Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Sunday, 7 April 2013


Daily Headlines

Mark Sanford may have won the Republican Party primary, but he's getting no support from Republican officials.

Obama proposes to squander his mandate in pursuit of a "grand bargain" with House Republicans -- a bargain that would replace the current approach to calculating cost-of-living increases for Social Security recipients with a "Chained-CPI" scheme. The change will harm not just seniors, children and people with disabilities but a fragile economic recovery.

Why vote if you don't have to?

By Stephen Lendman
Defending IMF Financial Terrorism
On March 29, New York Times editors headlined "Strengthening the IMF." What demands abolition, they support. It doesn't surprise.
By Brent Budowsky
It's The Jobs, Stupid
I am not proposing a presidential photo op in front of a bridge, or a news cycle public relations maneuver that is wheeled out with a bad jobs report and returned to the closet after a few news cycles. Obama needs to contemplate the possibility that his legacy will be "the jobless president." He should fight to become "the jobs president."

By William Boardman
A Lifetime in War Crimes
This is one of the great untold stories of the Iraq War, how just over a year after the invasion, the United States funded a sectarian police commando force that set up a network of torture centers to fight the [Sunni] insurgency.
A decade later, these liberal war enablers, their careers unhindered, remain leaders within the same liberal class that endorsed the Iraq war. This means, of course, that they continue to promote the same dominant Israeli Middle East narrative of the nation's liberal ruling class.

It is a sad time in our history when an American combat veteran must resort to such an extreme measure to alleviate the pain and suffering from injuries he received fighting in the name of our country.

There should be no cuts to any important services and benefits, no increases in taxes for ordinary folks, and no tax audits of the poor and middle class until trillions of offshore stolen money is recovered, says TCBH! journalist Dave Lindorff

By Herbert Calhoun
Book Review of the book: "Sugar in the Blood"
This a review of Andrea Stuart's book "Sugar in the Blood." It is a dramatic reassessment of the impact that sugar had on slavery and the initial experiments in slavery that began in Barbados had on the world of race. It is carefully researched and will certainly be a finalist in the 2013 book of the year awards.
The neurologist Robert Burton is skeptical, to say the least. His new book, "A Skeptic's Guide to the Mind," is a scathing indictment of reductionism in all its guises, and a stirring call to consider whether scientists are even asking the right kinds of questions... The real question is, how do you find and nurture a future Einstein of the mind. Improving our technologies without an accompanying breakthrough in thinking about the brain-mind connection is equivalent to upgrading a linotype machine to the world's greatest printer without having something to say. To use another analogy: Believing that knowledge of brain wiring can tell us the nature of consciousness is like predicting what sound will come out of a set of speakers by looking at wiring diagram of the component parts... Above all, keep in mind the unavoidable philosophical limits of neuroscience.

Culture of masculinity in sports and abuse by coaches

By Gary Corseri
Poets Talk
A continuation of a dialogue begun last December. The premise is simple: Politics, economics, social concerns, religion, spirituality and morality--all are embraced by our cultural perspectives. The authors offer a revivified neo-Socratic dialogue, for the age of the Internet, to prune and hone thoughts, while reaching for a greater understanding.
How do we move from worshiping the religious stories in our lives to understanding and practicing the principles contained in them?

Can an ocean protect Americans from the horse meat scandal if "the mob" is involved? Rhetorical question.

Are dogs just funny looking wolves? Substantial scientific evidence indicates that modern domestic dogs were originally derived from wild wolf populations over 30,000 years ago, probably somewhere in Eurasia. Dogs can interbreed with wolves to produce "wolfdogs", indicating that they have not changed sufficiently to have lost the capacity to produce hybrids. Dogs share many similarities with wolves...

Jerry Brown's proposed fees for public information are a dreadful idea
A few ideas in Gov. Jerry Brown's recent budget proposal would be so damaging to the free flow of information in California that they should be scrapped immediately.
The assault on public education intensifies. An unsigned letter from a Washington, D.C. teacher sent to wsws.org

By JON LARSEN
When We Ignore the Truth
When we all ignore the truth and don't question the media or the corporate-purchased government's actions, we are losing democracy and aiding them in establishing world-wide Empire.
By Joan Wile
The No Drones Explosion
New York City peace grannies protest killer drones at Rockefeller Center April 3
Birgitta Jónsdóttir, the Icelandic MP who was part of a small team of activists that produced the WikiLeaks dump of US state secrets, has arrived in the United States for the first time since the controversy three years ago, to protest against what she sees as a disproportionate clampdown by the US government on internet whistleblowers. Jónsdóttir formed part of a very small group of volunteers who joined Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, in Iceland to prepare the Collateral Murder video for publication. It had been leaked as part of a massive trove of US state secrets that Manning has admitted to passing to WikiLeaks between 2009 and 2010 including hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables from around the world.

Environmentalist Daniel McGowan was profiled in the Oscar-nominated documentary "If a Tree Falls." McGowan was sentenced to 7 years in prison, and the court applied what's called a "terrorism enhancement." If McGowan's recent re-incarceration is retaliation for his First Amendment activity, it would fit a pattern of behavior by the Justice Department and Bureau of Prisons to keep these units secretive.

By Richard Girard
A Past That Never Was
One of our society's greatest flaws is its inability to learn even from our immediate past, let alone any lessons that we might garner from other times and other places. Ignorance is not bliss, and the past is far too often prologue. We must save our democratic republic from the predations of a pseudo-aristocracy while we still can.

Workers go on a hunger strike to protest Union Busting efforts by the San Diego Hilton in Mission Valley.

The legacy of Hugo Chavez and how and why the corporate media is desperate to distort it.

By j dial
Frack-Flavored Gas
The next time a spokesperson showers you with platitudes, you might want to drill a little deeper.

By Pepe Escobar
The South also rises
The Global South's intellectual liberation from the North is finally on. And it's irreversible. There's no turning back to the old order. If this was a movie, it would be 1968 replayed all over again -- full time, all the time; let's be realists, and demand, and implement, the impossible.



Latest Articles
Iranian Nuclear Talks
On April 5, so-called P5+1 talks began. They picked up where previous ones left off. Countries involved include America, Britain, China, Russia, France and Germany. Almaty, Kazahhstan played host. It did so for the second time.
Another Dismal Jobs Report
Putting lipstick on this pig doesn't wash. One analyst said March data was miserable from every angle. Economist David Rosenberg called it "one soft US jobs report." It "quash(ed) the consensus view of economic re-acceleration."

Best News Links from the Web
A high-ranking United Nations official called for the closing of Guantanamo Bay today in one of the strongest statements issued by the U.N. in recent memory. Navi Pillay, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, said the prison camps must be shuttered and that they are in a "clear breach of international law."

President Obama reportedly is unveiling a budget using the chained CPI inflation measure to cheat elderly Americans out of the benefits they were promised. In two previous posts I've explained the perversity of the current debate about Social Security. The tax-favored private components of America's mixed private-public retirement system -- programs like employer pensions, 401Ks, and IRAs -- are inefficient, volatile, and subject to manipulation by overcompensated, fee-extracting money managers. In contrast, the Social Security program is simple and efficient, and has low overhead costs. And yet the bipartisan establishment, including many "progressive" Democrats as well as Republicans, wants to cut Social Security -- the part that works -- and expand tax-favored private savings, the inefficient, unstable, and inequitable part.

Angelina Jolie, Madonna, Kate Hudson and other A-list celebrities often make the headlines for their big picture roles or the Hollywood gossip mill, but many are also doing their part to make the world a better place. Take a look at the following do-gooder celebrities and their projects around the world, also including Charlize Theron, Amy Poehler, Christy Turlington Burns, and John Legend.

After a full year of fruitless job hunting, Natasha Baebler just gave up. She'd already abandoned hope of getting work in her field, counseling the disabled. But she couldn't land anything else, either -- not even a job interview at a telephone call center. Until she feels confident enough to send out resumes again, she'll get by on food stamps and disability checks from Social Security and live with her parents in St. Louis. "I'm not proud of it," says Baebler, who is in her mid-30s and is blind. "The only way I'm able to sustain any semblance of self-preservation is to rely on government programs that I have no desire to be on." Baebler's frustrating experience has become all too common nearly four years after the Great Recession ended: Many Americans are still so discouraged that they've given up on the job market. Older Americans have retired early. Younger ones have enrolled in...
Posted by Roberto Abraham Scaruffi at 14:31