Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Monday 12 January 2015


 Daily Headlines
the question is, how did the big, top-down phenomena happen. And what are the big top-down early manifestations of top-down?

One of the world's largest book publishers wiped Israel off the map--literally. Here's the story--and it's not an unusual act in textbook publishing.
The murder of twelve people at France's Charlie Hebdo newspaper is being hijacked to promote a new wave of anti-Muslim hatred. The media is typically devoid of any real context and Americans are again being duped into signing up for the clash of civilizations. It is so easy that it doesn't even take a real domestic "terrorist" attack like 9/11 to whip the star-spangled sheep into a blood frenzy anymore.

By Prakash Kona
Pourquoi Je ne suis pas Charlie Hebdo
The Charlie Hebdo tragedy is a thinly disguised parody of what used to be the "white man's burden" in the heydays of colonialism. It is therefore racist too by extension, a racism hiding behind discourses such as free speech within the "comfort zone" of western democracy.
"Without understanding tax havens, we'll never properly understand the economic history of the modern world," wrote Nicholas Shaxson, author of 'Treasure Islands.' "Tax havens are now at the heart of the global economy. Their tentacles have curled their way into pretty much everything."

Republicans touted the pipeline as an economy-boosting job creator that will give the US energy independence. The most striking moments came when the microphone went to Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), who eloquently summed up the arguments against building a tar sands pipeline directly through the United States. Taking the environmental angle, Sen. Bernie Sanders implored his fellow senators to think of their grandchildren, who will one day ask, "What were you doing? Did you not hear what the scientific community all over the world was saying?"
War On Terror is a pretext for illegal regime change. Western use of proxies creates more rather than less terrorism.
Senator Ted Cruz will chair the committee that oversees science and Nasa in the new Republican-controlled Congress, raising fears that the conservative Texan will cut funding to the space agency and science programs. His vociferous opposition to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and his support of extreme budget cuts could spell trouble for Nasa's less prominent programs, such as its own climate research and sophisticated supercomputers.
Press freedom has been under attack with the deaths in Paris of nine Charlie Hebdo employees, including editor Stephane Charbonnier, and the continued incarceration in Cairo of three Al Jazeera journalists. The circumstances of the victimization of the journalists are starkly different.
We have engineered the rage of the dispossessed. The evil of predatory global capitalism and empire has spawned the evil of terrorism. Rather than understand the roots of that rage and attempt to ameliorate it, we have built mechanisms of security and surveillance, passed laws for targeted assassinations and torture of the weak, and amassed armies and the machines of industrial warfare to dominate the world by force.
A review of French author Houellebecq's novel Soumission (Submission) that caused outrage in France when released, on the day of the January attacks in Paris. The review challenges most media analyses of the novel that simply lambasted it for being anti-Islam - the novel has for general theme the election of a Muslim president, in France. The review shows that it actually deals with a general submission of French elites, literary and intellectual in particular, to free market and mass information - through the desultory description of a Sorbonne professor of literature who, having abdicated all his duties as a teacher and intellectual, is tempted, at the end to covert to Islam as, at least, he would then reap the sort of financial and social benefits and standing which, for all his submission to the bureaucracy and the whims of his current managers, he cannot, ever, hope to get.

By Robert De Filippis
"Je suis Charlie" Me Too!
To add fuel to the roaring fire, certain news organization's and individual's have rushed to condemn all Muslims for the acts of an infinitesimal, disenfranchised minority. Some claiming that the Muslim community doesn't do enough to protest these horrible actions being committed in the name of Islam. Wrong again. Tens of thousands of true Muslims have protested all over the world, France included.
Obama To Disband the Marine Corps? To all of my conservative friends, past, present: Can one of your New Year's resolutions be that when you hear something SO INCREDIBLE about your president or, in fact, any politician, that you will put a minimum amount of effort to verifying it is true before you spout it as fact? Just ONE google search will usually do it.
The price of oil's been crashing, and no one's cutting back production to bring up prices. Could this be a death knell for the U.S. fracking industry, and possibly even a disaster for the world economy?
By Eugene Elander
From Selma to Ferguson: The Mixed Legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
The legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. needs to be re-examined in the light of the Ferguson and Staten Island police killings of Black males, if the civil rights movement is to move beyond the present mixed situation. This article highlights some directions for that movement.
Attorney General Eric Holder isn't saying whether he still will be on the job when the time comes to decide whether to bring charges in the investigation of former CIA Director David Petraeus. Holder, in several television news interviews on Sunday, steered clear of commenting directly on the investigation. But he told CBS' "Face the Nation" that he expects that "a matter of this magnitude" would be decided "at the highest level" of the department.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu managed to ruffle a few feathers while taking part in the "Charlie Hebdo" rally in Paris on Sunday, an event his office initially said he would not be attending. A video posted on Facebook, the news footage mockingly set to the Looney Tunes cartoon music, showed Netanyahu manoeuvring his way to the front of the rally with the help of several bodyguards, allowing him to be photographed arm-in-arm with other leaders, including French President Francois Hollande and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Both the US and Israel pride themselves in being "democratic" while the rest of the informed world ridicules the inconsistency of their words with their actions.
WARSAW -- Russia's new military doctrine calls for a more aggressive stance toward NATO, boosting presence in the Arctic and strengthening cooperation with India and China. "Global developments at present stage are characterized by an increasing global competition, tensions in various interstate and interregional areas," said the document, signed by Russian President Vladimir Putin on Dec. 26. "There are many regional conflicts which remain unresolved. There is a tendency to force their resolution, including those which are in the regions bordering the Russian Federation. The existing architecture of the international security system does not provide an equal level of security to all states." The new doctrine brings significant changes to the country's defense strategy in a number of fields, and names the expansion of NATO in Russia's neighborhood as one of the principal threat factors.
By Mike Rivage-Seul
Charlie Hebdo: Porquoi?
Even Israel's Prime Minister, Benjamin Natanyahu, fresh from butchering 500 Muslim children in Gaza solemnly marched against the criminal barbarism of killing 12 westerners.
A team of Indonesian navy divers has located both black boxes from an AirAsia airliner that crashed two weeks ago, which is believed to have exploded as it hit the sea. Indonesian officials announced on Monday that the first black box, the flight data recorder, had been retrieved from the Java Sea for analysis. Hours later they said the cockpit voice recorder had been located but not yet brought to the surface. Flight QZ8501 crashed on 28 December on its way from Indonesia's second-biggest city of Surabaya to Singapore, killing all 162 people on board.

US secretary of state, John Kerry, is to travel to Paris this week following sharp criticism of the Obama administration for not sending a senior official to Sunday's rally in the French capital that was attended by about 40 world leaders. Kerry, who will be in France on Thursday and Friday, dismissed the criticism as "quibbling," and noted that the assistant secretary of state for Europe, Victoria Nuland, was in Paris at the march, as was the US ambassador to France and many embassy staffers. The US attorney general, Eric Holder, was also in Paris, but did not march.
NATO's civilian figurehead Jens Stoltenberg this week urged Russia to be a partner against terrorism. He was speaking the day after the deadly gun attack on a magazine in Paris where 12 people, including three police officers, were killed by assailants purporting to be affiliated with radical Islamists.
Liberal Zionists are trapped between their loyalty and devotion to Israel and their obvious awareness that Israel's current leadership is driving their nation into what Amos Oz sees as an "isolated ghetto." What they do not want to accept is the reality that after decades as an occupying military force, Israel has already sunk itself into an isolated ghetto.
The can of worms opened in Paris. It's not a straightforward situation.
The 23% unemployment rate is consistent with the declining Civilian Employment-Population Ratio and the declining Labor Force Participation Rate. The excess of new start-ups over closures currently adds an average of 61,000 jobs each month. In other words, these jobs are spun off of the assumptions of a model and are likely to be phantom jobs.

 Latest Articles
A report released in December by the U.S. Conference of Mayors showed that homelessness rates grew across the country in 2014, a trend driven by lack of affordable housing, widespread unemployment, chronic poverty, and a lack of needed services for those struggling with mental illness or substance abuse. There are now more homeless children in the U.S. than anytime in the nation's history.

Hunt Terrorists, Don't Scapegoat Muslims
The instant the horrific news hit that yet another pack of deranged nut cases debased Islam by shooting up the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish grocery store, nearly every Muslim organization, diplomat, and head of state, no matter their political views, roundly condemned the attacks. All were careful to point out that heinous murders, indeed any killing of innocent civilians, under the pretense of defending Islam,
Ann Jones: Answering for America
So wherever we expatriates settle on the planet, we find someone who wants to talk about the latest American events, large and small: another country bombed in the name of our "national security," another peaceful protest march attacked by our increasingly militarized police, another diatribe against "big government" by yet another wannabe candidate who hopes to head that very government in Washington.
For more than three decades, the United States and its European allies have committed one fundamental error after another in the process of creating a commonly held narrative that Iran was secretly pursuing a nuclear weapons program. The story of how suspicions of the Iranian program hardened into convictions is a cautionary tale of political and institutional interests.

This is the voice of the master, the imperialist, the slaveowner, the sadist: "We can bomb you, we can starve you, we can torture you, we can eviscerate you, we can visit every imaginable horror on you, we can utterly destroy you -- but you are forbidden to ever attack even one of us in any manner at all."
Does Affordable Housing Really Need to Be So Scarce in Most Big Cities?
Why is it that a growing percentage of urban men today can't afford to rent or buy a home that is as nice as the one in which they grew up? Meanwhile, there are plenty of rundown buildings in, or very close to, such cities . . as well as a huge supply of currently idle workers who would love to repair and refurbish such buildings, if it would eventually earn them a home of their own, from amongst those they help refurbish.

 Best News Links from the Web
It should come as no surprise that the very first move of the new Republican Senate is an attempt to push President Obama into approving the Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry oil from Canadian tar sands. After all, debts must be paid, and the oil and gas industry -- which gave 87 percent of its 2014 campaign contributions to the G.O.P. -- expects to be rewarded for its support.hat should be done about Keystone XL? If you believe that it would be environmentally damaging -- which I do -- then you should be against it, and you should ignore the claims about job creation. The jobs argument for the pipeline is basically a sick joke coming from people who have done all they can to destroy American jobs.

Two Code Pink protesters were arrested at the McLean, Virginia, home of former Vice President Dick Cheney on Saturday after 20 demonstrators, some in orange prison jumpsuits, walked onto his property to mark the 14th anniversary of the opening of Guantanamo Bay prison. Another Code Pink group demonstrated without incident outside the home of CIA Director John Brennan, also in the Washington, D.C. suburb of McLean, as part of its "Guantanamo Anniversary Weekend Torturers Tour."
Posted by Roberto Abraham Scaruffi at 19:04