Bill Moyers Journal: Juan Cole & Shahan Mufti on Pakistan + Daniel Goleman on Sustainable Economy

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Bill Moyers Journal
May 15, 2009

Juan Cole & Shahan Mufti

As the world follows the violence and unrest in Pakistan, Bill Moyers speaks with historian Juan Cole and journalist Shahan Mufti about the U.S. relationship with Pakistan, how it relates to the war in Afghanistan, and why they think Pakistan is not likely to become a failed state anytime soon.

via Bill Moyers Journal . Watch & Listen | PBS.

PBS

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Daniel Goleman

Daniel Goleman explains to Bill Moyers how better educated consumers can help build a sustainable economy.

via Bill Moyers Journal . Watch & Listen | PBS.

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“We Are Helping The Taliban” By Ron Paul

Pakistan on Dandelion Salad

Afghanistan on Dandelion Salad

The Story of Stuff By Robert Weissman (+ video)

Time For Renewable Energy by Ralph Nader

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by Ralph Nader
The Nader Page
May 15, 2009

After years of opposing or ridiculing renewable energy, the giant oil companies are using a new approach. A recent ExxonMobil advertising campaign puts it this way:

“Oil, gas, coal, biofuels, nuclear, wind, solar….to fuel the future we need them all.”

Not an unexpected maneuver from a fossil fuel company that has owned Washington and received subsidies and tax breaks for decades. What is unfortunate is that this is the exact kind of energy pitch coming out of the Obama Administration and most Congressional Democrats. Indeed it is right out of candidate Obama’s 2008 campaign rhetoric last year.Then Senator Obama gave every energy source its due although he spent an inordinate amount of time pushing the mirage of “clean coal” and keeping nuclear energy on the table.

‘Prisoner abuse’ photographs surface as Barack Obama prepares to block publication

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By Alex Spillius in Washington
Telegraph
Last Updated: 11:46PM BST 15 May 2009

[Photos slideshow – some photos may be disturbing]

Images emerged from Australia yesterday where they were originally obtained by the channel SBS in 2006 in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal.

Shocking images of inmates in Iraq are the kind of images whose release the president has now vowed to fight in court.

They risk provoking renewed hostility in the Middle East as Mr Obama attempts to build bridges with the Islamic world.

[…]

One picture showed a prisoner hung up upside down while another showed a naked man smeared in excrement standing in a corridor with a guard standing menacingly in front of him. Another prisoner is handcuffed to the window frame of his cell with underpants pulled over his head.

Others yet to be released reportedly show military guards threatening to sexually assault a detainee with a broomstick and hooded prisoners on transport planes with Playboy magazines opened to pictures of nude women on their laps.

[…]

via ‘Prisoner abuse’ photographs surface as Barack Obama prepares to block publication – Telegraph.

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Obama Administration Reverses Promise To Release Torture Photos 5/13/2009

American Civil Liberties Union

Decision Betrays Commitment To Transparency And The Rule Of Law

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: 212 549-2666; media@aclu.org

NEW YORK – The Obama administration announced today that it is reversing its promise to make public photos depicting detainee abuse by U.S. personnel overseas. The Department of Defense had told a federal judge that it would release a “substantial number” of photos in response to a court ruling in an American Civil Liberties Union Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

Israeli Foreign Minister’s Party Proposes Ban on Arab Mourning by Jeremy R. Hammond + Nakba remembered

By Jeremy R. Hammond
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Foreign Policy Journal
May 15, 2009

Yisrael Beitenu, the political party of Israel’s foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, has proposed that Arab Israelis be banned from marking the anniversary of the dispossession of hundreds of thousands of Arab Palestinians in 1948.

An estimated 700,000 Arabs were expelled or fled from their homes in 1948 and forbidden from returning in what Israel calls its “War of Independence” but what Arabs call the “Nakba”, or “Catastrophe”.

It’s Not Too Late to Save America By Timothy V. Gatto

By Timothy V. Gatto
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
liberalpro.blogspot.com
May 15, 2009

Every day the United States manages to portray itself as being worse than the day before. At this particular point, I don’t believe that we can possibly dive any deeper into the cesspit that we have managed to dig for ourselves. Our foreign policy is based on lies; our economic policy is only functioning because the world holds so much US debt that if America defaults on its loans it would bankrupt China, Japan, India and other nations that have managed to base their entire economy on worthless American paper.

Our government is embroiled in debate over torture. The debate isn’t if we torture, the debate is about whether torture works and when government officials knew about and authorized our use of torture methods first. Meanwhile, the President has decided that releasing photos of Americans torturing people might not be such a good idea. The question of whether anyone will be prosecuted for breaking US and International law was hinted at when the “liberal” American President replaced the Commander of American forces in Afghanistan with a man that some analysts claim is the chief architect of modern torture methods, Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, a senior administrator with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will take the place of Gen. David McKiernan once he is confirmed by the Senate. McChrystal was deeply involved with Special Forces, including Delta Force.

The Financial Storm by Stephen Lendman (Part IV)

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by Stephen Lendman
Global Research, May 15, 2009

Reviewing Ellen Brown’s “Web of Debt:” Part IV

order here

This is the fourth in a series of articles on Ellen Brown’s superb 2007 book titled “Web of Debt,” now updated in a December 2008 third edition. It tells “the shocking truth about our money system, (how it) trapped us in debt, and how we can break free.” This article focuses on America’s “web of debt” entrapment.

The Debt Spider Captures America – American Workers Consigned to Debt Serfdom

America has been trapped for over two centuries, with today’s debt level way exceeding developing nations. Like bankrupt people staying “afloat by making the minimum payment(s) on (their) credit card(s), the government (avoids) bankruptcy by paying just the interest on its monster debt” – now double in size since Brown’s first edition and onerous enough for Controller of the Currency David Walker to warn earlier of its unaffordability by this year. If America can’t service the amount, it’s officially bankrupt and the economy will collapse. If it happens, IMF austerity will follow and turn America into Guatemala. Other vulnerable economies as well – permanent debt bondage and worker serfdom.

Catherine Austin Fitts was a former high-level Wall Street and government insider. She points to a “financial coup d’etat” conspiracy between the two to hollow out America, centralize power and knowledge, shift wealth to the top, destroy communities and local infrastructure, create new wealth by rebuilding them, and leave human wreckage in its wake.

Fire the Boss: Naomi Klein & Avi Lewis + Despair in Detroit (Nader; Paul)

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Democracy Now!
May 15, 2009

Fire the Boss: Naomi Klein & Avi Lewis on “The Worker Control Solution from Buenos Aires to Chicago”

Shock Doctrine author Naomi Klein and Al Jazeera host Avi Lewis discuss the workers who are taking over their factories and plants rather than lose their jobs, some to owners who owe money to bailed-out banks. They also address the latest news in the nation’s global economic collapse amidst the White House and Democratic-led Congress’s rejection of single-payer healthcare. [includes rush transcript]

Real Video Stream

Real Audio Stream

MP3 Download

via Fire the Boss: Naomi Klein & Avi Lewis on “The Worker Control Solution from Buenos Aires to Chicago”.

‘You can’t authorise murder’: Dick Cheney headed a secret assassination wing that targeted America’s enemies

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Global Research, May 14, 2009
By Abbas Al Lawati, Staff Reporter
Gulf News

Interview with Seymour Hersh

Dubai: Pulitzer prize-winning American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh recently said that former US vice-president Dick Cheney headed a secret assassination wing that targeted America’s enemies abroad.

Video: Seymour Hersh interview (best viewed with Internet Explorer)

Gulf News catches up with him on his trip to Dubai for the Arab Media Forum to ask about those revelations as well as issues concerning Barack Obama, Lebanon, Israel, Syria and Egypt.

GULF NEWS: You have spoken about an assassination unit that reported to Cheney called the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). There have been allegations that this unit was responsible for former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri’s assassination.

SEYMOUR HERSH: I can’t verify [that]. What I said was, and what I have written more than once, is that there’s a special unit that does high-value targeting of men that we believe are known to be involved in anti-American activities, or are believed to be planning such activities.

In Cheney’s view this isn’t murder, but carrying out the “war on terror”. And in the view of me and my friends, including people in government, this is crazy. The vice president is committing a crime. You can’t authorise the murder of people. And it’s not just in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s in a lot of other countries, in the Middle East and in South Asia and North Africa and even central America.

Escobar: Obama and Osama – McChrystal clear

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TheRealNews

The more it changes, the more the “war on terror” stays the same

Cheney Used Torture To Get The Answers He Wanted To Get!

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VOTERSTHINKdotORG

http://earth2obama.org/

May 14, 2009 MSNBC Rachel Maddow Show

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Pt 2

Lawrence Wilkerson Nails Cheney On Use Of Torture To Invade Iraq by Andy Worthington

by Andy Worthington
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.andyworthington.co.uk
15 May 2009

The reawakening of the biggest scandal in the whole of the Bush administration’s bleak and brutal tenure — the fact that prisoners in the “War on Terror” were tortured not to protect America, but to find excuses to justify the invasion of Iraq — began three weeks ago, with a surprising revelation in the Senate Armed Services Committee’s report into detainee abuse (PDF), and a McClatchy Newspapers report by Jonathan Landay, but yesterday it stepped up after Lawrence Wilkerson, the chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, appeared on the Rachel Maddow Show.

In a blog post for the Washington Note, Wilkerson explained that he had been so appalled by recent tapes of former Vice President Dick Cheney “extolling the virtues of harsh interrogation, torture, and his leadership,” which had been played in the run-up to his interview, that when he got home, reflecting on how everything he had heard had been “stunningly inaccurate,” he “thought long and hard about what I knew at this point in my investigations with respect to the former VP’s office.”

The A H1N1 Pandemic: Pig to Human Transmission of the Swine Flu? by Michel Chossudovsky

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by Michel Chossudovsky
Global Research, May 15, 2009

The initial outbreak of the H1N1 swine virus is said to have occurred in Mexico. The emphasis, at the political level, has been on tracking the spread of the Mexican swine flu virus as well controlling and monitoring the movement of people in and out of Mexico. A global campaign of fear and insecurity was unleashed following the WHO April 28 announcement of a phase pandemic. The decision of the WHO, which was taken after consultations with Washington and Brussels, was based on unconfirmed and incomplete data regarding the spread of the swine flu and the numbers of cases.

What proves that Mexico was the epicentre of the WHO’s global swine flu pandemic?

There are several important issues underlying this question:

1. The official data pertaining to morbidity and mortality were, in numerous cases, both in Mexico, the US and around the World, not firmly corroborated by laboratory testing of the H1N1 virus.

Taming the Speculators: What Should Countries Do With Their Central Bank Reserves? by Michael Hudson

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by Michael Hudson
May 14, 2009

Yevgeny Primakov explains where Russia’s Neoliberal Model Went Wrong

Last week Izvestiya published an interview with former Premier Yevgeny Primakov, now president of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry. (Johnson’s Russia List published a translation on May 8). The discussion centered on a universal problem – what China and other Asian countries, as well as OPEC and Europe should do with the export surpluses and proceeds mounting up in their central banks from mortgaging or selling off their real estate and industry. Or to put matters in retrospect, what should they have done to avoid the neoliberal monetarist ideology that governments should do nothing at all with these surpluses, not even use them to fuel economic growth.

Who Rules America? By Paul Craig Roberts

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By Paul Craig Roberts
May 14, 2009 “Information Clearing House”

What do you suppose it is like to be elected president of the United States only to find that your power is restricted to the service of powerful interest groups?

A president who does a good job for the ruling interest groups is paid off with remunerative corporate directorships, outrageous speaking fees, and a lucrative book contract. If he is young when he assumes office, like Bill Clinton and Obama, it means a long life of luxurious leisure.

Fighting the special interests doesn’t pay and doesn’t succeed. On April 30 the primacy of special over public interests was demonstrated yet again. The Democrats’ bill to prevent 1.7 million mortgage foreclosures and, thus, preserve $300 billion in home equity by permitting homeowners to renegotiate their mortgages, was defeated in the Senate, despite the 60-vote majority of the Democrats. The banksters were able to defeat the bill 51 to 45.

Obama Administration Statements on Iran Nukes Not Backed by Intelligence By Jeremy R. Hammond

By Jeremy R. Hammond
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Foreign Policy Journal
May 15, 2009

A recent unclassified CIA report to Congress says that it is not known whether Iran is working towards developing a nuclear weapon, despite consistent rhetoric from the Obama administration that Iran is pursuing the bomb.

The report was drafted by the CIA’s Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arms Control Center (WINPAC) and submitted to the Congress by the Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis.

It discusses the acquisition of technology related to weapons of mass destruction (WMD) for the year 2008 and repeats the assessment of a 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that Iran “had been working to develop nuclear weapons through at least fall 2003, but that in fall 2003 Iran halted its nuclear weapons design and weaponization activities, and its covert uranium conversion- and enrichment-related activities.”