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“If a man has an apartment stacked to the ceiling with newspapers we call him crazy. If a woman has a trailer house full of cats we call her nuts. But when people pathologically hoard so much cash that they impoverish the entire nation, we put them on the cover of Fortune magazine and pretend that they are role models.”
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 | Opinion: The Anti-Empire Report - February 2012 |
 by William Blum, www.killinghope.org
The Lord High Almighty Pooh-Bah of threats. The Grand Ayatollah of nuclear menace.
As we all know only too well, the United States and Israel would hate to see Iran possessing nuclear weapons. Being "the only nuclear power in the Middle East" is a great card for Israel to have in its hand. But — in the real, non-propaganda world — is USrael actually fearful of an attack from a nuclear-armed Iran? In case you've forgotten ...
In 2007, in a closed discussion, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said that in her opinion "Iranian nuclear weapons do not pose an existential threat to Israel." She "also criticized the exaggerated use that [Israeli] Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is making of the issue of the Iranian bomb, claiming that he is attempting to rally the public around him by playing on its most basic fears." [1]
2009: "A senior Israeli official in Washington" asserted that "Iran would be unlikely to use its missiles in an attack [against Israel] because of the certainty of retaliation." [2]
In 2010 the Sunday Times of London (January 10) reported that Brigadier-General Uzi Eilam, war hero, pillar of the Israeli defense establishment, and former director-general of Israel's Atomic Energy Commission, "believes it will probably take Iran seven years to make nuclear weapons."
Early last month, US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told a television audience: "Are they [Iran] trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No, but we know that they're trying to develop a nuclear capability." [3] ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Saturday, February 04 @ 20:12:14 EST (14 reads)
(Read More... | 18974 bytes more | Comments? | Opinion | Score: 0)
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| Health News: US: Number of Aging Prisoners Soaring |
Corrections Officials Ill-Prepared to Run Geriatric Facilities
From: Human Rights Watch, hrw.org
(New York) – Aging men and women are the most rapidly growing group in US prisons, and prison officials are hard-pressed to provide them appropriate housing and medical care, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. Because of their higher rates of illness and impairments, older prisoners incur medical costs that are three to nine times as high as those for younger prisoners.
The 104-page report, “Old Behind Bars: The Aging Prison Population in the United States,” includes new data Human Rights Watch developed from a variety of federal and state sources that document dramatic increases in the number of older US prisoners.
Human Rights Watch found that the number of sentenced state and federal prisoners age 65 or older grew at 94 times the rate of the overall prison population between 2007 and 2010. The number of sentenced prisoners age 55 or older grew at six times the rate of the overall prison population between 1995 and 2010. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Friday, February 03 @ 20:35:25 EST (15 reads)
(Read More... | 7780 bytes more | Comments? | Health News | Score: 0)
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| History/Culture: This Is What I Know |
by: William Rivers Pitt, Truthout | Op-Ed
"A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way."
- Mark Twain
A bottle of whiskey, a shot glass, and an article to write.
I'm not going to lie and say this particular combination hasn't come together before on my desk, but it has been rare enough to be considered special, and here we are. You see, something struck me out of the clear blue a while ago: the very first article of mine Truthout ever published happened somewhere in early 2002, so I did a little digging with the help of my Facebook friends, and hot damn, there it was: "Hell to Pay," published on January 17, 2002.
I missed marking my ten-year anniversary with this extraordinary organization by two weeks and two days. I suppose, by normal standards, the fun of it is ruined to a degree: you celebrate your birthday on your birthday, your anniversary on your anniversary, so running this up the flagpole as a special day two weeks late is kind of a bummer, but I really don't care all that much.
I was busy.
Ten years, a bottle of whiskey, a shot glass, and an article to write. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Thursday, February 02 @ 17:52:56 EST (20 reads)
(Read More... | 11678 bytes more | Comments? | History/Culture | Score: 0)
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| Health News: Humanize or Euthanize |
 by Rosemarie Jackowski
A conversation that is under the radar might surprise some... the 'exit strategy' conversation.
The health care topic seems to be getting a lot of attention these days. In Vermont the Death with Dignity Bill was to be considered by the Legislature during the current session. It is now reported that the Bill will be put on hold. Physician assisted suicide is a controversial topic. Moral, philosophical, and scientific considerations are included in the debate.
In complete disclosure - I believe that all life is sacred. That puts me on one side of the argument - sort of. I also believe that if pain is so intense that it does not respond to any drug, compassion might be the preferred stance. Moral conundrums always make life complicated. To gain some clarity on this question, I recently had a conversation with a doctor. I chose a doctor who is highly respected for her humanitarianism. My question was whether or not pain could be so horrific that nothing would relieve it. I suggested putting the patient in a coma. The doctor told me intractable pain is something that can happen, and then she quickly expanded her answer. She said it is extremely rare. That is reassuring. It seems to me, a patient in pain should be given anything that works - morphine drips, pot, absinthe - anything if it can relieve intense pain. When nothing works, we have to rethink the moral dilemma. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Thursday, February 02 @ 17:38:43 EST (20 reads)
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| Opinion: Destroy Our Future |
I'm forming my very own Super PAC.
By Donald Kaul
Newt Gingrich has a Super PAC called "Winning Our Future." Mitt Romney's is called "Restore Our Future."
I know, technically Super PACs don't belong to candidates. But only innocents like Boy Scouts and the Supreme Court believe that. In the real world, this new kind of political action committee, created in the wake of a 2010 Supreme Court ruling, is a powerful campaign weapon.
Super PACs may raise unlimited sums of money from corporations, unions, associations, and individuals. They then may spend unlimited sums to overtly advocate for or against specific political candidates as they wish.
Unlike traditional PACs, Super PACs are technically prohibited from donating money directly to political candidates. In practice, they serve a specific candidate, who directs them with winks and nudges.
Gingrich's Super PAC apparently thinks the way to win the future is to say nasty things about Mitt Romney. Romney's Super PAC, meanwhile, is attempting to restore the future by saying nasty things about Gingrich.
It's called free speech. If you don't believe me, ask the aforementioned Supreme Court justices, a majority of whom don't seem drunk. But they sure vote that way. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Wednesday, February 01 @ 21:56:59 EST (25 reads)
(Read More... | 4947 bytes more | Comments? | Opinion | Score: 0)
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| Peace News: Sat. 2/4 - Nat'l Day of Action: No War on Iran! Protest in Boston |
Action initiated by: the Occupy Boston Action for Peace Working Group
Sat., Feb. 4 National Day of Action:
No Sanctions, No War Against Iran!
Boston Protest: Sat. 2/4 at 1:00PM
Gather at Park St., March to the Israeli Consulate & Copley Square
Click here to download a leaflet and important fact sheet issued by the ANSWER Coalition
The U.S.-led campaign to bring about regime change is escalating. The EuropeanUnion announced a complete embargo of Iranian oil. Taken together with the other economic sanctions imposed by the U.S. and its allies, this is a campaign meant to impose maximum suffering on the people of Iran by destabilizing and destroying the country’s economy. At the same time, covert action inside the country, including assassinations, sabotage and drone over flights, is intensifying. U.S. military bases surround Iran, while nuclear-armed U.S. aircraft carriers and Trident submarines sit right off its cost. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Monday, January 30 @ 19:30:45 EST (33 reads)
(Read More... | 3417 bytes more | Comments? | Peace News | Score: 0)
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| Opinion: Staring at Empty Pages |
 by: William Rivers Pitt, Truthout | Op-Ed
Staring at empty pages,
Centered 'round the same old plot,
Staring at empty pages,
Flowing along the ages...
-Traffic
The Occupy Wall Street movement should spend today doing a nice little victory lap, because it seemed for all the world like its members were ghost-writers on President Obama's State of theUnion speechwriting staff. Though he never directly mentioned the movement itself, Mr. Obama spent a great deal of time on Tuesday night underscoring many of Occupy's most central themes: income inequality, tax fairness, and the need to rein in the illegal and immoral behavior of the nation's largest financial institutions.
Talk is cheap, of course; despite all of Mr. Obama's high-flown rhetoric, his administration is reportedly prepared to cut a disgracefully easy deal with the five banks most directly responsible for the financial meltdown, giving his so-pretty words a hollow ring: ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Saturday, January 28 @ 21:00:38 EST (42 reads)
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| Action Alert: A Call for Nationwide Response to Entergy Nuclear's Attack |
 on the People of Vermont
Entergy Nuclear of Lousiana is giving those of us who care about our futures a golden opportunity to exercise our power. This multi-national corporation is a poster boy for the callous pursuit of profit at the expense of health, safety and even state sovereignty.
Consider the current pox that Entergy has brought down upon the people of Vermont. In their negotiations to get permission to buy Vermont Yankee, corporate officials agreed to abide by future state statutes, and promised to forgo the right to sue the state over any statutes that might be contrary to Entergy's interests. But they were lying through their teeth, have sued the state, and have just won the first round in a federal court suit that reverses the state legislature's refusal to extend Vermont Yankee's operating license. The judge has empowered only the Public Service Board to decide the reactor's fate.
In the last few years, Entergy has lied repeatedly in testimony at the Vermont State House, from topics as varied as the aforementioned promise, to the non-existence of underground pipes that turned out to not only exist but also to be leaking tritium. Entergy lobbyists have been a noxious presence in our citizen legislature's House, cajoling and threatening but not succeeding in having their way. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Friday, January 27 @ 20:12:42 EST (36 reads)
(Read More... | 3980 bytes more | Comments? | Action Alert | Score: 0)
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| Occupy: Foreclosure Auction: Occupied! |
press release from: occupywallst.org
BREAKING: One hundred Brooklyn community members and Occupiers peacefully disrupt foreclosure auction. Approximately 35 people arrested for nonviolent civil disobedience, singing in courtroom
Brooklyn, NY — This afternoon approximately one hundred people peacefully and powerfully disrupted a foreclosure auction by bursting into song. At 3pm the foreclosure auctioneer attempted to start bidding on homes that had been foreclosed upon. When the bidding started, the courtroom burst into song:
“Mr. Auctioneer
All the people here
Are asking you to stop all the sales right now
We’re going to survive, but we don’t know how”
Video clip: http://yfrog.com/mq9hsz
The National Lawyers Guild estimated that approximately 35 people were arrested. Those arrested continued to sing as they were handcuffed and escorted out of the courtroom. ...
Note: Inside: #OWS Builds Momentum for Spring Resurgence: Launches 5-Week Bus Trip
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Posted by Blue1moon on Thursday, January 26 @ 18:51:11 EST (40 reads)
(Read More... | 4218 bytes more | Comments? | Occupy | Score: 0)
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| Peace News: What Kind of Christianity Is This? |
 By Gary G. Kohls
From time to time, I read about condemnations of religion coming from non-religious groups, especially concerning the all-too-common violence perpetrated in the name of religious gods. Indeed there is plenty to condemn.
Altogether too many religions sects of both major and minor religions, despite verbally professing a desire for peace and justice in the world, are actually pro-war, pro-homicide and pro-violence in practice (or they may be silent on the subject, which is, according to moral theology, the same as being pro-violence).
Obvious examples include those portions of the three major war-justifying religions of the world: fundamentalist Islam, fundamentalist Judaism and fundamentalist Christianity.
I use the term fundamentalist in the sense that the religious person, who ascribes to a fundamentalist point of view, believes, among other dogmatic belief, that their scriptures are inerrant and thus they can find passages in their holy books that justify homicidal violence against their perceived or fingered enemies, while simultaneously ignoring the numerous contradictory passages that forbid violence and homicide and instead prescribe love, hospitality, mercy, forgiveness and reconciliation. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Wednesday, January 25 @ 20:52:44 EST (50 reads)
(Read More... | 13448 bytes more | Comments? | Peace News | Score: 0)
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| Business/Economy: Patients May Die When Doctors Moonlight |
as Big Pharma's "Key Opinion Leaders"
by: Kathleen Sharp, Truthout | News Analysis
As the crimson sun slipped into the gray Pacific Ocean, a multibillion-dollar drug deal took shape. A group of board-certified doctors greeted each other in a private room at a luxury hotel in California. The oncologists were big buyers of an anti-anemia drug called Procrit, sold by Ortho Biotech, a Johnson & Johnson (J&J) division. That Friday evening, the company toasted its top clients and their wives with bottles of Beaujolais, porterhouse steaks and free weekend accommodations.
The event could have been just another "grin and grip" affair, but there was a catch: J&J wanted to pump the sales of its biotech drug to beat its rival Amgen and its anti-anemia drugs. "The idea," as J&J drug rep Dean McClellan later explained, "was to get the docs to increase their Procrit dosage to 40,000 units."
There was just one problem. Regulators had approved a weekly drug dose of 30,000 units, and J&J was prohibited by the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FDAC) from marketing its drugs in unapproved ways. But the doctors could prescribe in any "off-label" manner they wanted. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Tuesday, January 24 @ 22:35:00 EST (51 reads)
(Read More... | 10967 bytes more | Comments? | Business/Economy | Score: 0)
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| Business/Economy: Wealthy Tax Cheats |
The rich don't much like paying taxes when tax rates run high -- or low.
By Sam Pizzigati
Tax systems that heavily tax the rich are asking for trouble — or so the politicians who cater to the 1 percent incessantly argue. The higher the tax rate on high incomes, their argument goes, the greater the incentive the rich have to waste time and energy figuring out ways to pay less.
In 2001 and again in 2003, this convenient excuse helped the Bush White House chop away at the taxes the IRS expects rich people to pay. The government trimmed the tax rate on top tax-bracket income from 39.6 to 35 percent and slashed the rates on capital gains and dividends to 15 percent from 20 and 39.6 percent, respectively.
According to rich-people-friendly right-wing rhetoric, these cuts should have boosted tax compliance.
Instead, tax evasion actually increased, rising to $385 billion in 2006 from $290 billion five years earlier, according to a new IRS study. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Monday, January 23 @ 19:06:06 EST (44 reads)
(Read More... | 4856 bytes more | Comments? | Business/Economy | Score: 0)
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| The News: Beating Up on Chavez |
by Stephen Lendman
Since inaugurated in February 1999, he's faced open US hostility, including by go-along major media scoundrels.
New York Times writer Simon Romero's among them. On January 6, he and William Neuman played both Chavez and Iranian cards headlining, "Increasingly Isolated, Iranian Leader Set to Visit Allies," saying:
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visiting "some of the United States' most ardent critics: Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba and Ecuador."
Chavez "is Mr. Ahmadinejad's most vociferous ally in the region." Central University of Venezuela Professor Elsa Cardozo said his visit gave Chavez a chance to "project his own style and radical message. His core supporters are very radical and he doesn't want to lose them."
Indeed they're radical for social justice. Chavez delivers so they support him. Imagine the difference from America. Poverty's unprecedented. Recent Census data show half US households impoverished or bordering on it. Millions have no jobs and can't find one. Homelessness and hunger keep growing. When need's greatest, austerity drives people to the edge. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Saturday, January 21 @ 22:51:29 EST (48 reads)
(Read More... | 10783 bytes more | Comments? | The News | Score: 0)
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| Occupy: Lynching the Dream |
 by: William Rivers Pitt, Truthout | Op-Ed
This past Monday, this nation celebrated the memory of one of our greatest minds, one of our tallest souls, one of our lost children. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day celebrates the memory of our American Gandhi, a man who dedicated his life - and, in Memphis, gave his life - to the idea that is America: all are created equal.
To be sure, the "Negro" was counted only as 3/5ths of a man in the document that first established the ridiculous experiment that became America, and women were counted not at all, but more than two hundred years have passed since that original ink was put to paper. Ours is a self-improving republic, thanks to the genius of those founding documents. A "Negro" now sits in the highest office of the land, and a woman (who lost the chance to sit in that exalted seat by only an eyelash or two) now commands the most important and influential position in the Federal government, save the one enjoyed by her immediate superior.
Ours is a nation of genius, and of assassins, in equal measure. We reached the moon, cracked the genome code, we feed millions, liberated Europe and Asia from horrific tyranny sixty years ago, and daily export the idea that one should be able to speak their mind without fear of the gulag or the work camp or the executioner's bullet...and yet we do this even as the souls of slaughtered Native Americans, enslaved Africans, and ten times ten thousand Iraqis shriek their condemnation from the blood this nation has spilled in its pursuit of "greatness."
I have been preaching this gospel, in word and deed, for almost twenty years: America is an idea. You can take our cities, our roads, whatever is left of our manufacturing base, our crops, our armies, our weapons, you can take the land itself from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon...you can take it all, and the idea that is America will still remain, as robust and vital as the day it was first conceived. It is the idea that sustains me, the brilliant simplicity of actual equality, and it is the offenses to the idea that I have pledged my life against. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Friday, January 20 @ 23:05:27 EST (53 reads)
(Read More... | 6880 bytes more | Comments? | Occupy | Score: 0)
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| Truth To Power: A Watchbird Is Watching You |
The shortage of real terrorism in recent years has been a challenge for our law enforcers.
By William A. Collins
Careful when
You text your friend;
Spooks are reading
What you send.
The FBI now employs 36,000 people and focuses ever more on dissenters. The CIA, supposedly prohibited from spying domestically, now stations agents in local police departments. Homeland Security may legally confiscate your computer and smart phone at the airport, copy their contents, and eventually give them back. Civilian agencies have drones to follow you.
And that's just the beginning. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Thursday, January 19 @ 18:54:13 EST (42 reads)
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| Old Articles | |
| Wednesday, January 18 | | · | America Wakes Up to the Reality: Inequality Matters |
| Tuesday, January 17 | | · | Censorship in the Green Mountains |
| Monday, January 16 | | · | We're No. 27! |
| Saturday, January 14 | | · | In the Clearing Stands a Boxer: One Man's Fight Against Fracking |
| Friday, January 13 | | · | Climate Change Disaster Has Struck |
| Thursday, January 12 | | · | Obama, Sarkozy and Taxing Wall Street |
| Wednesday, January 11 | | · | Occupy Wall Street Honors the Spirit Of Dr. King With Year’s Largest Action |
| Tuesday, January 10 | | · | South Carolina on my Mind |
| Monday, January 09 | | · | If You Liked the A-Bomb - You'll Love the Smart Grid |
| Sunday, January 08 | | · | Targeting Journalists Covering OWS Protests |
| Saturday, January 07 | | · | Killer Cops Aren't Heroes: |
| Friday, January 06 | | · | WHY THE NDAA NOW? |
| Thursday, January 05 | | · | Alabama's Immigration Aftershock |
| Wednesday, January 04 | | · | Avoiding Another Long War |
| Tuesday, January 03 | | · | The Anti-Empire Report - January 2012 |
| Monday, January 02 | | · | Fumbling Foreign Policy |
| Friday, December 30 | | · | 75 Years Ago Today, the First Occupy |
| · | America's Welfare "Reform" Laws Deepen & Perpetuate Poverty |
| Wednesday, December 28 | | · | Better than Obama: Why the Establishment is Terrified of Ron Paul |
| Tuesday, December 27 | | · | Resolve to Keep Science Experiments off Your Dinner Table in 2012 |
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