Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Thursday 2 May 2013


 Daily Headlines
Chronicle of the May Day march in San Diego in 2013

How smart can Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg be if he has his minions censor an ad from an upstart activist group called CREDO?
The wake of the Boston Marathon bombings brought with it an undertow of conspiracy theories ranging from the farfetched to the unbelievable. Two weeks ago, I never would have imagined being asked to explain, in casual social situations, what a "false flag' attack is.

Guantanamo has been in the headlines lately as detainees have staged a hunger strike that began in February. It has caused the Pres. to say, "It's not sustainable. The notion that we're going to keep 100 individuals in no mans land in perpetuity made no sense. Why are we doing this?" Action on his part is what is needed. Close Guantanamo, charge & try detainees or release them. It would be the right thing to do.
Meet the Gun Rights for Terrorist Caucus.. In almost six years since a bi-partisan group of lawmakers introduced the legislation in Congress, there has been exactly one vote. on May 12, 2011 HERE ARE THE 15 CONGRESSMEN WHO VOTED TO PROTECT THE RIGHTS OF KNOWN AND SUSPECTED TERRORISTS TO BUY AND ONW GUNS LEGALLY AND REMAIN IN OFFICE.
By Tom Engelhardt
Ellen Cantarow: Big Energy Means Big Pollution
Gary Judson had just been removed from his shackles when they slapped the handcuffs on him. The 72-year-old Methodist minister had chained himself to the fence surrounding a compressor station -- part of the critical infrastructure associated with hydraulic fracturing, better known as fracking -- a stone's throw from Seneca Lake in upstate New York. The sheriff and his deputies freed him only to arrest him for trespassing.
On April 19, a truck delivering waste from a fracking operation in Greene County, PA, was quarantined after being rejected by a hazardous waste landfill as too dangerous.

To put it plainly, the elites don't need us anymore -- or not many of us, anyway. And thanks to runaway population growth -- and the greasy mobility of global capital -- those few of us they do still need to keep the machinery going can be easily replaced, at any moment, by some other desperate chump trying to avoid destitution.
If revenge for U.S. foreign policy was the motive, what will happen next? Will such evidence prompt a national reconsideration of America's decades-old imperial foreign policy? If we wish to prevent such wanton crimes in the future, we'd better understand what motivates the criminals who commit them.
A civilized society should solve disputes through a democratic process and democratic institutions, rather than through the barrel of a gun. And while our democracy has been corrupted by Big Money, it still functions better than autocracy. In that sense, Churchill had it right when he said "democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others."
"Cannibalism at Jamestown has been confirmed by forensic evidence, according to researchers. Tales of cannibalism among the early American settlers have always drifted around, but the stories were so grisly that scholars were reluctant to accept them as true."

May 4th, 2013 is the 5th annual World Labyrinth Day (WLD) and people all around the world will participate by walking labyrinths. An initiative of The Labyrinth Society (TLS), World Labyrinth Day is celebrated every year on the first Saturday in May. You can particpate!
By Seymour Patterson
Bad Results Follow Flawed Reasoning about the Debt-to-GDP Ratio
The case for austerity made by Harvard economists Reinhart and Rogoff in their paper "Growth in a Time of Debt" fell apart when graduate student Thomas Herndon discovered errors in their argument. Neoliberal thinking about deficits, as it applies to developing countries, Europe, and America, cannot demonstrate that austerity, Structural Adjustment Programs, or sequestration promote economic growth.
The Securities and Exchange Commission has issued subpoenas to firms and individuals in connection with the leak last month of a federal funding decision that appeared to cause a surge in stock trading of several major health companies. The move deepens the government's scrutiny of the emerging "political intelligence" industry, which has been thriving on delivering valuable information from Washington to investors. This relatively new breed of companies capitalizes on the fact that decisions made in Washington -- whether a regulator blocking a big merger or a lawmaker tweaking legislation -- can create opportunities for stock traders to make money.

By Barry Brown
Does the Bible Say the Garden of Eden Was in India?
Do the earliest Bible stories have their roots in real global history? Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist and author Barry Brown investigates the Garden of Eden. This article contains excerpts from his forthcoming book "God Doesn't Belong to Anyone: The World Before Religion & How We Got Here." His website is Shalomaste.com.
Jason Collins' coming out is not quite the watershed moment many claim it to be.

The lights remain off in essential offices across the administration. The White House faults an increasingly partisan confirmation process in the Senate and what officials say are over-the-top demands for information about every corner of a nominee's life. Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew received 444 questions from senators before his confirmation, more than the seven previous Treasury nominees combined, according to data compiled by the White House. Gina McCarthy, Obama's nominee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, got 1,000 questions from the Senate.
By Mick Meaney
Trust In the British Establishment Has Been Destroyed
According to a new survey of British citizens, public trust in the establishment has declined. Results show that politicians, banks and the media are all trusted by fewer than 10% of those polled.
When it comes to stupid ideas, there is no recession. Our crazy world is a prolific generator of stupid ideas.

Many journalists are confronted with a choice in their careers: pursue a difficult truth by taking on powerful interests or protect their livelihoods by going with the flow. While readers may think the choice is obvious --- pursue the truth --- it often comes with a high price.
Could Sarah Palin make a political comeback in 2014? That is the goal of the Tea Party Leadership Fund, which is trying to draft the former vice-presidential candidate to run against Senator Mark Begich (D-AK) in his 2014 re-election campaign. The group revealed its plan in an email sent to supporters this week. "You and I both know that Sarah Palin is a fighter who will stand up to Harry Reid and his pals in the Senate to protect our Constitution in issues like amnesty, gun control and our nation's crushing debt," the email reads
By Richard (RJ) Eskow
My Dark Night of the Sequester
The only sensible thing to do is to cancel the entire sequester. And stop trying to use it to gin up hysteria so they can put through other unpopular cuts. Just can it. If it will help, they can cancel everything except the delayed flights. I'd gladly volunteer to keep enduring flights like last week's if we could scrap the rest of this foolish austerity program right now.
The Obama administration may be just months away from green-lighting the 1,700-mile oil pipeline despite an all-out opposition campaign that has seen anti-Keystone activists staging massive sit-ins and arrests outside the White House and dogging the president's speeches and fundraisers with rallies. If that happens, Keystone would become the latest painful defeat for environmentalists, who suffered through the collapse of cap and trade and the administration's failure to reach a major new international climate treaty.
The government doesn't even claim that Bradley passed information directly to "the enemy" or that he had any intent to do so. But they are nonetheless making the absurd claim that merely informing the public about classified government activities makes someone a traitor because it "indirectly informs the enemy."
Little or nothing is trickling down. The average American can't borrow at nearly the low rates Apple or any other big company can. Most Americans no longer have a credit rating that allows them to borrow much of anything. The reason big companies aren't creating more jobs is consumers aren't buying enough to justify the expansion. Corporations are borrowing simply in order to push stock prices up and reward their investors.
By Scott Baker
A Conversation With Rocky Anderson And Ralph Nader
A CONVERSATION WITH"- ROCKY ANDERSON AND RALPH NADER
Time for a wrap on how the NRA's reign of terror makes war against longterm American values. In the process, the NRA dumps outmoded or invented "states of nature" wholly inappropriate to modern times. The linkage to Bush-Cheney's failed military adventures is strong, and I haven't see the point made.

 Latest Articles
My traditional article on WWII.

Postcard from the End of America: San Jose
To be misused or unused has become our common lot. In nearly every field, corporate, military, civic, media, entertainment and academic, talent and integrity are wasted, if not punished, as ruthless crooks, groveling connivers and grinning morons rise to the top.
Even natural allies of the United States feel that the targeted killings infringe on Yemen's sovereignty. Many ruefully repeat a line from President Obama's press conference on November 18, 2012: "There is no country on Earth that would tolerate missiles raining down on its citizens from outside its borders."

Only there's little truth in it -- this is helicopters and Montag. And this time it's real! The narrative is quite simple: the police did a good job and what they did was right. The first responders and those on the scene were heroes and we must come together as a nation.
Freedom Rider: Crushed by Capitalism
Some Americans feel, mistakenly, that they live in a different universe from Bangladeshis. However, "The American retailers supplied by the Bangladeshi workers routinely practice wage theft, reduce hours worked and prevent their employees from earning a living wage." It is, so far, only a matter of degree.
On Friday, April 26, the New York Times, with an assist from the Washington Post property Slate.com committed a journalistic atrocity with a false and misleading portrayal of the lawsuit launched by black farmers against the USDA.

 Best News Links from the Web
North Korea on Thursday sentenced a detained American to 15 years of "compulsory labor," punishment for what Pyongyang describes as an attempt to overthrow its government. Bae's punishment complicates the decision-making for Washington, which had been hoping to open talks with the North only if Pyongyang showed signs of curbing its weapons program.

Caroline Starks, 2, was killed after being shot by her 5-year-old sibling with his own .22 caliber rifle. The county coroner has ruled the death "just one of those crazy accidents.'
"Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has a rock-solid hold on the hearts of Democratic voters at this point," said Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute."
Teachers: Deasy Killing Off Crenshaw High School | Diane Ravitch's blog
If you wish to see the process that ended public education in NYC, the nations' largest school district, take a look at the debacle in Los Angeles (LAUSD) which is the nations' second largest school district. "Teachers at Crenshaw High School are trying to stop the executioners' axe from falling on their school, as it has fallen on so many others. Is it too late? They write: "The last few days have been hard to bear--especially for those of us who want UTLA to become an organizing union, which puts forth our vision for how we can best educate our kids. Last night, teachers at Crenshaw High School--who, despite the most valiant and strategic fight we've seen yet against a reconstitution, had been forced to reapply for their jobs under the district's "magnet conversion"--began receiving news about whether they'd been rehired for year. The news has been very bad."
The White House is considering providing weapons to the Syrian rebels, officials said Tuesday, but no decision is imminent and President Barack Obama seemed to soften his public threats to the Syrian government over its alleged use of chemical weapons. A decision to supply weapons would mark a reversal for the Obama administration, which has resisted repeated proposals to deepen its involvement in Syria's 2-year-old conflict, which, according to the United Nations, has killed more than 70,000 people, mostly civilians.

Gabriel Gomez has zero political experience -- which is exactly why he might have a chance at winning the Massachusetts special election to replace John Kerry in the U.S. Senate. Gomez, a 47-year-old Republican, has an impressive life story: The son of Colombian immigrants, Gomez graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy, and went on to become a Navy pilot, decorated Navy SEAL operator, graduate of Harvard Business School, and later, had a successful career in private equity. As the Boston Globe put it, he "might have been compiled by a team of Republican consultants trying to craft the perfect candidate."
Three college students have been arrested on suspicion of assisting one of the two suspects following the Boston Marathon bombings, according to law enforcement officials. The three were identified as friends of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, who has been charged with carrying out the bombings along with his brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26. The younger brother was a student at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, the same school attended by the students at various points in recent months, according to authorities.
Posted by Roberto Abraham Scaruffi at 20:19