Monday, 20. July 2009, 20:33:02
bloglovin'I stumbled upon this when chasing down links related to a site with wallpaper that I immediately downloaded - but Web of Trust has no rating as the place is too new.
FOTOFRONTERAWhile seeming to vanish, class digs deeperNext on the Endangered Species List: Your Hometown NewspaperDaily papers in major cities across the US have been folding at an alarming rate this year. Rocky Mountain News in Denver has closed its doors, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer stopped its print operation to go online. In addition, The Detroit Free Press, The Miami Herald, The Kansas City Star and The Fort Worth Star-Telegram all made major cuts this year. The Ann Arbor News will be closing this July after a 174-year history.
40 communities receive $45 million in stimulus money for water projects( Snarky thought from a neighbour when I noted lots of stuff isn't tested in municipal water, lines aren't maintained nor cleaned, and chlorine isn't a disinfectant anyway : she told a tale of junk clogging up piping running to a school fountain and her child getting sick from it - then said ; "The chlorine is just there to make it look as if they're doing something useful. I won't drink town water ( she uses a distiller ), It stinks from all the chemicals they put in it." )
The Privatization of the Global Freshwater CommonsThe supply of freshwater on this planet is only 2.5 percent of the world’s total water. Considering the amount that is frozen up in ice and snow, roughly one percent is left for human use. Water consumption has grown twice as fast as the world’s population.
Ninety percent of human water use is for industrial purposes – 70 percent being used exclusively for large-scale agriculture and factory farming. If the dominant economic mode were to shift gears, to one that wasn’t defined globally, and predicated upon the funneling of resources to the producer rather than the community, the availability of water would be much different. If community-scale projects and strict environmental protection policies were implemented to define our economic behavior, then I’m pretty sure billions of people would not be facing such dire water related plights. However, in a world where market theory has greatly influenced the dominant praxis of economic intercourse, the privatization of the planet’s water has been pitched as the panacea that will solve our troubles.
Despite corporate claims (which are fallacious beyond a doubt), the privatizing of water heavily increases the price of water. According to foodandwaterwatch.org, “International corporations can easily expect to make a 20 percent to 30 percent margin of profit from investment in water service… In 2006, Veolia made a consolidated net income of €759 million (nearly $1.12 billion), according to its 2006 annual report. In addition, 35 percent of Veolia’s total revenue came from water, with 10 percent from North America,” and “In the same year Suez earned a gross operating income of €7,083 million (nearly $10.38 billion), and RWE had a net income of €3,847 million (almost $5.66 billion). Some €689 million ($1.02 billion) of RWE’s EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) came from its water division, known as U.S. water provider American Water.”
All of this money is funneled out of the community and into the pockets of the shareholders. There is virtually no case in which the privatizing of water has benefited everyone in a specific community.
I recently had a chat with environmentalist Annette Smith from Vermonter’s for a Clean Environment (VCE), over the issues of water privatization, and the reprehensible bottled water industry. She explained to me that “large extractions of water, the size at which commercial bottled-water companies operate, can taper stream channels, alter temperatures fish rely upon for their life cycles, and can expend aquifers and other nearby water sources.
“Furthermore, the impact goes far beyond the actual water extraction.” Smith explained that, “the plastic bottles have their environmental impacts as well. For one, the plastic bottles contain phthalates, which are chemical compounds that are added to plastics to increase their flexibility. Phthalates have been known to be culpable for organ damage, adverse hormonal activity, and birth defects.”
Touring Empire's Ruins: From Detroit to the Amazon Motown's dilapidated buildings today invoke America's fast slipping supremacy.
Ford owned forests in Michigan as well as mines in Kentucky and West Virginia, which gave him control over every natural resource needed to make a car -- save rubber. So in 1927, he obtained an Amazonian land grant the size of a small American state.
Over the course of nearly two decades, Ford sank millions upon millions of dollars into trying to make his jungle utopia work the American way, yet not one drop of Fordlandia latex ever made its way into a Ford car.
Ford preached with a pastor's confidence his one true idea: ever increasing productivity combined with ever increasing pay would both relieve human drudgery and create prosperous working-class communities, with corporate profits dependent on the continual expansion of consumer demand.
Nearly a century ago, the journalist Walter Lippmann remarked that Henry Ford's drive to make the world anew represented a common strain of "primitive Americanism," reinforced by a confidence born of unparalleled achievement. He then followed with a question meant to be sarcastic but which was, in fact, all too prophetic: "Why shouldn't success in Detroit assure success in front of Baghdad?" We know the ruination that befell Detroit. Whither Baghdad? Whither America?
All-American Squatters Fight HomelessnessTake Back the Land, based in Miami, finds empty foreclosed homes and illegally moves homeless families into them. So far his organization has moved nine families into “liberated” houses and has at least four more occupations planned.
Squatting has a long history in the United States. During the westward expansion, much of the land was settled by squatters. Pioneers lived on land they had no legal entitlement to until the federal government recognized their rights as “homesteaders” with several pieces of legislation in the 1800s.
Today, as the recession roars on, organized squatting movements are springing up across the nation.
Afghanistan's Ralph Nader? Inside the Tent of an Honest ManBashardost has built a reputation as a staunch idealist who resigned from his ministerial position in the Karzai government. He is popular with ordinary Afghans – he won a parliamentary seat with the second highest number of votes cast for an Afghan MP. Most important, he’s known as an eccentric who travels on a bike with no security, votes against almost any decision that comes to Parliament and receives his guests in a tent.
9URL=http://towardfreedom.com/home/content/view/1599/1/]'Al-Jazeera Effect’ Counters ‘CNN Effect’: Canadians Deserve Al Jazeera
Al Jazeera’s staff and reporters are as diverse as Canada. It has more than 1,200 staff from nearly 50 nationalities, including more than 45 ethnicities, constituting the most diverse news network in the world.
Piracy and Washington: The Somalia CrossroadsIn October 2008, Human Rights Watch rated Somalia the most ignored tragedy in the world. Almost 1.5 million Somalis are internally displaced, and an additional half million are refugees. Two decades of instability, including a U.S.-backed intervention by Ethiopian troops in December 2006, have failed to put Somalia on the map.
It took the drama of high seas piracy to bring Somalia back into the media spotlight. The hijacking of a Saudi supertanker in November was followed by the capture and sensational rescue of U.S. merchant ship Captain Richard Phillips in April.
“Kill the Pirates,” screamed a Washington Post op-ed by Reagan-era hawk Fred C. Iklé. On Fox News, George W. Bush’s ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, called for attacking the pirates’ bases on land to “really end this problem once and for all.
Vice Admiral Bill Gortney, commander of the U.S. 5th Fleet, was skeptical about attacking pirate bases on land. “I see people looking for an easy military solution to a problem that demands a non-kinetic [non-combat] solution,” Gortney said. The high risks of collateral damage, he added, “cannot be overestimated.”
The lack of a functioning government in Somalia has fostered an environment in which weapons are easily available and piracy is among the few profitable career paths open to youth.
Obama’s new emphasis on diplomacy coexists uneasily with the revival of enthusiasm for counterinsurgency doctrine in the Pentagon that has resulted from the U.S. military’s challenges in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the counterinsurgency mindset holds sway among American military commanders, it is likely that U.S. hopes for military victory will prove just as illusory as in Vietnam in the 1960s.
Compared to Afghanistan, Somalia is a sideshow for U.S. military strategists. But the fact that some anti-government insurgents in Somalia have links with al Qaeda makes it possible to slot the conflict there into the global-war-on-terror framework, even if the Obama administration has renounced that label as misleading.
“There is little the U.S. can do to shape the outcome of the current fighting,” says Ken Menkhaus, a U.S. expert on Somalia. Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on May 20, he warned that U.S. military intervention would likely weaken, rather than strengthen, an inclusive Somali government and would thus play into the hands of insurgents.
Somalis have good reason to distrust the outcome of U.S. intervention, even if it is bundled with pledges of respect for Somali sovereignty and the authority of a multilateral mandate. For decades, Somalis have experienced the bungled interventions—alternating with neglect—of outside powers.
Outside involvement has thus reinforced divisions and stoked conflict inside the country.
For a short period in 1992, Algerian diplomat Mohamed Sahnoun, leading the first U.N. mission to Somalia, skillfully built momentum for reconciliation among Somalis. But he was forced to resign when he ran afoul of the U.N. bureaucracy.
Kenyan journalist and former U.N. official Salim Lone summed up the consensus view among African and international analysts: “Instead of engaging with the Islamists to secure peace, the United States has plunged a poor country into greater misery.”
TF News, Action and AnalysisMillions face hunger as seasons disappear
July 14th, 2009
Report from Oxfam
Climate change is damaging people’s lives today. Even if world leaders agree the strictest possible curbs on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the prospects are very bleak for hundreds of millions of people, most of them among the world’s poorest. This paper puts the dramatic stories of some of those people alongside the latest science on the impacts of climate change on humans. Together they explain why climate change is fundamentally a development crisis. The world must act immediately and decisively to address this, the greatest peril to humanity this century.
US: United States: Whites only pool causes outrage
July 14th, 2009
Source: Green Left Weekly
An appeal for action from US-based anti-racist group Colour of Change reported on the actions of the Vally Club just outside Philidelphia. The appeal said that “65 children from a summer camp tried to go swimming at a club that their camp had a contract to use. Apparently, the people at the club didn’t know that the group of kids was predominantly Black.”
When the children began using the pool, “the swimming club’s staff asked the campers to leave”.
The appeal said “the club told the summer camp that their membership would be canceled and that their payment would be refunded. When asked why, the club’s manager said that a lot of kids ‘would change the complexion … and the atmosphere of the club’.”
Colour of Change said: “The club’s actions appear to be a violation of section 1981 of the Civil Rights Act …
“Obama is President but that doesn’t mean that suddenly all is fine when it comes to race in America. This is a vivid reminder of what we know still lies beneath the surface.”
Visit Colourofchange.org to add your name to a statement calling on the Vally Club to end its racist exclusion policy.
Workers at a bankrupt French factory say they will blow it up
July 14th, 2009
Source: The Guardian
First there was boss-napping, now angry workers at a factory in France have come up with a new tactic in their battle against mass redundancy.
Staff at bankrupt car parts maker New Fabris are threatening to blow up the plant if they do not receive compensation from the companies that provided most of the firm’s business.
The 336 workers at the factory at Châtellerault, near Poitiers in central France, want Renault SA and PSA Peugeot Citroen to pay €30,000 (£25,850) to each of them, or some €10m in total, in return for the company’s remaining stocks of equipment and machinery. The workers, who are currently occupying the factory, have given Renault and Peugeot Citroen until 31 July to come up with the money.
Guy Eyermann, a CGT trades union official, told France Info radio: “The bottles of gas have already been placed at various parts of the factory and are connected with each other. If Renault and PSA refuse to give us that money it could blow up before the end of the month.”
Michael Jackson: The Man in the Mirror
July 14th, 2009
Source: Truthdig
In celebrity culture we destroy what we worship. The commercial exploitation of Michael Jackson’s death was orchestrated by the corporate forces that rendered Jackson insane. Jackson, robbed of his childhood and surrounded by vultures that preyed on his fears and weaknesses, was so consumed by self-loathing he carved his African-American face into an ever-changing Caucasian death mask and hid his apparent pedophilia behind a Peter Pan illusion of eternal childhood. He could not disentangle his public and his private self. He became a commodity, a product, one to be sold, used and manipulated. He was infected by the moral nihilism and personal disintegration that are at the core of our corporate culture. And his fantasies of eternal youth, delusions of majesty, and desperate, disfiguring quests for physical transformation were expressions of our own yearning. He was a reflection of us in the extreme.
His memorial service—a variety show with a coffin—had an estimated 31.1 million television viewers. The ceremony, which featured performances or tributes from Stevie Wonder, Brooke Shields and other celebrities, was carried live on 19 networks, including the major broadcast and cable news outlets. It was the final episode of the long-running Michael Jackson series. And it concluded with Jackson’s daughter, Paris, being prodded to stand in front of a microphone to speak about her father. Janet Jackson, before the girl could get a few words out, told Paris to “speak up.” As the child broke down, the adults around her adjusted the microphone so we could hear the sobs. The crowd clapped. It was a haunting echo of what destroyed her father.
Symbolic Blather: Washington’s Congenital Disease
July 10th, 2009
Source: Our Future
July 8, 2009
This Congress potentially could be the most productive in over 40 years. It has passed the largest recovery plan in the nation’s history. It extended health care to millions of children. It passed Obama’s first budget with its significant down payment on education and energy. The House just passed the comprehensive energy bill. Health care reform and the most extensive financial reform since the New Deal are next up. Yet this same Congress will take the time to debate legislation that might best be considered symbolic blather. Its only effect is symbolic and the symbolism is loony.
The best example of this is the bill championed by Blue Dogs in the House and Senate—the conservative Democrats that the media labels “moderates”—called “paygo.” Paygo is the Washington shorthand for a rule that requires the Congress to pay for any expansion of entitlements (guaranteed benefits like Social Security Medicare) or decrease in taxes. It’s supposed to “discipline” the Congress on spending.
Whose Country is it anyway?
July 10th, 2009
Source: Global Research
July 4, 2009
A political-economic oligarchy has taken over the United States of America. This oligarchy has institutionalized a body of law that protects businesses at the expense of not only the common people but the nation itself.
CNN interviewed a person recently who was seriously burned when his vehicle burst into flames because a plastic brake-fluid reservoir ruptured. Having sued Chrysler, he was now concerned that its bankruptcy filing would enable Chrysler to avoid paying any damages. A CNN legal expert called this highly likely, since the main goal of reorganization in bankruptcy is preserving the company’s viability and that those creditors who could contribute most to attaining that goal would be compensated first while those involved in civil suits against the company would be placed lowest on the creditor list since compensating them would lessen the chances of the company’s surviving. This rational clearly implies that the preservation of companies is more important than the preservation of people. Of course, similar cases have been reported before. The claims of workers for unpaid wages have often been dismissed as have their contracts for benefits.
Michael Parenti: The Honduras Coup - Is Obama Innocent?
July 10th, 2009
Source: Information Clearing House
July 8, 2009
Is President Obama innocent of the events occurring in Honduras, specifically the coup launched by the Honduran military resulting in the abduction and forced deportation of democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya? Obama has denounced the coup and demanded that the rules of democracy be honored. Still, several troubling questions remain.
First, almost all the senior Honduran military officers active in the coup are graduates of the Pentagon’s School of the Americas (known to many of us as “School of the Assassins”). The Honduran military is trained, advised, equipped, indoctrinated, and financed by the United States national security state. The generals would never have dared to move without tacit consent from the White House or the Pentagon and CIA.
Second, if Obama was not directly involved, then he should be faulted for having no firm command over those US operatives who were. The US military must have known about the plot and US military intelligence must have known and must have reported it back to Washington. Why did Obama’s people who had communicated with the coup leaders fail to blow the whistle on them? Why did they not expose and denounce the plot, thereby possibly foiling the entire venture? Instead the US kept quiet about it, a silence that in effect, even if not in intent, served as an act of complicity.
Obama’s Cap & Trade Carbon Emissions Bill - Stealth Scheme to License Pollution & Fraud
July 10th, 2009
Source: Global Research
July 10, 2009
On May 15, HR 2454: American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (ACESA) was introduced in the House purportedly “To create clean energy jobs, achieve energy independence, reduce global warming pollution and transition to a clean energy economy.”
In fact, it’s to let corporate polluters reap huge windfall profits by charging consumers more for energy and fuel as well as create a new bubble through carbon trading derivatives speculation. It does nothing to address environmental issues, yet on June 26 the House narrowly passed (229 - 212) and sent it to the Senate to be debated and voted on. More on that below.
On March 31, Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman and Energy & Environment Subcommittee Chairman Edward Markey released a “discussion draft” of the proposed legislation & falsely claimed:
– it’s “a comprehensive approach to America’s energy policy that charts a new course towards a clean energy economy;” it will
– create millions of clean energy jobs….that can’t be shipped overseas;
– put America on the path to energy independence;
Organic Bytes #180: Who’s Killing Organics? Horizon, Silk, Whole Foods Market, UNFI, More…
July 9th, 2009
Source: Organic Consumers Association
July 1, 2009
Horizon Sells Out Organic Farmers With New “Natural” Milk: Dean Foods’ WhiteWave division has announced it will release a new non-organic “natural” version of its popular Horizon dairy products. Horizon is the largest organic dairy brand in the marketplace, and many consumers will likely alternatively purchase the Horizon “natural (conventional) ” brand at a premium and at a time when organic dairy farmers are already experiencing record losses…
Breaking the Organic Monopoly & the “Natural” Foods Myth: Whole Food Market and United Natural Foods, Inc.: Undermining Our Organic Future: After four decades of hard work, the organic community has built up a $25 billion “certified organic” food & farming sector. This consumer-driven movement, under steady attack by the biotech & Big Food lobby, with little or no help from government, has managed to create a healthy & sustainable alternative to America’s disastrous, chemical & energy-intensive system of industrial agriculture. However, the annual $50 billion natural food & products industry is threatening to undermine the organic movement by flooding the marketplace with conventional products greenwashed with “natural” labeling. “Natural,” in the overwhelming majority of cases, translates to “conventional-with-a-green-veneer.” Natural products are routinely produced using pesticides, chemical fertilizer, hormones, genetic engineering, and sewage sludge…
Editor’s FYI: Whole Foods has been shedding increasing numbers of organic products, from produce to you-name-it. They are also discontinuing the sale of respected & reliable name brands and substituting their own - “certified” by QAI, whose reputation is in question. Could it have something to do with profit$$$ ? If you have a choice, shop at food coops and independent stores, and/or join a local CSA (community-supported agriculture) which offers shares of fresh organic produce.
The Obama Organic Family Garden: Swimming in Sludge?
July 9th, 2009
Source: Huffington Post
July 1, 2009
When Michelle Obama created an organic vegetable garden on the White House lawn earlier this year, the move was greeted with positive headlines and excitement among the food advocacy community. Here, we thought, was a First Lady who understood the importance of locally grown, whole and organic foods in her family’s diet.
Unfortunately, something happened on the way to the realization of the First Lady’s good intentions. Recently the National Park Service discovered that the White House lawn, where the garden was planted, contains highly elevated levels of lead — 93 parts per million.
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