Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Monday 20 May 2013


 Daily Headlines
By Chris Hedges
Rise Up or Die
We stand helpless before the corporate onslaught. There is no way to vote against corporate power. Citizens have no way to bring about the prosecution of Wall Street bankers and financiers for fraud, military and intelligence officials for torture and war crimes, or security and surveillance officers for human rights abuses.

Last week the pontiff made some surprisingly critical remarks about capitalism and ethics to a group of new ambassadors to the Vatican. Is he showing his true colors? Or is this just more blah, blah?
By Paul Craig Roberts
No Bear Market In Gold
The misinformation that Soros had sold his gold holdings came from misinterpreting the reason Soros' holdings in the GLD gold trust declined. Soros did not sell the shares; he redeemed the paper claims for physical gold. Watching the gold ETFs, such as GLD, being looted by banksters, Soros cashed in some of his own paper gold for the real stuff.

An interview with investigative journalist Allan Nairn, on the historic conviction of US supported Guatemalan Strongman, Rios Montt, for Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide, and the continuing legal battle to sustain the verdict, and expand the genocide investigation for indigenous justice in Guatemala.
By Tom Engelhardt
Rebecca Solnit, What Comes After Hope
I worked for years as an editor at Pantheon Books. Its publisher, maybe the most adventurous in the business, was André Schiffrin. Among his many accomplishments, he "discovered" Studs Terkel (already a well-known Chicago radio personality), published his first oral history (Division Street: America), and made him a bestseller.
By Dave Lefcourt
Nearly 600,000 Wounded Vets Claims for Disability Suffered in Iraq and Afghanistan Wars "backlogged" for Months
There's a big controversy concerning the Dep't of Veterans Affairs where nearly 600,000 wounded vets of the Iraq & Afghanistan wars are having their claims for disability compensation "backlogged" for over 125 days. These wounded vets don't want to hear about the antiquated system now overwhelmed by their claims. They expect their claims be acted on swiftly & w/o red tape. They are right.
There's a contradiction built into every campaign promise about transparent government beyond the failure to keep the promises.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad says militants from 29 different countries are now fighting against the government in different parts of the country. Assad stated that foreign intervention is the most important factor aggravating the situation in Syria. Assad also accused the West and the US of interfering in his country's internal affairs.
Is the Environmental Defense Fund in an ill-conceived relationship, or has it simply sold out?
From the start of the Republic to today's Republican ranting against Barack Obama, racism has been a central element of the American Right. But this ugly feature of U.S. history has often come concealed behind words praising traditions, liberty and states' rights.
Vast stretches of Texas farmland lying over the aquifer no longer support irrigation. In west-central Kansas, up to a fifth of the irrigated farmland along a 100-mile swath of the aquifer has already gone dry. In many other places, there no longer is enough water to supply farmers' peak needs during Kansas' scorching summers. And when the groundwater runs out, it is gone for good. Refilling the aquifer would require hundreds, if not thousands, of years of rains.

By Joel Hirschhorn
African Safari Trip of a Lifetime
No matter how much foreign travel you have done, going on an African safari trip will be a uniquely spectacular experience. Learn from my recent trip.
By Gary Corseri
Mainstream Media Acrostic
It's pretty clear-cut, so long as one knows what an acrostic is!
By William Barth
The Problem with Partition: Human Rights Provide an Alternative for Israel and the Palestinians
The article reviews solutions to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. It concludes that Human Rights can help both sides to resolve their conflict.
Lincoln's most important veto is buried and forgotten. Yet, it saved the union, and it still applies today.

Major international oil companies are buying off governments, according to the world's most prominent climate scientist, Prof James Hansen. During a visit to London, he accused the Canadian government of acting as the industry's tar sands salesman and "holding a club" over the UK and European nations to accept its "dirty" oil. "Oil from tar sands makes sense only for a small number of people who are making a lot of money from that product," he said in an interview with the Guardian. "It doesn't make sense for the rest of the people on the planet. We are getting close to the dangerous level of carbon in the atmosphere and if we add on to that unconventional fossil fuels, which have a tremendous amount of carbon, then the climate problem becomes unsolvable."
We're pointing a pistol at our heads. A government of, by, and for the people requires that people talk to people, that we can agree to disagree but do so in civility. If we let the politicians and those who report dictate our discourse, then our course will be dictated. Why am I alarmed? Because two "scandals" -- the IRS tax-exempt inquiries and the Department of Justice's tapping of reporters' phones -- have become lynch parties. And the congressional investigation of Benghazi may become a scandal in itself.
By Dr. Glen T. Martin
"Terrorism" and the Plans for Absolute Tyranny within the US: Our Need for a New Image of Human Liberation
This article diagnoses the structural causes of the momentum toward tyranny within the US in terms of the global war-system. It shows why the global war-system necessarily destroys freedom and democracy everywhere. It shows what is required for a global peace-system. It is only such a global peace system, under the Earth Constitution, that can protect freedom, democracy, and the rule of law within the US or anywhere else.
Debates over the legality of targeted killing using drones ignore some very important legal arguments that clearly lead to the conclusion that killing subjects with drones violates legal and domestic law. There is, in fact, a United Nations law expressly prohibiting drones under any circumstances. Therefore, Obama and all those involved in targeting and firing drones are war criminals.

There's no small irony to Woodward injecting himself into what has become a scandal driven by deceptively edited emails passed off to reporters, given the recent attention he received after using a similar method to support his ridiculous accusation that a White House aide threatened him.
"Bipartisanship" is when the owners prompt their official lackeys to screw over humanity again. The best we can hope for is a mud wrestling impeachment.
By Matthias Chang
Japan's Sham Currency War - The Hidden Objective Behind Japan's Massive Kamikaze Quantitative Easing
US$ dollars have been flooding the financial markets ever since Bernanke launched quantitative easing, allegedly to turn around the US economy. These huge amounts of US$ toilet papers are mainly in financial markets (and in central banks) outside of the United States. A huge chunk is represented as reserves in central banks led by China and Japan.
Who's in the Tea Party, who's not, and a gray line the Gray Lady didn't clarify.


 Latest Articles
Energy Crisis is the single most important issue the incoming Govt will have to deal with.This paper points out issues & suggests solutions.

Homophobia hit new highs last week, with the murder of a New York man named Mark Carson. However, the vigil for Carson was a strike back - in the right direction.
Presiding Judge, "he knew about everything that was going on and he did not stop it, despite having the power to stop it from being carried out." US President Ronald Reagan also had the power, greater power, to stop the massacres being perpetrated by dictator General and President Ríos Montt, instead visited him in Guatemala City and praised Rios Montt as "a man of great personal integrity and commitment. Who was more guilt
"The worst crimes in UK history'
UK member of parliament and US citizen expose the crimes of the west
May 27, 1942 -- Highest Ranking Nazi Killed in WWII - Reinhard Heydrich -- Seventy- One Years Later: Could Author Joanie Schirm Have Uncovered the Secret Cause of Death about the real demise of the highest ranking Nazi officer assassinated during WWII from a friend of her father at the Hospital when Heydrich died

"Why do we treat our dying pets with more mercy than we treat our dying people?"
Inequality and Growth
The inequality and growth debate is a red herring. It just doesn't matter. The problem is inequality, and its solution is simple.

 Best News Links from the Web
President Barack Obama will use a major speech on counter-terrorism this week to address the failure to shut down Guantánamo Bay and push the legal case for targeted drone strikes, according to reports. The Washington Post, citing White House officials, said the speech Thursday at the National Defence University would serve to review the administration's security policy. In particular he is is due to focus on how the use of unmanned aircraft to kill terrorist targets fits into the legal framework.

President Obama's professed ignorance of the targeting of conservatives by one government agency and his support of tracking journalists' sources by another highlight one of the great paradoxes of his presidency: Sometimes he uses his office as aggressively as anyone who's held it; other times he seems unacquainted with the work of his own administration.
Today, the practice of giving vested economic interests such as large corporations a higher priority than the rights of the People still continues. Many politicians seem to think of public policy as a commodity to be sold to the highest bidder or just another market to be manipulated. Voters' interests are largely ignored, treated by politicians and their highly-paid campaign consultants as a target market to which candidates are sold much like a consumer product.[1] The quality of the candidate matters little. The only thing that matters is whether the voters will buy what is being mass-marketed and sold. If the voters are fooled by the candidate's marketing campaign, the marketers know that voters are not likely to figure out what happened to them until after their candidate takes office. (President Obama is a perfect example of this.
"Manufacturing dissent" - Every nascent grass-roots movement wants to grow, and is stymied by lack of money. There is an irresistible opportunity for synergistic aid: The world's great corporate charities would love to fund progressive change, and provide, incidentally, guidance about how to achieve your goals by becoming "more realistic". This article tells the deep story of the World Social Forum, a nominally radical movement for anti-colonialism and local self-governance, which has been subtly but relentlessly guided by their funders, including the Ford Foundation, and the Rockefellers, toward a more moderate agenda, consistent with global capitalism. The monied powers have discovered that it is far more effective to de-fang the opposition than to fight us head-on.
Posted by Roberto Abraham Scaruffi at 21:09