From Austerity to Abundance: Why I Am Running for California Treasurer by Ellen Brown

Image by 401(K) 2013 via Flickr

by Ellen Brown
Writer, Dandelion Salad
The Web of Debt Blog
January 15, 2014

Governor Jerry Brown and his staff are exchanging high-fives over balancing California’s budget, but the people on whose backs it was balanced are not rejoicing. The state’s high-wire act has been called “the ultimate in austerity budgets.”

Welfare payments, health care for the poor, and benefits for the elderly and disabled have been slashed. State workers have been downsized.

WikiLeaks Releases the Secret Draft Text for the Entire #TPP Environment Chapter + Kevin Zeese: President Obama’s Actually Worse on Environment and Trade than President George W. Bush Was

Dandelion Salad

wikileaks.org
Press Release
January 15, 2014

Image by cool revolution via Flickr

Today, 15 January 2014, WikiLeaks released the secret draft text for the entire TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) Environment Chapter and the corresponding Chairs’ Report. The TPP transnational legal regime would cover 12 countries initially and encompass 40 per cent of global GDP and one-third of world trade. The Environment Chapter has long been sought by journalists and environmental groups. The released text dates from the Chief Negotiators’ summit in Salt Lake City, Utah, on 19-24 November 2013.

The American Dream is Built on the American Nightmare by William T. Hathaway

by William T. Hathaway
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Germany
January 14, 2014

This photo of my parents reveals much about their personalities (hers vivacious and outgoing, his withdrawn and closed off), their relationship (little real contact), and also the times (could be captioned Gender Roles in the 1950s: The Bathing Beauty and the Soldier).

The typicality of their lives reveals much about the USA. My mother was a farmer’s daughter whose father lost the farm to the banks, and they had to scrabble along in the slums of the big city, St. Louis. All her life she yearned for her bucolic childhood when everything was “nice.” My father was a coal miner and the son of a coal miner from West Virginia. He hated the mines so much that after the Second World War he stayed in the military as a professional soldier.

Geneva II – Washington’s Plan B for Regime Change in Syria by Finian Cunningham

by Finian Cunningham
Writer, Dandelion Salad
East Africa
Crossposted from Strategic Culture Foundation
January 15, 2014

The fatal problem with the Geneva II negotiations on Syria, due to open next week in Switzerland, is that the process is furtively being treated by the US and its allies as a lever for regime change. It is their Plan B for regime change, where Plan A is the failed covert military tactic. That does not bode well for a successful, that is sustainable, settlement to a crisis that is nearly three years old with well over 100,000 deaths and nine million people – more than a third of the total population – displaced from their homes. It amounts to an illegal interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign state, and as such is doomed to fail.

Ariel Sharon: His Sabra and Shatila Legacy – An Eye Witness Account by Felicity Arbuthnot

by Felicity Arbuthnot
Writer, Dandelion Salad
London, England
January 14, 2014

Image by IsmailKupeli via Flickr

As Israel buried Ariel Sharon amid eulogies from world figures, Tony Blair, a Butcher of Baghdad, paid a tribute to the Butcher of Beirut which included the line that Sharon: “didn’t think of peace as a dreamer, but did dream of peace.” Also that: “ … he sought peace with the same iron determination” as he had fought (read slaughtered, across the Middle East.) Re-writing history does not come more blatant, but Blair was ever good at fantasy, think “weapons of mass destruction” and “forty five minutes.”