Worldwide Declines of Large Old Trees, by
David B. Lindenmayer, William F. Laurance and Jerry F. Franklin appears
in today's issue of the journal Science.
CEED is the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for
Environmental Decisions. CEED's research tackles key gaps in
environmental decision making, monitoring and adaptive management.
Fracking:
From Fidel Castro’s 1/06/12 Speech: The March Towards the Abyss
. . . Just a few months ago I read for the first time some news about
the existence of shale gas. It was stated that the US had reserves to supply
their needs for this fuel for 100 years. Since I now have time to do
research on political, economic and scientific topics that could be really
useful for our peoples, I discretely got in touch with several people living
in Cuba or abroad. Oddly, none of them had heard a word about the
matter. Of course, this wasn’t the first time that happened. One is amazed
about important facts that are hidden in a veritable sea of information,

mixed in with hundreds or thousands of news items that circulate the
planet.
Nevertheless, I persisted in my interest on the subject. Only a few
months have gone by and shale gas is no longer news. Just before the new
year enough information was known to clearly see the world’s inexorable
march towards the abyss, threatened by risks of such great seriousness as
nuclear war and climate change. I have already spoken of the first of these;
about the second one, in the interest of brevity, I shall restrict myself to
reveal known data and some to be known, that no political cadre or
sensible person should ignore.
I don’t hesitate saying that I am observing both facts with the serenity
imparted by the years I have lived, in this spectacular phase of human
history, that have contributed to the education of our brave and heroic
people.
The gas is measured in TCF, which can be referred to in cubic feet or
cubic metres – it is not always explained whether they are dealing with
one or the other – it depends on the system of measurement that is used in
certain countries. On the other hand, when they speak of billions they tend
to refer to the Spanish billion that means a million millions; that figure in
English is called a trillion, and we must keep that in mind when analyzing
the references to the gas which tend to be copious. I shall try to point that
out when necessary.
The American analyst Daniel Yergin, author of a voluminous classic
on the history of oil stated, according to the IPS news agency, that now a
third of all the gas produced in the US is shale gas.
“…exploitation of a platform with six wells can consume 170,000
cubic metres of water and even create harmful effects such as
influencing seismic movements, polluting surface and groundwaters
and affecting the landscape.”
The British BP group informs us that “proven reserves of
conventional or traditional gas on the planet add up to 6,608 billion
―million millions― of cubic feet, some 187 billion cubic metres, […]
and the largest deposits are in Russia (1,580 TCF), Iran (1,045), Qatar

(894), and Saudi Arabia and Turkmenistan with 283 TCF each”. We are
dealing with gas that is being produced and marketed.
“An EIA study ―a US government energy agency ― published in
April of 2011 found practically the same volume (6,620 TCF or 187.4
billion cubic metres) of recoverable shale gas in just 32 countries, and the
giants are: China (1,275 TCF), United States (862), Argentina (774),
Mexico (681), South Africa (485) and Australia (396 TCF)”. Shale gas is
gas de esquisto. Take note that according to what is known, Argentina and
Mexico have almost as much as the United States. China, with larger
deposits, has reserves that equal almost the double of those and 40% more
than the United States.
“…countries secularly dependent on foreign suppliers shall count on
an enormous base of resources in relation to their consumption, such as
France and Poland which import 98 and 64 percent respectively of the gas
they consume, and in shale or lutite rocks they would have reserves
greater than 180 TCF each”.
“To extract it from the lutite ― IPS points out― they resort to a
method called ‘fracking’ (hydraulic fracturing), with the injection of great
amounts of water plus sand and chemical additives. Carbon traces
(proportion of carbon dioxide that is released into the atmosphere) are
much greater than those generated in the production of conventional gas.
“Since we are dealing with bombarding layers of earth crust with
water and other substances, the risk of damaging the subsoil, soil, surface
and groundwater tables, the landscape and communication channels is
greater if the facilities for extracting and transporting the new wealth
presents handling defects or errors.”
Suffice it to point out that among the numerous chemical substances
that are injected with the water to extract this gas we have benzene and
toluene, substances that are terribly carcinogenic.
Lourdes Melgar, expert from the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios
Superiores of Monterrey, has the opinion that:
“‘It is a technology generating much debate and they are resources
located in zones where there is no water…”.

“Gas-bearing lutites ― IPS states― are unconventional hydrocarbon
quarries, encrusted in rock that protects them, therefore fracking is used to
release them on a grand scale.”
“Generation of shale gas involves high volumes of water and the
excavation and fracking generates great amounts of liquid waste that may
contain dissolved chemicals and other pollutants that require treatment
before they are disposed.”
“Production of shale leaped from 11,037 million cubic metres in 2000
to 135,840 million in 2010. In the event of expansion following this pace,
in 2035 it will cover 45 percent of the demand of general gas, according to
EIA.
“Recent scientific research has warned on the negative environmental
profile of lutite gas.
“Professors Robert Howarth, Renee Santoro and Anthony
Ingraffea from Cornell University in the US have concluded that this
hydrocarbon is a greater pollutant than oil and gas, according to the
study ‘Methane and the traces of greenhouse effect gases from natural
gas coming from shale formations’ published in April last year in the
Climatic Change review.
“‘Carbon trace is greater than that from conventional gas or oil,
seen on any time horizon, but particularly within the lapse of 20 years.
Compared to carbon, it is at least 20 percent greater and perhaps
more than double in 20 years’, the report underlined.”
“Methane is one of the most polluting greenhouse effect gases,
responsible for the rise in the planet’s temperature.”
“‘In active extraction areas (one or more Wells in one kilometre)
average and maximum concentrations of methane in wells of drinking
water increased with proximity to the closest gas well and were a danger
for potential explosion’, states the text written by Stephen Osborn, Avner
Vengosh, Nathaniel Warner and Robert Jackson, from Duke State
University.
“These indicators put into question the industry argument that shale
could replace carbon in generating electricity and, therefore be a resource
for mitigating climate change.

“‘It is an adventure that is far too premature and risky’.”
“In April of 2010, the US State Department started up the Shale Gas
Global Initiative to help countries seeking to use that resource in order to
identify and develop it, with the eventual economic benefit for US
transnationals.”
I have been inevitably extensive, I had no other option. I write these
lines for the Cubadebate website and for Telesur, one of the most serious
and honest channels in our long-suffering world.
In order to deal with the subject, I let the holidays of the old and the
New Year slip by.
Nuclear Fallout: Ongoing Tragedy/Disaster In Japan:
EnergyNews:
0:18 AM EST on December 9th, 2012 | 4 comments
Asahi: Fukushima workers report exploitation — Told to be like
kamikaze — Large numbers leaving — “I wonder if we can raise
children”
12:35 AM EST on December 9th, 2012 | 10 comments
Expert: Giant Louisiana sinkhole “has the potential to impact larger
areas” (VIDEO)
05:44 PM EST on December 8th, 2012 | 16 comments
Report: M7.3 quake caused reaction inside Unit 1 at Fukushima
Daiichi — Indications are that something corium related is going on
11:17 AM EST on December 8th, 2012 | 23 comments
“Especially Alarming”: Giant quake of magnitude 8 or greater could
soon strike Japan — Gov’t calls for ‘continued vigilance’
Ongoing Gulf of Mexico Oil Disaster:

Oil Spill Attorney Stuart Smith’s Blog:
Weekend Environmental Must-Reads – December 8-9, 2012
Conflicts, Errors Revealed In Positive Fracking Study
A report that shed favorable light on fracking is at the center of a
controversy at the University of Texas. The head of the school’s Energy
Institute has stepped down and another professor has retired after an
investigation found numerous errors and flaws in the report — and
undisclosed conflicts of interest.
In Wake of Scathing Review of Fracking Report, University of Texas
Revises Conflict of Interest Policies
The University of Texas (UT), Austin, is getting a hard lesson in what
can go wrong if you fail to spot and disclose a potential conflict of
interest. UT has been clobbered with a tough outside review, made public
yesterday by Provost Steven Leslie, of blunders in a controversial study on
the use of hydraulic fracturing to extract natural gas, known as “fracking.”
Hickenlooper: State won’t sue Longmont over fracking ban
The state won’t sue Longmont over its fracking ban, but will support
any oil or gas companies that choose to do so, Gov. John Hickenlooper’s
office confirmed Friday morning.
Judges rule fracking secrecy court case must be heard
A panel of appeals court judges ruled today that a court case over gas
industry secrecy must be heard by a trial court, despite objections from the
gas industry.
Americans Against Fracking formed by 100 groups
A group of over 100 public health, consumer, environmental and
faith-based organizations announced today the launch of Americans
Against Fracking, a national coalition dedicated to banning hydraulic
fracturing, or fracking, and drilling associated with fracking for oil and
natural gas in the United States. Including organizations such as 350.org,
Berks Gas Truth, Breast Cancer Action, CREDO Action, Catskill
Mountain Keeper, Center for Biological Diversity, Delaware Riverkeeper
Network, Democracy for America, Food & Water Watch, Frack Action,

Frack-Free Stark County, Illinois People’s Action and National Nurses
United, Americans Against Fracking supports federal state and local
efforts to ban fracking and to stop practices that facilitate fracking like
natural gas exports, frac sand mining and pipeline construction.
Review: UT Study Declaring Fracking Groundwater-Safe Failed To
Disclose Conflict of Interest, Should Be Withdrawn
An independent review of the University of Texas study that
famously declared fracking could not be tied to groundwater
contamination has recommended that the school retract it.
The fracking boom, as told in six railroad industry graphs
You can learn the story of the fracking boom by looking at one set of
data: railroad shipments. Because, you know, it’s 1890.
Our Lisa Hymas explained how and why oil companies are
increasingly relying on rail shipments; in short, no new pipelines plus a
huge spike in extraction. But how big is that spike? Here is how the
Association of American Railroads depicts it [PDF]
Voters Say: Yes, Fracking Does More Harm Than Good
The more you know about fracking, the more likely you are to
oppose it.
That’s how things played out at the Nov. 30 debate, sponsored by the
Campbell Public Affairs Institute of Syracuse University, at which Cornell
University Professor Robert Howarth and I duked it out with frack
supporters Tim Whitesell and Ed Hinchey.
Yet Another Blow to the Fracking Industry
Weeks after SUNY Buffalo’s upper-level administration gave the
Shale Resources and Society Institute (SRSI) the boot due to its gas
industry public relations effort masked as a “study,” University of Texas-
Austin’s (UT-Austin) administration has somewhat followed suit for its
own “frackademia” study.
Natural Gas Nation: EIA Sees U.S. Future Shaped By Fracking
Truck stops will need restyled fuel pumps. New factories, and some
old ones, will whir to life. Ports will send new tankers onto the open seas,
heralding the return of the United States to the top of the global energy
scene.

All these changes already are in motion, according to the new U.S.
government annual energy outlook, a document that paints the clearest
picture yet of the transformation being wrought by the natural gas boom.
BLM studying massive Wyo. gas field expansion on mostly public land
The Obama administration has taken a major step toward authorizing
what could become one of the nation’s largest natural gas fields in
southern Wyoming that, if built out over the next 15 years, could produce
enough natural gas to heat millions of homes a year for decades.
The oil man who figured out fracking
He cracked the code. That’s what folks in the oilpatch say about
George Mitchell. In the 1970s and ’80s, the country’s conventional, big
pools of natural gas were tapped out. Drillers looked in new geologic
formations, but found themselves stumped.
“We knew the gas was there,” Mitchell tells Marketplace. “We didn’t
know how to get it free.”
Students’ fossil-fuel divestment campaign aims at colleges’ creamy
moral centers
Those kids today, amirite? What with their video games and their
Facebooks and their grassroots organizing to create sociopolitical change.
350.org’s campaign to create pressure on universities to divest from fossil
fuel companies is not just rolling — it’s snowballing.
Testing continues at giant Louisiana sinkhole after
Hydrogen Sulfide detected
There are more developments concerning the giant Louisiana
sinkhole in Assumption Parish and once again, the highly toxic gas
Hydrogen Sulfide is involved.
Officials seek gas source
Dangerous hydrogen sulfide gas was detected Friday in fumes
coming from crude oil drawn from an investigatory well tapped into a
Texas Brine Co. LLC salt cavern in northern Assumption Parish, company
and parish officials said.
BP Oil Spill Flow Rate Vastly Understated For Weeks, Emails Show
Emails that attorneys representing a defendant in the BP oil spill case
plan to introduce in February show for the first time that the oil company

knew the massive scale of the 2010 blowout in the Gulf of Mexico weeks
earlier than previously disclosed.
Gulf of Mexico oysters consumed little,
if any, oil from BP spill, study says
Gulf of Mexico oysters consumed little, if any of the crude oil from
the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill that spewed nearly half a million
tons of crude oil into Gulf waters, according to a recent scientific paper. A
study last year by University of New Orleans oyster biologist Thomas
Soniat similarly found that oysters — at known oil-exposed sites in
Louisiana — showed no contamination or apparent biological signs of
exposure six months after the 2010 spill.
Lawmakers seek probe of sheen near oil spill site
Two Democratic lawmakers are asking the U.S. Coast Guard to
investigate a sheen that appeared last week on the Gulf of Mexico surface
near the site of the BP well that blew out and caused the 2010 oil spill.
BP spill’s socioeconomic damage needs attention, too:
Jeffrey Buchanan
On the heels of a historic criminal plea agreement between BP and
the Justice Department over the 2010 oil spill, questions about how the
money will be spent loom ever larger. When an agreement on civil fines
and environmental damages is reached, how can we make best use of
those potential billions? Can we find ways to restore critical ecosystems
while we help families who have been struggling since the spill devastated
fishing grounds, oyster reefs, a fragile economic system and a way of life?
Panel OKs new formula for BP funds
Representatives from Bay, Walton, Okaloosa and Santa Rosa counties
voted Friday to accept a lesser share of RESTORE Act funds so smaller
counties among Florida’s eight most impacted by the BP oil spill can
receive more.
BP engulfed in lawsuit over 40-day Texas flare
By now images of the April 2010 Gulf oil spill are indelible: The rig
engulfed in smoke, oil gushing into the ocean, beaches stained on the
coast. These images defined the largest environmental disaster in U.S.
history — and sealed BP PLC’s reputation as a corporate polluter.

Oil spill – appropriate measures taken, Minister
The Ministry of Environment and Housing is “committed to ensuring
that all is being done” to limit the environmental impact of oil spills in
Freeport, Grand Bahama and Rock Sound, Eleuthera, a press conference
was told on Thursday.
The inevitable oil spill
For the most part, the government has been rather nonchalant about
the MSC Eugenia oil leak in Bahamian waters.
Yet, this “at sea” event was picked up by the Associated Press and
made international news in places such as Vancouver, Las Vegas, and the
online media behemoth The Huffington Post.
Oil spill investigation will continue
The Public Prosecutor of Curacao (OM) launched a criminal
investigation into the cause of the oil spill since the ‘Oil spill’ of August
18 at Jan Kok. The results of the sample analysis has been in and give,
according to the public, response to further questions.
Keystone Conflict:
Nebraska Firm Reviewing Tar Sands Project Has Ties to Pipeline
Builder
When Nebraska residents showed up for their final chance to speak
out about the proposed Keystone XL pipeline on Tuesday night, they were
greeted at every turn by smiling employees of HDR Engineering, Inc.,
uniformly decked out in khaki pants and blinding white Oxford shirts
embroidered with the company’s corporate logo. HDR, an engineering and
consulting firm based in Omaha, was hired by the state to conduct an
environmental impact assessment of the $7 billion project, which, if
approved, would transport toxic crude oil from the Alberta tar sands fields
across Nebraska’s environmentally sensitive Sandhills and the largest
freshwater aquifer in North America.
Crude Behavior: The Tarnished Legacy of the Tar Sands Industry
If the American dream can be reduced to a single image, it is of the
homestead—a place earned through long days and late nights, hard work,
planning and saving. It represents not only a dream realized, but an

investment in your family and future, and a place that is rightfully all your
own.
Now imagine that home, that achievement, taken away with a knock
at your door, seized in the blink of an eye by a company you’ve never
heard of, stolen away in distant boardrooms without your knowledge or
consent, all of it enabled by the government you pay your taxes to. As
Americans this seems unimaginable, and yet, for those whose homes lie in
the cross-hairs of the tar sands oil industry, it’s a bleak reality.
Environmental activists rally for fracking conference
Environmental activists met Saturday at the University of Baltimore
to organize a push for a legislative ban on the natural gas drilling
technique known as hydraulic fracturing — or fracking — casting the
issue as a fight pitting the little guys versus the lobbyists.
Unlike its Neighbors, Maryland Refuses to Rush Headfirst into
Fracking
Maryland doesn’t want to be another Pennsylvania, Ohio or West Virginia
—at least as far as rushing into shale gas development is concerned.
Maryland inches closer to decision time on hydraulic fracturing
As states in the Mid-Atlantic lined up for the jobs and tax revenue
that would come with drilling deep into the shale to release gas, Maryland
held back.
Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) and other state officials said no thanks,
wary that poisonous chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing could
contaminate groundwater in rural areas where it matters most.
Potential Fracking In Maryland Sparks Controversy
Does it harm or help? That’s the question surrounding a controversial
natural gas drilling method that could come to western Maryland.
Will There Be Fracking by February?
The Cuomo administration could be headed toward approval of
hydraulic fracturing in New York by the end of February, when a 90-day
extension on a rule making process ends.
Fracking is transforming our energy economy–
but it’s also causing earthquakes

In just the past few years a revolution in carbon extraction technology
has radically transformed our energy economy. Previously untapped
natural gas reserves, trapped by giant rock formations thousands of feet
below the Earth’s surface, are now accessible to us thanks to something
called hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” The natural gas boom that we
are now experiencing has cut natural gas prices in half since 2008, and has
hastened the demise of the coal industry, which now only provides a third
of our energy supply. The political establishment has been almost
universal in its praise of this development, calling natural gas a healthier
alternative to oil and coal and “an ideal energy source that we potentially
can use for the next hundred years,” as President Obama put it in July.
Organic message: Fracking and farming don’t mix
“Buy Fresh, Buy Local” has become the mantra of the organic
farming movement in the Northeast, a growing agricultural trend that has
sprouted in the Marcellus Shale region where an equally powerful industry
boom is buying up the land and erecting rigs to extract natural gas.
The Marcellus Shale region of Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York and
West Virginia counts the highest concentration of organic farms, raising
concerns that fracking will jeopardize produce and cause risks to farm
animals. Farming and fracking, many believe, don’t mix.
The fracking dream which is putting Britain’s future at risk
Amid the inky gloom that shrouded George Osborne when he
delivered a wintry autumn statement of more cuts and further tax rises,
there was a dreamy gleam in the eye of the chancellor. Like a Spanish
conquistador setting out for Latin America, he thinks he can find a source
of fabulous riches. This El Dorado is not made of bullion, but it sounds as
good as gold when you hear him and other enthusiasts talk about this
magic stuff. It is natural gas in underground shales. For believers, and
there are now many of them in the Tory party, shale gas is going to
provide Britain with a remarkable bonanza of cheap energy.
Proposed Rules on Fracking Gain Cautious Praise
Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, the controversial process of
shooting water, sand and chemicals underground to retrieve oil or natural
gas trapped in shale rock, has made plenty of headlines in recent years.

But the drilling process involves many other steps beyond breaking up
rock — and several opportunities for things to go wrong.
FPL wants to build major gas pipeline in state
TALLAHASSEE — With utilities relying heavily on natural gas to
fuel power plants, Florida Power & Light is pursuing a plan to add a major
new pipeline that would stretch across hundreds of miles of the state.
Officials seek gas source
Dangerous hydrogen sulfide gas was detected Friday in fumes
coming from crude oil drawn from an investigatory well tapped into a
Texas Brine Co. LLC salt cavern in northern Assumption Parish, company
and parish officials said.
Flaring at Shell Chemical plant in Norco to continue through Sunday
A malfunctioning Shell Chemical unit located on the Motiva
Enterprises campus in Norco that lost power on Thursday was restarted
about 10 p.m. Saturday, according to a news release from the company.
The company warned residents that the flaring and smoke that had
preceded Thursday’s power outage will continue through Sunday.
New evidence suggests BP knowingly downplayed huge scale of oil
leak in 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster
Documents that will be presented to court in February appear to show
that BP knew about the massive scale of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil
blowout weeks earlier than previously stated.
Gulf waters and oil workers must be safe: Frances Beinecke
From out of the Gulf of Mexico this fall come two tragic lessons
about offshore drilling. First, we, as a nation, can’t tolerate companies that
put our workers, waters and wildlife at needless risk. And, second, we’ve
got a long way to go to minimize those risks.
Official: Federal draft on Keystone pipeline due in ‘near future’
A preliminary decision from the U.S. State Department on the fate of
the Keystone XL pipeline project is coming soon, catching some by
surprise because Nebraska’s review of the controversial project is not yet
done.

A State Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity,
said a draft environmental impact statement on the rerouted crude oil
pipeline is coming “in the near future.”
Journal writers claim pipeline risks in Nebraska are manageable
Potential groundwater contamination risks posed by the Keystone
XL pipeline in Nebraska are minimal and manageable under a “riskmanaged”
route proposed by a University of Nebraska-Lincoln water
scientist, claim two writers of a recent journal article.
Worker wants new government to secure safety at Fukushima plant
A man in his 50s hopes that a new government to be formed after the
Dec. 16 Lower House election will protect the health of workers like
himself at the stricken Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, many of whom fear
for their jobs.
Rise of the machines: Hitachi joins robot race to dismantle
Fukushima ruins
Japanese company Hitachi has unveiled a new remote-controlled
robot designed for lifting duties in radioactive areas of Japan’s crippled
Fukushima nuclear power plant. Earlier, Toshiba also demonstrated a
radiation-resistant robot for Fukushima.
Black Liberation/Civil Rights:
Labor:
Economy:
46 Trillion Reasons To Evolve Society Right Now
by
David DeGraw

Due to technological advancements, over the past 35 years there has
been an explosion in production, distribution, profits and wealth creation.
Most of that wealth increase has gone to only one-hundredth of one
percent of the population, to the modern day aristocracy. In the United
States, the 400 richest people now have as much wealth as 185 million
people combined, nearly 60% of the entire population. US millionaire
households have at least $46 trillion in wealth, yet only one-tenth of one
percent of the population makes one million dollars a year.
$46 trillion. Can you comprehend how much money that is and what
could be done with that stunning amount of wealth, the implications, the
possibilities? Especially given the capabilities of modern technology.
Think about how we could evolve society with that astonishing amount of
wealth, and how much better off we would ALL be if we did.
It’s hard to comprehend how much wealth $46 trillion represents.
One trillion is equal to 1000 billion, or $1,000,000,000,000. People cannot
comprehend that much wealth because there is no frame of reference, no
comparison of scale or historical precedent. An entire generation of
stratospheric wealth has been systemically denied to the people and
hoarded into the hands of a few. It's the greatest theft of wealth in history,
a crime against humanity.
Once you wrap your mind around how much wealth $46 trillion is,
and realize how profoundly society can be transformed by it, you begin to
grasp the fact that we’ve been living under neo-feudal rule. If Americans
had a real understanding of how much wealth is being kept from them, we
would have a full-blown societal evolution right now.

There’s no doubt about it; the denial of wealth is what keeps us in
check, in debt. As a wise man once said, “There are two ways to conquer
and enslave a nation. One by sword, the other by debt.” The harsh,
unavoidable truth is that we live in a system of debt slavery. The
indentured servant is now the indebted consumer, indebted to a modern
day aristocracy that thinks we are merely wage slaves and glorified
peasants. Instead of using the advancement of technology and exponential
increase in production, distribution and wealth creation to empower
humanity, these modern neo-feudal lords are pathological in their
shortsighted greed.
When you understand the wealth at hand, you begin to recognize the
crime against humanity that is afoot. We live in the richest, most
technologically advanced society in human history. Yet here we are, in the
21st century, with the highest number of people living in poverty in
American history. People can't afford to pay their medical bills. Millions
upon millions of American families foreclosed on. An all-time record
number of children going hungry, as record-breaking profits and recordbreaking
bonuses are handed out to the bailed out aristocracy. It's a
massive crime against humanity.
We have people walking this earth who crashed the global economy,
then profited from it. They are responsible for the impoverishment of tens
of millions of people, and for their recklessness, they get bailed out and
then have the audacity to not only keep their jobs, but to give themselves
all-time record-breaking bonuses, bonuses on the backs of hardworking
American taxpayers. Their scandalous and shameful behavior makes the
Robber Barons look like Boy Scouts. It's so shortsighted, unstable and
unsustainable. Pathological shortsighted greed is humanity’s most severe
disease.
To paraphrase Guy DeBord, ‘The economy has declared war on
humanity, attacking not only our possibilities for living, but our chances of
survival. When an all-powerful economy lost its reason - that's what
defines these times.’
We anticipate reactionary, propagandized minds impulsively
attempting to dismiss this perspective as a demonization of wealthy

people. To be clear, we’re not against wealthy people; just because you
have wealth doesn't make you a tyrant. It's the people who crashed the
economy and use their money to rig the political system, to rig the legal
system, to rig the market, to rig the rules against hardworking Americans.
It's all the corrupt crony-capitalists we are calling out. In fact, we don’t
blame any single person. It is a systemic problem. It’s our archaic and
incredibly outdated system, a system that’s increasingly vulnerable to, and
easily rigged by, the forces of shortsighted greed.
We know many people within the economic top one percentile who
are using their wealth and resources to improve the human condition in
many different ways. We wish more wealthy people would put their
money where their mouth is. We’re sure they will soon enough, in the
interests of preservation, but just having wealth in no way makes you a
tyrant. Again, when you break it down, it is really only one-hundredth of
one percent of the population that is doing the damage. And ultimately, it
is the political system and mainstream media that allows them to get away
with it, that deceives, dumbs down and mentally conditions the population
to the point where the overwhelming majority remains unaware of their
own power and potential in an incredibly wealthy and technologically
advanced society.
Even more shocking than the $46 trillion and the 400 Americans who
have as much wealth as 185 million Americans combined, is the fact that a
mere 147 tightly knit companies control 40 percent of the global economy.
This is obviously a highly unstable, unsustainable and unhealthy situation.
To paraphrase from several quotes by philosopher and social
psychologist John Dewey:
‘There is no such thing as the liberty or effective power of an
individual, group or class, except in relation to the liberties and effective
powers of other individuals, groups or classes.
Liberty signifies release from the impact of particular oppressive
forces, emancipation from something once taken as a normal part of
human life, but now experienced as bondage. Today, it signifies liberation
from the coercions and repressions that prevent people from participation
in the vast wealth that is presently at hand.

In relations between people, between capital and labor, in our
attitudes toward other members of society, we have now developed a
social conscience and awareness, and situations that would have been
accepted a generation ago are now understood as an intolerable scandal.
Our current crisis continues only because people refuse to look facts
in the face and prefer to feed on illusions produced and circulated by those
in power with an excess that contrasts with their withholding the
necessities of life. The day that a critical mass of people awake to the
realities of the situation, the restoration of freedom will commence.’
Fortunately, that day is now upon us. A critical mass of humanity is
now awake and aware of the obsolete systems that limit our potential.
If the 400 wealthiest people and the CEOs from the 147 most
powerful corporations were not so blinded by shortsighted greed, they
would urgently call for a summit to strategize the most efficient and
effective way to evolve their destructive behavior and use the immense
resources that they are presently in control of to enhance the renaissance
that is just beginning.
We are on the right side of history. We are offering an olive branch.
We come in peace, respect and love. We’re here to amplify the mass
transition into a new age of enlightenment. The Occupy movement was
the first awakening wave from a tsunami of transformation that is just
beginning to wash over the planet. Each successive wave will be more
effective in eradicating humanity’s most severe disease, pathological
shortsighted greed.
Ye are few… hoarding $46 trillion.
You shall reap what you sow. Karma.
As a very wise man once said, “Enlighten the people generally, and
tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at
the dawn of day.”
Just over the horizon shines the first ray of the new rising sun.

Welcome to Renaissance 2.0.
World:
Health, Education, Science and Welfare:
Daily News Digest December 9, 2012
Photo: Hassan Ammar / AP
Egyptian protesters gather outside the presidential palace after
they broke through a barbed wire barricade that was keeping
them from getting closer to the presidential palace, in Cairo,
Egypt, Friday, Dec. 7, 2012. Egypt's political crisis spiraled
deeper into bitterness and recrimination Friday as thousands of
Islamist backers of the president vowed vengeance at a funeral
for men killed in bloody clashes earlier this week and large

crowds of the president's opponents marched on his palace to
increase pressure after he rejected their demands.
Egypt delays early voting on draft constitution
in sign of president yielding to pressure
Signs of retreat by Morsi after thousands protest against vote
Both sides have been accused of using firearms during protests that
left six dead
Alastair Beach
The first signs emerged last night that President Mohamed Morsi's
resolve to change the constitution could be cracking as aides hinted that
the referendum could be cancelled.
Early voting on the draft constitution was postponed in a surprise
move by election committee head Ismail Hamdi, and presidential aides
raised the possibility of cancelling next week's poll as they urged
protesters to show "self-restraint".
The prospect was raised after another day of protest in which
protesters breached the gates of President Morsi's palace and opposition
leaders rejected his call for talks.
Guards moved to secure the door of the palace after its barricade of
barbed wire was cut by demonstrators who swarmed into the compound,
after marching up to eight miles in numbers approaching 10,000.
In a potentially calamitous game of brinkmanship developing
between the nation's rival factions, opposition groups are planning to call
for labour strikes should Mr Morsi continue to ignore their demands to
suspend a vote on the country's new constitution.
Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate who is now
coordinator of the National Salvation Front, was among those saying they
would defy Mr Morsi's request for talks over the referendum due to be
held on 15 December.
The crisis has spurred the opposition to unite under the Front's liberal
coalition after months of nursing often petty divisions. As several
thousand protesters marched for hours in a huge procession across the
capital, descending on the president's east Cairo headquarters, Mr

ElBaradei said "national forces" should treat Mr Morsi's offer as an
exercise in "arm-twisting and imposition of a fait accompli".
One member of the coalition, Shaheer George, told The Independent:
"It's impossible for the referendum to happen now. The judiciary have said
they will not supervise it and there is also the potential for violence. It is
not just a political concern any more, but a security concern."
As a dangerous impasse develops, opposition parties are aware that
ordinary Egyptians provide their primary leverage, and yesterday's
demonstrators included members of all the country's leading liberal
political parties. Opposition groups continue to demand that the president
opens an independent investigation into Wednesday night's violence, in
which six people were killed and more than 600 injured.
Many have accused the Muslim Brotherhood of escalating the trouble
by using firearms against their opponents, although video footage
suggested that weapons were also being used by anti-Morsi protesters.
"We consider the violence an act of war," said Ahmed Khair of the
liberal Free Egyptians Party. "The people are calling for the removal of the
regime.
Protesters Gather as Egyptian Opposition Rejects Dialogue
By
David Kirkpatrick and Alan Cowell

CAIRO — Supporters and opponents of the government of President
Mohamed Morsi staged competing demonstrations on Friday after noon
prayers, throwing Egypt deeper into political crisis.
Thousands of pro-government Islamists attended the funeral of two
men killed in clashes on Wednesday outside the presidential palace, the
site of continuing demonstrations by the opposition. “With blood and soul,
we redeem Islam,” they chanted, while calling opposition leaders
“murderers,” The Associated Press reported.
Simultaneously, thousands of opposition protesters streamed in
separate marches toward the presidential palace, gathering there to shout
“Leave!, Leave,” even though Mr. Morsi does not make his residence in
the building. Speakers accused the Muslim Brotherhood, which Mr. Morsi
once helped lead, of sparking the violence by sending “hired thugs” to
destroy a tent camp set up by the president’s opponents, the news agency
reported.
Rival protests were reported throughout the country, including in
Alexandria in the Nile delta, the tourist center of Luxor and Assiut, in the
south, where marchers chanted “No Brotherhood, no Salafis, Egypt is a
civic state,” the A.P. said.
News reports quoted several leaders of the opposition coalition as
saying they would not join the dialogue proposed by Mr. Morsi in a speech
on Thursday in which he blamed the outbreak of violence on a “fifth
column.” He also vowed to proceed with a referendum on an Islamistbacked
constitution that has prompted deadly street battles between his
supporters and their opponents.
Mr. Morsi spoke a day after the growing antagonism between his
supporters and the secular opposition triggered the worst outbreak of
violence between political factions here since Gamal Abdel Nasser’s coup
six decades ago. By the time the fighting ended, six people were dead and
hundreds were wounded.
The violence also led to resignations that rocked the government, as
advisers, party members and the head of the commission overseeing the
planned vote on a new constitution stepped down, citing the bloodshed.

“The National Salvation Front is not taking part in the dialogue, that
is the official stance,” Ahmed Said, a member of the coalition and head of
the liberal Free Egyptians Party, told Reuters.
Several other prominent opposition figures, including Mohamed
ElBaradei, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency,
said they would not participate.
In a message on Twitter, Mr. ElBaradei said the president’s offer
“lacks the basics of real dialogue.”
“We are for dialogue that is not based on arm-twisting and imposing
a fait accompli,” he said.
The sight of protesters on Cairo’s streets has been common since the
beginnings of Egypt’s transition toward democracy that began with the
ouster of former President Hosni Mubarak last year.
In the latest protests, the target of the demonstrations has been the
presidential palace in the wealthy suburb of Heliopolis, where protesters
converged on Friday.
Since clashes there earlier this week, the elite presidential guard has
ringed the palace with barbed wire, tanks and armored vehicles. After Mr.
Morsi’s speech on Thursday, his opponents mocked his words and called
for new demonstrations on Friday.
Some observers said the president speech echoed his predecessor, Mr.
Mubarak, who always saw “hidden hands” behind public unrest. Mr.
Morsi said that corrupt beneficiaries of Mr. Mubarak’s autocracy had been
“hiring thugs and giving out firearms, and the time has come for them to
be punished and penalized by the law.” He added, “It is my duty to defend
the homeland.”
Mr. Morsi received a phone call on Thursday from President Obama,
who expressed his “deep concern” about the deaths and injuries, the White
House said in a statement.
“The president emphasized that all political leaders in Egypt should
make clear to their supporters that violence is unacceptable,” the statement
said, chastising Mr. Morsi and the opposition leaders as failing to urge
their supporters to pull back during the fight.

Prospects for a political solution also seemed a casualty, as both sides
effectively refused to back down on core demands.
The opposition leadership refused to negotiate until Mr. Morsi
withdrew a decree that put his judgments beyond judicial review until the
referendum — which he refused to do. And it demanded that the
referendum be canceled, which he also refused.
The hostilities have threatened to undermine the legitimacy of the
constitutional referendum with concerns about political coercion. The
feasibility of holding the vote also appears uncertain amid attacks on
Brotherhood offices around the country and open street fighting in the
shadow of the presidential palace.
Though Mr. Morsi spoke of opening a door for dialogue and
compromise, leaders of the opposition and the thousands of protesters
surrounding his palace dismissed his conspiratorial saber rattling as an
echo of Mr. Mubarak. And his tone, after violence many here view as a
national tragedy, seemed only to widen the gulf between his Islamist
supporters and their secular opponents over his efforts to push through the
referendum on an Islamist-backed charter approved over the objections of
other factions and the Coptic Christian church.
Outside the palace, demonstrators huddled around car radios to listen
to Mr. Morsi’s words and mocked his efforts to blame outside infiltrators
for the violence, which began when thousands of his Islamist supporters
rousted an opposition sit-in.
“So we are the ones who attacked him, the ones who attacked the sitin?”
one protester asked sarcastically. “So we are the ones with the swords
and weapons and money?” asked another. Read More
Quotes of the Day:
Image of the Day:
Videos of the Day:
Pearl Harbor Attack: FDR left the door open

End Wall Street’s Wars!
Occupy Wall Street!
Occupy Wall Street is the Only Organization
That Identifies The Enemy —
The 1% That Own and Control The Wealth!
1960s The Realist — One Nation Under God/1%
(Unlike The Trade Union Misleaders
Nor The Misleaders Of The Oppressed
Who Strive To Be In ‘Partnership’ With The 1%)
1960s The Realist — One Nation Under God/1%
(Unlike The Trade Union Misleaders
Nor The Misleaders Of The Oppressed
Who Strive To Be In ‘Partnership’ With The 1%)
Occupy Wall Street — ‘We Are The 99%’
The resistance continues at Liberty Square:
U.S.
Black Farmers ~ Pigford II Ombudsman Report ~ up to 1.25 Billion
dollars of payments due.
by John Zippert
Director of Program Operations for the Federation of Southern
Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund

The ongoing quest for a measure of justice for Elder Black Farmers
throughout America continues. Read the Pigford Ombudsman report on
the Pigford II ~ Black Farmers Case. 33,089 claim packages are being
processed and under close review. Black Agriculture throughout America
were once nearly 15% of all U.S. Agriculture producers, today less than
2%. A new generation of Black Agriculture producers must build on our
distant creation of Agriculture in ancient Africa, learn from the destruction
of Black Agriculture producers in America and build a new Golden Age
for Black Agriculture producers globally.
The ongoing quest for a measure of justice for Elder Black
Farmers throughout America continues. Read the Pigford
Ombudsman report on the Pigford II ~ Black Farmers Case.
33,089 claim packages are being processed and under close
review. Black Agriculture throughout America were once nearly
15% of all U.S. Agriculture producers, today less than 2%. A new
generation of Black Agriculture producers must build on our
distant creation of Agriculture in ancient Africa, learn from the
destruction of Black Agriculture producers in America and buiild
a new Golden Age for Black Agriculture producers globally.
Black Farmers Journey
EPES, ALABAMA ~ The court appointed Ombudsman in the Pigford
II "In re Black farmers" discrimination case issued their first report on the
implementation of the settlement agreement, which is dated November 6,
2012.

The Ombudsman, Stephen Carpenter and his deputy, Alva Waller,
were appointed by Federal District Judge Paul Friedman to provide an
independent review of the lawsuit implementation process and bring
specific issues and problems experienced by the Black farmer claimants to
the attention of the Judge.
In the report, the Ombudsman states, "As of October 2, 2012,
approximately 39,905 claim packages had been submitted to the Claims
Administrator in Portland Oregon. Also, as of October 12, 2012, out of a
total of 39,905 claim packages submitted, about 33,089 had been
determined by the Claims Administrator to be complete. Class Counsel
lawyers signed Claim Forms for about 12,984 claimants." The
Ombudsman noted, then, that "26,921 were submitted without a Class
Counsel signature."
No mention is made in the report on the number of "neutrals"
reviewing claims or the number reviewed per day or exactly when the
review process will be complete. What the report says on these matters is,
"The next steps in the claims process are for the Claims Administrator to
determine if the claim packages submitted are complete and timely and for
Track A and Track B neutrals to evaluate claims. These evaluations are
well underway. After the evaluations are complete, claimants will be
contacted and eventually payments will be made to claimants. The
implementation of these aspects of the Settlement Agreement will be
considered in future Ombudsman reports."
The report is generally complimentary of the efforts of Class Counsel
and the Claims Administrator to implement the settlement agreement
calling it a "complicated and formidable undertaking."
They say, "In sum, the In re Black Farmers Settlement Agreement
created a demanding process that called for the evaluation and sign-up of
tens of thousands of claimants. We conclude that the parties and neutrals
acted in good faith to implement this phase of the Settlement Agreement."
The report goes into great detail on the implementation of the
settlement but does not answer issues that have been raised by claimants
who have been left out of the settlement and hoped that the Ombudsman
would help to address and correct these problems.

In their report, the Ombudsman states on page 7 of the report,
"According to the In re Black Farmers settlement, only people who made a
written request to be a part of the Pigford lawsuit can be part of the In re
Black Farmers class. That written request must have been made between
October 13, 1999 and June 18, 2008 to one of five entities: the Court, the
Pigford Monitor, the Pigford Facilitator, the Pigford Arbitrator, or the
Pigford Adjudicator. In addition, a person cannot be an In re Black
Farmers class member if he or she actually participated in Pigford."
This statement excludes people who wrote to their U.S.
Congressperson or Senator; who called the Pigford Facilitator to be
included in the case during the appropriate time period but did not followup
with a written request; and those who submitted their request to
community organizations and lawyers that were not directly a part of the
official five entities. Many farmers who feel they were discriminated
against by USDA tried to get in the case by one of these methods and were
unsuccessful. These claimants are disappointed that the Ombudsman was
not more forceful in advocating for their inclusion with the Judge or Class
Counsel.
Without additional information from Class Counsel, the Judge or the
Ombudsman, it is difficult to determine when the claims evaluation period
will end and the payment process will begin. Many claimants are
wondering when they might receive payment under the settlement.
The Network of Black Farmer Organizations has urged the parties,
particularly Class Counsel and the Judge, to be more open and transparent
about the settlement claim review process and report progress on a
publicly available website.
President Obama and Congress have made $1.25 billion dollars
available for all of the costs and expense in settling the case. At least a
billion dollars and perhaps a little more will be available to be distributed
to Black Farmers in the settlement.
The Labor/Management ‘Partnership’ Approved
Pauperization of the Working Class:
Whatever Happened To The Labor Demand For

‘Equal For Equal Work’?!
America’s two-tiered future:
The deterioration of the once-mighty middle class
Greg Keenan
Geoff Robins For The Globe and Mail)
Elisa Gurule, 34, is not sure what future she has in the auto industry.
Her current job, installing seat belts and windshields at a Chrysler
assembly plant in Sterling Heights, Mich., pays $17.53 an hour.
When Sean Crawford and three co-workers hit the road for their daily
carpool to a General Motors Co. factory, they talk about drama at work,
home renovations and cars. But they seldom talk about money.
That’s because inside the car rolling along I-75 out of Flint, Mich.,
there’s a two-track version of America’s future: one with a secure,
traditional path to middle-class comfort and the other to a less-prosperous
existence with lower pay, no pension and meagre benefits.
Mr. Crawford and his colleague Dave Duehring are so-called tier-two
workers, employees hired in recent years at lower wages as part of the
Detroit Three’s bid to ratchet down costs and become globally
competitive. For them, the classic middle-class life of a house in the
suburbs, a new car every five years or so and maybe a cottage or regular
travel isn’t possible on pay of $18 (U.S.) an hour.
By contrast, the other men who share the ride and work on the same
assembly line get paid a lot more – $28 an hour, and they enjoy better
benefits and can look forward to a healthy pension. The higher wage
equals about $20,000 more a year.

There’s the odd jab at each other about their economic circumstances
as they make the 45-minute drive through the lake-sprinkled country
between Flint and GM’s Orion assembly plant in the leafy northern
suburbs of Detroit, Mr. Crawford says. But “a tier two will pretty much
never ever want to hear a tier one complain about their money problems,”
he says. “Ever.”
Mr. Crawford and his tier-two co-worker are on the leading edge of a
transformation of the auto industry that is contributing to a profound shift
in American society – the deterioration of the once-mighty middle class.
It’s a pivotal issue in the U.S. election and the central challenge
facing the next president. A frustrated electorate is looking for a real plan
to boost the ailing economy and restore middle class prosperity.
President Barack Obama is promising middle-class Americans that he
will extend tax cuts given to them by George W. Bush. Republican
challenger Mitt Romney bemoans how the middle class got crushed during
the past four years and promises to extend the Bush tax cuts and reduce
taxes by another 20 per cent.
Experts are skeptical, however, that easing the tax burden or other
promises made from political podiums will reverse the decline.
“Neither one of these guys is going to deliver a hell of a lot,” says
Tim Smeeding, a professor at the University of Wisconsin and director of
the school’s Institute for Research on Poverty.
The 2000s were a cruel decade for middle-class America. Incomes
dropped, net worth fell and jobs that once promised a middle-class
lifestyle were vaporized amid globalization and the restructuring of entire
industries such as airlines, steel and pharmaceuticals. As if that wasn’t
enough, the decade ended with the real estate crash and the Great
Recession.
The growth in income inequality and the crisis facing the middle
class have spawned fears that the long era of economic growth that turned
the United States into the wealthiest nation on earth has ground to a halt.
The risk is that the country is entering a period of economic stagnation,
shattering the optimism that led generations of Americans to improve their
lot in life.

The Evaporation Of Dreams
The recovery from the Great Recession is the first economic
comeback that has skipped the middle class, Prof. Smeeding notes.
U.S. census data show the percentage of U.S. households with
median incomes between $50,000 and $149,999 fell to 41 per cent last
year from 44.5 per cent in 2000. Households earning less than $15,000,
meanwhile, jumped to 13.5 per cent from 11.1 per cent in 2000.
The median U.S. household income itself tumbled to $50,054 last
year from $54,932 in inflation-adjusted 2011 dollars.
“Without a middle class, this society is in big trouble, big trouble,”
Prof. Smeeding says. “If they’re not spending money, that lowers the
demand for all goods and services.”
In the days before globalization, when U.S. companies had little
competition in their home market, middle-class demand for bigger houses
and the furniture and appliances to fill them – plus the vehicles to stuff
into two-car garages – fed a virtuous circle.
But when the middle class is squeezed as it has been for more than a
decade, the overall economy takes a hit.
The squeeze has affected more than just factory workers. Tens of
thousands of Americans in white-collar positions also lost their jobs in
restructurings and the recession.
Bob Poropatich, who was laid off in June, 2008, from his $85,000-ayear
job designing store displays for American Eagle Outfitters, can testify
to how losing a good job forces cutbacks in personal spending.
“I haven’t been anywhere on vacation since ’08,” says the 60-yearold
Pittsburgh resident, who now works 32 hours a week earning $11 an
hour stocking shelves at grocery stores. “I haven’t done anything. Haven’t
seen a movie. Haven’t bought gifts.”
He will have trouble getting to his part-time job if anything happens
to his six-year-old Subaru Forester.
“I pray that if I take it in for an oil change they don’t find $2,000 of
repairs on it,” he says.

The Detroit auto makers helped create middle-class America back in
the day when they were called the Big Three and there were no Subarus on
U.S. roads – or Hondas, Hyundais or Toyotas for that matter.
The $5-a-day wage that Henry Ford began paying his workers in
1914 was generous at the time and was aimed in part at giving them
enough money to buy the Model Ts they were bolting together. By the
middle of the 20th Century, workers at Chrysler Corp., Ford Motor Co.
and General Motors Corp. earned higher wages and better benefits than
any other factory workers.
The work was – and still is – exhausting and mind-numbing, but the
money allowed workers to flock to suburbia, buy new cars, cottages and
boats and pay university tuition for their children.
What was good for General Motors was good for the country, and
people in the heart of the auto industry in Michigan were better off than
much of the rest of the country.
But the upheaval in the sector has changed all that. Read More
Obamacare architect leaves White House
for pharmaceutical industry job
Few people embody the corporatist revolving door greasing
Washington as purely as Elizabeth Fowler
Glenn Greenwald

Photograph: screen grab, Bill Moyers' Journal
Former WellPoint VP Elizabeth Fowler sits behind her boss, Sen. Max
Baucus, as he announces in 2009 that the health care bill will have no
public option.
When the legislation that became known as "Obamacare" was first
drafted, the key legislator was the Democratic Chairman of the Senate
Finance Committee, Max Baucus, whose committee took the lead in
drafting the legislation. As Baucus himself repeatedly boasted, the
architect of that legislation was Elizabeth Folwer, his chief health policy
counsel; indeed, as Marcy Wheeler discovered, it was Fowler who actually
drafted it. As Politico put it at the time: "If you drew an organizational
chart of major players in the Senate health care negotiations, Fowler
would be the chief operating officer."
What was most amazing about all of that was that, before joining
Baucus' office as the point person for the health care bill, Fowler was the
Vice President for Public Policy and External Affairs (i.e. informal
lobbying) at WellPoint, the nation's largest health insurance provider
(before going to WellPoint, as well as after, Fowler had worked as Baucus'
top health care aide). And when that health care bill was drafted, the
person whom Fowler replaced as chief health counsel in Baucus' office,
Michelle Easton, was lobbying for WellPoint as a principal at Tarplin,
Downs, and Young.
Whatever one's views on Obamacare were and are: the bill's mandate
that everyone purchase the products of the private health insurance
industry, unaccompanied by any public alternative, was a huge gift to that
industry; as Wheeler wrote at the time: "to the extent that Liz Fowler is the
author of this document, we might as well consider WellPoint its author as
well." Watch the five-minute Bill Moyers report from 2009, embedded
below, on the key role played in all of this by Liz Fowler and the
"revolving door" between the health insurance/lobbying industry and
government officials at the time this bill was written and passed.
More amazingly still, when the Obama White House needed someone
to oversee implementation of Obamacare after the bill passed, it chose . . .
Liz Fowler. That the White House would put a former health insurance

industry executive in charge of implementation of its new massive health
care law was roundly condemned by good government groups as at least a
violation of the "spirit" of governing ethics rules and even "gross", but
those objections were, of course, brushed aside by the White House. She
then became Special Assistant to the President for Healthcare and
Economic Policy at the National Economic Council.
Now, as Politico's "Influence" column briefly noted on Tuesday,
Fowler is once again passing through the deeply corrupting revolving door
as she leaves the Obama administration to return to the loving and
lucrative arms of the private health care industry:
"Elizabeth Fowler is leaving the White House for a senior-level
position leading 'global health policy' at Johnson & Johnson's
government affairs and policy group."
The pharmaceutical giant that just hired Fowler actively supported
the passage of Obamacare through its membership in the Pharmaceutical
Researchers and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) lobby. Indeed,
PhRMA was one of the most aggressive supporters - and most lavish
beneficiaries - of the health care bill drafted by Fowler. Mother Jones'
James Ridgeway proclaimed "Big Pharma" the "big winner" in the health
care bill. And now, Fowler will receive ample rewards from that same
industry as she peddles her influence in government and exploits her
experience with its inner workings to work on that industry's behalf, all of
which has been made perfectly legal by the same insular, Versailles-like
Washington culture that so lavishly benefits from all of this.
It's difficult to find someone who embodies the sleazy, antidemocratic,
corporatist revolving door that greases Washington as
shamelessly and purely as Liz Fowler. One of the few competitors I can
think of is Adm. Michael McConnell, who parlayed his military and
intelligence career into a lucrative gig at Booz Allen, one of the nation's
largest private intelligence contractors; then became George W Bush's
Director of National Intelligence (where he spearheaded a huge gift to the
telecom industry - retroactive immunity shielding it from all
accountability for its participation in the illegal Bush NSA eavesdropping
program - as well as continued his Booz Allen work of privatizing

intelligence and surveillance functions); then returned to the loving arms
of Booz Allen, where he now exploits his national security credentials on
behalf of industry interests (by, for instance, spearheading the fearmongering
campaign about cyber-warfare in order to advocate for security
programs that would amply enrich Booz Allen's clients).
This is precisely the behavior which, quite rationally, makes the
citizenry so jaded about Washington. It's what ensures that the interests of
the same permanent power factions are served regardless of election
outcomes. It's what makes a complete mockery out of claims of
democracy. And it's what demonstrates that corporatism and oligarchy are
the dominant forms of government in the US:
Environment:
Peter Lehner’s Blog
See No Evil: the FDA's Failure to Respond to Known Health Hazards
Peter Lehner – Executive Director
Posted December 7, 2012 in Health and the Environment
Tags: antibiotics, carcinogen, coalfiredpowerplants, estabrook, FDA,
fish, food, gulfofmexico, lindane, meat, mercury, pesticides,
salmonella, shrimp
Theo Spencer’s Blog
Sandy Highlights One Sphere of Climate-Related Water Impacts,
Midwest Drought Another
Posted December 4, 2012 in Curbing Pollution, Green Enterprise,
Solving Global Warming
Tags: extremeweather, global warming pollution, hurricanesandy,
Carolina Herrera’s Blog

Wake up and smell the (carbon neutral) coffee and other positive
climate action from Latin America
Carolina Herrera – Latin America Advocate
Posted December 7, 2012
Tags: climatechagne, cop18, costarica, doja, dominicanrepublic,
globalwarming, international, latinamerica
Amy Mall’s Blog
Many more fracking tragedies for farmers and ranchers
in North Dakota
Posted December 7, 2012 in Health and the Environment
Tags: bakken, fracking, frackingairpollution, gasdrilling,
hydraulicfracturing, hydrofracking, naturalgas, northdakota, oil,
oilandgas
Jennifer Sass’s Blog
H.R. 6564 - The House Republican Bill to Destroy Scientific Oversight
Jennifer Sass – Senior Scientist
Posted December 7, 2012
Tags: ACC, cancer, conflict, FACA, HR6564, republican, SAB,
science, toxicchemicals
Rob Perks’s Blog
Now is the time for more transit, not less
Rob Perks – Transportation Advocacy Director
Posted December 6, 2012 in Living Sustainably, Moving Beyond Oil
Tags: charlotte, highway, lightrail, mccrory, publictransit,
publictransportation, rail, rails, road, train, transit, transportation
Daniel Rosenberg’s Blog
Rush to Lack of Judgment: Senate Poised to Waive Toxics Law as
Expert Science Panel Highlights Health Risks of Lead on Military
Shooting Ranges

Posted December 6, 2012 in Curbing Pollution, Environmental
Justice, Health and the Environment, Living Sustainably, Saving
Wildlife and Wild Places, The Media and the Environment, U.S. Law
and Policy
Tags: lead, perchlorate, takeouttoxics, toxicchemicals, TSCA
Theo Spencer’s Blog
Sandy Highlights One Sphere of Climate-Related Water Impacts,
Midwest Drought Another
Posted December 4, 2012 in Curbing Pollution, Green Enterprise,
Solving Global Warming
Tags: extremeweather, global warming pollution, hurricanesandy, pnp
‘Fiddling While Rome Burns’ Department:
Army Corps Declines Request To Boost Mississippi River Level
Barges floating on the Mississippi River near Burlington, Iowa,
along the Illinois border. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
The Army Corps of Engineers has turned back requests by federal
lawmakers and the barge industry to release more water from the Missouri
River, believing the drought-starved Mississippi River it feeds still will
remain open to shipping despite mounting concerns about water levels.
Army Assistant Secretary Jo-Ellen Darcy, in a Thursday letter
obtained by The Associated Press, told lawmakers from Mississippi River

states she doesn’t consider it necessary to boost Missouri River flows into
the Mississippi — something the politicians urgently had sought.
Darcy, a top Army Corps official, noted this week’s revised National
Weather Service forecast, which showed the Mississippi’s level wasn’t
falling as rapidly as expected. She also said the corps is hastening its push
to rid the river of rock pinnacles south of St. Louis that endanger barges
when the water level is low.
Darcy also reinforced what the corps has been insisting for weeks:
Reducing the Missouri’s flow is necessary because low levels in its upper
basin could negatively affect recreation in the upper Missouri while
impacting drinking water supplies, animal habitat and hydropower. Darcy
added that the corps is legislatively bound to act in the best interest of the
Missouri River, with what happens on the Mississippi incidental.
U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill did not greet the letter warmly. The
Missouri Democrat asserted Friday the corps would be to blame if
shipping on the Mississippi — a corridor on which everything from grain
to coal, chemicals and petroleum products is transported — gets slowed or
shut down completely.
“Missouri businesses and jobs depend on our ability to continue
commercial navigation along the Mississippi — and the dropping water
level can’t be ignored,” McCaskill said. “The Army Corps is now saying
that we can continue navigation without increased flows from the
Missouri, and we should hold them accountable if that prediction doesn’t
pan out.”
The corps last month began paring the outflow from an upper
Missouri River dam in South Dakota with plans to gradually cut about
two-thirds of the flow through next Tuesday. That action stoked concerns
among Mississippi River barge operators, given that Missouri River water
accounts for about 78 percent of the Mississippi at St. Louis.
Of chief concern is a pivotal 180-mile stretch of the Mississippi from
St. Louis to the confluence with the Ohio River at Cairo, Ill., where heavy
two-way traffic includes shipments going south to the Gulf of Mexico, as
well as transports from the Illinois and Ohio rivers headed north to
Chicago and Minneapolis. There, the Mississippi is 15 to 20 feet below

normal due to months of drought, and rock pinnacles at two southern
Illinois sites could make it difficult, if not impossible, for barges to pass if
the river drops much lower.
Several Midwest lawmakers met privately with Darcy last week,
asking her to analyze whether additional water from the Missouri can be
released without sacrificing the corps’ objectives upriver from the South
Dakota dam. Darcy’s letter was their answer — and to Democratic Sen.
Dick Durbin of Illinois, an understandable one, in that the corps is bound
legislatively to be the Missouri’s steward, independent of any
consequences for the Mississippi.
“She believes releasing water could threaten the Missouri River
navigation in 2013. That’s her technical conclusion, which is not good
news for us downriver,” Durbin told The Associated Press. He said he
would seek another meeting next week with Darcy, and would ask barge
operators and other Mississippi-dependent industries to attend so Darcy
can “spell out to them in as much detail as possible her vision of getting
through this challenge without serious disruption to the economy.”
The Mississippi’s level at St. Louis was around 13 feet Friday —
about four feet above the point at which the U.S. Coast Guard has said
could necessitate further barge restrictions. Previous forecasts suggested
the river could dip to the 9-foot level as early as Sunday, though the
National Weather Service said this week it believes the river will stay
above the 9-foot threshold until about Dec. 29.
As for the rock pinnacles, the corps originally planned to hire a
contractor by early February to blow up the rocks, but at the request of
lawmakers have hastened that effort, with Darcy saying it could begin this
month.
All the while, the corps continues to look at options to ensure the
Mississippi stays open.
Last month, the agency released water from an upper Mississippi
River reservoir in Minnesota, adding a few inches of depth. Mike
Petersen, a corps spokesman in St. Louis, said the agency also is
considering reducing the water level at five lakes in Missouri and Illinois,
allowing some of that water to flow into Mississippi tributaries. But

Petersen said that option is complicated by the fact the drought has left
four of those lakes too low for additional water removal.
Water Quality Water Pollution
Industrial agriculture is among the leading causes of water pollution
in the United States today. In the 2000 National Water Quality Inventory
conducted by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), agricultural
activity was identified as a source of pollution for 48% of stream and river
water, Fand for 41% of lake water.
Water pollution from industrial farms not only damages the
environment and kills wildlife, but it can also sicken and kill people. And
since these farms exercise little restraint when it comes to water usage,
they tend to waste large quantities of water, even when neighboring
communities are experiencing water shortages. Because small, sustainable
farms are more integrated with their surrounding communities, they pay
closer attention to the ways that they use water and how their practices
affect local water supplies.
Sources of Pollutants
Most water pollution from industrial farms results from the storage
and disposal of animal waste. Industrial livestock farms store manure and
other farm wastes in gigantic tanks known as “lagoons” which can hold
millions of gallons of manure and urine. Unfortunately, these lagoons
often leak and—during large storms—they may rupture or simply
overflow. When this happens, the environmental damage can be
devastating, as raw manure is up to 160 times more toxic than raw
municipal sewage. FLeaking lagoons also release antibiotic residues and
harmful bacteria that can leach into water supplies.
In order to dispose of manure after it’s been stored in lagoons,
industrial farms spray the waste onto farm fields as fertilizer.
Unfortunately, these farms produce far more waste than can be applied to
fields, and once the saturation point has been reached, the waste runs off
into nearby water systems. The most common form of water pollution in
the United States is excess levels of nitrogen or phosphorous, both of
which are largely caused by fertilizer runoff. FWhen manure is spread on

fields as a fertilizer, it can also introduce some of the more toxic
substances present in livestock excretions, such as pharmaceuticals For
bacteria. FWater pollution from manure as well as synthetic fertilizers can
lead to serious environmental damage and harm human health.
Types and Effects of Pollutants
Agricultural water pollution can have variety of negative effects. Not
only do substantial environmental problems result, but many of the
pollutants produced by farms (minerals, chemicals and pathogens, to name
a few) can make water unsafe for human consumption.
Case in Point: Fish Kills
By polluting the nation’s waterways, a single factory farm has the
ability to negatively affect whole regions, as was the case when manure
spilled from a ruptured tank on a 3,000-head dairy farm in upstate New
York in August 2005. Three million gallons of cow manure poured into the
Black River, polluting an area one-fourth the size of the Exxon Valdez
spill. FThe New York State Department of Environmental Conservation
cited the farm for numerous environmental and permit violations, and
estimated that this spill killed around 200,000 to 250,000 fish.
Nutrients
Nutrients, such as nitrogen and phosphorous, are the minerals in
fertilizer that promote plant growth. But due to the over-fertilization of
cropland, far more nitrogen and phosphorous are applied to fields than are
removed by crops. FExcess nutrients in water cause harmful plant growth
—commonly referred to as “algal bloom,” which can cause fish kills.
Nitrogen can also degrade ecosystems by making water more acidic and
killing some aquatic plants while promoting the growth of other kinds of
plants.
Case in Point: Nitrogen and Dead Zones
Excess nutrients in bodies of water can contribute to the excessive
growth of plant life, a process known as “eutrophication,” which, in turn,
can make water “hypoxic,” or low in oxygen. FThe effects of
eutrophication can be vast. According to the USDA, “as much as 15
percent of the nitrogen fertilizer applied to cropland in the Mississippi
River Basin makes its way to the Gulf of Mexico.” This pollution is one

of the leading causes of the so-called Gulf “Dead Zone,” an oxygendeprived
area as large as 8,000 square miles—almost the size of New
Jersey—in which no fish can survive.
Ammonia and Nitrates
Livestock manure is high in ammonia concentrations, Fand dissolved
ammonia in water is not only highly toxic to fish, Fbut can also be
converted to dangerous nitrates. FElevated nitrate levels in drinking water
are highly poisonous to humans, causing potentially fatal oxygen levels in
babies (known as “blue-baby syndrome”), spontaneous abortions, and
possibly cancer. FIn a sample of wells surveyed by the US Geological
Survey from 1993 to 2000, 2 percent of public-supply and 9 percent of the
domestic wells more common in rural areas were found to have nitrate
concentrations higher than the EPA’s maximum allowable level. FThe
EPA estimates that about 1.3 million households in counties with industrial
livestock facilities get their water from wells with dangerously high nitrate
levels.
Pathogens and other microorganisms
Manure contains a high level of pathogens (disease-causing
microorganisms). When the waste is applied to fields, those pathogens can
be transferred to local water supplies during a run off from either irrigation
or rainfall. FThe impact of pathogens from manure is severe: according to
the Centers for Disease Control, in every waterborne disease outbreak in
the United States from 1986 to 1998 where the pathogen could be
identified, it most likely originated in livestock.
Some other waterborne microorganisms do not originate on farms,
but develop as a result of eutrophication caused by high nutrient levels.
Pfiesteria piscicida, for example, thrives in many areas where algal blooms
grow, and causes lesions in fish and large-scale fish kills. FIt can also
cause a range of symptoms in humans, including respiratory and eye
irritation, gastrointestinal problems, fatigue, as well as skin problems and
cognitive symptoms such as memory loss and confusion.
Antibiotics and Hormones
Antibiotics and artificial growth hormones are commonly used on
industrial farms, either injected directly into the livestock or added to their

feed. Large amounts of both substances end up being excreted by animals
and can thus pollute water along with everything else in livestock waste.
Some hormones can remain functional in manure up to 270 days after
excretion, and there have been many documented cases of hormones
discovered miles downstream of farms. FAlthough it is unclear whether
these hormone concentrations can be high enough to affect humans, they
have been shown to compromise the reproductive processes of fish. F
An estimated 75% of all antibiotics administered to livestock are
excreted, Fand for certain common antibiotics that figure can be as high
as 90%. F. The overuse of antibiotics for livestock contributes to the
development of antimicrobial-resistant bacteria, and some studies suggest
that growth of these resistant bacteria may be promoted in waterways with
high levels of antibiotics. FNumerous studies have demonstrated that
waterways are a prominent means of transmitting these dangerous types of
bacteria to humans.
Heavy Metals and Salts
Some heavy metals, such as copper and zinc, are essential nutrients
for animal growth—especially for cattle, swine, and poultry. FHowever,
such elements are often present in animal feed in concentrations far higher
than necessary for animal health, along with other heavy metals such as
chromium, lead, arsenic and cadmium. FFarm animals excrete excess
heavy metals in their manure—which in turn gets spread as fertilizer,
leading to soil and water pollution. The health hazards resulting from
exposure to heavy metals in water include kidney problems from
cadmium; nervous system disorders, kidney problems and headaches from
lead; and both cardiovascular and nervous system problems from arsenic,
which is also known to cause cancer.
Many salts are also present in large quantities in manure, including
sodium, calcium, magnesium, potassium, chloride, sulfate, bicarbonate,
carbonate, and nitrate. When introduced to the environment, these salts
increase the salinity of waterways, leading to changes in aquatic
ecosystems and making water brackish, and therefore unfit for drinking.
Organic Matter and Other Solids

In addition to the biodegradable organic matter naturally present in
manure, animal bedding, wasted feed, soil, dust, hair and feathers are often
mixed with manure in storage and can end up in waterways. The
decomposition of organic matter can cause increased levels of bacteria,
which in turn reduces oxygen levels in water and kills fish. FThis
decomposition can also negatively affect the color, taste, and smell of
water.
Wells and Groundwater
Although much of the water used in the U.S. is obtained from surface
water sources, many families continue to use wells to draw water from the
ground. FIn fact, groundwater is the source of drinking water for 46% of
the U.S. population and for 99% of the population living in rural areas. F
While public drinking water systems are regulated by the EPA,
private drinking water wells are not regulated, and are not required to meet
EPA clean water standards. Furthermore, unlike public water systems,
private wells aren’t required to undergo routine testing by experts. As a
result, families that rely upon private drinking water wells are especially
vulnerable to the harmful effects of water pollution from factory farms. In
U.S. counties that have industrial farms, approximately 13.5 million
households depend on domestic drinking water wells.
Water Usage and Conservation
Agriculture uses a staggering amount of water on an annual basis. In
2000, 41% of all freshwater used by humans in the United States was used
for agriculture. FPerhaps even more notable is that agriculture accounted
for more than 80% of US “consumptive use” of water—that share of water
which is not returned quickly to the environment. \
Water overuse is particularly a problem on industrial farms that
do not tailor their farming practices on a case by case basis. For
example, a dairy that uses an automatic “flushing” system to clean out
its animal houses uses an average of 150 gallons of water per cow per
day, compared to an average of 5-10 gallons used by farms that
monitor their water use in order to conserve it. Not only does water
overuse hurt the environment, it’s also expensive. One estimate from
the USDA concludes that increasing water use efficiency on irrigated

farms by just 10% could save almost $200 million per year solely due
to the associated savings in fuel costs.
Fracking:
Nuclear Fallout: Ongoing Tragedy/Disaster In Japan:
EnergyNews:
08:51 AM EST on December 8th, 2012 | 3 comments
Newspaper: Door-to-door surveys revealed clusters of Fukushima
residents with persistent nose bleeds, diarrhea — Fallout refugees talk
about bizarre rashes, high fevers, more
09:47 PM EST on December 7th, 2012 | 10 comments
Deadly gas found in salt cavern below giant sinkhole — Official
Reveals: Now the cavern can’t be plugged and Hydrogen Sulfide will
have to be removed as it flows (VIDEO)
05:20 PM EST on December 7th, 2012 | 23 comments
Reports: “Something may have happened at Fukushima II Nuclear
Power Plant” after M7.3 quake — Tepco “did not know cause of
pressure rise”
01:46 PM EST on December 7th, 2012 | 13 comments
New flyover of giant Louisiana sinkhole shows changing appearance
(VIDEOS)
01:21 PM EST on December 7th, 2012 | 7 comments
Levels of Iodine-131 spike to highest levels yet in Philadelphia water
supply — Almost double permissible limit
11:55 AM EST on December 7th, 2012 | 34 comments

Gov’t agency warns of possible M8 quake — Recent M7.3 predicted
just before it happened (PHOTO)
Ongoing Gulf of Mexico Oil Disaster:
Oil Spill Attorney Stuart Smith’s Blog:
Black Liberation/Civil Rights:
Labor:
Economy:
World:
Robert Fisk: Syria, Bashar al-Assad, and the truth about chemical
weapons and who may or may not have them
Bashar’s father Hafez al-Assad was brutal but never used chemical
arms. And do you know which was the first army to use gas in the
Middle East?
The bigger the lie the more people will believe it. We all know who
said that – but it still works. Bashar al-Assad has chemical weapons. He
may use them against his own Syrian people. If he does, the West will
respond. We heard all this stuff last year – and Assad’s regime repeatedly

said that if – if – it had chemical weapons, it would never use them
against Syrians.
But now Washington is playing the same gas-chanty all over again.
Bashar has chemical weapons. He may use them against his own people.
And if he does…
Well if he does, Obama and Madame Clinton and Nato will be very,
very angry. But over the past week, all the usual pseudo-experts who
couldn’t find Syria on a map have been warning us again of the mustard
gas, chemical agents, biological agents that Syria might possess – and
might use. And the sources? The same fantasy specialists who didn’t warn
us about 9/11 but insisted that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction in
2003: “unnamed military intelligence sources”. Henceforth to be
acronymed as UMIS.
Coup de théâtre
And now, the coup de théâtre. Someone from the Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation called me up this week to talk about the use of
chemical weapons by Hafez al-Assad in Hama during the Sunni Muslim
uprising in the city in 1982. Their sources were the same old UMIS. But I
happened to have got into Hama in February 1982 – which is why the
Canadian was calling me – and while Hafez’s Syrian army was very
definitely slaughtering its own people (who were, by the way, slaughtering
regime officials and their families), no one ever used chemical weapons.
Not a single soldier I saw in Hama carried a gas mask. No civilians
carried gas masks. The dangerously perfumed air which I and my
colleagues smelt after chemicals were used by our (then) ally Saddam
against Iranian soldiers in the 1980s was not present. And none of the
dozens of civilian survivors I have interviewed in the 30 years since 1982
ever mentioned the use of gas.
But now we are to believe that it was used. And so the infantile new
fairy tale has begun: Hafez al-Assad used gas against his own people in
Hama 30 years ago. So his son Bashar may do the same again. And wasn’t
that one of the reasons we invaded Iraq in 2003 – because Saddam had
used gas against his own people already and may do so again?
Bunkum

Yes, the bigger the lie, the better. Certainly we journos have done our
duty in disseminating this bunkum. And Bashar – whose forces have
committed quite enough iniquities – is about to be accused of another
crime which he has not yet committed and which his father never did
commit. Yup, chemical weapons are bad news, folks. That’s why the US
supplied Saddam with the components for them, along with Germany (of
course).
That’s why, when Saddam first used gas on Halabja, the UMIS told
CIA officers to blame Iran. And yes, Bashar probably does have some
chemicals in rusting bins somewhere in Syria. Madame Clinton has been
worrying that they may “fall into the wrong hands” – as if they are
presently “in the right hands”. But the Russians have told Bashar not to
use them. Would he piss off his only superpower ally?
And by the way, which was the first army to use gas in the Middle
East? Saddam? Nope. The Brits, of course, under General Allenby, against
the Turks in Sinai in 1917. And that’s the truth.
Health, Education, Science and Welfare:
Daily News Digest December 8, 2012
Return of the Jedi:
AP
Egypt Protesters March Toward President's Palace

US-backed Muslim Brotherhood unleashes bloody
crackdown in Cairo
By
Johannes Stern
Protesters marching toward Mursi's palace on December 4 [Photo: Moud Barthez]
Muslim Brotherhood (MB) forces supporting Egypt’s Islamist
President Mohamed Mursi are carrying out a bloody crackdown in Cairo.
Amid intensifying mass protests in the past two weeks against Mursi, the
Islamists are mobilizing their forces to try to crush strikes and protests.
In scenes recalling the “Battle of the Camels”—when then-President
Hosni Mubarak’s thugs attacked protesting workers and youth on Tahrir
Square in the initial days of the Egyptian Revolution last year—MB
cadres together with forces of the Salafist Call and al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya
assaulted a sit-in of several hundred peaceful protesters in front of the
presidential palace in Heliopolis in Cairo.
The sit-in began after hundreds of thousands of workers and
youth protested, demanding the ouster of Mursi and the cancellation
of Mursi’s presidential decree, granting himself dictatorial powers, on
Tuesday night. It was one of the largest mass protests against the MB
and Mursi since Mursi’s power grab two weeks ago.
According to eye-witnesses, thousands of Islamists stormed the sit-in
Wednesday afternoon. They destroyed tents, attacked participants with

ocks and sticks, and shouted: “The people support the president’s
decisions”, “Long live President Mursi,” and “We will cleanse the palace.”
In the evening and throughout the night, the Islamists intensified their
attacks on protesters.
The Islamists erected metal barricades to block off workers and youth
marching to the presidential palace. They cooperated closely with the
Central Security Forces (CSF). Ahram Online reported that “Hundreds of
Brotherhood supporters are standing right before the palace, and there are
two rows of Central Security Forces in front of them.”
CSF units attacked anti-Mursi protesters at Roxy Square, in Kahlifa
El-Maamoun Street, and in other locations close to the palace with tear gas
and rubber bullets. Reportedly live ammunition was also fired.
Protesters hurled back stones at the security forces and the Islamist
thugs, shouting: “Down, down Mohamed Mursi,” and “The people want
the fall of the regime.”
Imams incited the Islamist crowd to use the utmost violence against
protesters: “Chase them and catch them in the name of God.” MB
members and their Islamist allies chased protesters through the streets,
beat them, and threatened everyone they caught using knives and other
weapons.
Writing for Ahram Online, Ahmed Feteha explained how Mahmoud
Nabil, 24, had his arm broken by pro-Mursi thugs. “He said that he
approached a bearded man supporting President Mursi and told him that
what he and his colleagues were doing is unacceptable. The bearded man,
according to the victim, threw him on the ground, and then another man
used a hammer to break his arm.”
As of this writing, hundreds of protesters were reportedly injured and
at least four people killed. The dead include Mirna Emad, a member of the
Socialist Popular Alliance Party and Taha Magdy of the Revolutionary
Socialists (RS).
The brutal crackdown is accompanied by a vicious propaganda
campaign by the state-controlled media and the Islamists. On Wednesday
the Islamist groups issued a statement accusing protesters of “sabotaging”

the country and threatening that “non-peaceful protests are an offense to
Egypt.”
When MB militias brutally assaulted protesters, Essam al-Erian, the
deputy head of the MB’s Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), incited violence
against them.
He said that what is happening at the presidential palace is “not
clashes between supporters and opponents, but rather skirmishes between
the guardians of legitimacy and the revolution against the
counterrevolutionary attempts to topple legitimacy. There are thugs who
want to depose the elected president.” Erian called upon citizens to
“besiege those thugs and expose the third party, and those firing live
ammunition.”
Mursi is unleashing this wave of repression with the full support of
the US government and its European allies. They have hailed Mursi for his
reliability during last month’s brutal Israeli onslaught against Gaza and the
suppression of the Palestinians and given him a blank check for the
repression his regime is now unleashing.
After Mursi worked to isolate the Gaza Strip during the offensive, the
New York Times wrote that Obama felt he had a “connection” with Mursi
developed over six phone calls. It added that Obama had decided to
“invest heavily” in Mursi.
In an official statement, British Foreign Secretary William Hague
also signaled his support for Mursi. He said, “The UK remains committed
to supporting Egypt’s political transition and strengthening democracy. We
are in close contact with both the Egyptian authorities and leaders of the
opposition.”
On Tuesday Essam al-Haddad, Mursi’s assistant for foreign affairs
and member of the MB’s Guidance Bureau, met on Tuesday in
Washington with US National Security Advisor Tom Donilon. The US
embassy in Cairo issued a statement on Wednesday on its Facebook page
saying: “The two officials reaffirmed the strategic relationship between the
United States and Egypt.”
After Washington’s long-time stooge Mubarak was ousted in mass
working class protests last year, US imperialism sees the Islamists as its

new ally in Egypt and entire Middle East to defend American strategic and
economic interests. The MB’s backers in the US see the Islamists as the
ruling class’s best hope to suppress the revolutionary optimism in the
working class created by Mubarak’s ouster last year, and also to intensify
the US war drive against Syria and Iran, which Mursi supports.
Before the protests, Egypt’s new Prosecutor-General Talaat Ibrahim
Abdallah ordered investigations of the main figures of the liberal and
secular opposition. The leaders of National Salvation Front (NSF)—the
liberal leader Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nasserite Hamdeen Sabahi, former
Mubarak regime official Amr Moussa and Sayed Al-Badawi, the head of
the liberal Wafd party—are accused of inciting the overthrow of the
regime as part of a “Zionist plot.”
The Mursi regime’s invocations of a Zionist plot are a cynical and
absurd attempt to mobilize the most backward elements of Egyptian
society against protesters and the working class. It recalls the propaganda
of former dictator Hosni Mubarak, who also sought to portray the mass
protests against his rule as an Israeli and American conspiracy. In reality,
just like his predecessor Mubarak, Mursi is backed by the US and works
out his reactionary policies in close discussions with Washington and the
Israeli state.
In fact, contrary to the bulk of the protesters, the NSF is not calling
for the overthrow of Mursi. On Wednesday they issued a statement
demanding the reversal of Mursi’s constitutional declaration and a new
Constituent Assembly to redraft the constitution. As the Islamists launched
their brutal attack on the protesters, the NSF called for a press conference
declaring itself to be “ready for real dialogue to sort out this situation.”
The NSF speaks for sections of the Egyptian ruling elite who are in
conflict with Mursi over the distribution of power and wealth inside the
Egyptian state machine. However, their main fear is a revolutionary
movement of the working class; the more the threat of a renewed mass
uprising grows, the more they look for a compromise with Mursi. Last
week thousands of textile workers marched in the industrial city of
Mahalla al-Kubra against Mursi, and on Wednesday, striking doctors
issued a statement objecting to Mursi’s constitution.

Quotes of the Day:
BP/Corexit Murder
Then there’s the matter or Corexit*, the chemical
dispersant that was aggressively deployed by BP or its
contractors while the oil flowed freely from the damaged rig
in 2010. Much of the Corexit was deployed at the wellhead,
in a misguided effort to disperse the oil before it reached the
surface. In the end, nearly 2 million gallons of the dangerous
dispersant was released into the Gulf. Earlier this week, I
told you about alarming new research showing that Corexit
mixed with the Gulf oil proved to be 52 times more toxic
than first believed. This may have been news to the scientific
community but frankly it was little surprise to the boat
captains who got sick working on the cleanup efforts, or
fisherman struggling with dead zones in the Gulf.
— Stuart Smith, They poisoned the Gulf with
dispersant — and it didn’t even disperse
* Corexit: According to the Material Safety Date Sheet
for Corexit EC9527A, it contains 2-Butoxyethanol. ! 2-
Butoxy Ethanol should be handled as a CARCINOGEN —
WITH EXTREME CAUTION.
— Right to Know Hazardous Substance Fact Sheet
Image of the Day:

The seasonally-adjusted SGS Alternate Unemployment Rate reflects current
unemployment reporting methodology adjusted for SGS-estimated long-term
discouraged workers, who were defined out of official existence in 1994. That
estimate is added to the BLS estimate of U-6 unemployment, which includes
short-term discouraged workers.
The U-3 unemployment rate is the monthly headline number. The U-6
unemployment rate is the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) broadest
unemployment measure, including short-term discouraged and other marginallyattached
workers as well as those forced to work part-time because they cannot
find full-time employment.
Alternate Unemployment Charts
Videos of the Day:
End Wall Street’s Wars!
Occupy Wall Street!
Occupy Wall Street is the Only Organization
That Identifies The Enemy —
The 1% That Own and Control The Wealth!
1960s The Realist — One Nation Under God/1%
(Unlike The Trade Union Misleaders
Nor The Misleaders Of The Oppressed
Who Strive To Be In ‘Partnership’ With The 1%)

1960s The Realist — One Nation Under God/1%
(Unlike The Trade Union Misleaders
Nor The Misleaders Of The Oppressed
Who Strive To Be In ‘Partnership’ With The 1%)
Occupy Wall Street — ‘We Are The 99%’
The resistance continues at Liberty Square:
U.S.
Iran captures spy drone,
Chicago anti-war leader denounces U.S. war moves
By
Staff

Anti War Committee members leafleted outside Boeing headquarters recently
in protest of bombs made of depleted uranium, sold to Israel and used in
Gaza, killing hundreds and then poisoning the population.
Chicago, IL - A spy drone made in the U.S. by Boeing Corporation
was captured by Iran after violating their air space. Called a Scan Eagle, it
was displayed on Iranian television as evidence that the U.S. government
is making moves toward war with Iran.
Joe Iosbaker of the Anti War Committee of Chicago expressed
opposition to the U.S. intervening in Iran. “The U.S. government points
fingers at Iran as a country that wants a war. But the Iranians don’t have
spy drones 12 miles off Long Island, New York.”
The Chicago-based Boeing Corporation is the second largest
weapons manufacturer in the U.S. and has a growing role in the drone
industry. The Scan Eagle is mainly used for surveillance, but they are also
deployed in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, used for targeting for
bombings and for assassinations.
The Anti War Committee is organizing opposition to Boeing’s part in
the drone wars that the U.S. is waging in Pakistan and other countries,
including Iran, as well as Boeing’s sales of weapons to Israel.
A statement from the anti-war activists notes, “Boeing Corporation
receives tens of millions of dollars in tax breaks from the state of Illinois

and the city of Chicago and they use that money to make drones and other
war machines. We want these dollars spent at home to address vital needs
like jobs, education and health care.
In Richness and in Health
Inequality and Poverty American-Style
by
Graham Peebles
Irrespective of ones circumstances or stage of life, illness is never
welcome, in America if your poor it can prove to be a total catastrophe,
ending often in personal bankruptcy. “According to a report published in
The American Journal of Medicine, medical bills are a major factor in
more than 60% of the personal bankruptcies in the United States“. Health
care insurance an unaffordable luxury, for the 15% or 50 million people
now living in ‘official’ poverty in America, anxiously relying on good luck
and a poor diet to keep sickness at a bay.
Average individual health care insurance costs around $200 per
month, unbelievable as it may sound to the unfamiliar, this does not
automatically cover prescription charges. Having paid around $12,000 into
insurance company coffers and made no claim in five years, a friend
recently needed hospital care; no charge, antibiotics however, prescribed
and dispensed $50 – ‘have a nice day’. My daughter living in New York
with family health insurance, was charged $100, yes $100, for an
ameliorative wonder cream earlier in the year, one can only imagine it was
infused with miracle oil and laced with melted gold. The Bureau of
Investigative Journalism (BIJ) in a recent documentary state, the US
healthcare industry is the largest in the world, with “$300 billion a year
spent on prescription drugs alone”, a figure that is rising in tandem with
the pharmaceutical companies colossal profits, the top three according to
Fortune Magazine making $27,000 millions in 2010. Surprisingly or
perhaps not given US politicians relationship with corporate leaders,
Noam Chomsky states, the prices set by these companies are protected in
law. Unsurprisingly and in keeping with commonsense and codes of social
fairness, 80% of the population would support lower rates.

The American health care system is a moneymaking machine for the
Insurance giants and their pharmaceutical bedfellows and a major cause of
poverty and hardship in the country. It is inefficient and at approximately
twice the cost per capita of comparable countries, extremely expensive,
Cuba e.g. Noam Chomsky says “achieves the same outcomes at 5% the
cost.“ The fact that the worlds only so called ‘super-power’ does not offer
a health care system to all 311 million or so of its citizens, based on need
and “free at the point of delivery”, reflects the driving political/economic
ideological doctrine that underpins all areas of life in America; Capitalism,
with its single motive; profit. It is a system that is fuelling economic and
social inequalities that are trapping increasing numbers of people into a
life of poverty devoid of hope.
Disadvantaged and living in poverty
More people are living in poverty in America now than at any time
since 1959 when data was first collected with around 43 millions (August
2012 figures) a 70% increase in five years, relying on the Supplemental
Nutrition Assistance Program – Food Stamps for their meals. The 15%
figure may be an understatement as the income level used by the
government to define ‘poverty’ increases based on the rate of inflation.
The threshold established for a family of four in 2011 was $23,021 per
annum, extreme poverty where 21 million Americans live – $11,000.
However if as The Economic Collapse, report on Poverty in America state
“inflation was still calculated the way that it was 30 or 40 years ago, the
poverty line would be much, much higher and millions more Americans
would be considered to be living in poverty”. Wealth and poverty
predictably falls along lines demarcated by race as well as social
backgrounds, 27% of Hispanics and Blacks and 31% of single mothers,
compared with 13% of adults generally and 11% of families are living
under the demoralizing, de humanising shadow of poverty.
Since the late 1970’s poverty rates and levels of economic equality
have been dramatically increasing. Under the presidency of Ronald
Reagan and the days of unbridled competition and market forces that his
administration, and across the sea The Iron Lady championed, poverty
numbers leapt to a tat below the present figure. Reagan famously

admitted to having “fought a war on poverty and poverty won.” Those
under fire were poorly armed and inadequately prepared, the battle rages
today and more furiously, with inequities and social disadvantages acute.
Lack of opportunities and a plethora of social difficulties, many of
which, including overcrowding in housing and at school, poor nutrition
and health care, contravene the spirit at least of the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights, which states, in Article 25/1, “Everyone has the right to
a standard of living adequate for the health and well- being of himself and
of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and
necessary social services.” Living in unsafe communities, with perhaps
little or no parental support destroys hope and makes people more
susceptible to emotional problems and psychological issues, with low selfesteem,
depression, anxiety and substance/alcohol addiction potential
consequences. Those coming from poor backgrounds living disadvantaged
lives in difficult circumstances, outgunned and outmanoeuvred, are being
slaughtered on the economic battleground.
Unemployment or poorly paid work is regarded by World Hunger as
the primary causes of poverty in America, but Frances Stewart, Professor
emeritus at Oxford Department of international Development takes a
different, more just view. She believes that the equitable distribution of
resources, “from the privileged to the deprived, would be enough to
eliminate poverty in high and middle income countries”. Not simply the
redistribution of wealth but resources more broadly, to, as she puts it,
“improve the health, the education, the assets and the productivity of the
poor so that the improving of their lives can become self sustaining.” The
fair and equitable sharing of resources to meet the needs of everyone in
society is an economic model rooted in compassion and justice. Beyond
ideological constraints of the various political isms of old, sharing as a
rational economic principle, is an idea whose time has perhaps arrived. It
is of course, foreign to capitalist principles that believe in the wisdom of
the market, to house, educate heal and clothe the peoples of the world. At
least this is the justifying jargon of the economic/political just as they
promote an unjust system that concentrates wealth and power so
effectively in their hands.

World Hunger’s position is that there are three factors causing
citizens in the most powerful nation on earth, as US politicians like to
exclaim, to be living in poverty and without decent education adequate
housing and or appropriate health care:
1. Poverty in the world.
2. The operation of the political and economic system in the United
States which has tended to keep people from poor families poor
and
3. Actual physical mental and behavioural issues among some
people who are poor All too often poor health-physiological and
psychological is a consequence of a system and not a major cause
of poverty. Read More
4.
How Capitalism is Destroying Democracy
An Interview With Eugene Jarecki
by
Laura Flanders
Eugene Jarecki is an author and a filmmaker. The director behind
“Freakanomics,” “The Trials of Harry Kissinger,” “Why We Fight,” and
most recently “The House I Live In.”
“The House I Live In” his documentary about the drug war leaves
one thinking that nothing will ever change, but then it did. On election
night voters in Colorado and Washington State voted to legalize
recreational marijuana and voters in California passed a ballot initiative to
end that state’s controversial mandatory minimum law, three strikes and
you’re out. Eugene Jarecki sees possibility for more and you can be a part
of it. We talked to him right after the election of 2012.
LF: The day after the election what stuck out to you? What did you
wake up feeling? Good mood? Bad mood?
EJ: It was with a guarded kind of optimism, but optimism
nonetheless. On one level you look at the presidential election: the
reelection of Barack Obama is far more significant than his original
election…. The American people by a majority are saying we’ve seen this
guy on the job in very hard times, we’ve watched him go gray on the job,

and frankly seeing his performance we think he would simply do a better
job than the other guy, the other white patrician, wealthy guy, and that’s an
important moment in American life in terms of race; there’s no way
around that whatever one thinks of Barack Obama (and I have been quite a
critic of Barack Obama), that’s a victory and it’s an important victory for
our evolution in race, but of course it also revealed another half of the
country feels actually not very progressed in terms of race. A lot of the
antagonism towards Obama is expressed in rather thinly veiled old notions
of how to involve in race speak in American life. So that was a little
disorienting, so I will call that bittersweet.
But against that backdrop there were great positives on Election Day
that didn’t have to do with the presidential election, and I allude here to
the victories in the state of Washington, the state of Colorado and the state
of California. In Washington and Colorado we saw legalizations of
marijuana. As a maker of a movie about the drug war, that’s very
important to me because I think those victories demonstrate a certain
frailty in the system and they demonstrate a public appetite for going
about this differently, for starting to recognize that the way we’ve dealt
with drugs over the past forty years has been a disaster and that we need a
course correction. In the state of California the victory was almost more
significant because Californians as it turns out voted 68% to revise the
notorious three strikes law in California.
Prior to election day the “Three Strikes” law in California could put
you in jail for the rest of your life for a third offense that was petty or
nonviolent; as trivial as stealing a slice of pizza or stealing dental cream or
socks as one person got a life sentence for. When you see such an absurd
law as that finally get addressed by the public who voted to say,
henceforth under what was called Prop 36, California law has now been
changed. Now the third strike that puts you in jail for life has to be serious
or violent. That’s what we should think would put you in jail for life, but
that hadn’t been the case for decades and now it is the case. I think that
sends a message across the nation, not only in California (which led the
nation into draconian sentencing), that they can begin to lead us out
toward a more sane place. But for anyone who doesn’t care about the

humanity of it, this will save the state over $100 million dollars a year, and
I want to send that message to other state governments who are
hemorrhaging money and themselves have excessive sentencing policies
in the drug war.
LF: How did the U.S. come to spend a trillion dollars on a so-called
“war on drugs”?
EJ: I can’t underscore just how disastrous the drug war has been.
We’ve been at this for forty years, it’s our longest war, we’ve spent a
trillion dollars, we’ve had forty-five million drug arrests and what do we
have to show for it, a record of abject failure. Drugs are cheaper, purer,
more available than ever before. We have the world’s largest prison
population in real numbers, 2.3 million people behind bars and of course
more of our citizens behind bars than any other nation, as well. So we look
at the numbers and they speak of such a tragic error and misguided policy
that the question is, how long will it take until it dawns on our policy
makers what I think the American people increasingly know which is that
this is a gigantic waste of money and time, where we can’t afford a waste
of money, and it is denigrating a cross section of our population,
particularity minorities, particularly poor people, particularly people of
color, and has been doing so for decades to the incredible detriment of that
community, and the detriment of ourselves and our standing in the world.
LF: In your film you show how we got here; the private interests of
corporations and the public interests of politicians were both drivers.
Given the popularity of getting “tough on crime” and the self-perpetuating
nature of this criminalization of a whole section of a population…. What
happened? I mean with that kind of machine pushing in one direction how
did voters in California, Colorado, Washington say stop?
EJ: To sort of put this in five easy pieces we can look at the drug war
in the following way, we’ve had drug laws going back in this country to
the 1800s. The first drug laws we saw were opium laws that were, lo and
behold, targeted towards Chinese immigrant populations coming to
America. In a way that we saw that these were thinly veiled laws of racial
control. We made opium illegal, but only in California, and only the way
Chinese people were taking it, which was to smoke it. Everywhere else in

the country it was legal. So we were very selective with our opium laws
and we used it to harass and incarcerate Chinese immigrants. That gave
way to a new chapter in the Mexicanization of hemp, which was suddenly
renamed “marijuana” so that we could use it as what we called “Mexican
Opium” to stop and detain Mexicans in new and startling numbers.
Chapter by chapter we’ve seen drug laws in the history of this
country really be thinly veiled laws of racial control. It wasn’t until 1971
that this was declared a “war.” Richard Nixon stood in front of the
American people and declared a war on drugs. When he did that he
unleashed the dogs of war. What had been an ad hoc series of improvised
laws over time suddenly got codified into a national policy, and a national
policy on a wartime footing. What does a wartime footing imply? It
implies all of the horrors of war: the incredibly casualties, the mass scale,
and the entrenched economic and bureaucratic interests that arise that
sense of a threat. The moment you could now say this is not just a little
group here or there, but this is public enemy number one as Richard Nixon
called drug abuse. Well, you can’t declare a war on a substance like drugs
anymore than you can declare war on terror. The war on terror was a war
on people we associate with terrorist activities. The war on drugs was a
war on people we associate as being involved with drugs. That ended up
being a very specific, a very racially targeted and ultimately economically
targeted cross section of our population. Read More
Environment:
Fracking:
Nuclear Fallout: Ongoing Tragedy/Disaster In Japan:
EnergyNews:
10:45 AM EST on December 7th, 2012 | One comment

Both webcams capture strong quake rattling Fukushima Daiichi
(VIDEOS)
09:29 AM EST on December 7th, 2012 | 20 comments
M7.3 earthquake strikes Northeast Japan — Japan TV warned of
strong quake minutes BEFORE it hit — Several M5 and M6 follow
(VIDEO)
09:56 PM EST on December 6th, 2012 | 29 comments
The New Economy: Extreme radioactive contamination responsible
for US’s fastest growing metro area
08:16 PM EST on December 6th, 2012 | 25 comments
Report: Hawaii doctors finding uranium in people’s urine —
Residents demand action (VIDEO)
06:36 PM EST on December 6th, 2012 | Leave a comment
Watch: US gov’t charges anti-nuclear activists with sabotage
(VIDEO)
02:21 PM EST on December 6th, 2012 | 14 comments
*News Alert* Kyodo: Japan gov’t thinks they can restart nuclear
reactors in a few months
01:57 PM EST on December 6th, 2012 | 17 comments
Officials: We don’t know how much oil is below giant sinkhole — We
don’t know where it’s coming from
01:14 PM EST on December 6th, 2012 | 2 comments
State of Louisiana to hold briefing “specific to health concerns” for
people in area of giant sinkhole
11:03 AM EST on December 6th, 2012 | 19 comments

Outrage as AP exposes Japan scientists taking money from nuke
industry — But we usually only fly coach so it’s OK — Radiation
standards ‘twisted’ after 3/11 to limit evacuations
Ongoing Gulf of Mexico Oil Disaster:
Oil Spill Attorney Stuart Smith’s Blog:
They poisoned the Gulf with dispersant — and it didn’t even disperse
Now that we’re more than two years out from the Deepwater Horizon
catastrophe, a good bit of scientific research is starting to come in. Most of
the findings — unfortunately, but predictably — are not good news for the
Gulf Coast. Many of these studies are showing that oil has been more
damaging to fish or other marine creatures, or to the region’s fragile
wetlands, than originally feared. It’s why I’m troubled that BP is racing to
settle the various legal claims from the April 2010 spill before the whole
extent — or the real cost — of the damage is known.
Then there’s the matter or Corexit, the chemical dispersant that was
aggressively deployed by BP or its contractors while the oil flowed freely
from the damaged rig in 2010. Much of the Corexit was deployed at the
wellhead, in a misguided effort to disperse the oil before it reached the
surface. In the end, nearly 2 million gallons of the dangerous dispersant
was released into the Gulf. Earlier this week, I told you about alarming
new research showing that Corexit mixed with the Gulf oil proved to be
52 times more toxic than first believed. This may have been news to the
scientific community but frankly it was little surprise to the boat captains
who got sick working on the cleanup efforts, or fisherman struggling with
dead zones in the Gulf.
And now comes a second study published in Environmental Science
and Technology, led by researchers from the University of Miami and
others, showing that not only did Corexit poison the Gulf, it didn’t even do
what it was supposed to do, disperse the oil:

Together they developed and tested models to show that the
application of oil-dispersing chemicals had little effect on the oil
surfacing in the Gulf of Mexico.
“Deepwater drilling into large, high-pressure reservoirs of
oil and gas located far offshore and hundreds of meters below
the ocean’s surface involves risks for which we were not
adequately prepared,” said Paris.
“As the oil gushed uncontrolled into the Gulf, injection of
chemical dispersant into the deep ocean may have had little
effect because the oil was coming out with such pressure that it
was already dispersed in small droplets.
It is impossible to know whether the synthetic dispersant
was well mixed with the oil as it was injected. Our models treat
both scenarios, and regardless of whether you have the
dispersant in the water mixture or not, the amount of oil
reaching the sea surface remained relatively unchanged.”
I don’t understand why this issue doesn’t get more attention, and why
it’s not provoking more outrage. The ill-conceived and indiscriminate use
of this dispersant is what took the worst oil spill in the history of the
United States, and managed to make it much, much worse. And it’s
extremely disappointing, that a federal judge has recently dismissed claims
from spill victims against Nalco, the company that manufactures the ultra
hazardous Corexit.
But the judge was correct in noting that it was BP — with what many
of us believe was shoddy federal oversight — that made the ultimate
decisions on how to deploy the Corexit, and how much to use. Those of us
who live in the Gulf are still living with the consequences of that mistake.
What makes it even more maddening is it was all done for nothing.
For my Dec. 2 blog post on the alarming toxicity levels of Corexit
deployed in the Gulf. please read: http://www.stuarthsmith.com/scientistsefforts-to-disperse-the-bp-spill-made-it-much-much-more-toxic/
To read more about the study by a team led by University of Miami
researchers, please go to: http://www.theadvertiser.com/viewart/20121205/
NEWS01/212050318/Judge-tosses-claims-against-dispersant-maker

To read about the dismissal of legal claims against Nalco in the BP
spill, please read: http://www.theadvertiser.com/viewart/20121205/
NEWS01/212050318/Judge-tosses-claims-against-dispersant-maker
Environmental Must-Reads – December 7, 2012
Fracking-Study Conflicts Prompt Head of Institute to Quit
University of Texas research that determined hydraulic fracturing for
natural gas is safe was tainted by a conflict of interest involving the
study’s lead investigator, an independent panel has concluded.
Panel criticizes fracking study, UT ethics rules
SAN ANTONIO – A review panel that examined conflict-of-interest
charges against the leader of a University of Texas at Austin study on
hydraulic fracturing has called for the university to adopt “rigorous”
policies governing ethics rules for research for university personnel.
Damning Review of Gas Study Prompts a Shakeup at the
University of Texas
The University of Texas said today that it has accepted the findings of
a damning independent review of the preparation of a report on potential
impacts of shale gas drilling by the school’s Energy Institute. The school
said it will undertake six recommended actions, the most significant being
the withdrawal of papers from the Energy Institute’s Web site related to
the report until they are submitted for fresh expert review.
Fracking Makes Livestock Sick, Says Recent Study Of Natural Gas
Drilling On Animal And Human Health
Reduced milk production. Gastrointestinal, neurological and
urological issues. Sudden death. These are just a few of the symptoms
experienced by livestock living near natural gas fracking sites and
catalogued in a recent paper studying the impact of natural gas drilling on
human and animal health.
‘Promised Land’ putting fracking in focus
The natural gas industry is getting ready — very ready — for its
close-up.

With the Gus Van Sant film featuring fracking, “Promised Land,”
scheduled to hit select theaters at the end of this month, energy firms
worried about a misleading Hollywood treatment are adjusting the focus
with websites and campaigns against what they see as the movie’s motives
and message.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: You Need to See This Movie
A December 2012 Siena College poll shows that upstate New Yorkers
oppose fracking by an astounding margin of 45-39. Those numbers
surprise New York politicians who can generally count on the support of
upstaters for virtually any industrial or commercial enterprise that
promises even the faintest chance of economic development for New
York’s impoverished rural communities.
Fracking Blamed For Cracks In Woman’s House In Ohio
A homeowner says cracking walls and crumbling mortar are being
caused by a nearby well.
Beckie Dean blames the “enormous” damage to her 11-year-old
house on the drilling operation just across the street, about 1,000 feet
away.
Longmont council will report on anti-fracking amendment executive
sessions
The Longmont City Council will release summaries of its closeddoor
sessions on Article 16, the city’s anti-fracking charter amendment.
National anti-fracking group launched
A new group called Americans Against Fracking, which claims more
than 100 members including environmental, civic and religious groups,
said it seeks a national ban on hydraulic fracturing “and drilling associated
with fracking.” The group in a news release says that efforts to regulate
the industry have been unsuccessful and only an outright ban will suffice,
along with restrictions on related oil and gas production activities.
“Americans Against Fracking supports federal, state and local efforts to
ban fracking and to stop practices that facilitate fracking like natural gas
exports, frac sand mining and pipeline construction.” It calls for a move
away from fossil fuels toward renewables. The group’s website is here.
Federal Scientists Link Oil and Gas Fracking to Earthquakes in U.S.

A new federal study has found the drilling practice known as fracking
can trigger earthquakes. The U.S. Geological Survey found that oil and
gas operations caused the majority, if not all, earthquakes in certain areas
of New Mexico and Colorado between 2001 and 2011. The report’s coauthor,
U.S. Geological Survey scientist Justin Rubinstein, called fracking
“a societal risk [we] need to be considering.”
Hydrofracking may lead to oil discovery in Nevada but comes with
environmental concerns
Buried beneath Nevada’s desert are rich reserves of gold, copper and
other natural resources. But when it comes to oil, the state is a lightweight.
Activity continues at site of gas pipeline leak
There were dozens of vehicles, numerous dump trucks and dirt
moving equipment in a cornfield southeast of Fairmont Thursday morning
– at the site of an earlier leak from a gas pipeline.
UPDATE: Pipeline Explosion Investigation
Goldsmith, TX – The scene from the explosion site caused many
drivers to stop and even take pictures.
The Texas Railroad Commission is heading the investigation a
spokesperson says they are looking into what caused the pipeline to
rupture.
Report endorses liquefied natural gas exports
A federal report endorsing exports of liquefied natural gas gives
developers of the proposed multibillion-dollar facilities the “green light”
to move forward, an LSU energy expert said Thursday.
Natural gas is eating coal’s lunch in the Southeast
The natural gas revolution will not be televised, because it’s not fun
to watch. But it might provide the power for your television, if that counts
— and if you live in the Southeast, the odds that it does are climbing.
How fracking affects a bean grown in India
Many people may not know what guar gum is, but chances are
they’ve put it in their mouths or on their hair. Guar gum is made out of the
seed and it’s used to thicken things like ice cream, shampoo and paper. It’s
also a key ingredient in hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, the controversial
oil drilling process.

Americans Against Fracking Calls for a Ban on Fracking in the U.S.
A group of more than 100 public health, consumer, environmental
and faith-based organizations announced today the launch of Americans
Against Fracking, a national coalition dedicated to banning hydraulic
fracturing, or fracking, and drilling associated with fracking for oil and
natural gas in the U.S. Including organizations such as 350.org, Berks Gas
Truth, Breast Cancer Action, CREDO Action, Catskill Mountain Keeper,
Center for Biological Diversity, Delaware Riverkeeper Network,
Democracy for America, Food & Water Watch, Frack Action, Frack-Free
Stark County, Illinois People’s Action and National Nurses United,
Americans Against Fracking supports federal state and local efforts to ban
fracking and to stop practices that facilitate fracking like natural gas
exports, frac-sand mining and pipeline construction.
Community College Faculty Says No to Fracking, Yes to Clean Energy
In a standing-room-only meeting on Dec. 4, the governing body of
the Community College of Philadelphia’s (CPP) faculty and staff union
denounced the College’s ties to the Marcellus Shale Coalition (MSC).
MSC is the primary fracking industry lobbying group in Pennsylvania.
Fracking Boom in North Dakota
Has Heavy Impact on Native Americans
In just five years North Dakota has gone from a quiet agricultural
state to a rapidly industrializing energy powerhouse. By the middle of
2012 North Dakota was producing about 660,000 barrels of oil a day,
more than twice as much as just two years before. That number makes
North Dakota the second largest oil producing state in the U.S., after
Texas.
Dangerous gas discovered at sinkhole Thursday
Hydrogen sulfide gas was detected Thursday morning in equipment
that is part of an operation designed to burn off methane from a cavern
beneath Texas Brine’s salt dome site in Assumption Parish, officials said.
Flaring removes 2.7M cubic feet of gas so far from aquifer in
Assumption Parish

Officials say vent wells burning off gas trapped in an aquifer in
Assumption Parish have removed slightly more than 2.7 million cubic feet
of gas since flaring began.
Ex-BP executive seeks trial delay in spill case
A former BP executive is asking a federal judge to postpone his trial
on charges he concealed information from Congress about the amount of
oil that was spewing from the company’s blown-out well in 2010.
BP Oil Spill: Supervisors’ Case Gets New Judge After Halliburton
Connection Revealed
A new judge was assigned Wednesday to the case against two BP
supervisors charged in the deaths of 11 workers aboard the Deepwater
Horizon drilling rig in 2010, after the previous judge disclosed his wife
owns stock in one of the contractors.
Scientific Papers Share Lessons Learned from the BP Oil Spill
A collection of papers now out in the journal Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) looks at the response to the
Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill in 2010, examining whether it was successful
and how it could be improved. The release of the reports comes just days
after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) suspended BP from
obtaining new U.S. contracts due to its “lack of business integrity”
following the Deepwater Horizon accident that killed 11 workers. After
the explosion, the rig’s Macondo well began gushing crude oil, a leak that
would continue for nearly three months. Uncertainty surrounding the flow
rate of the leaking oil was a key problem during the disaster, prompting
these U.S. government scientists to recommend that future drilling permits
require mechanisms to assess the flow rate.
Government agency has yet to conduct audit of safety systems for
offshore oil operators
It’s been more than a year since offshore oil and gas operators had to
have new safety systems in place; more than a year since a revamped
federal agency got the power to audit them.
Bahamas: Cargo ship spilled 3,000 gallons of oil

Roughly 3,000 gallons (11,355 liters) of oil have spilled into the
ocean from a cargo ship accident earlier this week in the northern
Bahamas, government officials said Thursday.
At a news conference, Environment Minister Kenred Dorsett said
crews were able to recover a portion of the oily water off Grand Bahama
island but he did not provide any specifics of how much. He said chemical
dispersants that break up oil were not used out of concern for its effect on
marine life.
Mobil intensifies clean up of spill contaminated coastline in Ibeno
Mobil Producing Nigeria (MPN) has intensified the clean-up of the
Atlantic shoreline in Akwa Ibom contaminated by the Nov. 9, oil spill
emanating from its operations.
NU researcher puts new spin on pipeline path
It was just a coincidence, said Roy Spalding, a water chemist at the
University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
His scientific paper on using center-pivot irrigation to clean up water
contaminated by a potential future oil spill just happened to come out on
the same day as a hearing on the proposed route of the controversial
Keystone XL pipeline through the Ogallala Aquifer.
US authorities to interview injured Filipinos in oil rig blast
The Philippine embassy in Washington on Friday said that federal
authorities were expected to interview three Filipino oil rig workers who
sustained burn injuries in the November 16 oil platform fire in the Gulf of
Mexico.
Cornhuskers pack Keystone XL hearing
A Dec. 5 public hearing on the proposed re-route of the Keystone XL
Pipeline at the Boone County Fairgrounds in the central Nebraska town of
Albion was unexpectedly packed with nearly 1,000 people who showed up
to sound off on the project. The lone hearing was hosted by the Nebraska
Department of Environmental Quality—the only opportunity for impacted
residents to sound off on the DEQ’s findings on TransCanada’s revised
plan for an oil pipeline through the state on its way to Gulf Coast
refineries. Oglala Lakota Nation vice president Tom Poor Bear was among
those who expressed concerns about groundwater contamination from the

project. TransCanada says it has altered the pipeline’s path through
Nebraska to avoid the environmentally sensitive Sand Hills and some
town water wells.
BP building what it calls the world’s largest supercomputer complex
in Houston
BP said Thursday that it has started construction in Houston on a new
facility that will house what’s being billed as the world’s largest complex
of supercomputers for commercial research, which the British oil giant
will use for processing and managing massive amounts of geological and
seismic data.
Strong quake hits off Japan near Fukushima disaster zone
A strong quake centred off northeastern Japan shook buildings as far
away as Tokyo on Friday and triggered a one-metre tsunami in an area
devastated by last year’s Fukushima disaster, but there were no reports of
deaths or serious damage.
As it happened: No problems detected in N-plants after earthquake
The UN atomic agency said it had been informed by Japanese
authorities that no problems had been detected at nuclear power plants in
the region nearest to the epicentre of Friday’s earthquake.
IAEA, Fukushima Prefecture
to set up joint decontamination program
VIENNA–The International Atomic Energy Agency said it will set up
a joint program on decontamination next year with the Fukushima
prefectural government as efforts continue at the crippled Fukushima No.
1 nuclear power plant.
Fukushima safety scientists paid by nuclear operators
Influential Japanese scientists who help set national radiation
exposure limits have for years had trips paid for by the country’s nuclear
plant operators to attend overseas meetings of the world’s top academic
group on radiation safety.
Black Liberation/Civil Rights:
Global Neoliberalism: “The Nation of an American Empire”

Neo-liberal policies, as well as the financial and political
powers backing them, ensured that the City and its most
vulnerable citizens would be adversely affected. Infrastructure
deteriorations, breakdown of water and sanitation and prolonged
electrical blackouts are products of public disinvestment and
private profit-taking; delays in repairing the electric grid are
products of cuts in the labor force. While the state and federal
government compiles detailed data files on every mosque, and
Muslim charity donor and whoever else might voice a criticism
of the State of Israel, it has no ‘data’ on our vulnerable elderly
and disabled citizens trapped in high rises, public housing and
nursing homes. These citizens suffered cold, thirst and hunger in
darkness and many lacked medicine. Some died. None existed in
the priority registries of Homeland Security.
— James Petras, “Tropical Storm Sandy: Natural Disaster
or Political?” November, 13, 2012.
[A}fter the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia and Kosovo in the
early 1990s we were not all suddenly oppressed Muslims; after
the Central African genocide of the mid-1990s - at the expense
of perhaps 700,000 lives - the citizens of the world did not all
become Tutsis; nor did we become Timorese nor Palestinians
nor Guatemalan peasants. After the horrific bombing of trains in
Madrid in 2004, we did not all become Spaniards, nor Russians
after Beslan.
— Neil Smith, The Endgame of Globalization

Five miles outside of Birmingham, writes Douglas A. Blackmon,
“spread in haphazard rows across the forest floor…were sunken graves of
the dead from nearby prison mines once operated by U.S. Steel.”
Long ago, they tell us.
Neoliberalism’s business of “freeing of people” flourished with the
flames from Little Boy and Fat Man.
Title to Indian lands passed to the English Crown, thanks to the
Doctrine of Discovery. This international law, explains Robert J. Miller,
“preempted sales of these lands to any other European country or any
individual, and granted sovereignty and commercial rights over Indian
Natives to the Crown and its colonies.”
Yet this is older still! Only look to the future, warns President Obama
as did his predecessors.
“Never again a November 1918,” shouted Hitler. And Hitler became
a politician (Chris Hitchens, “Imagining Hitler,” Arguably Essays by
Christopher Hitchens, 2012). His first act of business once he took office?
Naturally repressive:
[He}shut down the unions and then viciously pillaged the galleries of
a once civilized nation to hang most of the best modern painting in
Germany in a wildly philistine 1937 exhibition - in Munich - entitled (sic)
‘Degenerate Art.’
The past is never the past for those whose task is to conceal and to
manipulate.
Never again, shouted Nixon, will Black leadership muster the
courage to resist and gain support of Red, Brown, Yellow, and white
Americans, workers, poor and middle class, anti-war activists, housewives
and feminists, youth and student organizations.
Never again!
In the United States, we are at a stage in the globalization process
where it is less about forgetfulness and more a blatant display of ignorance
and indifference, no care whatsoever about the country’s violent role in
world affairs, past or present.
In May 2008, Bush II celebrated Israel’s 60th birthday. Israelis and
Americans cheered. “Many Israelis look at Bush as one of the best friends

we’ve ever had in terms of understanding our problems and his attitudes
toward Israel,” said Elihu Ben-Onin, former Israeli general (Huffington
Post). Bush was the best friend of Israel, but now it has another.
Listen carefully to the donkeys and the elephants!
Netanyahu praised Bush’s successor this past March 2012 when he
visited the White House. The friendship of the Israeli prime minister and
the president of the United States is of utmost importance and rest, states
Netanyahu in Israel’s ability “to make its own decisions” as a sovereign
state. “it must have the ability to defend itself, by itself, against any
threats.” Of course, billions in U.S. funds and U.S. weaponry is a given.
Obama, the newest friend’s response: The bond between our two countries
is unbreakable” (The Daily Mail).
So congratulations on your victory, Mr. Obama!
Continuity!
Why, asked geographer and historian Neil Smith, did citizens around
the world respond to the World Trade Center attacks by shouting, “We are
all Americans now?”
A certain racism - perhaps more accurately a sense of some
differential value of citizens from different groups, countries, or
hemispheres - surely framed some of the differential response to
September 11th, and the global power of U.S.-owned and controlled
media, for whose executives these events were obviously highly personal,
accentuated response. (Endgame of Globalization, 2005)
And after all, Americans are the “good guys,” the saviors of the world
- but American will not tolerate anti-Americanism! The piercing look of
the American Eagle, a donkey on one side and an elephant on the other,
searching for advantages in the adversity it creates, only mean the
“revolution” for “peace” can proceed…Proceed where?
To a course of action begun in its past and continuing, according to
Smith, in what he calls “the endgame global America,” the “culmination
of a U.S.-centered (but not exclusively American) political and economic
globalization.”
All those dead millions and millions of people, all the suffering, and
struggling, not at the hands of communism or fascism, but in the name of

“democracy,” is sponsored by “U.S. repression and exploitation,” denied
or justified, writes Smith, “as a pragmatic necessity for the nefarious
enemies.”
They display the posture of indifference toward their fellow citizens.
While despised worldwide, “many U.S. multinational firms and their
subsidiaries and contractors,” manage to attract many, at home and abroad,
to the American Dream. Victims they may be of the corporate mentality,
worse, they display the posture of indifference toward their fellow
citizens. As Marxist economist David Harvey notes, Thatcher famously
announced that there was “‘no such thing as society, only individual men
and women, “- and she subsequently added, their families” (A Brief
History of Neoliberalism, 2007).
In America, all are welcome to our one, big, prosperous community
where there is a slice of the pie for everyone. America, the Empire, has
enemies. The Empire’s crusade against terrorism concedes certain levels
of collateral damage to the ideals of liberty, equality, and democracy.
The idea of freedom ‘this degenerates into a mere advocacy of free
enterprise,’ which means ‘the fullness of freedom for those whose income,
leisure and security need no enhancing, and a mere pittance of liberty for
the people, who may in vain attempt to make use of their democratic rights
to gain shelter from the power of the owners of property.’ (Karl Polanyi
qtd. in Harvey, The Brief History)
The hungry child in Cleveland, the farmer in India, the millions of
homeless in the proxy state of Ethiopia, the Bradley Mannings, Darius
Williams, and Trayvon Martins, the hounded and deported mothers and
fathers, and the invisible Indigenous Americans in the U.S. are marked as
expendable as those daily victims of U.S. drone attacks. Hitler’s trains into
Germany are no longer necessary.
Smith: the conservative leadership wish away the contradictions
while liberals “fold the contradictions into a narrative of realities verses
ideals and focus on a moral parsing of specific events and episodes,
sorting apart the regrettable failings of the ideal, the causes thereof and
their implications” (The Endgame). Listen carefully to the donkeys and the
elephants! In the language of “freedom, equality, and rights,” Smith

continues, “measures and agreements” that sound as if for the good of the
world’s citizens, are actually “proposed on terms heavily favorable to U.S.
economic interests.” The “global ambition” of the U.S., voiced by the
donkeys and elephants is, writes Smith, “constitutively nationalist.” In
other words, “American nationalism is founded on globalist claims.” Read
More
Labor:
Economy:
World:
Health, Education, Science and Welfare:
Daily News Digest December 7, 2012
Quotes of the Day:
Scientists have attempted to use testosterone to build
muscle going back more than 1,000 years, but the modern
era of steroids starts in 1889 when prominent French
scientist Charles Edouard Brown-Sequard tried to figure out
how to increase the strength and mass of workers in the
service of the industrial revolution. Brown-Sequard began to
inject himself with a liquid extract derived from the
testosterone of dogs and guinea pigs. He claimed that the
injections “increased [his] physical strength and intellectual
energy, relieved [his] constipation and even lengthened the
arc of [his] urine.
…As the sporting industry exploded in the 1920s,
athletic trainers and their charges immediately saw the
possibilities of using his research. Even the Big Bambino
himself, Babe Ruth, injected himself with extract from a

sheep’s testicles, hoping for increased power at the plate
(and in the bedroom). He attempted this only once, and it
made him incredibly ill; the Yankees covered the story by
telling the press that the Babe just had one of his famous
bellyaches. Even though the Yankees tend to celebrate all
things Babe Ruth, they have never, to my knowledge, had
“Sheep Testicles Day” at the stadium. — Dave Zirin,
Babe Ruth Injected Sheep’s Testicles and Shilled for Tobacco
There is no longer any basis for support to the reformism and its
‘lesser evil’ politics.
Worldwide the capitalist class is socializing their debts —
transferring their losses to the working class and the poor. Now they
are in frenzy in their search for profits and are stripping the working
class and the poor any and all assets. This is what happened
historically in the Roman Empire on its way to debt bondage and
serfdom.
The only solution for capitalism, at this time is the worldwide
application of the Iron Heel, as described by Jack London in his book,
The Iron Heel.
The Iron Heal
The immediate tasks is to build the international opposition of
the working class and the oppressed of the world to this international

crisis of debt and overproduction. The petty bourgeois leaderships of
the working class and the world’s oppressed have no solution to this
final crisis of capitalism. — Roland sheppard, Occupy Wall Street
Demonstrates The Need To Build An Organization of All Anti-
Capitalist Revolutionary Forces!
Image of the Day:
The Universal Melting Pot
Videos of the Day:
I Remember Fred Hampton (Video)
Bruce Dixon, managing editor at Black Agenda Report recalls
Fred Hampton, deputy chairman of the Illinois Chapter of the Black

Panther Party, murdered by the FBI and Chicago police 43 years ago
this week. Read more
End Wall Street’s Wars!
Occupy Wall Street!
Occupy Wall Street is the Only Organization
That Identifies The Enemy —
The 1% That Own and Control The Wealth!
1960s The Realist — One Nation Under God/1%
(Unlike The Trade Union Misleaders
Nor The Misleaders Of The Oppressed
Who Strive To Be In ‘Partnership’ With The 1%)
1960s The Realist — One Nation Under God/1%
(Unlike The Trade Union Misleaders
Nor The Misleaders Of The Oppressed
Who Strive To Be In ‘Partnership’ With The 1%)
Occupy Wall Street — ‘We Are The 99%’
The resistance continues at Liberty Square:
U.S.
Entitlements Are Fundamental Human Rights,
Not Political Poker Chips to Be Bargained Away
By
Salvatore Babones, Truthout | Op-Ed

[Those whom, the powers that be, now call the ‘Forefathers of the
Constitution’, were the ones who led the counter-call to the Declaration of
Independence.
Instead of codifying the constitution to guarantee our “certain
unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness”, they refused to include the 1776 Virginia Declaration of
Rights and even the 1689 English Bill of Rights in the original draft of the
constitution! — Roland Sheppard, Their ‘Founding Fathers’ and Mine]
In September 1974, Gerald Ford's Office of Management and Budget
(OMB) introduced a new term into the English language: "entitlement
program."
Journalist Edwin L. Dale Jr. (who later joined Ronald Reagan's OMB
as budget spokesperson) explained in the September 22, 1974 New York
Times that the term "covers all those cases where the law creates a formula
of some kind that entitles individuals or, in a few cases, state and local
governments, to qualify for federal payments."
Since Richard Nixon had just resigned on August 9, the nation may
not have been paying much attention to technical briefings from the OMB.
To read more articles by Salvatore Babones and other authors in the
Public Intellectual Project, click here.
Ford's OMB divided the federal budget into four categories, a basic
division that is still used today. First came contractual obligations like
interest on the debt. Interestingly, the OMB placed corporate welfare
programs like federal mortgage insurance and farm price supports in this
sacrosanct category.
Second came "entitlement programs" like Social Security, Food
Stamps, Medicare and Medicaid. The OMB assumed that these could not
realistically be cut because the people receiving them would raise hell if
they were.
These were the programs that Nixon wanted to get rid of, but felt he
couldn't. He left Ford in no position to pursue an ideological crusade
against them. Ford needed every vote he could get.
Third came defense spending, ring-fenced as always.

Last on the list, and first on the chopping block, came domestic
discretionary spending - in other words, "government." According to
OMB data, domestic discretionary spending has fallen from 21.3 percent
of all federal spending in 1974, to just 16.1 percent today. Under the
Budget Control Act of 2011 domestic discretionary spending will suffer
disproportionate cuts due to sequestration in 2012.
Of the four categories, Nixon prioritized interest payments to
investors first, subsidy payments to individuals second, the military third
and government last. The only major change to this formula came with
election of Ronald Reagan, who moved the military up from third place to
second. Subsequent presidents have followed Reagan's lead.
Now that domestic discretionary spending has been eviscerated, antigovernment
forces have turned their attention to entitlement programs.
Conservative doomsters claim that growth in entitlement spending is
swallowing the federal budget and swamping the American economy. On
September 17 conservative commentator David Brooks wrote in The New
York Times that "the entitlement state is growing at an unsustainable rate
and will bankrupt the country."
A December 1 article in the Wall Street Journal quoted conservative
Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield calling entitlements "an attack on the
common good.
"Entitlements say that 'I get mine no matter what the state of the
country is when I get it.'"
Mansfield goes on to lay out a strategy for getting rid of entitlements:
"If Republicans can get entitlements to be understood no longer as
irrevocable, but as open to negotiation and to political dispute and to
reform, then I think they can accomplish something."
Runaway growth in entitlement spending has long been a bugbear of
American conservatives. The New York Times, then as now, slightly to the
right of Richard Nixon on economic issues, concluded back in 1974 that
growth in government spending "is the problem much more than this
year's final total. And getting a handle on growth means getting a handle
on entitlement programs."

Conservative attacks on entitlements have been so successful that
many progressives now shy away from using the term. Mark Karlin
prefers to call Social Security an "earned benefit." Lambert Strether
prefers FDR's concept of "social insurance." Anything but an entitlement.
But those who would reframe the term miss the point. What about
people who never paid into the system, never had a social position to fall
from, maybe never earned a cent at all? Do we leave them to beg on the
streets and sleep under a bridge? Do we let them starve? If they get sick,
do we let them die?
If they have children, do we let those children go to school barefoot
and hungry? Do we let their teeth rot and their dirty little noses run? Do
we put them to work cleaning toilets to pay their way through charter
school?
As citizens of the richest country on earth, we are entitled to food,
clothing, housing, medical care and education. The basic necessities of life
are not for government to give or withhold based on its current budget
situation. They are things we are entitled to have, no matter how
inconvenient it may be for our neighbors to pay for them.
So far as the United Nations is concerned, not just Americans, but all
human beings, are entitled to food, clothing, housing, medical care and
education - as well as rest, leisure and holidays. That's from the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights. The United States voted for it way back in
1948.
In fact, we wrote it. Eleanor Roosevelt chaired the commission that
drafted it. Most of the work was done in Lake Success, NY. That's right:
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was written on Long Island.
Entitlements are not political poker chips to be bargained away in
exchange for tax cuts or legislative victories. They are not problems to be
reformed. They are universal human rights.
Wall Street manipulates deficit angst with fiscal cliff fear
Deficit hawks rely on media allies to report budget doom to advance
their agenda of cutting Medicare and social security
Dean Baker

White House. Photograph: Carolyn Kaster/AP
President Obama talking about the economy and the deficit in the White House
Many of the nation's most important news outlets openly embrace the
agenda of the rich and powerful that colors its coverage of major
economic issues. This is perhaps nowhere better demonstrated than during
the current budget standoff between President Obama and Congress,
which the media routinely describes as the "fiscal cliff". This terminology
seriously misrepresents the nature of the budget dispute, as everyone in the
debate has acknowledged. There is no "cliff" currently facing the budget
or the economy.
If no deal is reached this year, then on 1 January, daily tax
withholdings will rise by an average of about $4 per person. Any money
actually deducted from pay checks will be refunded if a deal is
subsequently reached that returns tax rates to 2012 levels. Government
spending probably won't change at the start of the new year, since
President Obama has considerable discretion over the flow of spending.
No one can think that this modest increase in tax withholdings would
plunge the economy into a recession, but the Wall Street types seeking to
dismantle social security and Medicare have used their enormous wealth
and allies in the media to generate this kind of fear-mongering across the
country.
One way in which they have pushed their agenda has been in
misrepresenting projections from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).
The CBO's projections show that if higher tax rates and lower spending
are left in place for the whole year, then it will substantially slow growth
and push the economy into a recession. However, these projections

explicitly assume that we go a whole year without reaching a deal. They
say nothing about what happens if the government cuts a deal by the
second or third week in January. Even a Washington Post editor should be
sharp enough to understand this distinction; nonetheless, many stories
have implied that the recession projections apply to missing the 1 January
deadline.
Wall Street types have also pushed this idea that the markets are
demanding for programs like social security and Medicare be cut. This
sort of assertion, which is treated as a fundamental truth by the
Washington insider crowd, has the wonderful feature of escaping
contradiction. Of course, none of us knows exactly what will trouble the
financial markets or by how much that trouble would hurt the economy.
(In fact, even a sustained drop in the stock market has a limited effect on
the economy, and short term fluctuations have almost no impact.) This
means that when Wall Street, or their designated mouthpieces, make
authoritative-sounding claims that the markets will be upset if we don't cut
social security or Medicare as part of a budget deal, there is no direct way
to refute them. After all, it is possible that they might be right.
If economic reporters did their job, though, they would be looking for
evidence to support these assertions about financial markets. They could
start by looking at the track records of those issuing the warnings. If they
examined the track records of people at organizations like the Campaign to
Fix the Debt, and other deficit hawks, they would reveal to their audiences
that these "experts" have the distinction of being almost 100% wrong on
just about all their economic predictions over the last five years.
This crew has been predicting that large budget deficits would cause
interest rates to skyrocket ever since President Obama's first round of
stimulus, almost four years ago. Many also predicted that inflation would
explode. Yet, none of them warned us about the housing bubble: they were
too busy running around the country yelling about the budget deficits even
when the deficits were small enough that the debt to GDP ratio was
actually declining.
In short, major national news outlets have adopted the agenda of the
Wall Street elite that displays zero evidence of any understanding of what

drives the economy, wholesale. Their assertions that the markets will panic
without a budget deal that cuts social security and Medicare have no
apparent foundation in reality. It is just a threat that they have concocted to
advance their agenda. Now, that would make for a very good news story.
Environment:
Government and Industry Still Denying Science at Fukushima
Deception Confirmed by UN
by
John LaForge
When the Fukushima-1 reactor complex in Japan went into
radioactive apoplexy on March 11, 2011, the Japanese government and the
Tokyo Electric Power Co. — like the Russians at Chernobyl before them
— began minimizing the risks of radiation and the known and potential
effects of radiological disasters.
The principle mouthpiece for this well-rehearsed minstrel show was
Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano who told the world that evening,
“Let me repeat that there is no radiation leak, nor will there be a leak.”*
Edano is now the Trade and Industry Minister and oversees federal
cleanup and recovery efforts.
Independent observers like Dr. Chris Busby, scientific secretary of
the European Committee on Radiation Risk and a founder of the Low-
Level Radiation Campaign in England, warned four days into the disaster:
“Reassurances about radiation exposures issued by the Japanese
government cannot be believed.” Likewise, physicist Nils Bøhmer, with
the Oslo-based environmental foundation Bellona, insists that throughout
the crisis Japan has been withholding information about radiation dangers.
Even the New York Times reported Nov. 30 on “The gap between the
initial assurances given by company and government officials, and the
ultimate scale of the nuclear disaster…”
Deception confirmed by UN
Now 20 months later, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the
right to health has issued a draft report charging that Japan “has adopted

overly optimistic views of radiation risks and has conducted only limited
health checks” among contaminated populations, the AP and CBC
reported. According to Anand Grover, the UN investigator, “Japan hasn’t
done enough to protect the health of residents and workers affected.”+
Previous investigations found that monitoring data from the federal
system that tracks plumes of radiation during disasters — called “Speedi,”
for System for Prediction of Environmental Emergency Dose Information
— was kept secret when it was needed most. News reports in August 2011
said that the system forecast that Karino Elementary School in the town of
Namie would be directly in the path of the radiation plume spewing from
the smashed reactors. Yet the warning never reached decision-makers and
neither the school nor the town was evacuated. Instead, they became
evacuation centers where families even cooked and ate meals outdoors.
Bellona reports that documents obtained by the AP and the New York
Times, its own interviews with key officials, and a review of other newly
released data and parliamentary transcripts show that “…Japan’s system to
forecast radiation threats was working from the moment its nuclear crisis
began on March 11, after an earthquake and tsunami pummeled the
Fukushima” reactor site.
The UN’s Grover severely criticized the government’s commitment
to health care for exposed workers and people in contaminated areas, and
complained that its ongoing health checks are “too narrow in scope
because they are only intended to cover Fukushima’s two million people.”
Surveys of health effects should extend to “all radiation-affected zones”
Grover said, a vast area including much of the north-eastern half of
Honshu, Japan’s main island.
But so far, only one-fourth of Fukushima’s population has been
surveyed. Grover thinks it’s unwise to check only children for thyroid
damage. Indeed, Dr. Helen Caldicott told Business Insider last summer
that even when lesions are found on a child’s thyroid, they aren’t being
biopsied. The lesions “should all be biopsied,” Caldicott warned.
Further minimizing the actual numbers of affected persons, thousands
of reactor site workers with short-term contracts “have no access to

permanent health checks,” Grover said, and Fukushima residents complain
that they have not been allowed access to their own health-check results.
Last March, Human Rights Watch leveled the same charge.^ “We are
really not seeing basic health services being offered in an accessible way
and we are not seeing accurate, consistent, non-contradictory information
being disclosed to people on a regular basis” Jane Cohen, a researcher at
the New York-based rights group, told Reuters. Of the 24,228 workers
who risk radiation exposure at the reactor complex, only a mere 904 are
eligible for free cancer screenings being provided by the government and
Tepco, the daily Asahi Shimbun reported Nov. 22. The authorities have
limited the scope the $600 checkups to workers who were exposed to over
50 millisieverts between March 11 and mid-December 2011, but
thousands of workers are demanding that the time limit be abolished.
Disinformation and denials confounded by science
Official lullabies, denials and attempted cover-ups are desperate
shields against the enormous economic and legal liability that would
follow any acknowledgment of the depth and breadth of radiation’s likely
effects. Tepco said Nov. 6 that it may need 11 trillion yen, or $137 billion,
to cover its damages. Tokyo already set aside ¥9 trillion in July as part of
the federal bailout and takeover of the utility. Minister Edano hinted last
May that the government may cover some of the costs of decontaminating
certain limited areas. Comprehensive decontamination is not even being
considered because, as the science ministry reported in Nov. 2011,
radioactive fallout from the triple meltdowns was found in every one of its
57 prefectures.#
The journal Science reported this fall that 40% of the fish caught off
the coast of NE Japan are contaminated with radioactive cesium at levels
well above what the government allows.** Author Ken Buesseler of the
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution concluded that there is either a
source of cesium on the seafloor, or it is still being dumped into the ocean
by Tepco.
Referring to the millions of gallons of cooling water still being
poured into the three destroyed reactors and their waste fuel pools,
Buesseler told Radio Australia Nov. 20, “Some of that water is getting

ack into the ocean, either actively being pumped out after some
decontamination or through leaks in the building, so [Tepco’s] not able to
contain all of the water that they use to cool.”
The government and Tepco moved quickly to deny Science. The
federal fisheries ministry claimed that cesium from Fukushima’s wrecked
cooling systems — about 16,000-trillion becquerels, what Science called
“by far the largest discharge of radioactivity into the ocean ever seen”— is
“sinking into the seabed” and no longer entering the food chain. (A
becquerel is one subatomic disintegration per second) Tepco
representatives just said contaminated water was not leaking from any of
its wreckage.
Oceanographer Kanda at Tokyo University told the journal Nature
that his analysis indicates the site itself is leaking about 300 billion
becquerels into the sea every month.
John LaForge is on the staff of Nukewatch, a nuclear watchdog and
environmental justice group in Wisc., and edits its Quarterly.
Double Your Trouble With Nuclear Power
Bad for Health, Bad for Business
by
Joseph Mangano, MPH MBA and Dr. Janette Sherman
Industry leaders will have no problem closing nuclear reactors that
don’t generate expected profits. Exelon, the Chicago-based company that
owns 17 of the 104 U.S. reactors, recently saw its stock price drop below
$30 a share, the same level as mid-2003, and a whopping 70% below its
peak of over $92 a share in mid-2008.
The standard explanation for this reversal is cost. In particular,
electricity from growing natural gas and wind sources costs less to
produce than that from nuclear reactors. The famous 1954 promise by
Atomic Energy Commission head Lewis Strauss that the atom would
create energy “too cheap to meter” has failed miserably. But while cost is
the reason why utilities will be closing reactors, most reports fail to look
beneath the surface and understand WHY nukes are so expensive.

The answer is that nuclear power poses great danger to safety and
health. This danger means that reactors must comply with numerous safety
regulations; must be built with many safety features; and must be manned
by a large and highly trained work force – each a high-ticket item. In
addition, the fleet of 104 U.S. reactors in operation is aging – most over 30
years old – requiring that corroding parts be replaced, pushing costs even
higher.
Another element in the high cost of nukes won’t be faced until they
are decommissioned (after closing). Decommissioning costs run hundreds
of millions of dollars per reactor. Utilities are forced by federal law to
keep a large decommissioning fund while operating reactors, to prevent
them from simply closing reactors, not securing them, and sticking
taxpayers with the bill.
Even with all these extensive and expensive efforts to protect the
public, nukes still aren’t safe. The chance of a meltdown exists every day,
from human error, natural disaster, or terrorist act. The disasters at
Chernobyl in 1986 and at Fukushima last year remind us that catastrophic
meltdowns that affect thousands to millions are a sobering reality. In
addition to meltdowns, there is the matter of routine emissions from
reactors and elevated cancer rates near reactors, demonstrated in many
studies. Finally, the U. S. and other nations still have no long-term plans to
store the massive amounts of hazardous nuclear waste.
Dominion Nuclear recently announced that the Kewaunee reactor in
Wisconsin will permanently shut down in the spring. This action is a
milestone. Not only will this be the first U.S. reactor closed since 1998,
but it will likely be followed by numerous other shutdowns. An October
23 New York Times article was headlined “Reactors Face Mothballs.”
Kewaunee’s closing also represents a turning point. For over a
decade, nuclear leaders steadily proclaimed an era of a revival, after years
of no growth. But the word “renaissance” has vanished, and nuclear power
is now in full retreat.
So which reactors will join Kewaunee and be the next to close?
Nobody knows for sure, but there are a number of reactors that are faring
poorly, and are candidates for shutdown:

- Crystal River (Florida), closed for over three years, needs
considerable funds to replace defective parts
- San Onofre (California, two reactors), closed for nearly one year
due to faulty steam generators, will require millions to repair.
- Oyster Creek (New Jersey), which must shut down by 2019, may
close sooner according to Exelon executives who cite costs and market
forces
- Vermont Yankee (Vermont), up for sale (and like Kewaunee with no
buyers), along with stiff opposition from local citizens and elected
officials
- Clinton (Illinois), another Exelon reactor, has been hit hard by
cheaper alternatives
- Indian Point (New York, two reactors), faced considerable citizen
and political opposition ever since a plane hijacked by terrorists on 9/11
flew directly over it on its way to the World Trade Center.
This autumn has been the worst period for U.S. nuclear reactors in a
long time. Hurricane Sandy caused six reactors to close temporarily, while
others were shut to change fuel, and others closed due to mechanical
problems. From mid-October to late November, U.S. reactors operated at
just 70-75% of capacity, down sharply from the 90% figure of the past
decade.
Shrinking nuclear power is even more pronounced overseas. In
Japan, nearly two years after Fukushima, only 2 of 54 reactors are
operating, and the majority of Japanese are fiercely opposed to restarting
any reactors. Soon after Fukushima, governments in Germany, Belgium,
and Switzerland announced plans to phase out nuclear power, and
Germany has already closed half a dozen reactors.
The business troubles facing reactors are nothing new – historical
construction costs far exceeded original estimates, and Wall Street
executives stopped lending money for new reactors in the 1970s. Fewer
reactors will mean reduced threats to health but also reduced costs –
proving what’s good for the environment is also good for business.
Joseph Mangano, MPH MBA, is an epidemiologist, and Executive
Director of the Radiation and Public Health Project (www.radiation.org).

Janette Sherman, MD is an internist and toxicologist.
(www.janettesherman.com).
Fracking:
Nuclear Fallout: Ongoing Tragedy/Disaster In Japan:
EnergyNews:
09:42 AM EST on December 6th, 2012 | 6 comments
Gov’t Promo: It’s less than a stomach x-ray of radiation per day, so
please come visit Fukushima — Children can even go outside
(VIDEO)
08:59 AM EST on December 6th, 2012 | 3 comments
Methane found just below surface in neighborhood near giant
sinkhole — School bus will not enter area to pick up students still
living there
09:18 PM EST on December 5th, 2012 | 21 comments
Fukushima 3/11 Fallout Figures Released: Over 4,000,000 Bq/m2 in
major city — Contamination did NOT come from much talked about
Iodine-131 or Cesium-137
04:43 PM EST on December 5th, 2012 | 4 comments
Study finds weathered BP oil is much more toxic than when it was
fresh
11:51 AM EST on December 5th, 2012 | 11 comments
Reuters: Last 24 hours have ‘killed’ French nuclear -Analyst — “It
looks really bad”
10:47 AM EST on December 5th, 2012 | 19 comments
Al Gore claims nuclear power will be used in future — “I think the
waste issue can probably be solved”

09:42 AM EST on December 5th, 2012 | 2 comments
New drilling platform above BP’s Deepwater Horizon wellhead in
Gulf — Many large oil slicks nearby (VIDEOS)
08:28 AM EST on December 5th, 2012 | 15 comments
Japan TV: More than 80% of homes are still contaminated with
Fukushima fallout
12:56 AM EST on December 5th, 2012 | 12 comments
Former Gov’t Scientist: ‘Tar pavement’ is beneath sand along Gulf —
“Like a paved highway” after hurricane
10:33 PM EST on December 4th, 2012 | 21 comments
New Study: BP using Corexit in Gulf made oil up to 50 times more
toxic — Industry likes it so much, companies are stocking up for next
disaster
Ongoing Gulf of Mexico Oil Disaster:
Oil Spill Attorney Stuart Smith’s Blog:
Environmental Must-Reads – December 6, 2012
Fracking will drive oil boom, federal report says
As oil regulators draft rules for hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” in
California, a new federal report underscores the critical role the
controversial procedure will play in what energy authorities predict will be
a national oil boom.
Boulder fracking opponents demand county ban
Passion turned to intimidation during public testimony at the Boulder
County Commissioner meeting Tuesday night.

Opponents of the process of Hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,’ made
their voices heard as the county debates new regulations for the oil and gas
industry.
It will take more than Matt Damon to make fracking sexy
In the hierarchy of sexy environmental issues, fracking ranks pretty
low.
The process by which natural gas is extracted from shale deposits
miles below the surface has none of the adorable pandas of the endangered
species movement, no oil-covered birds and no picturesque glaciers
disappearing before our very eyes.
ALEC, CSG, ExxonMobil Fracking Fluid “Disclosure”
Model Bill Failing By Design
Last year, a hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) chemical fluid
disclosure “model bill” was passed by both the Council of State
Governments (CSG) and the American Legislative Exchange Council
(ALEC). It proceeded to pass in multiple states across the country soon
thereafter, but as Bloomberg recently reported, the bill has been an abject
failure with regards to “disclosure.”
Ohio once again approving injection wells for fracking waste after
earthquake scare
Following a moratorium sparked by an earthquake, The Ohio
Department of Natural Resources is once again approving permits for
injection wells for fracking wastewater.
Fracturing can cause small quakes, Oklahoma researcher says
Hydraulic fracturing, not just wastewater injection wells, has likely
caused small earthquakes in Oklahoma, a research scientist with the state
said Wednesday. Austin Holland, speaking at the American Geophysical
Union annual meeting in San Francisco, said his studies suggest that about
2 percent of the oil and gas wells hydraulically fractured in that state in the
past 2 1/2 years were followed within 21 days by a quake within eight
kilometers, or about five miles, of the well. While some likely were
coincidental, not all were, concluded Holland, who is with the Oklahoma
Geological Survey.
Portage County: Fracking blamed for home damage

A homeowner says cracking walls and crumbling mortar are being
caused by a nearby fracking well.
Beckie Dean blames the “enormous” damage to her 11-year-old
house on the drilling operation just across the street, about 1,000 feet
away.
Feds linking fracking, earthquakes
Recent earthquakes in Colorado and elsewhere were induced by a
drilling procedure to dispose of wastewater, federal geologists planned to
argue in a report announced Wednesday.
Researchers Find Surprises
When Analyzing DNA From Fracking Site
Researchers making a genetic analysis of microbes living at a
fracking site have uncovered some surprises.
The scientists reported that they found very few genetic biomarkers
for archaea, a domain of single-celled species found in high-salt
environments and hot springs. Instead, they found many more for species
that derive from bacteria.
Big Oil threatens Everglades with fracking
Big oil and gas companies are pushing forward with plans to begin
“fracking” in Florida on land just outside the Big Cypress National
Preserve—the gateway to the Florida Everglades—just 45 miles west of
Miami. The Everglades are part of a water system of subtropical wetlands
in Florida that extends throughout the southern part of the state.
Protect rare bird? Move by US has energy backers crying foul
A move by U.S. authorities to consider placing a small grassland bird
native to parts of the oil and gas belt on the Endangered Species List has
drawn the ire of some Western lawmakers.
Fracking North Dakota
In 1979, Brenda and Richard Jorgenson built a split level home in the
midst of a large ranch outside the tiny town of White Earth, North Dakota.
Richard’s family is from the area—his grandfather started homesteading
on the plains in 1915—and the couple’s affinity for the area runs deep.
They love the land they live on: the epic sky and seemingly endless
grasses of the prairie, the White Earth River meandering through a tree-

lined valley. For most of their lives the landscape of the region has been
dominated by agriculture—wheat, alfalfa, oats, canola, flax and corn. The
Jorgensons always figured they would leave the property to their three
children to pursue the same good life they have enjoyed.
Shale Oil Boom in North Dakota is Impacting Native Americans
Especially Hard
In just five years North Dakota (Read our Winter cover story,
“Boom!”) has gone from a quiet agricultural state to a rapidly
industrializing energy powerhouse. By the middle of 2012 North Dakota
was producing about 660,000 barrels of oil a day, more than twice as
much as just two years before. That number makes North Dakota the
second largest oil producing state in the United States, after Texas.
Exxon Hates Your Children
As Congress debates what actions to take to avoid the so-called
“fiscal cliff” perhaps no programs are less worthy of government support
than those which subsidize Big Oil, Gas and Coal.
The New Threat to Organics
Fracking the food supply is creating contamination problems, farmers
and researchers suggest.
Water Wars Pit Dakotas Against Barges for Missouri Flow
The Missouri River has blessed and cursed Kevin Schmidt,
alternately nourishing or overrunning his farmland. This year its water
saved his cows, and it may do so again next year if a lack of rain dries out
his soil.
Water Fight: Drought, Farming, Fracking
And The Midwest’s Tense Shipping Situation
Politicians across the Midwest are continuing to press the President to
declare a state of emergency on the Mississippi River to allow barge traffic
to keep flowing.
Fracking is the new gold rush
Tim Karle, the park ranger at the Klondike Gold Rush National
Historic Park, wonders whether today’s oil and gas boom in the Midwest
will turn into yet another American stampede for precious resources. And

he says this as someone who lived in Alaska four decades ago as his
brother worked on the oil pipeline.
Imperial Oil preparing application for drilling in the Arctic
Imperial Oil Ltd. is preparing an application to drill in the Canadian
Arctic that stands to renew the debate about how the energy industry will
tap high-latitude resources.
New judge assigned to case against BP supervisors
A new judge was assigned Wednesday to the case against two BP
supervisors charged in the deaths of 11 workers aboard the Deepwater
Horizon drilling rig in 2010, after the previous judge disclosed his wife
owns stock in one of the contractors.
New judge assigned to hear case against BP supervisors in oil spill
A new judge has been assigned to the case against two BP
supervisors charged in the deaths of 11 workers aboard the Deepwater
Horizon drilling rig in 2010.
Feds funnel millions into Gulf Coast
Days before a newly formed council focuses on long-term Gulf of
Mexico cleanup, a report released to The Associated Press shows that one
federal agency has committed more than a half-billion dollars to the region
in the past two years, nearly one-fifth of it on projects directly linked to
recovery from the 2010 oil spill.
On Our Radar: Shell’s Oil-Spill Sea Trials
A release of e-mails in response to a Freedom of Information Act
request yields more details on a debacle involving the containment dome
that Shell aimed to deploy in the event of an oil spill in the Arctic.
APNewsBreak: Federal report shows
conservation agency spending millions on Gulf Coast recovery
Days before a newly formed council focuses on long-term Gulf of
Mexico cleanup, a report released to The Associated Press shows that one
federal agency has committed more than a half-billion dollars to the region
in the past two years, nearly one-fifth of it on projects directly linked to
recovery from the 2010 oil spill.
Ecology, Army Corps investigate oil spill

The Washington state Department of Ecology and the Army Corps of
Engineers are investigating the source of an oil spill on the Snake River
near Lower Granite Dam in southeast Washington.
Louisiana Company Fined Over Sinkhole Tries to Resolve Problems
The owners of a failed Louisiana brine storage cavern are doing their
best to comply with a state order to quickly resolve problems created by
an eight-acre sinkhole in Assumption Parish spokesman Sonny Cranch
said Sunday.
Texas Brine: Sinkhole gas flow diminishing
Vent wells burning off gas trapped in an aquifer under homes and
swamps in northern Assumption Parish have removed slightly more than
2.7 million cubic feet of gas since flaring began, parish officials said.
Susan Rice’s Environmental Stances: Keystone XL And Climate
Change In The Spotlight
Susan Rice, rumored to be a top candidate to replace Hillary Clinton
as secretary of state, has received mixed reviews from environmentalists.l
Hundreds of Nebraskans speak out against Keystone XL pipeline
For eight hours last night, Nebraskans at a public meeting in Albion
shared their views on the proposed Keystone XL pipeline — most of
which were unfavorable.
AP Exclusive: Japan scientists took utility money
Influential Japanese scientists who help set national radiation
exposure limits have for years had trips paid for by the country’s nuclear
plant operators to attend overseas meetings of the world’s top academic
group on radiation safety.
Carbon emissions up 3.9% amid reactor halt
Japan’s greenhouse gas emissions for the year that ended March 31
rose 3.9 percent from the year before on increased use of fossil fuels by
power utilities after the Fukushima meltdowns effectively led to the
shutdown of all but two atomic reactors
Nuclear scientists found to have accepted travel money from
Japan’s utilities
A handful of scientists in Japan who were tasked with setting the
country’s nuclear radiation exposure limits were found to have accepted

money for years from utility companies in order to cover travel expenses.
While not paying for personal vacations, but rather overseas meetings on
nuclear safety, the conflict of interest is more than enough to raise red
flags over the future independence of Japan’s energy policy.
Novato’s Green Swan promotes cellphone safety
Lawyer invents application to remind users to keep device away from
head and vital organs
Black Liberation/Civil Rights:
Class Warfare and Victories for the Everyday People
Never be deceived that the rich will allow you to vote away
their wealth.
— Lucy Parsons
In order to genuinely change this corrupt, rotten, political system, one
must fight the system, not accommodate or acquiesce to it.
It is a struggle based upon the needs and human rights of the many
versus the insatiable greed and lust for power of the few.
The objective of this U.S. political system and its corporate-stream
media is to manipulate, break your spirit, and wear you down. Only this
way can those who actually own the system be the successful profiteers
that they are.
The plain ordinary everyday Black, White, Brown, Red, and Yellow
people of this nation are never genuinely told or truly heralded for their

political, economic, and social victories in the daily struggle to survive in
this predatory capitalist system.
The fact is that ordinary people in this nation and throughout the
world have made enormous collective strides on behalf of everyday
people. The people of this nation are no exception in this regard. We are
led to believe that this corrupt system is of, by, for and about us. It is not!
It is about maintaining and perpetuating the interests of, for, and by the
wealthy elite.
One of the most profound writers who delineated the
accomplishments of we, the ordinary people, was Howard Zinn, in his
book, A Peoples History of the United States. The relatively tiny national
and global wealthy elite will never, in their ‘educational’ institutions, their
corporate media, or their corporate-owned government(s), tell the truth
about the sacrifices, struggle, and accomplishments made by ordinary
people. They cannot afford to do this - for such truths would mentally and
politically empower ordinary people - and such empowerment would
threaten the status quo - their status quo.
Perpetual wars, ‘racial’ disharmony, economic austerity, and
deliberately manipulated ‘terrorism’ serve the interests and objectives of
the avaricious wealthy elite - not the teeming ordinary people of all colors.
We must understand that both color and class are being insidiously
and effectively used against us ordinary people. And this is being done to
the overwhelming majority of people by the elite - and the aspirant elite of
all colors. Today, the New Plantation, in the de facto Patriot Act / NDAA /
‘Kill List’ U.S. police-state - Plantation America - is all about pimping the
fears, hopes, dreams, and economic and political human rights of the vast
majority of people.
Sadly, many Black Americans have, for the moment, bought into the
bloody ‘manifest destiny’ myth of this nation - even as their own
economic, social, and political rights are being consistently decimated.
The war mongering, insipid, and articulate Barack Obama house ‘Negro,’
has served and continues to serve, his corporate Wall Street masters well -
at the terrible expense of everyday people of all colors.

Nevertheless, the ordinary people of all colors in this nation have the
capacity to rise up against this corporate-owned, rotten, hypocritical,
unjust political system. It is a matter of consciousness and time. This
struggle is about class warfare, not simply color. It is a struggle based
upon the needs and human rights of the many versus the insatiable greed
and lust for power of the few.
The corporate-stream media is, of course, essentially nothing more
than the propaganda mouth-piece for the slimy elite. Once this fact is
understood, recognized, and acted upon, the power of the corporate-stream
media (in all its wily forms) will be greatly diminished.
Both color and class are being insidiously and effectively used
against us ordinary people
The fact is that throughout this nation, ordinary people, at great costs,
are effectively resisting systemic home foreclosures, corporate hegemony,
and systemic brutality. The corporate-stream media reports little or
nothing of these valiant actions and victories on the part of the people as
such information is not in the interests of their corporate masters. The less
this corporate-stream media reports, the more the ordinary people should,
must, and will organize and resist in this nation and throughout Mother
Earth.
Only the persistent, determined, coordinated, and collective actions
of everyday people, can and will be an important part of resisting and
ultimately changing this corrupt and irretrievably rotten political system. It
is time to shove this entire corrupt political system off the so-called ‘fiscal
cliff,’ and collectively create one that serves the needs, wants, and hopes
of everyday people.
We are winning victories, and every victory - large or small - belongs
to the people, all the people! This struggle is a long and protracted one -
and it must be intensified! All Power To The People - conscious,
determined, and victorious people!
Remember: Each one, reach one. Each one, teach one. Onward, then,
my sisters and brothers! Onward!
BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member and Columnist,
Larry Pinkney, is a veteran of the Black Panther Party, the former

Minister of Interior of the Republic of New Africa, a former political
prisoner and the only American to have successfully self-authored his
civil / political rights case to the United Nations under the International
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. In connection with his political
organizing activities in opposition to voter suppression, etc., Pinkney was
interviewed in 1988 on the nationally televised PBS News Hour, formerly
known as The MacNeil / Lehrer News Hour. For more about Larry
Pinkney see the book, Saying No to Power: Autobiography of a 20th
Century Activist and Thinker, by William Mandel [Introduction by
Howard Zinn]. (Click here to read excerpts from the book.) Click here to
view Larry’s interview of October 26, 2012. Click here to contact Mr.
Pinkney.
Racist Justice In The United States — Making The Victim The
Criminal And The Criminals The Victims!
Brandon Jackson Defends Himself Against White Mob,
Sentenced to 12 Years in Prison
Brandon Jackson was reportedly jumped by 7 or 8 white men in
2006. One would think that the white men would’ve been charged with a
crime, maybe even a hate crime, but actually the reverse happened. Six
years after the fact, Jackson was sentenced to 12 years in prison for

attempted murder, aggravated assault, and possession of a weapon he
reportedly used to defend himself against the mob.
The fight began when Jackson was helping his employer move
furniture when he noticed a rowdy group of intoxicated whites fighting
across the street. He ran over to get a closer look, when one of the
intoxicated fighters swung on Jackson.
Jackson tried to run, but was chased by the aggressor, who was now
accompanied by 7 to 8 other white men, who followed Brandon and then
reportedly began stomping and kicking him while yelling, “Kill the
n*gger!”
Jackson then pulled out a small three inch knife to protect himself,
and once police arrived, the crowd was forced to disperse. Even though
the police report described the fight as a “racial” incident, and Jackson
was the only person hurt, Jackson was the only person charged with a
crime.
By the time Jackson went to trial in 2009, the charges had somehow
increased to include attempted murder.
Brandon’s lawyer provided a statement from a witness confirming
that he hadn’t attacked the group of drunken white men, but prosecutors
withheld that information from the defense team. Also withheld were
toxicology reports which proved the white teens who attacked Jackson
were intoxicated. Jackson was offered a five year plea deal but refused
because he says he is innocent.
In Brandon’s trial, which was postponed until February of 2012, he
was sentenced to twelve years in jail.
In a recent interview with News One, Brandon’s mother says she
hasn’t lost faith and won’t give up on freeing her son.

(Late Edition)
December 4, 1969 — Nothing but a Northern Lynching:
The Assassination of Fred Hampton
• Black Panther Party
by
G. Flint Taylor
Observations of one of the attorneys who represented the families of
survivors of the murderous December 4, 1969 raid by the FBI and
Chicago police on the home of Fred Hampton, Deputy Chairman of the
Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party. Read more
Labor:

Let’s Keep Our Eye on the Ball: No Cuts to Safety Net Programs!
As the December 31, 2012 deadline fast approaches for decisions on
what to do with trillions of dollars in federal programs set to expire on that
date, speculation is rife as to whether a “Grand Bargain” will be struck.
Politicians of both parties are posturing for position as headlines and
pundits warn of “falling over the fiscal cliff.” The debates between the
principal spokespersons of the Democratic and Republican parties are
going off in many different directions, creating a maze of confusion and
uncertainty.
The fact of the matter is that much of the hullabaloo is a sideshow to
what is most at stake in the coming weeks. In the first place, under the
“sequestration” — which unless changed by Congress will take effect
January 1, 2013 — there will be an automatic across the board 10% cut in
domestic programs, including education, food safety, child care, home
heating, environment, and much more, as well as a 2% cut in payments to
Medicare providers. This will be extremely damaging to hundreds of
urgently needed human services programs. In addition, federal aid to the
states and cities will be sharply curtailed.
At the same time, if cuts are enacted to Medicare, Medicaid and
Social Security, this will jeopardize the health, welfare, and retirement
security of the 90 million people who depend on these programs for their
very existence.
A special target of the benefit-cutters is Medicare, with the emphasis
on extending the eligibility date for coverage. Polls show that 71% of
Democratic and 68% of Republican voters oppose any extension. Yet in a
front page article in the December 1–2, 2012 Wall Street Journal titled
“GOP Takes Aim at Entitlements,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch
McConnell calls for such an extension, along with a number of other cuts.
President Obama has in the past indicated a willingness to support
legislation delaying the age for seniors to be eligible for Medicare
coverage. In his “Grand Bargain” talks with Boehner in the summer of
2011, he also proposed $700 billion in Medicare cuts and additional cuts
to Medicaid.

There is plenty of money available to deal with the debt and deficit
without resorting to Draconian cuts in safety net programs: for starters,
increase taxes on the wealthy; levy the payroll tax on all forms of income,
including dividends, interest, rental and capital gains; levy a tax on stock
transactions; levy a special financial tax on the big banks, corporations and
investment houses which received trillions in stimulus funds and are now
sitting on $2.5 trillion in cash as a result, which they’re not using to create
jobs; eliminate the cap on Social Security earnings; slash the military/war
budget; close corporate loopholes; and eliminate corporate welfare.
Note: If the Bush tax cuts were continued for another decade intact, it
would mean $4.7 trillion more in deficits. So the big problem is on the tax
side when it comes to the fiscal cliff, not the spending side.
We need to keep our eye on the ball and focus our energy and
attention on the fight to preserve the safety net programs. For this reason,
we in the Emergency Labor Network applaud the resolution adopted
unanimously by the San Francisco Labor Council, AFL-CIO, on
November 26, 2012, which we believe places the focus on what is most
importantly at stake. Here is that resolution:
No Grand Bargain: Protect Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid
Whereas, the real national deficit was caused by wars, tax cuts for
the richest, reckless financial speculation, and bank bailouts; and
Whereas, both Democrats’ and Republicans’ proposals would cut
Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other vital safety net programs;
and
Whereas, the proposed program cuts would hit women, people of
color, and children hardest, the very populations that have most suffered
unemployment, wage discrimination and stagnation, homelessness, food
insecurity, and lack of medical care and education over the last 40 years of
wealth transfer to the top; and
Whereas, focusing on the “middle class” hides the problem of
expanding poverty; and
Whereas, even though Social Security has not contributed a cent to
the deficit, and the Social Security Trust Fund is entirely solvent through
2038, the “Grand Bargainers” have discussed lowering benefits by raising

the retirement age, changing the COLA formula using CPI, which
increases at an even slower rate than the current inflation adjustment, and
would cut benefits for current and future retirees affecting younger
beneficiaries, veterans and women;
Whereas, there are 29 U.S. Senators, including Sen. Boxer but not
Sen. Feinstein, who have signed a letter initiated by Sen. Bernie Sanders
demanding no cuts to Social Security, explaining that Social Security
cannot contribute to the deficit, and that it is fully funded by workers and
their employers; and
Whereas, Democrats and Republicans have used the “Fiscal Cliff” as
a guise of “shared sacrifice” when our real need is stable, well-paying jobs
for the tens of millions of un- or under-employed workers, and rebuilding
the nation’s debilitated infrastructure, education, housing, and distorted
medical system; and
Whereas, health insurance corporations continually escalate health
care costs and cause workers to carry more of the cost burden.
Therefore, be it resolved, the San Francisco Labor Council endorse
and support the following:
No Cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, or Other Social
Programs. No cuts in eligibility range, benefit amounts, or cost-of-living
increases, no means testing of benefits, no out-of-pocket cost increases,
and no cuts to providers. Scrap the cap on payroll taxes (FICA) and
require those earning more than $110,100 to pay FICA on all their income.
Make Corporations and the Rich Pay for What They Have
Withheld for Decades. Restore the pre-Bush tax rates on the top 2%. No
compromises such as eliminating classes of deductions or caps on total
deductions that could ease the burden on the 2% and/or penalize low- and
middle-income people. No decrease in corporate tax rates. More revenue
through additional tax brackets on million- billionaires, tax investment and
inheritance income as regular income.
Be it further resolved, that the San Francisco Labor Council
circulates this resolution among union membership urging them to support
actions on this Resolution.

Be it finally resolved, that the San Francisco Labor Council send a
letter to both Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Sen. Harry Reid based on this
Resolution.
Submitted by SFLC Executive Committee members Conny Ford
(OPEIU Local 3), Maria Guillen (SEIU Local 1021) and Alan Benjamin
(OPEIU Local 3) and adopted unanimously by the San Francisco Labor
Council on November 26, 2012
Respectfully, Tim Paulson, Executive Director San Francisco Labor
Council Read More
Economy:
World:
Morsi supporters clash with protesters
outside presidential palace in Cairo
Egyptian president's supporters accused of 'vicious' attack against
those protesting over decrees and draft constitution
The Guardian
Photograph: Hassan Ammar/AP
President Mohamed Morsi's supporters, many members of the Muslim Brotherhood,
clash with protesters outside the presidential palace in Cairo, Egypt.
Supporters and opponents of President Mohamed Morsi threw rocks
and firebombs at each other during violent clashes outside the presidential
palace in Cairo on Wednesday, as a new round of protests deepened
Egypts political crisis.

Mohamed ElBaradei, a leading opposition advocate of reform,
accused Morsi's supporters of a "vicious and deliberate" attack against
peaceful demonstrators.
"We hold President Morsi and his government completely responsible
for the violence that is happening in Egypt today," he said. "A regime that
is not able to protect its people and is siding with his own sect, [and] thugs
is a regime that lost its legitimacy and is leading Egypt into violence and
bloodshed."
The opposition is demanding Morsi rescind decrees giving him near
unrestricted powers and shelve a disputed draft constitution his Muslim
Brotherhood allies passed last week.
The political crisis has divided Egypt. Islamists and an opposition
made up of youth groups, liberal parties and large sectors of the public
have dug in their heels, signalling a protracted standoff.
The latest clashes began when thousands of Islamist supporters of
Morsi descended on the area around the palace where some 300 of his
opponents were staging a sit-in. Members of the Brotherhood chased the
protesters away from outside the main gate and tore down their tents. The
protesters fled into side streets where they chanted anti-Morsi slogans.
After a lull in fighting, hundreds of young Morsi opponents arrived
and began throwing firebombs at the president's backers, who responded
with rocks.
No casualties were immediately reported but witnesses said they saw
several bloodied protesters. Several opposition groups said they were
calling on their supporters to head to the palace.
"I voted for Morsi to get rid of Hosni Mubarak. I now regret it,"
Nadia el-Shafie yelled at Brotherhood supporters from a side street. "God
is greater than you. Don't think this power or authority will add anything
to you. God made this revolution, not you."
By nightfall, there were about 10,000 Morsi supporters outside the
palace. They erected metal barricades to keep traffic off a stretch of road
that runs parallel to the palace in Heliopolis district. Some of them
appeared to plan staging their own sit-in.

"May God protect Egypt and its president," read a banner hoisted on
a truck. On top of the vehicle was a man reciting verses from the Qu'ran
via a loud speaker.
"We came to support the president. We feel there is a legitimacy that
someone is trying to rob," said Rabi Mohammed, an engineer. "People are
rejecting democratic principles using thuggery."
At least 100,000 opposition supporters rallied outside the palace on
Tuesday and smaller protests were staged by the opposition elsewhere in
Cairo and across much of Egypt. It was the latest of a series of mass
protests against the president.
Buoyed by the turnout on Tuesday, the mostly secular opposition held
a series of meetings on Wednesday to decide on next steps in the standoff
that began 22 November over Morsi's presidential decrees. It escalated
after his allies hurriedly pushed through a draft constitution.
As well as more demonstrations, activists said opposition leaders
were discussing whether to campaign for a "no" vote in a constitutional
referendum scheduled for 15 December or to call for a boycott.
Brotherhood leaders have been calling on the opposition to enter a
dialogue with Morsi. But the opposition says dialogue is pointless unless
the president first rescinds his decrees and shelves the draft constitution.
Mahmoud Mekki, Egypt's vice-president, called for dialogue between
Morsi and the opposition to reach a "consensus" on the disputed articles of
the constitution and put their agreement in a document that would be
discussed by the next parliament. He put the number of clauses in disputes
at 15, out of a total of 234, but said the referendum must go ahead.
The draft constitution has been criticised for not protecting the rights
of women and minority groups, and many journalists see it as restricting
freedom of expression. Critics also say it empowers Islamic religious
clerics by giving them a say over legislation, while some articles were
seen as tailored to get rid of the Islamists' enemies.
If the referendum goes ahead next week and the draft constitution is
adopted, elections for parliament's lower chamber will be held in February.

Health, Education, Science and Welfare:

Daily News Digest December 6, 2012
Slavery Today
Yes, we mean real slavery. People held against their will, forced to
work and paid nothing.
Sometimes the slave holder ‘pays’ a few grains of rice to keep the
slaves alive, or uses a bogus payment that the slave holder reclaims at the
end of the month. But the end result is what slavery is today and has
always been—one person controlling another and then forcing them to
work.
Through Free the Slaves’ research, first published in Kevin Bales’
Disposable People, our conservative estimate is that there are 27 million
people in slavery today. This means that there are more people in slavery
today than at any other time in human history. Slavery has existed for
thousands of years, but changes in the world’s economy and societies over
the past 50 years have enabled a resurgence of slavery.
Three trends have contributed most to the rise of modern-slavery.
1. The first, a recent population explosion has tripled the
number of people in the world, with most growth taking place
in the developing world.

2. The second, rapid social and economic change, have displaced
many to urban centers and their outskirts, where people have
no ‘safety net’ and no job security.
3. The third, government corruption around the world, allows
slavery to go unpunished, even though it is illegal everywhere.
In this way millions have become vulnerable to slave holders and
human traffickers looking to profit through the theft of people’s lives. This
new slavery has two prime characteristics: slaves today are cheap and they
are disposable.
Cheap, Disposable People
• An average slave in the American South in 1850 cost the
equivalent of $40,000 in today’s money; today a slave costs an
average of $90.
• In 1850 it was difficult to capture a slave and then transport
them to the US. Today, millions of economically and socially
vulnerable people around the world are potential slaves.
This “supply” makes slaves today cheaper than they have ever been.
Since they are so cheap, slaves are today are not considered a major
investment worth maintaining. If slaves get sick, are injured, outlive their
usefulness, or become troublesome to the slaveholder, they are dumped or
killed. For most slave holders, actually legally ‘owning’ the slave is an
inconvenience since they already exert total control over the individuals
labor and profits. Who needs a legal document that could at some point be
used against the slave holder? Today the slave holder cares more about
these high profits than whether the holder and slave are of different ethnic
backgrounds; in New Slavery, profit trumps skin color. Finally, new
slavery is directly connected to the global economy. As in the past, most
slaves are forced to work in agriculture, mining, and prostitution. From
these sectors, their exploited labor flows into the global economy, and into
our lives.
How does slavery affect us?
• Since slavery feeds directly into the global economy, it makes
sense that we would be concerned by the ways in which slavery
flows into our homes through the products we buy and the

investments we make. Slaves harvest cocoa in the Ivory Coast,
make charcoal used to produce steel in Brazil, weave carpets in
India—the list goes on. These products reach our stores and our
homes. Click here to learn about what businesses and consumers
can do to fight slavery in our products and investments.
In addition, there may be people held in slavery in your community.
Slavery happens in nearly every country in the world, and the US and
Europe are not immune. Research that Free the Slaves conducted with the
University of California, Berkeley found documented cases of slavery and
human trafficking in more than 90 cities across the United States. To learn
about the warning signs of slavery and what you can do to combat slavery
in your community, click here.
Quote of the Day:
Willie Sutton, a famous bank robber, when asked why
he robbed banks replied, "Because that's where the money
is." This is also the the answer to why the rich should be
taxed.
— Doc Charly Walton
Images of the Day:

Now that the Board of Education and Rahm Emanuel have
gotten the Illinois Legislature to delay the announcement of school
closings, we know we have a fight on our hands.We should expect that
CPS will close up to 150 schools and announce them by March 31,
2013.
Join hundreds of parents, students and community members who
want to help us FIGHT FOR OUR STUDENTS AND OUR
SCHOOLS!
Let’s make it happen…
TOGETHER
Education Summit
Saturday December 8
10:00 a.m.–3:00 p.m.
Marshall High School
3250 West Adams St.
Click here to register
FEATURING WORKSHOPS ON:
• Sustainable School Transformation
• Charter Schools: Myth vs. Reality
• Student Organizing
• Appropriate Student Assessment vs. Test Factories
• Whose Schools? Our Schools!
• Fighting for an Elected School Board
• Decision-making on the Ground
• Strengthening & Empowering LSCs
• Educating the Whole Child
• Wrap-around Services

IN COLLABORATION WITH:
Action NOW ● Albany Park Neighborhood Council ● Chicago
Teachers Solidarity Campaign ● Grassroots Collaborative ● KOCO ●
Chicago PEACE ● Parents 4 Teachers ● People for Community
Recovery ● Pilsen Alliance ● PACE ● SOUL ● Stand Up Chicago ●
STOP ● Teachers for Social Justice
Click here to register
Education Summit
Investigation of slave labour at new US embassy in Iraq
Videos of the Day:
The prison biz — The new slavery
The prison biz. It's bigger than you think and the product is slave
labor - in the US. Profits and payoffs for everybody.
End Wall Street’s Wars!
Occupy Wall Street!
Occupy Wall Street is the Only Organization
That Identifies The Enemy —
The 1% That Own and Control The Wealth!

1960s The Realist — One Nation Under God/1%
(Unlike The Trade Union Misleaders
Nor The Misleaders Of The Oppressed
Who Strive To Be In ‘Partnership’ With The 1%)
1960s The Realist — One Nation Under God/1%
(Unlike The Trade Union Misleaders
Nor The Misleaders Of The Oppressed
Who Strive To Be In ‘Partnership’ With The 1%)
Occupy Wall Street — ‘We Are The 99%’
The resistance continues at Liberty Square:
U.S.:
The Just Actions of a ‘Fan of Sunshine’
Manning Up
by
Randall Amster
Whatever one’s views about his alleged actions, you would need a
pretty hard shell not to be moved by the case of Bradley Manning. Hero to
some, traitor to others, this diminutive soldier has endured an
unprecedented level of mistreatment, languishing in a largely
incommunicado pretrial state for more than two years and facing repeated
episodes of humiliation and degradation. Compounding this case is
Manning’s status as a gay solider, for which he had experienced
repercussions well before gaining international notoriety as a purported

Wikileaks source for some of the whistleblowing site’s most damning
allegations about governmental and military machinations around the
world.
Being accused of revealing the “emperor’s new clothes” is likely to
land one in hot water, but Manning’s treatment has crossed all bounds of
fairness, decency, and legality. Having one’s life stripped down (literally)
to its most basic functions, being confined in a space barely the size of a
standard bathroom, having to formally ask even for toilet paper while
standing at attention, and getting access to the outdoors for only 20
minutes per day is the sort of thing that could drive anyone mad. The fact
that the military has justified the conditions of Manning’s confinement by
asserting that he was a suicide risk is a specious argument; being in such a
state can cause one to seek any way out, and putting all options on the
table is more a sign of sanity than the opposite.
We can speculate how any of us would hold up in similar
circumstances, which hopefully we’ll never have to find out. But the art
and science of breaking down the human spirit is quite well-developed by
now, and the harshness of Manning’s confinement is likely intended as a
warning and deterrent to anyone else even contemplating blowing the
whistle on the architects of empire. It is thus all the more important and
impressive that Manning has endured this brutal captivity — doing so
through methods like dancing in his cell, “working out” with imaginary
weights, and making faces at himself in the small mirror on the wall.
Indeed, as Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights
observed upon attending the recent hearing on Manning’s confinement, the
testimony Manning gave showed him to be “dignified, articulate, smart
and self-aware…. His incredible sincerity and strength was visible to all.
We are lucky to have people with the courage of Bradley Manning.”
Where Manning found this resolve will likely be a subject for
biographers someday, but early signs indicate that the military itself may
have ironically contributed to it. From his first days as a soldier, Manning
seemed to be ill-suited for the role, at least in the eyes of some of his
colleagues. In an interview with The Guardian, an anonymous soldier who
served with Manning recalls the situation: “The kid was barely 5ft — he

was a runt. And by military standards and compared with everyone who
was around there — he was a runt. By military standards, ‘he’s a runt so
pick on him’, or ‘he’s crazy — pick on him’, or ‘he’s a faggot — pick on
him.’ The guy took it from every side. He couldn’t please anyone. And he
tried. He really did…. A lot of people let him down. He is not the first one
they let down and he is not the last one.” If we subscribe to the school of
thought that says our scars make us stronger, then Manning’s early duress
may have steeled him for what would come later.
In another irony, Manning’s first post after basic training was at Fort
Huachuca in southern Arizona, where human rights activists would gather
annually to demonstrate against the base’s claim to fame as being the
headquarters of U.S. Army military intelligence and the place where the
“torture manuals” for the War on Terror were developed. The nonviolent
protests there specifically addressed cruel treatment of detainees: “We
practice nonviolence at Ft. Huachuca to call for civilian, human-rights
centered oversight of all interrogation training and practice, which must
include absolute prohibition of cruel treatment and command
responsibility for any violation of this prohibition.” In fact, the history of
nonviolent praxis is replete with examples of people enduring suffering for
their principles. Gandhi referred to this as tapasya, meaning “austere
devotion” and often implemented as a willingness to suffer for one’s
beliefs rather than inflict suffering on another.
In the annals of nonviolence, Thoreau’s famed essay “Civil
Disobedience” stands out as a testament to the principled endurance of
unjust confinement: “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly,
the true place for a just man is also a prison.” In his equally celebrated
“Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King, Jr. extols the virtues
of myriad activists for justice “willingly going to jail for conscience’
sake.” Perhaps Manning, implicitly if not outright, was aware of the
essence of these teachings when he made the alleged decision to transgress
the hegemon by revealing its secrets. If so he would be in good company,
as validated by the “198 methods of nonviolent action” developed by
Gene Sharp and the Albert Einstein Institution and their inclusion of
“disclosing identities of secret agents” among the list of tactics — which

we can extrapolate to include disclosing damning evidence of the sort that
Manning is said to have given to Wikileaks.
Manning may be guilty of revealing state secrets, but that action pales
before the state’s guilt in perpetrating atrocities and committing them to
secrecy in the first place. In a recent accounting of what these revelations
demonstrate, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange catalogues their import:
“The material that Bradley Manning is alleged to have leaked has
highlighted astonishing examples of U.S. subversion of the democratic
process around the world, systematic evasion of accountability for
atrocities and killings, and many other abuses…. the cables show that
torture and killing are not isolated events, but the violent manifestations of
an aggressive policy of coercion used by the United States in the pursuit of
its strategic commercial and political goals around the world.”
The implications of this are wide-ranging and eminently clear:
whatever privileges of democratic governance and material comfort we
enjoy here in the U.S. (and in other privileged nations), they are provided
at the expense of innumerable underprivileged others’ democracy and
comfort. Perhaps some are content with this bargain, and they will
accordingly construct Manning as a traitor. Many others, however, grasp
more deeply that such an inherently unequal system is untenable and
unjust. Eventually, it entraps even those nominally “privileged” within its
confines, turning us all into captives of a sort as the tentacles of inequality
and injustice expand their network. Again, Assange, from a recent
interview with Democracy Now! in which he considers the digital-age
implications:
“I think this tension between power and knowledge is extremely
important. So, we’ve all heard the saying that knowledge is power. Well,
it’s true. And the mass surveillance and mass interception that is occurring
to all of us now who use the internet is also a mass transfer of power from
individuals into extremely sophisticated state and private intelligence
organizations and their cronies. Now, if that is to be resisted, we must have
a transfer of information that is going the other way.”
In getting to hear directly from Manning for the first time, we not
only learn more about his story and personal qualities, but also come to

understand the deeper connections between this small man and the big
questions raised by his alleged actions. Intriguingly, Manning’s testimony
itself alludes to the basic issues of transparency that determine whether the
balance of power will be struck in favor of “the people” or the entrenched
“powers that be” in the days ahead. As reported in The Guardian, in his
landmark pretrial testimony Manning reflected on the deprivation of
natural light during his excessive period of confinement. “I’m a fan of
sunshine,” he stated. If we care at all about the cause of justice in our
world, Bradley Manning’s fortitude should render us all devotees of
sunshine…
Randall Amster, J.D., Ph.D., is the Graduate Chair of Humanities at
Prescott College. He serves as Executive Director of the Peace and Justice
Studies Association, and is the publisher and editor of New Clear Vision.
Among his recent books are Anarchism Today (Praeger, 2012) and Lost in
Space: The Criminalization, Globalization, and Urban Ecology of
Homelessness (LFB Scholarly, 2008).
Kill This Entitlement Program: The 6% Risk-Free Dividend the Fed
Has Been Paying Wall Street Banks For Almost a Century
By
Pam Martens
Federal Reserve Building in Washington, D.C.
On December 23 of this year, the Federal Reserve will be 99 years
old. And throughout that 99 years, regardless of boom, bust, recession or
Great Depression, the biggest Wall Street banks have been enjoying a 6

percent, risk-free return on the capital they hold at the Fed in the form of
dividends.
Have you looked at your checking or money market bank statement
lately from JPMorgan Chase or Citibank? How about the statement
showing the interest you’re earning on your mortgage escrow account with
the big banks? While the country suffers through the lingering effects of
the Great Recession caused by the biggest Wall Street banks, the public
typically receives less than 1 percent on their deposits at the big banks,
while the government has legislated a permanent, risk-free 6 percent
guarantee to the Wall Street banks for their capital on deposit at the Fed.
Now that’s an entitlement program that needs to die!
The Fed requires that its member banks subscribe to “stock” in an
amount equal to 6 percent of their capital and surplus. The banks have
to post half that amount with the Fed upon becoming a member; the other
half is subject to call by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve in
Washington, D.C. The deposited capital entitles the bank to a
corresponding share of “stock” in the regional Fed. The stock is not like
regular common stock: it can’t be traded, sold, pledged as collateral, gifted
to family members, shorted, or aggregated to effect a takeover. It’s this
“stock” that’s receiving the risk-free 6 percent dividend from the Fed.
This corporate welfare program gets even better: if the shares of
stock were acquired prior to March 28, 1942, the 6 percent risk-free
dividend is tax exempt and the bank doesn’t have to pay corporate taxes
on it. Read More
A Double Standard of Justice: The War Crimes of a Sergeant,
the War Crimes of a Nation
by
Tom McNamara
Whatever grievances a nation may have, however
objectionable it finds the status quo, aggressive warfare is an
illegal means for settling those grievances or for altering
those conditions
— Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson,

the American prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, in his
opening statement to the tribunal
It is alleged that on the evening of March 10-11, 2012, US Army
Staff Sgt. Robert Bales left his base in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan,
fully armed and loaded, and murdered 16 civilians in a nearby village. At a
pretrial hearing, the prosecution stated that Sgt. Bales went from house to
house, firing his weapon with intent to kill. Children were shot through the
thighs or in the head. At one point during the massacre 11 bodies, mostly
women and children, were “put in a pile and put on fire.” The prosecutor
said that the carnage was so violent that when Sgt. Bales finally returned
to base, the blood of his victims had seeped all the way through his
uniform and down to his underwear.
Witnesses from the camp reported that Sgt. Bales, a decorated
veteran of four combat tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, had been upset over
an incident that occurred 2 days earlier, when an improvised explosive
device (IED) exploded, resulting in one US soldier losing the lower part of
a leg.
The murder of the local Afghans is the worst case of civilian
slaughter to be blamed on a single U.S. soldier since the Vietnam War. For
this hideous and blatant war crime, the prosecution is asking for the death
penalty.
A key component of US strategy in the Afghanistan / Pakistan
theatre, or “AfPak” as the area is commonly known, is drones. The
Pentagon has about 7,000 at its disposal, with not all of them being for
attack purposes. For several years now, a sustained targeted drone
campaign has been carried out in an effort to weaken the “insurgents” (i.e.
local Afghan resistance). It has been estimated that over the past decade
somewhere between 1,800 to 3,100 people have been killed in the region
by US drone strikes. And while the US government would argue that the
vast majority of these people were militant combatants, some estimates
show that for every “insurgent” killed, 10 civilians were also killed.
The US has taken the position that all of this is legal, with Attorney-
General Eric Holder arguing that the use of “technologically advanced
weapons” (i.e. drones) is based on “adherence to the law.” But Article 2(4)

of the UN Charter should give us reason to pause. It expressly prohibits
the threat or use of force by one state against another. One argument that
proponents for drone attacks use is that since the attacks are being carried
out on militants and insurgents, and mostly in regions where the rule of
law has broken down, the phrase “state” doesn’t apply and therefore
nullifies this section of the Charter. But this argument is dubious at best. If
it were Iran, China, or Russia engaging in this type of behavior closer to
US shores, say in Central or South America, there is no doubt that the US
government would be in an uproar over the legality, and morality, of their
use.
Compounding all of this is the controversial policy known as “the
double tap.” This involves striking an initial target and then following up,
in quick succession, with repeated attacks on the same site as people arrive
to give aid to the original victims. There are reports that innocent
bystanders and non-combatants have been intentionally killed as a result.
There are also reports that funerals have been deliberately hit by targeted
drone strikes as well. In almost any other circumstances these events
would be recognized for what they are. War crimes of the highest order.
But somehow, for the US, they only raise “contentious legal questions” to
quote the New York Times.
16 civilians (including 9 children) were murdered in cold blood in
Afghanistan. For that, Sgt. Bales is facing the possible loss of his life.
America’s drone policy alone has reportedly killed between 474 and 881
civilians in the region, including 176 children. For this, no one is on trial.
But to even talk of war crimes in Afghanistan is a farce. The whole
war, in addition to being undeclared and unfunded, can be considered as a
war crime. That is, if one chooses to respect the principles put forth at the
International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg and the founding charter of
the UN. To talk about the individual atrocities committed by one lonely
Sergeant (if that, indeed, is the case. 2 US soldiers are testifying for the
Government under immunity) while ignoring the war crimes committed
by a Nation, screams of hypocrisy and a double standard of justice.
After 11 years of fighting, the US has now been in Afghanistan
longer than the Soviet Union. 2,000 soldiers have died in combat, with

over 17,000 wounded. The cost of the war is well over $1 trillion, and still
counting. While combat operations are scheduled to cease by the end of
2014, NATO has stated that it is committed to maintaining a presence in
Afghanistan well after that. The results will inevitably be more innocent
deaths and more war crimes. Another inevitability will most likely be that
only front line soldiers will be held accountable for their actions, not the
senior military commanders and the leaders in Washington who should
ultimately be held responsible for this senseless and bloody quagmire.
When it comes to America’s war crimes it would appear that some
get punished. Most, however, get ignored.
Tom McNamara is an Assistant Professor at the ESC Rennes School
of Business, France, and a Visiting Lecturer at the French National
Military Academy at Saint-Cyr Coëtquidan, France.
‘America and Israel are in it together,’
Clinton declares– and nary a word about settlements
by
Philip Weiss
At a time when Britain and France are considering withdrawing
ambassadors from Israel over its latest settlement plans, Hillary Clinton
addressed the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution Friday night and,
declaring "America and Israel are in it together," said nothing about
settlements or occupation except when she three times praised Benjamin
Netanyahu for a "settlement freeze."
And in one pointed reference to a settlement, Gilo, Clinton bragged
about visiting the colony.
Seated at dinner next to Haim Saban, an ardent supporter of Israel
and the Democratic Party, Clinton seemed to be relaunching her political
career.

Haim Saban with Hillary Clinton.
(Photo by Natasha Mozgovaya of Haaretz).
She called Saban "a friend, a colleague, a mentor, an inspiration to so
many of us here tonight" and from start to finish Clinton took Israel's side
in the conflict. She accused Iran of fostering global terrorism "insinuating"
itself into countries around the world, chastised Palestinians for not
accepting Partition in 1947, and suggested that Palestinians should be
content with a mini-state in Palestinian-controlled areas of the West Bank
and not Gaza.
Clinton gave shoutouts to John Kerry and Eric Schmidt of Google,
and praised Israeli ambassador Michael Oren, Israeli Defense Minister
Ehud Barak and Israel promoter David Makovsky, and took questions
from (according to the transcript) an unbalanced roster, Makovsky, Israeli
journalist Ilana Dayan and settler activist Dani Dayan.
Here are some excerpts from her one-sided remarks:
America and Israel are in it together. This is a friendship that comes
naturally to us. Americans honor Israel as a homeland dreamed of for
generations and finally achieved by pioneering men and women in my
lifetime. We share bedrock beliefs in freedom, equality, democracy, and
the right to live without fear. What threatens Israel threatens America, and
what strengthens Israel strengthens us...
Our shared obsession with innovation is also bringing us closer
together. Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt recently called Israel
“the most important high tech center in the world, after the United States.”
So it is no surprise that our diplomatic challenge is not only about a

dialogue of strategic and political interests, including not just our soldiers
and our politicians, but increasingly including our techies and our venture
capitalists and our entrepreneurs.
She faults the Arab spring and praises rightwing Israeli Foreign
Minister Avigdor Lieberman:
And one of our problems is that when you think about who the
leaders are [in Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt], there aren’t political parties that
create a Tzipi Livni or an Ehud Olmert or Avigdor Lieberman.
She blames the Iranians for a skein of terror and "hegemonic"
ambitions:
we know very well the Iranian regime already exports terrorism, not
only to Israel’s doorstep, but across the world. If we had a map I could put
up there, I could show you what we track and plot on that map – the
evidence of terrorism – mostly, thankfully, plots foiled or unsuccessful.
Unfortunately, as in Bulgaria, some that succeeded. But those plots, those
activities of Iran directly and through their agents, stretches from Mexico
to Thailand. We see Iran bringing repression to Syria. We see Iran
brutalizing their own people. So a nuclear Iran is not simply a threat to
Israel. It is a threat to all nations and risks opening the floodgates on
nuclear proliferation around the world...
their concerted efforts to undermine governments, to create havoc
from Bahrain to Yemen and beyond, is equally troubling and dangerous.
And so, we are constantly working with friends and allies to try to prevent
that. And we see how Iran tries to insinuate itself into many societies with
all kinds of promises, many of which are never fulfilled. I cannot tell you
how many promises of infrastructure investment in Venezuela have been
made without building an outhouse. It’s just a ridiculous record of promise
with no follow-up. But they keep doing it. They are relentless in their
desire to exercise influence and to build a very intimidating, even
hegemonic, presence in the Gulf.
She blames Palestinians for the Gaza conflict:
Now, we have no illusions about those who launched the rockets.
They had every intention of hiding behind civilians in Gaza and killing

civilians in Israel. And they would have killed more of each if they could
have.
Here are her only references to settlements, all praising Netanyahu
and damning the Palestinians:
But there were moments of opportunity. And I will also say this.
When Prime Minister Netanyahu agreed to a 10-month settlement freeze I
flew to Jerusalem. ...And when Prime Minister Netanyahu agreed to a 10month
settlement freeze, it wasn’t perfect. It didn’t cover East Jerusalem,
but it covered much of the contested area in the West Bank... And I stood
on a stage with him at 11 o’clock – Israelis always meet late at night, I
don’t understand it – (laughter) – but 11 o’clock at night, midnight, and I
said it was unprecedented for any Israeli prime minister to have done that.
I got so criticized. I got criticized from the right, the left, the center,
Israeli, Jewish, Arab, Christian, you name it. Everybody criticized me. But
the fact was it was a 10-month settlement freeze. And he was good to his
word. And we couldn’t get the Palestinians into the conversation until the
tenth month.
The usual demographic chatter, supporting Israeli discrimination
against Palestinians:
And without peace, the inexorable math of demographics will, one
day, force Israelis to choose between preserving their democracy and
remaining a Jewish homeland. Read More
Environment:
Fracking:
Nuclear Fallout: Ongoing Tragedy/Disaster In Japan:
EnergyNews:
12:15 PM EST on December 4th, 2012 | One comment

Japan TV broadcasts mutations in animals and plants after
Fukushima — Scientist: “Very few insects, only 2 birds” (PHOTOS &
VIDEO)
11:24 AM EST on December 4th, 2012 | Leave a comment
Louisiana Sinkhole Footage: Almost 100% of people in neighborhood
nearby have stayed — “I know of 3 homes that evacuated” (VIDEO)
Ongoing Gulf of Mexico Oil Disaster:
Oil Spill Attorney Stuart Smith’s Blog:
Environmental Must-Reads – December 5, 2012
Highlights from a Fracking Flyover
For all that we do working on satellite and aerial images, it’s
extremely refreshing to actually get a chance to go up in the air ourselves.
Last month we had the opportunity when we were asked by the
Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) if we could put together an aerial tour
of active gas fields. Enabled by our partners at LightHawk, we arranged a
flyover of one of the most heavily drilled regions in West Virginia—
Wetzel County.
Are Earthquakes and Fracking Wastewater Injection Wells Related?
Two new papers tie a recent increase in significant earthquakes to
reinjection of wastewater fluids from unconventional oil and gas drilling.
The first study notes “significant earthquakes are increasingly occurring
within the United States midcontinent.” In the specific case of Oklahoma,
a Magnitude “5.7 earthquake and a prolific sequence of related events …
were likely triggered by fluid injection.”
Fracking in the U.K.: Britain Looks to Boost Shale Gas
Could a European shale-gas revolution start in Britain? While efforts
to drill gas from shale deposits have stalled on the Continent, the British
government could soon give the go-ahead to drilling and provide tax
breaks to encourage it.

Anti-fracking demonstrators disrupt, delay Boulder County oil and
gas hearing
Anti-fracking activists delayed the start of the Boulder County
commissioners’ Tuesday afternoon meeting on oil and gas regulations for
nearly half an hour, chanting their opposition to that drilling technique and
demanding the commissioners resign if they won’t ban hydraulic
fracturing in unincorporated Boulder County.
Fracking: Coming Soon to a Campus Near You
Fracking rigs reared their ugly heads at schools across the country,
making the student-led push for universities and colleges to divest their
endowments from the top 200 oil-and-gas companies tougher at some
campuses.
Federal scientists link fracking — waste disposal to earthquakes
The increasingly common practice of disposing of oil and gas drilling
wastewater by injecting it underground can trigger earthquakes, according
to federal scientists who studied quakes since 1970 in Colorado and
neighboring states.
Race Is On to Clean Up Hydraulic Fracturing
Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, has raised fears around the world
that the procedure needed to coax shale oil and gas out of tightly packed
rock could cause pollution damaging to human health.
Petition the BLM to issue strong fracking rules
EcoWatch, an online news service in partnership with the
Waterkeeper Alliance, has posted an online petition asking the Bureau of
Land Management (BLM) to issue strong rules for fracking under federal
oil and gas leases, including leasing on both public and private land.
Fracking Update: Protestors Cause Hullaballoo In West Village
Last Saturday, hundreds of people gathered on Hudson Street to
protest the Spectra Pipeline construction slated to bring natural gas to the
West Village. The project, which is already under construction, has drawn
ire from activists and environmentalists who argue that it’s unsafe and will
bring fracked gas into Manhattan.
Homeowners suing over Wis. gas pipeline spill

Homeowners sued Monday over a massive gasoline spill in
southeastern Wisconsin this summer that has contaminated many of their
wells, their attorneys said.
Latest News on Earthquakes
Caused by Oil and Gas Production Activities, 12.04.12
The American Geophysical Union is holding its Fall Meeting in San
Francisco this week. The program includes multiple presentations on
induced seismicity (a.k.a. earthquakes) caused by oil and gas production
activities.
Nebraskans gather for final public hearing on Keystone pipeline
Nebraskans will make their voices heard at a public hearing tonight
in Albion. The Nebraska Department of Environmental Quality is holding
a final hearing on a proposed new route of the Keystone XL oil pipeline.
Gulf oil spill remains an enigma
The Deepwater Horizon disaster happened in one of the worst places
in the world for an oil spill ? 5,000 feet below the surface in a body of
water that scientists admitted they knew little about, where it could
potentially ruin both the seafood and tourism industries that depended on
it.
Federal judge dismisses claims against dispersant maker over
Gulf oil spill
A federal judge presiding over litigation spawned by the massive
Gulf of Mexico oil spill has dismissed all claims against the manufacturer
of a chemical dispersant that was used to break up crude gushing from
BP’s blown-out well.
Claims against dispersant company used in BP oil spill dismissed
Even as the National Academy of Sciences warns about the dangers
of chemical dispersants to clean oil spills, U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier
has dismissed all claims in the BP oil spill case against Nalco, the maker
of the dispersant that was used in unprecedented quantities to combat the
2010 BP spill.
Shell’s Arctic Oil Spill Gear
“Crushed Like a Beer Can” in Simple Test

Royal Dutch Shell, the massive multinational oil company, badly
wants to be ready to drill for oil in the Arctic Ocean next summer. This
year, the company’s plans to begin drilling in the treacherous seas of the
Arctic were thwarted by its late start and repeated failures to get even
basic oil spill response equipment into place.
Oil Spill off Grand Bahama “Not Likely to Threaten Bahamian
Environment”
The oil spill off Grand Bahama on Monday is not likely to threaten
the Bahamian environment, Transport and Aviation Minister Glenys
Hanna-Martin said at a press conference.
After the Spill: Oysters and Oil Consumption
Oysters are a benchmark commercial species harvested along the
shores of lower Alabama’s Gulf Coast. After the Deepwater Horizon Oil
Spill of 2010 dumped almost half a million tons of crude oil into Gulf of
Mexico waters, fishermen and consumers were concerned about the status
of local oyster beds.
Villagers struggle as oil spill destroys food source
IT will not be such a merry Christmas for locals of Waiqanake
Village after damage caused by a recent oil spill affected one of their main
food sources.
Concerned villager and chairperson of the qoliqoli, or fishing
grounds, Asakaia Balawa told this newspaper the amount of small fish,
crabs and food sources had depleted over the course of the year and it was
not getting any better.
Numerical study suggests subsea injection of chemicals
didn’t prevent oil from rising to sea surface
The 2010 blowout of the Macondo well in the waters of the Gulf of
Mexico resulted in the region’s largest oil spill in U.S. history. As the
Deepwater Horizon (DWH) incident unfolded, in an effort to prevent the
oil from coming to the surface and reaching coastal and marsh ecosystems,
chemical dispersants were injected at the wellhead. These powerful
dispersants, typically used to break up oil slicks at the sea surface had
never been used in such large quantities and over such a prolonged period
of time in the deep ocean.

Experts discuss ways to cleanup oil spills in Arctic waters
As oil drilling experts considered the most outlandish of Arctic
challenges, involving icebergs and whaling routes, the more fundamental
issue of spill cleanup remained the main concern at a Houston conference
Tuesday.
TEPCO: Half of contract workers at Fukushima
work under dodgy conditions
Nearly half of contract workers at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear
power plant after the disaster there last year toiled in conditions that
apparently breached labor laws, according to a survey by Tokyo Electric
Power Co., the plant operator.
More than 80% of Fukushima homes still awaiting decontamination
It has been well over a year and half since the March 11th, 2011
tsunami struck the Fukushima nuclear plant, causing the worst meltdown
crisis in more than 20 years. But more than 80% of people’s homes located
in the surrounding area, which reaches as many as seven prefectures, are
still waiting to be cleared of the radioactive particles that were released,
and be safe for their owners to return once more.
Nuclear disaster evacuee feels discrimination as ‘refugee’
Natsumi Takakura cannot cast her vote in the Dec. 16 Lower House
election in her hometown. Nor can she find a polling station near her new
home–her family’s seventh in less than two years.
It is just one of the many inconveniences–some minor, others
aggravating–that continue to plague residents who evacuated after the
Fukushima nuclear disaster last year.
Black Liberation/Civil Rights:

The Shameless Vacuity of Susan Rice's Black Boosters
• RIce Bomb Libya | Rice Invade Somalia | RIce Bomb Sudan |
M23 | Congo genocide | Institute of the Black World |
Congressional Black Caucus | National Council of Negro Women
| Susan Rice Secretary of State
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
Africa doesn’t matter, U.S. wars don’t matter, nothing matters to the
Black Misleadership Class except the sickly prestige of basking in the
(distant) glow of power. Susan Rice’s “Black boosters embrace an abettor

of genocide and endless military interventions as one of their own – and
indict themselves.” Read more
Parent Trigger Laws Coming To Georgia This Year:
The Privatization of Education Marches On
• school privatization
A Black Agenda Radio commentary
by
Bruce A. Dixon
The forces of education privatization scored a major victory this
November in Georgia, thru passage of a cleverly written constitutional
amendment back by a multiimillion dollar deceptive ad campaign, and the
active backing or complicit silence of much of the black political class.
Read more
Freedom Rider: Latinos Lead the Way
• Latino political power | Dream Act | don’t ask don’t tell | Deferred
Action

y
BAR editor and senior columnist
Margaret Kimberley
Latinos make up barely ten percent of the electorate, and have only
emerged as a major national political presence in recent years. Yet, they
are outclassing Blacks at every political juncture. “The victory of young
Latinos and Latinas did not come about because of altruistic motives from
the administration, but because of a carefully planned and very courageous
public campaign.” Read more
Massacre in Cleveland: Lynch Law Was Never Repealed
• extrajudicial killings | Cleveland
A Black Agenda Radio commentary

y
Glen Ford
America’s “unwritten law” dictates that nothing unusual is happening
when 13 cops shoot 137 bullets at an apparently unarmed Black couple in
Cleveland, a Black-run city. Ida B. Wells, who fought and chronicled
lynching at the turn of the 20th century, would feel horribly at home. Read
more
Sandy, the Storm from Hell – Unless You’re a Banker
• Strike Debt | Shouldering the Costs | Hurricane Sandy Recovery
aid
A Black Agenda Radio commentary
by
Glen Ford
“For Wall Street, every disaster is an opportunity to make debt slaves
of the victims.” Federal disaster policy is built on “credit-worthiness”
rather than need. Moreover, “federal policy has the effect of widening
already existing racial disparities.” Read more
An Interview with Cornel West on Occupy, Obama and Marx
• Marxism | anarchism | poverty in America | Occupy Movement |
Obama Rockefeller Republican in Blackface | Obama corporate
mascot

y
Shozab Raza and Parmbir Gill
Fresh from his winning debate at Oxford, Dr. Cornel West discussed
a ranged of subjects with two graduate students. “More and more these
days, race is taking a class form because you’ve got a black middle class
that is often times indifferent to the black poor.” Read more
Britain and America Target DR Congo
• Uganda | Rwanda | Congo
by
Antoine Roger Lokongo
It’s now an “open secret” that the U.S. is plotting the dismemberment
of the Democratic Republic of Congo, through Washington’s proxies

Uganda and Rwanda. “This is not a Congolese civil war, but a
continuation of a 16-year aggression by its two neighbors, financed and
directed by the United States and Britain.” Read more
Bill and Hillary Clinton: “Friends of Haiti?”
• oil and resource wars | Haiti | Hillary Clinton | Democrats | Bill
Clinton
by
Marty Goodman
The Clintons’ crimes against Haiti go back two decades, making Bill
singularly unsuitable to act as United Nations envoy to Haiti. “Bill’s
friendly relations with Haiti’s current President Michael Martelly, who is
linked to Duvalier-era thugs and their kin, is well known.” Read more
The Death of Jordan Davis: Is it Open season on Negroes?
• Stand Your Ground law | Jordan David killed | extrajudicial
killings

y
Doshon Farad
Another unarmed 17 year-old Black male shot dead by a Florida
white man. Are white men really so terrified by the presence of Black
males, or “is black life, specifically that of black males, seen as
valueless?” Or both? Read more
It’s lunacy to keep Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens
out of the Hall of Fame
Craig Calcaterra
There are 37 players on the 2013 Hall of Fame ballot. And, over the
coming weeks, we will consider all of their candidacies in turn. But there
are two players making their debut on the ballot who tower above all of
the others, and nothing useful can be said about the Hall of Fame class of

2013 without first considering those two. So let’s talk about Barry Bonds
and Roger Clemens.
Bonds and Clemens are two players who, in a just world, would be
unanimous selections for induction but who, for reasons discussed
earlier today, will almost certainly not make the Hall. Let’s first walk
through their obvious baseball qualifications for the Hall — and bear with
me, because I will assume in this first part that the performance enhancing
drug issues don’t exist — and then deal with those pesky objections so
many have to their candidacy.
The Baseball Bonafides
While it’s always hard to compare players between eras, it is not
hyperbole to say that Bonds and Clemens would be finalists in a contest to
name the greatest hitter and the greatest pitcher who ever lived. We all
think we know how great they were because their careers just wound up
five years ago, but even the most dedicated baseball fan can be shocked to
take a look back over their stat sheets to see just how thoroughly they
dominated their era.
I won’t go into hardcore statistics with you, but let’s just see where
Barry Bonds resides on the leader board in various categories:
• He’s the all-time home run king;
• He’s the all-time walk king and the all-time intentional walk king
• Third all-time in runs scored;
• Third all-time in wins above replacement (WAR);
• Sixth all-time in on-base percentage;
• Sixth all-time in slugging percentage;
• Fourth all-time in OPS (on-base plus slugging) and Third all-time
in adjusted OPS (which weights for era and ballpark);
• Second all-time in extra base hits;
• Fourth all-time in total bases;
• Fourth all-time in RBI;
• Second all-time in total times on base; and
• He’s the single-season record holder for home runs and base-onballs
(actually he holds the top three seasons in base-on-balls)

In addition, he has the record for most MVP awards (seven) and
probably deserved to win the MVP a couple more times, most notably
1991. And he wasn’t all bat, either. He holds the all-time record for
putouts by a left fielder, won eight Gold Gloves and stole 514 bases.
How about Roger Clemens?
• Third all-time in strikeouts (4,672)
• Ninth all-time in wins (354), but third among pitchers who didn’t
spend the bulk of their career in the deadball era;
• Sixteenth all-time in innings pitched, but ninth among nondeadballers;
• Seventh all-time in games started;
• Third all-time in WAR for pitchers;
• Tenth all-time in adjusted ERA+ (which is analogous to OPS+ in
that it weights for era); and
• First in several other complex era-adjusting statistics such as runs
saved, win probability and the like.
Like Bonds and his MVPs, Clemens has seven Cy Young Awards and
arguments for more. He also has one MVP award of his own.
When you look merely at their production and their dominance, the
number of hitters better than Barry Bonds and the number of pitchers
better than Roger Clemens in all of baseball history can be counted on one
hand. Comparing Bonds and Clemens to people like Babe Ruth, Willie
Mays, Ted Williams and Walter Johnson is not just not hyperbole. It’s
absolutely necessary, for their like has rarely if ever been seen in the game
of baseball. Put simply, they are immortals.
But their baseball exploits are not the end of the story, obviously.

Bonds, Clemens and Performance Enhancing Drugs
While Clemens and (to some extent ) Bonds continue to either deny
or play down their use of PEDs, and while the criminal prosecutions
against them were either misguided, unsuccessful or both, it is simply
obtuse to believe that they weren’t significant PED users. Bonds’ use was
painstakingly documented in the 2007 book “Game of Shadows.”
Clemens’ use is far less clear cut, but just because the Justice Department
couldn’t convict him of lying about it under oath doesn’t mean that we
have to assume he never did it. For our purposes here, let’s make the
exceedingly safe assumption that he did.
Bonds and Clemens use of PEDs will, for many, disqualify them
from Hall of Fame consideration out of hand. The reason they won’t get
75% of the vote and induction on this year’s ballot is because far, far more
than 25% of the Hall of Fame electorate believes that anyone who used
PEDs should not be in the Hall of Fame, full stop. Many if not most fans
feel this way too, as do no small amount of current and former major
leaguers. Read More
The Unforgiven: Jack Johnson and Barry Bonds
By
Dave Zirin
Barry Bonds: Home Run King. As the San Francisco Giants slugger
approaches Henry Aaron’s record for career homers, this probability seems
to be turning otherwise rational people upside down, as Bonds has

encountered an almost surreal level of hostility. Sports has always had its
anti-heroes, but the antipathy directed at Bonds by the media and some
“fans” has been visceral and frightening. Some say they can’t stand Barry
Bonds because they suspect —with the smug certitude of having received
holy writ —that he has used steroids. (For a full discussion on the
hypocrisy of anti-steroid hysteria, please see my article, “The juice and the
noose,” ISR 50.)
Others say it is his “surly attitude,” or “bad sportsmanship.”
But much of the reaction to Bonds is simply bad old-fashioned
racism. Not since Jack Johnson has an athlete become the repository for so
much racial animus —and revealed broader gaps in Black and white
perceptions—as Barry Lamar Bonds.
Jack Johnson
In 1908, when Jack Johnson became the first Black heavyweight
boxing champion, his victory created a serious crisis in the “conventional
wisdom” about race. When Johnson told the world to go to hell and openly
consorted with white women, crisis became hysteria. The media whipped
up a frenzy around the need for a “great white hope” (a phrase coined by
author Jack London) to restore order to the boxing world—and the world
in general. Former champion Jim Jeffries was coaxed out of retirement
and said, “I am going into this fight for the sole purpose of proving that a
white man is better than a Negro.”
In the weeks before their fight, Johnson—in stark contrast to the
standard African-American posture of the day—was more than willing to
be heard. In a July 4, 1910, Philadelphia Inquirer story titled, “Johnson
believes he’s Jeff’s master,” he is quoted as saying, “I honestly believe that
in pugilism I am Jeffries’ master, and it is my purpose to demonstrate this
in the most decisive way possible.... Let me say in conclusion that I
believe the meeting between Mr. Jeffries and myself will be a great test of
strength, skill, and endurance. The tap of the gong will be music to me.”
This might seem tame by contemporary standards, but at the time it
was verbal TNT. To say he was a white man’s master a mere fifty years
after the formal end of chattel slavery was simply explosive.

But Johnson wasn’t merely despised: he was hated by one America
and revered—if not loved—by another.
A piece in the Dallas Morning News titled “Negroes praying for
Johnson,” reads, “Some others fear trouble if he [Johnson] wins and are
consequently boosting Jeffries.... For the first time Independence Day will
be enjoyed as a real holiday by the Negroes tomorrow.”
When Jeffries and Johnson finally squared off, the ringside band
played All coons look alike to me, and promoters led the all-white crowd
in the chant “Kill the nigger.” But Johnson was faster, stronger, and
smarter than Jeffries, knocking him out with ease. In an early incarnation
of the information superhighway, young children working as “telegram
runners” ran through city streets shouting out the progress after each
round.
As Johnson wrote in his autobiography,
More than 25,000 people had gathered to watch the fight,
and as I looked about me, and scanned that sea of white faces I
felt the auspiciousness of the occasion. There were few men of
my own race among the spectators. I realized that my victory in
this event meant more than on any previous occasion. It wasn’t
just the championship that was at stake—it was my own honor,
and in a degree the honor of my own race.... The “white hope”
had failed.
This was no idle boast. As the New York World wrote, “That Mr.
Johnson should so lightly and carelessly punch the head of Mr. Jeffries
must come as a shock to every devoted believer in the supremacy of the
Anglo-Saxon race.”
But far more important than respect gained from the New York
World, was his folkloric status in the Black community. As one spiritual
sang,
Amaze an’ Grace, how sweet it sounds,
Jack Johnson knocked Jim Jeffries down.
Jim Jeffries jumped up an’ hit Jack on the chin,
An’ then Jack knocked him down agin.
The Yankees hold the play,

The white man pulls the trigger;
But it make no difference what the white man say,
The world champion’s still a nigger
After Johnson’s victory, there were race riots around the country—in
Illinois, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Texas, and
Washington, D.C. Most of the riots consisted of white lynch mobs
attacking Blacks, and Blacks fighting back.
This reaction to a boxing match was the most widespread racial
uprising that the U.S. had ever seen—or would see—until the 1968
assassination of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Right-wing
religious groups immediately organized to ban boxing. Congress actually
passed a law banning boxing films.
Even some Black leaders pushed Johnson to condemn African
Americans for rioting, and to toe the line. But Johnson remained defiant.
For this mortal sin—and a variety of venal ones—he faced harassment and
persecution for most of his life. He was forced into exile in 1913 on the
trumped-up charge of transporting a white woman across state lines for
prostitution. As Johnson wrote in his autobiography, In the Ring and Out,
as soon as he defeated Jeffries, “From that minute on, the hunt for the
‘white hope’ was redoubled, and when it proceeded with so little success
other methods were taken to dispose of me.”
Booker T. Washington, the Black leader who founded the Tuskegee
Institute and believed that Blacks should abstain from any kind of
agitation, couldn’t stand Johnson. He said with unvarnished scorn,
I can only say at this time, that this is another illustration of the
almost irreparable injury that a wrong action on the part of a single
individual may do to a whole race. It shows the folly of those persons who
think that they alone will be held responsible for the evil that they do.
Especially is this true in the case of the Negro in the United States today.
No one can do so much injury to the Negro race as the Negro himself.
This will seem to many persons unjust, but no one can doubt that it is
true.... What makes the situation seem a little worse in this case, is the fact
that it was the white man, not the black man who has given Jack Johnson
the kind of prominence he has enjoyed up to now and put him, in other

words, in a position where he has been able to bring humiliation upon the
whole race of which he is a member.
Washington’s contempt for Johnson didn’t stop him, however, from
setting aside a special assembly room at his Tuskegee Institute to hear
special telegraphic reports of Johnson’s fights.
A far different reaction to Johnson was articulated by Washington’s
great rival, W. E. B. DuBois. DuBois, a towering intellectual, was one of
the first to try to put the moralizing about “violence” in sports—and the
street violence associated with Jack Johnson—in some sort of context. As
he wrote in the Crisis, the organ of the NAACP, in 1914,
There is today some brutality connected with boxing, but as
compared with football and boat racing it may be seriously questioned
whether boxing deserves to be put in a separate class by reason of its
cruelty. Certainly it is a highly civilized pastime as compared with the
international game of war which produces so many “heroes” and “national
monuments.” Boxing has fallen into disfavor—into very great disfavor.
The cause is clear: Jack Johnson...has out-sparred an Irishman. He did it
with little brutality, the utmost fairness and great good nature. He did not
“knock” his opponent senseless. Apparently he did not even try. Neither he
nor his race invented prize fighting or particularly like it. Why then this
thrill of national disgust? Because Johnson is Black.
Bonds
Barry Bonds is today’s Jack Johnson. Like Johnson, he is a dominator
in his sport, a pantheon player: the only person in baseball history with
500 home runs and 500 stolen bases, a seven-time Most Valuable Player,
and eventual home run king. Read More
Labor:
Blacklisting: Ian Kerr reveals how he spied on workers and the left
by
Simon Basketter

Electricians and campaigners protested on Tuesday of this week as Ian Kerr
gave evidence to a select committee (Pic: Guy Smallman)
The man who blacklisted construction workers justified ruining their
lives because “they had other agendas” when they raised health and safety
issues.
Britain’s largest construction companies set up and ran blacklists of
“troublemakers”. This involved spying on the left and infiltrating union
meetings. This blacklisting by building bosses continues today.
Ian Kerr ran the West Midlands-based Consulting Association from
1993 until it was shut down in 2009 following a raid by the Information
Commissioner’s Office (ICO).
Kerr gave evidence to parliament’s Scottish Affairs Select Committee
on Tuesday of this week. The committee is conducting an investigation
into blacklisting.
This was the first time Kerr has spoken in public. He revealed
shocking new facts about the scale of the blacklisting operation.
Kerr was fined £5,000 in July 2009 for breaching the Data Protection
Act by running the blacklist. Sir Robert McAlpine Ltd paid the fine “on
the basis that I put myself at the front, took the flak if you like for it, so
they wouldn’t be drawn into all of this, but they would remain hidden,” he
told the committee.
In addition to paying Kerr’s fine, the firm also paid towards windingup
costs for the Consulting Association. Kerr said the total of both was
approximately £20,000.

Kerr also said Sir Robert McAlpine Ltd made up to £20,000 in loans
in the early 1990s to help set up the Consulting Association.
Price
That included the price of buying a blacklist—“intellectual
property”—from the Economic League (see below).
Cullum McAlpine, a director of a number of Sir Robert McAlpine
Ltd companies, was the founding chair of the Consulting Association.
David Cochrane—former head of human resources at Sir Robert
McAlpine—was the chair in the last few years. The blacklisting
association’s management meetings were also often held at the company’s
offices.
Asked to name other directors Kerr’s memory became a little shaky.
He said, “I mean, this is going back a long time. God rest them, they may
not be alive some of them.”
Construction companies subscribed to the association’s blacklists for
around £2,500 a year. They supplied information on employees and sat on
its organising boards.
Companies additionally paid around £1.50 per name to have Kerr
search his files. Some 44 companies in total were subscribers at one time
or another. That averaged out at around 20 companies a year. They
included the biggest names in construction, including Skanska, Tarmac,
Kier Group and Trafalgar House.
The projects that had used the blacklist included the headquarters for
GCHQ, hospital PFI projects, power stations and the Jubilee Line tube
extension. Wembley Stadium and the Millennium Dome were also built
with blacklisting.
Olympics
Sir Robert McAlpine, Balfour Beatty “and possibly Skanksa” had
used blacklisting for their Olympics contracts, according to Kerr. He
claimed he was routing out “troublemakers” in order to “ensure they were
built on time”.
Confirming what rank and file electricians have argued, Kerr said that
companies subscribed to the Consulting Association had discussed the
ongoing multi-million pound Crossrail project.

Kerr said, “There was a lot of discussion at meetings [of the
Consulting Association] about Crossrail because there was a perception
that it was going to be a problematic contract. Like the Jubilee Line had
been.”
People were put on the blacklist for being militant, raising health and
safety issues—or for simply being active trade union members.
Sometimes the reasons for blacklisting were ridiculous. One person
wrote to their local paper mentioning Nelson Mandela. Another sent a
May Day greeting to the Morning Star. But nonetheless it ruined lives.
In contrast, Kerr was paid £47,500 a year on top of a car, life
insurance, private health cover and a Christmas bonus of half his
December salary.
Kerr claims that the names and the rest of the files were destroyed.
He told the committee, “I considered what to do with all this and the
obvious thing to do was to get rid of it. It was so thoroughly burnt that
there’s no chance of it remaining.”
Continues
Kerr confirmed that there was at least one other blacklisting company
in existence and that blacklisting continues to this day.
Blacklisted worker Steve Acheson told Socialist Worker, “That man
has ruined my life. The secret files the Consulting Association kept on me
were used to unfairly dismiss me on job after job, for no more than raising
genuine safety issues such as drying facilities and Weil’s disease caused by
rats urine.”
“But he was only the foot soldier for the directors of multinational
construction firms. Whether they are from big business, the state or the
unions, the guilty should be brought to justice.”
Dave Smith from the Blacklist Support Group told Socialist Worker,
“Kerr himself is a pathetic figure—but a pathetic figure that got rich and
lived the high life by running an illegal blacklist that put thousands of
innocent decent hard working people on the dole for years. Read More
Economy:

World:
The new Iraqi labour law, a law for a new slavery
by
Falah Alwan,
president Federation of Workers' Councils and Unions in Iraq
We received this request for international protests against the
new labour Law being introduced in Iraq under the pressure of the
IMF. It is clearly against the interests of workers in Iraq and openly
defends the right of capitalists to brutally exploit the workers.
“Dear Sister and Brothers in working class organizations around the
World,
“We are sending out this report by Falah Alwan, president of the
Federation of Workers' Councils and Unions in Iraq, concerning the new
labour law in Iraq. We are calling on all trade unions and leaders around
the world to support our struggle against it. Please speak out loudly to
stand with us in solidarity. Send your letter to the government of Iraq to
respect workers’ rights now. Send us copies of your letters please as we
want to publish them among the workers in Iraq. Your support is very
important to us always.
“Hand to hand and shoulder to shoulder in working class struggle for
freedom and Equality.
“Akram Nadir,
Union Organizer in Iraq and Kurdistan and International
Representative of Federation of Workers' Councils and Unions in Iraq
(FWCUI).” [email: akram_nadir_1999@yahoo.com, www.fwcui.org]
More than one hundred serious notes and objections, to the 156
articles which are the components of the draft of the new labour law, were
set out. Such issue means that it is an objectionable draft. And these
objections are undermining it.
Since 2004 there have been five drafts of the new labour law in Iraq,
none of them were presented publicly or to the workers' unions. The
Ministry of Labour, coordinating with the government controlled trade
union federation, composed the latest draft of the labour law

surreptitiously in a conspiratorial manner. The other unions in Iraq
received copies of the latest draft, via the Solidarity Centre, only one year
ago.
The recent draft of the labour law is not merely the result of a normal
development of the economic necessities, or a kind of cure to the
economic crisis. It is the direct result of the IMF policies which have been
imposed by the US occupation in collaboration with their loyal
government, so the struggle against it is part of the struggle against the
occupation policies and the neo-liberal agenda.
The spirit of the draft is to legitimize the capitalist interests, and to
defend them within an officially authorized framework. The notes are so
numerous, that we cannot list them all in detail; here we focus only on the
main key points.
The new labour law confirms the laws of the former regime, which
consider the workers in the public sector as officials, depriving them of the
most basic rights and guarantees, denying them the right to organize and
the right to strike.
Most of the articles of the new labour law are to guarantee the
interests of the capitalists. More than one article gives the full right to the
capitalists to lay off workers for no reason. The dismissals of the workers
are up to the owners of the factories or the projects.
In 2004 the Iraqi government had accepted the 6 demands of the IMF
as conditions for a compulsory loan of about US$436million. All those
conditions are undoubtedly expressions of the neo-liberal policies.
The new labour law reflects clearly and overtly the class interests of
the capitalists before the workers' interests. It gives legitimacy to
exploitation, while justifying the greed of the capitalists. In a word, the
new labour law is a framework within which to intensify and justify the
exploitation and the suppression of the workers and to enable the neoliberal
model to control the economy in Iraq.
The preamble of the draft is to facilitate the investment conditions for
the capitalists. There is no real confirmation of the rights to strike, to sitin,
to assemble or to demonstrate. There are no guarantees for the workers'
rights, such as,

1. Protection against dismissal,
2. Assurances against unemployment,
3. The safety insurance and benefits to the workers.
Finally, we realise it is impossible to end exploitation or to acquire
full rights of the working class by simply changing or reforming the labour
law. In addition, the implementing of the new labour law will not change
the system of property relations or implement a new social state, i.e.
socialism.
Actually, our criticism of the new labour law is aimed at
implementing many reforms, such as; the right to strike, the right to sit in,
unemployment insurance and the full right to organize and join unions, in
a word, to strengthen the ability of the working class to struggle against
the exploiters, and the whole of capitalism.
Short cuts
by Eyal Weizman
London Review of Books
In the course of the eight-day aerial bombardment of Gaza by Israel –
using drones, F-16s and Apache helicopters – more than 1350 buildings
were hit. They included military depots, which are considered legitimate
targets under international humanitarian law. But the police stations, TV
stations, a local healthcare centre, ministries, road tunnels and a bridge
that were also targeted are legally protected as civilian infrastructure. To
justify their destruction, Israel argued that ‘they belong to a terrorist
entity.’ This is an argument that would render all public buildings and

physical infrastructure in the Strip legitimate targets: it is not accepted by
international lawyers outside Israel.
Israel’s attempt to provide any sort of legal defence at all, however
tenuous, is a response to the Goldstone Report, which alleged (before
Goldstone himself recanted) that both the Israeli military and Hamas had
committed war crimes during the 2008-9 conflict, and that Israel might
even be guilty of ‘crimes against humanity’. During the Goldstone storm,
in a speech delivered at an Israeli security institute, Netanyahu called
organisations that claimed to support the principles of human rights and
international law the third strategic threat to Israel’s security – third after
Iran and Hizbullah. Israeli think-tanks, like some of their Western
counterparts, now refer to this ‘third strategic threat’ of legal action against
state militaries as ‘lawfare’: the use of international law as a weapon by a
non-state party, to make up for its weakness on the field of combat.
Mindful of the danger of further exposure to international legal
action, during Operation Pillar of Defence Netanyahu ordered the military
to exercise restraint so as to avoid the level of destruction seen in 2008-9.
Israeli experts in international humanitarian law were more closely
involved than they ever have been before in the planning of the attacks,
and the military repeatedly proclaimed its commitment to minimising
harm to civilians. The number of casualties was much lower than during
Operation Cast Lead, when ten times as many Palestinians were killed,
though as the operation approached its end the number of casualties rose:
as the list of targets was depleted, the air force had no choice but to drop
bombs on more populous neighbourhoods, with a higher risk of collateral
damage.
But Israel is no longer content merely asserting that its aerial
bombardments are justified under international law. It has begun to
experiment with new kinds of bombing. After the 2008-9 attack, human
rights advocates undertook an investigation using techniques associated
with the new field of ‘forensic architecture’. In so doing they discovered
the traces of a new Israeli strategy: small-scale craters caused by impacts
on what had been the roofs of destroyed buildings. The Israeli military let
it be known that it was using this tactic – known as ‘knock on the roof’ –

again during Operation Pillar of Defence. It involves firing low-explosive
‘teaser’ bombs or missiles onto houses designated for destruction, with the
intention of making an impact serious enough to scare the inhabitants into
fleeing their homes before they are destroyed completely.
Israel makes much of the fact that it always tries to warn civilian
inhabitants of impending bombings. The new procedure is a twist on the
established ‘knock on the door’ method, which involved telephoning a
house – with a recorded message, or using an Arabic-speaking air-force
operator – to inform the inhabitants that in a few minutes the building
would be destroyed. Sometimes phones that had been disconnected for
months because the bill hadn’t been paid were suddenly reactivated in
order to relay these warnings. According to the Israeli military, during the
last 24 hours of Pillar of Defence, thousands of such calls were made to
residents of Gaza, warning them of incoming strikes. (Israel can penetrate
Gaza’s communication networks so easily because its telephone networks
and internet infrastructure are routed through Israeli servers, which has
advantages both for the gathering of intelligence and the delivery of
propaganda.)
Of course, many inhabitants of Gaza don’t have a landline or a
mobile phone. In these cases, an IDF spokesperson recently explained, the
military’s legal experts recommend the use of leaflets to encourage people
to leave their houses before they are destroyed. Teaser bombs are just
another means of sending a warning. In 2009, an IDF lawyer said: ‘People
who go into a house despite a warning do not have to be taken into
account in terms of injury to civilians … From the legal point of view, I do
not have to show consideration for them.’ To communicate a warning can
indeed save a life. But the strategy is also aimed at changing the legal
designation of anyone who is killed. According to this interpretation of the
law, if a warning has been issued, and not heeded, the victim is no longer a
‘non-combatant’ but a voluntary ‘human shield’. In this and other cases,
the laws of war prohibit some things but authorise others. This should give
pause to those who have protested against Israel’s attack only in the name
of the law.

We will learn more about the way Pillar of Defence was conducted
when, over the coming weeks, it becomes possible to start reading the
rubble. Some of what we know about the 2008-9 assault comes from an
archive – the Book of Destruction – compiled by the Hamas-run Ministry
of Public Works and Housing. The archive contains thousands of entries,
each documenting a single building that was completely or partly
destroyed, recording everything from cracked walls in houses that still
stand, to complete ruins. The ministry will no doubt put together a new
archive following the latest attack. Its list will be a close parallel to the one
contained in a document owned by the Israeli military. This is the Book of
Targets in Gaza, a thick blue folder that the outgoing chief of staff, Gabi
Ashkenazi, who presided over Operation Cast Lead, passed to his
successor in a televised ceremony at the beginning of 2011: ‘I want to
hand over something I carry with me all the time,’ he announced. Read
More
Health, Education, Science and Welfare:
Daily News Digest December 5, 2012
The open Internet is central to people’s freedom to communicate, share,
advocate and innovate in the 21st century. But powerful interests want to
censor free speech, block the sharing of information, hinder innovation and
control how Internet users get online. All too often, people in power are
making political decisions behind closed doors about how the Internet

operates, and without the involvement of Internet users themselves. The
result: policies that could close down the open Internet and threaten our
freedom to connect. It’s time for us to reclaim the Internet for its users. We
must declare our Internet freedom.
Internet Freedom
Internet freedom at stake in global meeting
Associated Press
Dubai, United Arab Emirates -- The United Nations' top
telecommunications overseer sought Monday to quell worries about
greater Internet controls emerging from global talks in Dubai, and any
attempts at major Web regulations will likely face stiff opposition from
groups led by a high-powered U.S. delegation.
The 11-day World Conference on International Telecommunications,
seeking to update codes last reviewed when the Web was virtually
unknown, highlights the fundamental shift from tightly managed
telecommunications networks to the borderless sweep of the Internet. The
conference is sponsored by the U.N.'s International
Telecommunication Union.
Some at the conference, including a 123-member U.S. delegation
with envoys from tech giants such as Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp.,
worry that nations such as China and Russia could use any new U.N.
oversight to justify further tightening of Web blocks and monitoring.
"Love the free and open Internet? Tell the world's governments to
keep it that way," said a message on google.com's main search page, with
a link for comments directed to the Dubai conference, which opened
Monday and runs through Dec. 14.
U.N.'s role
The agenda for the gathering of more than 1,900 participants from
193 nations covers possible new rules for a broad range of services such as
the Internet, mobile roaming fees, and satellite and fixed-line
communications. Questions include how much sway the U.N. can exert
over efforts such as battling cyber-crime and expanding the Internet into
developing nations.

The secretary-general of the ITU, Hamadoun Toure, said accusations
that the meeting could limit Web freedoms are "completely untrue" and
predicted only "light-touch" regulations.
"Many countries will come to reaffirm their desire to see freedom of
expression embedded in this conference," he told reporters.
But the American contingent's head, Ambassador Terry Kramer, said
the United States would propose taking all Internet-related discussions off
the table and concentrating on already regulated services such as
phone networks.
"What we don't want to do is bring in all the private networks, the
Internet networks, the government networks, etc.," he said. "That opens
the door to censorship."
The outcome of the gathering is far from certain.
900-plus proposals
More than 900 regulatory changes have been proposed, but details
have not been made public. Broad consensus is needed to adopt any items
- the first major review of the U.N.'s telecommunications protocols since
1988, well before the Internet age.
The conference is also powerless to force nations to change their
Internet policies, such as China's notorious "Great Firewall" and blackouts
of political opposition sites in places including Iran and the Gulf Arab
states. Last week, Syria's Internet and telephone services disappeared
during two days of heavy fighting.
Kramer told reporters last week in Washington that all efforts should
be made to avoid a "Balkanization" of the Internet, in which nations'
different rules and standards could disrupt the flow of commerce and
information. "That opens the door ... to content censorship," he said.
The International Trade Union Confederation, representing labor
groups in more than 150 nations, charged that a bloc including China,
Russia and some Middle East nations seeks to "pave the way for future
restrictions on both Internet content or its users."
Quotes of the Day:

Pauperization:
The tendency in capitalist society for the proletariat
(working class) to become poorer, even as the overall
economic system becomes more productive.
— Karl Marx, Pauperization
Image of the Day:
Austerity Survival Guide

The Road Through 2012: Revolution or World War III
Videos of the Day:
Gundersen: 70,000 shad in river before nuclear plant…
now there’s 16, not 16 thousand, sixteen —
We’ve essentially decimated the population (VIDEO)
Strangled by monopolies
What our great-grandfathers understood and we better rediscover
End Wall Street’s Wars!
Occupy Wall Street!
Occupy Wall Street is the Only Organization
That Identifies The Enemy —
The 1% That Own and Control The Wealth!
1960s The Realist — One Nation Under God/1%
(Unlike The Trade Union Misleaders
Nor The Misleaders Of The Oppressed
Who Strive To Be In ‘Partnership’ With The 1%)

1960s The Realist — One Nation Under God/1%
(Unlike The Trade Union Misleaders
Nor The Misleaders Of The Oppressed
Who Strive To Be In ‘Partnership’ With The 1%)
Occupy Wall Street — ‘We Are The 99%’
The resistance continues at Liberty Square:
Call to Action: A Month Later and Still No Housing and No Medical
Access #OccupySandy
Tags: bloomberg, gentrification, health care, housing, nyc, occupy
sandy
Urgent Call To Action And Bloomberg’s Stealth Visit To An
Occupy Sandy Relief Distribution Hub In The Rockaways
New York City’s billionaire mayor, Michael Bloomberg, stepped out
of a helicopter midday Thursday in St. Camillus’ parking lot, ironically an
Occupy Sandy relief distribution hub in the Rockaways, Queens. The visit
had been kept under wraps and not listed on his official schedule. Watch
this video, read the statement, and stay informed and pledge your
support for the communities most affected by Sandy that are still in
dire need! We are planning a day of action on December 15th. Join us!
• Share InterOccupy's page on Facebook
• Send a Tweet: Bloomberg’s stealth visit to the Rockaways, and
join Occupy Sandy for a call to action on 12/15 http://bit.ly/
Tth0sQ #occupysandy #ows
• Stay Informed and Pledge Support!

VIDEO
Bloomberg and a small party accompanying him were whisked off in
black cars. He missed a greeting from community members in an area still
reeling from Hurricane Sandy, with quickly-lettered signs: “Rockaways in
Health Crisis,” “We Need Safer Housing.” Bloomberg made his way to the
still-shuttered offices of The Wave, the Rockaways weekly newspaper. As
word spread about the stealth visit, a crowd gathered outside hoping to
explain those signs to the mayor: a month after Sandy hit, swamping
homes with seawater, many residents—homeowners and tenants—are still
living without electricity, without heat, without working appliances, with
black mold taking hold of walls and other surfaces. Temporary housing is
desperately needed, absentee landlords must fix their properties.
The mayor emerged behind a row of police, thanked the group, and
was quickly driven away—avoiding a repeat of his November 4 visit when
residents lambasted him for ignoring them.
THE CRISIS AND STATEMENT
Hurricane Sandy is an ongoing tragedy that for many people is only
getting worse. Residents, community organizations and city, state, and
federal agencies must come together to address the IMMEDIATE crisis
that is worsening as the weather gets colder.
A month after Hurricane Sandy, thousands remain without electricity,
heat, water, healthy food, basic healthcare, adequate housing, or even
temporary shelter.
Here is a statement from a group of individuals and residents who
have been working in the affected communities with Occupy Sandy:
1) HOUSING
Long before Sandy hit, New York City already ranked high for
homelessness. Now, tens of thousands of New Yorkers have been
displaced, while many more are living in unsafe, moldy houses. Many
NYCHA residents have been forced to pay full rent while having no heat
and, in some cases, no water or electricity for weeks.
There should be an immediate housing plan that addresses their
needs; it would include: extending the NYCHA rent credit to cover
November and December to account for lost wages and the storm’s true

impact; providing sufficient federal disaster relief funding to NYCHA, and
employing NYCHA residents for building repairs instead of outsourcing
jobs.
A recent census found 2,489 vacancies in 20 City Council districts
that could house 200,000 people. In Far Rockaway, there are 384 lots that
could be used to set up housing for 31,696 people immediately, keeping
families close to their community networks. The City of New York should
seize this opportunity to set a global precedent that would address both the
immediate crisis as well as create housing for the tens of thousands who
were homeless before the storm.
2) HEALTH
The storm has compounded an already existing health crisis in NYC.
Now, families are living in unsafe homes, there is not enough access to
primary care physicians, mental health practitioners and health care
facilities in affected communities, and it has become even more difficult
for those in impacted areas to access healthy food.
FEMA and Red Cross should work with volunteer healthcare
infrastructures to set up more clinics to dispense necessary prescriptions
and trauma counseling, and should direct money toward supplying healthy
food to those in need — instead of canned goods, military rations, and
other food high in sodium.
3) SAFETY NET SERVICES
Workers are being or have been deducted pay from jobs they cannot
physically get to, many are unaware of FEMA benefits and deadlines, and
private insurers are denying many claims. The Red Cross should dedicate
some of its Sandy recovery funds to public information campaigns that
inform employers and employees of their rights and what services are
available. FEMA should be out canvassing neighborhoods with
interpreters in order to ensure that all individuals impacted by the storm
know their rights. FEMA should also organize weekly or twice weekly
mass mailings for a minimum of four weeks, distributing leaflets in
multiple languages, notifying people of available assistance and pertinent
deadlines.

Already many residents are being denied FEMA assistance because
they have insurance while their insurance companies are denying claims.
The Attorney General should immediately intervene on behalf of residents
who are unable to make repairs and in danger of losing everything because
of these discrepancies.
4) TRANSPARENCY AND COMMUNITY INCLUSION
The influx of relief money coming into the region provides an
opportunity for healthy, environmentally sustainable rebuilding with the
inclusion of communities and community-based organizations.
We call for a public task force to monitor the use of funds and create
structures that encourage community participation to help sustainably
rebuild NYC in a way that prepares for today’s environmental challenges.
STAY INFORMED AND TAKE ACTION
From the start, Occupy Wall Street has always been a disaster
recovery effort propelled by the power of the people to rebuild a better
future. We, along with our many allies, have been dedicated to more than
just addressing economic inequality. We believed, and continue to believe,
that New York City can reverse its role as the capitol of economic
inequality, homelessness and corporate control over our democracy, and
become a model for addressing the needs of its residents while promoting
their dignity and ability to help shape our future.
In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, yet again we see both an opportunity
and a threat. As Hurricane Katrina showed, moments of devastation and
rebuilding can lead to the return of the status quo, or worse —
gentrification, displacement and continued privatization of basic services
and jobs.
• We are dedicated to seeing that that does not happen here in New
York City.
• And we are dedicated to ensuring participation and transparency
in this process.
• We know another world is possible and we are committed to
working with our neighbors to build it.
STAND WITH US!

We are planning a day of action on December 15th. To stay informed
about this issue or to join us on the 15th, please fill out this form.
Mexico: Marches Against Political Corruption Met with Violence
Tags: mexico, yo soy 132
Part of a march in Mexico City
Today across Mexico, protesters (including participants from the
#YoSoy132 movement and others) have taken to the streets to march
against election fraud and the imposition of Enrique Peña Nieto as
P r e s i d e n t o n h i s i n a u g u r a t i o n d a y. U s i n g t h e s l o g a n
"#MéxicoNOTienePresidente" (#MexicoHasNOPresident"), the protesters
marched on Congress in Mexico City and were met with large squadrons
of riot police, enormous barricades, rubber bullets, tear gas, and gas
bombs. Reports claim approximately 30 people have been injured, several
critically.
For more information and livestreams from Mexico, see: http://
1dmx.wordpress.com/ and http://www.yosoy132media.org/. On Twitter,
follow @YoSoy132media, a n d u s e h a s h t a g s : # 1 d m x ,
#MexicoNOTienePresidente, #MexicoHasNOPresident, #YoSoy132,
#OcupaSanLázaro.
There have also been solidarity protests in cities across the world
outside Mexico, including many planned for tonight in various U.S. cities.
Today in NYC, YoSoy132-NY will gather at the Mexican Consulate at
5pm (leer en español). They invite Occupiers to join them.
Demonstration for an authentic democracy

Yosoy132NY summons Mexicans living in New York to participate
in a demonstration outside the Mexican Consulate on Saturday, December
1, on the occasion of the inauguration of Enrique Peña Nieto as president
of our country.
We will march toward genuine democracy for Mexico and against the
current Mexican political system, understood as a set of political,
economic, and social institutions set up to the benefit of a minority and
facilitate the imposition of candidates such as Enrique Peña Nieto.
This system includes but is not limited to:
• The political party system that restricts citizens' access to power
and inadequately represents their interests.
• The practices of corruption, impunity, repression, violation of
freedom of expression, and patronage committed by the PRI for
decades of its hegemonic rule, and adopted by the PAN, the PRD
and the rest of the political parties.
• The manipulation of information, especially through the mass
media.
Join and participate! You can contribute to change our country! Your
voice counts!
See also:
#TodosSomos132: Solidarity With the Mexican Spring
#YoSoy132 Blockades Mexico's Largest Media Company; Support Them
At #OccupySaks!
Pacific NW Cross Border Action: The People’s Round on the Trans-
Pacific Partnership
Tags: british columbia, trans pacific partnership, washington

Today marks the 13th anniversary since the 99% shut down the
World Trade Organization summit in Seattle. Tomorrow, activists from
across North America will come together along the U.S./Canada border in
Cascadia for a People's Round of Negotiations in opposition to the Trans-
Pacific Partnership, another "free trade area" that would expand further
expand the NAFTA-agenda of the 1%.
via TPP Cross Border Action (Facebook event):
Saturday, December 1 @ 1:00pm
Peace Arch Park (Surrey, BC & Blaine, WA).
Because the 99% can not afford another NAFTA-another bad sequel,
help ‘FlushTheTPP’ & Be part of a cross-border movement towards trade
justice!
For more information visit: http://www.tppXborder.org or
TPPxBorder on Facebook Twitter: @TPPxBorder hashtag: #stopTPP
No more corporate trade deals – Flush the TPP
NAFTA-WTO-FTAA-MAI-FIPA-CETA-CEPA-ETC-ETC-ETC-ETC…
Tired of trade deals that serve only multi-national corporations and
not people? Tired of deals that perpetuate inequality and a worldwide race
to the bottom in salaries and working conditions? Tired of trade

agreements that protect billionaires but not labor, Indigenous and human
rights, or the environment?
We’re tired too. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
We can all imagine international agreements that create, not destroy
jobs; that promote the right to organize; that don’t destroy the
environment; that don't exploit migrant labour; that don’t infringe on the
rights of communities to create rules that protect public health, worker’s
rights, Indigenous rights; that strengthen public services instead of
encouraging privatization; that support a free and democratic Internet
instead of a corporate-controlled one.
We can all imagine trade deals built by and for people, negotiated in
public, debated openly, with a real opportunity to say no if the deal’s no
good.
It’s possible, but it isn’t going to happen unless we make it happen.
Right now, the newest, biggest, (and potentially baddest) trade
agreement yet is being negotiated behind closed doors – the U.S.-led Trans
Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP). Canada and Mexico just joined the
nine other countries involved, making this the expansion of NAFTA that
we have all feared. We have learned that the best way to stop bad trade
agreements is to get to them before they are signed. Now is the time to act.
On Saturday, December 1, join unionists, environmentalists,
Indigenous peoples, migrant justice activists, trade and Internet freedom
activists, students organizers and other allies from Mexico, Canada, and
the U.S. for cross-border action – The People’s Round of Negotiations –
1:00 PM. For more information and to get on the bus visit
www.tppxborder.org & TPPxBorder on Facebook
Past articles:
Occupy TPP: Dallas, TX – May 8-19
July 2-10, San Diego: Stop the Trans-Pacific Partnership
NYC Threatens Imminent Eviction Of 24/7 Sandy Relief Hub
Tags: nyc, occupy sandy, staten island

Info via Occupy Sandy - Staten Island / SI Recovers.
Get up-to-date info on Twitter: @SIrecovers
ACTION ALERT: Support the community hub at 489 Midland Ave
ONSITE ACTIONS
• Come to 489 Midland Ave Staten Island, NY 10306 to stand in
support
• Volunteers requested to help move the hub to 100% private
property
OFFSITE ACTON
• Demand the Mayor’s office end community hub eviction and
instead support hubs with space and equipment
• Public Advocate’s office: (212) 669-7250 9am-5pm EMAIL:
GetHelp@pubadvocate.nyc.gov
The community-run network of support for food, volunteering,
supplies, clothing, and human services is an essential part of the New York
City recovery efforts, and the mayor’s office wants to shut it down
immediately. The mayor’s office is calling upon local police forces to
“clear all outdoor sites” effective immediately. We are calling on all New
Yorkers to advocate on behalf of these community run hubs that provide

essential services to those whom the city and federal government, and
support agencies, have under-served, neglected, or abandoned.
We call on the city, service organizations and police to support these
crucial hubs by maintain location and services to community, offering
tents, generators, and storage pods for supplies or finding free, nearby, and
feasible medium to long term spaces where hubs can operate.
This Friday morning Staten Island police representing the mayor’s
office have threatened eviction action against the crucial Staten Island hub
at 489 Midland Avenue, in the heavily hit Midland Beach area. Aiman
Youssef, a 42-year-old Syrian-American Staten Islander whose house was
destroyed in the hurricane, has been running a 24/7 community pop up
hub outside his property at 489 Midland Avenue since the day after the
storm. He and a coalition of neighbors, friends and community members
are serving hot food and offering cleaning supplies, non-perishables,
medical supplies, and clothing to the thousands of residents who are still
without heat, power, or safe housing. This popular hub is well-run, wellstaffed,
and has a constant hum of discussion, support, and advice as well
as donations and pick ups and volunteer dispatch through another pop-up
group, volunteers who call themselves “The Yellow Team.”
At the standing-room only Town Hall meeting at Staten Island’s New
Dorp High School last night, Youssef was the first to raise his voice in the
question and answer period. The community’s expression of extreme need
and frustration with the lack of official support made for a contentious
environment where city government officials offered few solutions. At one
point borough president James Molinaro asked the audience “You wanna
shut your mouth?” due to their increasingly loud demands for community
support and housing solutions.
We ask all New Yorkers and Sandy supporters worldwide to not heed
Molinaro’s demand, but to speak out as Youssef did. Ask the mayor’s
office to support, not evict, the well-run community support hubs giving
crucial services to New Yorkers in need.
Chicagoans to Erect Tent City Against "Fiscal Cliff" Austerity
Negotiations #durbinville

Tags: austerity, chicago, fiscal cliff
In what might well become a model for popular resistance to the 1%'s
"Fiscal Cliff" austerity negotiations happening now in Washington D.C.,
activists in Chicago are planning a shantytown encampment of Federal
Plaza -- a tangible portent of exactly where austerity is taking us. The
"Fiscal Cliff" is a manufactured crisis to promote a "grand bargain" of
austerity measures to maintain the rich and attack the poor; we demand an
end to a world governed by the interests of the 1%, Wall Street, and the
corporations!
More information on the Occupy Chicago GA-approved action from
the event's facebook page:
As part of the ongoing “fiscal cliff” discussions, Senator Durbin is
negotiating behind our backs to gut Social Security, Medicare, and
Medicaid – cuts that could create depression-era conditions for millions of
Americans who’ve paid for and earned support from these vital programs.
Join us on December 6th at noon to tell Senator Durbin that we won't
go back! On December 6, we're building a Durbinville Shantytown
encampment at the Federal Building to symbolize the dire consequences
these cuts could have, and fight to preserve these essential programs. Join
us! And bring a tent!
Come get free soup and bread every day in Federal Plaza from
December 3rd - 6th!

Monday, December 3, noon: Soup and Bread line in Federal Plaza
Tuesday, December 4, noon: Soup and Bread line in Federal Plaza
Wednesday, December 5, noon: Soup and Bread line in Federal Plaza
Thursday, December 6, noon: Erect the “Durbinville” shantytown to show
the world what these cuts really mean!
Enough is enough! It's time to stop unnecessary budget cuts and
make corporations and the rich pay their fair share!
Demand that Senator Durbin:
• Block the "debt ceiling sequester" cuts – say no to austerity!
• Reject Simpson-Bowles or any other “Grand Bargain” that
attempts to balance the budget on the backs of the poor, working
people, the sick or the elderly – protect vital public programs, no
cuts to Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid!
• Block the extension of the Bush Tax Cuts for the top 2% – it’s
time for the rich to start paying their fair share!
• Support and fight for progressive sources of revenue – impose a
Robin Hood Tax on Wall Street financial speculation, tax capital
gains as normal income and close corporate tax loopholes!
U.S.:
The crumbling empire has depleted the US treasury. As the Congress and
White House fight over raising the debt ceiling, the cost of war aggressively
erodes any possibility of maintaining stable living standards for the American

middle and working classes and heightens growing inequalities between the
top 1% and the rest of the American people. Imperial wars are based on the
pillage of the US treasury. The imperial state has, via extraordinary tax
exemptions, concentrated wealth in the hands of the super-rich while the
middle and working classes have been pushed downward, as only low paid
jobs are available. . . .
Imperial Decline, Empty Treasury and the Specter of a Smash-Up
Washington's Serious People Are on the War Path Against Middle-
Income and Poor People
By
Dean Baker, Truthout | News Analysis
Fans of arithmetic everywhere know that the large deficits of the last
five years are the result of the economic downturn caused by the collapse
of the housing bubble. But those taking part in deficit discussions in
Washington won't allow such numbers into the discussion.
The Serious People in Washington, such as The Washington Post
(both the opinion and news sections), the Wall Street Campaign to Fix the
Debt, and the Republican Congressional leadership are in full budgetcutting
frenzy. They demand cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid
and everything else that benefits middle income and poor people because,
well, because the market demands it.
And we know the market demands these cuts because the Serious
People told us the market demands these cuts. The fact that the cuts have
the effect of redistributing income from the rest of us to the Serious People
and their friends is just a coincidence.
Those of us who focus on numbers and data might see that we
actually have near-record low interest rates on U.S. government debt,
suggesting that the markets aren't at all concerned about budget deficits.
We can also point out the obvious truth that budget deficits are supporting
the economy, given the loss of more than $1 trillion in annual construction
and consumption demand as a result of the collapse of the housing bubble.
But the Serious People in Washington don't have the time to deal with
the stinkin' numbers. They have worked themselves into a full-fledged
budget-cutting frenzy.

Perhaps the best piece of utter wackiness coming out of this
Washington debt-cutting frenzy is a proposal from Republican Sen. Bob
Corker of Tennessee, a member in good standing of the Serious People
club. Corker's plan, the Fiscal Reform Act of 2012 includes items like cuts
to Social Security and Medicare, which are described in classic
Washington fashion as "reform."
But the best part of Corker's plan is his proposal for cuts in the wages
and benefits of the federal government's workforce. These cuts average $
$180,700 for every federal employee. That is not a typo. The figure comes
from taking the $397 billion in savings that Corker wants to come from
"Federal Employee Hiring and Benefit Reform" and dividing it by the
2,197,000 employees on the federal government's payroll.
That one is worth mulling over for a few minutes. We're talking about
$180,700 in wage and benefit cuts for every nurse and custodian working
at the Veterans Administration's hospitals; $180,700 in cuts for every letter
carrier who delivers our mail; $180,700 in cuts for every meat inspector at
the Food and Drug Administration who ensures that our food is safe.
In Washington today, proposals like Corker's pass for serious. At a
time when tens of millions of people are still unemployed, underemployed
or out of the labor force altogether as a result of the fallout created by the
collapse of the housing bubble, in Washington it is serious to argue that
our biggest problem is that custodians at the VA hospitals are getting paid
too much.
In fairness, it is not only federal employees who Corker and the other
deficit hawks want to whack. They also want to cut Social Security
benefits, raise the age of eligibility for Medicare to 67 and to cut
Medicaid, which covers the cost of most nursing home care for the
nation's elderly. The basic story is that anyone who is not rich can expect
to see a big hit if these deficit hawks get their way; it's just that federal
employees get special treatment.
As always, the folks who were the central cause of the economy's
wreckage and the large current budget deficits escape largely unscathed in
the Serious People's offensive on the debt. For some reason, the Serious
People never consider the idea of a modest tax on Wall Street speculation.

Hey, they don't even consider the idea of cutting the pensions of folks like
Alan Greenspan, whose astounding incompetence as Federal Reserve
Board chairman allowed the housing bubble to grow so big that its
collapse would destroy the economy.
But going after the rich and incompetent would not be Serious. In
Washington, "Serious" means beating up on people without money and
power. It's that simple.
Correction: This article has been amended to reflect the correct
amount of wage and benefit cuts per federal worker. The calculation for
the initially published figure mistakenly included postal workers.
Murder and Rape Rampant in Afghanistan
The latest Afghan rape and multiple murder atrocity reflects countless
others. It's because US soldiers are trained to be violent in war
theaters and show no mercy. Anything goes and does
By
Willy Scanlon
Last evening I was watching an episode of Bill Maher on HBO and
he put up a copy of the New York Times that showed the 2,000 pictures of
Americans killed in Afghanistan since the war began. Having been to
Afghanistan I thought how ludicrous it was. Maybe what they should have
shown were the more than 36,000 pictures of the unarmed men, women
and children who were killed or raped by American forces in Afghanistan.
Or the stories of female American soldiers raped or sexually assaulted by
their male counter parts in Afghanistan. Then we could all get the real
truth about American behavior there. On December 13, the American Civil
Liberties Union (ACLU) and other groups filed a federal lawsuit seeking
Pentagon records in order to get the real facts about the incidence of
sexual assault in the ranks.
The Pentagon has consistently refused to release records that fully
document the problem and how it is handled. This journalist has filed
several Freedom of Information requests to see them come back stating
that material is deemed "classified". Sexual assaults on women in the US
military have claimed some degree of visibility, but about male victims

there is absolute silence.1 in 3 women in the U.S military according to one
survey have experienced sexual assault at the hands of their male
counterparts in Afghanistan and in Iraq.
Pack Parachute, a non-profit in Seattle, assists veterans who are
sexual assault survivors. Its founder Kira Mountjoy-Pepka, was raped as a
cadet at the Air Force Academy. In July 2003 she was member of a team
of female cadets handpicked by Donald Rumsfeld, at the time the
secretary of defense, to tell their stories of having been sexually assaulted.
The ensuing media coverage and a Pentagon investigation forced the
academy to make the aforementioned major policy changes . But that's all
they did was to write a new policy as it has yet to be enforced by most
commands.
In May of 2004, as the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal was
dominating headlines, the Boston Globe printed pictures of what appeared
to be the rape of a Middle Eastern woman by American soldiers. The
pictures were also published on the Internet and continue to be circulated
both online and in print throughout the Muslim world to this day.
The photos helped trigger a firestorm of implied allegation and
innuendo that ran in articles with headlines like "Women Raped Before
their Husbands" and "American Perverts Gang-Rape Defenseless
Women." A trip through the message boards finds that, for many, the rape
of Iraqi women by Americans has become a self-evident axiom that is
impervious to either proof or disproof. As one writer put it (in trying to
justify terrorism), "What else are you supposed to do when you find that
American soldiers have raped your mother, your sister and your
daughter?"
Given the serious nature of rape, however, one would expect these
sensational accusations to be supported by plenty of hard evidence,
including an alarming level of reported rape. If Americans are targeting
Iraqi women for rape, including young girls and old women, then specific
accusations would be made. Defendants would be named. Trials would be
held. Verdicts handed down "
But in fact, peeling away the surface of rumor and anecdote reveals"
more rumor and anecdote. Instead of an apple, my inquiry discovers the

issue to be more like an onion, where the layer below is not much different
than the layer above. It's a tough issue to get Muslim women to talk about.
In that culture rape carries shame because one's virginity is taken away
and they no longer are eligible for marriage. In Islamic culture sex outside
of marriage is rare and frowned upon. Adultery and fortification are
punished by death by stoning in most Muslim countries. Hence getting
women to come forward is sometimes almost impossible and many
Americans know that which makes the act seem even more heinous.
(Photos: Der Spiegel) SPIEGEL published some of the photos.
The images are repulsive. A group of rogue US Army soldiers in
Afghanistan killed innocent civilians and then posed with their bodies.
On March 24,2011 the German news outlet Der Spiegel published
photographs of what appear to be two U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan posing
over the bodies of dead Afghans - images which threaten to further
complicate the American military effort there. Two images show the
soldiers kneeling by a bloody body sprawled over a patch of sand and
grass. A third shows what appears to be two bodies propped up, back to
back, against a post in front of a military vehicle. Der Spiegel identifies
the soldiers as Spc. Jeremy Morlock and Pfc. Andrew Holmes, who are
both facing charges relating to the wrongful deaths of Afghan civilians.
Holmes and Morlock are among 12 soldiers from the 5th Stryker
Brigade accused of taking part in a plot to murder three Afghan civilians,
plant weapons on them and cover up the alleged crimes. Holmes and
another soldier Pfc.Gibbs are accused of cutting off some of the men's
body parts to keep as war trophies. He faces a potential life sentence in a

military prison if convicted and has said the killings were justified under
Army rules of engagement. Morlock has already been sentenced to 24
years in prison.
In a low, often mumbling voice, Morlock Thursday detailed how he
and his fellow soldiers abused drugs and after Gibbs joined their ranks
they plotted to kill Afghan civilians and plant "drop weapons" on the men
to make them appear as if they were insurgents. Morlock said he and
Gibbs talked about how the "drop weapons" would make it look like the
soldiers had first come under attack before firing. They left the timing of
the alleged killings, he said, up to chance. "There was never anything
planned," Morlock testified. "Like this date, this time. We found an
opportunity." Several soldiers are also charged with taking pictures of the
corpses, and one soldier is charged with stabbing a corpse. Read More
U.S. Preparing to Invade Syria:
(We’ve Been Down This Road Before)
Syria Chemical Weapons Moved, U.S. Official Says
By
Kimberly Dozier and Pauline Jelinek
WASHINGTON — The White House and its allies are weighing
military options to secure Syria's chemical and biological weapons, after
U.S. intelligence reports show the Syrian regime may be readying those
weapons and may be desperate enough to use them, U.S. officials said
Monday.
President Barack Obama, in a speech at the National Defense
University on Monday, pointedly warned Syrian President Bashar Assad
not to use the weapons.
"Today I want to make it absolutely clear to Assad and those under
his command: The world is watching," Obama said. "The use of chemical
weapons is and would be totally unacceptable. And if you make the tragic
mistake of using these weapons, there will be consequences and you will
be held accountable."
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, in Prague for meetings
with Czech officials, said she wouldn't outline any specifics.

"But suffice it to say, we are certainly planning to take action if that
eventuality were to occur," Clinton said.
Options now being considered range from aerial strikes to limited
raids by regional forces to secure the stockpiles, according to one current
U.S. official, and one former U.S. official, briefed on the matter. The
officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not
authorized to discuss the matter publicly.
The administration remains reluctant to dispatch U.S. forces into
Syria, but a U.S. special operations training team is in neighboring Jordan,
teaching troops there how to safely secure such sites together with other
troops from the region, the officials said.
The warnings come after U.S. intelligence detected signs the Syrian
regime was moving the chemical weapons components around within
several of Syria's chemical weapons sites in recent days, according to a
senior U.S. defense official and two U.S. officials speaking on Monday.
Two officials said the activities did not involve movement of components
in or out of various sites, but the movement was confined to within the
individual locations.
One of the officials said they were seeing activities they had not seen
before that bear further scrutiny.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not
authorized to speak publicly about intelligence matters.
According to another senior US official, the US is worried about
"indications of preparations" for a possible use of the chemical weapons.
The U.S. still doesn't know whether the regime is planning to use them,
but the official says there is greater concern because there is the sense that
the Assad regime is under greater pressure now.
U.S. intelligence also intercepted communications within the last six
months between Iran's infamous Quds Force, urging Syrian regime
members to use its supplies of toxic Sarin gas against rebels and the
civilians supporting them in the besieged city of Homs, the former U.S.
official said.
The Assad regime insists it would not use such weapons against
Syrians, though it carefully does not admit to having them. The Ministry

of Foreign Affairs said the government "would not use chemical weapons
– if there are any – against its own people under any circumstances." The
regime is party to the 1925 Geneva Protocol banning chemical weapons in
war.
The Syrian assurances did not placate the White House.
"We are concerned that in an increasingly beleaguered regime, having
found its escalation of violence through conventional means inadequate,
might be considering the use of chemical weapons against the Syrian
people," said White House press secretary Jay Carney.
An administration official said the trigger for U.S. action of some
kind is the use of chemical weapons, or movement with the intent to use
them, or the intent to provide them to a terrorist group like Hezbollah. The
U.S. is trying to determine whether the recent movement detected in Syria
falls into any of those categories, the official said. The administration
official was speaking on condition of anonymity because this person was
not authorized to speak publicly about the issue.
Israeli officials have repeatedly expressed concerns that Syrian
chemical weapons could slip into the hands of Hezbollah or other anti-
Israel groups, or even be fired toward Israel in an act of desperation by
Syria.
Syria has some 75 sites where weapons are stored, but U.S. officials
aren't sure they have tracked down all the locations, and fear some
stockpiles may have already been moved. Syria is believed to have several
hundred ballistic surface-to-surface missiles capable of carrying chemical
warheads, plus several tons of material stored in either large drums, or in
artillery shells, which become deadly once fired.
"In Syria, they have everything from mustard agent, Sarin nerve gas,
and some variant of the nerve agent VX," according to James Quinlivan, a
Rand Corp. analyst who specializes in the elimination of weapons of mass
destruction.
A primary argument against sending in U.S. ground troops is that
whoever takes possession of the chemical weapons will be responsible for
destroying them, as part of the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention.

Destroying Syria's stockpiles could cost hundreds of millions of dollars,
and take more than a decade, Quinlivan said.
Syria's arsenal is a particular threat to the American allies, Turkey
and Israel, and Obama singled out the threat posed by the unconventional
weapons earlier this year as a potential cause for deeper U.S. involvement
in Syria's civil war. Up to now, the United States has opposed military
intervention or providing arms support to Syria's rebels for fear of further
militarizing a conflict that activists say has killed more than 40,000 people
since March 2011.
Activity has been detected at Syrian weapons sites before.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said in late September the
intelligence suggested the Syrian government had moved some of its
chemical weapons in order to protect them. He said the U.S. believed that
the main sites remained secure.
Asked Monday if they were still considered secure, Pentagon press
secretary George Little declined to comment about any intelligence related
to the weapons. Read More
Environment:
Fracking:
Nuclear Fallout: Ongoing Tragedy/Disaster In Japan:
EnergyNews:
0:29 AM EST on December 4th, 2012 | Leave a comment
Asahi: Giant net to be placed around Fukushima Daiichi port?
05:58 AM EST on December 4th, 2012 | 15 comments
Gundersen: The dominoes are starting to fall in U.S. — I think we’ll
see quite a few nuclear plants shutting down permanently (VIDEO)
03:10 AM EST on December 4th, 2012 | 9 comments

Top Headline: DAM LIES — Nuclear whistleblowers blast NRC for
cover up (PHOTO)
08:11 PM EST on December 3rd, 2012 | 14 comments
Kyodo: Concern about condition of Fukushima Unit 4 — Fuel rods
may get dumped onto ground and burn up in quake — Tepco
‘hastening’ removal
02:40 PM EST on December 3rd, 2012 | 7 comments
Gundersen: 70,000 shad in river before nuclear plant… now there’s
16, not 16 thousand, sixteen — We’ve essentially decimated the
population (VIDEO)
12:57 PM EST on December 3rd, 2012 | One comment
Japan Newspaper: New 3/11 footage reveals “highly radioactive
liquid” from Fukushima reactor leaked into sea (VIDEO)
Ongoing Gulf of Mexico Oil Disaster:
Oil Spill Attorney Stuart Smith’s Blog:
We’re keeping the pressure on BP
to stop spilling more oil into the Gulf
Late last week, we won a big victory in federal court when a judge
signed off on a plan that will require BP and its rig partner Transocean to
monitor the Deepwater Horizon site and nearby to identify the source of
fresh oil that continues to create a sheen in the Gulf of Mexico.
The order signed by U.S. Magistrate Judge Sally Shushan last Friday
approves plans by the oil giant and Transocean to conduct a close visual
inspection with a robotically operated vehicle, or ROV, of the site where
an explosion in April 2010 killed 11 workers and triggered the initial spill
that dumped nearly 5 million barrels of oil into the waters off the
Louisiana coast. The device will allow engineers to get a better handle on
whether the oil sheen that was confirmed this fall by the Coast Guard is

coming from a so-called cofferdam that was installed to capture oil right
after the explosion — which is what BP has sought to claim — but could
also show whether the oil is seeping from cracks in the ocean floor, a
worst-case scenario.
Magistrate Judge Shushan needed to approve the inspections because
the site of the 2010 explosion is also a key piece of evidence in the U.S.
government’s massive civil case against BP that is slated for next year,
although negotiations aimed at a settlement are still ongoing. You can read
the judge’s order here. The inspections were slated to begin this week.
This is a huge victory for environmentalists who’ve long argued that
BP — and at times the federal government — have been trying to hide
fresh leaks of oil at the Deepwater site, despite claims to the contrary. The
leader in this effort has been an intrepid associate, the pilot Bonny
Schumaker of the web site On Wings of Care. It was Schumaker who
continued to undertake surveillance flights over the Gulf to look for
ongoing problems — at times when the oil company and the feds were not
eager for citizens to investigate what was going on at or near the site.
In August 2011, Schumaker spotted a fresh sheen of oil in the Gulf,
and this blog was the first to report on the apparent new spill, long before
it was confirmed by other scientists and the mainstream media. This
proved not to be an isolated incident. In October of this year, Schumaker
and this website reported a new oil sheen, ultimately confirmed by the
Coast Guard, and her flyovers continue to find evidence of leaking crude.
Here is her latest report, filed just this Sunday:
Since our November 9th flyover of the Deepwater
Horizon wellhead and our publishing of the large surface oil
slick there, BP has announced plans to begin further
investigation of the wreckage and seafloor in that area,
beginning tomorrow, December 3. Since the weather was perfect
today and seas calm, we made a quick flight to see how things
look out there, now three weeks since our Nov 9th flyover. We
were surprised to find a new drilling platform sitting almost
right over the wellhead, and a large drillship also in the vicinity.
We were dismayed to find many large surface slicks in the area,

as well as some new ones along the eastern coast of Louisiana
south of Black Bay. And of course it’s unfortunately no surprise
anymore to see the large, chronic Taylor Energy oil slick that has
plagued the southern tip of Louisiana since 2004.
This is — and continues to be — an underreported lesson from the
BP spill, but it is a crucially important one. The bias of both Big Oil and
their allies in the government is to obfuscate or cover up. That is why
folks like Bonny Schumaker, myself, and several key associates have
worked tirelessly since we first learned of the disaster to independently
investigate the spill and its impacts on residents and on the marine
environment. As a result, we’ve helped change the narrative and raise
awareness that there’s two sides to the ongoing story of the Gulf, not just
the propaganda that BP televises in its well-produced ads. Hopefully, this
new, court-approved testing will get us even closer to the truth.
To check out the original of U.S. Magistrate Judge Sally Shushan’s
order for BP and Transocean inspections of the Deepwater Horizon site,
please read: http://www.stuarthsmith.com/wp-content/uploads/
2012/12/53251575_8060.pdf
Read my Aug. 17 , 2011 post that broke the story of the “new
Macondo leak”: http://www.stuarthsmith.com/oil-rising-again-frommacondo-well-bp-hires-fleet-of-40-shrimp-boats-to-lay-boom-around-olddeepwater-horizon-site
To check out my post from last November about the 2011 leaks at the
Macondo field, check out: http://www.stuarthsmith.com/breakthrough-inthe-macondo-mystery-bp-admits-to-new-activity-at-deepwater-horizonsite/
Here is our report from Oct. 3 of this year about another fresh oil
sheen in the Gulf: http://www.stuarthsmith.com/breaking-news-new-oilsheen-near-site-of-deepwater-horizon-disaster/
To read Bonny Schumaker’s report of her most recent flyover filed on
Dec. 2, please go to: http://www.onwingsofcare.org/protection-apreservation/gulf-of-mexico-oil-spill-2010/gulf-2012/334-20121202slicks-macondo-area.html

Environmental Must-Reads – December 4, 2012
First Study of Its Kind Detects
44 Hazardous Air Pollutants at Gas Drilling Sites
With gas wells in some states being drilled near schools and homes,
scientists see a need for better chemical disclosure laws and follow-up
research.
South African Company to Build U.S. Plant to
Convert Gas to Liquid Fuels
In an ambitious bet that the glut of cheap natural gas in the United
States will last for many years, a South African energy company
announced on Monday that it would build America’s first commercial
plant to convert natural gas to diesel and other liquid fuels.
Yakama Nation: Gas pipeline damages historic site
The Yakama Nation has asked the federal government to halt
construction of a natural gas pipeline across southwest Washington’s
White Salmon River, saying the project will impair an archaeological site
that is culturally significant to the tribe.
Homeowners suing over Wis. gas pipeline spill
Homeowners sued Monday over a massive gasoline spill in
southeastern Wisconsin this summer that has contaminated many of their
wells, their attorneys said.
Construction near gas pipeline has neighbors fearing the worst
A proposal to build a 59-unit residential complex off the Palisades
cliffs in North Bergen — only 20 feet from a natural gas pipeline — has
set off a protracted dispute between neighbors and the developer that’s
lingered for seven years.
State Rep.:
Fracking Loophole “Big Enough To Drive A Mack Truck Through”
A new study says Texas oil and natural gas companies are claiming
trade-secret exemptions to keep from revealing the chemicals used for
hydraulic fracturing or “fracking”.
Drillers use trade-secret exemption to avoid
disclosure of fracking chemicals

A subsidiary of Nabors Industries pumped a mixture of chemicals
identified only as EXP- F0173-11 into a half-dozen oil wells in rural
Karnes County in Southeast Texas in July.
But few people outside Nabors, the largest onshore drilling contractor
by revenue, know exactly what’s in that blend, despite a year-old Texas
law that requires drillers to disclose chemicals they pump underground
during hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.”
Hazardous Air Pollutants Detected Near Fracking Sites
For years, the controversy over natural gas drilling has focused on the
water and air quality problems linked to hydraulic fracturing, the process
where chemicals are blasted deep underground to release tightly bound
natural gas deposits.
But a new study reports that a set of chemicals called non-methane
hydrocarbons, or NMHCs, is found in the air near drilling sites even when
fracking isn’t in progress.
Review of fracking health risks sought
Opponents of hydrofracking said Monday that Gov. Andrew Cuomo
has put the regulatory cart before the horse, with the state Department of
Environmental Conservation offering rules to control hydrofracking while
a newly launched review of its health impacts remains incomplete.
Fracking industry refusing to report which chemicals they’re using
Colorado officials question link of fracking-waste disposal to quakes
The increasingly common practice of disposing of oil and gas drilling
wastewater by injecting it underground can trigger earthquakes, according
to federal scientists who studied quakes since 1970 in Colorado and
neighboring states.
DNA analysis of microbes in a fracking site yields surprises
Researchers have made a genetic analysis of the microbes living deep
inside a deposit of Marcellus Shale at a hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,”
site, and uncovered some surprises.
How the North Dakota fracking boom shook a family
The Jorgenson family loved living on the prairie in North Dakota –
until the shale gas boom started
Wanna know what’s in that fracking fluid? Tough

As of last year, Texas has a law that requires fracking companies to
reveal the chemicals used in their fracking fluids. Unless that fracking
fluid is considered a “trade secret” by the fracking company, which,
surprise surprise, companies have claimed 19,000 times in the first eight
months of this year.
Fracking Infrastructure = Paradise Lost
It’s a story of paradise lost for some Pennsylvania residents who are
confronted with a natural gas transmission compressor station that has
altered life in their rural towns. The Delaware Riverkeeper Network video
highlights another one of the problems caused by the pipelines and the
infrastructure used to transport shale gas. The Delaware River Basin
Commission holds a public hearing tomorrow on the group’s petition that
the agency begin regulating pipelines in the Delaware River watershed.
Despite state laws requiring disclosure,
fracking companies keep tens of thousands of chemicals secret
The evidence keeps piling up regarding the inadequacy of state
fracking disclosure laws when it comes to ensuring transparency. A recent
article from Bloomberg News finds that in many states with regulations
requiring disclosure of fracking chemicals, companies can evade the
requirement for transparency by unilaterally declaring that a chemical is a
proprietary “trade secret.”
Fracking Our Food Supply: new reports of livestock illnesses
I’ve blogged before about farmers and ranchers reporting serious
illnesses in their livestock that they believe were caused by nearby oil and
gas operations. They report that their veterinarians have ruled out all other
potential causes. These reports have come from Colorado, New Mexico,
Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas and North
Dakota.
Well Pad Suffers New Slip
Because of another soil slip at the Ray Baker well pad in southern
Marshall County, Chesapeake Energy is still trying to meet West Virginia
Department of Environmental Protection requirements to resume
operations.
Chesapeake fined $600,000 in W.Va. waterfall case

A federal judge fined Chesapeake Appalachia $600,000 for
destroying a Wetzel County waterfall while constructing a well pad.
Breaking: Cargo Ship Spills Hundreds Of Gallons Of Oil
Minister of Transport and Aviation Glenys Hanna-Martin described
the oil spill, during a press conference at the port department this evening,
as a tier one spill, which she said represents the least threatening type of
spill on a scale of 1-3.
Bahamas: Crews working to contain oil spill from
cargo ship with breached hull
Government officials say a cargo ship is slowly leaking oil off the
northernmost island of the Bahamas.
Transport Minister Glenys Hanna-Martin said Monday that the ship’s
hull was somehow breached off Grand Bahama island and it is unclear
how much oil has spilled into the ocean so far
BP Oil Highly Toxic When Mixed with Dispersants
The two million gallons of the chemical used to break up BP’s
catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 may have made the oil
more toxic to marine life than it already was. In a study published in the
journal Environmental Pollution, the chemical dispersant called Corexit
was mixed with oil taken from the BP spill. The chemical cocktail killed
and reduced reproduction in rotifers, a tiny creature that forms part of the
base of the Gulf food chain.
Future oil permits should require flow-rate gauge-BP spill study
One lesson learned from the deadly 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill is
the need to gauge how much oil is leaking from a blown-out well,
prompting U.S. government scientists to recommend all future drilling
permits require mechanisms to assess the flow rate.
New Report On BP Oil Spill Says Size of Spills
Can Be Determined by “Sniffing” the Air
Today the final three reports in an overview of the scientific
community’s response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill is being
released. One of the authors is University of South Florida biologist Steve
Murawski, who was the chief scientist for the National Marine Fisheries
Service during the disaster.

BP argues for access to Transocean spill insurance
BP should have access to $750 million in Transocean’s insurance to
pay costs from the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, a lawyer for the British
company told an appeals court.
19 Months Later,
Here’s What We’ve Learned From The Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill
The BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill began on April 20, 2010 and
lasted 87 days, releasing about 4.9 million barrels of oil into the ocean
from a mile deep well.
In response to the largest oil spill in US history more than 1 million
gallons of oil dispersant was added to the sea surface and over 770
thousand gallons to the sub sea.
Research To Show How Oil Spills Harm Ocean Fish
Latest hatchery technology and ‘treadmill’ help to reveal
physiological impacts on fish in Deep Water Horizon spill. UM Scientists
in partnership with scientists from NOAA, Stanford and Univ. of N. Texas
Present Findings on Post-Oil Spill Fish Toxicology; Studies Show
Potential for Impact on Several Important Fish Species in the Region
Oil spills on the home front
Last year, the average Canadian household spent $1,400 on expenses
at Christmas. Keith and Susanne Phillips can only dream of a holiday
season so cheap.
The Saanich couple was left with a $48,000 cleanup bill when their
home heating tank failed mere days before Christmas 2011, pouring
upwards of 1,000 litres of oil into the soil on their property.
Shell Chemical equipment failure causes
flame and flares in St. Charles
For more than 30 hours, Shell Chemical, located on the Motiva
Enterprises campus in Norco, has been experiencing elevated flares,
shooting flames and leaking thick black smoke into the air above St.
Charles Parish. According to a report submitted to the U.S. Coast Guard
National Response Center, the plant is releasing unknown amounts of
hydrogen sulfide, butadiene and benzene, a known carcinogen.
Health of workers hospitalized after

Black Elk oil platform fire improves
The three Filipino oil workers who were seriously injured in a Nov.
16 explosion and fire on an oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico are in
improving health, according to the Philippines embassy. Wilberto Ilagan, a
50-year-old welder in good condition, has been able to walk unaided,
while 52-year-old pipefitter Renato “Rey” Dominguez, as well as a worker
is not being identified out of respect for his family’s wishes, are conscious
and can move certain parts of their bodies, officials announced in a
statement Sunday.
Three Arrested in Pipeline Barricade
Action to Halt Keystone XL Construction
Today three people where arrested outside Tyler, Texas after they
barricaded themselves in a mile long segment of Keystone XL pipe and
successfully shut down construction at the worksite for most of the day.
Keystone XL protesters blockade themselves inside pipeline
On Monday two activists protesting the expansion of the Keystone
XL pipeline blockaded themselves inside the pipeline itself in an
unprecedented protest move. The Tar Sands Blockade group has staged a
number of high-profile blockades in East Texas, where the southern leg of
the pipeline is being constructed, but this was the very first blockade to
enter the pipeline and involved extreme risk to the participants.
Landowner Fights Keystone XL Pipeline By Suing the State
Mike Bishop is fired up. He’s standing with about a dozen protestors
and half that many reporters in front of a state office building, waving a
lawsuit in his hands.
Report: La. refinery accidents down
Refineries in Louisiana had fewer accidents in 2011 than the previous
year, but those accidents resulted in more pollution being released,
according to a Louisiana Bucket Brigade report.
Louisiana refinery accidents decline,
but accident emissions rise, Louisiana Bucket Brigade reports
Louisiana’s 17 petroleum refineries reported a slight decline in the
number of accidents in 2011, but registered an increase in the chemicals
released to the land, air and water during those accidents, according to a

eport released by the Louisiana Bucket Brigade and the United
Steelworkers union Monday morning.
Black Liberation/Civil Rights:
Listen to Black Agenda Radio on the Progressive Radio Network,
with Glen Ford and Nellie Bailey – Week of December 3, 2012
• Education as Human Right | Fire Arne Duncan | Congo genocide |
Congo Holocaust | NAACP Image Awards | Haiti cholera | fiscal
cliff
NAACP Image Awards Targeted for Protest
Benton Harbor, Michigan, activist Rev. Edward Pinkney plans to
lead hundreds of pickets at the NAACP’s Image Awards ceremonies on
February 1, in Los Angeles. “Our main objective is to wake up the
NAACP, and show that they are out of touch with the community,” said
Pinkney, longtime leader of the civil rights group’s local chapter. Pinkney
charges the NAACP collaborated with a Whirlpool Corporation scheme to
take over the Ben Harbor NAACP, in return for financial support. The Los
Angeles protest will send the NAACP a message, said Pinkney: “We need
you to stop taking these corporate dollars.”
White House and Republicans Play Fiscal Tag Team
The Obama administration and Republican congressional leaders “are
pushing essentially the same solutions” to the so-called fiscal cliff

problem. “Nobody on either side is talking about the military budget” or
“serious taxation of billionaires; in fact, both sides are talking about
cutting corporate taxes,” said David Swanson, publisher of the influential
website War Is a Crime. “You don’t really have opposition between these
two parties, you have agreement,” he said.
Arne Duncan Must Go
Black and progressive educators should push for Secretary of
Education Arne Duncan to be replaced early in Obama’s second term, said
Dr. Sam Anderson, of New York City’s Independent Commission on
Public Education. The concept of education as a “human right is
historically rooted in our struggle to be free in this country, as Black
people,” said Anderson.
Bill Clinton Most to Blame for Congo “Holocaust”
Millions of Congolese have died since 1996 due to policies set in
motion by President Bill Clinton, said Prof. Yaa Lengi, of the Congo
Coalition. Neighboring Uganda and Rwanda “are always coming up with
schemes to foment chaos in eastern Congo” in order to exploit the region’s
mineral resources. “Cell phones, lap tops, flat screen TVs – all those
gadgets need the minerals of the Congo,” said coalition organizer William
Misezuel.
More Bad News for Congo: Oil
“Of late there’s been a major oil discovery in Congo, which makes it
even more attractive” to outsiders, said Dr. Gerald Horne, professor of
history and African American Studies at the University of Houston. “The
United States needs to put more pressure on the Rwandan and Ugandan
regimes,” since Washington “is the puppeteer” of the relationship. Dr.
Horne spoke on Regent Radio’s Saturday Morning Show, in Toronto,
Canada.
UN Fails Haiti on Rights
A report by the Paris-based Federation of Human Rights charges the
United Nations with failing to take responsibility for causing the cholera
epidemic in Haiti, and with inflicting other human rights violations on the
occupied nation. In addition to spreading cholera, UN troops have
“violated Haitians’ rights in various ways, from rapes to extrajudicial

killings,” said Dan Beeton, of the Center for Economic and Policy
Research, in Washington. The UN recently extended its occupation
troops’ mandate for another year. Read more
Treble Army - ConsumeRhythm (Video)
Prosecute Tuskegee Experiment Murderers
Syphilis Victim - The Tuskegee Experiment
Blindness, insanity, body sores, deformity, birth defects, and death
are common side effect of untreated syphilis. Torture and death were
inflicted on victims of the Tuskegee Experiments. The Tuskegee syphilis
experiment (also known as the Tuskegee syphilis study or Public Health
Service syphilis study) was an infamous clinical study conducted between
1932 and 1972 in Tuskegee, Alabama by the U.S. Public Health Service to
study the natural progression of untreated syphilis in poor, rural black men
who thought they were receiving free health care from the U.S.
government. [Source: Wikipedia] Please sign and share the petition at this
link http://wh.gov/N2bw to PROSECUTE TUSKEGEE EXPERIMENTS
MURDERERS. People who subjected the Alabama rural black subjects to
torture and death are still alive, and they deserve to be prosecuted and
punished like Nazi war criminals.

Google Images' "syphilis" search http://goo.gl/CsbqK
Doctor with U.S. Department of Health injects syphilis virus in black man
See photographs showing the torturous, deadly syphilis virus on human guinea pigs at
Medical experiments on unsuspecting blacks did not end with the
Tuskegee Experiment. The U.S. Dept of Health used rural Tennessee's
black teens to test the birth control shot in the 1970's (after the Tuskegee
Experiment ended). Manufacturers claimed the shot was tested on women
in a third world country. One would assume that meant adult volunteers
who were apprised of the risks. But I had a 15-year-old friend in Fayette
County, Tennessee who was afraid her mom would find her birth control
pills. She went to the Health Department for an IUD, and medical
providers convinced her to take the shot. Birth control shots were not
approved by the FDA until the 1990s - 25 years later! An Ohio-based
company recently said it would fire 150 employees for refusing to take the
flu vaccine which the company forced on its 10,800 employees. TriHealth
obviously confuses its position as "employer" with "owner." American
Pharaohs are anxious to remove all choice from citizens over their bodies
and get everyone inoculated with flu vaccines that Natural News labeled
"deadly." See the excerpt from the news article below:
(NaturalNews) Health freedom is under attack in Ohio, where a
major Cincinnati-based healthcare conglomerate, TriHealth, is forcing all
of its 10,800 employees to take a "free" flu shot or else face termination.
According to WLWT News 5 in Cincinnati, the 150 objectors who have
thus far refused the shot have until December 3 to either comply with the

company's demands, provide a valid reason why they cannot take the
vaccine, or else get fired. Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/
038155_flu_shots_TriHealth_employees.html#ixzz2DjJ6mQUR
Apparently, Pharaohs are interested in getting Americans injected
with microchips, also. In fact, poor Americans who refuse the microchip
may lose the right to participate in the nation's food stamp program. See a
video embedded below and also at YouTube link entitled "Urgent!! Food
Stamps To Be Ended Unless Microchipped!!" http://youtu.be/
41ikDa78m8k
Pharaohs were not finished in 1972. They secretly arrested my
mentally, physically disabled brother in 2003 and murdered him after 18
days of medical experimentation, starvation, Tasering, Restraint Chair -
My family does not know because we are black people, and the Justice
Department and Shelby County Jail refuse to tell us exactly how they
murdered Larry Neal. So does Attorney General Eric Holder. Visit our
website, WRONGFUL DEATH OF LARRY NEAL at this website link
http://WrongfulDeathofLarryNeal.com . Hundreds of mentally ill people
have died in mental hospitals, jails and prisons, and by police violence in
America during this 21st century besides my unfortunate brother. Many of
them "went missing" in/after police custody. Some may have been made
victims of some heinous medical experiments. Prisoners were once used
as medical test rats.
What experiments is the government conducting on Americans
today? Tens of thousands of people claim being victims of covert
harassment programs, including microwave torture, directed energy
weapons, and mind control. A lawsuit being litigated now seeks
injunction against the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) “gas
chamber” experiments (http://www.activistpost.com/2012/11/lawsuitseeks-injunction-against-epa.html).
The Activist Post article states: "The
experiments involve gassing human subjects with PM2.5. The New York
Health Department defines PM2.5 as follows: “Fine particulate matter
(PM2.5) is an air pollutant that is a concern for people's health when levels
in air are high.” In one of these experiments, individuals were given a

eathing apparatus through which they inhaled diesel fuel piped in from a
truck parked outside." Read More
Labor:
Ford Workers Sit Down, Slow Down over Late Paycheck
By
Jane Slaughter
Workers who make underbodies for the Mustang pulled off a ministrike
and work-to-rule last Friday.
At Ford’s Flat Rock, Michigan, plant, workers in the body and paint
areas had been canvassed to work the Sunday after Thanksgiving, for
double-time. But someone in management messed up. Workers learned
they weren’t going to get paid on Friday, their regular payday.
So after their morning break, a couple dozen underbody workers
went to their stations but sat down and refused to work, for about 20
minutes. Union reps advised them to work, but to follow all rules and
abstain from their usual shortcuts—resulting in a noticeable slowdown in
production.
In the afternoon a union rep texted workers that they could pick up a
special check that same day. Victory! No one received any punishment.
But when they got to the office, workers were told they’d have to wait till
the next Tuesday or Wednesday.
These are the sorts of wildcat actions that were frequent in the United
Auto Workers’ early days in the 1930s and during World War II. The
companies didn’t like it, and the legalized system of “obey now, grieve
later, wait months for a solution” was established.
If the checks aren’t delivered tomorrow, maybe the Flat Rock
workers should try “self-help” again.
Economy:
World:

Robert Fisk: Both Arab and Jew lived in the original Palestine.
Why, Moshe Dayan asks, can't they do so again?
The Long View: Our Middle East Correspondent interviews a
feminist, patriot and widow who is nostalgic for a time of much
greater harmony in the region
“I was born here and I have a right to live here – the same thing goes
for the Arab population”
On the wall of the flat is a photograph of a beautiful young woman
with long, dark hair. She is sitting on a lawn with a handsome young man
in British uniform.
I am sitting opposite a lady aged 95, the sea glittering behind her Tel
Aviv balcony, her memories of the old Palestine and the new Israel as
sharp as a teenager’s. She is the woman in the photograph.
The man is Moshe Dayan, the former Israeli chief of staff who
conquered East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza and Golan in 1967,
Israel’s golden boy, whose values – so his widow Ruth Dayan believes –
have been distorted by the country’s present leadership.
After Zionism
Many times she has spoken out to tell the world – and Israelis – that
the country’s right-wing governments are ruining Israel, that Zionism has
“run its course”.
Now she sits in her tartan skirt, surveying her journalist visitor.

“I could look you up on the internet in two minutes,” she says. “I read
that you are pro-Arab. You shouldn’t be. You should be pro-world. There
shouldn’t be any discrimination between races. Discrimination has a lot to
do with what’s happening. The Bible is a beautiful philosophical book.
But it’s full of cruel wars…”
I tell Ruth that she shouldn’t believe all she reads on the internet, that
a website recently denounced me as a Mossad agent because I had
“revealed” in The Independent that my mother’s maiden name was Rose.
She bursts into laughter. “When Israelis tell me there is “no one to talk
to” [among the Palestinians], it gets on my nerves,” she says. “Most
people who deal in politics, don’t see Arabs. I go to the terri- tories – but I
have to have a [Israeli] permit to get into Ramallah.”
Her accent in English is poised, slightly upper crust and she
obviously admires the country which ruled mandate Palestine until 1948.
“I am an Anglophile,” she says proudly, a woman born in Ottoman
Palestine in 1917, moving to London with her parents. She was “the only
child in the whole of England who was a Jewish Palestinian”.
She has an acute memory, some corners of which I choose not to
disturb. Moshe Dayan was a war hero, black patch over his eye and
socialist ideals, but he was a notorious womaniser and he and Ruth
divorced in 1971 after 36 years of marriage. So I ask about the early
Dayan, the man in the photograph in British uniform. They were deeply in
love, she says – she was 18 and he was 20 – and she had an eight-year-old
daughter when he was arrested by the British, one of 34 Jewish militants,
in 1939. But he was later released to serve in the 1941 invasion of
Lebanon, where a French sniper took his eye out. Legend has it that he lost
his eye in Damour. Ruth thinks it was further south, near Sidon.
Nostalgic
Ruth is nostalgic for the values that existed in the original Palestine,
where Arab and Jew lived together. “My older son was born in an Arab
house in 1942.”
Today, she doesn’t like the word “Zionism”. “The country was built
by settling the land and working in malarial swamps up to our knees. Even
the Mufti was with the Jews at the beginning.” When she returned to

Palestine at the age of 12 in 1929, “I didn’t know I was Jewish – I didn’t
know what Palestine was. My mother taught an Arabic kindergarten, just
inside the old city of Jerusalem. We went to a playground on Mount Zion,
provided by a Jew on condition it was for Arabs as well as Jews.
“I was taught Arabic at home… I was born here and I have a right to
live here – the same thing goes for the Arab population. I’ve never been
brought up in a religious home. My grandfather didn’t speak Yiddish, he
came in 1903… Now when I see what’s happening around us, this
frightens me more.”
Ruth Dayan is aristocratic. Her sister Reuma married Ezer Weizman,
Israeli Defence Minister and later President; her three children have been a
Knesset member, a writer and a famed actor. Feminist, patriot, pining for
the “old” Israel, she is a paragon of old age. And if I can be like Ruth
Dayan, I intend to reach my nineties.
Health, Education, Science and Welfare:
Daily News Digest December 4, 2012
Dec 2, 1823: Monroe Doctrine declared
During his annual address to Congress, President James Monroe
proclaims a new U.S. foreign policy initiative that becomes known as the
"Monroe Doctrine." Primarily the work of Secretary of State John Quincy
Adams, the Monroe Doctrine forbade European interference in the
American hemisphere but also asserted U.S. neutrality in regard to future
European conflicts.
The origins of the Monroe Doctrine stem from attempts by several
European powers to reassert their influence in the Americas in the early
1820s. In North America, Russia had attempted to expand its influence in
the Alaska territory, and in Central and South America the U.S.
government feared a Spanish colonial resurgence. Britain too was actively
seeking a major role in the political and economic future of the Americas,
and Adams feared a subservient role for the United States in an Anglo-
American alliance.

The United States invoked the Monroe Doctrine to defend its
increasingly imperialistic role in the Americas in the mid-19th century, but
it was not until the Spanish-American War in 1898 that the United States
declared war against a European power over its interference in the
American hemisphere. The isolationist position of the Monroe Doctrine
was also a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy in the 19th century, and it
took the two world wars of the 20th century to draw a hesitant America
into its new role as a major global power.
Quotes of the Day:
The logic of the lesser evil, often used by the Egyptian
Left (for example when a part of it chose to support Morsi in
the second ballot against Shafik), in a revolutionary situation
is very dangerous. On the one hand it paves the way for MB
propaganda that accuses the revolutionaries of protecting
the felool (members of the former regime), and on the other
hand it confuses the masses, failing to draw a sharp a line of
demarcation between the revolutionary and
counterrevolutionary camps. Partly, it was this lack of a
clear demarcation that permitted the victory of the Muslim
Brotherhood in the latest elections. Why has Sabbahi, who
came third in the elections by winning over 20% of the votes,
not appealed to the workers to organise a general strike in
support of the movement? This would clearly characterise
the street protests, giving them more strength and allowing a
firmer connection between the revolutionary movement and
the labour movement – a connection that we have lacked so
far in an organised fashion.
— Umm Kulthum, Egyptian Revolution, Act 2
Image of the Day:
Videos of the Day:

End Wall Street’s Wars!
Occupy Wall Street!
Occupy Wall Street is the Only Organization
That Identifies The Enemy —
The 1% That Own and Control The Wealth!
1960s The Realist — One Nation Under God/1%
(Unlike The Trade Union Misleaders
Nor The Misleaders Of The Oppressed
Who Strive To Be In ‘Partnership’ With The 1%)
1960s The Realist — One Nation Under God/1%
(Unlike The Trade Union Misleaders
Nor The Misleaders Of The Oppressed
Who Strive To Be In ‘Partnership’ With The 1%)
Occupy Wall Street — ‘We Are The 99%’
The resistance continues at Liberty Square:
U.S.:
Organizing McDonalds and Walmart, and Why Austerity Economics
Hurts Low-Wage Workers the Most
By
Robert Reich
(During the Clinton years, Robert Reich was Clinton’s chief
promoter of the ill-fated concept of the “Labor Bureaucracy’s

‘partnership’ with the boss”. In this article he is writing about the
‘bitter fruits’ from this ‘partnership with the boss’ and the the
betrayal of the working class due to this “‘partnership’ with the
boss’ brokered by the Democratic Party.— R.S.)
What does the drama in Washington over the “fiscal cliff” have to do
with strikes and work stoppages among America’s lowest-paid workers at
Walmart, McDonald’s, Burger King, and Domino’s Pizza?
Everything.
Jobs are slowly returning to America, but most of them pay lousy
wages and low if non-existent benefits. The Bureau of Labor Statistics
estimates that seven out of 10 growth occupations over the next decade
will be low-wage — like serving customers at big-box retailers and fastfood
chains. That’s why the median wage keeps dropping, especially for
the 80 percent of the workforce that’s paid by the hour.
It’s also part of the reason why the percent of Americans living below
the poverty line has been increasing even as the economy has started to
recover — from 12.3 percent in 2006 to 15 percent in 2011. More than 46
million Americans now live below the poverty line.
Many of them have jobs. The problem is these jobs just don’t pay
enough to lift their families out of poverty.
So, encouraged by the economic recovery and perhaps also by the
election returns, low-wage workers have started to organize.
Yesterday in New York hundreds of workers at dozens of fast-food
chain stores went on strike, demanding a raise to $15-an-hour from their
current pay of $8 to $10 an hour (the median hourly wage for food service
and prep workers in New York is $8.90 an hour).
Last week, Walmart workers staged demonstrations and walkouts at
thousands of Walmart stores, also demanding better pay. The average
Walmart employee earns $8.81 an hour. A third of Walmart’s employees
work less than 28 hours per week and don’t qualify for benefits.
These workers are not teenagers. Most have to support their families.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median age of fast-food
workers is over 28; and women, who comprise two-thirds of the industry,
are over 32. The median age of big-box retail workers is over 30.

Organizing makes economic sense.
Unlike industrial jobs, these can’t be outsourced abroad. Nor are they
likely to be replaced by automated machinery and computers. The service
these workers provide is personal and direct: Someone has to be on hand
to help customers and dole out the burgers.
And any wage gains they receive aren’t likely to be passed on to
consumers in higher prices because big-box retailers and fast-food chains
have to compete intensely for consumers. They have no choice but to keep
their prices low.
That means wage gains are likely to come out of profits – which, in
turn, would affect the return to shareholders and the total compensation of
top executives.
That wouldn’t be such a bad thing.
According to a recent report by the National Employment Law
Project, most low-wage workers are employed by large corporations that
have been enjoying healthy profits. Three-quarters of these employers (the
fifty biggest employers of low-wage workers) are raking in higher
revenues now than they did before the recession.
McDonald’s — bellwether for the fast-food industry — posted strong
results during the recession by attracting cash-strapped customers, and its
sales have continued to rise.
Its CEO, Jim Skinner, got $8.8 million last year. In addition to annual
bonuses, McDonald’s also gives its executives a long-term bonus once
every three years; Skinner received an $8.3 million long-term bonus in
2009 and is due for another this year. The value of Skinner’s other perks
— including personal use of the company aircraft, physical exams and
security — rose 19% to $752,000.
Yum!Brands, which operates and licenses Taco Bell, KFC, and Pizza
Hut, has also done wonderfully well. Its CEO, David Novak, received
$29.67 million in total compensation last year, placing him number 23 on
Forbes’ list of highest paid chief executives.
Walmart – the trendsetter for big-box retailers – is also doing well.
And it pays its executives handsomely. The total compensation for

Walmart’s CEO, Michael Duke, was $18.7 million last year – putting him
number 82 on Forbes’ list.
The wealth of the Walton family – which still owns the lion’s share of
Walmart stock — now exceeds the wealth of the bottom 40 percent of
American families combined, according to an analysis by the Economic
Policy Institute.
Last week, Walmart announced that the next Wal-Mart dividend will
be issued December 27 instead of January 2, after the Bush tax cut for
dividends expires — thereby saving the Walmart family as much as $180
million. (According to the online weekly “Too Much,” this $180 million
would be enough to give 72,000 Wal-Mart workers now making $8 an
hour a 20 percent annual pay hike. That hike would still leave those
workers making under the poverty line for a family of three.)
America is becoming more unequal by the day. So wouldn’t it be
sensible to encourage unionization at fast-food and big-box retailers?
Yes, but here’s the problem.
The unemployment rate among people with just a high school degree
– which describes most (but not all) fast-food and big-box retail workers –
is still in the stratosphere. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts it at 12.2
percent, and that’s conservative estimate. It was 7.7 percent at the start of
2008.
High unemployment makes it much harder to organize a union
because workers are even more fearful than usual of losing their jobs.
Eight dollars an hour is better than no dollars an hour. And employers at
big-box and fast-food chains have not been reluctant to give the boot to
employees associated with attempts to organize for higher wages.
Meanwhile, only half of the people who lose their jobs qualify for
unemployment insurance these days. Retail workers in big-boxes and fastfood
chains rarely qualify because they haven’t been on the job long
enough or are there only part-time. This makes the risk of job loss even
greater.
Which brings us back to what’s happening in Washington.
Washington’s obsession with deficit reduction makes it all the more
likely these workers will face continuing high unemployment – even

higher if the nation succumbs to deficit hysteria. That’s because cutting
government spending reduces overall demand, which hits low-wage
workers hardest. They and their families are the biggest casualties of
austerity economics.
And if the spending cuts Washington is contemplating fall on lowwage
workers whose families are under the poverty line – reducing not
only the availability of unemployment insurance but also food stamps,
housing assistance, infant and child nutrition, child health care, and
Medicaid – it will be even worse. (It’s worth recalling, in this regard, that
62 percent of the cuts in the Republican budget engineered by Paul Ryan
fell on America’s poor.)
By contrast, low levels of unemployment invite wage gains and make
it easier to organize unions. The last time America’s low-wage workers got
a real raise (apart from the last hike in the minimum wage) was the late
1990s when unemployment dropped to 4 percent nationally – compelling
employers to raise wages in order to recruit and retain them, and
prompting a round of labor organizing.
That’s one reason why job growth must be the nation’s number one
priority. Not deficit reduction.
Yet neither side in the current “fiscal cliff” negotiations is talking
about America’s low-wage workers. They’re invisible in official
Washington.
Not only are they unorganized for the purpose of getting a larger
share of the profits at Walmart, McDonalds, and other giant firms, they’re
also unorganized for the purpose of being heard in our nation’s capital.
There’s no national association of low-wage workers. They don’t
contribute much to political campaigns. They have no Super-PAC. They
don’t have Washington lobbyists.
But if this nation is to reverse the scourge of widening inequality,
Washington needs to start paying attention to them. And the rest of us
should do everything we can to pressure Washington and big-box retailers
and fast-food chains to raise their pay.
“Legal Imperialism” and International Law

Legal Foundations for War Crimes, Debt Collection and Colonization
by
James Petras
By now we are familiar with imperial states using their military
power to attack, destroy and occupy independent countries. Boatloads of
important studies have documented how imperial countries have seized
and pillaged the resources of mineral-rich and agriculturally productive
countries, in consort with multi-national corporations. Financial critics
have provided abundant data on the ways in which imperial creditors have
extracted onerous rents, royalties and debt payments from indebted
countries and their taxpayers, workers, employees and productive sectors.
What has not been examined fully is the over-arching legal
architecture which informs, justifies and facilitates imperial wars, pillage
and debt collection.
The Centrality of Imperial Law
While force and violence, especially through overt and covert
military intervention, have always been an essential part of empirebuilding,
it does not operate in a legal vacuum: Judicial institutions,
rulings and legal precedents precede, accompany and follow the process of
empire building. The legality of imperial activity is based largely on the
imperial state’s judicial system and its own legal experts. Their legal
theories and opinions are always presented as over-ruling international law
as well as the laws of the countries targeted for imperial intervention.
Imperial law supersedes international law simply because imperial law is
backed by brute force; it possesses imperial/colonial air, ground and naval
armed forces to ensure the supremacy of imperial law. In contrast,
international law lacks an effective enforcement mechanism. Moreover,
international law, to the extent that it is effective, is applied only to the
weaker powers and to regimes designated by the imperial powers as
‘violators’. The very judicial processes, including the appointment of
judges and prosecutors who interpret international law, investigate
international crime and arrest, sentence and punish ‘guilty’ parties are
under to the influence of the reigning imperial powers. In other words, the
application and jurisdiction of international law is selective and subject to

constraints imposed by the configurations of imperial and national power.
International law, at best, can provide a ‘moral’ judgment, a not
insignificant basis for strengthening the political claims of countries,
regimes and people seeking redress from imperial war crimes and
economic pillage. To counter the claims and judgments pertaining to
international law, especially in the area of the Geneva protocols such as
war crimes and crimes against humanity, imperial legal experts, scholars
and judges have elaborated a legal framework to justify or exempt
imperial-state activity.
The Uses of Imperial Law
Empire-building throughout history is the result of conquest – the use
or threat of superior military force. The US global empire is no exception.
Where compliant rulers ‘invite’ or ‘submit’ to imperial domination, such
acts of treason on the part of ‘puppet’ or ‘client’ rulers usually precipitate
popular rebellions, which are then suppressed by joint imperial and
collaborator armies. They cite imperial legal doctrine to justify their
intervention to repress a subject people in revolt. While empires arose
through the direct or indirect use of unbridled force, the maintenance and
consolidation of empires requires a legal framework. Legal doctrines
precede, accompany and follow the expansion and consolidation of empire
for several reasons.
Legality is really an extension of imperial conquest by other means.
A state of constant warfare raises the cost of imperial maintenance. Force,
especially in imperial democracies undermines the sense of civic virtue,
which the rulers and citizens claim to uphold. Maintaining ‘law and order’
in the conquered nations requires a legal system and doctrine to uphold
imperial rule, giving the facade of legitimacy to the outside world,
attracting collaborator classes and individuals and providing the basis for
the recruitment of local military, judicial and police officials.
Imperial legal pronouncements, whether issued directly by executive,
judicial, military or administrative bodies, are deemed the ‘supreme law of
the universe’, superior to international law and protocols fashioned by
non-imperial authorities and legal experts. This does not imply that
imperial rulers totally discard international law: they just apply it

selectively to their adversaries, especially against independent nations and
rulers, in order to justify imperial intervention and aggression – Hence the
‘legal bases’ for dismantling Yugoslavia or invading Iraq and assassinating
its rulers.
Legal rulings are issued by the imperial judiciary to force states to
comply with the economic demands of multi-national corporations, banks,
creditors and speculators, even after the local or national courts have ruled
such claims unlawful. Imperial law protects and provides sanctuary and
financial protection to convicted former collaborator-rulers charged with
human rights crimes, pillage of public treasury and destruction of
democratic institutions. Imperial judicial and administrative agencies
selectively investigate, prosecute and levy severe fines and even jail
sentences on banks, individuals and financial institutions of their
competitor imperial countries, thereby strengthening the economic
position of their own ‘national’ imperial firms.
Judicial officials are not only ‘instruments’ of closely related imperial
political and economic powers; they also instrumentalize and, in some
cases, override officials from other branches of their own imperial
government and economic sectors. Judges, with ties to particular financial
sectors, may rule in favor of one group of creditors thereby prejudicing
others. In a recent ruling, a New York judge ruled in favor of the demands
by minority creditors that the Argentine government make ‘full payment’
on long-standing national debt in, prejudicing already agreed upon
payments to the majority of creditors who had negotiated an earlier debtrestructuring
arrangement.
Imperial legal doctrine has played a central role in justifying and
providing a basis for the exercise of international terrorism. Executives,
such as US Presidents Bush and Obama, have been provided with the legal
power to undertake cross-national ‘targeted’ assassinations of opponents
using predator drones and ordering military intervention, in clear violation
of international law and national sovereignty. Imperial law, above all else,
‘legalizes’ aggression and economic pillage and undermines the laws of
targeted countries, creating lawlessness and chaos among its victims. Read
More

Environment:
Fracking:
Nuclear Fallout: Ongoing Tragedy/Disaster In Japan:
EnergyNews:
10:42 AM EST on December 3rd, 2012 | Leave a comment
AP: Over 100,000 gallons of oil mix removed from giant Louisiana
sinkhole — “Officials don’t yet know how big it will get”
08:44 AM EST on December 3rd, 2012 | 7 comments
UN official back from Fukushima exposes nuclear cover-up: “Large
number of different cancers and other diseases” after Chernobyl are
not reported — Tells Japan to pay attention (AUDIO)
07:53 AM EST on December 3rd, 2012 | 12 comments
TV: Gov’t seeking to empty Fukushima No. 4 fuel pool much sooner
than planned — Worries it could become ‘unsafe’ (VIDEO)
04:32 AM EST on December 3rd, 2012 | 5 comments
Government’s hospital “will not report the truth about the conditions
of our health” -Fukushima restaurant owner
10:14 PM EST on December 2nd, 2012 | 18 comments
School Official in Fukushima: Almost every night parents come to
our temple crying about kid’s health problems — My own children
are sick and have diseases
03:13 PM EST on December 2nd, 2012 | 21 comments

Gundersen: Fukushima contamination will be “redeposited onto the
surface for 300 years” — “This is not a problem that goes
away” (VIDEO)
02:11 PM EST on December 2nd, 2012 | 20 comments
Watch: Local resident filmed how close giant Louisiana sinkhole is to
SR 70 — “It is much bigger, and closer to the highway now” (VIDEO)
11:20 AM EST on December 2nd, 2012 | Leave a comment
NYTimes on New 3/11 Footage: Flames sighted deep within
Fukushima Unit 4 — Second fire in 24 hours
10:09 AM EST on December 2nd, 2012 | Leave a comment
Top 33 Headlines from the NRC’s Fukushima FOIA releases
08:36 AM EST on December 2nd, 2012 | One comment
TV: Fukushima ‘hotspots’ move to new areas, but still remain where
they were — “With rain or wind, radioactive materials come always
into city” (VIDEO)
08:57 PM EST on December 1st, 2012 | 19 comments
NBC: Animals quietly falling sick and dying near oil & gas drilling —
Cows tails dropping off (PHOTO)
05:50 PM EST on December 1st, 2012 | 16 comments
State: “Potential danger to human life” due to gas pressures in area of
giant sinkhole — Emergency directive issued on weekend — Texas
Brine fined $100,000
12:54 PM EST on December 1st, 2012 | 54 comments
Man Films Area Near Giant Sinkhole: Homeland Security &
Emergency Preparedness on scene — “You can see some bubbling”
from road (VIDEO)

Ongoing Gulf of Mexico Oil Disaster:
BP's Dispersant Allowed Oil to Penetrate Beaches More Deeply
By
Julia Whitty
A worker cleans up oily waste on Elmer's Island, Louisiana, on May 21, 2010: Photo by
Petty Officer 3rd Class Patrick Kelley, US Coast Guard, via Flickr
In an attempt to deal with the 206 million gallons of light crude oil
erupting from the Deepwater Horizon blowout in 2010, BP unleashed
about 2.6 million gallons of Corexit dispersants (Corexit 9500A and
Corexit EC9527) in surface waters and at the wellhead on the sea floor.
From the beginning the wisdom of that decision was questioned. I wrote
extensively about those concerns in "BP's Deep Secrets [2]."
In the short term the dispersed oil made BP's catastrophe look like
less of a catastrophe since less oil made it to shore. But what about the
long term?
In a new paper in PLOS ONE [3], researchers took a closer look.
They examined the effects of oil dispersed mechanically (sonication), oil
dispersed by Corexit 9500A, and just plain seawater (the control). They
used laboratory-column experiments to simulate the movement of
dispersed and nondispersed oil through sandy beach sediments.

PLOS ONE doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0050549.g001
Clean seawater, crude oil dispersed by sonication, or crude oil dispersed by
Corexit and sonication were flushed through the sand columns by gravity.
The effluent of the columns was collected as a time series in four vials each.
Their findings: Corexit 9500A allows crude oil components to
penetrate faster and deeper into permeable saturated sands where the
absence of oxygen may slow degradation and extend the lifespan of
potentially harmful polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), a.k.a.
organic pollutants—a.k.a. persistently abominable hork—in the marine
environment.
"The oil concentrations used in our experiments are at the lower end
of those reported for coastal waters after the Deepwater Horizon accident,
and the Gulf of Mexico beaches were flooded with consecutive surges of
oil."
Furthermore, the authors warn, dispersants used in nearshore oil
spills might penetrate deeply enough into saturated sands to threaten
groundwater supplies. (Did anyone look at this in the BP settlement?)
How does dispersant change oil's behavior in a beach? The authors
write:
The causes of the reduced PAH retention after dispersant application
has several reasons: 1) the dispersant transforms the oil containing the
PAHs into small micelles that can penetrate through the interstitial space
of the sand. 2) the coating of the oil particles produced by the dispersant
reduces the sorption to the sand grains, 3) saline conditions enhance the

adsorption of dispersant to sand surfaces, thereby reducing the sorption of
oil to the grains.
In other words, repeated flushing by waves washing up a
contaminated beach may pump PAHs deep into the sediment when
dispersant is present. Natural dispersants—those produced by oildegrading
bacteria—may support this effect when oil is present in the sand
for longer time periods.
Furthermore the continuous flushing by waves on an oilcontaminated
beach may result in the release of PAHs from the sand back
to the water. And after PAHs are released from the sediment, UV light can
increase their degradation but also increase their toxicity to marine life by
up to eightfold.
As for what effects those long-lived PAHs have released back into the
water, the authors cite recent research findings:
• Increased mortality in planktonic copepods exposed to
dispersants with stronger effects on small-sized species.
• In early life stages of Atlantic herring dispersed oil dramatically
impaired fertilization success.
• Grey mullet exposed to chemically dispersed oil showed both a
higher bioconcentration of PAHs and a higher mortality than fish
exposed to either the water-soluble fraction of oil or the mechanically
dispersed oil.
Deepwater Horizon Response via Flickr

Workers from the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries and the US Fish and
Wildlife Service prepare to net an oiled pelican in Barataria Bay, June 5, 2010:
Oil Spill Attorney Stuart Smith’s Blog:
Scientists: Efforts to disperse the BP spill made it much,
much more toxic
One of the least understood aspects of the environmental devastation
caused by the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion and spill in 2010 is the
role of the chemical dispersant — known by its brand name Corexit —
that was deployed by BP and its contractors, with the enthusiastic support
of federal regulators, in the weeks that oil flowed freely into the Gulf of
Mexico.
Spraying Corexit made some of the oil disappear from sight — which
we all know was the No. 1 priority in the spring of 2010 for the imageconscious
BP — but at a tremendous cost to the marine environment.
From Day One, our experts told us that the widespread use of Corexit had
unknown — but quite possibly severe — consequences for the food chain
in the Gulf of Mexico.
On May 11, 2010, I noted in a statement that the “Corexit 9500″
dispersant was designed to breakup the slick at the water’s surface,
sending the oil into the water column, and from there, to the bottom of the
seabed where bottom residing organisms such as shrimp, crabs and oysters
reside. My concern with the usage of such dispersants at that time
was that, aside from being themselves toxic, they do little more than hide
the problem. Many leading experts, doctors and environmentalists had
discredited the use of Corexit as a tool for oil spill clean up. As another
lawyer observed at that time:
“Toxicity of the petroleum products is increased when it is
dissolved into the water by dispersants,” said Co-Counsel
Robert McKee, Gulf Oil Disaster Recovery Group. “In essence,
this activity is making aquatic organisms more exposed to
chemicals’ harm. The attempt to make these floating tars and

oils disappear from view by the use of dispersants increases the
likelihood of poisonous effects in these oil polluted waters.”
Also, Marco Kaltofen, an outstanding environmentalist and civil
engineer with whom I’ve worked closely on the Deepwater Horizon spill
as well as other issues, produced an outstanding video in 2010 showing
the toxicity of Corexit. You can watch it here.
In other words, the dangerous impact of Corexit was well known.
In the end, it appears that a whopping 2 million gallons of the dispersant
were sprayed in the Gulf; in other words, authorities responded to a
horrendous oil spill by dumping a hazardous chemical – an appalling
situation. The question lingered: Just how damaging was its widespread
use in 2010?
Now, scientists from Georgia Tech and from Mexico are here to
report that Corexit was even more poisonous than we imagined:
A new study by researchers at the Georgia Institute of
Technology and the Universidad Autonoma de Aguascalientes in
Mexico finds that mixing oil with dispersant made the BP oil
spill worse. Georgia Tech reports that the two million gallons of
dispersant used to clean up the 4.9 million barrels of oil that
spilled into the Gulf of Mexico during the 2010 Deep Water
Horizon spill made the oil 52 times more toxic.
The researchers discovered that mixing the dispersant with
oil raised the toxicity of the mixture up to 52-fold over the oil
alone. They found that the mixture’s impacts increased the death
rate of rotifers, a microscopic grazing animal at the base of the
Gulf’s food web.
Combining oil from the BP oil spill and Corexit, which is
the dispersant mandated by the Environmental Protection
Agency for clean up, the researchers measured the toxicity of
oil, dispersant, and mixtures on five strains of rotifers. Rotifers
are often used by ecotoxicologists to calculate toxicity in marine
waters because of their fast response time, ease of use in tests
and sensitivity to toxicants.

Not only did the oil-dispersant mixture increase mortality
in adult rotifers, as little as 2.6 percent of the mixture decreased
rotifer egg hatching by 50 percent. These eggs hatch into rotifers
each spring, reproduce in the water column and provide food for
baby fish, shrimp and crabs.
And this is not the only new bad news on the Corexit front. A second
study has found that while Corexit may have “dispersed” the oil from the
surface, it also allowed oil to penetrate Gulf beaches more deeply:
Their findings: Corexit 9500A allows crude oil components
to penetrate faster and deeper into permeable saturated sands
where the absence of oxygen may slow degradation and extend
the lifespan of potentially harmful polycyclic aromatic
hydrocarbons (PAHs), a.k.a. organic pollutants—a.k.a.
persistently abominable hork—in the marine environment.
Furthermore, the authors warn, dispersants used in
nearshore oil spills might penetrate deeply enough into saturated
sands to threaten groundwater supplies. (Did anyone look at this
in the BP settlement?)
Which is exactly the point I was trying to make earlier this fall when
I argued that the proposed $7.8 billion BP settlement with Gulf residents
and business owners was a rush to judgment. That’s because there is so
much more to learn about the 2010 spill and the long-term calamitous
effect that it continues to have on the region and will likely have for years
to come.
This is not some abstract academic debate: Every day, those of us
who live on the Gulf Coast are very aware of the massive and highly toxic
mistake that was made by deploying Corexit — the cleanup workers who
were sickened by exposure, the dead zones that were once thriving oyster
beds and fisheries. While there’s some relief in the large criminal and
expected civil penalties assessed against BP right now, we should
remember what a colossal mistake was made in the decision to massively
deploy Corexit, and how all that damage is still not yet known.
To read the May 11, 2010, warning about Corexit from me and from
other scientists and environmental attorneys, please read: http://

www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/gulf-oil-spill-dispersants-havepotential-to-cause-more-harm-than-good-93424899.html
To watch a video from civil engineer Marco Kaltofen showing the
toxicity of Corexit, go to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?
feature=player_embedded&v=BdAtvB9OtRs
To read more about the new research on Corexit toxicity from
scientists in Georgia and Mexico, please read: http://
www.sciencerecorder.com/news/study-mixing-oil-with-dispersant-madethe-bp-oil-spill-worse/
To read a Mother Jones report on the second study on Corexit’s
impact on Gulf beaches, check out; http://www.motherjones.com/bluemarble/2012/11/bps-dispersant-makes-oil-immortal
Environmental Must-Reads – December 3, 2012
DEC: no fracking decision till health study is done
The Cuomo Administration says it won’t be ruling on whether to
allow hydro fracking in New York until an on going health review is
finished.
Science Museums Celebrate the Wonders of…Fracking?!
If oil companies designed the lessons contained in middle school
science textbooks, it would be a national scandal. But helping to design
scientific displays in natural history museums that host countless school
field trips each year? Apparently, that’s just fine.
Fracking in Focus:
Pittsburgh Filmmaker Chronicles Impact of Shale Gas Revolution
Sound-bite journalism dominates the broadcast news media’s
coverage of top environmental issues. The heated debate on the use of
hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for the extraction of natural gas from
shale gas plays is no exception.
Fracking chemical used in US linked to organ damage
An unidentified chemical used in fracking in the United States has
triggered concern after it emerged it can cause kidney and liver damage.
Coughing, Headaches, Fatigue: Is Fracking to Blame?

As hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” spreads throughout the Buckeye
State, so do questions about its affects on health. The process involves
using water and sand mixed with chemicals to fracture shale formations
and unlock reservoirs of oil and gas.
Gardeners: The pipeline will put our crops in jeopardy
It’s full steam ahead for plans to run a controversial natural gas
pipeline through Floyd Bennett Field — a move members of the Floyd
Bennett Gardeners Association say will kill their crops.
Archaeological concerns slow natural gas pipeline
Already delayed by slow permit approval, the proposed Tennessee
Gas pipeline from West Milford to Mahwah is now being held up by
federal officials because it would either run through or near historic areas,
including Native American burial grounds.
2 injured Filipino oil workers off critical list – embassy
Two of the Filipino oil workers seriously injured in an oil platform
fire off Louisiana’s coast made it out of the critical list, while a third
Filipino remained in good condition, the Philippine Embassy in
Washington D.C. said Monday.
PHL govt ready to provide legal help to Pinoys in US oil rig fire
Malacañang on Sunday reassured the Filipino workers involved in an
oil rig blast and fire off the Gulf of Mexico that the government is ready to
provide them legal assistance if they are in need of it.
Enbridge acknowledges fierce opposition to new pipeline
Executives of Enbridge Inc., one of the largest pipeline companies in
the world, say their construction project across Lower Michigan has
brought some of the toughest homeowner opposition they’ve ever
encountered.
Exxon Mobil Baton Rouge Refinery Pipeline Leak Releases Benzene
About 10 pounds of benzene was released by a pipeline leak at Exxon
Mobil Corp. (XOM)’s Baton Rouge Refinery in Baton Rouge, Louisiana,
according to a report made to the National Response Center.
Monster Sinkholes An Indication That Major Earth Changes Are
Coming Along The New Madrid Fault?

Michael Snyder: The most powerful earthquakes in the history of the
United States happened along the New Madrid Fault in 1811 and 1812.
Those earthquakes were reportedly felt more than 1,000 miles away.
Scientists assure us that one day we will once again see very powerful
earthquakes along the New Madrid fault. It is only a question of when it
will happen.
Mobile to Host Gulf Coast Ecosystem Restoration Council’s Meeting
The Gulf Coast Ecosystem Restoration Council announced that it will
hold its first public meeting on December 11, 2012 in Mobile, Alabama.
For these spill victims, legalese is just one language barrier
Even the lawyers and accountants poring through the 1,200-page
Gulf oil spill settlement sometimes grumble about deciphering the
intentions in its legal language, and Vietnamese immigrant crabber Dung
Tran faces an even more daunting language barrier.
Nigeria: Mobil Spends N70 Million to Clean Oil Spill
Mobil Producing Nigeria (MPN) says it has spent more than N70
million to clean up the recent oil spill from its facilities in Ibeno, Akwa Ibom.
UN expert:Japan’s view on Fukushima too optimistic
The United Nations’ special rapporteur on the right to health, Anand
Grover, says the Japanese government should consult more with local
communities to assess the real impact of the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
The winds of Fukushima
Over 18 months ago, the reactors at Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear
power station went into meltdown. Large amounts of radioactive material
were released. And the world seems to have forgotten about it, or at least
pretend that it’s all finished.
Black Liberation/Civil Rights:
The Shocking Details of a Mississippi School-to-Prison Pipeline
http://colorlines.com/archives/2012/11/
school_prison_pipeline_meridian.html
by

Julianne Hing
Color Lines
Cedrico Green can’t exactly remember how many times he went back
and forth to juvenile. When asked to venture a guess he says, “Maybe 30.”
He was put on probation by a youth court judge for getting into a fight
when he was in eighth grade. Thereafter, any of Green’s school-based
infractions, from being a few minutes late for class to breaking the school
dress code by wearing the wrong color socks, counted as violations of his
probation and led to his immediate suspension and incarceration in the
local juvenile detention center.
But Green wasn’t alone. A bracing Department of Justice lawsuit
filed last month against Meridian, Miss., where Green lives and is set to
graduate from high school this coming year, argues that the city’s juvenile
justice system has operated a school to prison pipeline that shoves students
out of school and into the criminal justice system, and violates young
people’s due process rights along the way.
In Meridian, when schools want to discipline children, they do much
more than just send them to the principal’s office. They call the police,
who show up to arrest children who are as young as 10 years old. Arrests,
the Department of Justice says, happen automatically, regardless of
whether the police officer knows exactly what kind of offense the child
has committed or whether that offense is even worthy of an arrest. The
police department’s policy is to arrest all children referred to the agency.
Once those children are in the juvenile justice system, they are denied
basic constitutional rights. They are handcuffed and incarcerated for days

without any hearing and subsequently warehoused without understanding
their alleged probation violations.
“[D]efendants engage in a pattern or practice of unlawful conduct
through which they routinely and systematically arrest and incarcerate
children, including for minor school rule infractions, without even the
most basic procedural safeguards, and in violation of these children’s
constitutional rights,” the DOJ’s 37-page complaint reads. Meridian’s
years of systemic abuse punish youth “so arbitrarily and severely as to
shock the conscience,” the complaint reads.
The federal lawsuit casts a wide net in indicting the systems that
worked to deny Meridian children their constitutional rights. It names as
defendants the state of Mississippi; the city of Meridian; Lauderdale
County, which runs the Lauderdale County Youth Court; and the local
Defendant Youth Court Judges Frank Coleman and Veldore Young for
violating Meridian students’ rights up and down the chain.
The DOJ’s complaint also charges that in the course of its eightmonth
investigation the city blocked the inquiry by refusing to hand over
youth court records. Attorneys for city officials deny that claim, and say
they are bound by law to protect the confidentiality of youth who’ve been
through the system and so cannot share their records with the federal
government.
‘Judge, Jury and Executioner’
The DOJ’s lawsuit, despite its bombshell revelations for the rest of
the country, has been a long time coming. Groups like the Southern
Poverty Law Center and the NAACP have been concerned about Meridian
for years.
The SPLC’s inquiry into Meridian began in 2008, when attorneys
started hearing reports of “horrific abuse” of youth housed in juvenile
detention centers, said Jody Owens, managing attorney of the SPLC’s
juvenile justice initiative in Mississippi. Advocates learned that 67 percent
of youth in detention centers arrived there from the Meridian school
system, Owens said. In between school and detention, students were
denied access to counsel and due process, and many were never made

aware of what they were even being arrested for. “The administrators were
the judge, jury and executioner,” Owens said.
This practice has also appeared to target black students. Meridian, a
city of 40,000 people, is 61 percent African-American. But over a fiveyear
period, Owens said, “There was never once a white kid that was
expelled or suspended for the same offense that kids of color were
suspended for.”
Among the infractions that landed Green, who is black, in juvenile
detention were talking back to a teacher, wearing long socks and coming
to school without wearing a belt. He was behind bars for stretches of time
as long as two weeks, and the real rub, his mother Gloria said, is that
weekends didn’t count as days served. A 10-day suspension stretched to 14
actual days; time for Meridian juvenile justice officials apparently stopped
on weekends. All that back and forth out of school and in juvenile took a
real toll on Green’s education, and he was held back from the eighth
grade.
“It was mind-boggling,” Gloria Green said. “My son loved school
and to be kicked out as much as he was, one year he just couldn’t catch
up.”
“We did everything we know to do. I went over to the school and got
make-up work, and he still failed two subjects and at that point I didn’t
know which way what my child was going to go.”
“We talk about the school to prison pipeline and it’s often an abstract
thing,” said Shakti Belway, an attorney who worked closely with families
on the Meridian case for the Southern Poverty Law Center. “But here it is
literally happening over ridiculous, minor charges.” Indeed, children as
young as elementary school students have been taken directly from school
and forced to serve school suspensions inside a jail cell. In its complaint,
the DOJ charged the city’s police department with operating a de facto
“taxi service” shuttling students away from school and into youth jails.
Studying While Black
But Meridian doesn’t have a monopoly on this kind of injustice.
Every which way a person can look—from elementary to high school, at a
national level and on down to the most local—black students are far more

likely to be punished and to be punished more harshly than all other
students. Read More
Labor:
Economy:
The Coming Crash of America
Our Collapsing Economy and Currency
by
Paul Craig Roberts
Paul Craig Roberts is a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and
Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. His latest book, Wirtschaft am
Abgrund (Economies In Collapse) has just been published.
Is the “fiscal cliff” real or just another hoax? The answer is that the
fiscal cliff is real, but it is a result, not a cause. The hoax is the way the
fiscal cliff is being used.
The fiscal cliff is the result of the inability to close the federal budget
deficit. The budget deficit cannot be closed because large numbers of US
middle class jobs and the GDP and tax base associated with them have
been moved offshore, thus reducing federal revenues. The fiscal cliff
cannot be closed because of the unfunded liabilities of eleven years of USinitiated
wars against a half dozen Muslim countries–wars that have
benefitted only the profits of the military/security complex and the
territorial ambitions of Israel. The budget deficit cannot be closed, because
economic policy is focused only on saving banks that wrongful financial
deregulation allowed to speculate, to merge, and to become too big to fail,
thus requiring public subsidies that vastly dwarf the totality of US welfare
spending.
The hoax is the propaganda that the fiscal cliff can be avoided by
reneging on promised Social Security and Medicare benefits that people
have paid for with the payroll tax and by cutting back all aspects of the
social safety net from food stamps to unemployment benefits to Medicaid,
to housing subsidies. The right-wing has been trying to get rid of the

social safety net ever since Franklin D. Roosevelt constructed it, out of
fear or compassion or both, during the Great Depression.
Washington’s response to the fiscal cliff is austerity: spending cuts
and tax increases.
The Republicans say they will vote for the Democrats’ tax increases
if the Democrats vote for the Republican’s assault on the social safety
net. What bipartisan compromise means is a double-barreled dose of
austerity.
Ever since John Maynard Keynes, economists have understood that
tax increases and spending cuts suppress, not stimulate, economic activity.
This is especially the case in an economy such as the American one, which
is driven by consumer spending. When spending declines, so does the
economy. When the economy declines, the budget deficit rises.
This is especially the case when an economy is weak and already in
decline. A declining economy means less sales, less employment, less tax
revenues. This works
against the effort to close the federal budget deficit with austerity
measures. Instead of strengthening the economy, the austerity measures
weaken it further. To cut unemployment benefits and food stamps when
unemployment is high or rising would be to provoke social and political
instability.
Some economists, such as Robert Barro at Harvard University, claim
that stimulative measures, the opposite of austerity, don’t work, because
consumers anticipate the higher taxes that will be needed to cover the
budget deficit and, therefore, reduce their spending and increase their
saving in order to be able to pay the anticipated higher taxes.
In other words, the Keynesian effort to stimulate spending causes
consumers to reduce their spending. I don’t know of any empirical
evidence for this claim.
Regardless, the situation on the ground at the present time is that for
the majority of people, incomes are stretched to the limit and beyond.
Many cannot pay their bills, their mortgages, their car payments, their
student loans. They are drowning in debt, and there is nothing that they
can cut back in order to save money with which to pay higher taxes.

Many commentators are complaining that Congress will refuse to
face the difficult issues and kick the can down the road, leaving the fiscal
cliff looming. This would probably be the best outcome. As the fiscal cliff
is a result, not a cause, to focus on the fiscal cliff is to focus on the
symptoms rather than the disease.
The US economy has two serious diseases, and neither one is too
much welfare spending. Read More
Crony Capitalism Lives On: New York Times’ Event Headlines
Its Writers With Wall Street Honchos
By
Pam Martens
In what can only be described as an unseemly marriage of
the plundering herd on Wall Street and the so-called paper of record
assigned with the arduous task of delivering unbiased investigative reports
to the public, the New York Times has made the deeply unwise decision to
hold “The Inaugural DealBook Conference.”
The all-day conference to be held at the New York Times Center on
December 12, headlines Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan
Chase – a company under serious Federal investigation on multiple fronts
— and Lloyd Blankfein, Chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs, a
company which faces multiple lawsuits alleging investors were defrauded
and which paid $550 million two years ago to settle SEC charges that it
knowingly harmed its own clients.
The Times’ business writer, Andrew Ross Sorkin, appears to be the
official host of the conference, delivering the opening welcome alongside
Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., Chairman of the company and Publisher of the
paper. Sorkin will also interview Jamie Dimon on stage and deliver the
closing remarks at the conference. Read More
World:
Egyptian Revolution, Act 2
by
Umm Kulthum (in Cairo)

We received this report from Cairo, written last week just after the
big November 27 th demonstration. While it was being written, several
thousands of demonstrators were still in Tahrir Square after the big
demonstration of 27 th . Hundreds of thousands had gathered in this square,
the symbol of the Egyptian Revolution, shouting “Revolution”, “Oust the
murshid government” (murshid is the supreme leader of the Muslim
Brotherhood).
A demonstrator in the square told us: “Shoes are ready to fly for the
president”. This was a reference to the Middle Eastern custom of taking
off one's shoes and throwing them to display disapproval and disdain, in
the same manner that protestors threw shoes when Mubarak announced he
would not resign. The banners welcoming us in the square read: “The
Muslim Brotherhood are traitors”, “Entry forbidden to Ikhawan” (Arabic
for “Brothers”) and “The president is pushing the people towards a general
strike”.
Rallies numbering tens of thousands of people started out from every
neighbourhood of Cairo to reach the square. The march from the workingclass
area of Shubra was particularly large. Almost all sectors of society
got involved: there were marches of the lawyers' trade union, and the
artists'. Even the judiciary has announced mass resignations to protest
against the “tyranny” – this is how they define the Morsi government –
which reveals the widespread malaise existing in society.
The protest
The protest erupted seven days ago against the decree presented by
Morsi (November 22nd) by which the Egyptian president has concentrated
wide powers in his hands. The justification put forward is the “defence of
the revolution”. The opposite, of course, is true. But it is the usual excuse
which is often used in this country to sanction an unpopular policy. The
protests have included many clashes between the demonstrators (three
dead so far) and the police who have used the same tear gas used by the
SCAF, as a reminder of the real scent of this “democracy”.
The use of teargas was so heavy as to make it impossible to breathe
even inside the Sadat metro station, the one in Midan Tahrir. Last night the
clashes were particularly violent. The opposition's reaction to the decree

was immediate, both by political parties (El Baradei and Sabbahi have
both declared that they want to build a national front against the decree)
and revolutionary movements that jointly called for tomorrow (November
30th) a new demonstration (under the slogan of “Repeal or resign”) with
the aim of not leaving the square until the goal is reached, i.e. the decree is
revoked.
Tension could build up even more if you take into account that the
Muslim Brotherhood has called for a rally precisely in Tahrir Square (with
the clear aim of provoking and triggering riots), in defence of the president
– whom, in some slogans, the protestors call “Hosni Morsi”, to underline
the continuum with the previous Egyptian president. Tonight it was
announced that the Muslim Brotherhood is not going to rally in Tahrir, a
clear sign that the MB movement feels weak, or at least they're not sure
they can win the unavoidable battle if they march on Tahrir.
There have been demonstrations not only in Cairo, but throughout
Egypt. The most important ones have been in Alexandria, Suez, Port Saiz,
Damietta. In many cities regarded as strongholds of the Islamic
movement, such as Alexandria and Port Said, the Brotherhood's offices
were set on fire and the pro-Morsi marches have seen little participation.
The Egyptian president has invited the citizens to stay united to save
Egypt – a kind of unity that only serves the privileges of those in power.
Continuity or discontinuity?
The Muslim Brotherhood and their Freedom and Justice party have
presented themselves as representatives of the Revolution but, as we have
explained in many articles, they represent nothing but the interests of a
group within the Egyptian bourgeoisie which was virtually excluded from
power during the old regime.
Egypt is a country on the brink of economic collapse, with an
economy on its knees with soaring poverty and illiteracy rates. To give an
idea of the situation, the average income of an Egyptian household is
25,000 Egyptian pounds per year (but, for example, a kilo of meat costs
over 40 Egyptian pounds) and one child in four lives below the poverty
line (source: Egyptindipendent).

And what is the government doing? Absolutely nothing! The
members of the party in power have repeatedly stated that the laissez faire
economic policies of Mubarak were perfectly in line with the economic
policies of the Muslim Brotherhood. The people feel that the dream of
social justice that came with the Revolution has been betrayed. Many of
those who voted for the MB in the last elections – because they naively
believed this would change their living conditions – are now having to
come to terms with reality. The truth is that the Muslim Brotherhood
cannot and does not want to modify the conditions of the poorer layers of
society.
On a side note, it was in the recent news that the Constituent
Assembly has maintained the privileges granted to the military apparatus
under the old regime. The government will not be able to change the
budget reserved for the military and it will still be possible to try a civilian
in a military court. There is a tight connection between the two sectors, the
old and new apparatuses.
Meanwhile, the strikes continue. A few days ago, there was a strike of
the tube workers. The strike of the doctors was militant. It started on
October 1st and carried on for several days with a high rate of
participation (in the city of Mansoura there was 93% participation). The
medical staff was asking for an increase of state expenditure on healthcare
to 15% of GDP (today it's only 5%), wage increases, and better safety in
hospitals and medical centres. The workers have challenged the leadership
given by the trade union controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood. This trade
union boycotted the strike and experienced a loss of 15,000 members
among the medical staff. These are just two examples of countless
industrial actions and workers' protests taking place in this period,
showing the current trend of working class militancy.
Whither the Revolution?
Together with the courage and determination of the protestors there
are come some questions in the movement that have prevented, at least so
far, the development of its true potential. For instance, Sabbahi and El
Baradei have extended their front against the decree to Amr Moussa,

Mubarak's former Minister of Domestic Affairs, defining him “least
worse” than many others in the old Establishment! Read More
Health, Education, Science and Welfare:
Daily News Digest December 3, 2012
Quotes of the Day:
. . . Most of us really would like to prevent breast and
other cancers, but it won’t happen without getting effective
regulation of cancer-causing chemicals. The President’s
Cancer Panel (appointed by President George W. Bush), in a
2010 report concluded that “the true burden of
environmentally induced cancer has been grossly
underestimated” and specifically called for reform of our
federal toxic chemical regulations (called the Toxic
Substances Control Act, TSCA) which the Cancer Panel
called “the most egregious example of ineffective regulation
of chemical contaminants.”. . . — Jennifer Sass, We Won't
Prevent Cancer Until We Prevent Exposure to Cancer-
Causing Chemicals
Image of the Day:

Students are escorted to a waiting bus as they leave Miramonte Elementary school
after classes Tuesday, Jan. 31, 2012 in Los Angeles. Veteran Miramonte Elementary
school teacher Mark Berndt, 61, was arrested Monday, Jan. 30, on charges of lewd
conduct with 23 children after a film processor gave police photos showing
blindfolded children with their mouths taped and cockroaches on their faces. Berndt
remained jailed Tuesday on $2.3 million bail. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)
LAUSD 'jails' fill with teachers as misconduct complaints rise
Videos of the Day:
Blaming the victims
The Army Corps of Engineers caught in (another) lie
End Wall Street’s Wars!
Occupy Wall Street!
Occupy Wall Street is the Only Organization
That Identifies The Enemy —
The 1% That Own and Control The Wealth!
1960s The Realist — One Nation Under God/1%
(Unlike The Trade Union Misleaders
Nor The Misleaders Of The Oppressed
Who Strive To Be In ‘Partnership’ With The 1%)

1960s The Realist — One Nation Under God/1%
(Unlike The Trade Union Misleaders
Nor The Misleaders Of The Oppressed
Who Strive To Be In ‘Partnership’ With The 1%)
Occupy Wall Street — ‘We Are The 99%’
The resistance continues at Liberty Square:
U.S.:
Christian Science Monitor:
Hearing for Bradley Manning focuses on harsh prison treatment
At a pre-trial hearing, defense lawyers for Private Bradley Manning
focused on the treatment he received while held in a Virginia brig,
saying the case should be dismissed. Manning is accused of leaking
massive amounts of material to WikiLeaks.
By
Medina Roshan,
Reuters / December 2, 2012

Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, (c.), steps out of a security vehicle as he is escorted into a
courthouse in Fort Meade, Md., for a pretrial hearing Nov. 28. Manning is charged with
aiding the enemy by causing hundreds of thousands of classified documents to be
published on the secret-sharing website WikiLeaks. Patrick Semansky/AP/File
A pre-trial hearing for U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning, who is
accused of masterminding a massive leak of classified material to
the WikiLeaks website, focused on Saturday on a 2011 incident when he
broke down and cried in a military brig.
The hearing is to determine whether Manning should face a courtmartial
on suspicion of leaking thousands of classified documents,
including military reports and diplomatic cables.
Manning's lawyers have sought to have the case against him
dismissed, arguing that his treatment after arriving at the Marine Corps
brig in Quantico, Virginia, in July 2010 was unduly harsh.
Related: Extradition fight: Who is Julian Assange, why is Sweden
seeking him?
Saturday's proceedings, on the fifth day of the hearing, focused on the
events of Jan. 18, 2011, when Manning broke down and began crying after
falling while guards were removing his shackles in an exercise room.
Defense attorneys allege that Manning became especially distraught
that day because guards were bullying him. Manning himself testified
earlier that his guards seemed angry on the morning the incident occurred,
making him nervous.
One of Manning's guards at the time, former Marine Corps Lance
Corporal Jonathan Cline, acknowledged in his testimony that military

personnel at Quantico had been irritated by a pro-Manning protest a day
before the incident in the exercise room. The protest had snarled traffic
around Quantico.
"They were annoyed by it," Cline said. "It would kind of close down
parts of the base and it would kind of hinder them or interrupt the way
they would travel to get home or to do other things."
Manning faces up to life in prison if convicted of charges he played a
role in the leaking of secrets by WikiLeaks, which stunned governments
around the world by publishing intelligence documents and diplomatic
cables, mostly in 2010.
Prosecutors have alleged that Manning, without authorization while
on intelligence duty, disclosed hundreds of thousands of U.S. diplomatic
cables, military reports and video of a military helicopter attack in Iraq in
which two Reuters journalists were killed.
WikiLeaks has never confirmed Manning was the source of any
documents it released.
Manning's lawyers are working with the court on the language of a
proposed plea involving less serious charges. A prison term of at least 16
years is under discussion, one of his attorneys said, but until a plea is
formally entered and accepted, the length of any prison term is uncertain.
Related: Extradition fight: Who is Julian Assange, why is Sweden
seeking him?
Related stories
1. Extradition fight: Who is Julian Assange, why is Sweden
seeking him?
2. Bradley Manning to testify again Friday over 'harsh'
conditions in jail
3. Wikileaks GI Bradley Manning to argue harsh detention
merits release
Environment:

Jennifer Sass’s Blog
We Won't Prevent Cancer Until We Prevent Exposure to Cancer-
Causing Chemicals
Posted November 30, 2012 by Jennifer Sass in Health and the
Environment
Tags: ACC, chemical, flame, flameretardants, SafeChemicalsAct,
safety, toxic, toxicchemicals
A smart editorial in Nature this week (Nov 29, 2012), one of the top
scientific journals in the world, criticizes the U.S. National Breast Cancer
Coalition for setting an unrealistic and unscientific public promise to beat
breast cancer by 2020. Now, don’t get me wrong - I would do almost
anything to be able to prevent cancer, and also, learning disabilities,
reproductive impairments, and birth defects. Who wouldn't? I’ll tell you
who - the American Chemistry Council (ACC). ACC is the trade group
that represents its chemical manufacturer corporate members by defending
the toxic chemicals that cause cancer and other health harms. My
colleague Daniel Rosenberg blogged about a recent report by Common
Cause, “Toxic Spending: The Political Expenditures of the Chemical
Industry 2005-2012” that documents the hundreds of millions of dollars
the chemical industry spends on lobbying, political advertising, and
campaign contributions.
Need evidence that ACC defends cancer-causing chemicals that you
and your family are exposed to? A new scientific study also just out this
week shows that the foam in our household furniture like couches contains
detectable levels of many harmful chemicals, including ones like
chlorinated-Tris long-known to cause cancer, placed there on purpose as a
flame retardant (Stapleton et al, 2012). Chlorinated-Tris was banned from
children’s pajamas in the 1970s because of its health risks, but it is still
frequently used in the sofa’s that children sit on, and ends up in the house
dust that children touch, along with other harmful and unnecessary
chemicals made by ACC member corporations (see the blog of my

colleague, Dr. Sarah Janssen, here for more details). ACC is reported in a
news response saying that there is no evidence that the levels found in the
furniture would cause health problems, and the chemicals provide valuable
escape time from house fires although this claim was proved false by
government studies of the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
Defending cancer-causing chemicals is standard operating procedure
for the ACC, acting on behalf of some of the biggest chemical companies
in the world including Dow, DuPont, BASF and Exxon. Some of the
ACC's recent cancer-promoting activities include the following:
ACC efforts to derail the congressionally mandate Report on
Carcinogens issued biennially by the National Institutes of Health have
been reported In an op/ed by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof
titled, “The Cancer Lobby”. (NYT, October 2012)
This past spring the Chicago Tribune reported that large chemical
manufacturers including ExxonMobil, Dow Chemical and BASF Corp.
were blocking EPA from listing their toxic products as “chemicals of
concern,” going so far as to tell the White House rules office in closeddoor
meetings that “the chemicals they make are safe” despite increasing
scientific evidence to the contrary. (Chicago Tribune, Chemical industry
lobbyists keep stronger oversight plan at bay. May 2012)
And, in a five-part investigative expose titled, “Chemical companies,
Big Tobacco and the toxic products in your home”, the Chicago Tribune
pulled the curtain back on dishonest and manipulative tactics of the
chemical industry to defend the continued use of toxic flame retardants in
household furniture and other consumer products. Their tactics include
generating false scientific data and setting up phony consumer groups to
misrepresent information to the public and regulators. (Chicago Tribune
May 2012)
The ACC is currently opposing a new LEED Green Building ratings
proposal that would give builders credits for not using materials that
contain chemicals that cause cancer, birth defects and other harmful
environmental and health impacts. (See my blog here).
See more of ACC’s pro-cancer activities documented in the blog of
my colleague, Daniel Rosenberg here.

Most of us really would like to prevent breast and other cancers, but
it won’t happen without getting effective regulation of cancer-causing
chemicals. The President’s Cancer Panel (appointed by President George
W. Bush), in a 2010 report concluded that “the true burden of
environmentally induced cancer has been grossly underestimated” and
specifically called for reform of our federal toxic chemical regulations
(called the Toxic Substances Control Act, TSCA) which the Cancer Panel
called “the most egregious example of ineffective regulation of chemical
contaminants.” Other organizations calling for reform of TSCA include
the American Medical Association, the National Medical Association and
the American Nurses Association.
This reform, The Safe Chemicals Act (S.847) needs your public
support!
This week’s editorial in Nature is dead right! Empty promises by
well-meaning groups to beat cancer only serve to provide false hope and
dismiss justified concerns by consumers and environmental health experts.
We will begin to beat back cancer when we reduce, control and eliminate
the industrial chemicals that cause cancer and end up the places we live,
play, learn, and work. You can help by supporting the Safe Chemicals
Act. Tell your friends and share it on your blogs and facebook pages!
Congress needs to know that you want them to pass this important
legislation.
Scientists publish chilling report on melting ice sheets, rising sea levels
By
Don Butler

Two people look into a 17-metre-deep canyon carved over the course of
several years by turbulent water overflow from a large melt lake southwest of
Ilulissat, Greenland. Polar ice sheets are now melting three times faster than
in the 1990s, but so far that’s added 11.1 millimetres to already rising global
sea levels, a new giant scientific study says. Photograph by: Ian Joughin , AP
OTTAWA — In what’s billed as a landmark study, an international
team of experts — including a researcher from the University of Ottawa
— has produced the most accurate assessment of ice sheet losses in
Antarctica and Greenland to date.
Their findings, to be published Friday in the journal Science, confirm
that Antarctica and Greenland are both losing ice. The melting has
generated a 11.1-millimetre increase in global sea levels since 1992 —
one-fifth of the total sea level rise over that period.
Moreover, the rate of sea level rise is accelerating, rising by nearly
one millimetre per year now compared with 0.27 millimetres per year in
the 1990s, the researchers say.
Melting ice sheets now account for about one-third of the annual rise
in sea levels. Melting mountain glaciers and the thermal expansion of the
ocean account for the rest.
According to the study, the change has been particularly acute in
Greenland, where the rate of ice loss has increased almost five-fold since
the mid-1990s. Overall, Greenland and Antarctica are now losing more
than three times as much ice as they were in the 1990s, the study found.
“With this new data, we can say with confidence that the ice sheets
have been losing mass over the last 10 to 15 years,” said the University of
Ottawa’s Glenn Milne, the only Canadian participant in the study.

Since 1998, there have been at least 29 estimates of ice sheet losses
based on various satellite techniques. However, even though they were
often looking at the same satellite findings, researchers could not agree on
how to interpret the data.
The last major assessment in 2007 by the International Panel on
Climate Change was so broad it was impossible to say whether the
Antarctic ice sheets were growing or shrinking.
In the new study, 47 researchers from 26 laboratories around the
world reconciled the differences by combining measurements collected by
different types of satellites and matching time periods and survey areas.
That produced estimates believed to be more than twice as accurate as
those in the 2007 IPCC report.
The researchers estimate that between 1992 and 2011, the Greenland
ice sheet lost 2,940 gigatonnes of ice and ice sheets in Antarctica lost
1,320 gigatonnes. (One gigatonne equals one billion tonnes.)
Results in the Antarctic varied by region. The Western Antarctic and
Antarctic Peninsula both lost ice during the study period, but ice sheets in
the Eastern Antarctic — which occupies more than three-quarters of the
continent — actually grew in size during the final years of the survey.
Milne said the ice losses are significant because of their impact on
sea levels. “When you talk about millimetres per year, people don’t really
understand how much ice that actually is,” he said. About 360 gigatonnes
of ice must melt to raise worldwide sea levels by one millimetre, he said.
The geological record indicates that ice sheet losses generated annual
sea level rises in excess of 10 millimetres a year during past periods of
climatic change, the study says.
“The prospect of such changes in the future are of greatest concern.
Even the modest rises in ocean temperatures that are predicted over the
coming century could trigger significant ice sheet mass loss through
enhanced melting of ice shelves and outlet glaciers.”
According to the 2006 Stern Review on the Economics of Climate
Change, 200 million people live in coastal flood plains and assets worth
$1 trillion lie within a metre of the current sea level.

Extrapolating the study’s findings into the future is an uncertain
exercise, Milne acknowledged. “This is what we call a non-linear system.
You can’t just get a straight line today and push it into the future. Chances
are you’re going to depart from a straight line.”
Even so, he said, most experts agree that a simple extrapolation of
current trends “would give you a minimum estimate of what to expect in
100 years.” That would yield a 30-centimetre rise in sea levels, he said. “I
think we’re already committed to at least that amount.”
Predicting the upper limit is more difficult, partly because ice sheets
can change very quickly, Milne said. But if ice sheet melting continues to
accelerate, sea levels could rise by as much as a metre by the end of the
century, he said.
One caveat is that the researchers’ study covers a relatively short time
frame in climate change terms, Milne said. That means the acceleration in
Greenland could be just a blip.
But Milne said that’s unlikely, pointing out that this past summer, for
the first time in centuries, the whole surface of the Greenland ice sheet
was melting.
“All of these pieces of evidence are coming together to suggest that
what Greenland’s doing right now is quite anomalous,” he said. “Chances
are it’s not just a blip that we’ll recover from.”
Yuck: Our Seafood Is Loaded with Unspeakably Gross Pollutants
By
Jill Richardson
This article was published in partnership with GlobalPossibilities.org [3].

Photo Credit: © AJP/Shutterstock.com
When you tuck into a delicious seafood dish, is it possible that the
fish you are eating once ate human poop? Surprisingly, that might be the
case. A look at the U.S. seafood supply reveals that some of our most
popular seafood treats might come to us from unsanitary and disgusting
operations in other countries. And the federal government does not
necessarily stop it from making its way to your dinner plate, either.
These days, 91 percent of U.S. seafood is imported, and half of that is
farmed (the other half is wild-caught). Our top suppliers include China,
Thailand, Canada, Chile, Indonesia, Ecuador, and Vietnam. And the
production systems some of these countries use would make your stomach
turn.
Michael Doyle, regents professor and director at the Center for Food
Safety at the University of Georgia, described tilapia production in China,
saying, “The farmers there grow the fish in ponds that are maybe one to
two acres in size. That's their livelihood. And they use excessive
antibiotics.” China is a leading supplier of tilapia to the U.S.
“It's not just antibiotic residues on the seafood. It's also antibioticresistant
microbes that come with the fish or the shrimp,” he continued.
“A primary source of salmonella is the raw manure that is used to feed the
shrimp and fish. Many of these farmers have poultry -- maybe chickens,
maybe geese, maybe ducks. The fecal waste of these animals is fed
directly into these ponds, which is the source of nutrients for these fish and
shrimp… Poultry can harbor salmonella... that's shed in the feces. And

many of these little farms have the family outhouse just feed directly into
the ponds."
If that makes you less interested in ordering the tilapia, then you
surely don’t want any Vietnamese “catfish” either. U.S. aquaculture
produces channel catfish, but these days, American producers compete
with a flood of cheap Vietnamese fish that are marketed as catfish. Dr.
Carole Engle, chair and director of aquaculture and fisheries at the
University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, says these Vietnamese catfish are
“not only a different species, it's a different genus and a different family.
We call it pangasius.”
To understand pangasius farming in Vietnam, one must first know a
little bit about life in the Mekong Delta. Engle explains, “What's striking
when you first get there is that there's more water than there is land in the
Mekong Delta region. There are these large rivers coming through the
Mekong Delta… These waters are everything. A lot of the transportation is
on the water, and a lot of people live on the water, on houseboats. It's also
a disposal system. People live on these rivers and their restrooms are right
on these boats and they are discharging right on the rivers. And all the
human waste, and all of the waste from cities… it's all going into the river
and the river is the source of the water.”
That water is where the fish are raised. “A lot of the fish are raised in
cages directly in rivers,” says Engle, but “more and more the pangasius are
raised in what the Vietnamese call ponds.” But the ponds are nothing like
U.S. aquaculture ponds that are closed systems using clean water. The
Vietnamese ponds are regularly flushed with polluted river water.
"Upstream a factory or a houseboat might have discharged something into
it, and all that human waste is flowing through these ponds because they
are flushing it through a few times a day," Engle explains.
Another concern with imported farm-raised seafood is the use of
drugs and pesticides that are banned in the United States. A few that show
up frequently include the drugs chloramphenicol and nitrofurans, and the
fungicide malachite green. Each of these is banned in the United States for
a good reason. Chloramphenicol can cause aplastic anemia, a condition in
which the bone marrow does not produce enough new blood cells, in

humans. Doctors use it as a drug of last resort to treat typhoid fever and
meningitis. Nitrofurans and malachite green are potentially carcinogenic
in humans.
What happens when a shipment of filthy or toxic seafood shows up in
a U.S. port? Most likely, nothing. It enters the U.S. and unwitting
Americans eat it. The Food and Drug Administration has an inspection
program that is notoriously limited, underfunded and not at all transparent
– particularly when compared to its counterparts in Japan, Canada and the
EU.
In a study published last year, David Love, science director of the
Public Health and Sustainable Aquaculture Project at the Johns Hopkins
Center for a Livable Future, found that Japan physically inspected 12 to 21
percent of its seafood imports between 2004 and 2009. The European
Union goes even further, physically inspecting either 20 percent or 50
percent of all imported seafood shipments, depending on the risk of each
individual product. But the U.S. inspects less than 2 percent of seafood
imports.
Since 1997, the U.S. has relied on the Hazard Analysis and Critical
Control Points (HACCP) system (which some deride as Have a Cup of
Coffee and Pray). The system essentially turns control over to industry,
requiring it to identify and control for points in the production chain when
food might become contaminated. When done properly, it’s an excellent
system. But it’s fair to say that setting your family’s outhouse to flow into
your aquaculture pond does not constitute a good HACCP system.
Most of the time, the FDA relies on inspecting documentation to
verify that adequate HACCP programs are in place and that they are being
followed. (Because, you know, no one would ever falsify paperwork…)
For just over 1 percent of imported seafood shipments, the FDA performs
sensory examinations, checking for things like color, texture and odor.
These exams can easily discover whether the seafood is filthy or rotting,
but might not catch residues of veterinary drugs or microscopic pathogens.
Less than 1 percent of U.S. seafood import shipments actually go to a
lab for testing. Last year, a GAO report [4] titled “FDA Needs to Improve
Oversight of Imported Seafood and Better Leverage Limited Resources”

chided the FDA for inadequate oversight and even failing to meet its own
inspection goals. According to the report, “FDA”s sampling program is
limited in scope, is not effectively implemented, and does not fully use the
capabilities of FDA’s laboratories.”
For example, in 2009, the FDA tested only 0.1 percent of seafood
imports for drug residues. When they do test, they only test for 16 drugs,
whereas Canada tests for 40, some European countries test for 50, and
Japan tests for 57. In recent years, the U.S. lagged behind other nations in
starting to test for drugs. The EU began testing for chloramphenicol and
nitrofuran in 2001, but the U.S. did not do so until 2002 and 2004,
respectively. In 2003, the EU began testing for malachite green, but the
U.S. waited until 2005 to do so.
Once the FDA rejects a shipment of seafood, “they don't destroy the
product,” explains Engle. “So it can go out on the ship and come in on
another port. And because there is such a small percentage being tested,
then when they go to another port like that, it's equally unlikely to be
caught. So that's what happens. They call it port swapping.” She
concludes, “FDA is just simply not catching things, and the system is not
set up to catch it.”
The U.S. catfish industry was so fed up with the FDA’s lack of
oversight that it lobbied to have catfish inspected by the U.S. Department
of Agriculture instead. The USDA requires equivalency, says Engle,
meaning that imported catfish (including pangasius) are held to the same
standards as domestically raised catfish. “Why should we have different
standards for our US growers and... an imported product?” Engle asks.
But even though catfish oversight was transferred to the USDA in the
2008 farm bill, the change was never implemented. Engle calls it a
"political battle” between states with many seafood importers and those
with a domestic catfish industry. Vietnam joined in the fight too,
threatening to boycott U.S. beef. “Why would they be worried about it
unless they realized they couldn't meet the US safety standards right
now?" Engle points out. “The battle was not about safety for US
consumers or even safety for Vietnamese consumers. It's really a shame.”
Read More

Fracking:
Nuclear Fallout: Ongoing Tragedy/Disaster In Japan:
EnergyNews:
11:20 AM EST on December 2nd, 2012 | Leave a comment
NYTimes on New 3/11 Footage: Flames sighted deep within
Fukushima Unit 4 — Second fire in 24 hours
10:09 AM EST on December 2nd, 2012 | Leave a comment
Top 33 Headlines from the NRC’s Fukushima FOIA releases
08:36 AM EST on December 2nd, 2012 | One comment
TV: Fukushima ‘hotspots’ move to new areas, but still remain where
they were — “With rain or wind, radioactive materials come always
into city” (VIDEO)
08:57 PM EST on December 1st, 2012 | 19 comments
NBC: Animals quietly falling sick and dying near oil & gas drilling —
Cows tails dropping off (PHOTO)
05:50 PM EST on December 1st, 2012 | 16 comments
State: “Potential danger to human life” due to gas pressures in area of
giant sinkhole — Emergency directive issued on weekend — Texas
Brine fined $100,000
12:54 PM EST on December 1st, 2012 | 54 comments
Man Films Area Near Giant Sinkhole: Homeland Security &
Emergency Preparedness on scene — “You can see some bubbling”
from road (VIDEO)
10:34 AM EST on December 1st, 2012 | 25 comments

WHO: Fukushima workers had radiation dose over 10 sieverts in
their thyroids
08:48 AM EST on December 1st, 2012 | 6 comments
Radio: Tests indicate Minnesota pelicans exposed to contamination in
Gulf — Concern for what it could do to population — Dispersant
chemicals in 1/3 of birds — Official: ‘Really interesting’ results
coming in
06:44 AM EST on December 1st, 2012 | 4 comments
TV: More oil reported at BP disaster site — ‘Persistent’ and
‘recurring’ sheen (VIDEO)
04:12 PM EST on November 30th, 2012 | 61 comments
New flyover footage of giant Louisiana sinkhole shows growth, oil
(VIDEO)
03:20 PM EST on November 30th, 2012 | 11 comments
Officials: ‘Large chunks’ were knocked off salt dome when cavern
collapsed — Giant sinkhole now getting deeper
12:57 PM EST on November 30th, 2012 | 28 comments
More Fukushima Footage Released: “We have confirmed a worst
situation — Water containing extremely high levels of radiation
flowing into sea” (VIDEO)
Ongoing Gulf of Mexico Oil Disaster:
Oil Spill Attorney Stuart Smith’s Blog:
Weekend Environmental Must-Reads – December 1-2, 2012
Experts’ review of NY fracking soon to be complete

ALBANY, N.Y. — Experts reviewing the health effects of shale gas
development in New York are among the nation’s most prominent in
environmental health, giving opponents hope but the industry concern that
reviewers will warn against drilling operations that use hydraulic
fracturing.
Fracking rules under consideration by state
DEC have all sides holding breath
A week filled with regulatory maneuvering in New York has
supporters of shale-gas drilling hoping for the best, critics fearing for the
worst and environmental regulators straining to stay somewhere in
between.
Peter Mantius: Doctors’ fracking concerns being ignored
For years, New York State officials who oversee natural gas drilling
have stiff-armed doctors on the public health risks of fracking.
Fracking Secrets by Thousands Keep U.S. Clueless on Wells
A subsidiary of Nabors Industries Ltd. (NBR) pumped a mixture of
chemicals identified only as “EXP- F0173-11” into a half-dozen oil wells
in rural Karnes County, Texas, in July.
Revised fracking rules raise more questions in the
Finger Lakes region
A revised set of proposed regulations for hydraulic fracturing natural
gas released this past week by the state Department of Environmental
Conservation raise more questions about how the future of natural gas
drilling will play out in New York.
The history of fracking
1860s: Liquid first used to stimulate shallow, hard rock wells in
Pennsylvania, New York, Kentucky and West Virginia.
1930s: Idea of injecting a nonexplosive fluid into the ground to
stimulate a well began to be attempted.
UT plans to drill for gas on its land, study fracking
The University of Tennessee plans to drill for natural gas in its
research forest in Morgan and Scott counties, a proposal that would allow
UT to lease its land to an oil and gas company and then study the
environmental impacts of hydraulic fracturing — often called fracking.

Fracking secrets keep Americans clueless
A subsidiary of Nabors Industries Ltd. pumped a mixture of
chemicals identified only as “EXP-F0173-11” into a half-dozen oil wells
in rural Karnes County, Texas, in July.
Detectors find methane leaks from the air
Five hundred feet above California’s Central Valley, a line on Stephen
Conley’s laptop screen jumped.
Conley peered over from the pilot seat of his single-engine plane. The
line showed methane levels in the surrounding air as he flew downwind
from a natural gas pipeline buried in the green hills below. A sharp spike
could mean that the pipeline had sprung a leak, venting gas into the sky.
Methane, which is the fuel’s main ingredient, is a potent greenhouse gas,
trapping heat far more effectively than carbon dioxide.
Proposed path of liquid fuel pipeline frightens
North Huntingdon neighborhood
Bob Kaczynski bought a home in North Huntingdon in October, and
he’s wondering whether he made a mistake. He just learned that his house
lies along the path of a proposed and potentially dangerous type of gas
pipeline.
Archaeological concerns slow natural gas pipeline
Already delayed by slow permit approval, the proposed Tennessee
Gas pipeline from West Milford to Mahwah is now being held up by
federal officials because it would either run through or near historic areas,
including Native American burial grounds.
Rockaway Pipeline Project Set to Move Forward
A pipeline operator is moving forward with plans to build a natural
gas pipeline through the Rockaways and under Jamaica Bay, despite
concerns about the area’s vulnerability to storms like Sandy.
Fracking ‘exploitation’ report dismissed by energy department
The energy department has dismissed a report that “60% of the UK
countryside could be exploited” for fracking, the controversial gas
extraction method.
Anti-fracking activists drill home message with parliament protests

Campaigners plan to erect mock rig in Whitehall and deliver letter to
Downing Street denouncing shale gas extraction
Cochrane resident worries new fracking guidelines too weak
A Calgary-area rancher says Canada’s oil and gas producers’ new
guidelines for hydraulic fracking don’t go far enough.
New York’s hydrofracking review nearing final stages
A week filled with regulatory maneuvering in New York has
supporters of shale-gas drilling hoping for the best, critics fearing for the
worst and environmental regulators straining to stay somewhere in
between.
Residents against Marcellus shale drilling near reservoir
Some residents in Elk County are concerned about an area of land
that is being cleared in preparation for drilling.
Fracture over fracking moratorium splits Fort Collins City Council
A city council philosophically divided by whether a temporary halt to
hydraulic fracturing in Fort Collins is necessary will revisit the question
Tuesday.
Pictures: Bakken Shale Oil Boom Transforms North Dakota
North Dakota, once a sleepy backwater of the petroleum industry, this
year surpassed Alaska as the number two oil producer in the United States.
The gush of North Dakota crude has helped lift U.S. oil production to its
highest level in 14 years, and has the United States on track to regain its
spot as the world’s top energy producer within five years. (Related: “U.S.
to Overtake Saudi Arabia, Russia as World’s Top Energy Producer”)
Oil Train Revival:
Booming North Dakota Relies on Rail to Deliver Its Crude
North Dakota surpassed Alaska this year as the number two oilproducing
state. It’s thanks to fracking—the extraction of oil from the
state’s Bakken Shale formation. But all that oil would be stuck in the
Midwest without trains. (See related photos: “Bakken Shale Oil Boom
Transforms North Dakota”)
Study: Mixing oil with dispersant made the BP oil spill worse
A new study by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology
and the Universidad Autonoma de Aguascalientes in Mexico finds that

mixing oil with dispersant made the BP oil spill worse. Georgia Tech
reports that the two million gallons of dispersant used to clean up the 4.9
million barrels of oil that spilled into the Gulf of Mexico during the 2010
Deep Water Horizon spill made the oil 52 times more toxic.
BP oil spill cleanup toxic to key species
Plankton-like animals suffer when chemical dispersants and crude are
mixed, study finds
Dispersant makes oil from spills 52 times more toxic
As in 2010 Gulf of Mexico disaster, it makes petroleum less visible,
but much more harmful
RESTORE Act’s Gulf Coast Ecosystem
Restoration Council to hold first meeting Dec. 11 in Mobile, Ala.
The Gulf Coast Ecosystem Restoration Council, which will oversee
the spending of about 80 percent of BP Clean Water Act fine money under
the terms of the federal RESTORE Act, will hold its first public meeting in
Mobile, Ala., on Dec. 11.
Steffy: Call may decide fate of 2 from BP
The difference between exoneration and a lifetime in prison may
come down to a 10-minute phone call.
Shell’s oil spill containment gear ‘crushed like a beer can’ in testing
Shell Oil has been building and testing equipment designed for the
Arctic Ocean in Puget Sound.
In September, a key test of underwater oil-spill equipment was a
spectacular failure.
Shell VP: Yeah, we’re gonna spill some oil in the Arctic
Your quote of the day comes from the BBC.
There’s no sugar-coating this, I imagine there would be spills, and no
spill is OK. But will there be a spill large enough to impact people’s
subsistence? My view is no, I don’t believe that would happen.
LA oil company faces criminal charges for 2011 spill
Los Angeles city prosecutors have filed criminal charges against an
oil company for a 245-gallon crude oil and water spill last December.
Pressure mounting on Obama over pipeline decision

Embarking on a second term, President Barack Obama faces
mounting pressure on a decision he had put off during his re-election
campaign: whether to approve the $7 billion proposed Keystone XL oil
pipeline between the U.S. and Canada.
Groups: Pipeline proposal a sign tar sands oil is headed to Maine
Maine environmental groups sounded an alarm Thursday about the
possible impacts here of a Canadian energy company’s application to
reverse the flow of a pipeline and move heavy crude oil from the western
provinces to Montreal.
Jailed Activists Start Hunger Strike in Campaign Against
Keystone XL Pipeline
Two activists have gone on hunger strike in jail as part of a campaign
against the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline that would carry
Canadian tar sands oil to Texas. Diane Wilson and Bob Lindsey Jr. are
demanding that energy firm Valero divest from the Keystone XL project.
The pair were arrested after locking themselves to trucks in a bid to block
access to a Valero refinery in Houston, Texas.
Unfinished Business: The Unspoken Link Between Dispersants and
Sick Children in the Gulf of Mexico
All six of Julie Creppel’s young children are sick. Vomiting. Blisters
all over their bodies, even in their throats. Boils. Severe headaches that
wake them up screaming at night. Nausea. Fevers. Diarrhea. Stomach
spasms that contort their bodies in pain. Skin lesions. Psoriasis. Nose
bleeds that gush unexpectedly. Respiratory infections. Dizziness. Sinus
infections. Hand, Foot, and Mouth disease. Hair loss. And more.
BP sanction brewing long before Gulf disaster
When the Obama administration temporarily banned BP from federal
contracts Wednesday, it pointed to BP’s “lack of business integrity” and
conduct relating to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion and spill.
The sanction, however, has been years in the making.
BP to Shareholders:
We’re Already Working With EPA to Lift Federal Contract Ban

Despite a long history of ”egregious violations,” the behemoth oil
company’s temporary suspension from obtaining lucrative government
contracts may turn out to be much shorter than expected
EPA Finds Its Backbone, Blocks BP From New Oil Drilling Contracts
Not so long ago, we reported that BP will finally accept criminal
charges for the catastrophic 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The
guilty plea was entered as part of a deal with the U.S. Government that
would cost BP about $4.5 billion in fines but ultimately absolving the
company from future prosecution on these charges.
Study: Mixing oil with dispersant made the BP oil spill worse
A new study by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology
and the Universidad Autonoma de Aguascalientes in Mexico finds that
mixing oil with dispersant made the BP oil spill worse. Georgia Tech
reports that the two million gallons of dispersant used to clean up the 4.9
million barrels of oil that spilled into the Gulf of Mexico during the 2010
Deep Water Horizon spill made the oil 52 times more toxic.
Sanibel wildlife refuge awarded grant money
Ding Darling National Wildlife Refuge is getting a hefty settlement
from the 2010 BP oil spill, and they say the money is going towards
promoting the park as an ecotourism destination.
We Finally Have A Reliable Way To Detect Oil Spills Before They Get
Disastrous
Energy technology: As oil exploration moves into the Arctic, new
methods are being developed to detect and handle spills
Exclusive: Chevron Brazil ban ended, marks restart step
Chevron Corp received a boost to its efforts to restart oil output in
Brazil after a court overturned a ban on its operating in the country and the
company agreed on a plan to improve safety procedures after an oil spill
last year.
Obama facing tough choice on oil pipeline
It’s a decision President Obama put off during the 2012 campaign,
but now that he has won a second term, his next move on a proposed oil
pipeline between the United States and Canada may signal how he will
deal with climate and energy issues in the four years ahead.

Louisiana Sinkhole Evacuees Won’t Be Home For Awhile
At the eight-acre, Bayou Corne sinkhole in Assumption Parish,
owners of slab houses are waiting for methane-gas monitors to be installed
in December. The sinkhole deepened in November and coughed up debris
and hydrcarbons late in the month. Cypress trees fell into the gap.
Residents are watching natural gas being flared from the site and are
ventilating homes while bayous around them bubble.
Texas Brine fined $100,000
The state Department of Natural Resources said Saturday it has fined
a Houston-based company $100,000 for failing to obey several safety
directives the state issued Nov. 12 regarding the sinkhole in Assumption
Parish.
New View from Inside Fukushima: Chaos and Uncertainty
Even in the early days of the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi
Nuclear Power Plant in March of last year, as the reactors spiraled out of
control, the terse statements issued by the operator felt like an exercise in
denial. Radiation readings were “higher than the ordinary level” (about
100 times higher), and a “loud noise and white smoke” had hit the No. 4
reactor (a possible hydrogen explosion).
High thyroid radiation doses in 178 Fukushima workers
Dozens of workers received potentially cancerous doses of radiation
to their thyroid glands during recovery work at the Fukushima No. 1
nuclear power plant, according to data submitted to the World Health
Organization.
Black Liberation/Civil Rights:
A Viewer’s Guide to Steven Spielberg’s
‘Lincoln & the American Civil War’
By
NOI Research Group

(FinalCall.com)
Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln opened last week, and many have flocked
to see this Hollywood version of one of the nation’s most tumultuous
times the American Civil War. The film purports to recount the last months
of the life of Abraham Lincoln as he lobbied to achieve the passage of the
13th Amendment to the Constitution, which is said to have ended legal
slavery in America—at least on paper.
Spielberg is the master of American propaganda, and there is no one
since the notorious director D.W. Griffith who has more successfully
exported to the world a utopian vision of America as a Caucasian paradise.
And while his White characters—from Jaws to ET to Amistad—show a
range of virtues, his Black characters have been limited to cardboard
portrayals of simplistic and racially clichéd stereotypes.
This is the inescapable context with which one must approach
Spielberg’s Lincoln, a film that is no more accurate in its depiction of a
critical period in history than George Bush was about the so-called
weapons-of-mass-destruction lie that brought a world of nations to endless
war.
First, let us take a couple of paragraphs to dispose of some wellentrenched
historical myths. No war in the 6,600-year history of the White
man has ever been fought for the benefit of Blacks—never has happened
and never will. If the North fought to “free the slaves,” then why did the
war start with the slaveholding South attacking the Union at Fort Sumter?

Should it not have been the reverse? The Civil War was fought between
two sets of White people to see which one would benefit most from the
multitude of products America derived from Black slave labor.
Southerners realized that the engines of the American economy—cotton
and slaves—were in their territory. They resented that the big banks in the
North were making most of the profits from their plantations. They
decided to end that one-sided relationship and SEPARATE from America.
Abraham Lincoln knew that America would collapse without Southern
slavery and reluctantly fought the war to maintain the UNION of North
and South—and, most important, to keep the slavery wealth flowing from
South to North.
No one fought to free Black people, and, indeed, before a single shot
was fired both sides agreed to the Crittenden Resolution, which made it
clear that the war would not target what they called “established
institutions,” namely, Black slavery.
Here are a few more points:
• While still engaged in the war, Union General Benjamin F. Butler
placed his troops at the disposal of the governor of Maryland to
repress a rumored slave insurrection.
• In 1861, when General John C. Fremont freed all slaves in the
state of Missouri, Lincoln fired him. When General David Hunter
freed the slaves in three states, Lincoln cancelled and reversed the
order.
• Union military camps were closed to runaway slaves, and some
poor Black souls were actually captured by Union soldiers and
returned to their rebel owners!
• Most abolitionists were White workers who HATED Blacks but
wanted an end to slavery so that they—Whites—would not have
to compete with Black workers.
• Lincoln had no intention of establishing “integration” and in 1862
sent 450 “freed” slaves to an island off the coast of Haiti in an illfated
colonization scheme. The navy had to be sent to retrieve the
beleaguered Blacks.

• Lincoln publicly voiced support for the Fugitive Slave Law,
which made every American citizen—North and South—
responsible for catching runaway slaves.
***
Contrary to popular belief, Lincoln’s famous Emancipation
Proclamation did not “free” a single Black person from chattel slavery—
not one. When it looked like the Union was losing the war, Lincoln
“freed” slaves in the South so that they could fight against their masters. In
that same document he made sure that slavery was not disturbed where it
existed in the North!
These are hardly the acts of a Saviour or of a Salvation Army. But
they are truths that dirty the image of Lincoln, whom Spielberg is posing
as America’s very own Christ figure—the man who died for the racial sins
of a nation.
Spielberg is intent on hiding these important facts, portraying his
subject as the avuncular oracle of racial kindness. But Spielberg is not so
charitable with the Black characters that appear throughout his wartime
fairytale. It opens with a combat scene, but the first death we see is a
Black man stabbed in the chest with a bayonet—Spielberg preserves an
honored Hollywood tradition that Blacks must be the first to die.
President Lincoln is then shown in the midst of a Union camp
earnestly listening to the battlefield accounts of two Black soldiers.
Spielberg puts them with the Second Kansas Colored Regiment, an actual
Black military unit, though their encounter with the President is totally
fictional. What is troubling is that one of the soldiers describes a combat
event in which, he says, his colored unit “killed them all”—every last one
of them. This is a description of a war atrocity—not a battle in which the
enemy was beaten badly—and it is Spielberg’s way of making the Black
race responsible for the extreme brutality of America’s deadliest war
(750,000 dead). The Jenkins Ferry battle was indeed brutal and bloody, but
if an order were given to “kill them all” it would have had to come from
the White leader of the “colored” unit.
Spielberg’s other Black soldier presses the President for equality in
an unrealistically brash dialogue that would have earned him time in a

dungeon after many lashes. Yet Spielberg’s brazen Negro has the temerity
to ask Lincoln for a job! This again is a bold falsehood that misstates the
actual condition of the Black race. Blacks were not asking for jobs—
because during slavery and for a time after the war they dominated all of
the skilled crafts in the South and were capable builders, inventors, and
independent-minded believers in their own talents and skills. The fact is,
Whites feared that freeing Blacks would leave Whites totally stranded and
uncared for. In many cases, the Black slave of a White family was the only
breadwinner in that family! If America were to actually allow the ex-slave
40 acres, a mule, and the vote, Whites would be homeless, friendless and
hopeless in a matter of days.
From there, Spielberg gives us Black caricatures direct from the set
of Gone With The Wind. We see Mrs. Lincoln’s mulatto maid, Mr.
Lincoln’s dutiful butler, the trusty carriage driver, the obligatory Blacks
praising God for the White man’s largesse, and the Lincolns’ child oddly
playing with slavery photos like they are baseball cards. Jewish writer
Tony Kushner puts “nigger” in the mouths of too many whiteys, but not in
the mouth of Lincoln, who actually used the word with chilling regularity.
And then there is the last scene, when Thaddeus Stevens, played by
Tommy Lee Jones, grabs the original copy of the 13th Amendment and
brings it home, where he is greeted by his Black housekeeper Lydia Smith,
played by S. Epatha Merkerson. He presents it to her with the words “a
gift for you,” whereupon the satisfied servant crawls into bed with the
White man, for a night of emancipation fornication, one assumes.
Centuries of slavery meant the daily debasement and brutal rape of
the Black woman (see Legitimate Rape: A Truly American History). In his
nauseating reconstruction Spielberg shows us what he feels are the
“benefits” of the legal end of slavery—even more of the White man’s
sexual debasement of the Black woman!
In reality, Abraham Lincoln is no hero for the Black man. Ebony
Magazine editor historian Lerone Bennett wrote a landmark 652-page
book titled Forced Into Glory that really ends all debate in the matter. But
Hollywood would have to hold its nose in reading the true history of
Lincoln’s racial words and deeds. And then there’s the forgotten fate of the

Native American, whose Holocaust was accelerated by Lincoln’s
murderous expansionist policies, which unleashed violent White
settlement on Indian lands in the West.
In analyzing the insufferable idolization of this supreme White
supremacist, one is reminded of the words of Elijah Muhammad:
“Abraham Lincoln was not instrumental in trying to free you….The truth
will make you free.”
Next Time: Plenty of Negroes, But Why No Jews in Spielberg’s
Lincoln?
Labor:
Economy:
World:
Al Qaeda “Virtue Police”
Show up Along NATO Protected Turkish-Syrian Border
By
Tony Cartalucci
Images: Screenshot from Getty Images depicting Al Qaeda-style “virtue
police” atop a building in northern Syria. The accompanying captions
provided by AFP run roughshod over the intelligence of potential readers,
claiming the “Committee for Promotion of Virtues and Prevention of Vice” is
actually aimed only at “FSA” fighters, and seeks to “fight abuses and crimes
committed by members of the Free Syrian Army.” In reality, the West and its
media agencies are continuing to bury a premeditated US-Israeli-Saudi plan
to fund and arm sectarian extremists to overrun Syria.

NATO-backed terrorists along Turkish-Syrian border establish Al
Qaeda-style “Virtue & Vice Police,” heralding the West’s true designs for
Syria.
An obscure, unreported pair of Getty images created on November
21, 2012 depict masked, armed terrorists atop a building with the words
“Committee for Promotion of Virtues and Prevention of Vice” scrawled
across its facade. The images were taken in al-Bab, northern Syria.
While the establishment of Al Qaeda-style “virtue police” along
Syria’s borders is troubling enough, what is perhaps even more disturbing
is the AFP caption that accompanied the images. The caption reads:
Syrian members of the Committee for Promotion of Virtues and
Prevention of Vice stand guard ontop of a building with a freshly painted
wall with the name of the committee in Arabic at their headquarters in al-
Bab, northern Syria, on November 21, 2012. The committee was created
to fight abuses and crimes committed by members of the Free Syrian
Army (FSA) only, and has 80 elements recruited outside the FSA. The
rebels faced growing criticism, particularly after a video was posted on
YouTube earlier in November, appearing to show opposition fighters
beating and executing soldiers after attacks.
The caption presumes absolute ignorance on behalf of potential
readers as to what “Committee for Promotion of Virtues and Prevention of
Vice” actually means in the context of sectarian extremism linked to
groups such as Al Qaeda, leading US-backed efforts to topple the Syrian
government. Not only do the committees have nothing to do with fighting
“abuses and crimes committed by members of the Free Syrian Army,” but
to suggest that the “committee” is only policing fellow terrorists betrays
the last 2 years of documented evidence regarding the so-called “FSA”
and its members who hail from Al Qaeda linked groups both inside Syria
and beyond, including the notorious Libyan Islamic Fighting Group
(LIFG) hailing from Benghazi, Darnah, and Tobruk, Libya.
“Virtue Police” Simply a Manifestation of NATO-backed
Terrorist Flooding over Turkish Border.
It was exposed at length that many of the so-called “Free Syrian
Army’s” fighters were in fact foreign terrorists imported into Syria via

long-established Al Qaeda networks used to feed fighters first into
Afghanistan during the 1980′s, then into Afghanistan and Iraq during
America’s occupation of both nations over the past decade.
The documented details of this network were exposed in the
extensive academic efforts of the US Army’s own West Point Combating
Terrorism Center (CTC). Two reports were published between 2007 and
2008 revealing a global network of Al Qaeda affiliated terror
organizations, and how they mobilized to send a large influx of foreign
fighters into Iraq.
The first report, “Al-Qa’ida’s Foreign Fighters in Iraq,” was
extensively cited by historian and geopolitical analyst Dr. Webster Tarpley
in March of 2011, exposing that NATO-backed “pro-democracy” rebels in
Libya were in fact Al Qaeda’s Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG),
listed by the US State Department, United Nations, and the UK Home
Office (page 5, .pdf) as an international terrorist organization.
The West Point report exposed Libya as a global epicenter for Al
Qaeda training and recruitment, producing more fighters per capita than
even Saudi Arabia, and producing more foreign fighters than any other
nation that sent militants to Iraq, except Saudi Arabia itself. Read More
Health, Education, Science and Welfare:
LAUSD False Imprisonment Of Teachers
Doesn’t Balance Students Safety With Teachers Rights
(Daily News Reporter Barbara Jones reports in her article "LAUSD
'jails' fill with teachers as misconduct complaints rise" that "the cost is
enormous: $1.4 million a month in salaries...and $865,000 to hire
substitutes. What neither she nor any other mainstream media reporter
tells you is that this short term loss to LAUSD is more than compensated
for when these housed, jailed or rubber room teachers- pick you
euphemism- are coerced into resigning or are ultimately dismissed.
Last year LAUSD brought false and often completely fabricated
charges on the vast majority of the 853 teachers it forced out of their jobs,
who were at the top of the salary scale or about to vest in expensive

lifetime health benefits- something LAUSD is already $13 billion in the
hole on for those teachers who have already vested and/or retired. By
replacing these targeted teachers with novice teachers at the bottom of the
salary scale and with much diminished benefits, LAUSD saves over
$60,000 in salary and benefits per teacher. Do the math. This amounts to a
$51 million savings in just the first year after these mostly innocent
teachers have been liquidated. And this is a gift to the District that keeps
on giving in subsequent years.
Reporter Barbara Jones and others who write about targeted teachers
unquestioningly accept LAUSD's assertion that so many teachers are
being charged, because of "years of downplaying or ignoring suspected
abuse." Does she offer any evidence to substantiate this assertion? Hell no.
After all, what are the civil rights of a few teachers worth against the
financial interests of the cabal running LAUSD?
In good old fashion 1950s McCarthyism tactics of blacklisting or the
more recent McMartin Preschool case, where all teachers charged- whose
lives were nonetheless destroyed- turned out to be completely innocent,
LAUSD offers no evidence of teacher culpability for anything they are
charged with and, worse yet, hundreds of teachers are subjected to a
purposefully stalled "investigation" that often goes on for years. What
happened to the legal presumption of innocence until proven guilty by a
preponderance of the evidence and with that burden being on LAUSD?
Don't ask, don't tell seems to be LAUSD's position on this.
Nobody seems to be interested in the coincidence of LAUSD budget
shortfalls and deficit projections over the last 5 years and the fact that "the
number of housed teachers has more than doubled in the last 18 months."
LAUSD's General Counsel David Holmquist states, "We have zero
tolerance for inappropriate touching." And this seems to include a teacher
now in teacher jail for having touched her student's shoulder in a popcorn
reading exercise to let the student know it was her time to read. Miramonte
has created the pretext to go after teachers at the top of the salary scale or
who merely had the professional integrity to question their principal's
often irrational actions.

If teachers are sitting in LAUSD offices where they are either not
given any work or are unable to work doing anything but teach, why
would LAUSD require them to be there in the first place? In my own case,
when I reported the bagel breakfasts for LAUSD administrative wannabes
and two floors of empty space in the Bank of America building at Eastern
and Slauson, LAUSD administraor Jan Davis sent me home to my own
personal rubber room, where I could no longer blog about what I was
seeing. If they could send me home, why do they have to house any
teachers? The answer is sick and simple. Teacher jails and rubber rooms
are designed to make teachers both physically and mentally sick until the
unbearable isolation of sitting monotonous day after monotonous day
takes its predictable physical and mental toll on targeted teachers. All you
have to do to verify this is to look at the statistic from Workers
Compensation, where the number of LAUSD teachers applying has
skyrocketed as LAUSD purposefully continues to inflict harm on these
teachers in order to coerce them into resigning, trying to break them first
before proceeding with their dismissal.
And if as UTLA President Warren Fletcher belatedly says that "the
district is overreacting to the scandal, then why doesn't UTLA do
something about it. Clearly, LAUSD could not continue to savage UTLA
represented teachers unless UTLA did nothing about it. And nothing about
it is exactly what UTLA has continued to do. With representation like this,
who needs enemies.
Superintendent John Deasy says, "A witch hunt would be if we were
going after teachers," which is exactly what he is doing. Even some
administrators have said off the record, for fear of themselves being
targeted, that going back to when Ramon Cortines was superintendent,
they were told to "get something on all teachers." This witch hunt didn't
start yesterday and is carefully orchestrated. But reporters that don't point
out the inconsistencies in what LAUSD asserts seem to be missing the
boat or maybe they too are fearful of losing their jobs if they dare to report
the truth.
And as for Deasy's assertions that he is only pursuing "complaints
that come to us," this is patently untrue. In my own case, my Principal

Janet Seary had a pizza party for my class and encourage them to write
negative letters about me while removing positive exculpatory letters and
evidence from the case against me. Students have gone up to teachers and
threatened to get them fired, because they too can see that teachers are
being targeted by the District. Given a choice of doing your classwork or
getting rid of the teacher who gives it too you and makes your life
difficult, many students at the solicitation of LAUSD administration have
been encourage to bear false witness against their teachers. But
interestingly enough, this is never done under penalty of perjury as is
required by the California Education Code. In addition, children are
improperly and suggestively interviewed by LAUSD administrators to
encourage them to bear false witness against a teacher that LAUSD has
chosen to target.
Targeted teachers are "not told the specific allegations against
them...to prevent them from contacting students and parents." Does this
make any sense? Isn't anybody charged entitled to at least know what they
are being charged with? And even after LAPD clears the teacher of
charges, LAUSD still persists in keeping them in teacher jail. LAUSD
"alleges that 'a handful' of teachers successfully appealed their dismissals
and are collecting salary, but official do not want back in the classroom."
Does anybody ask who these teachers are and why LAUSD officials feel
they have the power to deprive them of their professional livelihood after
having been cleared of all charges? No, reporters just except LAUSD at its
word.
LAUSD with its $6 billion budget and $500 million "legal defense
fund" seems to be a big bully that nobody is willing to stand up to. To
confront the LAUSD bully, one might ask "Detective Juan Perez, one of
the three detectives assigned to the LAPD's Sexually Exploited Child
Unit," whether he thinks there is any greater incidence of teacher
exploitation of children or whether LAUSD is just exploiting top-of-the
salary-scale teachers? Teacher Randy Traweek is one of these highly
dedicated and honored teachers who had a perfect teaching career until
LAUSD decided to target him. He has been completely cleared by LAPD,

ut LAUSD persists and this week moved for his dismissal in derogation
of all evidence.
If you or someone you know has been targeted and are in the process
of being dismissed and need legal defense, get in touch:
Lenny@perdaily.com
Daily News Digest December 2, 2012
Gulf of Mexico Clean-Up Makes 2010 Spill 52-Times More Toxic;
Mixing Oil With Dispersant Increased Toxicity to Ecosystems

Rotifer. (Credit: Image courtesy of Georgia Institute of Technology)
ScienceDaily (Nov. 30, 2012) — If the 4.9 million barrels of oil that
spilled into the Gulf of Mexico during the 2010 Deep Water Horizon spill
was a ecological disaster, the two million gallons of dispersant used to
clean it up apparently made it even worse — 52-times more toxic. That’s
according to new research from the Georgia Institute of Technology and
Universidad Autonoma de Aguascalientes (UAA), Mexico.
The study found that mixing the dispersant with oil increased toxicity
of the mixture up to 52-fold over the oil alone. In toxicity tests in the lab,
the mixture’s effects increased mortality of rotifers, a microscopic grazing
animal at the base of the Gulf’s food web. The findings are published
online by the journal Environmental Pollution and will appear in the
February 2013 print edition.
Using oil from the Deep Water Horizon spill and Corexit, the
dispersant required by the Environmental Protection Agency for clean up,
the researchers tested toxicity of oil, dispersant and mixtures on five
strains of rotifers. Rotifers have long been used by ecotoxicologists to
assess toxicity in marine waters because of their fast response time, ease
of use in tests and sensitivity to toxicants. In addition to causing mortality
in adult rotifers, as little as 2.6 percent of the oil-dispersant mixture
inhibited rotifer egg hatching by 50 percent. Inhibition of rotifer egg
hatching from the sediments is important because these eggs hatch into
rotifers each spring, reproduce in the water column, and provide food for
baby fish, shrimp and crabs in estuaries.
“Dispersants are preapproved to help clean up oil spills and are
widely used during disasters,” said UAA’s Roberto-Rico Martinez, who
led the study. “But we have a poor understanding of their toxicity. Our
study indicates the increase in toxicity may have been greatly
underestimated following the Macondo well explosion.”
Martinez performed the research while he was a Fulbright Fellow at
Georgia Tech in the lab of School of Biology Professor Terry Snell. They
hope that the study will encourage more scientists to investigate how oil
and dispersants impact marine food webs and lead to improved
management of future oil spills.

“What remains to be determined is whether the benefits of dispersing
the oil by using Corexit are outweighed by the substantial increase in
toxicity of the mixture,” said Snell, chair of the School of Biology.
“Perhaps we should allow the oil to naturally disperse. It might take
longer, but it would have less toxic impact on marine ecosystems.”
Quotes of the Day:
I think that a Marxist analysis is indispensable for any
understanding, not just in the modern world but for our
historical situation. I think in the end it’s inadequate but it is
indispensable because how do you talk about oligarchy,
plutocracy, monopolies, oligopolies, asymmetrical relations
of power at the workplace between bosses and workers, the
imperial tentacles, profit maximizing and so forth. That’s
not Adam Smith. That’s not John Maynard Keynes. That’s
Karl Marx. — Cornell West, An Interview with Cornel West
on Occupy, Obama and Marx
. . . While the numbers of the victims are hard to know
for certain, there are credible reports of at least 5 million
and quite possibly over 6 million civilians killed, half of
whom were children under the age of 5 years old. Despite
these staggering numbers, the Congo has received little
attention in the press, and certainly much less than the
human rights situations in countries like The Sudan
(Darfur), the former Yugoslavia, Libya and now Syria – that
is, countries in which the U.S. wished to intervene — though
the tragedy in the Congo is much worse than in any of those
countries.. . .
— Daniel Kovalik, Genocide in Silence
Images of the Day:

The Hypocrisy of the United States: A Safety Net Saves The Rich
As The Safety Net Disappearing For The Poor:
Safety Net Net Cartoons by Khalil Bendib
Tax Payer bailout...

Wall Streeters land just fine,
but kids in dire poverty slip right through.
Video of the Day:
Behind the scenes at 60 Minutes
“Yeah, it’s a total train wreck”. “We give up”
They did a better-than-average job of reporting financial scandals.
And no one is more baffled than they are about why no one is going to
jail.
End Wall Street’s Wars!
Occupy Wall Street!
Occupy Wall Street is the Only Organization
That Identifies The Enemy —
The 1% That Own and Control The Wealth!
1960s The Realist — One Nation Under God/1%

(Unlike The Trade Union Misleaders
Nor The Misleaders Of The Oppressed
Who Strive To Be In ‘Partnership’ With The 1%)
1960s The Realist — One Nation Under God/1%
(Unlike The Trade Union Misleaders
Nor The Misleaders Of The Oppressed
Who Strive To Be In ‘Partnership’ With The 1%)
Occupy Wall Street — ‘We Are The 99%’
The resistance continues at Liberty Square:
U.S.:
An Interview with Cornel West on Occupy, Obama and Marx
“He’s had four years and proved himself to be a Wall Street
President!”
by
Shozab Raza and Parmbir Gill
This interview with Dr. Cornel West was conducted following
the Oxford Union Debate on November 22 nd 2012.
SR: Why are you here speaking in favour of the Occupy Wall
Street movement?

CW: The Occupy movement being the major public response to a 30
year class war against poor and working people, not just in the American
Empire but around the world, that to have this space – this space has of
course been consecrated by the Malcolm X’s of the world, the Desmond
Tutus, and so many others who have come through here – it has a certain
visibility, an international form, and so I figured it would be right.
SR: There have been some critiques of Occupy Wall Street from
the Left: for example, that it failed to significantly engage with the
labour movement and trade unions in the US or that its radically
decentralized structure made it very difficult to arrive at decisions to
accomplish particular objectives. And so moving forward, what are
the lessons that we, as participants in Occupy and supporters of it,
can learn from the movement?
CW: I think we have to draw a distinction between social motion and
social movements. Social movements are very rare because they require a
sophisticated level of organization, of leadership, of persons who are
highly courageous and willing to actually pay a price. Social motion is
very important because it helps shape the climate of opinion and that’s
exactly what the Occupy motion has been all about – it helps shape the
climate of opinion. But it was in many ways so heterogeneous, so diverse
in all of its various voices and perspectives. What I loved about it was that
there was a lot of respect. It wasn’t dogmatic, imposed from above,
professional revolutionaries coming in with Truth (with a capital ‘T’) and
imposing it on everybody. That’s what we were wrestling with in the 60’s
and 70’s. You didn’t have that kind of thing this time around – and that
was very important.
On the other hand, it was difficult to sustain it. But I think that the
next wave of social activism will be among young people and it’s going to
take a variety of different forms. I’m old school so I have to learn from
young people – for example, about social networking to forms of
democratic expression that I haven’t even thought of in that regard. I have
a respect for the anarchists precisely because – though I’m not one – they
have a powerful critique of concentration of power in the nation-state. And
as a black man in America dealing with the repressive apparatus, you live

under death threat every day from your own government. You know
governments can be vicious – and that’s the history of black people in
America. So then the anarchists say ‘we want democratic accountability,
not just of the corporations (which, coming out of the socialist tradition, I
accept) but we want to make sure that the government doesn’t have a
concentration of power, especially instrumentalities of violence which can
be brought to bear on dissidents, who are then criminalized and
assassinated.’ And that’s very important. Yet at the same time, as a radical
democrat or a deep democrat, in the end I’m not an anarchist but
anarchism has some deep truths that one has to take into consideration.
PG: Cornel, you campaigned for Obama in 2008 but unlike many
other critical supporters of the President, your critique of his policies
eventually eclipsed your support as his first term unfolded. And as a
result you’ve found yourself in confrontation with former comrades –
but still brother – like Michael Eric Dyson, Al Sharpton and others,
who remain allied to the Obama regime while purporting to be critical
of it from within.
CW: You don’t see too much criticism coming from either one of
them though! (laughs). I think they’ve sold their soul for a mess of Obama
pottage!
PG: Right, and it’s obvious that these confrontations have led
many in the mainstream American press to denounce you, but even
then your popularity among poor and working people in America and
across the world continues to grow. How do you account for that?
CW: Well, one important thing to keep in mind is that in the 65
events that I did, at each stop I would tell them that we must bring
Reaganism to a close – McCain and Palin were the last moments of
Reaganite policy (unregulated markets, indifference towards the poor,
stagnating wages) – and that if Obama won, I would break dance in the
afternoon and be his major critic the next morning. That’s how I ended
every speech. And so I broke dance in the afternoon [when Obama won in
2008] because we did stop McCain and Palin. But the next morning I
knew the social forces behind him (Wall Street and so forth) needed to be
called into question. So when I went after Larry Summers, went after Tim

Geithner, went after Gary Gensler and all the Wall St. folk who inhabited
his space, his cabinet, Rahm Emanuel, his chief of staff, and so forth, they
[his supporters] said ‘you’re turning on the President!’. I said ‘no, I’m just
being consistent. I’m being true to what I said’. But then that’s where the
demonization set in. But, you know, that goes with the territory.
PG: Was there a break-dance this November?
CW: God, no! He’s had four years and he’s proved himself to be a
Wall St. President, he’s proved himself to be imperial to the core, he’s
proved himself to be a war criminal. And you have to call that for what it
is. And people say ‘oh you hatin’ ‘ and I say ‘I’m a Christian. I hate the
deed; I don’t hate the person’, because he has the potential to change.
Malcolm X was a gangster for a long time; he was wrong, he changed and
he became a great freedom fighter. All of us have the capacity to change,
you see. And so in that sense, you know, as a Christian, ‘you love your
enemies’ which means you better have some! (laughs) Because if you take
a stand for poor and working people, you gonna’ have some enemies! That
was part of what Jesus had in mind – if you go through life with no
enemies, you’re probably not living a good life. You’re going to have
enemies if you take a stance. And, the question about loving them is not
sadomasochistic: you’re not loving your oppressors because they’re
beating you down but because they’re still human beings and you know
you have the capacity, inside of you, to actually engage in those same
kinds of vicious forms of revenge, envy, domination, hatred and so forth.
And therefore that allows a self-critique within your own soul. But, you
know, I don’t want to get too theological here but the point is that it’s been
a challenge. But what’s interesting now is that more and more people are
coming around. I gave a talk in San Francisco with 4,000 people; in New
York, 3,000 people. You think, ‘wow, this thing is getting bigger and
bigger and bigger!’. Read More
Austerity — the Battle Cry of the 1%
In Search of a More Just World
by
Mark Vorpahl

Whether we are left with the Fiscal Cliff or a Grand Bargain, workers
in the U.S. face massive cuts to programs such as Medicare, Medicaid,
Social Security, unemployment insurance, Food Stamp assistance and
other needed social safety nets. This is an example of “austerity” which
has largely been pursued in the U.S. until now, on a statewide and local
level.
The policies of austerity are not unique to the U.S. They are being
enacted internationally. In Europe they have been aggressively put into
play for four years. While austerity has been pursued on all continents, this
article will focus on Europe and the U.S.
What are the policies of austerity? They involve the cutting of public
investment and services such as education, health care, and retirement
insurance. In addition they also include the privatizing of existing
government assets. Public employees suffer wage freezes or cuts and mass
layoffs as part of austerity measures. Labor laws are revised to empower
employers at the expense of employees’ job security, wages, benefits, and
voice on the job. And austerity also involves increased taxes and fees on
working class people.
Austerity is sold as the only available means of reducing the debt.
However, there is plenty of money to take care of these financial
imbalances. It is in the pockets of the wealthy and big business elites
whose think tanks and politicians are, not coincidentally, the architects of
austerity. They want nations’ economies to be run more like the
corporations and banks, prioritizing that their shareholders get paid first
and foremost at the expense of everyone else.
In Europe the level of debt is 87 percent of its collective GDP,
necessitating a severe approach, according to their outlook. However, in
the U.S., which is in the beginning stages of an austerity campaign, the
level of debt is over 100 percent of our GDP. Considering this level of
debt and the size of the U.S. economy, the largest dose of austerity
measures are yet to come, and it will be working people who will be
expected to swallow them.
Austerity and Recession

What are the results of austerity? They depress the economy in the
countries in which they are enacted and reduce the government’s revenue
while fattening the big business elites’ financial reserves. With the January
1st Fiscal Cliff deadline in the U.S., the Economist Intelligence Unit cut
its expectations for growth. According to the International Monetary Fund
(IMF), Spain’s economy will contract by 1.5 percent, Italy’s by 2.3
percent, Portugal’s by 3 percent, Greece’s by 5.2 percent, Britain’s by 0.6
percent, Germany’s by 0.9 percent, and France’s by 0.1 percent.
These contractions are in addition to the devastating impact the Great
Recession has had on workers internationally with high unemployment
rates and a declining standard of living. Today life in Greece has been
likened to living under occupation during World War II. Spain and Italy
are not far behind. Given this, clearly what benefits the financial powers
behind austerity comes at a great cost to the vast majority of people and
the health of the economy as a whole.
The truth is that the world economy is not in crisis because of debt. It
is because too many have too little to buy what has been created. Without
a stronger consumer base the capitalists have no reason to invest in
making more commodities and creating more jobs. How are they going to
realize a profit if few can afford to buy what is produced?
Before the Great Recession the big business elites of the world had
gotten around this problem by indulging in an orgy of financial
speculation, especially in the U.S. This extra cash, created out of nothing,
enabled them to continue handing out dicey loans while repackaging and
selling these toxic assets as good investments. As long as the cash spigot
was flowing today, why worry about tomorrow, was the line of reasoning
for the 1%. This created massive financial bubbles in, for instance,
housing in the U.S. and several European nations.
The ultimate effect of all this financial gambling was to inflate the
fundamental problem with the economy, which was the crisis of
overproduction. When it was no longer possible to get beyond this limit,
the resulting crisis was so deep and wide that even today, four years later,
there is no real end in sight. This has been greatly exacerbated by massive

ailouts to the banks both in the U.S. and Europe as well as costly wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan conducted by the U.S.
Shared interests?
Given the ongoing suffering of working people as a result of the
Great Recession and austerity’s stunting effect on economic growth, why
are the big business elites and their politicians pursuing these measures
now? Aren’t we all in the same boat? Shouldn’t our fortunes rise together?
This myth is what is brought to center stage to justify the fanciful
notion of “shared sacrifice” when confronting economic ills. However, it
is working people who are doing all the sacrificing while the 1% fattens
their shares. The relationship between the ruling economic circles and
everyone else is that of predator to prey. Austerity is the result of
especially acute conditions regarding this relationship today and revealing
its essential antagonism to millions of people.
If governments were to take a growth approach and provide federal
funds to create jobs according to social need, this would result in inflation.
While it would be easier for people and governments to pay off debts, the
money paid back to the investors who hold the bonds would be worth less.
This is unacceptable to those who hold the purse strings, though such an
approach would greatly benefit the vast majority. Austerity is a way of
putting a stop to such hopes.
Big business is hoarding trillions of dollars rather than investing these
funds in job creating production and services. In the U.S. alone it is
estimated that these funds are up to $2 trillion. (1) Without a thriving
consumer base, the big business owners have no motivation to invest in
goods and services. Without this investment, there will be no thriving
consumer base. The economic elite sees no way out of this Catch 22, so
they are looking for other ways to enrich themselves.
One way they are doing this is by treating the world economy as an
enormous casino. For instance, it has been estimated that the total amount
of derivatives being played in the market comes to $1.2 quadrillion — 20
times the amount of money currently in the global economy. (2) While the
results of such reckless investment produce impressive portfolios for a few
today, everyone else is exposed to potentially disastrous risks in the future.

The 1% does need to obtain real money from somewhere, however.
Productive investment is out of the question for the reasons discussed
above. Austerity is a weapon they can use to muscle their way towards
grabbing the vast pools of social capital in government programs meant to
benefit working people. Rather than acting as organizers of production, the
corporation and bank owners are using austerity to act as parasites,
draining the economy as a whole.
Austerity also serves the business elite’s interests at the expense of
everyone else in another way. Without a strong safety net, workers are left
in an even more desperate competition with one another to find work. This
enables those on top of the economy to depress wages, benefits, and rights
since they have a larger reserve of workers to pick from who are willing to
take anything.
Finally, austerity is a weapon to weaken the Labor Movement, the
first line of defense for working people against corporate greed. For
instance, in the U.S., it is not a coincidence that austerity measures are
aimed first and foremost at public employees and teachers. These are the
nation’s two most heavily unionized sectors. If their unions can be broken
into accepting austerity, sweeping aside the rest of Labor in the pursuit of
greed will be an easier task for the 1%. In short, austerity is a program of
class war.
Push Back
Such an aggressive tearing up of social contracts that generations
have taken for granted, as is required by austerity, has been provoking a
fight back. In Europe this response has taken place at different rates across
the continent. Greece is where the struggle is most acute with at least 18
general strikes in the last two years, and many more mass mobilizations
against austerity. This example is beginning to spread.
On November 14, a series of Labor protests and political strikes
swept across Europe in a coordinated protest called by the European Trade
Union Confederation (ETUC). Many millions of people are estimated to
have participated in these events. In Spain and Portugal there were
national general strikes. Nine million Spaniards stayed at home, or 77
percent of the workforce of the country. Read More

Did Social Security and Medicare Crash the Economy?
By
Dean Baker
Co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research
The talk in Washington these days might lead people to think that the
main cause of the economic downturn is the Social Security and Medicare
benefits being paid to retirees. After all, we have people from both parties
giving us assurances that cuts to these programs are an essential part of
any budget deal. This is the sort of topsy-turvy thinking that passes as
conventional wisdom in Washington.
In case it’s necessary to remind people, our economy plunged due to
the collapse of a Wall Street-fueled housing bubble. The loss of demand
from the collapse of the housing bubble both led to a jump in the
unemployment rate from which we have still not fully recovered and also
the large deficits of the last five years.
Prior to collapse of the bubble, the budget deficits were quite modest.
In 2007 the deficit was just 1.7 percent of GDP, a level that can be
sustained indefinitely. Furthermore, the Congressional Budget Office
projected that the deficits would remain small for the near future, with the
scheduled expiration of the Bush tax cuts in 2011 projected to push the
budget into surplus.

The Deficit and the Downturn
The reason that we suddenly got large deficits was the economic
downturn, which caused tax revenue to plummet and increased spending
on programs such as unemployment insurance. We also had temporary
measures that included tax cuts such as the payroll tax holiday and various
spending programs that further raised the deficit.
However these stimulus measures were temporary and were quite
explicitly designed to boost the economy. Had it not been for the
downturn, they would not have occurred. There is very little by way of
permanent changes from the pre-recession tax and spending policy that
would raise the budget deficits from the low levels that had been projected
in 2008. This means that the story of current deficits is the story of the
collapsed housing bubble.
We Need a Speculation Tax
In a sane world we might be looking to square the deck with the folks
who brought us the bubble. One obvious way would be a modest financial
speculation tax like the one that the UK has had in effect on stock transfers
for centuries. A modest tax on trades of stock, options, credit default
swaps and other derivative instruments could raise enormous amounts of
money while barely affecting normal investors.
The Joint Tax Committee estimated that a 0.03 percent speculation
tax proposed by Sen. Tom Harkin and Rep. Peter Defazio would raise
almost $40 billion a year. This bill would imply a tax of just $3 on
$10,000 of trades. Since computerization has caused trading costs to
plummet, this tax would just raise transactions costs back to where they
were 10-15 years ago.
The big hit would be on the high speed traders and other fast turnover
types who are flipping stock and other assets by the hour or even by the
second. This trading is a drain on the economy and cutting it back would
free up resources for productive activity.
But It Won’t Happen
But in Washington policy circles, taxing Wall Street is off the agenda,
cutting Social Security and Medicare is on the agenda. And, best of all,

many of the people at the center of the housing crash are playing leading
roles in this drive to cut retirees benefits.
Last week, many people might have seen Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO
of Goldman Sachs, talking about the need to cut Social Security benefits
and raise the retirement age. The last time that Mr. Blankfein was very
visible in policy debates he was desperately seeking a bailout for Goldman
Sachs which was facing a bank run that pushed the company to the edge of
bankruptcy.
It was granted special protection from the Federal Reserve Board and
the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. This protection, coupled with
tens of billions of dollars in loans at below market interest rates allowed
Goldman Sachs to regain its health. Now its CEO wants to cut our Social
Security.
An even more amazing apparition in this story is former Federal
Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan. More than anyone in the whole
country, Greenspan deserves blame for the economic downturn. As the
bubble was growing to ever more dangerous levels, Greenspan was
cheering it on, insisting that there was no bubble, and that even if there
was a housing bubble its collapse would pose no special problem for the
economy.
In a sane world, Greenspan would be hiding away somewhere
enjoying his high six-figure pension. But this isn’t a sane world, this is
Washington. Therefore we could find Greenspan telling us that another
recession would be a price worth paying, if it led to cuts in Social Security
and Medicare.
So welcome to the Washington policy world. Cuts to Social Security
and Medicare are on the agenda and Wall Street speculation taxes are off
the agenda. Don’t we have much to be thankful for?
Cutting The ‘Safety Net — Obama Opening Savo: $400 Billion
Medicare Cuts! The Old And Poor Will Die Before Their Time!:
Opening Positions On The Cliff Deal: Deja Vu All Over Again
By

Robert Reich
So the bidding has begun.
According to the Wall Street Journal (which got the information from
GOP leaders), the President’s opening bid to Republicans is:
• $1.6 trillion in additional tax revenues over the next decade,
from limiting tax deductions on the wealthy and raising tax
rates on incomes over $250,000 (although those rates don’t
have to rise as high as the top marginal rates under Bill
Clinton)
• $50 billion in added economic stimulus next year
• A one-year postponement of pending spending cuts in defense
and domestic programs
• $400 billion in savings over the decade from Medicare and
other entitlement programs (the same number contained in
the President’s 2013 budget proposal, submitted before the
election).
• Authority to raise the debt limit without congressional
approval.
The $50 billion in added stimulus is welcome. We need more
spending in the short term in order to keep the recovery going, particularly
in light of economic contractions in Europe and Japan, and slowdowns in
China and India.
But by signaling its willingness not to raise top rates as high as they
were under Clinton and to cut some $400 billion from projected increases
in Medicare and other entitlement spending, the White House has ceded
important ground.
Republicans obviously want much, much more.
The administration has taken a “step backward, moving away from
consensus and significantly closer to the cliff, delaying again the real,
balanced solution that this crisis requires,” said Senate Minority Leader
Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) in a written statement. “No substantive
progress has been made” added House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio).

No surprise. The GOP doesn’t want to show any flexibility. Boehner
and McConnell will hang tough until the end. Boehner will blame his right
flank for not giving him any leeway, as he’s done before.
It’s also clear Republicans will seek whatever bargaining leverage
they can get from threatening to block an increase in the debt limit –
which will have to rise early next year if the nation’s full faith and credit is
to remain intact.
Meanwhile, the White House has started the bidding with substantial
concessions on tax increases and spending cuts.
Haven’t we been here before? It’s as if the election never occurred –
as if the Republicans hadn’t lost six or seven seats in the House and three
in the Senate, as if Obama hadn’t won reelection by a greater number of
votes than George W. Bush in 2004.
And as if the fiscal cliff that automatically terminates the Bush tax
cuts weren’t just weeks away.
Déjà vu all over again.
But if it’s really going to be a repeat of the last round, we might still
be in luck. Remember, the last round resulted in no agreement. And no
agreement now may be better than a bad agreement that doesn’t raise taxes
on the wealthy nearly enough while cutting far too much from safety nets
most Americans depend on.
If Republicans won’t budge and we head over the fiscal cliff, the
Clinton tax rates become effective January 1 – thereby empowering the
White House and Democrats in the next congress to get a far better deal.
Don’t Let Obama Cut Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security
By
Arun Gupta

If you voted this election, whether for Barack Obama, Jill Stein or
even Mitt Romney, you did not vote for austerity. But that’s of little
consequence to Obama and the Republicans. The two parties are currently
drafting measures that will undermine Social Security, Medicaid and
Medicare as the economy approaches the “fiscal cliff” at the end of this
year when more than $600 billion in tax increases and spending cuts will
kick in absent a new budget deal.
They hope to strike a “grand bargain,” but are bickering over how
much to increase taxes and cut spending. The spotlight has been on the
Bush tax cuts, which Obama campaigned on repealing for the rich, but this
issue is a sleight of hand that distracts the public from the bipartisan
plotting against your retirement income and healthcare.
Surely, you say, Obama will thwart the Republicans’ scheme to
dismantle social welfare. After all, it’s well known that retirement
programs are healthy. Social Security is solvent through 2033 [1] and
Medicare is solvent through 2024. Both can be strengthened for decades to
come with relative tweaking.
Trusting a Democratic president with protecting the general welfare
is ill advised when the last one gave us NAFTA, welfare “reform” and the

epeal of Glass-Steagall. Not only has Obama been gunning for retirement
programs since 2008 (I’ll explain), he’s so hell bent on reducing deficits
that he’s willing to damage the economy. The Congressional Budget
Office estimates [3] if the economy plunges over the cliff, recession will
hit in 2013. Interestingly, the CBO calculates that if all the tax cuts are left
in place and no spending cuts are enacted the economy will grow by 4.4
percent next year and add 2.3 million full-time equivalent jobs. This
would be the highest rate of growth since the late 1990s [4].
Now, it’s a stone-cold fact that the Democrats are willing to gut social
welfare. Listen to New York Times chief political correspondent Matt Bai
[5]: “Mr. Obama, during his ‘grand bargain’ negotiations with the House
speaker, John A. Boehner, in the summer of 2011, had already signed off
on painful cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.” Bai says there
was “near unanimity” among Obama’s advisers and Harry Reid and Nancy
Pelosi said “they would get behind it.” Paul Krugman’s assessment [6] is
harsher, saying Obama was “willing to sign on to … draconian cuts in key
social programs.”
During the summer of 2011 the Obama White House and the
Republican House played chicken over raising the federal debt ceiling. Bai
says the two sides were haggling over the amount of cuts, not the question
of bleeding retirement programs. Obama was willing to sacrifice $1
trillion in Medicare cuts over two decades, $110 billion in short-term
Medicaid cuts, and acquiesced to “changing the Social Security formula so
that benefits would grow at a slower rate.”
Mind you, the Budget Control Act Obama and Boehner eventually
inked not only put the fiscal cliff in place, it cut spending for a second
time in 2011. Over the next decade this will chop $900 billion in “nondefense
discretionary spending.” [7] This is wonk-speak for social
programs, which will shrink to pre-1962 levels by 2021. Simply put,
Washington already plans to roll back the Great Society – even before the
fiscal cliff is reached.
But wasn’t Obama at the mercy of a Tea Party Congress threatening
default unless he forked over $2 trillion in spending cuts? That’s what Bai
argued [8] last April: “Not only was [Obama] bent on avoiding a

catastrophic debt default, but he needed to get out from under the debt
issue, to demonstrate that he cared about reducing deficits before public
concerns about government spending, stoked by rhetoric on the right,
overwhelmed his presidency.”
There are more things wrong about this than a penguin in the desert.
Allowing Republicans to use “economic blackmail” [9] only emboldens
them. The fiscal cliff is the third time the right is using mafia tactics –
“Nice country you got here. Shame if something were to happen to it” – as
Krugman describes it [10]. The only way to call the right’s bluff is to
allow the economy to go wobbly so Wall Street, the GOP’s masters, will
bring their attack dogs to heel.
Also, notice that Bai thinks allowing a default is unthinkable, but
pilfering food, medicine and money from more than 100 million
Americans [11] is perfectly fine. As for Bai’s contention that “public
concerns about government spending” stoked by the right would
overwhelm Obama’s presidency, it’s utter bullshit.
Take a look at this site [12], which covers 25 polls on public priorities
going back to June 2010. When pollsters list options, which skew
responses, the economy and jobs poll close to 50 percent as the top
priority, trouncing the deficit, which averages in the low twenties. The
latter figure, incidentally, is similar to the percentage of voters in the 2010
mid-term elections who said they supported the Tea Party. In six polls, the
response was open-ended, which better reflects what the public thinks.
Economy and jobs still notched 49 percent on average. The deficit and
national debt was barely a blip, averaging 4 percent.
No matter how the data is sliced then, the deficit is an inside-the-
Beltway obsession that at most inflames right-wing firebrands who are
never going to support the Democrats.
Nate Silver crunched the numbers on the debt deal in July 2011 – if
there’s only one lesson from this election, it’s that Silver’s numbercrunching
is unparalleled – and found House Republicans to be
“extremely conservative on fiscal matters and … significantly out of step
with the public as a whole.” As for the mix of spending cuts and tax
increases Obama put on the table, it was “quite close to, or perhaps even a

little to the right of, what the average Republican voter wants, let alone the
average American.” Read More
Environment:
Mega-quarry victory shows people have the power
By
David Suzuki with contributions from David Suzuki Foundation
Communications Specialist Jode Roberts.
Photo Credit: Jose Diaz

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens
can change the world.” These words, attributed to anthropologist Margaret
Mead, capture the power that we, as citizens, have to overcome seemingly
insurmountable odds to protect the environment.
It just happened in Ontario, where Highland Companies announced it
was withdrawing its plan to build a massive open-pit limestone quarry in
the rural countryside north of Toronto. The controversial proposal to blast
a billion tonnes of limestone from beneath some of the finest farmland in
North America initially drew the ire of a handful of local farmers and
residents who faced overwhelming odds to stop it.
Rules governing aggregate mining in the province are weak, provide
little protection against large projects and too often sacrifice prime
agricultural land and nature to industry. And it’s easy to understand why
cash-strapped, rural-based municipalities would be tempted to accept
industrial projects, with their promise of local employment and an
improved tax base.
Making the battle against the quarry more challenging was the fact
that Highland was backed by a Boston hedge fund, the Baupost Group,
with assets of more than $25 billion. It was also represented by Hill and
Knowlton, the high-priced PR firm that infamously worked with Big
Tobacco to convince smokers that cigarettes don’t cause cancer.
Citizens rallied, though, and showed that the real issue was the
protection of local food lands and drinking water, things of importance
well beyond the borders of their community. Opponents of the megaquarry
reached out to people who may not have considered how they
would be affected if a company succeeded in destroying thousands of
acres of fertile fields close to a large urban centre like Toronto.
Groups like the North Dufferin Agricultural and Community
Taskforce successfully brought the battle to the city, through tireless
outreach at events like farmers markets. Thousands of “Stop the Mega
Quarry” signs sprouted in yards in towns and cities across southern
Ontario.
In 2011, renowned chef Michael Stadtlander, from the nearby
community of Singhampton, produced Foodstock with the Canadian Chefs

Congress and local farmers. The protest event drew 28,000 people to a
farm field a few hundred metres from where the quarry would be built.
This past October, that celebration of local food and protest was
replicated in Toronto, when the David Suzuki Foundation (which had
earlier provided scientific research and submissions for the regulatory
process) and the Canadian Chefs’ Congress hosted Soupstock. More than
200 top chefs from Canada and the U.S. prepared gourmet soup from
donated local ingredients for more than 40,000 supporters. They sent a
strong message to the company that urbanites stand in solidarity with the
farmers of Melancthon to oppose the mega-quarry.
Soupstock showed the movement was gaining momentum, but no one
predicted that Highland would raise the white flag a month later.
People power won! And it wasn’t the first time it’s happened in
Canada.
In 1984, I heard about a controversial plan to log the pristine Stein
Valley, the last untouched watershed in the southern Coast Mountains,
northeast of Vancouver. The battle to protect the Stein began with a small
group of conservationists and scientists but soon grew to include tens of
thousands. In 1988, the B.C. government placed a moratorium on logging.
A few years later the area was protected through the creation of the 1,060square-kilometre
Stein Valley Nlaka’pamux Heritage Park.\Similar
grassroots victories have helped stop logging on Haida Gwaii, prevented
giant dams from being built in northern Quebec and halted highway
projects that, if established, would have wiped-out historical
neighbourhoods in downtown Toronto and Vancouver.
Canada’s political and corporate leaders should take note.
Controversial megaprojects like the Northern Gateway Pipeline are being
met with increasing criticism and public opposition.
Although we’ll celebrate this victory over the mega-quarry, the
Ontario government must also seize this call to overhaul its policies for
aggregate mining that allowed the proposal to be considered in the first
place. No community should have to fight so hard to ensure that prime
farmland and valuable nature aren’t sacrificed to the interests of big
business.

But for now, we can savour success. Together, tens of thousands of
people accomplished something that only months ago seemed impossible:
stopping the mega-quarry.
Fracking:
Nuclear Fallout: Ongoing Tragedy/Disaster In Japan:
EnergyNews:
10:34 AM EST on December 1st, 2012 | One comment
WHO: Fukushima workers had radiation dose over 10 sieverts in
their thyroids
08:48 AM EST on December 1st, 2012 | 2 comments
Radio: Tests indicate Minnesota pelicans exposed to contamination in
Gulf — Concern for what it could do to population — Dispersant
chemicals in 1/3 of birds — Official: ‘Really interesting’ results
coming in
06:44 AM EST on December 1st, 2012 | 4 comments
TV: More oil reported at BP disaster site — ‘Persistent’ and
‘recurring’ sheen (VIDEO)
04:12 PM EST on November 30th, 2012 | 36 comments
New flyover footage of giant Louisiana sinkhole shows growth, oil
(VIDEO)
03:20 PM EST on November 30th, 2012 | 5 comments
Officials: ‘Large chunks’ were knocked off salt dome when cavern
collapsed — Giant sinkhole now getting deeper
12:57 PM EST on November 30th, 2012 | 13 comments

More Fukushima Footage Released: “We have confirmed a worst
situation — Water containing extremely high levels of radiation
flowing into sea” (VIDEO)
Ongoing Gulf of Mexico Oil Disaster:
Oil Spill Attorney Stuart Smith’s Blog:
Black Liberation/Civil Rights:
Labor:
Economy:
World:
Genocide in Silence
An Interview with Kambale Musavuli on the Congo
by
Daniel Kovalik
The most catastrophic human rights disaster since World War II has
been unfolding in the Democratic Republic of The Congo (”DRC” or
“Congo”) since the mid-1990’s. While the numbers of the victims are hard
to know for certain, there are credible reports of at least 5 million and
quite possibly over 6 million civilians killed, half of whom were children
under the age of 5 years old. Despite these staggering numbers, the Congo
has received little attention in the press, and certainly much less than the
human rights situations in countries like The Sudan (Darfur), the former
Yugoslavia, Libya and now Syria – that is, countries in which the U.S.
wished to intervene — though the tragedy in the Congo is much worse
than in any of those countries.
Given the current situation with rebels taking the city of Goma in the
eastern Congo, I decided to talk to Kambale Musavuli, one of the most
important human rights advocates for the Congo. Mr. Musavuli is from the

capital of the Congo, Kinshasa, and is now the spokesperson for the
Washington-based Friends of the Congo, and currently resides in D.C. He
has written and spoken extensively on the situation facing the people of
the Congo, including in the Washington Post, and in the powerful movie,
“Crisis in the Congo,” which can be found at friendsofthecongo.org. He
kindly spoke to me yesterday by phone, and excerpts of that interview
follow:
DK: Ok, wonderful. So, my first question would be just to cut to the
chase, well, first of all, what is happening right now in the Congo that we
should be concerned about?
KM: A militia group that has taken over cities in the eastern part of
Congo. And this militia group is calling itself M23 . . . The Congo’s
neighbors, Rwanda and Uganda, are supporting and arming the rebel
groups inside of the Congo. . . . And that situation that has caused over
650,000 people to be displaced, scores have been killed, there are
summary executions, women are being raped by the rebel militia groups,
and all of this accompanied by a most deafening silence by the
world governments to bring an end to this crisis.
DK: What role does the United States have in all of this?
KM: Well, as I mentioned, there are conflicts and the rebel groups,
the militia group actually I would rather call them militia. The militia
group they are supported by Rwanda for the most part, and Uganda is also
supporting them. Rwanda and Uganda are United States allies. They
receive our taxpayers’ money, their leadership is trained by our military
and they operate as trained police of the world for the United States. So
you see Ugandan soldiers in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia. And you
see Rwanda soldiers in Sudan, especially Darfur, and in Haiti. Doing
these peacekeeping operations where the U.S. has interests, and because of
that, the United States is mighty silent despite the evidence that exists.
And the evidence that even the US government recognizes — remember
the United States has withheld $200,000 to the Rwanda
government because of the support to rebel groups in Congo, which means
they have evidence of what Rwanda is doing in the Congo. Yet, we are
still providing them [Rwanda] with $240 million of our tax monies. So

the US is playing the very negative role in continuing to support nations
that are supporting, training, arming, and equipping the rebels in the
Congo and at the United Nations even playing a bigger role in being an
obstacle to peace in the Congo. By that I mean Susan Rice, the
United Nations Ambassador from the US, has blocked the reports
according to many. Let me go back, so it is clear what I am saying. Susan
Rice, the US Ambassador to the UN, according to many diplomats, has
blocked the release of the reports; there were two UN reports that were
supposed to be published, and the first one was supposed to come out in
June. Diplomats from the Security Council have shared with the media
and different contacts in New York that she single-handedly was blocking
the report from being published and wanted to give Rwanda an
opportunity to respond to the UN report documenting involvement in
supporting rebel groups in the Congo. The second report …
DK: Have you seen those reports?
KM: Both of them have been released.
DK: OK.
KM: But they are released because, what actually took place is that
the people who were working on the report even under pressure from the
United States, they leaked the report to the press.
DK: OK.
KM: Because the press gets it and the press, specifically Reuters,
was publishing excerpts from the report. [See,http://www.reuters.com/
article/2012/10/17/us-congo-democratic-rwanda-ugandaidUSBRE89F1RQ20121017]
The columnist even said, “how come this
report is not being published?” So it was impossible for the Security
Council not to publish the content of the report because there were already
eyes which have seen what was in the report. Same thing happened to the
second one, but the second one was just published about 10 days ago, last
week, and before the report was published, the UN was to put forward the
resolution to condemn Rwanda for supporting rebel groups. We have
been getting information that Rwanda’s name was taken off the resolution,
so the resolution is only saying that any external support to rebels, to the
M23 militia group, should be stopped, pretty much not naming who is

supporting the rebels. So seeing that, what we are letting Americans know
is your government is complicit in the displacement of 650,000 people
in the Congo. Scores of people killed because they [the U.S. officials]
choose to . . . cover for these allies in Africa to the detriment of human
rights of people living in The Congo.
DK: Now, Susan Rice is one of those, how would you say it, she
believes in this R2P, this right, or this “responsibility to protect” doctrine.
KM: Yet in R2P there is no “C”. That’s what we’ve been saying.
We say that in R2P there is no “C”; this means there is no “C” for Congo.
According to US policy, this means that The Congo is not to be protected.
The evidence is overwhelming. You don’t even have to read the
newspaper to find out what is happening. You can actually talk to
Congolese, walk on the ground in the areas where the militia group is.
But, and we know that the US government is aware of how bad
it’s happening. They are denying the report from the United Nations. The
head of the UN mission to the Congo, Roger Meece, is an American. He
is in contact. We have attaches there. What is happening in the Congo is
visible. But the responsibility to protect has not been activated for the
Congo, so why I have to ask. Why, what is the right of the United States
to talk about the issue of Syria, when we know what is happening in the
Congo, and we know the perpetrators, and the perpetrators are backed by
our allies, and that’s the discussion that needs to happen as they push for
R2P and we see that this does not apply to the Congo.
They are very aware of the situation — the UN mission, the US
government, all the way up to the White House and the National Security
Council, they are very aware of the situation. And I’m using the evidence
that the US government withdrew $200,000 to Rwanda for a military
academy. They did so because they had evidence that Rwanda
was supporting rebel groups. So I’m using their own information about
their knowledge of what is happening, and yet they’re not taking action.
This is complicity. If you are aware, just as we took action to end the
Holocaust in Europe, if we know in the Congo millions have died from,
estimates take the number to over 6 million, and half of them are children
under the age of 5, and we remain silent when we know what is

happening, we are really complicit. And in a very tangible way
because we are supporting the two oppressive regimes in Rwanda and
Uganda, and in turn these nations are using the support that we are giving
them to create, fabricate militia groups which are committing war crimes
and crimes against humanity. And when one has the proper evidence,
there should be outrage. I am not appealing to the government. The
appeal is to the American people, the people that I meet every day in the
streets, with whom I share what is happening in the Congo. They ask me,
“What can I do to help?” . . . So I’m appealing to them, I’m letting them
know your government is complicit in the killing of the people in the
Congo through its support of Rwanda and Uganda who have been
implicated in the massacre in the Congo by numerous respectable
organizations such as Human Rights Watch, a United Nations group of
experts. If you want to help me, hold your government accountable for
supporting oppressive regimes in Africa. That would mean in this case
stop supporting Rwanda and Uganda militarily. Stop supporting
oppressive regimes in Rwanda and Uganda. That will go a long way for
peace in the Congo. Read More
Robert Fisk: A historic triumph: Palestine is recognised as a state by
the UN and democracies in Europe - though not by America.
Will David Cameron stand with them?
Peace at any price is a non-starter. So too is peace at Mr Netanyahu’s
price

So I no longer have to put ‘Palestine’ in quotation marks? Just
Palestine. Back to the Ottoman fiefdom of Palestine, the British Mandate
Palestine and now the fulfilment – if ever it be so – of the UN’s 1947
divided Palestine exactly 65 years ago to the day, Arab Palestine, which
old King Abdullah – Hussain’s Dad – annexed to Jordan. If, of course,
there’s enough room for Arab Palestine today amid the cobweb of Jewish
colonies and colonial roads already built – and still being built, with total
impunity and against all international law – across the ‘viable’ state of
Palestine which Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara and the rest of our masters
always speak so blithely.
But that’s not the point just now, either for the Palestinians or the
Israelis. What both the Palestinians and the Israeli Left need is a
substantial Western European vote for a Palestine non-member state at the
UN. We already knew that France was on board, along with Luxembourg
and Spain. Francois Hollande had done a wobbly in recent weeks,
creeping back from his pre-election pledge to “support the international
recognition of the Palestinian state”, telling Benjamin Netanyahu a month
ago that he wanted “negotiations without preconditions” between Israelis
and Palestinians rather than a UN vote. But the Quai d’Orsay obviously
thought better.
For the Israeli Left, this was essential. They have been frightened that
if solely the world’s non-democracies and dictatorships vote for Palestine,
Mr Netanyahu would be able to say that since Mahmoud Abbas could only
get his vote with the help of extremists, despots and potentates, then Israel
would be able to claim a moral victory and brush off the whole affair. But
if the real democracies of Europe will have supported Palestine, it will be
a catastrophe for Netanyahu. Of course, until tonight – if this deadline is
met - we don’t know how Germany will vote. And we all know why.
Needless to say, the Palestinians were already celebrating 24 hours
before the scheduled vote. Celebrations are a dodgy business in the Middle
East. Hopes raised are always dashed. But the vote should also be a blow
to the United States, whose president has followed his usual dog-like
obeisance to Mr Netanyahu, pleading vainly to the world that they should
follow the Israeli-American line: direct ‘peace’ negotiations with the

Palestinians – even as Israeli colony building proceeds at a colossal rate –
rather than any form of recognition. After Israel handed Hamas the
enormous political recognition of a ceasefire last week, Mr Abbas will
need an infinitely more important recognition for all of Palestine in the
early hours of tomorrow morning.
The Israelis had circulated the world’s foreign ministries with their
hope that Palestine would not be recognised at the UN, and privately
suggested all kinds of nastiness if their wish was not granted: massive new
colony-building, an end to all negotiations, further withholding of money
legally owed to the Palestinian Authority. But in truth, these are Likud and
right-wing threats rather than Israeli threats. The country as a whole – and
especially the Left, however weak – does not appear to share this far-right
view of the world. Peace at any price is a non-starter. But peace at Mr
Netanyahu’s price is not attractive to every Israeli.
And by tonight, we should also have discovered whether David
Cameron has abided by what appear to be the feelings of millions of
British people – a UN vote for Palestine – or whether he preferred the
status of Lord Blair, the true servant of the White House, and of Israel.
Health, Education, Science and Welfare:
Daily News Digest December 1, 2012
UN votes to upgrade Palestinian status
Yes 138 No 9 Abstain 41
The countries which voted NO are:
Israel, United States, Canada, Czech Republic,
Panama, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru and Palau
Australia was one of 41 countries which abstained.
The result in favour was overwhelming.

Professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of
Law and author of Palestine, Palestinians, and International Law, Francis
A. Boyle said today: “This can be the start of a ‘Legal Intifadah’ by
Palestine against Israel:
4. 1. “Palestine can join the Rome Statute for the International
Criminal Court and file a Complaint with the ICC against the
illegal settlements and settlers, who are committing war crimes;
5. “Palestine can join the Statute for the International Court of
Justice, sue Israel at the World Court, and break the illegal siege
of Gaza;
6. Palestine can join the Law of the Sea Convention and get its fair
share of the enormous gas fields lying off the coast of Gaza, thus
becoming economically self-sufficient;
7. “Palestine can become a High Contracting Party to the Four
Geneva Conventions [this deals with the laws of war];
8. “Palestine can join the International Civil Aviation Organization
and gain sovereign, legal control over its own airspace;
9. “Palestine can join the International Telecommunications Union
and gain sovereign legal control over its own airwaves, phone
lines, bandwidths.”
Latest report from Aljazeera - 29 November 2012
The United Nations General Assembly has voted in favour of
upgrading the Palestinians status to that of a non-member observer state.

The vote was taken at a meeting of the body in New York, with 138
countries voting in favour of the upgrade. Nine countries voted against it,
and 41 others abstained.
Thousands of Palestinians gathered across the West Bank and Gaza to
demonstrate their support for the fresh attempt by President Mahmoud
Abbas to secure the status.
Palestinians were previously listed as a UN observer “entity” with no
voting rights.
The new status is an indirect recognition of the Palestinians’ claims
on statehood in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza Strip. It allows
them to join a number of UN agencies, as well as the International
Criminal Court (ICC).
Abbas addressed the General Assembly ahead of the vote.
Abbas referenced the recent Israeli assault on Gaza, saying that
Palestine had come to the UN at time when they were “still tending to
[their] wounds and still burying [their] beloved martyrs of children,
women and men who have fallen victim to the latest Israeli aggression”.
“What permits the Israeli government to blatantly continue with its
aggressive policies and the perpetration of war crimes stems from its
conviction that it is above the law and that it has immunity from
accountability and consequences [...] The moment has arrived for the
world to say clearly: Enough of aggression, settlements and occupation.”
He said that the Palestinians were not seeking to “delegitimise”
Israel, but to affirm the legitimacy of Palestine as a state. This recognition
of an upgraded UN status was the beginning of “a final serious attempt to
achieve peace”, he said, stressing that the Palestinian Liberation
Organisation was seeking to “breathe new life” into negotiations.
“The General Assembly is called upon today to issue a birth
certificate of the reality of the State of Palestine.”
Ron Prosor, the Israeli ambassador to the UN, also addressed the
assembly before the vote, stressing that Israel was “prepared to live in
peace with a Palestinian state”, but that Israeli concerns about its security
must be a part of any negotiated dialogue.

He said that none of Israel’s national security interests appeared in
the resolution, and that this was why his country could not support it.
“For as long as President Abbas prefers symbolism over reality, as
long as he prefers to travel to New York for UN resolutions rather than
travel to Jerusalem for dialogue, any hope of peace will be out of reach.”
He called the resolution “one-sided” and passing it would show that
“the international community is willing to turn a blind eye to peace
agreements”.
Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, meanwhile,
condemned Abbas’ statements as being “hostile and poisonous”. In a
statement released after the speech, Netanyahu said that “these are not the
words of a man who wants peace”.
The latest bid comes a year after the Palestinian leader first
approached the UN to seek full state membership but the request stalled at
the Security Council due to opposition from the veto-wielding US.
In a statement issued ahead of the vote, Abbas said that the
Palestinians “remain committed to the two-state solution and our hand
remains extended in peace”.
Rival factions celebrate
Ahead of Thursday’s vote, thousands of Palestinians from rival
factions celebrated in the streets of the West Bank. In a departure from
previous opposition, Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip, said it would not
interfere with the bid, and its supporters joined some of the celebrations.
The Palestinians say Israeli settlement-building on occupied West
Bank land has hampered prospects for a bilateral statehood deal.
Disagreement over the issue led to negotiations stalling in 2010.
Hanan Ashrawi, a Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) executive
committee member, described the bid as a “last-ditch effort”.
“We believe the two-state solution is in jeopardy because of [Israeli]
actions. We want to ensure that the world is still committed to the
establishment of a sovereign viable democratic free Palestinian state to
interact as an equal,” she said on Wednesday. Read More
Quote of the Day:

After 2005, The Energy Companies Began ‘Fracking’ The United
States — Stating That Fracking Was ‘Safe’. If Facking Is ‘Safe’, Why
Was Fracking Made Exempt From The Safe DrinkingWater Act in
2005?!:
. . . Fracking is exempt from key federal environmental
regulations.
The federal Energy Policy Act of 2005 contained a
provision that has come to be known as the “Halliburton
Loophole,” an exemption for gas drilling and extraction
from requirements in the underground injection control
(UIC) program of the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA).
Other exemptions are also present in the Clean Air Act and
Clean Water Act. . . .
— Fracking: Laws and Loopholes
Image of the Day:
Videos of the Day:
Defending the indefensible: “Obama can do no wrong”
Drones — Joe Klein defends the indiscriminate murder of children on
MSNBC. A better example of psychopathic thinking would be hard to
find. Good for Joe Scarborough to state this moral point so clearly on
television For more War Crimes: videos, click here
Glenn Greenwald on
The Next 4 Years with Obama & Journalism Tips
End Wall Street’s Wars!
Occupy Wall Street!
Occupy Wall Street is the Only Organization
That Identifies The Enemy —
The 1% That Own and Control The Wealth!

1960s The Realist — One Nation Under God/1%
(Unlike The Trade Union Misleaders
Nor The Misleaders Of The Oppressed
Who Strive To Be In ‘Partnership’ With The 1%)
1960s The Realist — One Nation Under God/1%
(Unlike The Trade Union Misleaders
Nor The Misleaders Of The Oppressed
Who Strive To Be In ‘Partnership’ With The 1%)
Occupy Wall Street — ‘We Are The 99%’
The resistance continues at Liberty Square:
Occupy Sandy: A Human Response to the
New Realities of Climate Change [FILM]
Tags: climate, disaster relief, hurricane, nyc, occupy sandy, video
If you missed last night’s guerilla premiere of academy-award
nominated director Josh Fox’s new film “Occupy Sandy: A Human
Response to the New Realities of Climate Change,” you can watch it in its
entirety above.
What Action can you take RIGHT NOW?
Join the Occupy Sandy efforts by visiting the website to plug in!
OccupySandy.org

Together we can recover from Hurricane Exxon Mobil
Call Cuomo and tell him to BAN Drilling and Fracking for Natural Gas in
NY State! NO MORE FOSSIL FUEL DEVELOPMENT!
(518) 474-8390 or mail:
The Honorable Andrew M. Cuomo
Governor of New York State
NYS State Capitol Building
Albany, NY 12224
tweet at him here: @NYGovCuomo
Call Bloomberg and urge him to protect public health by halting
construction of the Spectra Pipeline! Tell him the not to allow the
Rockaway Pipeline to be built! The People want to RebuildGreen. Call
NYCHA, show up to pressure board meeting at NYCHA HQ on Dec 5th,
10am, 250 broadway (interoccupy.net/blog/november-27th-first-postsandy-housing-action-citywide-call-from-nycha-residents/)
Today, 4pm, Times Square: Support Striking Fast Food Workers
Tags: fast food forward, fastfoodfwd, labor, living wage, nyc

Today across NYC, fast food workers walked off the job and
joined festive picket lines, calling for a living wage, fair working
conditions, and a union. You can find out more, including how to
support their efforts, at Fastfoodforward.org. For live updates on
Twitter, use #fastfoodfwd. Also, today at 4pm, join us for a rally
in Times Square to show support in person! via 99 Pickets
Brigade
From Walmart to fast food, low wage workers are standing up
and demanding more!
Today, NYC fast food workers from dozens of stores, including
McDonald’s, Burger King, Domino’s, KFC, Taco Bell, Wendy’s and Papa
John’s are walking out, in a historic one day strike for a fair unionization
process, decent wages, reasonable scheduling, paid sick days and an end
to retaliation.

Organizers from New York Communities for Change have been
meeting with workers for months, and now workers are standing up and
demanding respect at their jobs.
Put these multi-billion dollar corportations on notice: these
workers do not stand alone.
Thursday, Nov. 29th
4:00 pm Rally at the Times Square McDonald’s
220 West 42nd Street (between 7th & 8th Ave.)
Friday, Nov. 30th
Show solidarity with striking workers as they go back to for work.
Collective action is protected under U.S. labor law, and the workers are
asking the community to be on-site at fast food locations around the city to
support them as they return to the job.
Sign up for a shift on Friday by RSVPing to gfries@unitedny.org.
Two shifts are available: 5:30am-8:30am and 9:30am-12:30pm. Meet-up
locations are all over the city, including Manhattan (310 W. 43rd St.) and
Brooklyn (2-4 Nevins).
Save the Date: Thursday, Dec. 6

U.S.:
Three Quarters Of All US Nuclear Reactors Leaking Radiation
By
McCullough
BRACEVILLE, Ill. – Radioactive tritium has leaked from threequarters
of U.S. commercial nuclear power sites, often into groundwater
from corroded, buried piping, an Associated Press investigation shows.
The number and severity of the leaks has been escalating, even as
federal regulators extend the licenses of more and more reactors across the
nation.
Tritium, which is a radioactive form of hydrogen, has leaked from at
least 48 of 65 sites, according to U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission
records reviewed as part of the AP’s yearlong examination of safety issues
at aging nuclear power plants. Leaks from at least 37 of those facilities

contained concentrations exceeding the federal drinking water standard —
sometimes at hundreds of times the limit.
At three sites — two in Illinois and one in Minnesota — leaks have
contaminated drinking wells of nearby homes, the records show, but not at
levels violating the drinking water standard. At a fourth site, in New
Jersey, tritium has leaked into an aquifer and a discharge canal feeding
picturesque Barnegat Bay off the Atlantic Ocean.
Previously, the AP reported that regulators and industry have
weakened safety standards for decades to keep the nation’s commercial
nuclear reactors operating within the rules. While NRC officials and plant
operators argue that safety margins can be eased without peril, critics say
these accommodations are inching the reactors closer to an accident.
Nuclear generated power is perfectly safe….unless, of course,
something goes wrong. And the government’s lame response will be to
raise acceptable limits.
Environment:
Fracking:

Nuclear Fallout: Ongoing Tragedy/Disaster In Japan:
EnergyNews:
11:22 AM EST on November 30th, 2012 | Leave a comment
People from Tokyo area report thyroid cysts and nodules — Japanese
doctors laughing at patients (VIDEO)
08:32 AM EST on November 30th, 2012 | 17 comments
Mutilated dolphins found along Gulf Coast from Louisiana to Florida
— Missing body parts, bullet wounds, screwdriver (VIDEOS)
04:07 AM EST on November 30th, 2012 | 6 comments
Report: FBI taking over sabotage case at California nuclear plant —
Criminal charges possible — Employee: I’m not completely surprised,
people do crazy things — Expert: Similar incidents around US
01:48 AM EST on November 30th, 2012 | 10 comments
Conservative Radio Host: I was all about nuclear power, but now… I
believe this is one of greatest threats facing humanity — They’re not
going to kill me and my family (VIDEO)
07:26 PM EST on November 29th, 2012 | 21 comments
Again: Tepco edits image of Fukushima Unit 4 — Still attempting to
hide something at bottom of reactor building (PHOTO)
05:30 PM EST on November 29th, 2012 | 11 comments
Fish kill in area of giant sinkhole was blamed on Hurricane
02:52 PM EST on November 29th, 2012 | 6 comments
CNN: U.S. had plans to nuke moon — Hiroshima-sized bomb
considered — Carl Sagan worked on project (VIDEO)
01:41 PM EST on November 29th, 2012 | 7 comments

1,200-foot sinkhole opens up in Ohio: Pipeline exposed and hanging
— Gas company working to fix problem — “I’ve never seen anything
like this… very unusual situation” (PHOTOS)
12:49 PM EST on November 29th, 2012 | 5 comments
AP: Leak at NJ’s Oyster Creek nuclear plant — Gundersen: “A
larger issue than the NRC and Exelon is letting on”
Ongoing Gulf of Mexico Oil Disaster:
Oil Spill Attorney Stuart Smith’s Blog:
Environmental Must-Reads – November 30, 2012
Fracked Beef: It’s What’s for Dinner?
From a tainted water supply in Wyoming to toxic air pollution in
Colorado, there are concerns aplenty about the public health effects of
hydraulic fracturing. While many communities investigate what we drink
and breathe for answers, one new report from The Nation and the Food &
Environment Reporting Network highlights a key yet overlooked
complication—fracking chemicals could affect our food.
Revised ‘fracking’ regulations released in NY
ALBANY, N.Y. — New York environmental officials have released a
revised set of proposed regulations for hydraulic fracturing natural gas and
will begin taking public comment on them in December.
Livestock falling ill in fracking regions
In the midst of the domestic energy boom, livestock on farms near
oil- and gas-drilling operations nationwide have been quietly falling sick
and dying. While scientists have yet to isolate cause and effect, many
suspect chemicals used in drilling and hydrofracking (or “fracking”)
operations are poisoning animals through the air, water or soil.
Protecting Michigan Citizens and Communities from the
Hazards of Fracking

We are glad to see that Governor Snyder, in his recent message
Ensuring our Future: Energy and the Environment, acknowledges the
significant public concerns around the impacts of hydraulic fracturing (or
“fracking”) for natural gas and oil on the environment and public health.
We agree with Governor Snyder that scientific analysis should drive the
treatment of hydraulic fracturing in Michigan, and look forward to
working with the state and the University of Michigan in their evaluation
of fracking.
Frack Secrets by Thousands Keep U.S. Clueless on Wells
A subsidiary of Nabors Industries Ltd. (NBR) pumped a mixture of
chemicals identified only as “EXP- F0173-11” into a half-dozen oil wells
in rural Karnes County, Texas, in July.
Few people outside Nabors, the largest onshore drilling contractor by
revenue, know exactly what’s in that blend. This much is clear: One
ingredient, an unidentified solvent, can cause damage to the kidney and
liver, according to safety information about the product that Michigan
state regulators have on file.
On Our Radar: New York State Delays Fracking Rules
The administration of Gov. Andrew Cuomo extended the deadline for
its pending regulations on hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a controversial
technique used to extract natural gas from shale formations. The governor
said the delay would allow time for completion of a state-authorized
health study. [WNYC]
Fracking Our Food Supply
In a Brooklyn winery on a sultry July evening, an elegant crowd sips
rosé and nibbles trout plucked from the gin-clear streams of upstate New
York. The diners are here, with their checkbooks, to support a group called
Chefs for the Marcellus, which works to protect the foodshed upon which
hundreds of regional farm-to-fork restaurants depend. The foodshed is
coincident with the Marcellus Shale, a geologic formation that arcs
northeast from West Virginia through Pennsylvania and into New York
State. As everyone invited here knows, the region is both agriculturally
and energy rich, with vast quantities of natural gas sequestered deep below
its fertile fields and forests.

Say No to Fracking
Elizabeth Royte’s major new investigative report in The Nation gives
voice to the urgent cries of farmers and ranchers raising alarms about the
risks of fracking to human health. As her reporting makes clear, the early
evidence from heavily fracked regions suggests that drilling and fracking
operations represent a serious threat to the nation’s food security.
‘Gasland’ filmmaker to speak at local anti-fracking event
Josh Fox, the creator of Gasland, the documentary film that helped
catalyze national activism against hydraulic fracturing, will be the guest
speaker at an anti-fracking fundraiser in Boulder on Dec. 2.
Oil Companies May Shift from Recycled Water to Saltwater
A drilling project already consumes 6 million gallons of drinkable
water that are just disposed into underground wells. This huge waste of
potable water put pressure to oil companies in cutting down fresh water by
replacing it with recycled water.
Rubber Stamping the Exporting of Fracked Gas Poses
Significant Risk to Human Health and the Environment
Today Sierra Club released a new report highlighting the significant
risks of exporting liquefied natural gas (LNG), and calling on the U.S.
Department of Energy (DOE) to take a careful look at the dangerous
effects of increased fracking on Americans’ water, air, land and health.
Faculty Speaks Out Against Fracking Training Center at
Community College of Philadelphia
Faculty of the Community College of Philadelphia (CCP) were
“shocked and appalled” to learn that the college was collaborating with the
shale gas industry in establishing an “Energy Training Center.”
Frac-Sand Mining:
Is British Columbia the Gas Industry’s Next Wisconsin?
Stikine Gold Mining Corp. will provide unconventional gas
producers with British Columbian silica sand for fracking operations if the
Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations approves the
company’s open pit frac-sand mine project application. According to the
Ministry’s website the project, located 90 kilometers north of Prince

George, is in pre-application status with the Environmental Assessment
Office.
Senator Landrieu: “…we have to be a lot smarter about where we
drill and how we drill”
Yesterday, Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA) spoke at a policy briefing
on natural gas and energy issues. The oil and gas industry is a large
presence in her state and a big contributor to the Louisiana economy. She
mentioned that Louisiana is one of the largest producers of natural gas,
while also being a big consumer. Senator Landrieu spoke about what she
sees as the benefits of natural gas, including the boon to manufacturers,
more energy security, and local revenues. She also spoke of the need for
more energy efficiency measures in transportation and buildings.
Obama signs Staten Island Rep Michael Grimm’s
pipeline bill into law
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — Democratic President Barack Obama on
Tuesday signed into law a bill sponsored by GOP Rep. Michael Grimm to
allow the construction of a natural gas pipeline that the congressman said
will create close to 300 jobs and bring clean energy to New York City.
Houston Residents Worry about Burden of Keystone XL
Pipeline on Local Neighborhood
“We are part of America. We are a major city in America, but we do
not need to be the sacrifice zone for the nation,” states Houston resident
Juan Parras (pictured).
Parras joins a growing contingent of Houston residents concerned
about the overburdening of minority and low-income communities in the
area with the ill effects of energy production.
Activists Arrested, Launch Hunger Strike in Protest of Keystone
XL Pipeline
Longtime Gulf Coast activists Diane Wilson and Bob Lindsey Jr.,
locked their necks to oil tanker trucks destined for Valero’s Houston
Refinery in solidarity with Tar Sands Blockade’s protests of
TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline. Valero Energy Corp. is among the
largest investors in TransCanada’s toxic tar sands pipeline that will
terminate near the community of Manchester, located in the shadow of

Valero’s refinery. Not only did Wilson and Lindsey blockaded the Valero
refinery, the two lifelong friends have vowed to begin a sustained hunger
strike demanding that Valero divest from Keystone XL and invest that
money into the health and well-being of the people of Manchester.
Stake in Keystone Pipeline Is Potential Conflict for Susan Rice
Should Susan E. Rice, the United Nations ambassador, be nominated
for Secretary of State, one issue likely to arise during confirmation
hearings, aside from the lethal attack on the American Mission in
Benghazi, Libya, is her large stock holdings in TransCanada, the company
seeking an American permit to build the proposed the Keystone XL
pipeline.
Mike Bishop, Texas Landowner,
Sues State Agency Over Keystone Pipeline
A Texas landowner is asking a court to overturn a permit granted by a
state agency to a Canadian company to build a pipeline meant to
eventually connect to a larger cross-border project.
New Documentary Highlights Ecological and Cultural Impacts of
Enbridge’s Proposed Northern Gateway Pipeline
British Columbian filmmakers Nicolas Teichrob and Anthony
Bonello are leading a grassroots campaign to protect BC’s waters from
Enbridge’s proposed Northern Gateway Pipeline. In an effort to bring
awareness to all sides of the pipeline battle, the duo documented the tanker
route destined to carry diluted tar sands bitumen along rugged coastal
shores if the pipeline is approved.
BP Caught Off Guard
When U.S. authorities said they were temporarily suspending BP
BP.LN +0.38% from new contracts with the Federal government due to a
“lack of business integrity” demonstrated by the Deepwater Horizon oil
spill, there were strong indications that BP had been caught off guard.
Detecting oil spills
AN OIL WELL suffers a blowout, causing a fatal explosion on an offshore
platform. Oil spews into the water at an estimated rate of 53,000 barrels a
day. Company executives and government officials blame each other as
they try to find a way to stop the flow of oil. The Deepwater Horizon

disaster of 2010 was a tragedy in many respects, but in one detail, BP—
the operator of the well, which is now facing a bill of as much as $50
billion—was lucky. At least it could find the oil.
Oil spills likely in the Arctic, admits Shell executive
Oil will probably be spilt by companies drilling in the Arctic, Royal
Dutch Shell’s executive in charge of the company’s Alaskan operations
has admitted.
Gulf oil lease sale bids $134 million
WASHINGTON — The federal government took in nearly $134
million in high bids Wednesday during a Gulf of Mexico oil-and-gas lease
sale that did not include any bids from BP.
Louisiana lining up major restoration projects to build with BP oil
spill fine money
Louisiana officials are scrambling to prepare plans for dozens of
coastal restoration projects in anticipation of the arrival of billions of
dollars in BP oil spill fine money, the state Coastal Protection and
Restoration Authority was told Wednesday.
Coast Guard approves underwater inspection of BP well,
Deepwater Horizon wreckage for oil
The Coast Guard announced Thursday that it has approved another
investigation of the BP Macondo wellhead and nearby wreckage of the
Deepwater Horizon drillship to determine if they may be the source of a
recurring sheen at the site. The plan by BP and Transocean, owner of the
ship, was submitted by the companies on Nov. 9, after the sheen was
reported to the Coast Guard’s National Response Center by Bonny
Schumaker, founder of the California-based non-profit On Wings of Care,
after she flew over the area.
Plan OKd to look into sheen near 2010 blowout site
NEW ORLEANS (AP) – The Coast Guard says it has approved plans
to investigate another oil sheen spotted near the site of BP’s 2010
Deepwater Horizon disaster.
Contract Ban, Civil Litigation Add To BP’s Woes
BP has been banned from seeking new contracts with the federal
government. It’s the latest blow, with the company set to appear in a New

Orleans federal court next month to work out its guilty pleas to criminal
charges in connection with the Deepwater Horizon explosion. The oil
giant has agreed to pay a record $4.5 billion in a criminal settlement with
the U.S. Justice Department. But far more money could be at stake in civil
litigation stemming from the oil disaster.
USA: Coast Guard Approves Deepwater Horizon Investigation
Investigation of the BP Macondo wellhead and Deepwater Horizon
drillship has been approved by the Coast Guard, to determine whether they
are the source of the sheen at the site in Gulf of Mexico.
BP’s Dispersant Allowed Oil To Penetrate Beaches More Deeply
In an attempt to deal with the 206 million gallons of light crude oil
erupting from the Deepwater Horizon blowout in 2010 BP unleashed
about 2.6 million gallons of Corexit dispersants (Corexit 9500A and
Corexit EC9527) in surface waters and at the wellhead on the seafloor.
From the beginning the wisdom of that decision was questioned. I wrote
extensively about those concerns in BP’s Deep Secrets.
BP engineer says government records
should exonerate him in spill case
NEW ORLEANS – When federal prosecutors investigated BP for
lying about how much oil was coming out of its ruptured Gulf well in
April 2010, the first person they charged with obstruction was BP engineer
Kurt Mix.
U.S. scientists search for lessons in Fukushima
to improve nuclear safety
American scientists met in Tokyo this week to study the Fukushima
nuclear crisis in hopes of finding lessons to improve the safety of U.S.
atomic power reactors.
Lack of Humility and Fear of Public Misunderstandings
Led to Fukushima Accident
TOKYO—Speaking to a visiting committee of American experts, a
Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) official conceded that the root
causes of the Fukushima nuclear disaster stemmed from a lack of humility
in anticipating the full effects of natural disasters and a reluctance to share
internal concerns about nuclear power risks with regulators and the public.

Company officials feared such openness would “make people worry about
the safety” of nuclear power, he said.
Fukushima governor accepts surveys
for radioactive waste storage facility
Despite local objections, Fukushima Governor Yuhei Sato on Nov. 28
made the “agonizing” decision to allow surveys at 12 candidate sites for
interim storage of soil contaminated with radiation from the nuclear
accident.
Taking iodine before fallout hits is key: NRC
The Nuclear Regulation Authority released Friday the results of a
computer simulation on how the use of iodine tablets by people around
nuclear plants can protect their thyroids from excessive exposure to
radiation in the event of a severe catastrophe.
Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant Weekly Review
A bumped valve accidentally increased the amount of water injected
into unit 3 at Fukushima Daiichi this week, while Tokyo Electric Power
Co. announced its response center will be used as a formal reconstruction
headquarters.
It’s about time: Feds bar BP from new contracts
I rarely get a chance to say this, but the feds are on a roll when it
comes to the matter of BP. Although I’ve been quite critical over the last
two-and-a-half years of the government’s response to the Deepwater
Horizon spill, there’s little to criticize in its recent aggressive posture
toward the oil giant and its wanton recklessness that killed 11 workers and
caused massive environmental damage throughout the Gulf of Mexico.
Just before Thanksgiving, the U.S. Justice Department announced a
$4.5 billion criminal penalty against BP — the largest ever — and, more
importantly, held out the prospect of collecting a much larger civil penalty
for BP’s gross negligence in the matter, monies that would not undo the
damage but could go along way toward the job of environmental
restoration. One lingering criticism was the question of why BP had not
been barred from going after lucrative federal contracts.
Now, that is exactly what has happened:

The Environmental Protection Agency has suspended BP
from bidding on any new federal contracts, including drilling
leases, as a result of the company’s conduct during the
Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster in 2010 that led to 11 deaths
and the largest U.S. offshore spill.
The temporary ban came early on the day the Interior
Department held a sale of leases on 20 million acres of offshore
oil and gas prospects in the western Gulf of Mexico that the
department said attracted $133 million in bids. People familiar
with the process said the company did not submit any bids.
The EPA said the suspension will not affect BP’s current
contracts or leases, which are crucial to the company. The
London-based oil giant is the largest leaseholder in the deepwater
Gulf of Mexico, with more than 700 leases, and it is the
gulf’s largest producer of oil and gas, from more than 20 fields
there. It won 40 new leases in June.
In 2011, BP was also the largest supplier of fuel to the U.S.
military, with contracts worth about $1.35 billion.
This is good news on several front. For one thing, it’s been
hypocritical for one hand of the federal government to be accusing BP of
serious criminal misconduct while the other hand continues to dole out
considerable dollars. More importantly, this yet again sends BP the
message that the feds are getting serious and thus puts pressure to agree to
a civil settlement on terms dictated by Washington.
We’ve already seen the impact of this decision in what I would have
to call a good news/bad news development:
WASHINGTON — The federal government took in nearly
$134 million in high bids Wednesday during a Gulf of Mexico
oil-and-gas lease sale that did not include any bids from BP.
Adding:
Wednesday’s lease sale offered over 20 million acres and
attracted $133.7 million in high bids for 116 tracts covering
652,522 acres on the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf offshore of

Texas. A total of 13 offshore energy companies submitted 131
bids.
Chevron had the highest single-tract bid of $17.2 million,
Beaudreau said.
“The Gulf of Mexico is and will continue to be one of the
bedrocks of the United States’ all-of-the-above energy
portfolio,” Beaudreau said.
The bad news here is that the government continues to race forward
with these deepwater leases for big rigs that are very much like the
Deepwater Horizon. The accident in 2010 didn’t only expose a BP
problem, but it raised broader safety questions about the safety — and
wisdom — of drilling in one mile of water in a natural paradise like the
Gulf once was. The continued quest to meet our addiction to fossil fuels
with risky drilling raises the risk of another disaster — regardless of who’s
logo is on the side of the rig.
To read coverage from the Washington Post on the federal ban of BP
contracts, please go to: http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/
economy/epa-bans-bp-from-new-federal-contracts/2012/11/28/
cb186b20-396e-11e2-8a97-363b0f9a0ab3_story.html?hpid=z4
To follow coverage fron the Advocate of new oil and gas leases in the
Gulf of Mexico, please read: http://theadvocate.com/news/4550620-123/
gulf-oil-lease-sale-bids
Black Liberation/Civil Rights:
Labor:
Tunisia: Armed forces clash with striking workers and youth
by
Hamid Alizadeh

Thousands filled the highway between Siliana and Tunis today the
march symbolically walked 10 km out of the town in direction of
Tunis.
Clashes between protesters and the armed forces continue as the
Tunisian town of Siliana enters the fourth day of a general strike led by the
UGTT trade union federation. The clashes which have led to more than
300 injured have become a focal point for people all over Tunisia.
Today, like the previous days, thousands of people took to the streets.
The protesters are demanding the removal of Siliana governor Ahmed
Zine Mahjoubi and that something be done about the high poverty and
unemployment that exists in the region. They are also calling for the
release of 14 people arrested 20 months ago and still being held without
trial.
On Thursday the country’s National Guard deployed armoured
vehicles as protesters erected makeshift barricades in the streets. On
Friday morning the streets of the town were littered with stones and the
charred remains of barricades which had been put up in the previous days.
Residents also set up roadblocks on the highway leading to Tunis.
As one of the participants told AP, “I am a higher educated person
and I still do not have a job; I’ve been unemployed since 2009. I am

participating in this march to push the authorities to find solutions to our
social problems and to penalize those who shot and blinded protesters.”
The police and army units have been using live ammunition in the
form of buckshot that has left 15 people at risk of going blind. Explaining
the use of violence by security forces, Interior Minister Ali Laarayed
stated that events in Siliana are the product of violent attacks by citizens
and that the security forces were obliged to resort to using buckshot in
order to defend themselves.
France 24 reporter, David Thomson, who was one of the many
journalists who were also attacked, had a different account of the events.
According to him, “There was a disproportionate use of force by security
forces. I see no necessity to resort to firearms, especially if protesters did
not use Molotov cocktails or tear gas. These young people are just calling
to improve their situations and to be employed.”
Thursday people also poured in from neighbouring towns to join the
march and there were also demonstrations in solidarity with Siliana
throughout the province – including attacks on police posts and
headquarters of the Ennahda Party. Today a delegation was also expected
from Sidi Bouzid – the city in which the first protests of the Arab
revolution took place.
According to witnesses in Gaafour, north of Siliana, protesters hurled
rocks at police and army trucks heading to the town, forcing some of them
to turn back. In the town of Kesra protesters reportedly attacked and
torched a security post and two police vehicles. Also, offices of the ruling
Islamist party Ennahda in the town were attacked and documents burned.
Solidarity protests also took place in other cities, such as Mahdia,
Sfax, and Tunis. In Tunis hundreds of people have gathered for several
days in front of the Ministry of Interior in the centre of Tunis screaming
‘dégage.’ (”Leave!” a slogan initially used against the overthrown dictator
Ben Ali at the beginning of the Tunisian Revolution).
One of the main concerns raised by the protesters was the chronic
mismanagement of development funds in the poor farming region,
especially the unemployment schemes. Siliana, which lies 75 miles south
of the capital Tunis on the edge of the Sahara desert, saw investment

plummet by 44.5 percent from January to October on a year-over-year
basis. Unemployment in the region stands above 50 percent and the
situation has only worsened since the revolution of 2011.
On Thursday, Interim Prime Minister Hamadi Jebali gave a live
televised message to the protesters where he refused to dismiss Siliana’s
governor and at the same time called for the people of region to be
“realistic” and not expect that the economic crisis will be solved
immediately. “Do you think there will be investment in regions with
violence?” he asked. “We are all losers.”
It is clear that not all Tunisians are “losers”. There is a stark contrast
between the luxurious lives of the Tunisian capitalists and the Ennahda
politicians and the poor unemployed youth of the middle regions of the
country. But at the same time Jebali is reflecting a certain truth in the
sense that Tunisian capitalism cannot afford to raise living standards and
solve the question of unemployment. The way forward is to break with the
system and expropriate the commanding heights of the economy which are
still in the hands of the old rulers of the country.
Jebali also dismissed recent calls for a second revolution and claimed
that a democratically elected body is legitimate and must not be
overthrown by a revolution. He also added: “What do you mean when you
say ‘dégage’ to the governor? You mean that you want the government in
power to leave; saying ‘dégage’ to the government is chaos.”
To this an activist replied on Twitter: “Mr. Jebali that “dégage” is
what brought you to power and took you out of prisons, and if it wasn’t for
that dégage you wouldn’t be giving this speech right now Mr.
‘Legitimate’.”
It is clear that the Tunisian bourgeoisie is manoeuvring to betray the
revolution, but the Tunisian masses are confident in their own powers.
They can remember who brought down Ben Ali and they understand that
they can do it again.
Economy:
Free Trade and Economic Imperialism

Economic Progress Toward Ecological Suicide
by
Rob Urie
The modern dilemma is to understand just how unreasonable the
reasoning classes are in both thought and action. Political ‘progressives’ were
behind efforts to obliterate Native American cultures through forced
assimilation and acculturation for the purported ‘benefit’ of their victims.
Likewise, progressives continued and expanded institutional racism in ways
that persist to this day through promotion of bogus social ‘metrics’ like IQ
(Intelligence Quotient), the racialization of ‘crime,’ and through formal
strategies of forced cultural and economic assimilation via ‘education.’
Likewise, political ‘liberals’ have been the primary facilitators of the
ascendancy of the radical right in both academia and politics. In academia
liberals have functioned much like progressives in an earlier age, producing
‘reasoned’ rationales in their economics for economic imperialism. And in
politics liberals play three essential roles: to insist political differences are
matters of degree to be ‘worked through’ rather than the irreconcilable
differences of competing interests; to derail meaningful political action until a
‘better time’ in the future that never arrives, and to claim the political center no
matter how far the rightward march has taken it.
In the dimensions of economics and the environment ‘reason,’ both
academic and political, is producing unreasonable outcomes for most people.
The ‘managed’ neo-liberalism of academic economics pays lip service to the
looming catastrophe of global warming that its own radical capitalism
produces. If economic ‘growth,’ as measured by traditional metrics like GDP
(Gross Domestic Product), is desirable and it represents the output of
industrial capitalism contributing to global warming, as it does, then
‘solutions’ to global warming are simply attempts to clean up the catastrophes
and dislocations that capitalists and their academic apologists create. But as is
becoming increasingly obvious, these catastrophes never get cleaned up.
For example, about a decade after NAFTA (North American Free Trade
Agreement) was passed in the early 1990s cheap American corn flooded
Mexico and destroyed the peasant agriculture that had sustained millions of
peasant farmers for generations. Their livelihoods destroyed, those ‘freed’

from the land went to work either in Maquiladoras, factories established by
multi-national corporations in Mexico to exploit cheap labor, or migrated to
the U.S. in search of work.
Most of the corn exported to Mexico is ‘genetically modified’ and cross
breeds (pollinates) with domestic strains to render the traditional food supply
suspect. Subsequent U.S. policy diverted U.S. corn from the food supply to
ethanol production causing its price to rise just as Wall Street began
‘financializing’ agriculture through dedicated investment in agricultural
‘commodities’ funds. The result was that people whose indigenous economies
had been destroyed by cheap agricultural imports instantly faced starvation as
the imported food that consumed most of their incomes became unaffordable.
In the U.S. the ‘financial crisis’ and global recession caused by deregulated
finance was then exploited by cynical and / or ignorant politicians to
scapegoat for domestic economic travails the displaced peasant farmers from
Mexico who had come to the U.S. looking for work. The circumstances of
these economic refugees thus diminished, many now feed the detention and
deportation ‘industries’ as new and ever more intrusive ‘free-trade’ agreements
are negotiated in secret and to the exclusion of those affected by them.
The destruction of a sustainable indigenous economy and its (forced)
replacement with unsustainable industrial agriculture and newly ‘freed’ labor
adds to the environmental catastrophe of global warming and the human
catastrophes of economic disenfranchisement and dislocation. The ‘efficient’
model of industrial agriculture in use in the U.S. is a major contributor to
greenhouses gases through heavy use of fossil fuels, poses an unknown health
risk through genetic modification of crops, replaces localized economic risk
with systemic economic instability and forces millions of people into labor
‘competition’ in rigged labor ‘markets.’
The issues of nominal importance to political progressives and liberals
are here—potentially catastrophic global warming, a global food supply
forcibly compromised through untested modification of its fundamental
constituents, reliance on fossil fuels, economic inequality and the destruction
of sustainable economic practices. Liberal economist Paul Krugman and
President Barack Obama are both vocal proponents of the ‘free-trade’ policies
behind these outcomes while also proposing that ‘something should be done’

to clean up the rolling catastrophes that their economics produce. But why if
radical capitalism is ‘reasonable’ would progressive and liberal cohorts find
the outcomes unreasonable– why flail about for ineffective solutions rather
than stopping these problems before they arise?
The reason why from the perspective of Western academics is that actual
economic history has been replaced with the canard that people in their
‘natural’ state have no economic existence. Neo-liberals permanently point to
the economic circumstances that capitalism (and other forms of economic
imperialism) create, such as that of the Mexican farmers displaced by radically
destructive U.S. agricultural practices via ‘free-trade’ predation, as the ‘natural
state’ of humanity that capitalists then claim that capitalism is the solution to.
If it weren’t for the Mequiladoras and the work they provide, goes the
argument; those poor, ignorant people would be naked, rolling in the dirt, too
stupid to feed themselves. And the role of a ‘good’ liberal / progressive is to
provide them with a job making genetically modified death burgers for less
than subsistence wages.
Lest this seem an exaggeration, spend a moment with what Western
economists use to ‘prove’ their case of capitalism’s benefits. The
aforementioned GDP measures the monetary value of the goods and services
produced within a country. Economic production outside of tradable goods
and services, such as household labor, child rearing non-monetary mutual aid
—the economic fundamentals of any healthy society, make no contribution to
GDP. Likewise, the destruction of real economic value from the effects of
global warming—the devastation of the coastal Northeastern U.S. by
‘Superstorm’ Sandy, provides a positive effect as measured by GDP due to the
rebuilding of destroyed property that it entails. Depending on the ratio of
current to past economic production, global warming could provide the largest
boost to global GDP in modern history as it ends human existence.
Likewise, when economists use relative GDP growth rates as evidence in
policy debates, what is left out is the distribution of the benefits of economic
production that GDP measures. The argument that while Barack Obama has
occupied the White House U.S. GDP growth has outpaced that of austerityburdened
Europe leaves out that the resultant income gains have gone almost
entirely to the richest one percent of the population. Cheering for GDP growth

in this circumstance is pure trickle down economics—if the rich get richer
they can hire more of us to mow their grass and polish the silverware on the
yacht. (Low paying service jobs constitute the near entirety of Mr. Obama’s
employment ‘boom’). The austerity of failed capitalism forced on all but the
very wealthy is being used to prove that austerity for the very wealthy doesn’t
‘work.’ The Princeton-Harvard-Wall Street- Washington circle of contrived
misdirection is complete.
Economic imperialism has a long history—colonialism, neo-colonialism
and modern corporate extraction through new and historical colonial channels,
which contemporary mainstream economists appear to have no knowledge of.
This is more likely than not why trade economists can write about ‘free-trade’
without tying actual trade relations to imperial history. Progressives and
liberals hope to moderate the worst effects of capitalism without admitting
their historical roles as facilitators of imperial predation. And contemporary
liberals are proponents of the most radical forms of capitalism ever conceived
—just consider which self-described liberals win the ‘Nobel’ prize in
economics (it is actually a banker awarded prize having nothing to do with a
choice of the Nobel Committee) and then take an actual look at their trade
economics.
Looming global environmental catastrophe renders the last several
hundred years of Western economic theory dubious, if not outright suicidal.
Economic ‘progress’ that increases dependence on unsustainable economic
practices produces catastrophe in increasing proportion to the benefits that
even proponents claim will result. But the great thinkers behind modern trade
theory appear to have no knowledge of this paradox. For their own benefit, as
progressives would have it, why not ‘free’ the economics departments at
Princeton and Harvard to compete with displaced peasant farmers serving
genetically modified death burgers for $7 per hour? GDP would certainly rise
as a result.
Rob Urie is an artist and political economist in New York.
The Protectionists, The Free Traders and the Working Class
By
Karl Marx

The protectionists have never protected small industry, handicraft
proper. Have Dr. List and his school in Germany by any chance demanded
protective tariffs for the small linen industry, for hand loom-weaving, for
handicraft production? No, when they demanded protective tariffs they did
so only in order to oust handicraft production with machines and
patriarchal industry with modern industry. In a word, they wish to extend
the dominion of the bourgeoisie, and in particular of the big industrial
capitalists. They went so far as to proclaim aloud the decline and fall of
small industry and the petty bourgeoisie, of small farming and the small
peasants, as a sad but inevitable and, as far as the industrial development
of Germany is concerned, necessary occurrence.
Besides the school of Dr. list there exists in Germany, the land of
schools, yet another school, which demands not merely a system of
protective tariffs, but a system of import prohibition proper. The leader of
this school, Herr v. Gülich, has written a very scholarly history of industry
and trade, which has also been translated into French. Herr v. Gülich is a
sincere philanthropist; he is in earnest with regard to protecting handicraft
production and national labour. Well now! What did he do? He began by
refuting Dr. List, proved that in List’s system the welfare of the working
class is only a sham and a pretence, a ringing piece of hollow rhetoric, and
then, for his part, he made the following proposals:
1. To prohibit the importation of foreign manufactured products;
2. to place very heavy import duties on raw materials originating
abroad, like cotton, silk etc., etc., in order to protect wool and
nationally produced linen;
3. likewise on colonial products, in order to replace sugar, coffee,
indigo, cochineal, valuable timbers etc., etc., with national
products;
4. to place high taxes on nationally produced machines, in order to
protect handicraft production against the machine.
It is evident that Herr v. Gülich is a man who accepts the system with
all its consequences. And what does this lead to? Not merely preventing
the entry of foreign industrial products, but also hindering the progress of
national industry.

Herr List and Herr v. Gülich form the limits between which the
system moves. If it wishes to protect industrial progress, then it at once
sacrifices handicraft production, labour; if it wishes to protect labour, then
industrial progress is sacrificed.
Let us return to the protectionists proper, who do not share the
illusions of Herr v. Gülich.
If they speak consciously and openly to the working class, then
they summarize their philanthropy in the following words: It is better
to be exploited by one’s fellow-countrymen than by foreigners.
I do not think the working class will be for ever satisfied with this
solution, which, it must be confessed, is indeed very patriotic, but
nonetheless a little too ascetic and spiritual for people whose only
occupation consists in the production of riches, of material wealth.
But the protectionists will say: “So when all is said and done we at
least preserve the present state of society. Good or bad, we guarantee the
labourer work for his hands, and prevent his being thrown on to the street
by foreign competition.” I shall not dispute this statement, I accept it. The
preservation, the conservation of the present state of affairs is accordingly
the best result the protectionists can achieve in the most favourable
circumstances. Good, but the problem for the working class is not to
preserve the present state of affairs, but to transform it into its opposite.
The protectionists have one last refuge. They say that their system
makes no claim to be a means of social reform, but that it is nonetheless
necessary to begin with social reforms in one’s own country, before one
embarks on economic reforms internationally. After the protective system
has been at first reactionary, then conservative, it finally becomes
conservative-progressive. It will suffice to point out the contradiction
lurking in this theory, which at first sight appears to have something
seductive, practical and rational to it. A strange contradiction! The system
of protective tariffs places in the hands of the capital of one country the
weapons which enable it to defy the capital of other countries; it increases
the strength of this capital in opposition to foreign capital, and at the same
time it deludes itself that the very same means will make that same capital
small and weak in opposition to the working class. In the last analysis that

would mean appealing to the philanthropy of capital, as though capital as
such could be a philanthropist. In general, social reforms can never be
brought about by the weakness of the strong; they must and will be called
to life by the strength of the weak.
Incidentally, we have no need to detain ourselves with this matter.
From the moment the protectionists concede that social reforms have no
place in their system and are not a result of it, and that they form a special
question — from this moment on they have already abandoned the social
question. I shall accordingly leave the protectionists aside and speak of
Free Trade in its relationship to the condition of the working class.
World:
Health, Education, Science and Welfare: