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Obama Lied About Gaddafi's Bloodbath

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'Rebel' Leader Storms Off Debate Show

- Your Country Next?

What started out as a programmed march on the the 15th of May, held in major and minor cities around Spain with regional elections happening on the 22nd, has grown massively: well over ten thousand people have taken the Puerta del Sol, a large square in the center of Madrid (http://www.soltv.tv for live streaming). The initial demonstration was planned by the apolitical platform, Democracia Real Ya (Real Democracy Now!) with a manifesto claiming an end to corrupt politicians, harsh election laws for smaller parties, financial regulation, transparency and free media.

Is Racism

And Disposable Planet

By Michael Parenti

Some years ago in New England, a group of environmentalists asked a corporate executive how his company (a paper mill) could justify dumping its raw industrial effluent into a nearby river. The river--which had taken Mother Nature centuries to create--was used for drinking water, fishing, boating, and swimming. In just a few years, the paper mill had turned it into a highly toxic open sewer.

The executive shrugged and said that river dumping was the most cost-effective way of removing the mill's wastes. If the company had to absorb the additional expense of having to clean up after itself, it might not be able to maintain its competitive edge and would then have to go out of business or move to a cheaper labor market, resulting in a loss of jobs for the local economy.

Free Market Über Alles

It was a familiar argument: the company had no choice. It was compelled to act that way in a competitive market. The mill was not in the business of protecting the environment but in the business of making a profit, the highest possible profit at the highest possible rate of return. Profit is the name of the game, as business leaders make clear when pressed on the point. The overriding purpose of business is capital accumulation.

To justify its single-minded profiteering, Corporate America promotes the classic laissez-faire theory which claims that the free market---a congestion of unregulated and unbridled enterprises all selfishly pursuing their own ends---is governed by a benign ìinvisible handî that miraculously produces optimal outputs for everybody.

The free marketeers have a deep all-abiding faith in laissez-faire for it is a faith that serves them well. It means no government oversight, no being held accountable for the environmental disasters they perpetrate. Like greedy spoiled brats, they repeatedly get bailed out by the government (some free market!) so that they can continue to take irresponsible risks, plunder the land, poison the seas, sicken whole communities, lay waste to entire regions, and pocket obscene profits.

This corporate system of capital accumulation treats the Earth's life-sustaining resources (arable land, groundwater, wetlands, foliage, forests, fisheries, ocean beds, bays, rivers, air quality) as disposable ingredients presumed to be of limitless supply, to be consumed or toxified at will. As BP has demonstrated so well in the Gulf-of-Mexico catastrophe, considerations of cost weigh so much more heavily than considerations of safety. As one Congressional inquiry concluded: "Time after time, it appears that BP made decisions that increased the risk of a blowout to save the company time or expense."

Indeed, the function of the transnational corporation is not to promote a healthy ecology but to extract as much marketable value out of the natural world as possible even if it means treating the environment like a septic tank. An ever-expanding corporate capitalism and a fragile finite ecology are on a calamitous collision course, so much so that the support systems of the entire ecosphere---the Earth's thin skin of fresh air, water, and topsoil---are at risk. It is not true that the ruling politico-economic interests are in a state of denial about all this. Far worse than denial, they have shown outright antagonism toward those who think our planet is more important than their profits. So they defame environmentalists as "eco-terrorists," "EPA gestapo," "Earth day alarmists," "tree huggers," and purveyors of "Green hysteria."

In an enormous departure from free-market ideology, most of the diseconomies of big business are foisted upon the general populace, including the costs of cleaning up toxic wastes, the cost of monitoring production, the cost of disposing of industrial effluence (which composes 40 to 60 percent of the loads treated by taxpayer-supported municipal sewer plants), the cost of developing new water sources (while industry and agribusiness consume 80 percent of the nation's daily water supply), and the costs of attending to the sickness and disease caused by all the toxicity created. With many of these diseconomies regularly passed on to the government, the private sector then boasts of its superior cost-efficiency over the public sector.

The Superrich Are Different from Us

Isn't ecological disaster a threat to the health and survival of corporate plutocrats just as it is to us ordinary citizens? We can understand why the corporate rich might want to destroy public housing, public education, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Such cutbacks would bring us closer to a free market society devoid of the publicly-funded "socialistic" human services that the ideological reactionaries detest. And such cuts would not deprive the superrich and their families of anything. The superrich have more than sufficient private wealth to procure whatever services and protections they need for themselves.

But the environment is a different story, is it not? Don't wealthy reactionaries and their corporate lobbyists inhabit the same polluted planet as everyone else, eat the same chemicalized food, and breathe the same toxified air? In fact, they do not live exactly as everyone else. They experience a different class reality, often residing in places where the air is markedly better than in low and middle income areas. They have access to food that is organically raised and specially transported and prepared.

The nation's toxic dumps and freeways usually are not situated in or near their swanky neighborhoods. In fact, the superrich do not live in neighborhoods as such. They usually reside on landed estates with plenty of wooded areas, streams, meadows, and only a few well-monitored access roads. Pesticide sprays are not poured over their trees and gardens. Clear cutting does not desolate their ranches, estates, family forests, lakes, and prime vacation spots.

Still, should they not fear the threat of an ecological apocalypse brought on by global warming? Do they want to see life on Earth, including their own lives, destroyed? In the long run they indeed will be sealing their own doom along with everyone else's. However, like us all, they live not in the long run but in the here and now. What is now at stake for them is something more proximate and more urgent than global ecology; it is global profits. The fate of the biosphere seems like a remote abstraction compared to the fate of one's immediate--and enormous--investments.

With their eye on the bottom line, big business leaders know that every dollar a company spends on oddball things like environmental protection is one less dollar in earnings. Moving away from fossil fuels and toward solar, wind, and tidal energy could help avert ecological disaster, but six of the world's ten top industrial corporations are involved primarily in the production of oil, gasoline, and motor vehicles. Fossil fuel pollution brings billions of dollars in returns. Ecologically sustainable forms of production threaten to compromise such profits, the big producers are convinced.

Immediate gain for oneself is a far more compelling consideration than a future loss shared by the general public. Every time you drive your car, you are putting your immediate need to get somewhere ahead of the collective need to avoid poisoning the air we all breath. So with the big players: the social cost of turning a forest into a wasteland weighs little against the immense and immediate profit that comes from harvesting the timber and walking away with a neat bundle of cash. And it can always be rationalized away: there are lots of other forests for people to visit, they don't need this one; society needs the timber; lumberjacks need the jobs, and so on.

The Future Is Now

Some of the very same scientists and environmentalists who see the ecology crisis as urgent rather annoyingly warn us of a catastrophic climate crisis by "the end of this century." But that's some ninety years away when all of us and most of our kids will be dead---which makes global warming a much less urgent issue.

There are other scientists who manage to be even more irritating by warning us of an impending ecological crisis then putting it even further into the future: "We'll have to stop thinking in terms of eons and start thinking in terms of centuries," one scientific sage was quoted in the New York Times in 2006. This is supposed to put us on alert? If a global catastrophe is a century or several centuries away, who is going to make the terribly difficult and costly decisions today whose effects will be felt far in the future?

Often we are told to think of our dear grandchildren who will be fully victimized by it all (an appeal usually made in a beseeching tone). But most of the young people I address on college campuses have a hard time imagining the world that their nonexistent grandchildren will be experiencing thirty or forty years hence.

Such appeals should be put to rest. We do not have centuries or generations or even many decades before disaster is upon us. Ecological crisis is not some distant urgency. Most of us alive today probably will not have the luxury of saying "Après moi, le déluge" because we will still be around to experience the catastrophe ourselves. We know this to be true because the ecological crisis is already acting upon us with an accelerated and compounded effect that may soon prove irreversible.

The Profiteering Madness

Sad to say, the environment cannot defend itself. It is up to us to protect itóor what's left of it. But all the superrich want is to keep transforming living nature into commodities and commodities into dead capital. Impending ecological disasters are of no great moment to the corporate plunderers. Of living nature they have no measure.

Wealth becomes addictive. Fortune whets the appetite for still more fortune. There is no end to the amount of money one might wish to accumulate, driven onward by the auri sacra fames, the cursed hunger for gold. So the money addicts grab more and more for themselves, more than can be spent in a thousand lifetimes of limitless indulgence, driven by what begins to resemble an obsessional pathology, a monomania that blots out every other human consideration.

They are more wedded to their wealth than to the Earth upon which they live, more concerned about the fate of their fortunes than the fate of humanity, so possessed by their pursuit of profit as to not see the disaster looming ahead. There was a New Yorker cartoon showing a corporate executive standing at a lectern addressing a business meeting with these words: "And so, while the end-of-the-world scenario will be rife with unimaginable horrors, we believe that the pre-end period will be filled with unprecedented opportunities for profit."

Not such a joke. Years ago I remarked that those who denied the existence of global warming would not change their opinion until the North Pole itself started melting. (I never expected it to actually start dissolving in my lifetime.) Today we are facing an Arctic meltdown that carries horrendous implications for the oceanic gulf streams, coastal water levels, the planetís entire temperate zone, and world agricultural output.

So how are the captains of industry and finance responding? As we might expect: like monomaniacal profiteers. They hear the music: ca-ching, ca-ching. First, the Arctic melting will open a direct northwest passage between the two great oceans, a dream older than Lewis and Clark. This will make for shorter and more accessible and inexpensive global trade routes. No more having to plod through the Panama Canal or around Cape Horn. Lower transportation costs means more trade and higher profits.

Second, they joyfully note that the melting is opening up vast new oil reserves to drilling. They will be able to drill-baby-drill for more of the same fossil fuel that is causing the very calamity descending upon us. More meltdown means more oil and more profits; such is the mantra of the free marketeers who think the world belongs only to them.

Imagine now that we are all inside one big bus hurtling down a road that is headed for a fatal plunge into a deep ravine. What are our profit addicts doing? They are hustling up and down the aisle, selling us crash cushions and seat belts at exorbitant prices. They planned ahead for this sales opportunity.

We have to get up from our seats, quickly place them under adult supervision, rush the front of the bus, yank the driver away, grab hold of the wheel, slow the bus down, and turn it around. Not easy but maybe still possible. With me it's a recurrent dream.

On Humanitarian Ship To Gaza

By Prof. Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, 16 May 2011

The Spirit of Rachel Corrie (officially known as FINCH) carrying a humanitarian cargo to Gaza was attacked by an Israeli naval patrol within the so-called Palestinian Security Zone on May 15, at 10.54pm EDT.

In the course of the last few hours, Global Research has communicated several times with the Rachel Corrie vessel en route to Gaza. What is provided below is a detailed update.

The vessel left the Greek Port of Piraeus, on Wednesday, May 11. The humanitarian initiative is sponsored by the Perdana Global Peace Foundation (PGPF), chaired by the former Prime Minister of Malaysia Mahathir Mohamad.

Participating in this mission are anti-war activists and journalists, consisting of 7 Malaysians, 2 Irish, 2 Indians and 1 Canadian. The Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) is a partner in this endeavor. Global Research`s Julie Lévesque is on board the Rachel Corrie:



The cargo ship The Spirit of Rachel Corrie (officially known as FINCH) is carrying 7.5 kilometers of UPVC (plastic) sewage pipes to help restore the devastated sewerage system in Gaza. The ship was named after the courageous American activist who was crushed and killed by an Israeli bulldozer in 2003 while trying to prevent the demolition of another Palestinian home. She died at 23. ( Perdana's Second Press Release, Nakba and the Spirit of Rachel Corrie: Humanitarian Ship Attacked by Israel now within 1.5 nautical miles of Gazan Waters Global Research, May 16, 2011)

The Spirit of Rachel Corrie entered Gazan waters without being detected.

The Israeli navy with its radar equipment and advanced communications technology was unaware of the Spirit of Rachel Corrie Mission.

They were unprepared. They had received no prior information of the Rachel Corrie Mission, which had been planned for several months, scheduled to arrive off the coast of Gaza on the day of the "Nakba" commemoration.

Ironically, Mossad, Israel's intelligence agency was unaware of this mission. The Israeli navy vessels acted in an improvised fashion, without prior knowledge or intelligence. There was no indication that they had received precise instructions from the Israeli government.

At the time of the attack, the passengers on board were under the impression that the ship was still in international waters, when in fact was one mile inside the "Palestinian Security zone", namely in Gaza territorial waters, within a short distance of the Gaza coastline. This was an important accomplishment.

Indicated below is the initial report sent to Global Research by text message:

At 10.54 pm Eastern Time (EDT), the Spirit of Rachel Corrie was intercepted by an Israeli ship and a Egyptian ship in international waters [correction: within Gaza Territorial waters]

10:54pm EDT, Gaza 5:54am: We have been intercepted by Israeli ship and Egyptian ship. We are disobeying the orders and sailing ahead to Gaza.

10:57pm EDT, Gaza 5:57am: One Israeli warship coming to us very fast! We are in international waters, therefore they have no right to attack us. We are still sailing ahead.

10:59pm EDT, Gaza 5:59am: They are opening fire across our ship! We are still sailing ahead.

11:09pm EDT, Gaza 6:09am: They are shooting all over the place. We can't continue ...

11:35pm EDT, Gaza 6:35am: They circled our ship twice and fired across our ship. Machine guns. No one was injured. One of the fishing nets caught the propeller, so we can't move now.

11:37pm EDT, Gaza 6:37am: The Israeli ship was coming from one end and the Egyptian ship was coming from another end. Firing. We are just stalled now. Everybody is okay. No one is injured.

Two Israeli naval vessels initially launched a "warning attack" on the Rachel Corrie, indicating that if the ship did not change course, they would shoot at the crew and the passengers. One of the passengers was almost killed as a result of the attacks. (See Bernama, May 16, 2011)

The following exchange took place between the Israeli navy and the ship as reported by the Free Malaysia Today journalist on board the Spirit of Rachel Corrie:

"Israeli army: This is a warning shot. Turn around.

Captain Jalil Mansor: We are unarmed civilians on a humanitarian mission to Gaza.

Israeli army: This is a closed military zone. It’s a violation. Turn around.

Mansor: We will continue (the mission).

The Israelis then headed to the back of the aid vessel and released a second warning shot into the air.

Graham: This is a violation (of international law). We are on a peaceful mission and unarmed.

Israeli army: Turn around. We will fire again.

Graham: You are firing towards unarmed civilians.

Israeli army: We didn’t fire towards unarmed civilians.

Graham: Looks like firing towards us.

Israeli army: We didn’t fire towards you. That is only a warning shot.

Following that conversation, the Israeli army fired two more shots and threatened: “Next time, we will land on your ship.”

Then the Egyptian navy was heard telling the Israelis on the radio: “Stop firing. They are in Egyptian waters.”

Upon realizing the presence of Egyptian naval forces, the Israelis departed." (Free Malaysia Today, May 16, 2011)

The Egyptian navy guard was initially unaware of what was occurring. The Israeli navy contacted the Egyptian navy and initially got no response.

Our earlier report (filed at 12.30am) following communication with the ship shortly after midnight (March 16) pointed to cooperation between the Israeli navy and their Egyptian counterparts. While there was cooperation, the Egyptians played a supportive role, which served to appease the Israeli attacks. They also ensured the escorting of the Spirit of Rachel Corrie into Egyptian territorial waters.

The Israeli Navy had contacted the Spirit of Rachel Corrie. They were informed regarding the nature of the cargo and that the crew and passengers were unarmed civilians.

The warning attack was aggressive using automatic weapons. Two Israeli naval patrol boats armed with machine guns were deployed. The Israelis also opened fire on a Palestinian fishing boat which was within Gazan territorial waters.

Following the initial "warning attack" they ordered the Spirit of Rachel Corrie to turn back. "Turn around or we'll shoot". However, once the ship changed course as demanded by the Israeli commando, they continued firing on the ship: "They started shooting to kill"

The Egyptian navy ship while communicating with the Israeli Navy was instrumental in escorting the ship to safe haven. The crew of the Egyptian ship was supportive in ensuring the safety of the crew and passengers of the humanitarian vessel.

There was communication between the Israeli and Egyptian ships and the Israeli's "thanked" the Egyptian ship for having intervened.

The Spirit of Rachel Corrie, its crew and passengers are now in Egyptian territorial water, anchored off the Egyptian port of Al Arish, within a short distance of Gaza territorial waters.

It is essential at this stage to mobilize Worldwide in support for the Spirit of Rachel Corrie, break the blockade, open up Gazan territorial waters to aid and trade and also use this opportunity to open the land border between Egypt and Gaza.

The humanitarian convoy is of significance in the process of rehabilitation of Gaza's public health infrastructure including its sewage system which was partially destroyed by Israeli bombings under Operation Cast Lead:

On 27 December 2008, the Israeli military launched Operation Cast Lead, which not only killed some 1400 Palestinians, but also destroyed vital infrastructure leaving the Gazans with critical water and sewage problems. Repair of the infrastructure has proved impossible as Israel has prevented the entry of construction materials and fuel to resolve this dire situation.

According to a report from the Emergency Water, Sanitation and Hygiene group (EWASH), "the release of 80 million litres of untreated or partially treated sewage into the environment and Mediterranean Sea each day is primarily a result of the Israeli imposed blockade on the Gaza Strip."

Gaza, one of the world's most densely populated areas, is currently dealing with serious health issues such as the blue baby syndrome, diarrhea and other waterborne diseases like typhoid and hepatitis A. The World Health Organization is warning of a possible cholera epidemic if nothing is done rapidly to resolve this sanitation crisis.

According to Physicians for Human Rights-Israel: "Between 90% and 95% of the aquifers in the Gaza Strip are not safe for drinking." The primary cause of the current problem originates from the destruction, during Operation Cast Lead, of "20 kilometers of water pipes, 7.5 kilometers of sewage pipes and 5,700 mobile water tanks".

While the Gazans are experiencing the dramatic environmental impacts of the sewage and water crisis, the effects have already reached the Israeli shores, and could spread further affecting neighbouring countries. This severe health and environmental issue needs to be dealt with urgently. The international community must demand that the illegal Israeli blockade be lifted.

The Spirit of Rachel Corrie Mission stemmed from PGFP's participation in the Freedom Flotilla in 2010, in which 9 activists were killed by Israeli commandos. Following a fact finding mission conducted in Gaza in October 2010, PGPF decided to continue its efforts to assist Palestinians and shows this project as the most immediate of all priorities. See Perdana's Second Press Release, Nakba and the Spirit of Rachel Corrie: Humanitarian Ship Attacked by Israel now within 1.5 nautical miles of Gazan Waters0777 646 2379, Global Research, May 16, 2011)

by Gilad Atzmon

“There will be no return-- time has come to tell Palestinian refugees they will not be returning to the State of Israel,” writes Nahum Barnea, a prominent Israeli ‘liberal’ columnist.

It is becoming clear that Israel lacks the means to cope with Palestinian resilience. Despite Israeli barbarism; despite sixty-three years of oppression, racial discrimination and mass murderous tactics-- including the usage of WMD-- the Palestinian people have remained determined to return to their land.

This week they reminded the Israelis, world Jewry and the rest of the world that the Palestinian cause is not going to fade away. If anything, in 2011, Palestinians seem more decisive, firm and united than their parents’ or grandparents’ generations.

Hence, it is almost amusing to follow the bizarre manner in which Israeli writer Barnea tries to convince himself otherwise, proclaiming “Their politicians told them it would happen. The clerics promised Allah’s help. Foreign sponsors provided flags and buses. They embark on their mission with the confidence that the Zionist project is destined to collapse. Another small push and the entire Land of Israel, from the Jordan to the Sea, will become Palestine.”

Whether Barnea grasps it or not, this is indeed the vision more and more Palestinians have in mind and this is exactly the vision I have in mind. This is the exact vision more and more people around the world envisage as a perfect solution, and clearly, this is the only ethical and universal solution to this bitter conflict: Israel will be Palestine. It will stretch from the river to the sea. And it will be a State of all its citizens as opposed to the racially exclusivist ‘Jews only’ State.

“I have news for you, my dear cousins*,” says Barnea in a condescending manner. “It won’t be happening – not in your lifetime…. Sixty-three years have passed since that war; the time has come to embrace other dreams.”

It doesn’t take a genius to gather that Barnea, like many other Israelis, expresses wishful thinking here rather than a reading of the reality on the ground. As it happens - and more than a few of us detected it decades ago - Palestinians are at the forefront of a battle for a better world. The current regional Arab revolution is a mass call for justice, but also for justice in Palestine. As much as the world looks with admiration at young Muslims and Arabs making a change, it also becomes general knowledge that Israel is the biggest threat to world peace. The Palestinian Right of Return is about to become an international priority issue, and Israel will be defeated on that front. The West wouldn’t hesitate to sacrifice Israel on that issue: isolated and humiliated, Israel is going to struggle hopelessly against the entire region. And to clarify the matter, time is not exactly on the side of the Jewish State.

Israel has had sixty-three years to confront its original sin. It had a window of opportunity to repent, and open its border to the millions of refugees it so brutally expelled. But now the window seems to have been closed. Israel has lost the chance to save itself from itself. And what we saw this week was just an introduction. Israel is about to face a tidal wave of Palestinian gatherings on its borders. Israel doesn’t possess the political or military means to deal with these emerging forms of non-violent resistance.

Barnea like many other Israelis loves Abbas: according to the Israeli columnist Abbas is “the most humane, lovely politician in the three governments currently serving in the Land of Israel.” However, Barnea is disappointed to find out that even Abbas “gets carried away” when he declared on the eve of Nakba Day that no Palestinian leader will renounce the right of return: “the return is not a slogan…Palestine is ours.”

Barnea stresses that Abbas refrained from clarifying the question of how, and where this right will be realised, and whether it will be through compensation or physical return. Barnea concludes that “anyone could make what he wanted” out of Abass’ words.” But in fact Barnea is wrong again. Abbas' words were totally clear: there was no hidden message or even ambiguity in them. The return is not a slogan. For a while it was a universal and an ethical call. But as things stand this week, it is now becoming a call for a direct action. Barnea and most Israelis may still fail to grasp that today’s Middle East is a new entity all together. It is united; it is firm, and it is far from timid. It is vibrant, and revolutionary, and fuelled by yearning for justice and freedom. Israel is surrounded by a wall of fierce resistance. As far as the Jewish State is concerned, the countdown has begun.

Barnea ends his diatribe by telling his fellow Israelis that “those who wish to live in the sovereign, Zionist and democratic State of Israel have no other option but to keep telling the Palestinians: with all due respect, what’s in the past is in the past.”

Yet, a universal reading of Barnea’s suggestion surely also logically implies that the rest of us then, can also now relieve ourselves of the endless burden of Jewish exceptional suffering too: after all, Barnea did say, ‘what’s in the past is in the past.’ Accordingly then, if the Jews are not unique in their collective pain, nothing should stop the Israelis from opening a new page too, so they can cross the divide and build bridges with the indigenous people of the land; those whom they themselves ethnically cleansed and attempted to destroy. For if the burden of the past can, as Barnea suggests, lose its relevance or significance, Israel might as well live up to that, and turn its face to a brighter future and voluntarily invite the Palestinian refugees to return to their land. Such a move would mean an immediate end to the conflict.

But, needless to say, I do not hold my breath.

Yet, there is one crucial (currently hypothetical) question I must address: nowadays, when it becomes clear that the Jewish state approaches its final phase, how would Israelis who would like to return to Europe react to a Barnea-like ‘no return’ statement if it were expressed by a European ‘liberal’ columnist? How would Israelis or the rest of us react to the following: ‘there will be no return-time has come to tell the Jews they will not be returning to Europe’?

Such a statement would clearly provoke outrage amongst many of us.

Yet sadly enough, we are all too used to hear similar statements from ‘liberal’ Israelis and Jews.

Before viewing the following video in beautiful setting as a proud people commemorate their place in history, let us view some of that history and distortions thereof.

The Brits wave the name Winston Churchill around as wartime champion. The people of the US have been taught how they defeated Nazi Germany and repulsed a sneak attack of Japan in WWII. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Prime political motivation of the US for the last 100 and more years has been its opposition to communism. The US army invaded Russia in 1919 in failed attempt to put down its revolutionary move to communism. Germany, suffering greatly from the aftermath of WWI, shortly joined them in that as Hitler sought a way out.

Many of the largest US corporations, banks, and political movers actively supported the rise of Hitler's Third Reich and profited from it. The words "IBM, Standard Oil, Rockefellers, Bush come readily to mind.

The US also struggled at home under global financial depression. Germany set the recovery pattern. That was war, primarily against the communists of Russia. They had eager support from US financial interests. Go Capitalism! Germany's course appeared a way out for the US as well - at first.

But then it turned sour for both Germany and thus its sympathetic US interests. The backward imagined Russians did not lay down. Ninety-two percent of Germany's military casualties in WWII were on its eastern front as it was beaten by the Russian people. Its army in the west left to finally fight the amerikans and brits was reduced to old men and boys.

Time to switch sides? - Well, almost. The US needed a war badly and Germany's was a loser.

Japan needed oil. There were two ways to get it. One was overland through China. Trouble was the Chinese people stood in the way as they engaged in their own communist revolution.

The other way was by sea. The US maintained a naval blockage of Japanese oil shipments. The Japanese were forced to do the only thing they could. That was to destroy the US navy based in Hawaii. It was hardly the surprise proclaimed but rather a designed outcome. But never mind reality. It is what the folks believe that counts. So, "Let's remember Pearl Harbor as we did the Alamo (another lie of history inverted)" became the words of the US WWII rally cry song of the 40's.

The way was to take on desperate oil starved Japan and old men and boys of an already defeated Germany and get in on or even direct profiting over the rubble. Otherwise Russian commies would get all the gold and glory. Sorry about all those grave stones in world scattered military cemeteries, but those that count the gold don't go to those anyhow and so issue no apologies.

But communism was defeated by the west in the break up of the USSR right? And how about China and even Cuba allowing capitalist companies? Well, no. There is a great difference between communism evolving to use capitalist tools for benefit of societies' peoples and the same tools to rob them.

The Russians deserve celebration of their heroes and sacrifices (Can I say for us all?). Enjoy it with them!

I have taken this from the blogger "Flogging Dead Horses"

And Finally Some Good News

I have read that Anthony John Hill better known as Muad'Dib has been declared innocent. He is the author of the 7/7 video Ripple Effect and has been in jail in England for nearly 5 months since he was extradited from Ireland.

His "crime" was to send copies of his video to everyone evolved in one of "The Crowns" terror show trails. For that he was accused of perverting the course of justice and has been hounded ever since.

Well a jury heard an open discussion of 9/11 and 7/7 and watched his video in it's entirety. They then went on to acquit him. The truth can not be contained.



See the excellent http://jamesfetzer.blogspot.com for the low down on the whole trial by Queen and Country.

Dedicated to Madeleine Albright, on Behalf of the Children of Iraq, whose Lives were a "Price Worth It."

by Felicity Arbuthnot



" ... war in our time is always indiscriminate, a war against innocents, a war against children." Howard Zinn. (1922-2010.)

It was Kathy Kelly - relentlessly, lovingly, committed to the people of Iraq, constantly risking the draconian wrath, jail terms, and impossible fines of the US., government for her compassion - who alerted me. The 'phone rang, it was 12th May 1996, and Kathy was calling from Chicago, stunned. Madeleine Albright, then US., Ambassador the the UN., had just appeared on "Sixty Minutes."

Lesley Stahl, said Kathy, had said, of the US., driven embargo on Iraq: "We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?" Albright had responded: "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price--we think the price is worth it."

Some things really are indelibly seared in to memory. I remember a feeling of disbelief; somehow even the meticulous Kathy must have some way misconstrued. Was there any way she could fax me a transcript I asked, in those, for most, pre-home computer days. Magically, she obtained one within the hour. Reading it, the images of the children I had watched helplessly, their lives ebbing away, for want of embargoed medicines, treatments, frequently the ability to perform vital surgery, flooded my mind.

I thought of the sudden look of hope, in the eyes of parents sitting by the bed of a child, as one walked in to the ward. One was from outside Iraq, perhaps there was some miracle one could work, then the look died. As did so, so, many of the small, frail little souls, their lives snatched away. Now I knew that they were a "price" that was "worth it." And with it, the realization that total evil really exists.

Iraq imported seventy percent of virtually everything. On Hiroshima Day 1990, with the implementation of the embargo rational life ended. From school books, to childrens' toys, lipstick to sanitary items, washing up liquid to shampoo, normality died. But it was the health sector, formerly possibly the finest in the Middle East, free to all, which was uniquely devastated. After the 1991 bombing, it was - literally - largely in ruins.

The viciousness with which the UN., Sanctions Committee acted, made a mockery of the fine founding words of their Charter in general and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in particular. From incubators to paediatric syringes, cancer medications to dialysis machines and equipment, from pain killers to scalpels, anti-biotics to asthma inhalers, all were vetoed.

Six months before Albright's pronouncement, in December 1995, Sara Zaidi and Mary Smith Fawzi of the Center for Economic and Social Rights and the Harvard School of Public Health, wrote to the Lancet, pointing out that by August 1991, just one year in to the embargo: "baseline mortality for the under five population rose from 43.2 to 128.5 per 1,000, reflecting a three fold increase in child mortality." In their further survey (1995) under the auspices of UN., Food and Agricultural Organization: "the under five mortality rate increased five-fold." Stunting and wasting had become prevalent in a country where food was formerly cheap and plentiful.

I first went to Iraq after the 1991 bombing, less a year later, and within a couple of hours witnessed the reality behind the statistics. In what had been a flagship teaching hospital, I watched a young nurse, frantically trying to clear the throat of a perfect, new born baby boy, his young parents standing, their faces frozen with terror. A friend, a doctor from Scotland was with me, she looked round and said: "In a situation like this, in near any hospital, you know where the vital items will be, there is nothing here." We watched helplessly, as the little mite turned, white, grey, near blue, and lost his fledgling fight for life, as the sun streamed through broken, bomb damaged windows. The glass factories had been bombed - and glass too was vetoed. The baby had died for little more than cents worth of basic, plastic suction.

By 1993, mothers too malnourished to breast feed and unable to afford milk powder, fed their babies on sugared water, or sugared black tea. Virtually all became bloated, chronically malnourished and died. Doctors created a new diagnosis. They called them: "the sugar babies."

For children who survived, experts on children in war zones, warned that this was possibly the most traumatized child population on earth. With the austerity, the ongoing (illegal) bombings by the US., and UK., they had no way to recover from their experiences.

An unforgettable example was a child of about five, in a small grocery store, early one morning. He came in, in the proud mode of children everywhere, entrusted with an important errand. He bought one egg. At the time, a tray of eggs cost a university Professor's monthly salary. To go to a meal and find minute pieces of egg in it, was to be honoured indeed. The child carried it carefully to the door - and dropped it. He fell to his knees, trying to scrape it up up in his hands, tears streaming down his face. I reached in to my pocket, the shop keeper tapped him on the shoulder and gave him another one.

Two more children that were "worth" the "price", were suffering from acute myeloid leukaemia, bleeding internally, covered in bruises from their leaking capillaries and in intractable pain. There was no pain relief. The younger one, aged three, was lying rigid, his eyes full of unshed tears. He had taught himself not to cry, since it wracked his agonized little body further. I turned away, unable to take a picture, or take notes, just wanting to comfort him; but to touch would have brought further agony.

Near the door, I bent to stroke the head of the older child, just five. In a gesture which must have cost him the unimaginable, he responded as children everywhere, to affection, and squeezed my hand tightly. I wrote at the time: "I walked from the ward, leant against the wall, and knew that it was actually possible to died of shame."

Ms Albright would have been no doubt, pleased at the progress of her project in Basra. On one visit to the paediatric and maternity hospital, dear friend, Dr Jenan Hussein came running out to hug me. Then a moment's silence, and I had a near premonition. She said: "Felicity, you know those children you wrote about in June?" (It was November) "I am sorry, they have all died." They were seventeen babies in the premature baby unit, without even oxygen. (Vetoed.)

That was the visit when I nearly lost the plot. I walked in to one ward and a group of distraught women, aunts, grandmothers, were standing by a cot, of another perfect new born, who had just died. The mother had rushed from the unit beside herself in grief. I asked if I could hold the tiny still warm being. "Please, of course." I put him over my shoulder, stroked his head, back, certain I could bring him back to life, he was warm, fluid, total. How long I stroked his small form, willing him back, I do not know. Finally, defeated, I laid him down, wrapped him and we wept together.

Further down the corridor was another new born. He was in an incubator, wrapped in blankets, since the incubator did not work (replacements vetoed) in the looking glass world Iraq had become. He needed an exchange transfusion, premature and yellow with jaundice as he was. I thought I had the blood type needed and offered mine if they checked to be sure, since wrong blood is as lethal as no blood. There were no facilities to check. Vetoed. My premature son had been saved by and exchange transfusion. I looked in to the mother's eyes and resonated with her agony. We, the doctors, the baby, were all as helpless as each other.

As cancers soared (children in the mid 90's were sometimes born with cancer - an unheard of phenomenon) cancer treatments were vetoed. The cancer has been linked to the weapons used, especially depleted uranium.

The UK Atomic Energy Authority in a "self initiated" Report, estimated that if fifty tonnes of the residual dust remained after the 1991 hostilities, there would be half a million excess cancer deaths by 2000. In fact the highest estimates of that left is 700 tonnes. In 1998 a John Hopkins University study estimated that if cancers continued on the current curve, 44% of the population would develop it by 2000.

The 2003 blitzkrieg may have left 2,000- 3,000 further tonnes of DU. For years many years couples have feared having children, given the equal epidemic of birth defects, as would be expected if nuclear waste is dropped on populations.

I have written much of Jassim, the child poet, who, hearing I was a writer, glowed with delight, and took a note book from under his pillow in the cancer ward he was lying in. Could he read me his poem? Of course:

"The name is love

The class is mindless

The school is suffering

The government is sadness

The city is sighing

The street is misery

The home number is one thousand sighs. "

"Jassim", I said, finally finding my voice, if you can write this at thirteen, think what you will do at twenty. I asked if I could use his poem and credit him. He was thrilled. He never saw it in print, in many places and languages. He died before an aid agency could get the medications he needed to him, circumventing the embargo.

Just before the invasion, I asked the father of another terminally ill child, Mohammed, (10) what he would like to ask of George W. Bush and Tony Blair. He responded: "Please ask them, do they want all out children as child sacrifices?"

"Liberating" Iraq has resulted in an estimated five million orphans, one million widows, nearly five million displaced, internally and externally and an infrastructure, social distortion, medical tragedy which makes the embargo years seem mild. Between the embargo and the invasion - 1990 - 2011, higher estimates are three million dead, the unborn, new born and under fives, still paying the highest price. A "price worth it."

Happy Anniversary, Madam Albright.

That Never Existed

Do You?

Today is a legal holiday in most countries of the world except the USA. Workers in many are entitled to a day off work with full pay or double pay if they do work. The designation of May 1 as Labor Day by nations other than the US came about from worldwide outrage over events that took place in Chicago. It is the story of Haymarket Square.

May Day is celebrated around the world as International Workers Day. All around the world, that is, except for the United States. This is especially curious since May Day honors events that happened in the US. Of course, labor history is anathema to corporate America and is edited out of its textbooks. (Except for examples of corruption). As Orwell pointed out in 1984: "Those who control the present, control the past, and those who control the past, control the future." We should take strength from these brave Americans who fought against the entrenched forces of the right.

All of the privileges workers enjoy today—a minimum wage, safety laws, and even an eight-hour workday—came about only with the sacrifice of the workers who came before. Although the government prefers our collective amnesia, workers on this May Day should remember the past and realize that we too are part of an ongoing struggle to bring about an end to the exploitation of labor around the world. From the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, people in factories have worked very long shifts, lasting up to fourteen or more hours a day.

During the 1880s a new movement calling for an eight-hour day inspired both labor unions and unorganized workers in the US. At its 1884 convention, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions adopted a resolution stating that beginning May 1, 1886, "eight hours shall constitute a legal day's work" and workers would strike at companies that did not recognize the eight-hour day. By April 1886, a quarter of a million workers had committed themselves to go on strike as part of the May Day movement. This enabled thousands of workers to win shorter shifts. Most employers, however, refused to reduce working hours.

By May 1 some 200,000 workers were on strike. An additional 340,000 workers in the industrial cities of Boston, New York, Milwaukee, Chicago and Pittsburgh, turned out for local parades and rallies. One of the most militant campaigns occurred in Chicago. The syndicalist International Working People's Association—promoting equal rights and an end to racism and the class system—had successfully organized huge numbers of workers, building a movement that included African-Americans, immigrants, and women standing together with white men. Largely because of the organization’s efforts, 50,000 workers went on strike, with tens of thousands attending the city's May Day parade. The IWPA's successful broad-based appeal worried businesses and the government alike. This fear resulted in the expansion of both the police and the militias.

On May Day, Albert Parsons, along with Albert Spies, spoke to a huge crowd assembled as part of the May Day activities. Parsons was a member of both the Knights of Labor and the Chicago Central Labor Union, and Spies was the editor of the German workers' paper Die Arbeiter-Zeitung. Despite the city leaders' expectations of violence (which led to a heavy police presence), the rally ended without incident. Two days later, Spies spoke to a meeting of 6,000 workers. Among the workers were striking lumber workers and employees from the McCormick Harvester Works.

Cyrus McCormick, a determined union-buster had locked his workers out as a result of their strike of 2 ½ months. Nonstriking workers and replacement workers became the focus of heckling by other meeting participants, which created a chaotic atmosphere. Then, in a classic case of overreaction, police fired into the crowd and killed at least two men while wounding many more. Appalled by the police violence, Spies called for a massive rally the next day in Haymarket Square. Between 2,000 and 3,000 people attended the May 4 rally. Parsons gave an hour-long speech that was relatively tame. He specifically stated, "I am not here for the purpose of inciting anybody."

Chicago Mayor Harrison, who had attended most of the meeting, stopped by the police station on his way home. He reported to Police Captain Bonfield that "nothing looked likely to require police interference." Despite this advice the captain, who regularly employed Pinkerton detectives and supported "shoot to kill" policies when dealing with strikers, sent additional officers to the square. After hours of speeches, people had begun to leave, when Samuel Fielden, a Methodist preacher and the final speaker, took the podium. Concluding his speech, he encouraged workers to stand up to the law, which did not protect them, urging them to "kill it, stab it . . . to impede its progress."

The police considered this "inflammatory language" and 200 police officers ordered the remaining crowd to disperse immediately. As Fielden argued with the police of the peaceful intent of the meeting, someone threw a dynamite bomb at the police. One sergeant was killed immediately. The police then opened fire at the crowd. Estimates indicated that seven or eight civilians were killed. Several policemen and additional civilians died later. Following the event, hysteria swept the city.

Mayor Harrison declared martial law. Some believed the bomb had been thrown by an agent provocateur. Indeed, it served nicely as an excuse for the police to harass and attack scores of people. Hundreds were arrested. State Attorney for Cook County J. Grinnell announced in a public statement, "Make the raids first and look up the law afterwards." Labor unions were broken up. Picketing strikers were arrested and the police continued to beat labor supporters.

In conjunction with the bombing, the state arrested and indicted eight anarchists: Spies, Michael Schwab, Fielden, Parsons, Adolph Fischer, George Engel, Louis Lingg and Oscar Neebe. All were charged with conspiracy to murder, despite the fact that only three had been present at the Haymarket meeting. For their trial, a special bailiff was appointed to pick the jury. He stated, "These fellows are going to be hanged as certain as death." During the trial in June 1886, the state could not provide evidence that any of the men had knowledge of the bomb or that they had incited or participated in the violence.

But it wasn't the men so much as their ideas that were considered dangerous. As Grinnell stated in his summation: "Law is on trial. Anarchy is on trial. These men have been selected, picked out by the grand jury and indicted because they were leaders. They are no more guilty than the thousands who follow them. Gentlemen of the jury: convict these men, make examples of them, hang them and you save our institutions, our society."

As a result of the trial, all but one of the men received death sentences (Neebe received 15 years). Despite international outcry, Spies, Parsons, Fischer, and Engel were hanged on November 11, 1887; Lingg escaped by committing suicide. Hundreds of thousands of people lined the funeral procession for the executed men. Later, in 1893, when newly elected Governor Altgeld granted pardons to Neebe, Schwab, and Fielden, he admitted that the trial had been unfair and that the men had always been innocent of the crimes.

After Haymarket, workers all over the world pointed towards May 1 as their day. After 1886 rallies, strikes and other militant actions promoted the cause of the working class around the world. Unfortunately, a conservative element within U.S. organized labor, combined with the crushing government repression of left politics, allowed the significance of the day to become lost in the United States. As early as 1894, President Cleveland signed a bill naming not May 1 but the first Monday in September as "Labor Day." This creatively sidestepped the day with more historical significance. Adding further insult, President Eisenhower proclaimed May 1 as "Law Day" in 1958. In light of the history of May Day, it was ironic that the theme of the 2002 year's Law Day (sponsored by the American Bar Association) was "Celebrate Your Freedom." The focus is on "equal protection of the laws."

We must not forget what happened at Haymarket, lest we give reactionary forces the opportunity to revoke what the labor movement has gained. In 1886 the movement was strong and visible. It was the state that provoked crowds into violence in order to create an excuse to undermine the progress of the working class. We cannot allow the government to frighten us back into silence. Instead we must follow the examples set by Parsons, Spies, Fischer and Engel, and all the others who have died or been imprisoned by the state. The events of May Day 1886 remind us that workers will continue to be exploited until we stand up and oppose that exploitation. It is only with organization and the courage to speak out against injustice that we will gain better working conditions, better pay, and better lives.

Then came George W Bush once more further obscuring the truth of history by newly changing the name and function of the real Labor Day to "Loyalty Day". Haymarket Square no longer exists. Its location was where Chicago's Kennedy Expressway now crosses Randolph Street, The statue which marked the point of Labor Day's inception has been moved to the Chicago Police Academy and can only be viewed with special permission.

They can rename, they can distort, they can run, but they can't hide, for the world remembers.

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Edit note: This above was posted 1 May 2011 as has been on the Forum every Labor Day as well as at the time of US September fake 'labor day's. On May 1, 2011, a commemoration at Forest Home Cemetery in Chicago remembered the 1886 Haymarket Tragedy and the 1893 Monument to the Haymarket Martyrs was unveiled. The video below consists of the remarks there of General President Terence M. O'Sullivan of the Laborers International Union of North America. The video was made and uploaded to YouTube by an old friend and labor organizer. It was acquired today by his Facebook link and this post is updated with the video appended.

The Dice Are Stacked Against Humanity

This is the text of a speech delivered by Noam Chomsky at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, on September 30, 2010.

I'll begin with an interesting debate that took place some years ago between Carl Sagan, the well-known astrophysicist, and Ernst Mayr, the grand old man of American biology. They were debating the possibility of finding intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. And Sagan, speaking from the point of view of an astrophysicist, pointed out that there are innumerable planets just like ours. There is no reason they shouldn’t have developed intelligent life. Mayr, from the point of view of a biologist, argued that it’s very unlikely that we’ll find any. And his reason was, he said, we have exactly one example: Earth. So let’s take a look at Earth.

And what he basically argued is that intelligence is a kind of lethal mutation. And he had a good argument. He pointed out that if you take a look at biological success, which is essentially measured by how many of us are there, the organisms that do quite well are those that mutate very quickly, like bacteria, or those that are stuck in a fixed ecological niche, like beetles. They do fine. And they may survive the environmental crisis. But as you go up the scale of what we call intelligence, they are less and less successful. By the time you get to mammals, there are very few of them as compared with, say, insects. By the time you get to humans, the origin of humans may be 100,000 years ago, there is a very small group. We are kind of misled now because there are a lot of humans around, but that’s a matter of a few thousand years, which is meaningless from an evolutionary point of view. His argument was, you’re just not going to find intelligent life elsewhere, and you probably won’t find it here for very long either because it’s just a lethal mutation. He also added, a little bit ominously, that the average life span of a species, of the billions that have existed, is about 100,000 years, which is roughly the length of time that modern humans have existed.

With the environmental crisis, we’re now in a situation where we can decide whether Mayr was right or not. If nothing significant is done about it, and pretty quickly, then he will have been correct: human intelligence is indeed a lethal mutation. Maybe some humans will survive, but it will be scattered and nothing like a decent existence, and we’ll take a lot of the rest of the living world along with us.

So is anything going to be done about it? The prospects are not very auspicious. As you know, there was an international conference on this last December. A total disaster. Nothing came out of it. The emerging economies, China, India, and others, argued that it’s unfair for them to bear the burden of a couple hundred years of environmental destruction by the currently rich and developed societies. That’s a credible argument. But it’s one of these cases where you can win the battle and lose the war. The argument isn’t going to be very helpful to them if, in fact, the environmental crisis advances and a viable society goes with it. And, of course, the poor countries, for whom they’re speaking, will be the worst hit. In fact, they already are the worst hit. That will continue. The rich and developed societies, they split a little bit. Europe is actually doing something about it; it’s done some things to level off emissions. The United States has not.

In fact, there is a well-known environmentalist writer, George Monbiot, who wrote after the Copenhagen conference that “the failure of the conference can be explained in two words: Barack Obama.” And he’s correct. Obama’s intervention in the conference was, of course, very significant, given the power and the role of the United States in any international event. And he basically killed it. No restrictions, Kyoto Protocols die. The United States never participated in it. Emissions have very sharply increased in the United States since, and nothing is being done to curb them. A few Band-Aids here and there, but basically nothing. Of course, it’s not just Barack Obama. It’s our whole society and culture. Our institutions are constructed in such a way that trying to achieve anything is going to be extremely difficult.

Public attitudes are a little hard to judge. There are a lot of polls, and they have what look like varying results, depending on exactly how you interpret the questions and the answers. But a very substantial part of the population, maybe a big majority, is inclined to dismiss this as just kind of a liberal hoax. What’s particularly interesting is the role of the corporate sector, which pretty much runs the country and the political system. They’re very explicit. The big business lobbies, like the Chamber of Commerce, American Petroleum Institute, and others, have been very clear and explicit. A couple of years ago they said they are going to carry out—they since have been carrying out—a major publicity campaign to convince people that it’s not real, that it’s a liberal hoax. Judging by polls, that’s had an effect.

It’s particularly interesting to take a look at the people who are running these campaigns, say, the CEOs of big corporations. They know as well as you and I do that it’s very real and that the threats are very dire, and that they’re threatening the lives of their grandchildren. In fact, they’re threatening what they own, they own the world, and they’re threatening its survival. Which seems irrational, and it is, from a certain perspective. But from another perspective it’s highly rational. They’re acting within the structure of the institutions of which they are a part. They are functioning within something like market systems—not quite, but partially—market systems. To the extent that you participate in a market system, you disregard necessarily what economists call “externalities,” the effect of a transaction upon others. So, for example, if one of you sells me a car, we may try to make a good deal for ourselves, but we don’t take into account in that transaction the effect of the transaction on others. Of course, there is an effect. It may feel like a small effect, but if it multiplies over a lot of people, it’s a huge effect: pollution, congestion, wasting time in traffic jams, all sorts of things. Those you don’t take into account—necessarily. That’s part of the market system.

We’ve just been through a major illustration of this. The financial crisis has a lot of roots, but the fundamental root of it has been known for a long time. It was talked about decades before the crisis. In fact, there have been repeated crises. This is just the worst of them. The fundamental reason, it just is rooted in market systems. If Goldman Sachs, say, makes a transaction, if they’re doing their job, if the managers are up to speed they are paying attention to what they get out of it and the institution or person at the other end of the transaction, say, a borrower, does the same thing. They don’t take into account what’s called systemic risk, that is, the chance that the transaction that they’re carrying out will contribute to crashing the whole system. They don’t take that into account. In fact, that’s a large part of what just happened. The systemic risk turned out to be huge, enough to crash the system, even though the original transactions are perfectly rational within the system.

It’s not because they’re bad people or anything. If they don’t do it—suppose some CEO says, “Okay, I’m going to take into account externalities”—then he’s out. He’s out and somebody else is in who will play by the rules. That’s the nature of the institution. You can be a perfectly nice guy in your personal life. You can sign up for the Sierra Club and give speeches about the environmental crisis or whatever, but in the role of corporate manager, you’re fixed. You have to try to maximize short-term profit and market share—in fact, that’s a legal requirement in Anglo-American corporate law—just because if you don’t do it, either your business will disappear because somebody else will outperform it in the short run, or you will just be out because you’re not doing your job and somebody else will be in. So there is an institutional irrationality. Within the institution the behavior is perfectly rational, but the institutions themselves are so totally irrational that they are designed to crash.

If you look, say, at the financial system, it’s extremely dramatic what happened. There was a crash in the 1920s, and in the 1930s, a huge depression. But then regulatory mechanisms were introduced. They were introduced as a result of massive popular pressure, but they were introduced. And throughout the whole period of very rapid and pretty egalitarian economic growth of the next couple of decades, there were no financial crises, because the regulatory mechanisms interfered with the market and prevented the market principles from operating. So therefore you could take account of externalities. That’s what the regulatory system does. It’s been systematically dismantled since the 1970s.

Meanwhile, the role of finance in the economy has exploded. The share of corporate profit by financial institutions has just zoomed since the 1970s. Kind of a corollary of that is the hollowing out of industrial production, sending it abroad. This all happened under the impact of a kind of fanatic religious ideology called economics—and that’s not a joke—based on hypotheses that have no theoretical grounds and no empirical support but are very attractive because you can prove theorems if you adopt them: the efficient market hypothesis, rational expectations hypothesis, and so on. The spread of these ideologies, which is very attractive to concentrated wealth and privilege, hence their success, was epitomized in Alan Greenspan, who at least had the decency to say it was all wrong when it collapsed. I don’t think there has ever been a collapse of an intellectual edifice comparable to this, maybe, in history, at least I can’t remember one. Interestingly, it has no effect. It just continues. Which tells you that it’s serviceable to power systems.

Under the impact of these ideologies, the regulatory system was dismantled by Reagan and Clinton and Bush. Throughout this whole period, there have been repeated financial crises, unlike the 1950s and 1960s. During the Reagan years, there were some really extreme ones. Clinton left office with another huge one, the burst of the tech bubble. Then the one we’re in the middle of. Worse and worse each time. The system is instantly being reconstructed, so the next one will very likely be even worse. One of the causes, not the only one, is simply the fact that in market systems you just don’t take into account externalities, in this case systemic risk.

That’s not lethal in the case of financial crises. A financial crisis can be terrible. It can put many millions of people out of work, their lives destroyed. But there is a way out of it. The taxpayer can come in and rescue you. That’s exactly what happened. We saw it dramatically in the last couple of years. The financial system tanked. The government, namely, the taxpayer, came in and bailed them out.

Let’s go to the environmental crisis. There’s nobody around to bail you out. The externalities in this case are the fate of the species. If that’s disregarded in the operations of the market system, there’s nobody around who is going to bail you out from that. So this is a lethal externality. And the fact that it’s proceeding with no significant action being taken to do anything about it does suggest that Ernst Mayr actually had a point. It seems that there is something about us, our intelligence, which entails that we’re capable of acting in ways that are rational within a narrow framework but are irrational in terms of other long-term goals, like do we care what kind of a world our grandchildren will live in. And it’s hard to see much in the way of prospects for overcoming this right now, particularly in the United States. We are the most powerful state in the world, and what we do is vastly important. We have one of the worst records in this regard.

There are things that could be done. It’s not hard to list them. One of the main things that could be done is actually low-tech, for example, the weatherization of homes. There was a big building boom in the post–Second World War period, which from the point of view of the environment was done extremely irrationally. Again, it was done rationally from a market point of view. There were models for home building, for mass-produced homes, which were used all over the country, under different conditions. So maybe it would make sense in Arizona, but not in Massachusetts. Those homes are there. They’re extremely energy-inefficient. They can be fixed. It’s construction work, basically. It would make a big difference. It would also have the effect of reviving one of the main collapsing industries, construction, and overcoming a substantial part of the employment crisis. It will take inputs. It will take money from, ultimately, the taxpayer. We call it the government, but it means the taxpayer. But it is a way of stimulating the economy, of increasing jobs, also with a substantial multiplier effect (unlike bailing out bankers and investors), and also making a significant impact on the destruction of the environment. But there’s barely a proposal for this, almost nothing.

Another example, which is kind of a scandal in the United States—if any of you have traveled abroad, you’re perfectly aware of it—when you come back from almost anywhere in the world to the United States, it looks like you’re coming to a Third World country, literally. The infrastructure is collapsing transportation that doesn’t work. Let’s just take trains. When I moved to Boston around 1950, there was a train that went from Boston to New York. It took four hours. There’s now a highly heralded train called the Acela, the supertrain. It takes three hours and forty minutes (if there’s no breakdown—as there can be, I’ve discovered). If you were in Japan, Germany, China, almost anywhere, it would take maybe an hour and a half, two hours or something. And that’s general.

It didn’t happen by accident. It happened by a huge social engineering project carried out by the government and by the corporations beginning in the 1940s. It was a very systematic effort to redesign the society so as to maximize the use of fossil fuels. One part of it was eliminating quite efficient rail systems. New England, for example, did have a pretty efficient electric rail system all the way through New England. If you read E. L. Doctorow’s novel Ragtime, the first chapter describes its hero going through New England on the electric rail system. That was all dismantled in favor of cars and trucks. Los Angeles, which is now a total horror story—I don’t know if any of you have been there—had an efficient electric public transportation system. It was dismantled. It was bought up in the 1940s by General Motors, Firestone Rubber, and Standard Oil of California. The purpose of their buying it up was to dismantle it so as to shift everything to trucks and cars and buses. And it was done. It was technically a conspiracy. Actually, they were brought to court on a charge of conspiracy and sentenced. I think the sentence was $5,000 or something, enough to pay for the victory dinner.

The federal government stepped in. We have something that is now called the interstate highway system. When it was built in the 1950s, it was called the national defense highway system because when you do anything in the United States you have to call it defense. That’s the only way you can fool the taxpayer into paying for it. In fact, there were stories back in the 1950s, those of you who are old enough to remember, about how we needed it because you had to move missiles around the country very quickly in case the Russians came or something. So taxpayers were bilked into paying for this system. Alongside of it was the destruction of railroads, which is why you have what I just described. Huge amounts of federal money and corporate money went into highways, airports, anything that wastes fuel. That’s basically the criterion.

Also, the country was suburbanized. Real estate interests, local interests, and others redesigned life so that it’s atomized and suburbanized. I’m not knocking the suburbs. I live in one and I like it. But it’s incredibly inefficient. It has all kinds of social effects which are probably deleterious. Anyway, it didn’t just happen; it was designed. Throughout the whole period, there has been a massive effort to create the most destructive possible society. And to try to redo that huge social engineering project is not going to be simple. It involves plenty of problems.

Another component of any reasonable approach—and everyone agrees with this on paper—is to develop sustainable energy, green technology. We all know and everyone talks a nice line about that. But if you look at what’s happening, green technology is being developed in Spain, in Germany, and primarily China. The United States is importing it. In fact, a lot of the innovation is here, but it’s done there. United States investors now are putting far more money into green technology in China than into the U.S. and Europe combined. There were complaints when Texas ordered solar panels and windmills from China: It’s undermining our industry. Actually, it wasn’t undermining us at all because we were out of the game. It was undermining Spain and Germany, which are way ahead of us.

Just to indicate how surreal this is, the Obama administration essentially took over the auto industry, meaning you took it over. You paid for it, bailed it out, and basically owned large parts of it. And they continued doing what the corporations had been doing pretty much, for example, closing down GM plants all over the place. Closing down a plant is not just putting the workers out of work, it’s also destroying the community. Take a look at the so-called rust belt. The communities were built by labor organizing; they developed around the plants. Now they’re dismantled. It has huge effects. At the same time that they’re dismantling the plants, meaning you and I are dismantling plants, because that’s where the money comes from, and it’s allegedly our representatives—it isn’t, in fact—at the very same time Obama was sending his Transportation Secretary to Spain to use federal stimulus money to get contracts for high-speed rail construction, which we really need and the world really needs. Those plants that are being dismantled and the skilled workers in them, all that could be reconverted to producing high-speed rail right here. They have the technology, they have the knowledge, they have the skills. But it’s not good for the bottom line for banks, so we’ll buy it from Spain. Just like green technology, it will be done in China.

Those are choices; those are not laws of nature. But, unfortunately, those are the choices that are being made. And there is little indication of any positive change. These are pretty serious problems. We can easily go on. I don’t want to continue. But the general picture is very much like this. I don’t think this is an unfair selection of—it’s a selection, of course, but I think it’s a reasonably fair selection of what’s happening. The consequences are pretty dire.

The media contribute to this, too. So if you read, say, a typical story in the New York Times, it will tell you that there is a debate about global warming. If you look at the debate, on one side is maybe 98 percent of the relevant scientists in the world, on the other side are a couple of serious scientists who question it, a handful, and Jim Inhofe or some other senator. So it’s a debate. And the citizen has to kind of make a decision between these two sides. The Times had a comical front-page article maybe a couple months ago in which the headline said that meteorologists question global warming. It discussed a debate between meteorologists—the meteorologists are these pretty faces who read what somebody hands to them on television and says it’s going to rain tomorrow. That’s one side of the debate. The other side of the debate is practically every scientist who knows anything about it. Again, the citizen is supposed to decide. Do I trust these meteorologists? They tell me whether to wear a raincoat tomorrow. And what do I know about the scientists? They’re sitting in some laboratory somewhere with a computer model. So, yes, people are confused, and understandably.

It’s interesting that these debates leave out almost entirely a third part of the debate, namely, a very substantial number of scientists, competent scientists, who think that the scientific consensus is much too optimistic. A group of scientists at MIT came out with a report about a year ago describing what they called the most comprehensive modeling of the climate that had ever been done. Their conclusion, which was unreported in public media as far as I know, was that the major scientific consensus of the international commission is just way off, it’s much too optimistic; and if you add other factors that they didn’t count properly, the conclusion is much more dire. Their own conclusion was that unless we terminate use of fossil fuels almost immediately, it’s finished. We’ll never be able to overcome the consequences. That’s not part of the debate.

I could easily go on, but the only potential counterweight to all of this is some very substantial popular movement which is not just going to call for putting solar panels on your roof, though it’s a good thing to do, but it’s going to have to dismantle an entire sociological, cultural, economic, and ideological structure which is just driving us to disaster. It’s not a small task, but it’s a task that had better be undertaken, and probably pretty quickly, or it’s going to be too late.

Questions and Answers

WHAT POLITICAL process is needed to loosen the control of corporations that profit from the status quo and resist regulation and change?

THAT’S A question that goes way beyond climate change. It also has to do with a whole range of very serious problems which are not as lethal as the environmental crisis but are nevertheless serious, like, for example, the financial crisis, which is not just financial, it’s an economic crisis. There are millions of people unemployed. They may never get jobs back. The fact of the matter is, the U.S. is not all that different from other industrial societies, but it’s somewhat different.

Europe, for example, developed out of a feudal system. In feudal systems everybody had a place, maybe a lousy place, but you had some kind of place. And the society guaranteed you that place. The U.S. developed as a kind of a blank slate. The indigenous population was exterminated, a small fact that we don’t like to think about. Immigrants came. The country had huge economic advantages. The government massively supported the development of the society. Contrary to what’s claimed, we have always had substantial state intervention in the economy. And what developed was a business-run society, to an unusual extent. That shows up in all kinds of ways, like the fact that we’re about the only industrial society, maybe the only one, that doesn’t have some kind of semi-rational health care system, and that benefits in general are pretty weak as compared with other industrial societies. Labor is weak. That’s just a fact. There have been all kinds of developments, protests, and so on. There have been changes, a lot of progress, often regression. But it remains a society that is very much under the control of the concentrated corporate sector. It happens to have increased substantially in the last years. It’s getting increased right before our eyes, so, for example, the Citizens United decision of the Supreme Court is another very severe blow to democracy, and it should be understood as that.

So what do we do about it? What’s been done in the past? These are not laws of nature. The New Deal made a dent, a significant dent, but it didn’t come just because Roosevelt was a nice guy. It came because after several years of very serious suffering, much worse than now, five or six years after the Depression hit, there was very substantial organizing and activism. The CIO was formed, sit-down strikes were taking place. Sit-down strikes are terrifying to management, because they’re one step before what ought to be done—the workers just taking over the factory and kicking out the management. If you look back at the business press at that time, they were really terrified by what they called the hazard facing industrialists and the growing power of the masses and so on.

One consequence was that the New Deal measures were instituted, which had an effect. I’m old enough to remember. Most of my family was unemployed working class. And it had a big effect, as I mentioned, a lasting effect. Out of it came the biggest growth period in American history, probably world history, extended growth and egalitarian growth. Then it started getting whittled away, as all of this began to recede. It’s now changed very radically. The 1960s was another case where substantial popular activism was the motive force that led to Johnson’s reforms, which were not trivial. They didn’t change the social and economic system to the limited extent that the New Deal did, but they had a big effect then and in the years that followed: civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, all kinds of things. That’s the only way to change. If anybody has another idea, it would be nice to hear it, but it’s been kept a secret for a couple of thousand years.

ARE WE further along in global warming than it is politically possible for scientists to say?

IN THE sciences, you’re always going to find some people out at the fringes, maybe with good arguments but kind of at the fringes. But the overwhelming majority of scientists are pretty much agreed on the basic facts: that it’s a serious phenomenon that’s going to grow even more serious, and we have to do something about it. There are divisions. The major division is between the basic international scientific consensus and those who say it doesn’t go far enough, it’s nowhere near dire enough. So, for example, this study that I mentioned, which is one of the major critical studies, saying it’s much too optimistic, they point out that they’re not taking account of factors that could make it very much worse. For example, they didn’t factor into the models the effect of melting of permafrost, which is beginning to happen. And it’s pretty well understood that it’s going to release a huge amount of methane, which is much more harmful to the environment than carbon dioxide is, and that could set off a major change for the worse. A lot of the processes that are studied are called nonlinear, meaning a small change can lead to a huge effect. And almost all the indicators are in the wrong direction. So I think the answer is that scientists can’t say anything in detail, but they can say pretty convincingly that it’s bad news.

HOW CAN philosophers advance environmental responsibility?

PRETTY MUCH the same way algebraic topologists can. If you’re a philosopher, you don’t stop being a human being. These are human problems. Philosophers, like anybody else—algebraic topologists, carpenters, others—can contribute to them. People like us are privileged. We have a lot of privilege. If you’re an academic, you’re paid way too much, you have a lot of options, you can do research, you have a kind of a platform. You can use it. It’s pretty straightforward. There are no real philosophical issues that I can see. There is an ethical issue, but it’s one that is so obvious you don’t need any complicated philosophy.

HOW CAN human beings and food production be reformed to promote ecological stability? Is agriculture inherently destructive to our planet?

IF AGRICULTURE is inherently destructive, we might as well say good-bye to each other, because whatever we eat, it’s coming from agriculture, whether it’s meat or anything else, milk, whatever it is. There is no particular reason to believe that it’s inherently destructive. We do happen to have destructive forms of agriculture: high-energy inputs, high fertilizer inputs. Things look cheap, but if you take in all the costs that go into them, they’re not cheap. And if you count in environmental destruction, which is a cost, then they’re not cheap at all. So are there other ways of developing agricultural systems which will be basically sustainable? It’s kind of like energy. There’s no known inherent reason why that’s impossible. There are plenty of proposals how it could be done. But, again, it involves dismantling a whole array of economic, social, cultural, and other structures, which is not an easy matter. The same problems with green technology.

I should say another word about the green technology issue, which is, again, basically ideological. If you look at the literature on this, when people make the point, as they do, that the green technology is being developed in China but not here, a standard reason that’s given is, well, China is a totalitarian society, so that government controls the mechanisms of production. It has what we call an industrial policy: government intervenes in the market to determine what’s produced and how it’s produced and to set the conditions for it and to fix conditions of technology transfer. And they do that without consulting the public, so therefore they can set the conditions which will make investors invest there and not here. We’re democratic and free and we don’t do that kind of thing. We believe in markets and democracy.

It’s all totally bogus. The United States has a very significant industrial policy and it’s highly undemocratic. It’s just that we don’t call it that. So, for example, if you use a computer or you use the Internet or you fly in an airplane or you buy something at Wal-Mart, which is based on trade, which is based on containers, developed by the U.S. Navy, every step of the way you’re benefiting from a massive form of industrial policy, state-initiated programs. It’s kind of like driving on the interstate highway system. State-initiated programs where almost all the research and development and the procurement, which is a big factor in subsidizing corporations, all of this was done for decades before anything could go on to the market.

Take, say, computers. The first computers were around 1952, but they were practically the size of this room, with vacuum tubes blowing up and paper all over the place, I was at MIT when this was going on. You couldn’t do anything with them. It was all funded by the government, mostly by the Pentagon, in fact, almost entirely by the Pentagon. Through the 1950s, it was possible to reduce the size and you could get it to look like a big bunch of filing cabinets. Some of the lead engineers in Lincoln Labs, an MIT lab which was one of the main centers for development, pulled out and formed the first private computer company, DEC, which for a long time kind of was the main one. Meanwhile, IBM was in there learning how to shift from punch cards to electronic computers on taxpayer funding, and they were able to produce a big computer, the world’s fastest computer, in the early 1960s. But nobody could buy these computers. They were way too expensive. So the government bought them, meaning you bought them. Procurement is one of the major techniques of corporate subsidy. In fact, I think the first computer that actually went on the market was probably around 1978. That’s about twenty-five years after they were developed. The Internet is about the same. And then Bill Gates gets rich. But the basic work was done with government support under Pentagon cover. The same with most of these things—virtually the entire IT revolution. The Internet was in public hands for, I think, about thirty years before it was privatized.

So that’s industrial policy. We don’t call it that. Was it democratic? No more democratic than China. People in the 1950s weren’t asked, “Do you want your taxes to go to the development of computers so maybe your grandson can have an iPod, or do you want your taxes to go into health, education, and decent communities?” Nobody was told that. What they were told was, “The Russians are coming, so we have to have a huge military budget. So therefore we have to put the money into this. And maybe your grandchild will have an iPod.” It’s as undemocratic as the Chinese system is, and it goes way back. We just don’t give it that name. It doesn’t have to be done undemocratically, but to do it democratically requires cultural changes, understanding. On the computers, maybe it was the wrong decision. Maybe they should have done other things, make a more decent life. Maybe it was the right decision. But on things like green technology and sustainable energy, I don’t think there’s much question what’s the right decision, if you get people to understand it and accept it. And that has great barriers, like the kind I mentioned.

WHAT ROLE do you see cooperatives and community-based enterprises having in the United States as compared to other countries, like Argentina?

I THINK it’s a very positive development. It’s kind of rudimentary. There are some in Argentina, which developed after the crisis. They had a huge crisis. What happened in Argentina was that for years Argentina followed the advice of the IMF [International Monetary Fund]. In fact, they were the poster child for the IMF. They were doing everything right. And it totally collapsed, as, in fact, almost always happens. At that point, about ten years ago Argentina dismissed the advice of the IMF and the economists, rejected it totally, violated it, and went on to have pretty successful economic development, probably the best in South America. But out of the crisis did come cooperatives, some of them remain, and remain viable worker-controlled enterprises. There are some in the United States, too, more than you might imagine. There is a book about it, if you’re interested, by one of the main activists who works in this movement. His name is Gar Alperovitz. He reviews a lot of initiatives that have been taken, and there are surprisingly many of them. None of them exist on a very large scale, but they exist.

Let’s go back to the one example that I mentioned, of the closing the GM plants and getting contracts in Spain. One of the things that could happen is that the workers in those plants could simply take over the factories and say, Okay, we’re going to construct and develop, we’re going to reconvert, we’re going to develop high-speed rail, which they have the capacity to do. They would need help: they would need community support and other support. But it could be done. In that case, the community and the industry wouldn’t be destroyed. The banks wouldn’t make as much money, but we would have home-grown, high-speed rail. Those things are all possible.

In fact, sometimes they’ve come pretty close. Around 1980, U.S. Steel was going to close its main facilities in Youngstown, Ohio. That’s a steel town. It was kind of built out of the steel industry, but whoever owned it at that time figured they could make more profit if they destroyed it. There were big protests—strikes, community protests, others. Finally there was an effort to take it over by what are called the stakeholders, the workforce and the community. There are some legal questions, so they tried to fight through the courts to gain the legal right to do it. Their lawyer was Staughton Lynd, an old radical activist who was also a labor lawyer. They made it to the courts, and they had a case. But the courts turned it down. The courts aren’t living in some abstract universe. They reflect what’s going on in society. If there had been enough popular force behind it, they probably could have won, and the steel industry would still be here. Except it would be worker-controlled, community-controlled. These things are just at the verge of happening many times. And I don’t think it’s at all a utopian conception. It’s perfectly consistent with the basic legal system, the basic economic system. And it could make big changes.

On Imperialism

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Q. What's the difference between a Politician and a Psychopath?
A. None.
Funny joke.
And many a true word said jest? See


One of the hardest things to contemplate about in this world, is how can people justify their actions in wars and terror.

"The end justifies the means" has never ever made any sense to me. (Although I never saw the bigger picture then as to what is the end) It was an old adage when people tried to get to grips, as to what WAS the methodology behind the IRA's terror campaign.

UK's previous prime minister Tony Blair came fully packaged with a toothy grin as he went into illegal wars with the same adage. I was perplexed and puzzled as this man argued for his cause.. Justifying every which way (except to my mind, in the totally opposite direction of sanity) as to how this would help. Source

George W. Bush was the same, although he never felt the need to argue his cause as persistently as Blair.. And Bush's name brings me aptly to the topic, as words can not describe the wonder of this unfeeling man. I have a link here "Bush isn't a moron, he is a cunning sociopath"

There is evidence now that states that 4% of the worlds population are psychopaths. Most are not the serial killers that we perceive in our terrifying lives of film and media coverage. Source. There is overwhelming evidence to suggest that the world's politicians have this condition.

We see the "Obama bin Lyin" story. We see the birth certificate row. We know in our heart of hearts that this man is lying. Yet most people go on with their lives with a shrug and say " Yeah well, politician's lie" And yes it has been proved time and time again that they do.

We never get to the bottom of the story as the front man is plucked for his qualities to lead people astray. Without a conscience for their country, or the people they are supposed represent. Or to even spare a thought for the millions they are killing and maiming. Could you sleep at night? Could you give seminars as to how to combat terror and take a prize purse for it?

My mind turns cartwheels as to how these people can represent us.

So how do these people get there? Is it a natural evolvement of this psychopathic trait to get to the top, by hook or by crook? Or are they selected for these "qualities"?