Andrew Stephen

There is now every possibility that Obama will be defeated in 2012.

Did I ever say "I told you so" about Barack Obama? If I did, I never meant to and will never do so again. Besides which, it's too soon to deliver a definitive verdict on his presidency, especially when it remains to be seen whether he can achieve the miraculous feat of reforming health care. It grieves me, though, to report that a CNN poll has found that 52 per cent of Americans now think he does not deserve a second term in the White House. Even the hitherto Obamaniacal Washington Post - doubtless picking up on my idea that Hillary Clinton has her eye on a nomination to the US Supreme Court - is mooting that Obama should stand aside for Clinton in 2012, with the understanding that President Clinton II would nominate him for her first vacancy on the court.

Pundits are already predicting a possible Armageddon in the midterm elections this November, in a rerun of 1994 when Republicans took control of both the House and the Senate for the first time in 40 years. These days it is compulsory for every US politician to swear solemnly that this year's elections are the only ones on their minds. The truth, however, is that more and more attention is being paid to an election being held in less than 1,000 days - the next presidential polling day, which will either put Obama back into the White House for a second term or give the country a new, 45th president. Inside the Obama camp, strategising for what insiders are calling "the re-elect" has already begun.

Read more »

Tom Minchin

Christopher Walter Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley [1]

The IPCC Is "Corrupt from top to bottom"

I met Lord Monckton at a luncheon in Melbourne during his recent tour of Australia. I was surprised journalists here had not thought to ask him how his views on climate science had evolved. Why had he become so interested in climate science fraud and its political implications? The Q and A that follows is the result of an interview conducted with him after his return to Scotland on February 15.

I began by asking him what had started him on the road to his YouTube-covered speech exposing the draft Copenhagen treaty:

Minchin: What first made you suspect the "climate change" research of recent decades was skewed?

Monckton: The CEO of a boutique finance house in the City of London asked me to have a look at "global warming" because his analysts could not decide whether it was real or not. I first realized something was wrong when I wanted to find out how to convert radiative forcings in Watts per square meter to temperature in Kelvin, but not once in 1,000 pages did the IPCC's 2001 science assessment report reveal the existence of the Stefan-Boltzmann radiative-transfer equation, without which one cannot even begin the calculation. So obscurantist was the IPCC's methodology for determining climate sensitivity that it took me two years to research the underlying equations, some of which I had to derive for myself. A scientific establishment that was confident of its results would have explained the matter clearly and concisely.

Read more »

Stuart Littlewood

Stuart Littlewood looks at how Israel’s incessant abuse of the Palestinian people’s rights and freedoms, and its trampling on their dreams, lie behind almost every act of suicide bombing.

”Here in the West few of us can fully comprehend what turns a bright, intelligent person into a suicide bomber. But then, we don’t have a jackboot on our throat. We don’t have our front door battered down in the middle of the night by military thugs, our family abducted, our home bulldozed and our land confiscated.”

The suicide bomber wrote that he began to live the day he came to know he was to die. Where did he get this passion to kill? – Mahesh Bhatt

Here in the civilized West we hate suicide bombers with a passion.

We’re taught that the proper way to blow fellow humans to smithereens is to do it from 40,000 feet.

Or failing that, send Apache helicopter gunships at street level firing their laser-guided missiles and 30mm cannon.

Or failing that, turn loose our main battle tanks to shred and vaporize the “enemy”, reduce their homes to rubble with depleted uranium (DU) shells and spread birth defects for generations to come.

Nowadays we don’t even have to leave home to do it. We can train our really brainy chaps to steer armed drones to the target from the comfort of an armchair. B-52s, F-16s, Apaches, drones and tanks – that’s the ticket.

Read more »

Rodrigue Tremblay

“Quand le pillage devient un moyen d'existence pour un groupe d'hommes qui vit au sein de la société, ce groupe finit par créer pour lui-même un système juridique qui autorise le pillage et un code moral qui le glorifie." ~ Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850)

"Certaines autorités hiérarchiques de l'Eglise catholique en Amérique latine utilisent la prière comme d'un somnifère pour endormir les gens. Lorsqu'ils ne peuvent pas nous dominer avec les lois, ils se servent de la prière; et quand ils ne réussissent pas à nous humilier ou à nous dominer par la prière, ils ont alors recours aux fusils." ~ Evo Morales, Président de la Bolivie (13 juillet, 2009)

«La qualité la plus importante pour résister au mal, c'est l'autonomie morale. L'autonomie morale n'est possible que par la réflexion, l'auto-détermination et le courage de ne pas coopérer.» ~ Émmanuel Kant (1724-1804) philosophe allemand

Pourquoi avons-nous le sentiment que les dirigeants politiques mentent la plupart du temps ? Pourquoi l'avidité sans borne semble si répandue dans les officines d'entreprise ? Pourquoi des hommes pervers se lancent-ils dans des guerres d'agression et sont indifférents devant la mort d'innocents ? Pourquoi le matérialisme ambiant semble-t-il régner en maître ? Pourquoi avons-nous le drôle de sentiment que notre société progresse à reculons ? Le fait même que nous devions se poser ces questions est peut-être en soi un signe des temps.

Read more »

Chris Hedges

[Photo: University of California at Berkeley student Natalia Garcia protests on campus during a day of demonstrations, marches, teach-ins and walkouts planned nationwide. Events are being held at most of California’s public colleges and universities to protest budget cuts that have led to canceled classes, faculty furloughs and steep fee hikes.]

There are no constraints left to halt America’s slide into a totalitarian capitalism. Electoral politics are a sham. The media have been debased and defanged by corporate owners. The working class has been impoverished and is now being plunged into profound despair. The legal system has been corrupted to serve corporate interests. Popular institutions, from labor unions to political parties, have been destroyed or emasculated by corporate power. And any form of protest, no matter how tepid, is blocked by an internal security apparatus that is starting to rival that of the East German secret police. The mounting anger and hatred, coursing through the bloodstream of the body politic, make violence and counter-violence inevitable. Brace yourself. The American empire is over. And the descent is going to be horrifying.

Read more »

Stephen Lendman

In her 2002 book titled, "Water Wars," noted author, social activist, and ecologist Vandana Shiva called privatizing water:

-- ecological terrorism;

-- a global water crisis;

-- along with overuse, waste and pollution, it can cause "the most pervasive, most severe, and most invisible dimension of the ecological devastation of the earth;"

-- the road to "an ecological crisis with commercial causes but no market solutions; (they) destroy the earth and aggravate inequality; the solution to an ecological crisis is ecological, and the solution for injustice is democracy;" and

-- water rights are natural and "usufructuary....water can be used but not owned;" it belongs to everyone as part of the commons as an essential "basis of all life....under customary laws, the right to water has been accepted as a natural, social fact."

Read more »

Gareth Porter

For weeks, the U.S. public followed the biggest offensive of the Afghanistan War against what it was told was a "city of 80,000 people" as well as the logistical hub of the Taliban in that part of Helmand. That idea was a central element in the overall impression built up in February that Marja was a major strategic objective, more important than other district centres in Helmand.

It turns out, however, that the picture of Marja presented by military officials and obediently reported by major news media is one of the clearest and most dramatic pieces of misinformation of the entire war, apparently aimed at hyping the offensive as a historic turning point in the conflict.

Marja is not a city or even a real town, but either a few clusters of farmers' homes or a large agricultural area covering much of the southern Helmand River Valley.

"It's not urban at all," an official of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), who asked not to be identified, admitted to IPS Sunday. He called Marja a "rural community". "It's a collection of village farms, with typical family compounds," said the official, adding that the homes are reasonably prosperous by Afghan standards.

Read more »

Nora Barrows-Friedman,
writing from Hebron, occupied West Bank,
Live from Palestine, 8 March 2010

Amir and his mother just hours before he was abducted by
Israeli soldiers. (Nora Barrows-Friedman)

"Today, approximately 350 children are languishing inside Israeli prisons and detention camps, enduring interrogation, torture and indefinite sentences, sometimes without charge. The number fluctuates constantly, but thousands of Palestinian children between the ages of 12 and 16 have moved through the Israeli military judicial system over the past decade since the outbreak of the second Palestinian intifada."

Amir al-Mohtaseb smiled tenderly when I asked him to tell me his favorite color. Sitting in his family's living room last Thursday afternoon, 4 March, in the Old City of Hebron, the ten-year-old boy with freckles and long eyelashes softly replied, "green." He then went on to describe in painful detail his arrest and detention -- and the jailing of his 12-year-old brother Hasan by Israeli occupation soldiers on Sunday, 28 February.

Hours after our interview, at 2am, Israeli soldiers would break into the house, snatch Amir from his bed, threaten his parents with death by gunfire if they tried to protect him, and take him downstairs under the stairwell. They would beat him so badly that he would bleed internally into his abdomen, necessitating overnight hospitalization. In complete shock and distress, Amir would not open his mouth to speak for another day and a half.

Read more »

William Blum

About half the states in the US require that a woman seeking an abortion be told certain things before she can obtain the medical procedure. In South Dakota, for example, until a few months ago, staff was required to tell women: "The abortion will terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being"; the pregnant woman has "an existing relationship with that unborn human being," a relationship protected by the U.S. Constitution and the laws of South Dakota; and a "known medical risk" of abortion is an "increased risk of suicide ideation and suicide." A federal judge has now eliminated the second and third required assertions, calling them "untruthful and misleading." [1]

I personally would question even the first assertion about a fetus or an embryo being a human being, but that's not the point I wish to make here. I'd like to suggest that before a young American man or woman can enlist in the armed forces s/he must be told the following by the staff of the military recruitment office:

Read more »

Bill Quigley

It is time for a revolution. Government does not work for regular people. It appears to work quite well for big corporations, banks, insurance companies, military contractors, lobbyists, and for the rich and powerful. But it does not work for people.

The 1776 Declaration of Independence stated that when a long train of abuses by those in power evidence a design to reduce the rights of people to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, it is the peoples right, in fact their duty to engage in a revolution.

Martin Luther King, Jr., said forty three years ago next month that it was time for a radical revolution of values in the United States. He preached “a true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies.” It is clearer than ever that now is the time for radical change.

Look at what our current system has brought us and ask if it is time for a revolution?

Over 2.8 million people lost their homes in 2009 to foreclosure or bank repossessions – nearly 8000 each day – higher numbers than the last two years when millions of others also lost their homes. At the same time, the government bailed out Bank of America, Citigroup, AIG, Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the auto industry and enacted the troubled asset (TARP) program with $1.7 trillion of our money.

Wall Street then awarded itself over $20 billion in bonuses in 2009 alone, an average bonus on top of pay of $123,000. At the same time, over 17 million people are jobless right now. Millions more are working part-time when they want and need to be working full-time. Yet the current system allows one single U.S. Senator to stop unemployment and Medicare benefits being paid to millions.

Read more »