Re: [Biofuel] Okay, This time I really am going to take down the list, , , , but first, please read
On 3/16/2017 08:33, Chip Mefford wrote: The project of which I speak is FarmOS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCOqg5iH6fM Take a look, give me some feedback, if there is interest, I'll migrate some or all of this list into a new community. Please count me in! Robert Luis Rabello Adventure for Your Mind http://www.newadventure.ca Ceremonies and Celebrations video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PV3k-s_sg1Q Meet the People video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txsCdh1hZ6c Crisis video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZedNEXhTn4 The Long Journey video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy4muxaksgk This communication may be unlawfully collected and stored by the National Security Agency (NSA) in secret. The parties to this email do not consent to the retrieving or storing of this communication and any related metadata, as well as printing, copying, re-transmitting, disseminating, or otherwise using it. If you believe you have received this communication in error, please delete it immediately. ___ Sustainablelorgbiofuel mailing list Sustainablelorgbiofuel@lists.sustainablelists.org http://lists.eruditium.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel
Re: [Biofuel] Happy Solstice all, Taking the list down.
On 12/22/2016 14:42, Chip Mefford wrote: It has been many years now since Keith passed. As things stand, Darryl is about the only traffic posted here and even that is echoing (admittedly interesting) stuff posted elsewhere. If anyone is interested, I can and am willing to provide the subscriber's list if anyone wishes to continue this work. As things stand, this mailing list is the only mailing list left on my mailman server that gets any traffic at all, and the spam to post ratio is about 70:1 (intercepted). As of 20170101, the list will shut down. The archives will of course remain in place until such a time as those responsible for them decide to take some other action. Please take these few days to make your farewells. Thank you so much for all your work! To everyone who has been involved in the biofuels list, I wish you well. Goodbye! Robert Luis Rabello Adventure for Your Mind http://www.newadventure.ca Ceremonies and Celebrations video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PV3k-s_sg1Q Meet the People video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txsCdh1hZ6c Crisis video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZedNEXhTn4 The Long Journey video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy4muxaksgk This communication may be unlawfully collected and stored by the National Security Agency (NSA) in secret. The parties to this email do not consent to the retrieving or storing of this communication and any related metadata, as well as printing, copying, re-transmitting, disseminating, or otherwise using it. If you believe you have received this communication in error, please delete it immediately. ___ Sustainablelorgbiofuel mailing list Sustainablelorgbiofuel@lists.sustainablelists.org http://lists.eruditium.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel
Re: [Biofuel] The Change in the Change of Seasons
On 10/25/2016 07:23, Darryl McMahon wrote: That financialization mentality is why I have long argued for a carbon tax with enough bite to be notice. At least in BC where you are, there is a real carbon tax, and even at relatively modest levels, it does seem to be having an impact. (overall fossil fuel in BC has been falling since the tax was put into effect) Among conservatives, the carbon tax is seen as a power grab by the government. I had a longish highway drive yesterday to and from an out-of-town meeting. A large work crew with a lot of equipment was laying fresh asphalt on the road. A decade ago, nobody around here would have considered paving a heavy use roadway in October. Agreed. The same thing is happening here. Highway 97 is being resurfaced, creating a commuting nightmare between Penticton (where I work) and Summerland (where I live). It's astonishing how many cars with single drivers (I'm guilty!) line up to leave town at the end of the day. Normally, my commute takes 12 minutes. This week, it's been closer to 40. But who resurfaces a road in October? I'm trying to see if I can push our house to Nov. 1 before activating the furnace. In years past, a few considered me radical for trying to get to Oct. 1 before doing that. In my childhood, the furnace main switch was turned on sometime in September. I grew up in California. Some winters, we didn't turn the furnace on until January . . . Since I've lived here, it's usually October. Since we have a Sun Pump supplying our household energy, we just set the thermostat and it comes on whenever the house cools down. This fall, it's been extraordinarily rainy for this region. I don't remember getting this much rain when we lived here 22 years ago. It was a LOT colder and drier back then. Is there any sign of local (BC) awareness of the Nathan E. Stewart sinking near Bella Bella, or is anyone connecting that lame response with the M/V Marathassa bunker oil dump last year? Among activists, yes. But for most people, the US election is a preoccupation. My friends in Terrace are pretty upset about the impact of pipelines and oil tanker traffic on the Skeena River salmon run. That's not making the news, though. Yesterday's (non-)responses from Coast Guard Commissioner Jody Thomas bordered on offensive. Nobody is talking about the fact that the 'world leading' spill response promised by the feds and oil industry simply can't get on scene, let alone work effectively, in a timely manner during weather conditions which are not unusual in that area. Yes. And they want to put a dilbit terminal at the entrance of the aptly christened Hecate Straight . . . The provincial government is pushing a big LNG facility south of Kitimat, too! Robert Luis Rabello Adventure for Your Mind http://www.newadventure.ca Ceremonies and Celebrations video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PV3k-s_sg1Q Meet the People video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txsCdh1hZ6c Crisis video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZedNEXhTn4 The Long Journey video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy4muxaksgk This communication may be unlawfully collected and stored by the National Security Agency (NSA) in secret. The parties to this email do not consent to the retrieving or storing of this communication and any related metadata, as well as printing, copying, re-transmitting, disseminating, or otherwise using it. If you believe you have received this communication in error, please delete it immediately. ___ Sustainablelorgbiofuel mailing list Sustainablelorgbiofuel@lists.sustainablelists.org http://lists.eruditium.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel
Re: [Biofuel] The Change in the Change of Seasons
On 10/22/2016 14:59, Darryl McMahon wrote: I have a few minutes to think and reflect today. It's 2 weeks after the Canadian Thanksgiving weekend. I still have a lot to do to get ready for winter. But in my memory, we had to have most of this done by the end of Thanksgiving weekend, because hard freezes were due, and a soft freeze might have happened. Even just 5 years ago. I hear you. We've built a new home and moved back to Summerland, where we lived 22 years ago. Okanagan Lake used to freeze over from Penticton to Summerland, but now it barely freezes around the shallow edges of its southern shore. I remember seeing ice fog here, yet the last two years that I've been back in the area, it's never cold enough. We have Mourning Doves living here now. It feels like California . . . Now that we're over the 400 ppm mark, I suspect that climate changes we're seeing now are the beginnings of permanent changes for which we are totally unprepared. People are strangely complacent, though . . . When they see the evaporator panels for our Sun Pump on the roof, the first question they ask is, "How much did it cost?" I've started replying with, "How much is a stable climate worth?" We're ingrained to see dollar values in everything. However, the price of a biosphere that supports us can't be quantified. We're so accustomed to "privatizing profits and socializing costs" that people like me, who build for efficiency, are seen as eccentric. I shake my head at this kind of attitude and quietly worry about the trouble that's coming. Robert Luis Rabello Adventure for Your Mind http://www.newadventure.ca Ceremonies and Celebrations video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PV3k-s_sg1Q Meet the People video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txsCdh1hZ6c Crisis video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZedNEXhTn4 The Long Journey video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy4muxaksgk This communication may be unlawfully collected and stored by the National Security Agency (NSA) in secret. The parties to this email do not consent to the retrieving or storing of this communication and any related metadata, as well as printing, copying, re-transmitting, disseminating, or otherwise using it. If you believe you have received this communication in error, please delete it immediately. ___ Sustainablelorgbiofuel mailing list Sustainablelorgbiofuel@lists.sustainablelists.org http://lists.eruditium.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel
[Biofuel] Home Heating System
Last time we built a house, I had the radical thought that maybe we could heat the building using the sun. My idea involved using flat panel or tube connectors to heat a volume of water, and then using a heat pump to amplify that water's temperature. This heated water could be subsequently circulated through a radiant array in the floor and we'd stay warm inside when it was cold outside. Those of you who live in Europe probably look at an idea of this kind with a shrug. After all, systems like this have been used in the cold parts of that continent for quite awhile. Here in North America, however, the concept is radical. During the last house build, our credit union refused to fund any "non conventional" construction, so my heat pump idea was out . . . This time around, things are a little different. The idea still sounds novel over here, but now, there are companies who build solar heat pumps like this routinely. Last March, I found a company called Sun Pump right here in British Columbia. Their system uses flat panel collectors on the roof, but instead of circulating water, they circulate refrigerant through them and transfer that energy into the domestic hydronic heating array. One nice thing about this particular system, is that it can also cool the house down during the summer. Our winters are getting milder while our summers are getting hotter. From my perspective, having one system to handle both heating and cooling makes good sense. But I've been bumping up against "conventional thinking" with the contractors who design HVAC systems. The first person I tried to work with kept insisting that the heat pump idea wouldn't work with hydronic arrays and pushed hard for an air-to-air heat exchange system. After living in a home with warm floors for better than 12 years, we don't want hot air blowing around in our new house. The other problem I've been facing is that many contractors INSIST that the only way to heat a building during the winter involves burning something, preferably natural gas. Now, if I had my way, I'd not burn anything AT ALL, but the local municipality won't issue a building permit without a "secondary heat source" in the home. This kind of "conventional" thinking perpetuates the status quo as far as burning fossil carbon is concerned. Thus, we have what amounts to a natural gas mandate encoded within municipal laws all across the continent. The laws don't actually SAY that, but with bylaws preventing the installation of wood burners in new homes, what other options do homeowners have, aside from fuel oil (which is really expense), propane (which is neither convenient nor cheap) and natural gas? With brute determination, I've managed to find someone who was willing to design the hydronic array for my new home's heating system. The software he used insists that we have a shortfall in the total amount of energy required to heat the upper floor, totally ignoring the fact that heat rises, and the lower floor (for which our system is "over powered") will take the brunt of the heating load. In fact the difference in energy load between the two floors is rather significant, since much of the lower floor will be under ground, and there are fewer windows below than above. A lot of the trouble we've been facing stems from our need to build in town, using conventional credit union financing. There SHOULD be a better way to do this, but even taking little steps (like building a house that's half the size of the "average" home in BC) meets with significant resistance. I feel like I'm straining against the current. However, with our heating system approved and construction finally underway, at least we're doing SOMETHING to reduce our carbon footprint. Additionally, other folk who are more risk averse than I am are watching our project carefully to see if the Sun Pump system actually works for us. Robert Luis Rabello Adventure for Your Mind http://www.newadventure.ca Ceremonies and Celebrations video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PV3k-s_sg1Q Meet the People video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txsCdh1hZ6c Crisis video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZedNEXhTn4 The Long Journey video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy4muxaksgk This communication may be unlawfully collected and stored by the National Security Agency (NSA) in secret. The parties to this email do not consent to the retrieving or storing of this communication and any related metadata, as well as printing, copying, re-transmitting, disseminating, or otherwise using it. If you believe you have received this communication in error, please delete it immediately. ___ Sustainablelorgbiofuel mailing list Sustainablelorgbiofuel@lists.sustainablelists.org http://lists.eruditium.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel
[Biofuel] Building Another House
Perhaps one of the most environmentally significant decisions a family can make involves building a home. We're in the throes of the planning process for our next house, and like the last time we did this, I'm finding that there's a certain momentum pushing us toward the conventional that is exceedingly hard to resist. The pressure to build a BIG house is the most significant of these. When I first approached the draftsman about our project, I mentioned that I wanted a home no larger than 1 700 square feet. During the course of our discussion, this somehow morphed into 1 700 square feet on the main floor, creating all manner of frictions between us and the draftsman . . . Building BIG, of course, uses far more materials, creates a lot more waste, and all of that interior space has to be heated and cooled. As it is, 1 700 square feet is far larger than the home I grew up in as a boy, but compared to the home projects being constructed in our area, we're asking for a very small house. Odd, isn't it? 13 years ago, during our last construction project (which long-time list members may recall), I wanted to collect solar energy in a large water tank and use a heat pump to extract it for domestic hot water and home heating. The builder and the credit union manager both thought I was nuts. That won't work, they said, maths notwithstanding. The idea was too radical at the time, and we wound up with a natural gas fired boiler that, despite being the smallest one available, was still too large for our hyper-insulated house. It never stayed on long enough to properly heat its chimney, and we wound up with acidified gases in the flue that started eating away at the exhaust pipe. We battled this problem for as long as we owned that house. I'd not wanted to burn anything at all, but external factors forced my hand. About four years later, however, a builder in our area began constructing homes employing the exact idea I'd wanted to use in my house. Seeing this made me feel determined to stand firm next time around. In our current project, this type of hybrid solar heat pump has become commercially available, our builder is quite excited to install this technology in our new house, and this time around the credit union manager isn't even batting an eyelash at the idea. What a difference 13 years makes! Having written this, doing ANYTHING with passive solar, whether heating or cooling, is still a radical idea. Just the thought of installing a large diameter pipe below the foundation to pre-heat / pre-cool intake air for a heat recovery ventilator (a device required by code in BC) has the building inspector shaking his head. They're making us jump over all manner of hoops to do something ridiculously simple that will save heating and cooling energy. Shouldn't they be applauding us for that? To get a passive sun space, I've had to practically beg the draftsman for an extra window above our stair landing. We're now living in a hot climate (and it's considerably hotter this year than it has been in the past), so we have to be careful with glazing. But it DOES get cold here during the winter and if the roof overhangs are intelligently designed, we should get the benefit of solar gain during the cold months, and extra light throughout the year. Building in the Okanagan Valley, where we now live, isn't cheap. Construction costs start at $150 per square foot and go up from there. In an effort to save money, we're shopping around for discounted materials. Although we're wealthy enough to build whatever we want, it doesn't make sense to mortgage more than what we need. The average house in BC stands for about 50 years, and the average homeowner sells her / his house every 7 years and moves on. Given that mortgage interest in front-loaded, the banks are making a killing in real estate. The pressure to pay all that interest is partially what's driving property values up. Here in Canada, there's a growing belief that property values have inflated above sustainable levels. The government expected tar sands and other resource exports (LNG development is being pushed very hard by the provincial government in BC) to create a new prosperity in the country. But with the market issues that China is facing, that prospect seems unrealistic to people like me. (Besides, the best thing we can do with tar sands is leave them in the ground.) What that means for the real estate market, is that the optimism that drove up prices since the last recession has created a whole class of people whose mortgages are likely higher than the true value of their properties. If we experience a market correction, a cascade of financial problems will ripple through the economy. So, why should I build a big house under those conditions? More later . . . Robert Luis Rabello Adventure for Your Mind http://www.newadventure.ca Ceremonies and Celebrations video:
[Biofuel] Biofuel for Humans
I've been working in a greenhouse for most of the summer. It's hard, back-breaking labor in a hot and humid environment. I've ruined five shirts and three pairs of shorts. My shoes are so disgusting I leave them outside. Many of the people who work around me struggle to speak English, and some of them I can't understand at all. At the end of the day I'm often utterly exhausted, too. But it's THE BEST summer job I've ever had! The greenhouse where I work grows organic, heirloom tomatoes in soil -- the only one of its kind in Canada west of Saskatchewan. Mind you, as far as I'm concerned the texture of a tomato is equivalent to that of a human lip, and I hate both the flavor and the smell of the fruit. There is, however, something different about growing food in soil. Even when I have to collect the rotten ones, they don't stink as badly as do the ordinary ones I find in the supermarket. I've made several interesting observations since I began working there. 1) The best way to gain respect from the migrant workers is to work as hard as they do. These men and women aren't looking for handouts. They sweat and strain to produce the food we eat, often under a hot sun, for long hours. (It's been as warm as 42 degrees in that greenhouse for days on end this summer!) Think about that next time you go into a grocery store. Every piece of fruit you see has been handled by a long line of (mostly dark-skinned) people who labored to get it to you. 2) In general, wealthy white-skinned people like me think this kind of work is beneath them. We've had unemployed folk who look like me coming to the greenhouse for jobs, but they don't last for more than a day. Weeding, pruning plants, cleaning fruit and packing is a mind-numbing task for many people. We can't get enough workers for the amount of labor that needs to be done. Think about that next time you hear someone complaining about immigration. 3) Growing organically IS different from conventional agriculture. Aggressive weed management, pruning and pest control are the main ways to control losses that are typically done by spraying nasty chemicals in conventional agriculture. It's far more labor intensive, and because labor isn't subsidized, this food costs more to produce. But it's of higher quality, it tastes better, and it's likely much better for you. 4) This summer in the Pacific Northwest has been the hottest on record. A local meteorologist commented that the temperature and rainfall patterns for this summer are equivalent to what the computer models predicted 30 - 50 years from now. The same trend of high pressure over western North America and low pressure over the eastern regions of the continent that brought frigid temperatures to the eastern seaboard last winter have persisted. California is facing a horrendous drought, and our rainfall has been far below normal. I suspect we've been too conservative in our predictions for the impact of global climate change. 5) No matter WHAT the GMO advocates contend, the problem with agriculture is surplus, not scarcity. We're producing so much fruit in our greenhouse, nearly 500 kilos is going rotten PER DAY right now. There is no market for this abundance of fresh produce. It's very discouraging to throw out food when I know that people elsewhere are going hungry. There's a dehydrator in the works, but that's a really expensive and long-term solution. I spent more than an hour today trying to find a charity who had room for our seconds. I dropped off more than 100 kilos of fruit to a local group who feeds low income families in our town. Food for thought, for certain! -- Robert Luis Rabello Adventure for Your Mind http://www.newadventure.ca Ceremonies and Celebrations video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PV3k-s_sg1Q Meet the People video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txsCdh1hZ6c Crisis video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZedNEXhTn4 The Long Journey video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy4muxaksgk This communication may be unlawfully collected and stored by the National Security Agency (NSA) in secret. The parties to this email do not consent to the retrieving or storing of this communication and any related metadata, as well as printing, copying, re-transmitting, disseminating, or otherwise using it. If you believe you have received this communication in error, please delete it immediately. ___ Sustainablelorgbiofuel mailing list Sustainablelorgbiofuel@lists.sustainablelists.org http://lists.eruditium.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel
Re: [Biofuel] Ethanol Compatibility
On 7/29/2014 9:25 AM, Dawie Coetzee wrote: Another reason to replace one's OBD (should one be so cursed) with a phantom system ... -D I did, using a Megasquirt. Tuning for ethanol would be relatively straightforward. Now, if only distilling ethanol was legal in my jurisdiction . . . Robert Luis Rabello Adventure for Your Mind http://www.newadventure.ca Ceremonies and Celebrations video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PV3k-s_sg1Q Meet the People video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txsCdh1hZ6c Crisis video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZedNEXhTn4 The Long Journey video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy4muxaksgk This communication may be unlawfully collected and stored by the National Security Agency (NSA) in secret. The parties to this email do not consent to the retrieving or storing of this communication and any related metadata, as well as printing, copying, re-transmitting, disseminating, or otherwise using it. If you believe you have received this communication in error, please delete it immediately. - No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 2014.0.4716 / Virus Database: 3986/7944 - Release Date: 07/29/14 ___ Sustainablelorgbiofuel mailing list Sustainablelorgbiofuel@lists.sustainablelists.org http://lists.eruditium.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel
Re: [Biofuel] Ethanol Compatibility
On 7/29/2014 2:55 PM, Thomas Kelly wrote: Will a phantom system and/or Megasquirt adjust on the fly to varying ethanol concentrations? (E0 through E100) No, I don't believe so. That's where the factory flex fuel system really shines. Robert Luis Rabello Adventure for Your Mind http://www.newadventure.ca Ceremonies and Celebrations video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PV3k-s_sg1Q Meet the People video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txsCdh1hZ6c Crisis video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZedNEXhTn4 The Long Journey video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy4muxaksgk This communication may be unlawfully collected and stored by the National Security Agency (NSA) in secret. The parties to this email do not consent to the retrieving or storing of this communication and any related metadata, as well as printing, copying, re-transmitting, disseminating, or otherwise using it. If you believe you have received this communication in error, please delete it immediately. - No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 2014.0.4716 / Virus Database: 3986/7945 - Release Date: 07/29/14 ___ Sustainablelorgbiofuel mailing list Sustainablelorgbiofuel@lists.sustainablelists.org http://lists.eruditium.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel
[Biofuel] Ethanol Compatibility
I maintain that any OBDII vehicle can run E85. If your check engine light comes on, reset it and keep driving. (It's usually an O2 sensor that triggers the light.) The onboard computer WILL adapt. Here's what the NREL had to say on the matter: http://www.scribd.com/doc/117331392/Effects-of-Intermediate-Ethanol-Blends There are no E85 pumps in British Columbia. The best we can do is E10, which is only advertised as available at Husky. Robert Luis Rabello Adventure for Your Mind http://www.newadventure.ca Ceremonies and Celebrations video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PV3k-s_sg1Q Meet the People video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txsCdh1hZ6c Crisis video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZedNEXhTn4 The Long Journey video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy4muxaksgk This communication may be unlawfully collected and stored by the National Security Agency (NSA) in secret. The parties to this email do not consent to the retrieving or storing of this communication and any related metadata, as well as printing, copying, re-transmitting, disseminating, or otherwise using it. If you believe you have received this communication in error, please delete it immediately. - No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 2014.0.4716 / Virus Database: 3986/7939 - Release Date: 07/28/14 ___ Sustainablelorgbiofuel mailing list Sustainablelorgbiofuel@lists.sustainablelists.org http://lists.eruditium.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel
[Biofuel] More Ethanol Info
This pdf verifies my earlier claim. The long-term fuel trim setting (as determined by the O2 sensor) will often trigger the check engine light. But, that's because the computer is not aware that ethanol is being burned and is adjusting the A / F ratio on the fly. It won't harm your engine to do this. http://www.liquidsunenergy.com/learning/ppt/ice.pdf Robert Luis Rabello Adventure for Your Mind http://www.newadventure.ca Ceremonies and Celebrations video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PV3k-s_sg1Q Meet the People video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txsCdh1hZ6c Crisis video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZedNEXhTn4 The Long Journey video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy4muxaksgk This communication may be unlawfully collected and stored by the National Security Agency (NSA) in secret. The parties to this email do not consent to the retrieving or storing of this communication and any related metadata, as well as printing, copying, re-transmitting, disseminating, or otherwise using it. If you believe you have received this communication in error, please delete it immediately. - No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 2014.0.4716 / Virus Database: 3986/7939 - Release Date: 07/28/14 ___ Sustainablelorgbiofuel mailing list Sustainablelorgbiofuel@lists.sustainablelists.org http://lists.eruditium.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel
Re: [Biofuel] Truck Shopping Finished
On 7/27/2014 7:41 PM, Darryl McMahon wrote: So, anybody got any thoughts on doing the approx. 1/3 fill with E85 and 2/3 fill with regular (E10) to get approximately E30? Most automobile parts since the early 1990's have been compatible with E85. The tricky part is the engine management system. We bought a 2004 Explorer Sport Trac to replace the supercharged 1993 Ranger that I'd been driving (Alas! The faithful supertruck had no ABS, and one rainy day, my beloved couldn't stop in the same distance that a new Toyota FJ Cruiser could . . . My Ranger went to the bone yard for a pittance. It's a shame!) and the Sport Trac is officially a flex fuel vehicle. The reason I bring up the Ranger is to discuss the adaptability of modern fuel injection systems. They're designed to maintain emissions standards for the life of the vehicle, and as such, they DO adapt to changes in the engine over time. When I first installed the blower on my Ranger, I drilled out the mass airflow tube to fool the onboard computer into thinking the machine had less air going into it than was the case. After about 20 km of bucking, stalling and otherwise being a nuisance, it smoothed out and was fine. I eventually swapped the factory computer for a speed density Megasquirt, and in so doing, developed great respect for the engineers that design these fuel management systems. When we first picked up the Sport Trac, fuel economy was TERRIBLE! Even when I had my foot in the Ranger and climbed hills in boost (which was fun!), the Ranger never burned as much fuel as the much heavier, 4 liter, 4WD Sport Trac. Also, if I downshifted to use engine braking on long downhill runs (we live at the top of a hill), it took several seconds for the computer to tell the transmission, Oh, this idiot human WANTS to go downhill at 3 000 rpm! After driving the machine for several weeks, the fuel economy began improving. It's still not as good as the Ranger -- which was a guzzler, compared to our hybrid Camry -- but it's getting better as it adapts to the way I drive. And now, when I downshift into second going downhill, it downshifts right away. So, you'll find that the engine management system WILL adapt to ethanol. It's not going to be as good as the system in my truck, which senses the specific gravity of the fuel and uses a modified set of buckets (to maintain optimal A/F ratios) to maximize economy, but it WILL learn. The new machines are a little spooky that way. The trade-off is reducing annual gasoline consumption by up to 100 litres (by substituting ethanol) vs. any potential shortening of the vehicle life. (about 240 kg of CO2 as GHG difference) If only Mr. Harper would let us distill our own fuel. I'm working in an organic greenhouse right now, and the amount of fermentable material that gets thrown into the garbage is astonishing! Robert Luis Rabello Adventure for Your Mind http://www.newadventure.ca Ceremonies and Celebrations video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PV3k-s_sg1Q Meet the People video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txsCdh1hZ6c Crisis video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZedNEXhTn4 The Long Journey video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy4muxaksgk This communication may be unlawfully collected and stored by the National Security Agency (NSA) in secret. The parties to this email do not consent to the retrieving or storing of this communication and any related metadata, as well as printing, copying, re-transmitting, disseminating, or otherwise using it. If you believe you have received this communication in error, please delete it immediately. - No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 2014.0.4716 / Virus Database: 3986/7933 - Release Date: 07/27/14 ___ Sustainablelorgbiofuel mailing list Sustainablelorgbiofuel@lists.sustainablelists.org http://lists.eruditium.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel
Re: [Biofuel] Back in the garden
On 6/2/2014 11:14 AM, Darryl McMahon wrote: I broke up some sod in the past few days to re-start home gardening. For reasons too tedious and mundane to go into, most of my garden grew over in the past 3 years. First of all, thank you for continuing to contribute to the list. I'm grateful that you take the time to do so, and I wish I had more time to personally contribute. Some lessons learned. I really like my antique electric tractor and rototiller for breaking sod. I learned this years ago, and it is one of a few reasons I keep the electric garden tractor here in the urban small yard. Years ago, I had a hand-held cultivator which was also powered from the tractor, but with time it failed, and proved irreparable. Two years ago, I stumbled upon an identical unit, and purchased it without hesitation. I got to use this in the past week, and it will make weeding much easier. I do all of my weeding by hand. A few years ago, I bought an electric shredder, but I go through so much material -- some of which is really tough -- that it's just not adequate for the job. I still rely on my gas powered hammer mill shredder, which is old, rickety and not easy to use. If I could get a permit for distilling ethanol, I'd brew my own fuel for the machine. Here in Canada, however, home brewing of ethanol isn't even contemplated in the law . . . I had to replace my Ford Ranger after an accident last autumn, and we now own a flex fuel SportTrac, which will likely never see a drop of ethanol because it's simply not available around here. Decades ago, I frequently got the job of sod busting with spades, forks and walk-behind gas rototillers. It was hard work no matter how I went at it. The tractor is luxury and pleasure by comparison. No fumes, no burns from exposed exhaust parts, and the ability to turn a usable amount of grass area into garden space in a reasonable amount of time. It must be a powerful machine. My electric shredder has been a disappointment. My garden will be smaller this year. Because it is just for me. I still have others living in the house. However, as they are not willing to prepare the soil, plant the seed, weed, water and tend the plot or pick the crop, I have decided to focus on what I want from the garden. Tomatoes, radish, peas, currants, raspberries, spinach, leaf lettuce, herbs. Good for you! We've got our garden in already, but like you, it's less ambitious than it was in previous years. I suspect I could cultivate more intensely in less area and wind up with just as much produce. Yet we still wind up giving away the majority of the food we grow to family and friends. There's just too much for us to eat. Local tree growth has changed a couple of past sunny spots into much shadier locations. As the trees are not planted on my property, my ability to control this is limited to trimming the limbs that cross the property line. A maple I rescued some 20 years ago is now a densely-leafed neighbourhood treasure, complete with park bench beneath. On a hot afternoon, it can be about five degrees C cooler beneath the tree than out in the sun beside it. The same maple seems to have led to the demise of my large raspberry beds - providing too much shade for their survival. We're having a similar problem with the main part of our garden. The best soil on my property is currently shaded by a cedar border hedge that has grown so tall over the years, it blocks direct sunlight for the entire morning. A couple of years ago, this part of the garden stayed so wet that my maize plants had purple stems. I've not really had a bountiful maize crop for at least three years. One benefit of a couple of years of neglect; I have fair patches of a couple of wildflowers which have taken up residence. So, I think they will get relocated around the property where some colour is needed and the lighting conditions seem similar. We have California Poppies growing along the edge of our garden. I like the golden color, and they don't need care. For Father's Day, I should be receiving a VegTrug planter. http://www.vegtrug.com/range/medium/medium-18m-vegtrug/ This will be my first go at raised bed planting, and I expect to try my hand at square foot gardening at the same time. With a couple of years of neglect, the leaf mold and compost piles should have produced their own rich harvest to fill the VegTrug. Nice! A few years ago, my father-in-law built me a proper compost bin. I get some really terrific compost now -- not the smelly, worm-ridden muck that my old, plastic composter used to produce. The only thing I don't like about my compost situation is the need to use the gas powered hammer mill. I will effect some repairs on a small greenhouse, and I hope to use it in the fall to extend the growing season by a month or so. The season is starting late as winter overstayed its welcome
[Biofuel] And Then There Was One, Imperial Gigantism and the Decline of Planet Earth
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34863.htm And Then There Was One Imperial Gigantism and the Decline of Planet Earth By Tom Engelhardt May 08, 2013 Information Clearing House - It stretched from the Caspian to the Baltic Sea, from the middle of Europe to the Kurile Islands in the Pacific, from Siberia to Central Asia. Its nuclear arsenal held 45,000 warheads, and its military had five million troops under arms. There had been nothing like it in Eurasia since the Mongols conquered China, took parts of Central Asia and the Iranian plateau, and rode into the Middle East, looting Baghdad. Yet when the Soviet Union collapsed in December 1991, by far the poorer, weaker imperial power disappeared. And then there was one. There had never been such a moment: a single nation astride the globe without a competitor in sight. There wasn't even a name for such a state (or state of mind). Superpower had already been used when there were two of them. Hyperpower was tried briefly but didn't stick. Sole superpower stood in for a while but didn't satisfy. Great Power, once the zenith of appellations, was by then a lesser phrase, left over from the centuries when various European nations and Japan were expanding their empires. Some started speaking about a unipolar world in which all roads led... well, to Washington. To this day, we've never quite taken in that moment when Soviet imperial rot unexpectedly -- above all, to Washington -- became imperial crash-and-burn. Left standing, the Cold War's victor seemed, then, like an empire of everything under the sun. It was as if humanity had always been traveling toward this spot. It seemed like the end of the line. The Last Empire? After the rise and fall of the Assyrians and the Romans, the Persians, the Chinese, the Mongols, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the French, the English, the Germans, and the Japanese, some process seemed over. The United States was dominant in a previously unimaginable way -- except in Hollywood films where villains cackled about their evil plans to dominate the world. As a start, the U.S. was an empire of global capital. With the fall of Soviet-style communism (and the transformation of a communist regime in China into a crew of authoritarian capitalist roaders), there was no other model for how to do anything, economically speaking. There was Washington's way -- and that of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank (both controlled by Washington) -- or there was the highway, and the Soviet Union had already made it all too clear where that led: to obsolescence and ruin. In addition, the U.S. had unprecedented military power. By the time the Soviet Union began to totter, America's leaders had for nearly a decade been consciously using the arms race to spend its opponent into an early grave. And here was the curious thing after centuries of arms races: when there was no one left to race, the U.S. continued an arms race of one. In the years that followed, it would outpace all other countries or combinations of countries in military spending by staggering amounts. It housed the world's most powerful weapons makers, was technologically light years ahead of any other state, and was continuing to develop future weaponry for 2020, 2040, 2060, even as it established a near monopoly on the global arms trade (and so, control over who would be well-armed and who wouldn't). It had an empire of bases abroad, more than 1,000 of them spanning the globe, also an unprecedented phenomenon. And it was culturally dominant, again in a way that made comparisons with other moments ludicrous. Like American weapons makers producing things that went boom in the night for an international audience, Hollywood's action and fantasy films took the world by storm. From those movies to the golden arches, the swoosh, and the personal computer, there was no other culture that could come close to claiming such a global cachet. The key non-U.S. economic powerhouses of the moment -- Europe and Japan -- maintained militaries dependent on Washington, had U.S. bases littering their territories, and continued to nestle under Washington's nuclear umbrella. No wonder that, in the U.S., the post-Soviet moment was soon proclaimed the end of history, and the victory of liberal democracy or freedom was celebrated as if there really were no tomorrow, except more of what today had to offer. No wonder that, in the new century, neocons and supporting pundits would begin to claim that the British and Roman empires had been second-raters by comparison. No wonder that key figures in and around the George W. Bush administration dreamed of establishing a Pax Americana in the Greater Middle East and possibly over the globe itself (as well as a Pax Republicana at home). They imagined that they might actually prevent another competitor or bloc of competitors from arising to
[Biofuel] 20 Signs That The Next Great Economic Depression Has Already Started In Europe
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34825.htm 20 Signs That The Next Great Economic Depression Has Already Started In Europe By Michael Snyder May 05, 2013 Information Clearing House -Economic Collapse Blog - The next Great Depression is already happening - it just hasn't reached the United States yet. Things in Europe just continue to get worse and worse, and yet most people in the United States still don't get it. All the time I have people ask me when the economic collapse is going to happen. Well, for ages I have been warning that the next major wave of the ongoing economic collapse would begin in Europe, and that is exactly what is happening. In fact, both Greece and Spain already have levels of unemployment that are greater than anything the U.S. experienced during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Pay close attention to what is happening over there, because it is coming here too. You see, the truth is that Europe is a lot like the United States. We are both drowning in unprecedented levels of debt, and we both have overleveraged banking systems that resemble a house of cards. The reason why the U.S. does not look like Europe yet is because we have thrown all caution to the wind. The Federal Reserve is printing money as if there is no tomorrow and the U.S. government is savagely destroying the future that our children and our grandchildren were supposed to have by stealing more than 100 million dollars from them every single hour of every single day. We have gone all in on kicking the can down the road even though it means destroying the future of America. But the alternative scares the living daylights out of our politicians. When nations such as Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy tried to slow down the rate at which their debts were rising, the results were absolutely devastating. A full-blown economic depression is raging across southern Europe and it is rapidly spreading into northern Europe. Eventually it will spread to the rest of the globe as well. The following are 20 signs that the next Great Depression has already started in Europe... #1 The unemployment rate in France has surged to 10.6 percent, and the number of jobless claims in that country recently set a new all-time record. #2 Unemployment in the eurozone as a whole is sitting at an all-time record of 12 percent. #3 Two years ago, Portugal's unemployment rate was about 12 percent. Today, it is about 17 percent. #4 The unemployment rate in Spain has set a new all-time record of 27 percent. Even during the Great Depression of the 1930s the United States never had unemployment that high. #5 The unemployment rate among those under the age of 25 in Spain is an astounding 57.2 percent. #6 The unemployment rate in Greece has set a new all-time record of 27.2 percent. Even during the Great Depression of the 1930s the United States never had unemployment that high. #7 The unemployment rate among those under the age of 25 in Greece is a whopping 59.3 percent. #8 French car sales in March were 16 percent lower than they were one year earlier. #9 German car sales in March were 17 percent lower than they were one year earlier. #10 In the Netherlands, consumer debt is now up to about 250 percent of available income. #11 Industrial production in Italy has fallen by an astounding 25 percent over the past five years. #12 The number of Spanish firms filing for bankruptcy is 45 percent higher than it was a year ago. #13 Since 2007, the value of non-performing loans in Europe has increased by 150 percent. #14 Bank withdrawals in Cyprus during the month of March were double what they were in February even though the banks were closed for half the month. #15 Due to an absolutely crippling housing crash, there are approximately 3 million vacant homes in Spain today. #16 Things have gotten so bad in Spain that entire apartment buildings are being overwhelmed by squatters... A 285-unit apartment complex in Parla, less than half an hour's drive from Madrid, should be an ideal target for investors seeking cheap property in Spain. Unfortunately, two thirds of the building generates zero revenue because it's overrun by squatters. This is happening all over the country, said Jose Maria Fraile, the town's mayor, who estimates only 100 apartments in the block built for the council have rental contracts, and not all of those tenants are paying either. People lost their jobs, they can't pay mortgages or rent so they lost their homes and this has produced a tide of squatters. #17 As I wrote about the other day, child hunger has become so rampant in Greece that teachers are reporting that hungry children are begging their classmates for food. #18 The debt to GDP ratio in Italy is now up to 136 percent. #19 25 percent of all banking assets in the UK are in banks that are leveraged at least 40 to 1. #20 German banking giant
[Biofuel] US, Israel and Saudi Arabia Propping Up al-Qaeda in Syria
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34755.htm US, Israel and Saudi Arabia Propping Up al-Qaeda in Syria By Tony Cartalucci April 28, 2013 Information Clearing House - April 27, 2013 (LD) - In an astounding admission, the New York Times confirms that the so-called Syrian opposition is entirely run by Al Qaeda and literally states: Nowhere in rebel-controlled Syria is there a secular fighting force to speak of. From the beginning, it was clear to geopolitical analysts that the conflict in Syria was not pro-democracy protesters rising up, but rather the fruition of a well-documented conspiracy between the US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia to arm and direct sectarian extremists affiliated with Al Qaeda against the Syrian government. This was documented as early as 2007 - a full 4 years before the 2011 Arab Spring would begin - by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh in his New Yorker article titled, The Redirection: Is the Administration's new policy benefiting our enemies in the war on terrorism? which stated specifically (emphasis added): To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia's government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda. For the past two years the US, UK, France, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, and Turkey have sent billions of dollars and thousands of tons of weapons into Syria along side known-terrorists from Libya, Chechnya, neighboring Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq. In the Telegraph's article titled, US and Europe in 'major airlift of arms to Syrian rebels through Zagreb', it is reported: It claimed 3,000 tons of weapons dating back to the former Yugoslavia have been sent in 75 planeloads from Zagreb airport to the rebels, largely via Jordan since November The story confirmed the origins of ex-Yugoslav weapons seen in growing numbers in rebel hands in online videos, as described last month by The Daily Telegraph and other newspapers, but suggests far bigger quantities than previously suspected. The shipments were allegedly paid for by Saudi Arabia at the bidding of the United States, with assistance on supplying the weapons organised through Turkey and Jordan, Syria's neighbours. But the report added that as well as from Croatia, weapons came from several other European countries including Britain, without specifying if they were British-supplied or British-procured arms. British military advisers however are known to be operating in countries bordering Syria alongside French and Americans, offering training to rebel leaders and former Syrian army officers. The Americans are also believed to be providing training on securing chemical weapons sites inside Syria. Additionally, The New York Times in its article, Arms Airlift to Syria Rebels Expands, With C.I.A. Aid, admits that: With help from the C.I.A., Arab governments and Turkey have sharply increased their military aid to Syria's opposition fighters in recent months, expanding a secret airlift of arms and equipment for the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad, according to air traffic data, interviews with officials in several countries and the accounts of rebel commanders. The airlift, which began on a small scale in early 2012 and continued intermittently through last fall, expanded into a steady and much heavier flow late last year, the data shows. It has grown to include more than 160 military cargo flights by Jordanian, Saudi and Qatari military-style cargo planes landing at Esenboga Airport near Ankara, and, to a lesser degree, at other Turkish and Jordanian airports. And more recently the US State Department had announced hundreds of millions of dollars more in aid, equipment and even armored vehicles to militants operating in Syria, along with demands of its allies to match the funding to reach a goal of over a billion dollars. The NYT would report in their article, Kerry Says U.S. Will Double Aid to Rebels in Syria, that: With the pledge of fresh aid, the total amount of nonlethal assistance from the United States to the coalition and civic groups inside the country is $250 million. During the meeting here, Mr. Kerry urged other nations to step up their assistance, with the objective of providing $1 billion in international aid. And as this astronomical torrent of cash, weapons, and equipment was overtly sent by the West into Syria, the US State Department since the
[Biofuel] George Bush's Library
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34760.htm George Bush's Library By Matt Carr April 28, 2013 Information Clearing House - One of the great things about being an American president is the complete immunity that comes with the job. No matter what you do or what laws you might break, you will never pay more than a mild political price for it. OK, your ratings might drop, people may say nasty things about you in the press, you might even lose an election; but in the end your crimes and follies will be forgotten or airbrushed out of history with the effortless ease that would make any 'totalitarian' leader green with envy -- and all the more so because there is no need to use force, coercion or fear to obtain these results. Today not many Americans really care too much that Richard Nixon once ordered the illegal bombing of Cambodia and also blasted North Vietnam and Hanoi just because he wanted to prove to the North Vietnamese that he was a crazy guy who was capable of anything. By the time Ronald Reagan died in 2004, hardly any Americans remembered that his administration had overseen one of the sleaziest foreign policy operations in US history. Selling cocaine to fund the Contras and heroin for the Afghan 'Muj', weapons-for-hostages, equipping both sides in the Iran-Iraq war, bypassing Congressional scrutiny, running secret slush funds through BCCI, funding the death squad regimes in Central America -- hell, what exactly is your problem? This is the president we're talking about. Sometimes this process of rehabilitation can happen sooner than you think. Take George W. Bush. Just four years ago he left office with the lowest approval ratings in American history. He left a country in financial freefall, with a level of wealth inequality without parallel in US history, whose crumbling infrastructure and institutional incompetence was epitomized by Hurricane Katrina. Abroad the reputation of the United States had been dragged through the dirt by the disastrous response of his administration to the 9/11 attacks, that included Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, the rendition of suspected 'enemy combatants' to countries like Syria and Egypt to be tortured, two major wars that had achieved nothing substantial except to leave hundreds of thousands of people dead -- one of which was launched on blatantly false premises. These are not things that you would expect a responsible democratic society to want to forget in a hurry -- from the point of self-interest if nothing else. But the good news for Bush is that the forgetting has already begun, and everyone is doing their best to see that it continues. Last week a Washington Post/ABC News poll found that Bush's approval ratings had risen from 33 percent positive and 66 percent negative in 2009 to corresponding figures of 47 percent approval and 50 percent disapproval today -- almost on a par with Obama. So absence clearly does make the heart grow fonder, and whatever his abilities as an artist, it was probably a good move on Bush's part to spend the last few years away from the limelight mountain-biking, golfing and painting dogs. But an even better idea was to open a presidential library. Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, George Bush Senior -- all of them had presidential libraries established in their lifetime, in an attempt to shape the way they want their reputations to be remembered, and last week Bush continued this illustrious tradition, with the opening of The George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum on the campus of Southern Methodist University in Dallas. At an opening ceremony attended by 10,000 guests and all five living presidents, Bush told his audience how 'When our freedom came under attack we made the tough decision required to keep our people safe' and promised that his library's presidential center would be 'devoted to promoting freedom abroad.' The library includes a steel beam from the World Trade Center, and an interactive exhibit called Decision Points Theater, where visitors can ' decide what actions they would have taken on issues like Iraq, Hurricane Katrina and the financial crisis.' By coincidence, the opening of the library coincided with the tenth anniversary of an event that tells us a great deal more about the priorities of the Bush administration than visitors are likely to discover through interactive exhibits.On 14 April 2003, Iraq's national library and archives were mostly destroyed in a fire caused by the widespread looting that took place in the aftermath of the Anglo-American invasion. The fire destroyed priceless documents and manuscripts dating back to the sixteenth century.Others were looted.The burning of the library followed the burning of a nearby library of Korans at the National Endowment Museum, and the systematic looting of the Baghdad Museum of Archeology in which artefacts and manuscripts, some of
[Biofuel] The Terror of Capitalism
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34756.htm Made in Bangladesh The Terror of Capitalism By Vijay Prashad April 28, 2013 Information Clearing House -Counterpunch - Delhi. - On Wednesday, April 24, a day after Bangladeshi authorities asked the owners to evacuate their garment factory that employed almost three thousand workers, the building collapsed. The building, Rana Plaza, located in the Dhaka suburb of Savar, produced garments for the commodity chain that stretches from the cotton fields of South Asia through Bangladesh's machines and workers to the retail houses in the Atlantic world. Famous name brands were stitched here, as are clothes that hang on the satanic shelves of Wal-Mart. Rescue workers were able to save two thousand people as of this writing, with confirmation that over three hundred are dead. The numbers for the latter are fated to rise. It is well worth mentioning that the death toll in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City of 1911 was one hundred and forty six. The death toll here is already twice that. This accident comes five months (November 24, 2012) after the Tazreen garment factory fire that killed at least one hundred and twelve workers. The list of accidents is long and painful. In April 2005, a garment factory in Savar collapsed, killing seventy-five workers. In February 2006, another factory collapsed in Dhaka, killing eighteen. In June 2010, a building collapsed in Dhaka, killing twenty-five. These are the factories of twenty-first century globalization -- poorly built shelters for a production process geared toward long working days, third rate machines, and workers whose own lives are submitted to the imperatives of just-in-time production. Writing about the factory regime in England during the nineteenth century, Karl Marx noted, But in its blind unrestrainable passion, its wear-wolf hunger for surplus labour, capital oversteps not only the moral, but even the merely physical maximum bounds of the working-day. It usurps the time for growth, development and healthy maintenance of the body. It steals the time required for the consumption of fresh air and sunlight All that concerns it is simply and solely the maximum of labour-power that can be rendered fluent in a working-day. It attains this end by shortening the extent of the labourer's life, as a greedy farmer snatches increased produce from the soil by reducing it of its fertility (Capital, Chapter 10). Dhaka In the rubble of Rana Plaza. Photo by Taslima Akhter. These Bangladesh factories are a part of the landscape of globalization that is mimicked in the factories along the US-Mexico border, in Haiti, in Sri Lanka, and in other places that opened their doors to the garment industry's savvy use of the new manufacturing and trade order of the 1990s. Subdued countries that had neither the patriotic will to fight for their citizens nor any concern for the long-term debilitation of their social order rushed to welcome garment production. The big garment producers no longer wanted to invest in factories -- they turned to sub-contractors, offering them very narrow margins for profit and thereby forcing them to run their factories like prison-houses of labour. The sub-contracting regime allowed these firms to deny any culpability for what was done by the actual owners of these small factories, allowing them to enjoy the benefits of the cheap products without having their consciences stained with the sweat and blood of the workers. It also allowed the consumers in the Atlantic world to buy vast amount of commodities, often with debt-financed consumption, without concern for the methods of production. An occasionally outburst of liberal sentiment turned against this or that company, but there was no overall appreciation of the way the Wal-Mart type of commodity chain made normal the sorts of business practices that occasioned this or that campaign. Bangladeshi workers have not been as prone as the consumers in the Atlantic world. As recently as June 2012, thousands of workers in the Ashulia Industrial Zone, outside Dhaka, protested for higher wages and better working conditions. For days on end, these workers closed down three hundred factories, blocking the Dhaka-Tangali highway at Narasinghapur. The workers earn between 3000 taka ($35) and 5,500 taka ($70) a month; they wanted a raise of between 1500 taka ($19) and 2000 taka ($25) per month. The government sent in three thousand policemen to secure the scene, and the Prime Minister offered anodyne entreaties that she would look into the matter. A three-member committee was set up, but nothing substantial came of it. Aware of the futility of negotiations with a government subordinated to the logic of the commodity chain, Dhaka exploded in violence as more and more news from the Rana Building emerged. Workers have shut down the factory area around Dhaka, blocking
[Biofuel] Departing French envoy has frank words on Afghanistan
http://www.staradvertiser.com/news/19040101_Departing_French_envoy_has_frank_words_on_Afghanistan.html Departing French envoy has frank words on Afghanistan By ALISSA J. RUBIN POSTED: 01:30 a.m. HST, Apr 28, 2013 LAST UPDATED: 03:39 a.m. HST, Apr 28, 2013 KABUL, Afghanistan » It is always hard to gauge what diplomats really think unless one of their cables ends up on WikiLeaks, but every once in a while the barriers fall and a bit of truth slips into public view. That is especially true in Afghanistan, where diplomats painstakingly weigh every word against political goals back home. The positive spin from the Americans has been running especially hard the past few weeks, as congressional committees in Washington focus on spending bills and the Obama administration, trying to secure money for a few more years here, talks up the country's progress. The same is going on at the European Union, where the tone has been sterner than in the past but still glosses predictions of Afghanistan's future with upbeat words like promise and potential. Despite that, one of those rare truth-telling moments came at a farewell cocktail party last week hosted by the departing French ambassador to Kabul: Bernard Bajolet, who is leaving to head France's Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieure, its foreign intelligence service. After the white-coated staff passed the third round of hors d'oeuvres, Bajolet took the lectern and laid out a picture of how France --- a country plagued by a slow economy, waning public support for the Afghan endeavor and demands from other foreign conflicts, including Syria and North Africa --- looked at Afghanistan. While it is certainly easier for France to be a critic from the sidelines than countries whose troops are still fighting in Afghanistan, the country can claim to have done its part. It lost more troops than all but three other countries before withdrawing its last combat forces in the fall. The room, filled with diplomats, some senior soldiers and a number of Afghan dignitaries, went deadly quiet. When Bajolet finished, there was restrained applause --- and sober expressions. One diplomat raised his eyebrows and nodded slightly; another said, No holding back there. So what did he say? That the Afghan project is on thin ice and that, collectively, the West was responsible for a chunk of what went wrong, though much of the rest the Afghans were responsible for. That the West had done a good job of fighting terrorism but that most of that was done on Pakistani soil, not on the Afghan side of the border. And that without fundamental changes in how Afghanistan did business, the Afghan government, and by extension the West's investment in it, would come to little. His tone was neither shrill nor reproachful. It was matter-of-fact. I still cannot understand how we, the international community, and the Afghan government have managed to arrive at a situation in which everything is coming together in 2014 --- elections, new president, economic transition, military transition and all this --- whereas the negotiations for the peace process have not really started, Bajolet said in his opening comments. He was echoing a point shared privately by other diplomats, that 2014 was likely to be a perfect storm of political and military upheaval coinciding with the formal close of the NATO combat mission in Afghanistan. As for the success of the fight on the ground, which U.S. leaders routinely describe now as being Afghan-led, Bajolet sounded dubious. We do not have enough distance to make an objective assessment, he said, but in any case, I think it crucial that the Afghan highest leadership take more visible and obvious ownership for their army. His tone --- the sober, troubled observations of a diplomat closing a chapter --- could hardly have been more different from that taken by the new shift of U.S. officials charged with making it work in Afghanistan: in particular, with that of Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., the new U.S. commanding general here. This week Dunford sent out a news release cheering on Afghanistan's progress, noting some positive-leaning statistics and praising the Afghan army's abilities. Very soon, the ANSF will be responsible for security nationwide Dunford said, referring to the Afghan National Security Forces. They are steadily gaining in confidence, competence and commitment. At his farewell party, Bajolet wound up his realpolitik with a brisk analysis of what Afghanistan's government needed to do: cut corruption, which discourages investment, deal with drugs and become fiscally self-reliant. It must increase its revenues instead of letting politicians divert them, he said. Several diplomats in the room could be seen nodding as he said that drugs caused more casualties than terrorism in Russia, Europe and the Balkans and that Western governments would be hard-put to make the case for
[Biofuel] MoD admits for first time that Britain helped pilot the aircraft from American bases
http://is.gd/oChygG http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?e=001Uub2aVN7qj9buhB983Xbtz9Iph4ZH2rGik1QSPu8dsT_3DA3tDR7r8LxWLSeRq1jyYn4uMrGKNaKwmDxP1s9yCio-WMXq8s3Tm-SjkoZRn8= Ministry of Defence has admitted for the first time British helped fly drones Drones were operated remotely from bases thousands of miles away RAF were involved in as many as three missions a week from 2004 Tory MP said news raised 'serious questions' about British role in Iraq war By Robert Verkaik PUBLISHED: 22:41 GMT, 27 April 2013 | UPDATED: 23:14 GMT, 27 April 2013 RAF pilots took part in America's notorious drone programme in Iraq in which hundreds of civilians died, The Mail on Sunday has learned. Heavily armed drones -- using deadly missiles to destroy targets -- were flying as many as three missions a week from 2004. They were operated remotely by pilots, often from bases thousands of miles away. It had been thought the operations in Iraq, which have been condemned by human rights groups as war crimes, were run solely by the US Air Force. Now the Ministry of Defence has admitted for the first time that British personnel were helping to fly the drones from bases in the United States. In a statement to Parliament, Armed Forces Minister Andrew Robathan was forced to correct a previous account in which he said the RAF flew US drones only in Afghanistan and Libya. He said: 'The answer should have said that UK personnel embedded with the US Air Force have only flown US RPAS [Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems] in support of operations in Afghanistan, Libya and Iraq.' The MoD conceded that these embedded missions ran from 2004 to 2009, but a spokesman was unable to provide further details. One intelligence source said British pilots would have worked on drone operations in Basra, using Hellfire missiles to target insurgents fighting UK forces. US drone operations follow looser rules of engagement than those authorised by the UK. US drones abide by the controversial doctrine of 'pre-emptive self-defence' -- for targeted killings over countries such as Pakistan and Yemen. However, the MoD said British pilots followed UK combat rules, even when embedded with US forces. Reacting to the news, Tory MP Rehman Chishti said: 'This raises serious questions about our involvement with America's drone programme and our role during the insurgency. The Government must lift the veil of secrecy on their use of drones.' The MoD also admitted that Reaper drones have been operated remotely from Britain for the first time. The Reapers had flown missions in Afghanistan controlled from RAF Waddington in Lincolnshire, where campaign groups yesterday staged a protest against the news. The drones are all based in Afghanistan and can carry 500lb bombs and Hellfire missiles. They are launched from Kandahar air base. -- Robert Luis Rabello Adventure for Your Mind http://www.newadventure.ca Meet the People video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txsCdh1hZ6c Crisis video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZedNEXhTn4 The Long Journey video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy4muxaksgk ___ Sustainablelorgbiofuel mailing list Sustainablelorgbiofuel@lists.sustainablelists.org http://lists.eruditium.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel
[Biofuel] Russian envoy warns on Syria chemical arms 'pretext'
http://is.gd/Ne8DHp http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?e=001Uub2aVN7qj9tH6Zeq131C_OqbnIMD5vgAurVvHZ4wxc4ArchfJK094d6t6vNs0fgfRrAVzTabc1XXBowWUr4D1dKew6FJmdCCdb4YJ_mW-c= Russian envoy warns on Syria chemical arms 'pretext' Russian envoy warns on Syria chemical arms 'pretext' Saturday, 27 April 2013 Russia's deputy foreign minister Mikhail Bogdanov news of chemical weapon use must not be a pretext for an intervention in Syria. (AFP) Al Arabiya with AFP - Claims that chemical weapons have been used in Syria should not become a pretext for a foreign military intervention in the country, Russia's deputy foreign minister Mikhail Bogdanov said on Saturday. If there is serious evidence of the use of chemical weapons in Syria, it should be presented immediately and not concealed, said Bogdanov, who is Russian President Vladmir Putin's Middle East envoy, during a visit to Beirut. We must check the information immediately and in conformity with international criteria and not use it to achieve other objectives. It must not be a pretext for an intervention in Syria, added Bogdanov, according to an Arabic translation of his remarks. We must know the truth and have proof and not rely on information reported in the media which is not supported by facts, Bogdanov said in Arabic on the Al-Manar television station of Lebanon's Hezbollah movement, also allied to Assad. On Thursday, U.S. officials said for the first time that there was evidence the Syrian regime had likely used chemical weapons in small quantities, emphasizing that additional investigation was necessary to confirm the suspicions. U.S. President Barack Obama on Friday promised a vigorous investigation into the reports and renewed his warning that proof of their use would be a game changer. Obama is awaiting a definitive judgment on whether the Syrian regime used chemical weapons against rebel fighters before taking action, AFP reported the White House as saying on Friday. He said the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime would constitute a red line, though it remains unclear if the American administration is willing to intervene militarily in the Syrian conflict. Russia, one of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's staunchest allies, is firmly opposed to military intervention in Syria. We have the past experience of another violent intervention in Iraqi affairs under the pretext of the presence of nuclear weapons, and it turned out in the end that there was nothing, he added. The experience of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 looms large over claims of chemical weapons use in Syria, with critics claiming the allegations are a pretext for international intervention in the conflict. Bogdanov met Saturday with the head of Hezbollah's parliamentary group, Mohammed Raad, a meeting the envoy described as very useful, without adding details. Hezbollah, a long-standing ally of the Assad regime, has dispatched fighters to Syria to battle alongside government troops, raising tensions inside Lebanon. -- Robert Luis Rabello Adventure for Your Mind http://www.newadventure.ca Meet the People video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txsCdh1hZ6c Crisis video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZedNEXhTn4 The Long Journey video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy4muxaksgk ___ Sustainablelorgbiofuel mailing list Sustainablelorgbiofuel@lists.sustainablelists.org http://lists.eruditium.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel
[Biofuel] How the West Missed a Chance to Make Peace With Iran
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34723.htm http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?e=001Nir7YPSqESZjI1SI0grOQS0EEnHz6WALrFJTydYkOvuo-kz8hl0LlRRCuww7mW_4_9h08mPFoGiURCp0E8xznKMdB5ZmJsuvOOycyXv3pjiVVVGGXf3phZu3j-BB18tZF4-Jc0kqvwguXMinAi5UzVflcRK2Yvis How the West Missed a Chance to Make Peace With Iran Peter Oborne shows how the West turned down a precious opportunity to resolve the Iranian nuclear crisis eight years ago, and argues that it is western rather than Iranian intransigence that prevents a deal being struck today. By Peter Oborne April 24, 2013 Information Clearing House -The Telegraph - It was the early spring of 2005 and a team of British, French and German diplomats were arriving at the magnificent French foreign ministry at the Quai d'Orsay on the left bank of the Seine. But the splendour of the Second Empire building did not match their mood. The negotiating team, which included the high-flying John Sawers (now Sir John, head of the British Secret Intelligence Service), had been fruitlessly searching for a solution to the Iranian nuclear stand-off for more than a year. There seemed to be no solution. The European negotiators, under massive pressure from the United States, were adamant that Iran must give up its uranium enrichment programme. For the Iranians these demands seemed an intolerable humiliation for a sovereign state, and a classic manifestation of the western imperialism that had humiliated their ancient country for centuries. The meeting had been under way for approximately 20 minutes, with no progress, when suddenly the face of the leader of the Iranian negotiating team, Javad Zarif, was wreathed in smiles. We have a proposal to show you, he said. It is an entirely unofficial idea. It has not been discussed or approved by our masters in Tehran. But perhaps it might be something we can talk about. After these preliminary words, the Iranians delivered a PowerPoint presentation which amazed the European negotiating team. It was the basis of a deal and one, moreover, that offered genuine benefits for both sides, though both sides would have to make compromises as well. Briefly, in the gilded 19th-century Parisian salon, a resolution of the nuclear stand-off between Iran and the west felt entirely possible. The Iranians explained that they were not prepared to abandon their plans to develop centrifuge enrichment technology on Iranian soil. But in return for carrying on with their enrichment programme they proposed unprecedented measures to guarantee that they would never divert peaceful nuclear technology for military use. They offered a solemn pledge that Iran would remain bound by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) --- which obliges member states to subject their nuclear facilities to external inspection --- for as long as it existed. They said that Iran's religious leaders would repudiate nuclear weapons. They put on the negotiating table a series of voluntary restrictions on the size and output of the enrichment programme. And they offered inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Authority improved oversight of all nuclear activities in Iran. The European diplomats allowed not a trace of emotion to show on their faces. But one official recalls thinking that what we had just heard was a most interesting offer. We realised that what we had just heard was a valid and coherent proposal that was in full conformity with relevant international treaty provisions. This diplomat adds today that trust was not an issue, because over the preceding 18 months we had got to know our Iranian counterparts and had acquired confidence in the Iranians' ability to honour their commitments. When the Iranians had finished their presentation, the Europeans asked for a break so that they could discuss the proposal among themselves. Once on their own they agreed that there was no way that the Iranian offer would be acceptable to their political masters in Europe. One witness puts the problem like this: There was not the faintest chance that President George W Bush's Republican advisers and Israeli allies would allow him to look benignly on such a deal. On the contrary, if the Europeans were to defy American wishes, they would be letting themselves in for a transatlantic row to end all rows.?So when they came back to the negotiating table one hour later they were studiously non-committal. They spoke highly of the Iranian offer, but asked for time so that their governments could consider it. And when Sir John Sawers took the Iranian offer back to London it was very quickly forgotten. According to Foreign Office sources, Tony Blair intervened to make sure that it went no further. Later Sir John explained to Seyed Hossein Mousavian, spokesman of the Iranian nuclear negotiation team, why the offer could not be taken up. Washington would never tolerate the operation of even one centrifuge
[Biofuel] When Israeli Denial of Palestinian Existence Becomes Genocidal
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34720.htm When Israeli Denial of Palestinian Existence Becomes Genocidal By Ilan Pappe April 24, 2013 Information Clearing House -EI - In a regal interview he gave the Israeli press on the eve of the state's Independence Day, Shimon Peres, the current president of Israel, said the following: I remember how it all began. The whole state of Israel is a millimeter of the whole Middle East. A statistical error, barren and disappointing land, swamps in the north, desert in the south, two lakes, one dead and an overrated river. No natural resource apart from malaria. There was nothing here. And we now have the best agriculture in the world? This is a miracle: a land built by people (Maariv, 14 April 2013). This fabricated narrative, voiced by Israel's number one citizen and spokesman, highlights how much the historical narrative is part of the present reality. This presidential impunity sums up the reality on the eve of the 65th commemoration of the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of historic Palestine. The disturbing fact of life, 65 years on, is not that the figurative head of the so-called Jewish state, and for that matter almost everyone in the newly-elected government and parliament, subscribe to such views. The worrying and challenging reality is the global immunity given to such impunity. Peres' denial of the native Palestinians and his reselling in 2013 of the landless people mythology exposes the cognitive dissonance in which he lives: he denies the existence of approximately twelve million people living in and near to the country to which they belong. History shows that the human consequences are horrific and catastrophic when powerful people, heading powerful outfits such as a modern state, denied the existence of a people who are very much present. This denial was there at the beginning of Zionism and led to the ethnic cleansing in 1948. And it is there today, which may lead to similar disasters in the future --- unless stopped immediately. Cognitive dissonance The perpetrators of the 1948 ethnic cleansing were the Zionist settlers who came to Palestine, like Polish-born Shimon Peres, before the Second World War. They denied the existence of the native people they encountered, who lived there for hundreds of years, if not more. The Zionists did not possess the power at the time to settle the cognitive dissonance they experienced: their conviction that the land was people-less despite the presence of so many native people there. They almost solved the dissonance when they expelled as many Palestinians as they could in 1948 --- and were left with only a small minority of Palestinians within the Jewish state. But the Zionist greed for territory and ideological conviction that much more of Palestine was needed in order to have a viable Jewish state led to constant contemplations and eventually operations to enlarge the state. With the creation of Greater Israel following the conquest of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, the dissonance returned. The solution however could not easily be resolved this time by the force of ethnic cleansing. The number of Palestinians was larger, their assertiveness and liberation movement were forcefully present on the ground, and even the most cynical and traditionally pro-Israel actors on the international scene recognized their existence. The dissonance was resolved in a different way. The land without people was any part of the greater Israel the state wished to Judaize in the pre-1967 boundaries or annex from the territories occupied in 1967. The land with people was in the Gaza Strip and some enclaves in the West Bank as well as inside Israel. The land without people is destined to expand incrementally in the future, causing the number of people to shrink as a direct consequence of this encroachment. Incremental ethnic cleansing This incremental ethnic cleansing is hard to notice unless one contextualizes it as a historical process. The noble attempt by the more conscientious individuals and groups in the West and inside Israel to focus on the here and now --- when it comes to Israeli policies --- is doomed to be weakened by the contemporary contextualization, not the historical one. Comparing Palestine to other places was always a problem. But with the murderous reality in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere, it becomes an even more serious challenge. The last closure, the last political arrest, the last assault, the last murder of a youth are horrific crimes, but pale in comparison to nearby or far-away killing fields and areas of colossal atrocities. Criminal narrative The comparison is very different when it is viewed historically and it is in this context that we should realize the criminality of Peres' narrative which is as horrific as the occupation --- and potentially far worse. For the president of Israel, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate,
[Biofuel] Does Boston Bombing = Drone Strike?
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34718.htm Does Boston Bombing = Drone Strike? (Click on the link to view the embedded video) By Ryan J. Reilly April 24, 2013 Information Clearing House - WASHINGTON -- A Yemeni man named Farea al-Muslimi told a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday that a U.S. drone strike on his small town of Wessab tore my heart, much as the Boston Marathon bombings upset Americans. Most of the world has never heard of Wessab. But just six days ago, my village was struck by a drone, in an attack that terrified thousands of simple, poor farmers, Muslimi said in prepared testimony. The drone strike and its impact tore my heart, much as the tragic bombings in Boston last week tore your hearts and also mine. Muslimi testified that he was with an American colleague in the town of Abyan last year when the local residents suddenly became worried. They were moving erratically and frantically pointing toward the sky. Based on their past experiences with drone strikes, they told us that the thing hovering above us --- out of sight and making a strange humming noise --- was an American drone. My heart sank. I was helpless. It was the first time that I had earnestly feared for my life, or for an American friend's life in Yemen. I was standing there at the mercy of a drone. I also couldn't help but think that the operator of this drone just might be my American friend with whom I had the warmest and deepest friendship in America, Muslimi said. My mind was racing and my heart was torn, Muslimi continued in his statement. I was torn between the great country that I know and love and the drone above my head that could not differentiate between me and some AQAP militant. It was one of the most divisive and difficult feelings I have ever encountered. That feeling, multiplied by the highest number mathematicians have, gripped me when my village was droned just days ago. It is the worst feeling I have ever had. I was devastated for days because I knew that the bombing in my village by the United States would empower militants. -- Robert Luis Rabello Adventure for Your Mind http://www.newadventure.ca Meet the People video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txsCdh1hZ6c Crisis video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZedNEXhTn4 The Long Journey video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy4muxaksgk ___ Sustainablelorgbiofuel mailing list Sustainablelorgbiofuel@lists.sustainablelists.org http://lists.eruditium.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel
[Biofuel] Every Time a Bomb Goes Off, The Surveillance State Grows Stronger
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34725.htm Every Time a Bomb Goes Off, The Surveillance State Grows Stronger By Jonathan Kay April 24, 2013 Information Clearing House -National Post - Last week's terrorist attack in Boston was an emotional play in four acts. First came grief, then anger, then the morbid excitement of a manhunt. The last act was jubilation: When police officers zeroed in on Dzokhar Tsarnaev and took him into custody, they were applauded by a huge cheering Watertown crowd that had gathered to watch. It was essentially an anti-terrorism street party, with the police being celebrated as heroes. Americans are famously skeptical of the police state: Many Second Amendment advocates even cite the possibility of righteous rebellion as an argument in support of maintaining private paramilitary weapon inventories. But it turns out that all it takes to make this libertarian spirit melt away is a pair of murderous idiots with some pressure cookers. It seems a long time ago, but just last month, Republican Senator Rand Paul staged a 13-hour filibuster over the issue of U.S. government usage of weaponized drone aircraft over American soil. Even many lefitsts --- who typically lampoon Paul as a libertarian extremist --- admitted that he was taking a principled stand on an important issue. Yet on Monday afternoon, the U.S. military could have flown a fleet of drones over Boston, and the city's fearful residents would have stood and saluted. Following Monday's news of a major cross-border terrorist plot being broken up, I suspect that many Canadians feel the same way about their own communities. This is the effect of terrorism, or indeed of any form of deadly, random-seeming violence: In the immediate aftermath, people demand that leaders use any means possible to protect the citizenry. Usually, those leaders are only too happy to oblige. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney certainly were: Last Tuesday, the day after the bombings, a bipartisan, blue-chip legal-advocacy group called the Constitution Project went public with its determination that the United States engaged in the practice of torture during the years following 9/11. Alas, no one paid much attention to the document, in part because of Boston, and in part because --- to America's shame --- the torture issue has become almost banal over the last 12 years. The impulse that seizes politicians in the wake of terrorist attacks would be comically ironic if it were not so frightening. For historical context, consider that the Boston Marathon is run every year on Patriots Day, which honours the men who shaped America's tradition of freedom and due process. These include lawyer John Adams, who offered representation to such unpopular specimens as the eight British soldiers who shot into a crowd of protesters at the Boston Massacre of March 5, 1770. (The defendants claimed self-defence. Six were acquitted.) Yet now, following another Boston massacre 243 years later, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham has declared: I hope [the] administration will at least consider holding the Boston suspect as enemy combatant for intelligence gathering purposes --- and the last thing we may want to do is read Boston suspect Miranda Rights telling him to 'remain silent.' Britons once fretted over the proliferation of CCTV cameras in their country --- but then came the 2005 transit bombings, and the complaints ebbed The whole episode presents a case study in why the campaign to protect our civil liberties from the surveillance state seems doomed. In times of peace, civil libertarians who oppose ubiquitous closed-circuit TV cameras, Internet snooping and other privacy infringements are lucky to fight for a draw. But even that rearguard battle is lost as soon as bombs start exploding. Britons once fretted over the proliferation of CCTV cameras in their country --- but then came the 2005 transit bombings, and the complaints ebbed. In the United States, the same will be true in the aftermath of Boston, where CCTV footage played an important role in identifying the Marathon-bombing suspects. I'm as happy as everyone else that the Tsarnaev brothers were found, and that Canadian police apparently have broken up what might have been an even more deadly plot in our own country. Nothing a civil libertarian can say will take anyting away from their excellent police work. But as with all terrorist attacks, the emotional power of these crimes is hampering the ability of otherwise reasonable people to settle on the correct balance between security and civil liberties in a free society. -- Robert Luis Rabello Adventure for Your Mind http://www.newadventure.ca Meet the People video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txsCdh1hZ6c Crisis video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZedNEXhTn4 The Long Journey video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy4muxaksgk ___
[Biofuel] Battery Breakthrough?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22191650 Super-powered battery breakthrough claimed by US team By Leo Kelion Technology reporter A new type of battery has been developed that, its creators say, could revolutionise the way we power consumer electronics and vehicles. The University of Illinois team says its use of 3D-electrodes allows it to build microbatteries that are many times smaller than commercially available options, or the same size and many times more powerful. It adds they can be recharged 1,000 times faster than competing tech. However, safety issues still remain. Details of the research are published in the journal Nature Communications. Battery breakthrough The researchers said their innovation should help address the issue that while smartphones and other gadgets have benefited from miniaturised electronics, battery advances have failed to keep pace. Batteries work by having two components - called electrodes - where chemical reactions occur. In simple terms, the anode is the electrode which releases electrons as a result of a process called oxidation when the battery is being used as a power source. The cathode is the electrode on the other side of the battery to which the electrons want to flow and be absorbed - but a third element, the electrolyte, blocks them from travelling directly. When the battery is plugged into a device the electrons can flow through its circuits making the journey from one electrode to the other. Meanwhile ions - electrically charged particles involved in the anode's oxidation process - do travel through the electrolyte. When they reach the cathode they react with the electrons that travelled via the other route. The scientists' breakthrough involved finding a new way to integrate the anode and cathode at the microscale. The battery electrodes have small intertwined fingers that reach into each other, project leader Prof William King told the BBC. That does a couple of things. It allows us to make the battery have a very high surface area even though the overall battery volume is extremely small. And it gets the two halves of the battery very close together so the ions and electrons do not have far to flow. Because we've reduced the flowing distance of the ions and electrons we can get the energy out much faster. Repeatable technique The battery cells were fabricated by adapting a process developed by another team at the university which is designed to make it faster to recharge the batteries than lithium ion (Li-on) and nickel metal hydride (NiMH) equivalents. It involves creating a lattice made out of tiny polystyrene spheres and then filling the space in and around the structure with metal. The spheres are then dissolved to leave a 3D-metal scaffold onto which a nickel-tin alloy is added to form the anode, and a mineral called manganese oxyhydroxide to form the cathode. Finally the glass surface onto which the apparatus was attached was immersed into a liquid heated to 300C (572F). Today we're making small numbers of these things in a boutique fabrication process, but while that's reliable and we can repeat it we need to be able to make large numbers of these things over large areas, said Prof King. But in principle our technology is scalable all the way up to electronics and vehicles. You could replace your car battery with one of our batteries and it would be 10 times smaller, or 10 times more powerful. With that in mind you could jumpstart a car with the battery in your cell phone. Safety fear Other battery experts welcomed the team's efforts but said it could prove hard to bring the technology to market. The challenge is to make a microbattery array that is robust enough and that does not have a single short circuit in the whole array via a process that can be scaled up cheaply, said Prof Clare Grey from the University of Cambridge's chemistry department. University of Oxford's Prof Peter Edwards - an expert in inorganic chemistry and energy - also expressed doubts. This is a very exciting development which demonstrates that high power densities are achievable by such innovations, he said. The challenges are: scaling this up to manufacturing levels; developing a simpler fabrication route; and addressing safety issues. I'd want to know if these microbatteries would be more prone to the self-combustion issues that plagued lithium-cobalt oxide batteries which we've seen become an issue of concern with Boeing's Dreamliner jets. Prof William King Prof William King hopes to use the microbattery to power electronic equipment before the end of the year Prof King acknowledged that safety was an issue due to the fact the current electrolyte was a combustible liquid. He said that in the test equipment only a microscopic amount of the liquid was used, making the risk of an explosion negligible - but if it were scaled up to large sizes the danger could become
Re: [Biofuel] Battery Breakthrough?
On 4/19/2013 2:06 PM, Darryl McMahon wrote: Hi Robert, as you might expect, I saw this announcement earlier in the week. While industry analysts are excited, my enthusiasm is restrained. When they get this to market as an affordable product in a size that is relevant to vehicle propulsion, then I will be excited. Right now I'm underwhelmed. I've read periodic announcements like this before, and I can't help but wonder how much is hype designed to stir investment dollars, as opposed to a genuine breakthrough. Today, we have OEMs making electric cars that are affordable (e.g., 2012 Mitsubishi i-MiEV can be acquired today for about $21,000 (after rebates and before taxes) in Ontario - range about 100 km (reliable in winter). The 2012 Nissan Leaf can be acquired locally now for about $25,000 (after rebates and before taxes) - range about 120 km (reliable in winter). The Leaf is supposed to be a nice car. I've also been ogling that Ford Focus EV, but that's running close to $50K. My Ranger is aging not so gracefully now, my boys are getting ready to leave home, and if I'm going to buy a car at all, it's going to be an EV. Having written this, I'd prefer to avoid buying ANYTHING, as the embodied energy in an automobile, along with its requisite infrastructure, contributes mightily to dependence on fossil energy and climate change. The Tesla Model S (85kWh) can be acquired for about $92,000 (after rebates and before taxes) - range about 400 km (reliable in winter). (An amazing car.) That's with technology we saw on the market in small form factors a decade ago. We saw one in Langley a couple of weeks ago. It's a beautiful machine, for certain! I wonder what is stopping people from buying these vehicles in huge numbers today. They want to support the oil industry? Climate change is a hoax? They think the price of gasoline and diesel is going to drop dramatically in the near future and stay there indefinitely? The Osborne Effect (waiting for the next generation of a product which they expect to be better and cheaper, creating the risk that the vendor founders before they can produce it)? The last car we bought was a hybrid Camry, more than 6 years ago. We decided to support hybrid technology because if there is no demand, innovation will stop. The same thing is true of battery electrics. But while hybrids have been steadily gaining market share (there are quite a few of them in our neighborhood), battery electrics remain rare birds. People I've spoken to about this believe they're too expensive and don't like the limited range. They really do travel over 4 hours at a time at highway speeds, multiple times per day, on a routine basis? (I telecommute now, but I remember resenting 20 minute commutes as a colossal waste of time.) No, of course not. But perception and reality are often two different things. If, however, I had to work in Vancouver, I'd hit the range limit of the Focus EV in a single direction. Is it really still the sticker price? Supposing you plan to own a car for 10 years, and travel 20,000 km/year, and it gets a real world fuel consumption in the order of 8 litres/100 km, and gasoline is an average of just $1.50 per litre over the next 10 years. Well, 200,000 km at 8 L/100k is 16,000 litres for fuel. At $1.50, that's $24,000 - more than the price of the car (for the Leaf or i-MiEV). The electricity cost is almost trivial - charging at off-peak times, it really is, but let's say it's 2 cents per km over the 10 years, for a total of $4,000 for the whole decade. i-MiEV plus electricity for 10 years: $25,000. New gasoline econobox (e.g., Ford Focus) $17,000 vehicle + $24,000 fuel: $41,000. That's before we impose a carbon tax. Agreed. The maths make sense. Our family laughed at us for buying a hybrid, but they're not laughing now . . . The other exciting place for low-cost, high-capacity, long-life batteries (weight not an issue) is in storage for renewable energy from solar, wind, tidal and other intermittent sources. Sigh . . . One day! Robert Luis Rabello Adventure for Your Mind http://www.newadventure.ca Meet the People video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txsCdh1hZ6c Crisis video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZedNEXhTn4 The Long Journey video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy4muxaksgk ___ Sustainablelorgbiofuel mailing list Sustainablelorgbiofuel@lists.sustainablelists.org http://lists.eruditium.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel
[Biofuel] Woman Attacked by Man Accusing Muslims of Marathon Bombings
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34666.htm Woman Attacked by Man Accusing Muslims of Marathon Bombings By Maria Sacchetti, Globe Staff April 19, 2013 Information Clearing House -Boston Globe - Every day, Heba Abolaban of Malden checks on her family in war-strafed Syria, where water, bread and electricity are in short supply. She was far more worried about them than about herself on Wednesday morning when she put her baby daughter in a stroller and headed into the sunshine to a play group with a friend. But as they strolled down Commercial Street, an angry-faced man charged toward the petite woman, his hand balled into a fist. He punched her hard in the shoulder and screamed curses inches from her face. Then he pointed at her and walked away shouting. He said, '(Expletive) you. (Expletive) you Muslims, You are terrorists, you are the ones who made the Boston explosion,' said Abolaban, recalling the episode in a phone interview Thursday. I was really, really completely shocked. I didn't know what to do. Then I realized what happened. I was crying and crying. Abolaban, a 26-year-old physician who wears a traditional hijab, or head scarf, gripped the stroller carrying her nine-month old daughter and stood in shock. Soon, she and her friend, also pushing a baby stroller, burst into tears. I was so afraid he might hurt my baby, she said. What happened next made her feel better about Malden, a fast-changing city of 60,000 that now has the second-highest percentage of immigrants in Massachusetts. She called the Malden police, at her husband's urging, and as she waited for them to arrive, workers at the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) Nutrition Program, where the play group was, came outside to protect the women. The police arrived within minutes, soothed her and took her statement. Then the calls came: Mayor Gary Christenson called her at home, then Police Chief Kevin Molis phoned. They were there within two minutes. They were so kind. They were so helpful, she said. The Malden police chief -- he called me two times. The Islamic center in Malden also checked on her. She is scheduled to teach a class there tomorrow on breast cancer detection. Molis, who started as a beat officer in Malden, said the attack was one of the first things he brought up at Thursday's morning roll call. He said his officers are trained to serve the diverse city of Malden, home to immigrants from China, Haiti, Uganda, Vietnam and more. Police could not find the attacker, vowed to keep looking. Molis called the attack an intolerable act that violates state law and the very essence of our constitution. No investigative strategy will be overlooked in order to determine who's responsible for this, Molis said. This is something that as a city and as a police department we take seriously. No other incidents had been reported as of Thursday, he said. Abolaban and her husband, Ahmad Almujased, also a physician, moved here about a year and a half ago from Syria. Abolaban said she is a Muslim originally from Palestine. But Molis said he never asked Abolaban about her religion, because to him, it is a private matter. He said he reaches out to mosques, churches, businesses and all groups to ensure that they feel safe and protected. It is our role to make sure that all of our rights are protected and preserved, he said. That is why we became police officers. Abolaban and others said the response to the attack highlighted the good in a community that has changed dramatically in the past 20 years, and where such instances remain rare. Maria Sacchetti can be reached at msacche...@globe.com Let's Not Forget By Andrew Sullivan April 19, 2013 Information Clearing House - There are 1.6 Billion-with-a-B Muslims in the world. Less than 100 have successfully carried out an attack that killed US civilians. Even at the most generous estimate, there are less than 25,000 active members of Al-Quaeda. That's 0.0015% of the Muslim population. There are rogue ideologies, savage ideas floating around the world, easily accessible, and yet how many people have actually gone on to apply those ideas to kill others? Here's another fact: 1.7 million ethnic Chechens, only 2 of them have attacked the US. And those 2 were born and raised in Kyrgyzstan, as were their entire family for one generation, having been deported from Chechnya in 1944, and never lived in Chechnya during the conflicts there. Their family moved to Dagestan for less than a year in 2001, after which they became residents of the US at the ages of 8 and 15. They lived here for 11 years, studied here, wrestled and boxed here, graduated from school here, and one of them, Tamerlan, married a Christian woman and had a child HERE, according to his Aunt, who was interviewed on NPR. Whatever part of their lives inspired them to take this action, and WE DON'T KNOW if it had anything to do with their
Re: [Biofuel] Battery Breakthrough?
On 4/19/2013 4:13 PM, Chip Mefford wrote: I've got a 10 y/o prius, still working, though not as well. but mostly, I ride a bicycle. My eldest son doesn't have a driver's license. The family was up in arms about this, but he looks at an automobile as a liability and thinks, Why should I spend money on financing, insurance, repairs and fuel when I can ride my bike or take the bus wherever I need to go? In the town where I live, we have LOUSY bus service and we live high on a hill. My son and I have discussed converting his bike to an electric-assist by virtue of a hub motor and battery pack. He'd still have to climb the hill, but it would be a LOT easier than it is now. And, the climate here, while rainy, never gets as cold as it did even 20 years ago. We had ONE skiff of snow this winter. Mostly, it's been dry and cool. It's not bad for biking. Our Camry doesn't get the fuel economy it did when new, either. Robert Luis Rabello Adventure for Your Mind http://www.newadventure.ca Meet the People video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txsCdh1hZ6c Crisis video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZedNEXhTn4 The Long Journey video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy4muxaksgk ___ Sustainablelorgbiofuel mailing list Sustainablelorgbiofuel@lists.sustainablelists.org http://lists.eruditium.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel
[Biofuel] ICH
I just received an e-mail from Tom Feely at Information Clearing House. His web site has been hacked after coming under continuous attack and is currently offline. Those attacks arose after ICH posted articles critical of Israel. For those who love to complain about all the political posts on the biofuels list, I urge you to understand that there is a political context to every human endeavor, and further, that the actions of political forces constitute the greatest threat not only to our personal liberty, but also to the very survival of our species on earth. If any of you feel inclined to support Tom, please contact him at this address and ask him what you can do: email...@cox.net Robert Luis Rabello Adventure for Your Mind http://www.newadventure.ca Meet the People video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txsCdh1hZ6c Crisis video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZedNEXhTn4 The Long Journey video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy4muxaksgk ___ Sustainablelorgbiofuel mailing list Sustainablelorgbiofuel@lists.sustainablelists.org http://lists.eruditium.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel
[Biofuel] If Autocratic Regimes in Saudi Arabia, UAE, and the Gulf are Acceptable, What’s Wrong With Assad’s in Syria?
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34632.htm If Autocratic Regimes in Saudi Arabia, UAE, and the Gulf are Acceptable, What’s Wrong With Assad’s in Syria? By Iftekhar A. Khan April 16, 2013 Information Clearing House - Leading US senators have urged President Obama to get involved directly and use military force in the two years old uprising against President Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria. It isn’t that UK and US haven’t been involved so far; it’s just that both imperial powers have used their proxies to oust Assad from power. The proxies doing the bidding of the western powers are mainly Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey. Syria has traditionally remained under Russian influence and has relied on Russian military equipment as most of the Arab countries bought military hardware from the western powers. Russia has had a naval port facility in Tartus, Syria, since 1971. Intriguingly, why is Russia, by its inaction, absent from the Syrian scene, despite the presence of its naval force at Tartus when the western powers unite to shore up insurgency against Asad’s government? “Russia is not looking to oust Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad and wants the conflicting parties to negotiate and stop the ‘massacre’, putting an end to the ‘catastrophe’ in Syria”, President Vladimir Putin recently told a German broadcaster in an interview. “We do not think that Assad should leave today, as our partners suggest. In this case, tomorrow we will have to decide what to do and where to go” Putin said. Instead of asserting itself forcefully, the Russian response to the ongoing insurgency in Syria is apathetic. Once Assad goes and the western powers install their proxy in Syria, Russia will have to vacate the naval port there. It seems Russia’s withdrawal to self-isolation after its misadventure in Afghanistan continues. The western media portrays to the world that Assad’s Alawites minority – 12 percent Shiites – is ruling the Sunnis majority therefore the Sunnis have resin against the Alawites. But could such an uprising continue for two long years without the tacit support by the US? If popular protests by majority of people alone were the benchmark to change repressive regimes, the simmering uprising by the Shiites in Bahrain and Qatar would have toppled the Khalifas of the two Gulf States. The present arrangement, however, is interesting. Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other gulf emirates, finance the insurgency in Syria. Turkey provides its territory for the Free Syrian Army to operate from, while the US, the UK and France provide the military hardware. It’s bloodletting financed by the Muslims, inflicted by the Muslims against their kin, using weapons supplied by the western powers. To forge a more effective alliance against Asad, the US recently brought Israel and Turkey together by negotiating a patch-up between the two since Israel attacked the Gaza flotilla in 2010, in which some Turkish activists were killed. Israel and Turkey would now plan a common strategy to oust Asad and replace him with a pro-west stooge. A west-sympathetic Syrian National Council on the lines of Libyan Transitional National Council is already in place. SNC is likely to be headed by a US citizen and business executive Ghassan Hitto as LTNC was headed by Dr Abdelrahim Alkep. Syria is Libya’s replay. The imperial powers inflame and exploit the sectarian schism between the Sunnis and Shiites in not only Syria but also in other Muslim countries including Iraq. These powers don’t bother changing their tactics when occupying sovereign countries although the old crap of the oppressed people rising and arming themselves to overthrow the repressive regimes in power now stinks. In October 2010, Saudi Arabia purchased $60 billion worth of military aircraft from the US in the name of security against Iran. Similarly, Prime Minister David Cameron toured the Middle East in 2012 to sign a deal of 6 billion pounds to sell 100 Typhoon jets to Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Oman. When criticized at home for selling military hardware to autocratic regimes, the prime minister had said, “The autocratic countries had a right to defend themselves.” If autocratic regimes in Saudi Arabia, UAE, and the Gulf are acceptable, what’s wrong with Assad’s in Syria? Who doesn’t know that pulling down Assad’s regime in Syria aims at weakening Iran? Robert Luis Rabello Adventure for Your Mind http://www.newadventure.ca Meet the People video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txsCdh1hZ6c Crisis video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZedNEXhTn4 The Long Journey video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy4muxaksgk ___ Sustainablelorgbiofuel mailing list Sustainablelorgbiofuel@lists.sustainablelists.org http://lists.eruditium.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel
[Biofuel] The Boston Bombing Produces Familiar and Revealing Reactions
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34634.htm The Boston Bombing Produces Familiar and Revealing Reactions As usual, the limits of selective empathy, the rush to blame Muslims, and the exploitation of fear all instantly emerge By Glenn Greenwald April 16, 2013 Information Clearing House -The Guardian - There's not much to say about Monday's Boston Marathon attack because there is virtually no known evidence regarding who did it or why. There are, however, several points to be made about some of the widespread reactions to this incident. Much of that reaction is all-too-familiar and quite revealing in important ways: (1) The widespread compassion for yesterday's victims and the intense anger over the attacks was obviously authentic and thus good to witness. But it was really hard not to find oneself wishing that just a fraction of that compassion and anger be devoted to attacks that the US perpetrates rather than suffers. These are exactly the kinds of horrific, civilian-slaughtering attacks that the US has been bringing to countries in the Muslim world over and over and over again for the last decade, with very little attention paid. My Guardian colleague Gary Younge put this best on Twitter this morning: younge tweet Juan Cole this morning makes a similar point about violence elsewhere. Indeed, just yesterday in Iraq, at least 42 people were killed and more than 250 injured by a series of car bombs, the enduring result of the US invasion and destruction of that country. Somehow the deep compassion and anger felt in the US when it is attacked never translates to understanding the effects of our own aggression against others. One particularly illustrative example I happened to see yesterday was a re-tweet from Washington Examiner columnist David Freddoso, proclaiming: Idea of secondary bombs designed to kill the first responders is just sick. How does anyone become that evil? I don't disagree with that sentiment. But I'd bet a good amount of money that the person saying it - and the vast majority of other Americans - have no clue that targeting rescuers with double-tap attacks is precisely what the US now does with its drone program and other forms of militarism. If most Americans knew their government and military were doing this, would they react the same way as they did to yesterday's Boston attack: Idea of secondary bombs designed to kill the first responders is just sick. How does anyone become that evil? That's highly doubtful, and that's the point. There's nothing wrong per se with paying more attention to tragedy and violence that happens relatively nearby and in familiar places. Whether wrong or not, it's probably human nature, or at least human instinct, to do that, and that happens all over the world. I'm not criticizing that. But one wishes that the empathy for victims and outrage over the ending of innocent human life that instantly arises when the US is targeted by this sort of violence would at least translate into similar concern when the US is perpetrating it, as it so often does (far, far more often than it is targeted by such violence). Regardless of your views of justification and intent: whatever rage you're feeling toward the perpetrator of this Boston attack, that's the rage in sustained form that people across the world feel toward the US for killing innocent people in their countries. Whatever sadness you feel for yesterday's victims, the same level of sadness is warranted for the innocent people whose lives are ended by American bombs. However profound a loss you recognize the parents and family members of these victims to have suffered, that's the same loss experienced by victims of US violence. It's natural that it won't be felt as intensely when the victims are far away and mostly invisible, but applying these reactions to those acts of US aggression would go a long way toward better understanding what they are and the outcomes they generate. (2) The rush, one might say the eagerness, to conclude that the attackers were Muslim was palpable and unseemly, even without any real evidence. The New York Post quickly claimed that the prime suspect was a Saudi national (while also inaccurately reporting that 12 people had been confirmed dead). The Post's insinuation of responsibility was also suggested on CNN by Former Bush Homeland Security Adviser Fran Townsend (We know that there is one Saudi national who was wounded in the leg who is being spoken to). Former Democratic Rep. Jane Harman went on CNN to grossly speculate that Muslim groups were behind the attack. Anti-Muslim bigots like Pam Geller predictably announced that this was Jihad in America. Expressions of hatred for Muslims, and a desire to do violence, were then spewing forth all over Twitter (some particularly unscrupulous partisan Democrat types were identically suggesting with zero evidence that the attackers were
[Biofuel] Bombs from Boston to Baghdad:, What Is the Value of a Human Life?
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34636.htm Bombs from Boston to Baghdad: What Is the Value of a Human Life? Judged by the media coverage, it is hard not to conclude that western lives are valued much more highly than those of people in Afghanistan, Iraq or the Middle East. By Lindsey German April 16, 2013 Information Clearing House -Stop The War - The bombing in Boston is a tragedy, and everyone should condemn the actions of people who have destroyed the lives of people enjoying themselves watching the marathon. But last week in Afghanistan a US airstrike killed eleven children and several women. This Afghan bombing is only one of many that are killing civilians every week. In Iraq bombs go off in crowded areas regularly. A wave of bombings across the country yesterday left at least 75 Iraqis dead. And in Syria too, there is a daily repetition of carnage that is killing countless civilians. Judged by the media coverage, it is hard not to conclude that western lives are valued much more highly than those of people in Afghanistan or the Middle East, and that bombs in the middle of major US cities are regarded as more newsworthy than those in the Afghan countryside or in Baghdad. When commentators and journalists empathise with the victims of the Boston bomb, many will wonder why they give hardly a passing thought for those other victims who were also caught in the middle of their everyday lives, enjoying themselves in the sunshine, shopping in markets or celebrating weddings. The general rule seems to be 'out of sight, out of mind'. But the mayhem wreaked by western intervention in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and elsewhere is not out of the minds of the millions who witness it and live with it every day. Nor is it forgotten by those in the west who opposed these policies and predicted they would create more terrorism, not less. It is unclear who was responsible for the Boston bombs, with the reports suggesting either a group from the Middle East, or home grown right wing extremists marking Patriot Day. That hasn't stopped right wing commentators (step forward Fox News' commentator) from blaming the Muslims and from Muslims worldwide expressing fears that this new attack would lead to further scapegoating and racism towards them. Terrorism is now routinely blamed on Muslims even though most Muslims are as horrified by such attacks as anyone else. And even though the most serious terror attack in Europe in recent years was from a right wing extremist in Norway trying to advance his anti immigration and anti Muslim agenda. Whatever the truth about this latest bombing, the continued refusal to acknowledge the widespread grievances against the US and its allies caused by the wars and US policies in the Middle East will lead to turmoil until political solutions are found. That solution includes getting all foreign troops out of Afghanistan and the Middle East, ending discrimination against Muslims and supporting justice for the Palestinians. Not coming any time soon, then? Robert Luis Rabello Adventure for Your Mind http://www.newadventure.ca Meet the People video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txsCdh1hZ6c Crisis video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZedNEXhTn4 The Long Journey video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy4muxaksgk ___ Sustainablelorgbiofuel mailing list Sustainablelorgbiofuel@lists.sustainablelists.org http://lists.eruditium.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel
[Biofuel] A Tax System Stacked Against the 99 Percent
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34633.htm A Tax System Stacked Against the 99 Percent By JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ April 16, 2013 Information Clearing House -NY Times - LEONA HELMSLEY, the hotel chain executive who was convicted of federal tax evasion in 1989, was notorious for, among other things, reportedly having said that only the little people pay taxes. As a statement of principle, the quotation may well have earned Mrs. Helmsley, who died in 2007, the title Queen of Mean. But as a prediction about the fairness of American tax policy, Mrs. Helmsley's remark might actually have been prescient. Today, the deadline for filing individual income-tax returns, is a day when Americans would do well to pause and reflect on our tax system and the society it creates. No one enjoys paying taxes, and yet all but the extreme libertarians agree, as Oliver Wendell Holmes said, that taxes are the price we pay for civilized society. But in recent decades, the burden for paying that price has been distributed in increasingly unfair ways. About 6 in 10 of us believe that the tax system is unfair --- and they're right: put simply, the very rich don't pay their fair share. The richest 400 individual taxpayers, with an average income of more than $200 million, pay less than 20 percent of their income in taxes --- far lower than mere millionaires, who pay about 25 percent of their income in taxes, and about the same as those earning a mere $200,000 to $500,000. And in 2009, 116 of the top 400 earners --- almost a third --- paid less than 15 percent of their income in taxes. Conservatives like to point out that the richest Americans' tax payments make up a large portion of total receipts. This is true, as well it should be in any tax system that is progressive --- that is, a system that taxes the affluent at higher rates than those of modest means. It's also true that as the wealthiest Americans' incomes have skyrocketed in recent years, their total tax payments have grown. This would be so even if we had a single flat income-tax rate across the board. What should shock and outrage us is that as the top 1 percent has grown extremely rich, the effective tax rates they pay have markedly decreased. Our tax system is much less progressive than it was for much of the 20th century. The top marginal income tax rate peaked at 94 percent during World War II and remained at 70 percent through the 1960s and 1970s; it is now 39.6 percent. Tax fairness has gotten much worse in the 30 years since the Reagan revolution of the 1980s. Citizens for Tax Justice, an organization that advocates for a more progressive tax system, has estimated that, when federal, state and local taxes are taken into account, the top 1 percent paid only slightly more than 20 percent of all American taxes in 2010 --- about the same as the share of income they took home, an outcome that is not progressive at all. With such low effective tax rates --- and, importantly, the low tax rate of 20 percent on income from capital gains --- it's not a huge surprise that the share of income going to the top 1 percent has doubled since 1979, and that the share going to the top 0.1 percent has almost tripled, according to the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. Recall that the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans own about 40 percent of the nation's wealth, and the picture becomes even more disturbing. If these numbers still don't impress you as being unfair, consider them in comparison with other wealthy countries. The United States stands out among the countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the world's club of rich nations, for its low top marginal income tax rate. These low rates are not essential for growth --- consider Germany, for instance, which has managed to maintain its status as a center of advanced manufacturing, even though its top income-tax rate exceeds America's by a considerable margin. And in general, our top tax rate kicks in at much higher incomes. Denmark, for example, has a top tax rate of more than 60 percent, but that applies to anyone making more than $54,900. The top rate in the United States, 39.6 percent, doesn't kick in until individual income reaches $400,000 (or $450,000 for a couple). Only three O.E.C.D. countries --- South Korea, Canada and Spain --- have higher thresholds. Most of the Western world has experienced an increase in inequality in recent decades, though not as much as the United States has. But among most economists there is a general understanding that a country with excessive inequality can't function well; many countries have used their tax codes to help correct the market's distribution of wealth and income. The United States hasn't --- or at least not very much. Indeed, the low rates at the top serve to exacerbate and perpetuate the inequality --- so much so that among the advanced industrial
[Biofuel] The Real Reasons for the Crisis on the Korean Peninsula
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34605.htm http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?e=001xlu9NHDbEyaSQKNcGq-p7rpGUuXZs5RlWt4q6Cn81C-F2Ov15rR7UPq44IlOiiHzLo0oUSMwXvQno9xr73ePqkeW4E9kZYayNGOTwdC1fVVHUNbTMset_SBm5bfoMs57DTC2jyqdeX4Oah7Ai_a7Qpsywpqx56o9AeeikeEh0JCmw68mm409ZZcNJwnhVopMe_cK6NpZLYZPIozMx4eCxdVdYzqrOj1SeonUx3qPqeSOqxpPBDA1NiUXHTus8xlHAJ2h5duNY1dmo7AmEnR_-liTpK-PGss7UQxabJScMA6NprWtJ4TMewylaSKfppkp4LxBS-E59dYA_g5UwQTA-nFHQemU0kZCHKp3vSK5QuY= The Real Reasons for the Crisis on the Korean Peninsula By Alexander VORONTSOV April 14, 2013 Information Clearing House -SCF -Tensions are rising on the Korean Peninsula. Pyongyang has decided to close the industrial complex in Kaesong, which is a joint enterprise zone with South Korea, and has suggested that foreign embassies evacuate the Democratic People's Republic of Korea for reasons of safety. Most significant in this series of steps has been the decision of the Plenum of the Central Committee of the Korean Workers' Party, held in March 2013, regarding legal confirmation of North Korea's nuclear status and the decision of the Supreme People's Assembly of North Korea «On further strengthening the status of a country in possession of nuclear weapons for the purposes of self-defence». The majority of media, while painting a vivid picture of North Korea's militancy, is not trying to understand the reasons why the conflict on Korean soil is currently escalating so dramatically. When they do try, they usually name Pyongyang as the instigator of all the troubles, stressing that it was North Korea's third nuclear test that triggered the «nightmare». Consequently, a pressing need has arisen to examine the real, underlying causes of what is commonly referred to as «the Korean problem». In short, the initial cause is the unresolved outcome of the Korean War (1950-1953). This year marks 60 years since the end of the war and a peace agreement between its participants has still not been signed Only one Armistice Agreement exists (possibly on paper only these days), so a temporary cessation of hostilities, in other words. More importantly, there are no diplomatic relations between the main warring parties, the USA and North Korea. The anomalous nature of a situation like this is obvious. Pyongyang has repeatedly suggested that this astonishing anachronism of the cold war be removed, but in vain: Washington stubbornly refuses to both normalise intergovernmental relations and replace the Armistice Agreement with a fundamental document that establishes lasting peace on the peninsula. Effectively, the US is proving that they have «hostile intentions» -- as they are called in Pyongyang -- not in words, but in deeds. A peaceful co-existence with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea does not figure in America's plans. Rather, they are looking to eliminate the state. This is why there is a predetermined state of permanent conflict on the Korean Peninsula, a cyclical development of the situation from acute crisis to relative «remission» and back again. The actions of the West with regard to North Korea result in a vicious catch-22. Calls to stop the nuclear programme, thereby stopping the violation of the principles of the non-proliferation regime of weapons of mass destruction, are often used to cover up the realisation of a hidden agenda -- regime change in North Korea... As a result, in instances where Pyongyang chooses the bargaining model of relations with the international community and is prepared to agree to mutual compromises with regard to its concerns (the non-proliferation dossier), the West does not see this as an independent decision by those in the north, but as a display of weakness, a triumph of its policy of pressure. Following such logic, Washington and its allies are not in a hurry to assess steps taken by Pyongyang according to their merit, using them in the interests of constructive cooperation and a way to advance the settlement of the Korean Peninsula's nuclear issue; rather they act the complete opposite. Based on the false understanding that North Korea began to make concessions under external pressure, the West considers it necessary to increase this pressure in order to put the final squeeze on its opponent. And now every time the policy with a false bottom fails. Convinced of the true intentions of its partners, Pyongyang, with a view to cooperating with them, but in no way capitulating, is stopping playing other people's games and is taking steps to strengthen its national defence capabilities. As a result, instead of the further concessions that were expected and the long-awaited collapse of North Korea, the West is being responded to with new missile and nuclear tests. The chronology of the current crisis is well-known. The successful launch of a North Korean satellite took place on 12 December 2012. The UN Security Council chose the harshest way to respond in
[Biofuel] Hunger Strike at Gitmo: ‘We Are Dying a Slow Death Here’
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34599.htm Hunger Strike at Gitmo: ‘We Are Dying a Slow Death Here’ By Pardiss Kebriaei April 13, 2013 Information Clearing House -MSNBC - I’ve just returned from Guantanamo, where my clients and a majority of the other 166 men there have been on hunger strike for over two months. Most of them have been cleared for release or will never be charged. But the Obama administration has refused to send them home. I met with men who are weak and have lost between 30 and 40 pounds. They told me of other men who are skeletal and barely moving, who have coughed up blood, passed out, and one who tried to hang himself. One of the men I met with, Sabry Mohammed, a Yemeni who remains detained years after he was approved for release by the Obama administration, said, “We are dying a slow death here.” Yet the authorities say they will not let men die–they will force-feed them when their body weight drops dangerously low, strapping them into chairs and forcing a tube up their noses that pumps formula into their stomachs. The military reports that so far, 11 men are being “saved” this way. Yet as one of the men put it, the irony is that “the government will keep us alive by force-feeding us but they will let us die by detaining us forever.” Today, 166 men remain at Guantanamo, more than eleven years after they arrived in hoods and shackles. Most are being held without charge and will never be charged. The Obama administration has approved more than half of the men–86–for transfer, but hasn’t mustered the political will to overcome congressional hurdles, despite saying it can and will. As their indefinite detention stretches into a second decade, men are aging, declining and dying. Last September, Adnan Latif, a husband and a father, a man twice cleared for transfer under the Bush and Obama administrations, was the ninth prisoner to die. The current crisis at the base had specific triggers, but there has been an emergency at Guantanamo for years. The strike was sparked in early February, when prison authorities ordered searches of the men’s Qurans. One man told me, “I won’t even touch the Quran without washing my hands, how could I use it to hide something dirty?” The men viewed the searches as desecration, which should hardly have been news to those in charge. A former Muslim chaplain at Guantanamo once described the handling of the holy books as “the most contentious issue” at the prison. Given the sensitivity of the practice and the history of religious abuse at Guantanamo–acts like throwing Qurans on the ground and shaving detainees’ beards as punishment–the authorities should have known better. Indeed, former commanders did know better. In a 2009 review of conditions at Guantanamo, ordered by the Obama administration, a commander at the base recognized that standard operating procedures “do not permit searching of the Koran.” The rule reflected an “elevated respect” for detainees’ religious concerns–a lesson learned from the early years. It is unclear why that changed. Another of my clients said, “They are taking the camp back to 2006.” So far, prison authorities have defended their actions and downplayed the scale of the strike. Inside the prison, my clients have described various tactics used to make life even more difficult and break the strike. Some have been life-threatening, like delaying the delivery of filtered drinking water, forcing detainees to drink from the tap of sink faucets attached to toilets in their cells. Before, there used to be signs above the sinks saying it was not safe to drink the water. One man said he would rather go without water than drink from the sink. As the strike enters its third month and the crisis deepens, the authorities must reach for a resolution before someone dies. My clients are asking for assurances that their Qurans will not be searched, or to hand them in altogether rather than see them desecrated. But the solution to the broader calamity is closing Guantanamo, beginning with the release of men like Sabry. He told me he does not want to die, he wants to return to his family, but he and others are continuing the strike because they have been pushed too far and this is the only means they have to protest peacefully. The only thing they can control is their own bodies. It is an act of strength even as they are growing weaker. They are desperately wanting to believe there is still a life for them beyond the prison walls. At the end of our meeting last week, Sabry showed me a painting he made recently, of the prison surrounded by mountains. But outside the high, tight-mesh fence that encloses Camp 6, where Sabry is held, there is ocean. “I don’t know what is outside. It is just what I imagine.” After more than eleven years, it is long past time for the United States to send Sabry home. Pardiss Kebriaei is a senior attorney at the Center for
[Biofuel] Money for Militarism, not for People:, Obama's Betrayal of Social Security
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34609.htm Money for Militarism, not for People: Obama's Betrayal of Social Security By Dave Lindorff April 14, 2013 Information Clearing House - What's wrong with the Obama administration's proposal to change the way Social Security checks are adjusted for inflation from using the Consumer Price Index (CPI) to instead using something called a chained CPI? Let's start with the fundamental problem: Social Security is not a cause of the federal budget deficit, and will not be for years, even if nothing is done to raise more revenue for the program. Sure the US will eventually have to come up with more money to pay the benefits earned by retirees in the Baby Boom generation, but that problem of an eventual shortfall in Social Security tax revenues can be easily solved by simply eliminating the cap -- currently $113,000 in annual income -- that is subject to the FICA tax. If the cap were completely eliminated, so that all income was subject to the tax, as is the case with the Medicare tax, the shortfall would be nearly eliminated. Any remaining shortfall could be erased too, by extending some kind of FICA tax to unearned income from investments. My favorite is one that is common in Europe: a small -- say 0.25% -- tax on short-term stock and bond trades. But there is a bigger problem with this Obama proposal to cut both Social Security benefits and Medicare funding: Adopting a long-time Republican proposal, it only looks at those programs in isolation, and concludes that they need to be cut. Our Nobel Peace Prize-winning president does not look at the biggest and most wasteful spending in the entire federal budget, which is the military. That bloated white elephant, which this year is sucking up close to $800 billion, not counting the interest on money borrowed to pay for past wars and armaments, could be cut in half or even by three-quarters, and it would still leave the US military budget larger than any other nation's in the world. The US would be no less safe in that case. In fact, it would be a hell of a lot safer because we would no longer have US troops stationed expensively and provocatively in 1000 foreign locations. Nobody in Congress is talking about slashing military spending and spending the savings on medical care, Social Security, education and other pressing needs. The public needs to demand this. But let's leave those two points aside for a moment, important as they are. What the Obama administration is calling for -- a switch from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' CPI to a new chained-CPI to determine inflation adjustments in Social Security checks each year -- is a brazen attempt to cut benefits for the elderly without admitting it. This is unconscionable, and as poorly reported as the story has been, the American people, regardless of age, are smart enough to be solidly opposed to the idea. People old enough to be drawing Social Security benefits, or who are close to filing for Social Security, know it's stealing from them. But younger people, who almost all have parents or grandparents who are depending on Social Security, also know intuitively that this is a bad idea, and are opposed to it. Chained-CPI has long been a favorite scam among by Republicans and conservative Democrats, who are in thrall to business interests that want to reduce the payroll taxes they have to pay into the Social Security system. But their claim that it is a more accurate way to measure inflation's impact on the cost of living is clearly a fraud and a lie. The rationale behind a chained-CPI calculation of inflation is a theory that when the price of some good or service rises too much, people supposedly switch to a cheaper alternative, so that alternative should be substituted in the market-basked used to calculate the cost of living. Now sometimes that may be true. When gasoline prices soared during the Bush invasion of Iraq, many people downsized their cars to cut their gasoline bills. That move to smaller cars also cut families' overall transportation expenses because small cars are generally cheaper than big ones. A chained-CPI would account for this by substituting small cars in the market basket, and might also lower the allocation for gasoline, since people would be buying less. But the theory falls down, especially when it comes to older people, who drive a lot fewer miles than those who are commuting every day to work, and who also tend not to buy new cars. The old gas-guzzler they have, which doesn't get many miles put on it in a year, is kept on the road and repaired as needed. They continue to buy whatever gasoline it takes to drive the thing. (I had a great aunt who died in the mid-1970s. We discovered that the 1950s Rambler she drove, which was in mint condition because it was kept in a garage, only had 10,000 miles on it because she just used it to go to the store once
[Biofuel] Angry White Guys: The Roots of Reactionary America
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34596.htm Angry White Guys: The Roots of Reactionary America By Tom Magstadt Fifty years after the atom bomb, Hiroshima and Nagasaki are gleaming, thriving metropolises. After 50 years of failed government promises in Detroit, the money has dried up, welfare has run out and the city is headed for fire sale. With cities and states across the USA not far behind and teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, Detroit is no longer just a punch line. It is a warning of the future to come for millions of Americans. - Charles Hurt April 13, 2013 Information Clearing House -NOC - This is a story about the politics of anger. The quote above forms the last paragraph of a review of Charlie LeDuff's gut-wrenching book, Detroit, An American Autopsy. It's a powerful book that speaks volumes not only about Detroit but also about most big cities in America today -- cities where petty crime, gang violence, drug addiction, prostitution, poverty, vandalism, vagrancy, filth, abandoned buildings, arson, and despair have been on the rise for decades. Remarkably, LeDuff's chronicle of Detroit's descent avoids partisan rancor. His is a story of a city suffering from a chronic condition that has taken an ugly turn and become terminal. And, yes, he's angry; very angry. There's a lot of anger in America, Europe and the Middle East and, come to think of it, everywhere. Anger like everything else has gone global. We recognize it when we see it -- in others, that is -- but it's here, too, it's on the rise, and it explains as least as much about politics in contemporary America as such other deadly sins as greed and power lust. In fact, it's probably more central as a motivating force behind our dysfunctional politics than either. Take Charlie LeDuff, for example. LeDuff's anger is visceral. He makes no attempt to hide it -- and no apologies. He's angry with leaders who don't lead and politicians who make promises they don't even try to keep. He spares no one and directs his anger at both of our major political parties. And, of course, he's right to do so. But unlike LeDuff, our politicians and partisan voters are angry. That's especially true of the new breed of Republicans in Congress. Republicans have always been partisan, but then so have Democrats. It's only natural. But something has changed. Partisanship is now a synonym for paralysis in Washington. Why? Is the Tea Party the cause? Merely a symptom? Or is it something else altogether? Here's Harvard's Theda Skocpol, the eminent political sociologist, talking about what makes the Tea Party rank-and-file tick: At the popular level, where there are genuine activists who have really gone out there and protested and organized into hundreds of groups...they've played a huge role in shaping the presidential debates and the presidential agenda. Skocpol, who's written a book, Obama And America's Political Future, that delves deeply into the nature and origins of the Tea Party, as well as analyzing Obama's disappointing performance thus far, is both sympathetic and objective in her criticisms of both. In her public talks about the Tea Party she goes out of her way to express admiration for the accomplishments of people at the local level who are plainspoken, deeply committed, sincere, and unstinting in their efforts to move society in the direction they desire. She is also careful to qualify her criticism of President Obama: ...a lot of the criticism of him, she contends, is unrealistic. If so, the main reason it's unrealistic is that Obama has, quite simply, run into a brick wall erected by rightwing Republicans in the U.S. Congress. These Republicans -- including the Tea Party Caucus -- are nothing like traditional Republicans. They're also not in lockstep with the Tea Party itself. Skocpol: In Tea Party eyes there clearly are important things the federal government does---including care for veterans along with the dispensation of Medicare and Social Security. Many are ready to support taxation for such worthwhile programs. Not exactly what we've come to expect from the likes of Paul Ryan and company, including Eric Canter, Rand Paul, Tom Coburn, Jim DeMint, Steve King, Jerry Moran, and the entire cast of manic anti-government ideologues in Congress.* Hypothesis: extreme right-wing Republicans in Congress are not taking their cues from the grass-roots Tea Party rank-and-file but are in fact cynically using them, manipulating symbols and issues that move this mass of disenchanted gray hairs, embattled blue-collar workers, anxious job-seekers, financially stressed homeowners, and beleaguered taxpayers to accomplish other aims altogether. If they are not simply reflecting and regurgitating views held by conservative constituents, what IS behind the recalcitrance and rage of the avatars in Congress who pose as representatives of
[Biofuel] In This Nuclear Standoff, It's The US That's The Rogue State
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34563.htm In This Nuclear Standoff, It's The US That's The Rogue State The use of threats and isolation against Iran and North Korea is a bizarre, perilous way to conduct foreign relations By Jonathan Steele April 10, 2013 Information Clearing House -The Guardian - By coincidence two clashes over nuclear issues are hitting the headlines together. North Korea and Iran have both had sanctions imposed by foreign governments, and when they refuse to behave properly they are submitted to isolation and put in the corner until they are ready to say sorry and change their conduct. If not, corporal punishment will be administered, since they have been given fair warning by the enforcers that all options are on the table. It's a bizarre way to run international relations, one we continue to follow at our peril. For one thing, it is riddled with hypocrisy, and not just because states that have hundreds of nuclear weapons are bullying states that have few or none. The hypocrisy is worse than that. If it is offensive for North Korea to talk of launching a nuclear strike at the United States (a threat that is empty because the country has no system to deliver the few nuclear weapons that it has), how is it less offensive for the US to warn Iran that it will be bombed if it fails to stop its nuclear research? Both states would be resorting to force when dialogue is a long way from being exhausted. They would also be acting against international law. That is patently clear if North Korea ever managed to launch a nuclear strike against South Korea or the US, but the same is true of an altogether more feasible attack on Iran. There is no conceivable scenario under which the United Nations security council would authorise the United States, let alone Israel, to take military action, even if Iran were to tear up its long-standing statement that nuclear bombs are un-Islamic and produce one. So why does Washington go on with its illegal threats? The underlying cause of most international tension is the unwillingness of powerful states to recognise that we live in a multipolar world. The idea of hegemony, often sanitised as leadership, is unacceptable. In a post-colonial era there are multiple centres of authority, international influence and soft power, and we should rejoice when new or old states, individually or collectively, have the courage and ability to challenge another state's ambition to be a superpower. States will always make common cause or coalitions of the willing on specific issues, but interests fluctuate and priorities change -- and we should junk the cold war-style system of military alliances and ideological or sectarian camps. Let us go further and drop the figment of an international community, at least in its current western definition as the United States and its friends. By the same token, let's correct the myopia around isolation. When the leaders of 120 nations travelled to Tehran to ratify Iran's presidency of the Non-Aligned Movement last August, it was risible to hear US officials still talking of Iran being a rogue state. In Washington and Whitehall it may seem self-evident that the international community should arm the opposition to Syria's President Assad, but that is not the view of the world's largest democracy, India, or of the most democratic African and Latin American states, South Africa and Brazil. When their leaders convened with Russia and China (in the new Brics coalition) in Durban last month, they re-affirmed our opposition to any further militarisation of the conflict and called for a political settlement. Of course, the non-aligned and Brics summits were barely covered by the US media in its news or comment columns, the normal technique of reality suppression used by American opinion-formers and policy-makers. Rami Khouri, the distinguished US-trained Lebanese writer, calls it professionally criminal. After a month in the US recently, he found that coverage of Iran was based on assumptions, fears, concerns, accusations and expectations almost never supported by factual and credible evidence. In as much as these distortions build public support for a military attack on Iran, he finds it as culpable as the media's role in the runup to the attack on Iraq a decade ago. The alleged crises over North Korea and Iran are just not serious enough to warrant the classroom language of shunning and punishment. Dialogue and respect for other people's positions are the better course. Discuss everything as a package rather than dangle incentives one by one like sweets. Ironically, it was Iran at the recent talks with security council members that suggested a roadmap with a clear end state: the acceptance of Iran's right to enrich uranium like any other signatory of the non-proliferation treaty. In other words, the issue is primarily a matter of national dignity and
[Biofuel] What Christians Don't Know About Israel
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34560.htm What Christians Don't Know About Israel By Grace Halsell Note: This article was written in 1998 by the late Grace Halsell. Sadly it remains relevant today. April 10, 2013 Information Clearing House - American Jews sympathetic to Israel dominate key positions in all areas of our government where decisions are made regarding the Middle East. This being the case, is there any hope of ever changing U.S. policy? American Presidents as well as most members of Congress support Israel -- and they know why. U.S. Jews sympathetic to Israel donate lavishly to their campaign coffers. The answer to achieving an even-handed Middle East policy might lie elsewhere -- among those who support Israel but don't really know why. This group is the vast majority of Americans. They are well-meaning, fair-minded Christians who feel bonded to Israel -- and Zionism -- often from atavistic feelings, in some cases dating from childhood. I am one of those. I grew up listening to stories of a mystical, allegorical, spiritual Israel. This was before a modern political entity with the same name appeared on our maps. I attended Sunday School and watched an instructor draw down window- type shades to show maps of the Holy Land. I imbibed stories of a Good and Chosen people who fought against their Bad unChosen enemies. In my early 20s, I began traveling the world, earning my living as a writer. I came to the subject of the Middle East rather late in my career. I was sadly lacking in knowledge regarding the area. About all I knew was what I had learned in Sunday School. And typical of many U.S. Christians, I somehow considered a modern state created in 1948 as a homeland for Jews persecuted under the Nazis as a replica of the spiritual, mystical Israel I heard about as a child. When in 1979 I initially went to Jerusalem, I planned to write about the three great monotheistic religions and leave out politics. Not write about politics? scoffed one Palestinian, smoking a waterpipe in the Old Walled City. We eat politics, morning, noon and night! As I would learn, the politics is about land, and the co-claimants to that land: the indigenous Palestinians who have lived there for 2,000 years and the Jews who started arriving in large numbers after the Second World War. By living among Israeli Jews as well as Palestinian Christians and Muslims, I saw, heard, smelled, experienced the police state tactics Israelis use against Palestinians. My research led to a book entitled Journey to Jerusalem. My journey not only was enlightening to me as regards Israel, but also I came to a deeper, and sadder, understanding of my own country. I say sadder understanding because I began to see that, in Middle East politics, we the people are not making the decisions, but rather that supporters of Israel are doing so. And typical of most Americans, I tended to think the U.S. media was free to print news impartially. 'It shouldn't be published. It's anti-Israel.' In the late 1970s, when I first went to Jerusalem, I was unaware that editors could and would classify news depending on who was doing what to whom. On my initial visit to Israel-Palestine, I had interviewed dozens of young Palestinian men. About one in four related stories of torture. Israeli police had come in the night, dragged them from their beds and placed hoods over their heads. Then in jails the Israelis had kept them in isolation, besieged them with loud, incessant noises, hung them upside down and had sadistically mutilated their genitals. I had not read such stories in the U.S. media. Wasn't it news? Obviously, I naively thought, U.S. editors simply didn't know it was happening. On a trip to Washington, DC, I hand-delivered a letter to Frank Mankiewicz, then head of the public radio station WETA. I explained I had taped interviews with Palestinians who had been brutally tortured. And I'd make them available to him. I got no reply. I made several phone calls. Eventually I was put through to a public relations person, a Ms. Cohen, who said my letter had been lost. I wrote again. In time I began to realize what I hadn't known: had it been Jews who were strung up and tortured, it would be news. But interviews with tortured Arabs were lost at WETA. The process of getting my book Journey to Jerusalem published also was a learning experience. Bill Griffin, who signed a contract with me on behalf of MacMillan Publishing Company, was a former Roman Catholic priest. He assured me that no one other than himself would edit the book. As I researched the book, making several trips to Israel and Palestine, I met frequently with Griffin, showing him sample chapters. Terrific, he said of my material. The day the book was scheduled to be published, I went to visit MacMillan's. Checking in at a reception desk, I spotted Griffin across a room, cleaning out his desk. His
[Biofuel] Winner Takes All: The Super-priority Status of Derivatives
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34567.htm Why Derivatives Threaten Your Bank Account By Ellen Brown April 10, 2013 Information Clearing House - Cyprus-style confiscation of depositor funds has been called the new normal. Bail-in policies are appearing in multiple countries directing failing TBTF banks to convert the funds of unsecured creditors into capital; and those creditors, it turns out, include ordinary depositors. Even secured creditors, including state and local governments, may be at risk. Derivatives have super-priority status in bankruptcy, and Dodd Frank precludes further taxpayer bailouts. In a big derivatives bust, there may be no collateral left for the creditors who are next in line. Shock waves went around the world when the IMF, the EU, and the ECB not only approved but mandated the confiscation of depositor funds to bail in two bankrupt banks in Cyprus. A bail in is a quantum leap beyond a bail out. When governments are no longer willing to use taxpayer money to bail out banks that have gambled away their capital, the banks are now being instructed to recapitalize themselves by confiscating the funds of their creditors, turning debt into equity, or stock; and the creditors include the depositors who put their money in the bank thinking it was a secure place to store their savings. The Cyprus bail-in was not a one-off emergency measure but was consistent with similar policies already in the works for the US, UK, EU, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, as detailed in my earlier articles here and here. Too big to fail now trumps all. Rather than banks being put into bankruptcy to salvage the deposits of their customers, the customers will be put into bankruptcy to save the banks. Why Derivatives Threaten Your Bank Account The big risk behind all this is the massive $230 trillion derivatives boondoggle managed by US banks. Derivatives are sold as a kind of insurance for managing profits and risk; but as Satyajit Das points out in Extreme Money, they actually increase risk to the system as a whole. In the US after the Glass-Steagall Act was implemented in 1933, a bank could not gamble with depositor funds for its own account; but in 1999, that barrier was removed. Recent congressional investigations have revealed that in the biggest derivative banks, JPMorgan and Bank of America, massive commingling has occurred between their depository arms and their unregulated and highly vulnerable derivatives arms. Under both the Dodd Frank Act and the 2005 Bankruptcy Act, derivative claims have super-priority over all other claims, secured and unsecured, insured and uninsured. In a major derivatives fiasco, derivative claimants could well grab all the collateral, leaving other claimants, public and private, holding the bag. The tab for the 2008 bailout was $700 billion in taxpayer funds, and that was just to start. Another $700 billion disaster could easily wipe out all the money in the FDIC insurance fund, which has only about $25 billion in it. Both JPMorgan and Bank of America have over $1 trillion in deposits, and total deposits covered by FDIC insurance are about $9 trillion. According to an article on Bloomberg in November 2011, Bank of America's holding company then had almost $75 trillion in derivatives, and 71% were held in its depository arm; while J.P. Morgan had $79 trillion in derivatives, and 99% were in its depository arm. Those whole mega-sums are not actually at risk, but the cash calculated to be at risk from derivatives from all sources is at least $12 trillion; and JPM is the biggest player, with 30% of the market. It used to be that the government would backstop the FDIC if it ran out of money. But section 716 of the Dodd Frank Act now precludes the payment of further taxpayer funds to bail out a bank from a bad derivatives gamble. As summarized in a letter from Americans for Financial Reform quoted by Yves Smith: Section 716 bans taxpayer bailouts of a broad range of derivatives dealing and speculative derivatives activities. Section 716 does not in any way limit the swaps activities which banks or other financial institutions may engage in. It simply prohibits public support for such activities. There will be no more $700 billion taxpayer bailouts. So where will the banks get the money in the next crisis? It seems the plan has just been revealed in the new bail-in policies. All Depositors, Secured and Unsecured, May Be at Risk The bail-in policy for the US and UK is set forth in a document put out jointly by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and the Bank of England (BOE) in December 2012, titled Resolving Globally Active, Systemically Important, Financial Institutions. In an April 4th article in Financial Sense, John Butler points out that the directive does not explicitly refer to depositors. It refers only to unsecured creditors. But the effective
[Biofuel] True Costs of Iraq War Whitewashed by Fuzzy Maths
True Costs of Iraq War Whitewashed by Fuzzy Maths By Muhammad Idrees Ahmad April 05, 2013 Information Clearing House -The National - 'So many', wrote TS Eliot, reflecting on the waste land left by the First World War. I had not thought death had undone so many. This notion is unlikely to cross the minds of those surveying the devastation left by the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The most frequently quoted fatality figure - about 115,000 Iraqis killed - is shocking. But compared to major conflicts of the past century, it is a relatively modest toll. The 1916 battle of the Somme alone killed three times as many. More than that were killed by a single atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima during the Second World War. Former British prime minster Tony Blair, and then-US vice president Dick Cheney, were perhaps conscious of this when they expressed no regrets on the 10th anniversary of the war last month. That the perpetrators of an aggressive war should accept the lowest costs for their folly is unsurprising. What is less explicable is why so many supposed critics of the war are crediting the same estimate. Brown University's Costs of War project and the Centre for American Progress's Iraq War Ledger use it as their main source. This is particularly puzzling when there are two peer-reviewed epidemiological surveys that give a far more comprehensive accounting of the war's human cost. A Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Survey published in the Lancet, and the Iraq Public Health Survey published in the New England Journal of Medicine, gave figures of 655,000 and 400,000 excess deaths respectively. (Both were concluded in June 2006, a month before the violence peaked, suggesting the actual toll is even higher). It is odder still that when epidemiological surveys have come to be accepted as the standard method for estimating conflict fatalities - the method has been used without controversy in Congo, Bosnia and Darfur - an exception is made in the case of Iraq. The method involves a household survey to establish current mortality rates and comparing them with pre-war ones. The difference, extrapolated for the whole population, yields an estimate of the number of people who would still be alive had the war not happened. By comparison, the most commonly cited source, the UK-based online initiative Iraq Body Count (IBC), uses a passive surveillance method to estimate what it calls violent civilian deaths, relying mainly on media reports, initially only in the English language. Current total: between 111,842 and 122,326. Distinguishing a civilian from a combatant in an urban war zone is itself a fraught business. But the IBC methodology makes two further assumptions that raise questions: that war kills only by violence, and that the media records every death in every part of the country. If we accept the first assumption, then we would also have to revise our estimates of history's other major atrocities. Those who died of exhaustion or starvation during the Nazi death marches cannot be considered casualties of war using IBC criteria since they did not die of violence. One would also have to omit those who died in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising since, by virtue of taking up arms, they forfeited their right to be counted. War in most cases means collapse of state institutions and health care systems; it means social disintegration, food shortages and lawlessness. It kills by starvation, scarcity, contamination, shock, abandonment - and a host of other causes that don't involve bullets. There was a four-fold increase in traffic accidents alone in the years following the invasion of Iraq. IBC's methods make no allowances for such consequences. The second assumption appears to ignore both Iraqi reality and media practices. No journalist made a commitment to report every death in Iraq. Most were based in politically significant locations. During the most violent period, all but a few were confined to Baghdad's Green Zone. There is no reason to assume that every violent death, let alone every war-related death, was being reported. Despite such limitations, IBC has become the primary, if not the only, reference for Iraqi deaths. It speaks to the political serviceability of its numbers. It also speaks to a lack of seriousness among its user about establishing the actual costs of war. The manner in which the Lancet study has been buried attests to this. It is telling that the critics of the Lancet study are mainly journalists, politicians and bureaucrats. On the other hand, the study was endorsed by scientists, statisticians, epidemiologists and, in internal discussions, even some government officials. The soundness of the method and the rigour of the Lancet's research were acknowledged by Sir Roy Anderson, the British Ministry of Defence's chief scientific adviser. In an internal memo obtained by the BBC, Mr Anderson wrote: The study
[Biofuel] Obama’s Empathy Deficit in Palestine
Obama’s Empathy Deficit in Palestine By Uri Avnery April 05, 2013 Information Clearing House -CP - Obama in Israel: Every word right. Every gesture genuine. Every detail in its place. Perfect. Obama in Palestine: Every word wrong. Every gesture inappropriate. Every single detail misplaced. Perfect. It started from the first moment. The President of the United States came to Ramallah. He visited the Mukata’a, the “compound” which serves as the office of the President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas. One cannot enter the Mukata’a without noticing the grave of Yasser Arafat, just a few paces from the entrance. It is quite impossible to ignore this landmark while passing it. However, Obama succeeded in doing just that. It was like spitting in the face of the entire Palestinian people. Imagine a foreign dignitary coming to France and not laying a wreath at the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Or coming to Israel and not visiting Yad Vashem. It is more than insulting. It is stupid. Yasser Arafat is for the Palestinians what Gorge Washington is for Americans, Mahatma Gandhi for Indians, David Ben-Gurion for Israelis. The Father of the Nation. Even his domestic opponents on the left and on the right revere his memory. He is the supreme symbol of the modern Palestinian national movement. His picture hangs in every Palestinian office and school. So why not honor him? Why not lay a wreath on his grave, as foreign leaders have done before? Because Arafat has been demonized and vilified in Israel like no other human being since Hitler. And still is. Obama was simply afraid of the Israeli reaction. After his huge success in Israel, he feared that such a gesture would undo the effect of his address to the Israeli people. This consideration guided Obama throughout his short visit to the West Bank. His feet were in Palestine, his head was in Israel. He walked in Palestine. He talked to Palestine. But his thoughts were about the Israelis. Even when he said good things, his tone was wrong. He just could not hit the right note. Somehow he missed the cue. Why? Because of a complete lack of empathy. Empathy is something hard to define. I am spoiled in this respect, because I had the good fortune to live for many years near a person who had it in abundance. Rachel, my wife, hit the right tone with everyone, high or low, local or foreign, the old and the very young. Obama did so in Israel. It was really amazing. He must have studied us thoroughly. He knew our strengths and our weaknesses, our paranoias and our idiosyncrasies, our historical memories and dreams about the future. And no wonder. He is surrounded by Zionist Jews. They are his closest advisors, his friends and his experts on the Middle East. Even from mere contact with them, he obviously absorbed much of our sensitivities. As far as I know, there is not a single Arab, not to mention Palestinian, in the White House and its surroundings. I assume that he does receive occasional briefings about Arab affairs from the State Department. But such dry memoranda are not the stuff empathy is made of. The more so as clever diplomats must have learned by now not to write anything that may offend Israelis. So how could the poor man have possibly picked up empathy towards the Palestinians? The conflict between Israel and Palestine has very solid factual causes. But it has also been rightly described as a “clash between traumas”: the Holocaust trauma of the Jews and the Naqba trauma of the Palestinians (without suggesting equivalence between the two calamities.) Many years ago in New York I met a very good friend of mine. He was an Arab citizen of Israel, a young poet who had left Israel and joined the PLO. He invited me to meet some Palestinians at his home in a suburb of New York. His family name, by the way, was the same as Obama’s middle name. When I entered the apartment, it was crammed full with Palestinians – Palestinians of all stripes, from Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, the refugee camps and the Diaspora. We had a very emotional debate, full of heated arguments and counter-arguments. When we left I asked Rachel what, to her mind, was the most outstanding common sentiment of all these people. “The sense of injustice!” she replied without hesitation. That was exactly what I felt. “If Israel could just apologize for what we have done to the Palestinian people, a huge obstacle would have been removed from the road to peace,” I answered her. It would have been a good beginning for Obama in Ramallah if he had addressed this point. It was not the Palestinians who killed six million Jews. It was the European countries and – yes – the USA which callously closed their doors to the Jews, who were desperately trying to escape the lot awaiting them. And it was the Muslim world which welcomed hundreds of thousands of Jews fleeing from Catholic Spain and the inquisition some 500
[Biofuel] Dividing Up The Pie, U.S., U.K. Chiefs To Hold Historic Strategy Meeting
Dividing Up The Pie U.S., U.K. Chiefs To Hold Historic Strategy Meeting By VAGO MURADIAN and MARCUS WEISGERBER March 31, 2013 Information Clearing House -Defense News - WASHINGTON --- In what is believed to be the first time since the 1940s, the entire British defense staff will be here March 25 to discuss long-range strategy and the impact of budget cuts with their U.S. counterparts, according to U.S. and British sources. The meeting is reminiscent of the Combined Chiefs of Staff, when British and American military leaders joined forces during World War II. Both nations are undergoing significant budgetary reductions and will continue to rely on each other in future years for support. Understanding what capabilities will survive and won't is essential to long-term strategic planning. The relationship military to military is very strong. We have common interest in how we meet the financial constraints placed on both nations, but also on issues like how we manage the drawdown in Afghanistan and also how we reconfigure post Afghanistan, said Sir Gerald Howarth, a member of parliament and the ex-defense minister responsible for international security affairs from 2010 to 2012. We have a huge amount of strategic issues to discuss where we have a very large level of common interest, he said. A Defence Ministry spokesman characterized the meeting as private and declined further comment. In the U.S., spokesmen for the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff did not respond to questions. U.S. and British military leaders regularly discuss ongoing issues. What's different about this series of meetings is they will focus not on immediate budget, program or operational issues, but the strategic future of the Anglo-American alliance, including deepening cooperation. In addition to the U.S. Joint Chiefs, British attendees are expected to include Gen. Sir David Richards, chief of the Defence Staff; Gen. Sir Nicholas Houghton, vice chief of the Defence Staff, who will take over as chief when Richards retires later this year; Air Chief Marshal Sir Stephen Dalton, chief of the Air Staff; Adm. Sir George Zambellas, incoming Navy first sea lord; Gen. Sir Peter Wall, chief of the General Staff; and Air Chief Marshal Sir Stuart Peach, commander of Joint Forces Command, sources said. The U.S. and U.K. regularly share the most sensitive military intelligence, technology and equipment, including submarine-launched nuclear ballistic missiles. Britain over the past decade in particular has shaped its capabilities to dovetail with U.S. forces. The British are the leading developmental partner on the U.S.-led F-35 fighter program with Lockheed Martin and have in their inventory Boeing C-17 transports, Chinook and Apache helicopters and Lockheed C-130 cargo aircraft. In addition, the Royal Air Force is buying highly sensitive RC-135 Rivet Joint intelligence planes produced by L-3 Communications in the U.S., making London the only international customer for that program. The meeting comes as the Pentagon faces $500 billion in spending cuts over the coming decade, which will force senior leaders to make difficult choices. The British delegation arrives with particular experience in that area, having faced even deeper budget cuts --- in percentage terms --- over the past several years, forcing major reforms to force structure, organization and acquisition programs in that time. Getting value for money and efficiency is something we have focused a considerable amount of attention on, and we can offer them advice in that area, Howarth said. Still, the British budget is a fraction of that of the U.S. In fact, at $62.7 billion in 2011, the British budget is not much larger than the size of the annual cuts faced by the Americans. Under mandatory cuts for the remainder of 2013, the Pentagon is reducing its budget by $46 billion. Yet the U.S. military could learn a thing or two from its British counterparts when it comes to consolidation, especially within the headquarters staff ranks, said Barry Pavel, the director of the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security at the Atlantic Council here. I think [the U.S.] can learn a lot, Pavel said. There's a lot of inefficiencies in our headquarters. They've taken jointness ... to new levels that we haven't yet done. But the British, having cut so deeply, are also in need. They are going to have to leverage the U.S. to a greater degree, or try to, Pavel said. To get leaner and reduce overhead in recent years, the British military consolidated its war colleges into a single school and created an operational command center outside of London to oversee operations, according to retired British Army Brig. Gen. Ben Barry, now with the International Institute for Strategic Studies think tank in London. The U.S. Defense Department is already preparing for force structure reductions in
[Biofuel] Regime Change Begins at Home
Regime Change Begins at Home By Stephen Lendman March 31, 2013 Information Clearing House - Charles Derber's book by that title says it's the only way to free America from corporate rule. It transformed America from we the people to what CEOs say goes. It put monied interests in charge. Presidents, legislators, and high level bureaucrats serve them. Whatever they want they get. Institutionalized injustice follows. It's longstanding. Vital change more than ever is needed. America had previous corporate regimes. None match today's extremism. Bold, creative strategies are needed to change things. Commitment creates possibilities. Nothing worth struggling for is easy. Failure to try assures disaster. America's on a fast track to full-blown tyranny. It's a hair's breath away. Preventing it is top priority. It begins with knowledge. It involves knowing what's at stake. Money power runs America. Fundamental freedoms are on the chopping block for elimination. Preventing it takes commitment. Challenging authority is essential. Social movements are pivotal forces. They work. Abolitionists, labor movements, and civil rights activists proved it. Collective activism has power. What better time to use it than now. America's waging political, social, financial, and hot wars. It's doing it globally. It's happening at home and abroad. Constitutional protections are disappearing. America's social contract is being destroyed. Militarization, permanent wars, and unchallenged global dominance reflect policy. So does police state harshness. Dissent is endangered. Privilege is entrenched. Fundamental freedoms are eroding. Beneficial social change isn't tolerated. Electoral politics doesn't work. Duopoly power runs America. Republicans and Democrats reflect two sides of the same coin. Not a dime's worth of difference separates them. Throwing out bums assures new ones. It happens every time. Names and faces change. Policies remain unchanged. They're longstanding. They're cruel, malicious and unjust. Washington is too pernicious, corrupt and dysfunctional to fix. Vital change is needed. Revolution is the only solution. Authority must be challenged disruptively. Doing so requires mobilizing it. Egalitarian reform is essential. Grass roots activism is key. Popular struggles depend on it. Ordinary people have enormous power. Key is using it. It takes more than marches, rallies, slogans or violence. It takes sustained commitment, withdrawing cooperation, breaking entrenched rules, challenging reprisals, and staying the course. Change occurs bottom up. It never comes top down. Dark forces relinquish nothing willingly. Concessions come when forced. Struggling for rights achieves them. There's no other way. Powerful interests run today's America. They take full advantage. Absolute power corrupts them absolutely. They're free to steal, plunder, exploit, accumulate wealth, and dominate. They do it at our expense. Inequality is unprecedented. America the beautiful never existed and doesn't now. Calling it a land of opportunity defies reality. Democratic freedoms are incompatible with predatory capitalism. Everyone's on their own sink or swim. Privileged few alone benefit. Others are used and abused. Adam Smith said nominal democracy should be instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor. It's more than ever true today. Corporatism is empowered. It rules the world. Military might supports it. Fundamental rights don't matter. The world's richest most developed country spurns them. It thumbs its nose at what matters most. Growing poverty, unemployment, hunger, homelessness, and human misery follow. Plutocratic sharks don't care. Bottom line priorities alone matter. Money is used to make more of it. Enough is never enough. Human needs and welfare are sacrificed. Exploitation is institutionalized. American style democracy assures it. Michael Parenti calls it democracy for the few. It's the best money can buy. America's wealthy class dominates. Ordinary people have no say. What democratic mandate directed government to transfer wealth to the privileged few? Why are ordinary people left out? Why do corporate giants get huge handouts? Why are they licensed to steal? Why are wars fought to enrich them? Why are democratic freedoms compromised to serve them? Achieving equitable change isn't rocket science. Putting money power in public hands is a good way to start. So is prioritizing justice, fairness, full employment, a minimum living wage, universal healthcare, free education to the highest levels, other vital social services, peace, and government by and for everyone equitably. America's current system failed. When disrobed and exposed to the light of day, America's rulers have feet of clay. Their time has past. Social restructuring for everyone is needed. Mobilizing effectively can get
[Biofuel] You Have the Right to Remain Silent: The United Police States of America
You Have the Right to Remain Silent: The United Police States of America By Dave Lindorff March 28, 2013 Information Clearing House -This Can't Be Happening! - Willie James Sauls is unlikely to see the outside of a prison. Last fall a court in the state of Texas sentenced this 37-year-old man to 45 years in jail. His crime: he snatched the purse from an old woman. In Norway, meanwhile, a court sentenced Anders Behring Breivik, a right-wing racist who slaughtered 77 people, mostly teenagers, and injured several hundred, to 21 years in prison, with an option for that detention to be extended by five-year increments if he is determined to be still dangerous. Otherwise, the 32-year-old, if considered rehabilitated, could be released at the age of 53. In the 1970s and '80s, Germany was rocked by killings committed by a radical left group called the Red Army Faction. Its members killed over 30 people, including prosecutors and industrialists. Eventually its leaders were caught and convicted, but by 2007, almost a decade after the Red Army Faction had announced its own dissolution, those still in prison were pardoned by the country's president. It is beyond inconceivable to imagine a US president, governor or even a judge, releasing a prisoner from a US jail who had committed the kind of offenses committed by either Breivik or members of Germany's Red Army Faction. It is, in fact, hard to imagine any political leader in the US pardoning purse-snatcher Willie James Sauls. This is, after all, a country that hounded a 26-year-old internet activist, Aaron Swartz, into committing suicide, after a federal prosecutor threatened him with 35 years in jail -- this for the heinous crime of copyright violation (in a protest action he had publicly hacked an MIT server and downloaded hundreds of academic papers which a private contractor wanted to charge for!). Right-wing Americans love to call the US a nanny state, claiming that the federal government is always trying to pass laws regulating people's lives. What the US really is, though, is a puni-state -- a nation that thrives on vengeance and retribution, and that rejects the whole notion of rehabilitation or character change. How else to explain the prosecutorial passion for charging absurdly youthful offenders as adults? In 2011, a Pennsylvania judge agreed with a prosecutor's request to try Jordan Brown, an 11-year old boy, as an adult, because ahead of the trial, he refused to admit his guilt in the shooting death of his father's pregnant fiancee. While Brown became the youngest kid in the world to be facing a potential sentence of life in prison without possibility of parole, he would not be unusual in the state of Pennsylvania, which leads the US -- itself a country that leads the world in such prosecutions of children as adults -- in having an astonishing 450 people serving life terms in prison with no opportunity for parole who were sentenced as adults for acts they committed as children. Say what? One of the fundamental realities about children is that they grow up, and generally, if given a modicum of love and attention, they grow up to be more mature than they were as kids. That doesn't compute in the US, where what you did is all that matters to the average citizen, apparently. Some 40 of the 50 states allow children to be tried as adults in the United States, making it a pariah among nations in its brutishnish and barbarism. Politicians -- Democrat and Republican -- campaign on get-tough-on-crime platforms which have also made the US the most locked-up society in the world, outstripping even police states like China, which despite being almost four times the population of the US, has fewer people behind bars. In the US, 2.3 million people are in prison, but another 4.9 million are out of jail but still on parole or probation, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, meaning they've been in prison already, and are still under the control of prison and police authorities. That's over 3 percent of the US population, counting kids and old people. We lock people up at six times the rate, relative to population, of the average for all industrialized nations. Our lock-up rate is five times Britain's, nine times Germany's and 12 times Japan's, yet we have crime rates far in excess of those more enlightened countries. America has turned everything in to a crime. We get locked up for actions that rarely lead to prison in other modern societies -- things like writing bad checks or using recreational drugs...or purse snatching. And US prison sentences are much longer than sentences for the same crimes in other more enlightened countries. Take burglaries. In the US, the average sentence for a burglary is 16 months -- almost a year and a half. In Canada, it's five months, and in England, seven months. Of course, we stand out too as having one of the busiest execution programs
[Biofuel] Not Even Gold Will Save You From What Is Coming
. . . I know that I've read about this somewhere else . . . ;) MARC FABER: Not Even Gold Will Save You From What Is Coming Matthew Boesler| Mar. 27, 2013, 4:53 PM | 711,498 | 169 Global Financial Stress Is Starting To Pick Up Steam, And That's Bad News For Stocks Marc Faber, who authors the Gloom Boom Doom newsletter, is usually pretty bearish on stocks and bullish on gold. Lately, though, gold doesn't seem like it can catch a bid. Despite the continued reverberations regarding the Cyprus bailout and its involvement of bank deposits, gold struggled to maintain the positive momentum created in the first two weeks of March and instead now looks very likely to move lower, towards $1580/oz, wrote Deutsche Bank commodities analyst Xiao Fu in a note this morning. So, what does Faber have to say about it? This morning, on Bloomberg Surveillance with Tom Keene and Alix Steel, Dr. Doom was asked why gold wasn't holding up. Here's his explanation: When you print money, the money does not flow evenly into the economic system. It stays essentially in the financial service industry and among people that have access to these funds, mostly well-to-do people. It does not go to the worker. I just mentioned that it doesn't flow evenly into the system. Now from time to time it will lift the NASDAQ like between 1997 and March 2000. Then it lifted home prices in the U.S. until 2007. Then it lifted the commodity prices in 2008 until July 2008 when the global economy was already in recession. More recently it has lifted selected emerging economies, stock markets in Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, up four times from 2009 lows and now the U.S. So we are creating bubbles and bubbles and bubbles. This bubble will come to an end. My concern is that we are going to have a systemic crisis where it is going to be very difficult to hide. Even in gold, it will be difficult to hide. Faber is, of course, still bearish on U.S. stocks. He told Bloomberg that he sees considerable downside risk in the market. Robert Luis Rabello Adventure for Your Mind http://www.newadventure.ca Meet the People video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txsCdh1hZ6c Crisis video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZedNEXhTn4 The Long Journey video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy4muxaksgk ___ Sustainablelorgbiofuel mailing list Sustainablelorgbiofuel@lists.sustainablelists.org http://lists.eruditium.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel
[Biofuel] It Can Happen Here: The Confiscation Scheme Planned for US and UK Depositors
It Can Happen Here: The Confiscation Scheme Planned for US and UK Depositors By Ellen Brown March 28, 2013 Information Clearing House - Confiscating the customer deposits in Cyprus banks, it seems, was not a one-off, desperate idea of a few Eurozone troika officials scrambling to salvage their balance sheets. A joint paper by the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Bank of England dated December 10, 2012, shows that these plans have been long in the making; that they originated with the G20 Financial Stability Board in Basel, Switzerland (discussed earlier here); and that the result will be to deliver clear title to the banks of depositor funds. New Zealand has a similar directive, discussed in my last article here, indicating that this isn't just an emergency measure for troubled Eurozone countries. New Zealand's Voxy reported on March 19th: The National Government [is] pushing a Cyprus-style solution to bank failure in New Zealand which will see small depositors lose some of their savings to fund big bank bailouts . . . . Open Bank Resolution (OBR) is Finance Minister Bill English's favoured option dealing with a major bank failure. If a bank fails under OBR, all depositors will have their savings reduced overnight to fund the bank's bail out. Can They Do That? Although few depositors realize it, legally the bank owns the depositor's funds as soon as they are put in the bank. Our money becomes the bank's, and we become unsecured creditors holding IOUs or promises to pay. (See here and here.) But until now the bank has been obligated to pay the money back on demand in the form of cash. Under the FDIC-BOE plan, our IOUs will be converted into bank equity. The bank will get the money and we will get stock in the bank. With any luck we may be able to sell the stock to someone else, but when and at what price? Most people keep a deposit account so they can have ready cash to pay the bills. The 15-page FDIC-BOE document is called Resolving Globally Active, Systemically Important, Financial Institutions. It begins by explaining that the 2008 banking crisis has made it clear that some other way besides taxpayer bailouts is needed to maintain financial stability. Evidently anticipating that the next financial collapse will be on a grander scale than either the taxpayers or Congress is willing to underwrite, the authors state: An efficient path for returning the sound operations of the G-SIFI to the private sector would be provided by exchanging or converting a sufficient amount of the unsecured debt from the original creditors of the failed company [meaning the depositors] into equity [or stock]. In the U.S., the new equity would become capital in one or more newly formed operating entities. In the U.K., the same approach could be used, or the equity could be used to recapitalize the failing financial company itself---thus, the highest layer of surviving bailed-in creditors would become the owners of the resolved firm. In either country, the new equity holders would take on the corresponding risk of being shareholders in a financial institution. No exception is indicated for insured deposits in the U.S., meaning those under $250,000, the deposits we thought were protected by FDIC insurance. This can hardly be an oversight, since it is the FDIC that is issuing the directive. The FDIC is an insurance company funded by premiums paid by private banks. The directive is called a resolution process, defined elsewhere as a plan that would be triggered in the event of the failure of an insurer . . . . The only mention of insured deposits is in connection with existing UK legislation, which the FDIC-BOE directive goes on to say is inadequate, implying that it needs to be modified or overridden. An Imminent Risk If our IOUs are converted to bank stock, they will no longer be subject to insurance protection but will be at risk and vulnerable to being wiped out, just as the Lehman Brothers shareholders were in 2008. That this dire scenario could actually materialize was underscored by Yves Smith in a March 19th post titled When You Weren't Looking, Democrat Bank Stooges Launch Bills to Permit Bailouts, Deregulate Derivatives. She writes: In the US, depositors have actually been put in a worse position than Cyprus deposit-holders, at least if they are at the big banks that play in the derivatives casino. The regulators have turned a blind eye as banks use their depositaries to fund derivatives exposures. And as bad as that is, the depositors, unlike their Cypriot confreres, aren't even senior creditors. Remember Lehman? When the investment bank failed, unsecured creditors (and remember, depositors are unsecured creditors) got eight cents on the dollar. One big reason was that derivatives counterparties require collateral for any exposures, meaning they are secured creditors. The 2005 bankruptcy reforms
[Biofuel] Man and Humanity in Search of Peace and New Future
Man and Humanity in Search of Peace and New Future By Mahboob A. Khawaja March 28, 2013 Information Clearing House - The hell of human suffering, evil and oppression is paved with good intentions. The men who have most injured and oppressed humanity, who have most deeply sinned against it, were according to their standards and their conscience good men; what was bad in them, what wrought moral evil and cruelty, treason to truth and progress, was not at all in their intentions, in their purpose, in their personal character, but in their opinions. - (Robert Briffault. The Making of Humanity, London, 1918) Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of Mankind is Man. - (Alexander Pope An Essay on Man) The mankind stands at its most tormenting crossroads - a time fraught with insane tragedies, man seeing man as a wild beast to be haunted and sadistic leaders and decadent superpowers forging bogus wars, planned massacres and environmental disasters all in a knowledge-driven, information age global culture of citizenry participation and political activism wanting to co-exist in peace and harmony within the encompassed and Living Universe. Throughout history men of power and influence commit horrible crimes against the humanity of which they are an essential part. Why? The answer rests with their individualistic absolutism and mindset. Is it part of the human nature that man should be cruel to man? The primitive scope is now enlarged to encompass crimes against all the living things, the universe and whatever it contains. We are at a RISK of Extinction. Global warriors are the elite class born to rule - the men of king, who are most often hated and feared and always dream of glory and triumph to achieve at a cost of ruthlessness, triviality and success leading to degeneration and viciousness across the human societies. They are influential to defy accountability for their crimes. George Bush and Tony Blair both despite being indicted by an International Tribunal for crimes against the humanity in Iraq are free and untouchable. Greg Felton (1936 and the illusion of progress -- Part I: Mediamonitors.net: 3/31/2011) takes us to an historical insight - the aggression by a fascist regime against a helpless neighbor - a viewpoint very much intact in the contemporary global peace and security context: The lessons of history are lost because we are careful to compartmentalize them to the time they happened and treat them as museum pieces. Our governing myths of progress and the perfectibility of man instill in us the conceit that whatever happened back then could not have any meaning today because we know so much more and the world is so much differentThe criminals and victims may have changed in 75 years, but the polite rationalizations we offer up to appease international crime today are pretty much the same. Recently, a global Think-Tank gathering at Davos, Switzerland showed the organizing muscles of affluent bankers, politicians and billionaires and some ruling elite taken from the painful tragedies of the poor and left-over human beings in other parts of the world. It is unknown who invites who and what criterion is implied to select the rich and 1% affluent ruling elite under questioning in functional Western democracies. They have no legitimacy from the democratic masses to talk about their future. Does this mean only rich and most powerful entities are presumed intelligent and capable of change and future-making? This is naive historical thinking lingering on to this day. If so, it will undermine Reason and defy the logic of moral and intellectual advancements up to the 21st century. Bankers and few ruling elite are part of the problems, not solutions. Bankers would be obliged to save the banks, not the humanity as appears to be the case of Cyprus financial bankruptcy under the EU 10 billion Euro emergency loan. Bankers will deprive the common Cypriot folks of their lifelong savings and assets to impose the EU dictates. To them mankind is just numbers and digits and the same is viewed by the warmongers. Time and history have articulated new paradigms of change and future-making. Nobody is sure, how to imagine the future except some assumptions of the few affluent whose business will be at stake if future turns out to be problematic and uncertain. Charles A Kupchan (From the American Century to the Competition Century- Problem of Grand Strategy ISN- International Security Network: 11/19/2012) attempts to imagine the contextual framework: While most emerging powers agree that we are entering a post-Western world, there is little consensus on what this world will actually look like. As a result, the grand strategies they develop will confront alternative and competing visions of what constitutes the new international order. If the world's emerging powers enjoyed a consensus among themselves about the nature
[Biofuel] BRICS Go Over The Wall
BRICS Go Over The Wall By Pepe Escobar March 27, 2013 Information Clearing House -Asia Times - Reports on the premature death of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) have been greatly exaggerated. Western corporate media is flooded with such nonsense, perpetrated in this particular case by the head of Morgan Stanley Investment Management. Reality spells otherwise. The BRICS meet in Durban, South Africa, this Tuesday to, among other steps, create their own credit rating agency, sidelining the dictatorship – or at least “biased agendas”, in New Delhi’s diplomatic take – of the Moody’s/Standard Poor’s variety. They will also further advance the idea of the BRICS Development Bank, with a seed capital of US$50 billion (only structural details need to be finalized), helping infrastructure and sustainable development projects. Crucially, the US and the European Union won’t have stakes in this Bank of the South – a concrete alternative, pushed especially by India and Brazil, to the Western-dominated World Bank and the Bretton Woods system. As former Indian finance minister Jaswant Singh has observed, such a development bank could, for instance, channel Beijing’s know-how to help finance India’s massive infrastructure needs. The huge political and economic differences among BRICS members are self-evident. But as they evolve as a group, the point is not whether they should be protecting the global economy from the now non-stop crisis of advanced casino capitalism. The point is that, beyond measures to facilitate mutual trade, their actions are indeed becoming increasingly political – as the BRICS not only deploy their economic clout but also take concrete steps leading towards a multipolar world. Brazil is particularly active in this regard. Inevitably, the usual Atlanticist, Washington consensus fanatics – myopically – can see nothing else besides the BRICS “demanding more recognition from Western powers”. Of course there are problems. Brazil, China and India’s growth slowed down. As China, for instance, became Brazil’s top trading partner – ahead of the US – whole sectors of Brazilian industry have suffered from the competition of cheap Chinese manufacturing. But some long-term prospects are inevitable. BRICS will eventually become more forceful at the International Monetary Fund. Crucially, BRICS will be trading in their own currencies, including a globally convertible yuan, further away from the US dollar and the petrodollar. That Chinese slowdown It was Goldman Sachs’ Jim O’Neill who coined the term BRIC (no South Africa then) in 2001. It’s enlightening to check what he thinks about it now. O’Neill points out that China, even growing by a “mere” 7.7% in 2012, “created the equivalent of another Greek economy every 11-and-a-half weeks”. China’s slowdown was “structural and cyclical” – a “planned downturn” to control overheating and inflation. The BRICS push is part of an irresistible global trend. Most of it is decoded here, in a new United Nations Development Programme report. The bottom line; the North is being overtaken in the economic race by the global South at a dizzying speed. According to the report, “for the first time in 150 years, the combined output of the developing world’s three leading economies – Brazil, China and India – is about equal to the combined GDP of the long-standing industrial powers of the North”. The obvious conclusion is that, “the rise of the South is radically reshaping the world of the 21st century, with developing nations driving economic growth, lifting hundreds of millions of people from poverty, and propelling billions more into a new global middle class.” And bang in the middle of this process, we find an Eurasian epic; the development of the Russia-China strategic relationship. It’s always about Pipelineistan Russian President Vladimir Putin is taking no prisoners; he wants to steer the BRICS towards “a full-scale strategic cooperation mechanism that will allow us to look for solutions to key issues of global politics together”. This will imply a common BRICS foreign policy – and not only selective coordination on some themes. It will take time. It will be hard. Putin is very much aware of it. What makes it even more fascinating is that Putin advanced his ideas during last week’s three-day visit to Moscow by new Chinese President Xi Jinping. He went out of his way to stress Russian-Chinese relations now are “the best in their centuries-long history”. That’s not exactly what hegemonic Atlanticists want to hear – still eager to frame the relationship in Cold War terms. Xi retributed in style; “We did not come to see you for nothing” – as is partially detailed here. And wait till China’s creative drive starts yielding dividends. Inevitably, Pipelineistan is at the heart of the ultimate BRICS complementary relationship. China’s need of Russia’s oil and gas
[Biofuel] Kerry’s Middle East Tour Prepares Endless War in Afghanistan, Syria
Kerry’s Middle East Tour Prepares Endless War in Afghanistan, Syria By Alex Lantier March 27, 2013 Information Clearing House -WSWS - US Secretary of State John Kerry left Kabul for Paris yesterday, after a Middle Eastern tour to Jordan and Afghanistan to plan broader wars across the region. In Paris today, he is expected to discuss arming opposition forces fighting Washington’s proxy war against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad with French officials. During his unannounced two-day visit in Kabul, Kerry held a joint press conference with President Hamid Karzai, the leader of the American puppet regime in Afghanistan. He announced that US forces will remain in Afghanistan beyond the Obama administration’s 2014 withdrawal deadline. Kerry and Karzai both called upon the Taliban to open an office in Doha, the capital of the US-allied Persian Gulf emirate of Qatar, from which location they could negotiate with Karzai. To encourage the Taliban to accept the offer, Kerry stressed that the Taliban should not count on a US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Currently there are some 100,000 occupation troops in the country, including 66,000 US forces. American officials have reportedly discussed a lasting presence of roughly 12,000 US and European troops in Afghanistan. Kerry also offered to hand over formal control of Bagram prison to the Karzai regime. This was apparently designed to allow Karzai to posture cynically before the Afghan people, claiming he is restoring Afghan sovereignty over the country. The US-controlled prison, notorious for the killings and torture of Afghan resistance fighters imprisoned there, has become a hated symbol of the NATO occupation. This action was apparently aimed at smoothing US relations with Karzai, strained after the latter criticized Washington for “colluding” with the Taliban. The handover of Bagram has nothing to do with ending US rule in Afghanistan, however. Karzai made clear that Washington would continue to effectively control detainees at the prison, promising that an Afghan review board would consider intelligence provided by US authorities before deciding to release prisoners. Afghan officials also reportedly gave “private assurances” that no “enduring security threats” would be released from Bagram. By threatening to continue the bombing and occupation of Afghanistan, Kerry is pushing the Taliban leadership to negotiate a political settlement with Karzai that would include a lasting US protectorate in Afghanistan. Washington’s control would rest upon US air superiority and a permanent occupation force stationed in the country. It would be based on collaboration between Washington, the warlords backing Karzai and the Islamic fundamentalist leadership of the Taliban to suppress resistance to foreign occupation by the Afghan people. The American ruling class sees Afghanistan as a launching pad for US operations in Central Asia, such as the hundreds of drone strikes Washington has launched in Afghanistan and neighboring countries. The New York Times commented, “The Obama administration has made a priority of reaching an agreement on an American military presence here after 2014 that will allow the United States to keep tabs on Iran and Pakistan.” Significantly, Kerry had hoped to visit Pakistan during his tour, but decided against it. There is deep anger in that country over US drone strikes and the collaboration of the Pakistani army and intelligence with Washington. (See also: “UN says US drone war in Pakistan violates international law”) Instead, Kerry reportedly met privately with Pakistani army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani in the Jordanian capital of Amman on Sunday, before traveling to Afghanistan. Washington’s neo-colonial war in Afghanistan—like its proxy war in Syria, Iran’s main Arab ally—aims at establishing US imperialist hegemony over the Middle East and Central Asia. This involves not only controlling and manipulating the conflicts in Pakistan and broadly across Asia unleashed by the Afghan war, but also organizing regime change in Iran, an oil-rich state that Washington sees as the main obstacle to its interests in the Middle East. Kerry’s visits both to Amman and to Kabul were clearly bound up with Washington’s war drive against Iran and its regional allies. As the Secretary of State left Jordan for Afghanistan, the Associated Press (AP) reported that the US is working in Jordan with Britain and France to train Syrian opposition fighters. These fighters then cross the border into southern Syria to carry out attacks. The AP wrote that these forces were “secular” forces, apparently in an attempt to distinguish them from Al Qaeda-linked forces that provide the bulk of the Syrian opposition’s fighting forces. The wire service’s description of these forces made clear, however, that they are largely army deserters recruited on a religious or tribal basis. It wrote, “The
[Biofuel] N. Korea Warns : Danger of Nuclear War on Korean Peninsula
(Something is clearly lost in the translation here. I was tempted to fix the English, but refrained . . .) N. Korea Warns : Danger of Nuclear War on Korean Peninsula By Korea News Service March 27, 2013 Information Clearing House -KNS - The Foreign Ministry of the DPRK released the following statement on Tuesday. The U.S. anti-DPRK hostile acts being intensified over its satellite launch for peaceful purposes have reached the eve of nuclear war. On Monday U.S. B-52 strategic bombers flied to the sky above south Korea by stealth again to stage a nuclear bomb dropping drill aimed at a surprise nuclear preemptive attack on the DPRK. Their flight defying our repeated warnings clearly proves that the U.S. plan for a nuclear war has entered an uncontrollable phase of practice. The U.S. is making desperate efforts to seek a way out from igniting a nuclear war against the DPRK, afraid that if the DPRK with nuclear weapons achieves economic prosperity through the building of a thriving nation, its hostile policy toward the DPRK will end in failure. The U.S. has already cooked up two resolutions on sanctions through the UN Security Council in less than two months, creating a vicious cycle of escalated tension to provide an international pretext for unleashing a nuclear war under the signboard of nuclear non-proliferation. Now the U.S. is mobilizing all their three nuclear attack means in the preparation for a nuclear war against the DPRK. Strategic nuclear missiles in the U.S. mainland are aiming at the DPRK and submarines with nuclear warheads are swarming to the waters off south Korea and its vicinity in the Pacific region. Meanwhile, the U.S. deputy secretary of Defense, who visited south Korea to finally examine the preparations of a nuclear war against the DPRK, openly said that the U.S. military attaches top priority to the second Korean war, giving green light to a nuclear war. Accordingly, the commander of the U.S. forces in south Korea and the south Korean military chief drafted a joint plan to cope with local provocation. The main point of it is to start a total nuclear war involving the U.S. forces in the U.S. mainland and the Pacific region after the south Korean puppet army touches off a conflict. The south Korean warmongers, elated with the backing of the U.S. master, are threatening punishment to provocation of the DPRK and even seeking a nefarious purpose of hurting status of great Generalissimos Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, symbol of our supreme dignity. The prevailing grave situation goes to prove that the U.S. is seeking a nuclear war against the DPRK, its first target of attack, after moving the strategic centre for world domination to the Asian-Pacific region. A nuclear war in the Korean Peninsula is no longer a presentative meaning but realistic one. Now the U.S. is brave with the numerical advantage in nuclear weapons but it is doomed to perish in the flames kindled by itself. The DPRK has its own powerful precision means for nuclear attack and nuclear war methods. The south Korean puppets who are behaving recklessly under their master's nuclear umbrella will experience a sound by-blow of a nuclear attack when a war breaks out between the DPRK and the U.S. To cope with the prevailing grave situation the KPA Supreme Command made a final decision to demonstrate with a practical military action the strong will of the DPRK army and people to take a resolute counteraction and gave an order to the strike forces of justice to keep themselves on the highest alert. Upon authorization the Foreign Ministry of the DPRK openly informs the UN Security Council that the Korean Peninsula is now in a touch-and-go situation due to the nuclear war provocation moves of the U.S. and south Korean puppets. The DPRK army and people that have become one with the Supreme Command are entering the final stage of the all-out showdown with the U.S. to defend the country's sovereignty and the nation's dignity by dint of the power of Songun they have long bolstered up. DPRK People Vow Revenge on U.S., S. Korean Puppets By Korea News Service Pyongyang, March 26 (KCNA) -- The statement of the Supreme Command of the Korean People's Army, released Tuesday, is arousing the DPRK army and people to a sacred war for destroying the U.S. imperialists and the south Korean puppets at one stroke. The enemies' anti-DPRK moves have gone beyond the danger line and reached the phase of an actual war. The U.S. and south Korean forces worked out an operational plan to impair the dignity of the DPRK supreme leadership, even declaring that they would make precision missile strikes at the statues of the great Generalissimos Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. All the people in the DPRK now call for a rapid military action to wipe out all those disgusting enemies, contending that words do no longer work. Han Jong Nam, an officer of the KPA, told KCNA:
[Biofuel] Three (more) Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism
Three (more) Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism By Jules Peck March 24, 2013 Information Clearing House -Citizenrenaissance - Professor Ha-Joon Chang has two things in common with Karl Marx. Firstly he’s right in much of his economic analysis of the ills of capitalism and secondly his prescriptions of the solutions to these ills are lacking. Chang’s best-selling book 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism is a timely and important addition to the most crucial debate of our age. I recommend it as both a good read and helpful resource. But I think his analysis missed out three final and far more crucial ‘things’ to his 23. Aside from giving an incomplete analysis of the ills of capitalism, Chang’s work fails in that the ‘things’ he misses out (my ‘things’ 24, 25 and 26) are the ones which show both that capitalism is fatally flawed and ireformable and that an alternative is indeed both possible and viable. So Chang’s book is both an incomplete picture of the problematique and a flawed vision of the future. It fails to take us beyond the desperate attempts to shoehorn the needs of people and planet into the fundamentally broken and misconceived economics of capitalism. What’s supposedly so great about capitalism? Whilst Chang is not arguing for an overthrow of capitalism he is scathing of our current neo-liberal version of it. For each of the 23 ‘things’ he starts with a short ‘What they tell you’ section laying out myths he then debunks. These myths are the sales-pitches whose combined narrative persuade us that we can’t possibly live without capitalism. We are told that society does best where the interests of shareholders, not wider stakeholders’ are born in mind. But Chang refutes this in ‘thing 2’. We are told that capitalism is the best system because it rewards those who are most productive. But in ‘thing 3’ Chang clearly debunks this myth. We are told that capitalism is the only system capable of producing the kinds of things we so badly need – like yet another version of the ipad. Again Chang debunks this in ‘thing 4’. We are told that individuals are inherently self-seeking and cannot co-operate (‘thing 5’) and so we need the market to ensure the highest wellbeing for society. Again this is debunked well and truly by Chang and numerous others. Another common rationale for capitalism’s value are that only through continuing ‘creative destruction’ and economic ‘progress’, as defined as never ending growth, can we hope to satisfy human needs. The red-in-tooth-and-claw, ever competitive, ever striving for ‘more’ which is key to capitalism’s accumulation drive, is vital to ensure our wellbeing. Otherwise life would sink into a morass of Leviathan-esque life “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. But these things are not true. Man can be co-operative and live in reciprocal manners. We are not rational, but we are not entirely irrational either. And the roles which the capitalist mode of production has given us, of labourer and capitalist, are far from the only natural order of things. Perhaps we no longer need to be dictated by the booms and busts of ever-striving profit and accumulation? Perhaps we can all be worker and boss? Perhaps we can plan our economies to serve the interests of all, not just of the 1%? What Chang got right with his 23 things Chang is correct about many of his ‘’things’. There is no such thing as a free market (thing 1), and so called ‘free-market’ policies cause far more harm than good, creating huge public bad and few public goods (things 6 and 7). Companies should not be run in the interests of shareholders (thing 2). We are not smart enough to leave things to the market (thing 16), in any case our best markets are already very much planned economies (thing 19) and indeed more state-led markets give the best outcomes (things 12 and 21). All of these challenge the underpinning narratives that keep capitalism ‘credible’ (to some). The next three ‘Things they don’t tell you about capitalism’ suggest that an alternative to capitalism is both needed and possible. Thing 24 – Growth does not equal happiness Ever increasing economic growth (the rational for capitalism) long since ceased to bring increasing marginal returns to wellbeing. In the ‘rich world’ wellbeing has flat-lined since the 1970s. So in fact, all the extra growth and wealth we have accumulated since the 1970s could be distributed more fairly and could arguably satisfy all the basic needs of the worlds 7bn. A few facts might help to make this point. The combined wealth of the world’s 500 wealthiest people is equal to that of the bottom 60% of the world’s population. The top 1% in the US have more wealth than the entire bottom 90%. Just one of these individuals’ wealth – say Warren Buffett’s – could increase the wealth of 1bn of the world’s poorest people by around 20%. So the key rationale and driver of
[Biofuel] Cyprus banks impose ATM withdrawal limit of 100 Euros per day - govt official
Cyprus banks impose ATM withdrawal limit of 100 Euros per day - govt official By RT March 24, 2013 Information Clearing House -RT - All Cyprus local banks have imposed an ATM withdrawal limit of 100 euros per day to prevent a run on lenders, a government official told Reuters. A spokesman for the country's second largest lender, Cyprus Popular Bank, said the new measure began at 1pm local time (11am GMT) and would remain in place until the bank reopens, or until confirmation of continued emergency funding from the European Central Bank. Cyprus Popular Bank had previously limited withdrawals to 260 euros per day. A government official said the measure applied to all local banks on the island. The news comes after Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades took part in last-minute crisis talks with international lenders on Sunday, in an attempt to save the country from financial meltdown. The negotiations in Nicosia to seal a bailout from the EU and International Monetary Fund failed to reach a solution. Anastasiades then headed to Brussels to hold talks with EU, European Central Bank and IMF leaders ahead of a crunch meeting of eurozone finance ministers. Government spokesman Christos Stylianides said in a statement on Sunday that Anastasiades and his team have a very difficult task to accomplish to save the Cypriot economy and avert a disorderly default if there is no final agreement on a loan accord. The news comes just one day after Cyprus and the Troika agreed to a 20 per cent tax on deposits over 100,000 euros at the Bank of Cyprus and 4 per cent on deposits held at other banks. Unfortunately, the events of recent days have led to a situation where there are no longer any optimal solutions available. Today, there are only hard choices left, European Union Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner Olli Rehn said in a Saturday statement. Cyprus is scrambling to come up with €5.8 billion by Monday, or face being kicked out of the Eurozone. The cash is a prerequisite for a further €10 billion in bailout funds. Lawmakers' rejection of a previous proposal to tax all bank deposits prompted the European Central Bank to threaten to cut off emergency funding to Cypriot banks unless a deal was reached by March 25. Banks have been shut all week, and are due to reopen on March 26. On Saturday, at least 1,000 bank workers in Cyprus hit the streets of the country’s capital of Nicosia. The demonstrators marched against the latest bailout measures taken by the country’s central bank. Protesters carried banners that read, “Hands off provident funds” and “No to the bankruptcy of Cyprus.” Robert Luis Rabello Adventure for Your Mind http://www.newadventure.ca Meet the People video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txsCdh1hZ6c Crisis video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZedNEXhTn4 The Long Journey video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy4muxaksgk ___ Sustainablelorgbiofuel mailing list Sustainablelorgbiofuel@lists.sustainablelists.org http://lists.eruditium.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel
[Biofuel] WWIII Is Coming Soon Here's Why !
With apologies in advance to Keith, who views the world in a much more optimistic light . . . ;) WWIII Is Coming Soon Here's Why ! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8on8Ri4pL_gfeature=player_embedded Robert Luis Rabello Adventure for Your Mind http://www.newadventure.ca Meet the People video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txsCdh1hZ6c Crisis video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZedNEXhTn4 The Long Journey video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy4muxaksgk ___ Sustainablelorgbiofuel mailing list Sustainablelorgbiofuel@lists.sustainablelists.org http://lists.eruditium.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel
[Biofuel] Violence and Dignity – Reflections on the Middle East : Noam Chomsky
Violence and Dignity – Reflections on the Middle East : Noam Chomsky http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embeddedv=nZ0VzkahoGE Robert Luis Rabello Adventure for Your Mind http://www.newadventure.ca Meet the People video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txsCdh1hZ6c Crisis video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZedNEXhTn4 The Long Journey video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy4muxaksgk ___ Sustainablelorgbiofuel mailing list Sustainablelorgbiofuel@lists.sustainablelists.org http://lists.eruditium.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel
Re: [Biofuel] Victory at Hand for the Climate Movement?
On 3/25/2013 9:17 AM, Darryl McMahon wrote: Somewhat in this vein, I stumbled across this site and publication recently. http://www.corporateknights.com/ Seems to be North America centric, and Canada, if not Ontario, focused. A victory for the environment from the corporate sector? Probably not, but perhaps another signpost along that road. If you believe in 'greenvesting', such corporate ventures may be of interest. I feel we need to provide companies (their board's and executives) that choose to do good as much protection from shareholders driving for short term returns as there is for companies to put money into Political Action Committees (PACs) or their equivalents. This is all fine and good, but it sounds a little bit to me like a serial rapist confessing virtuous love for his wife. I get into many discussions with my right-wing friends and family over the issue of climate change, and while they're unanimously up in arms over all the severe, government environmental regulations that are supposedly strangling the economy, I look at what's going on and think, Why are you people upset? NOTHING is changing. It's 'Drill, baby! Drill!' or 'Pipelines create prosperity' wherever the government gets its greasy fingers into energy policy. Perhaps I'm overly pessimistic. However, from my perspective, we need a fundamental restructuring of our social contract, our economic system and our attitudes toward sharing the world not only with other creatures, but other people, too. -- Robert Luis Rabello Adventure for Your Mind http://www.newadventure.ca Meet the People video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txsCdh1hZ6c Crisis video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZedNEXhTn4 The Long Journey video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy4muxaksgk ___ Sustainablelorgbiofuel mailing list Sustainablelorgbiofuel@lists.sustainablelists.org http://lists.eruditium.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel
[Biofuel] A Small Country With Big Problems
This article comes from Charles Carson. You can find the original here: http://charlesecarlson.com/ Worldwide, stock and bond markets are convulsing over reports of financial failure in Cyprus, the little island that looks like a turtle with its long neck pointing at Turkey, a chip off the European Union, bitterly divided ethnically by warring factions, Its insolvent government and failing banks have anxious and hopeless depositors lining up at ATM machines all night long. Cyprus is a land of frozen assets and fear depositors can only say of the bankers, why did I trust their words? A few miles East on the Mediterranean shore, is Tel Aviv, where it is business as usual. Israel was just honored by a visit from the U.S. President; Israel's secretly indebted banking system funds a militarist economy that boasts of power but leaks at every seam. It is the consummate actor, feigning prosperity while it hovers on the brink of national financial suicide. Much like Cyprus, Israel is deeply dependent on tourist money for its day to day existence. It borrows with little future capacity to pay back, except by borrowing more. Israel is an economic fantasy; it lacks natural resources, water or arable land. Yet Israel has chosen to weigh itself down by a giant military machine, bigger and more costly than countries many times its size. What keeps Israel going? Will it ever go belly up, like Cyprus? Israel is near becoming a three-time loser; it counts on surviving its next financial crisis by passing its losses on to unknowing Americans through their pension plans. Who pays Israel's bills? It has never been a secret that Israel has been kept alive from the beginning by the variously categorized donations from U.S. taxpayers, which the U.S. government calls foreign aid. But due to the declining purchasing power of the Dollar, the more than $3 billion a year military aid is not nearly enough; Israel is looking for more money. It has always sold bonds to Jewish supporters worldwide. About a decade ago it initiated a plan to sell bonds to many more Americans, through states, cities, and retirement funds. These are dollars that keep U.S. local state government going, and must not be at risk. Israel, a two-time loser with a secret to keep. We all know what happens to us if we continue borrowing; Israel knows, too. The bond sales must be paid back, or the maker must someday default. That is how bonds work because interest compounds on top of interest. This is what has happened to Cyprus banks. What is little known, is that in its 65 year history, Israel has already reneged on its currency twice, washing away its debts by devaluing the underlying currency and then reissuing a new one, and pretending it never happened. Israel hides her financial history cleverly with half truths like this one: Israel has never missed an interest or principle payment on a bond. American state and local leaders accept, or pretend to believe, Israel's claim that it is solvent, and buy Israel's bonds (I-Bonds) with taxpayer money. Many conscientious American Zionists bought Israeli bonds in its first 20 years. I remember street sales in major cities. These bonds became worthless when Israel's money was devalued. Early investors have loyally kept Israeli's secret. They were small change compared to the money borrowing machine now at work worldwide. The latest advertising by Israeli Development Corporation (IDC), an organization set up to market Israeli bonds, boasts that U.S. 2012 Israel bond sales set a new record, with total investments exceeding $816 million. The sales represented a 29 percent increase over 2011. Worldwide sales also rose, surpassing $1.2 billion. It appears from this announcement that about 2/3 of Israel's bond sales are in the United States. This is in addition to the $3.0 billion in the foreign aid we are told the U.S. federal government gives to Israel every year. The IDC also claims: Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel completed the single largest Israel bond investment by a state --- a $42 million purchase that increased the total amount of Israel bonds in the Ohio Treasury's portfolio to over $80 million. Do Ohioans know this? IDC claims that some 80 cities and state governments and employee pension plans have now invested their taxpayers' money in Israeli bonds. The January 1, 2013 Prospectus for Jubilee Seventh Series, Israel-Dollar bonds, obtained from IDC, discloses that in the last two years, they have sold $735 million of this one series in the U.S. The Jubilee series introduced a new, audacious concept, in that they are not payable in Israeli money, but in U.S. dollars. And the prospectus warns in the last pages that no American has legal status to sue Israel for non-payment. It is fundamental to understand that Israel can never repay I-Dollar bonds, or even the generous interest it offers, except by selling more and more
[Biofuel] The Racism That Fuels the 'War on Terror'
The Racism That Fuels the 'War on Terror' A new Gallup poll finds a majority of Americans oppose the drone-executions of US citizens on foreign soil. Then why do they support the Awlaki killing? By Glenn Greenwald March 25, 2013 Information Clearing House -The Guardian - A new Gallup poll released Monday morning has a surprising finding: a majority of Americans - while supporting air strikes in foreign countries against foreign nationals suspected of Terrorism - oppose such air strikes when used to target US citizens who are suspected Terrorists, whether at home or on foreign soil: gallup awlaki The reason this is surprising is that when the US actually killed a US citizen on foreign soil on the grounds that he was a suspected Terrorist - Anwar al-Awlaki - large majorities approved. One poll at the time reported that a large proportion of Americans believe the US Government made the correct decision in killing a US born Islamist militant in a drone strike last month - specifically, that 69 per cent of respondents think the action taken by the US Government to kill Anwar al-Awlaki was justified (that included 77% Republicans and 73% Democrats approving). Another poll at the time reported that Obama's approval ratings on national security increased eight points in the wake of the Awlaki killing. Meanwhile, Obama aides ran to Politico to boast that Awlaki's corpse would be a significant asset in Obama's re-election bid, leading to this Politico headline: politico awlaki What can explain this obvious discrepancy? How can it be that a policy which a majority of Americans oppose (killing Americans on foreign soil on the grounds of suspected Terrorism) was so popular and politically beneficial for Obama when it was actually done to Awlaki? I'm not speaking here about those who support the US Government's right to kill US citizens on foreign soil without a trial: people who believe that and support the Awlaki execution are at least being consistent. I'm focusing here on how it can be that a majority of Americans say they oppose having Americans so targeted on foreign soil yet still support the Awlaki killing. There are several possible factors explaining this discrepancy. It is probably easier to oppose such killings when considered in the abstract than it is when asked specifically about a person like Awlaki who had been subjected to such an intense government and media demonization campaign. It's also possible that intervening events between these polls - particularly the Rand Paul filibuster - created unprecedented media debate about the dangers of Obama's claimed assassination powers and caused people to re-think their wisdom (that was the ground cited by the ACLU's Laura Murphy when she praised Paul's protest: As a result of Sen. Paul's historic filibuster, civil liberties got two wins: . . . Americans learned about the breathtakingly broad claims of executive authority undergirding the Obama administration's vast killing program). But it seems clear there is a much more odious factor driving some of this. Many Americans can (a) say that they oppose the targeted killings of Americans on foreign soil while simultaneously (b) supporting the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen because, for them, the term Americans doesn't include people like Anwar al-Awlaki. Americans means their aunts and uncles, their nice neighbors down the street, and anyone else who looks like them, who looks and seems American. They don't think those people - Americans - should be killed without charges by the US government if they travel on vacation to Paris or go to study for a semester in London. But the concept of Americans most definitely does not include people with foreign and Muslim-ish names like Anwar al-Awlaki who wear the white robes of a Muslim imam and spend time in a place like Yemen. Legally - which is the only way that matters for this question - the New-Mexico-born Awlaki was every bit as much of an American citizen as the nice couple down the street. His citizenship was never legally revoked. He never formally renounced it. He was never charged with, let alone convicted of, any crime that could lead to the revocation of citizenship. No court ever considered revoking his citizenship, let alone did so. From a legal and constitutional perspective, there was not a single person more American than he. That's because those gradations of citizenship do not exist. One is either an American citizen or one is not. There is no such thing as more American or less American, nor can one's citizenship be revoked by presidential decree. This does not exist. But the effort to depict Muslims as something other than real Americans has long been a centerpiece of the US political climate in the era of the War on Terror. When it was first revealed in 2005 that the Bush administration was spying on the communications of Americans without the warrants required
[Biofuel] The Day That TV News Died
The Day That TV News Died By Chris Hedges March 25, 2013 Information Clearing House -Truthdig - I am not sure exactly when the death of television news took place. The descent was gradual---a slide into the tawdry, the trivial and the inane, into the charade on cable news channels such as Fox and MSNBC in which hosts hold up corporate political puppets to laud or ridicule, and treat celebrity foibles as legitimate news. But if I had to pick a date when commercial television decided amassing corporate money and providing entertainment were its central mission, when it consciously chose to become a carnival act, it would probably be Feb. 25, 2003, when MSNBC took Phil Donahue off the air because of his opposition to the calls for war in Iraq Donahue and Bill Moyers, the last honest men on national television, were the only two major TV news personalities who presented the viewpoints of those of us who challenged the rush to war in Iraq. General Electric and Microsoft---MSNBC's founders and defense contractors that went on to make tremendous profits from the war---were not about to tolerate a dissenting voice. Donahue was fired, and at PBS Moyers was subjected to tremendous pressure. An internal MSNBC memo leaked to the press stated that Donahue was hurting the image of the network. He would be a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war, the memo read. Donahue never returned to the airwaves. The celebrity trolls who currently reign on commercial television, who bill themselves as liberal or conservative, read from the same corporate script. They spin the same court gossip. They ignore what the corporate state wants ignored. They champion what the corporate state wants championed. They do not challenge or acknowledge the structures of corporate power. Their role is to funnel viewer energy back into our dead political system---to make us believe that Democrats or Republicans are not corporate pawns. The cable shows, whose hyperbolic hosts work to make us afraid self-identified liberals or self-identified conservatives, are part of a rigged political system, one in which it is impossible to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, General Electric or ExxonMobil. These corporations, in return for the fear-based propaganda, pay the lavish salaries of celebrity news people, usually in the millions of dollars. They make their shows profitable. And when there is war these news personalities assume their patriotic roles as cheerleaders, as Chris Matthews---who makes an estimated $5 million a year---did, along with the other MSNBC and Fox hosts. It does not matter that these celebrities and their guests, usually retired generals or government officials, got the war terribly wrong. Just as it does not matter that Francis Fukuyama and Thomas Friedman were wrong on the wonders of unfettered corporate capitalism and globalization. What mattered then and what matters now is likability---known in television and advertising as the Q score---not honesty and truth. Television news celebrities are in the business of sales, not journalism. They peddle the ideology of the corporate state. And too many of us are buying. The lie of omission is still a lie. It is what these news celebrities do not mention that exposes their complicity with corporate power. They do not speak about Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, a provision that allows the government to use the military to hold U.S. citizens and strip them of due process. They do not decry the trashing of our most basic civil liberties, allowing acts such as warrantless wiretapping and executive orders for the assassination of U.S. citizens. They do not devote significant time to climate scientists to explain the crisis that is enveloping our planet. They do not confront the reckless assault of the fossil fuel industry on the ecosystem. They very rarely produce long-form documentaries or news reports on our urban and rural poor, who have been rendered invisible, or on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or on corporate corruption on Wall Street. That is not why they are paid. They are paid to stymie meaningful debate. They are paid to discredit or ignore the nation's most astute critics of corporatism, among them Cornel West, Medea Benjamin, Ralph Nader and Noam Chomsky. They are paid to chatter mindlessly, hour after hour, filling our heads with the theater of the absurd. They play clips of their television rivals ridiculing them and ridicule their rivals in return. Television news looks as if it was lifted from Rudyard Kipling's portrait of the Bandar-log monkeys in The Jungle Book. The Bandar-log, considered insane by the other animals in the jungle because of their complete self-absorption, lack of discipline and outsized vanity, chant in unison: We are great. We are free. We are wonderful. We are the most wonderful people in all the jungle! We all say
[Biofuel] Computer Woes
Hello everyone! Blessings to you! My desktop computer experienced catastrophic failure yesterday and is now in the shop for repairs. I'm posting via laptop, which is a bit clunky, and hope to have the ICH postings for the list back within a day or two. Robert Luis Rabello ___ Sustainablelorgbiofuel mailing list Sustainablelorgbiofuel@lists.sustainablelists.org http://lists.eruditium.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel
Re: [Biofuel] To Darryl, Robert, Sandbh and. . . .
On 3/17/2013 9:30 AM, Chris Burck wrote: I'd like to say thanks for your efforts with the daily postings. It is really appreciated. Respect. Was there a volunteer to handle Truthout? I thought at one point I saw someone say they'd step up but haven't really been able to stay on top of it. One thing I noticed, though, is that on the items you are posting Robert, you seem to be omitting the step of heading them with the direct link? I know that for myself, the direct link is very helpful both for sharing and sometimes for viewing directly. I've done that for the last couple of days because ICH has been under a hacker attack since posting a rather unflattering article about Israel. Their URLs have suddenly become very large and take up multiple lines on the page. I can include them, but I thought they looked messy. Robert Luis Rabello Adventure for Your Mind http://www.newadventure.ca Meet the People video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txsCdh1hZ6c Crisis video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZedNEXhTn4 The Long Journey video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy4muxaksgk ___ Sustainablelorgbiofuel mailing list Sustainablelorgbiofuel@lists.sustainablelists.org http://lists.eruditium.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel
Re: [Biofuel] Clean-Car Battle Shows How to Fight for Emissions Reduction
On 3/17/2013 7:59 AM, Dawie Coetzee wrote: The motor industry have trained the environmental movement well. Through the illusion of an adversorial relationship between industry and the state the motor industry had already been able to get well-meaning activists to hand them an unassailable position of power on a plate. This has been happening for a LONG time, Dawie. I vividly recall the foot-dragging and recalcitrance over emissions standards in California. Rather than meaningful change, we've had a series of bandages applied to the environmental wound. We have more cars now, more roads, and though pollution from unburnt hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide and NOx have diminished, the air is still filthy and industry has managed to avoid counting carbon dioxide as a regulated pollutant. Look for further oligopalization of the motor industry, down to three or four players world-wide. Look for increased volumes of production overall, increased new car sales, collapse of second-hand values, more frequent scrappage. Why do you expect the latter to happen? With the economic downturn, it makes more sense to let someone else handle the depreciation, which is the most significant cost of owning a new car. My father-in-law has to replace his broken-down truck, and we've FINALLY convinced him to go with something smaller and more economical. We looked a lease-return and a new vehicle this afternoon, and by the time we were done, I was doing my best to talk him out of buying anything at all . . . Look for greater travel distances, longer commutes, greater overall fuel consumption, more traffic. Look for increased energy consumption through economic activity to service the needs induced by increased state-enforced dependency. We don't have to go along with that sort of nonsense. We can, and should, elect to live different lifestyles. Robert Luis Rabello Adventure for Your Mind http://www.newadventure.ca Meet the People video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txsCdh1hZ6c Crisis video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZedNEXhTn4 The Long Journey video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy4muxaksgk ___ Sustainablelorgbiofuel mailing list Sustainablelorgbiofuel@lists.sustainablelists.org http://lists.eruditium.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel
[Biofuel] Twisting the Intel to Fit the Politics, The New Generation of Hypocrisy on Iran
Twisting the Intel to Fit the Politics The New Generation of Hypocrisy on Iran By Ted Snider March 15, 2013 Information Clearing House -Counterpunch - Though the recent nuclear talks with Iran ended with an apparent whiff of progress, and though the two sides have agreed to meet for further technical negotiations this month and then for political level talks next month, the U.S. continues to approach Iran with a hostility that can barely contain its hypocrisy. The current generation of hypocrisy has three faces: Iran as a terror threat, Iran as a nuclear threat, and Iran's need to be monitored. At the end of 2012, an astonishing and little noticed bill became law in America. The bill declares Iran's terrorist presence in Latin America. The bill gives the go ahead for the State Department to provide a strategy to address the threat of Iran's growing hostile presence and activity in the Western Hemisphere. It declares that the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard has boosted its presence in Latin America and that there is now direct Iranian government support of Hezbollah activities in South America. The bill passed both houses and was signed into law by Obama on December 28. According to Alex Main of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, the US government has produced no evidence for these claims. Despite the lack of evidence, Iran's terrorist presence in our hemisphere is now official. At the recent AIPAC conference, Vice President Joe Biden echoed these assertions. Iran, he said, is using terrorist proxies to spread violence in the region and beyond the region. . . . For too long, Hezbollah has [plotted] against innocents in Eastern Europe to East Africa; from Southeast Asia to South America. We know what Israel knows: Hezbollah is a terrorist organization. American accusations that Iran is using Hezbollah as a terrorist proxy in Latin America are not new. In the 1990?s, America blamed attacks on the Israeli embassy and a Jewish community centre in Argentina on Iran. Then, as now, the claim was that Hezbollah was responsible for the bombings and that Iran was responsible for Hezbollah. But political scientist Stephen Zunes says that Despite longstanding investigations b Argentine officials, including testimony by hundreds of eyewitnesses and two lengthy trials, no convincing evidence emerged that implicated Hezbollah. As for Iran, William Brenick, who was chief of the political section of the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires and the primary Embassy contact for the investigation of the bombing, told Gareth Porter that the U.S. claim that Iran was behind the attack was based on a wall of assumptions. But the only thing more shocking than the new law's baselessness is its hypocrisy. The hypocrisy takes two forms. First, it is America, not Iran, who is engaging in terrorism in the other's region. The Obama administration has admitted direct responsibility for a barrage of cyber attacks against Iran. The now best known is Stuxnet, the computer virus that infected Iran's centrifuges and sent them spinning wildly out of control and then playing back previously recorded tapes of normal operations which plant operators watched unsuspectingly while the centrifuges literally tore themselves apart. And Stuxnet, it turns out, was only the beginning. The New York Times has revealed that Obama ordered sophisticated attacks on the computers that run Iran's nuclear enrichment facilities. A virus much larger than Stuxnet, known as Flame, has attacked Iranian computers. This virus maps and monitors the system of Iranian computers and sends back intelligence that is used to prepare for cyber war campaigns like the one undertaken by Stuxnet. Officials have now confirmed that Flame is one part of a joint project of America's CIA and NSA and Israel's secret military unit 8200. And America has been involved in not only cyber terrorism in Iran, but assassinations too. Since the beginning of 2010, there have been at least three assassinations and one attempted assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists. Two senior officials in the Obama administration have revealed to NBC news that the assassinations have been carried out by the People's Mujahadin of Iran, or the MEK. They also confirm that the MEK is able to carry out these sophisticated attacks because it is being financed, armed and trained by the Israeli Mossad and that the assassinations are being carried out with the awareness of the Obama administration. But secondly, and more brazen, is the hypocrisy of the U.S. accusing Iran of terrorism in Latin America. How hypocritical is that accusation? Just check the living memory of virtually any country in Latin America. Ask Guatemalans about the coup that took out Jacobo Arbenz. Or ask Brazilians about the one that removed Goulart from power. Ask the Guyanese about Cheddi Jagan, or the Cubans about the attempts on Castro's life. Ask
[Biofuel] Obama to Israel: `We got your back'
Obama to Israel: `We got your back' By Anne Gearan March 15, 2013 Information Clearing House -Associated Press - WASHINGTON - In a display of unity between allies who often disagree, President Barack Obama assured Israel's visiting leader Monday that the United States will always have Israel's back, and said the U.S. and Israel agree that diplomacy is the best way to resolve the crisis over potential Iranian nuclear weapons. Both the prime minister and I prefer to solve this diplomatically, Obama said as he and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu began several hours of White House consultations. The U.S. will consider all options in confronting what it sees as the unacceptable outcome of an Iranian bomb, Obama said. Israel and America stand together, Netanyahu said. He added that Israel is a sovereign nation with the right to defend itself, a pointed reference to the main question hanging over Monday's high-stakes meeting: Whether to try to stop an Iranian bomb by with a military attack in the next several months. Israel must remain the master of its fate, Netanyahu said. Obama will try to persuade Netanyahu to slow quickening pressure among many in his hawkish government to attack Iran's disputed nuclear development sites. Obama is trying to avert an Israeli strike that could come this spring, and which the United States sees as dangerously premature. The president is expected to tell Netanyahu in private at the White House that although the U.S. is committed to Israel's security it does not want to be dragged into another war. Obama is unlikely to spell out U.S. red lines that would trigger a military response, despite Israeli pressure to do so. Obama previewed the Oval Office meeting with a speech Sunday to American supporters of Israel, a key constituency in this election year. Obama said he doesn't want war but insists he would attack Iran if that was the only option left to stop that nation from getting a nuclear weapon. Loose talk of war only plays into Iran's hands, Obama said. U.S. officials believe that while Tehran has the capability to build a nuclear weapon, it has not yet decided to do so. They want to give sanctions time to pressure Iran to give up any military nuclear ambitions. Israel says the threat is too great to wait and many officials there are advocating a pre-emptive strike. Obama did not directly call on Israel to stand down, and made a point of saying Israel should always have the right to defend itself as it sees fit. That was the part of Obama's speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee that Netanyahu said he liked best. Speaking to reporters in Canada ahead of his arrival in the U.S., Netanyahu made no reference to the sanctions and diplomacy Obama emphasized. Obama is unlikely to persuade Netanyahu that economic sanctions and diplomacy are enough to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and he is unlikely to win any new concessions from Netanyahu on peace talks, the issue that drew bad blood between the two men in previous meetings and led the Israeli leader to publicly scold Obama last year. Netanyahu has not publicly backed a military strike, but his government spurned arguments from top U.S. national security leaders that a preemptive attack would fail. Now is not the time for bluster, Obama said. Now is the time to let our increased pressure sink in. Israeli President Shimon Peres, who had a meeting with Obama Sunday, said he came out with the feeling that the man is determined to prevent Iran from attaining nuclear weapons. Netanyahu was more subdued in reacting to Obama's comments Sunday, saying, more than everything, I value his statement that Israel must be able to protect itself from all threats. Obama framed military force as a last resort, not the next option at a time when sanctions are squeezing Iran. He said just the talk of war has driven up the price of oil to the benefit of Iran. Although Israel says it hasn't decided whether to strike, it has signaled readiness to do so within the next several months. The top U.S. military officer recently called a unilateral strike imprudent, a mild catchall for the chain-reaction of oil price hikes, Iranian retaliation, terror strikes and a possible wider Mideast war that U.S. officials fear could flow from an Israeli strike. Israel says a nuclear-armed Iran would be a threat to its existence. It cites Iranian leaders' repeated calls for Israel's destruction, support for anti-Israel militant groups and its arsenal of ballistic missiles that are already capable of striking Israel. Israel also fears a nuclear Iran would touch off an atomic weapons race in a region hostile to Israel's existence. Addressing the powerful pro-Israel lobby, Obama delivered messages to multiple political audiences: Israel, Iran, Jewish voters, a restless Congress, a wary international community and three Republican presidential
[Biofuel] U.N. Drone Inquisitor Says It’s Time to End Robot War in Pakistan
U.N. Drone Inquisitor Says It’s Time to End Robot War in Pakistan By Spencer Ackerman March 14, 2013 Information Clearing House -Wired - - After days of meeting with Pakistani officials, the United Nations official investigating Washington’s global campaign of drone strikes attacked the legal and strategic basis for the robotic war in its biggest battlefield. And he raised doubts over whether Americans operating the drones can actually distinguish terrorists from average Pakistanis. Ben Emmerson spent much of the week in Pakistan soliciting the views of senior government and elected officials about the drone strikes, part of his ongoing effort to investigate the relatively new method of targeted killing. He said in a statement on Friday that he also met with representatives of the tribal areas of western Pakistan that have borne the overwhelming brunt of the drone campaign. The officials underscored to Emmerson that Pakistan doesn’t consent to the U.S. drone effort, and denied extending the tacit consent that its military — with whom Emmerson did not consult — has previously provided. “As a matter of international law the U.S. drone campaign in Pakistan is therefore being conducted without the consent of the elected representatives of the people, or the legitimate Government of the State,” Emmerson, the U.N. special rapporteur on human rights and counterterrorism, said in the statement. “It involves the use of force on the territory of another State without its consent and is therefore a violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty.” Emmerson’s statement is carefully worded. He portrays himself as conveying Pakistan’s concerns, rather than vouching for their particulars. But it’s still the strongest statement yet by an international official calling for an end to a campaign of targeted killing that briefly flared back up earlier this year. And to call the strikes an unwarranted violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty is tantamount to saying the U.S. is waging a war of aggression. “The Pashtun tribes of the FATA area have suffered enormously under the drone campaign,” Emmerson’s statement continues, referring to the tribal areas. “It is time for the international community to heed the concerns of Pakistan, and give the next democratically elected government of Pakistan the space, support and assistance it needs to deliver a lasting peace on its own territory without forcible military interference by other States.” If the drone strikes continue into the next Pakistani government, Emmerson warned, the U.S. drone effort could further destabilize the nuclear power, undermining a key U.S. strategic goal at the heart of the drone strikes. He urged patience with a Pakistani military effort to eradicate al-Qaida’s allies in the tribal areas — one that official Washington has long since written off as unserious. Significantly and subtly, Emmerson raised doubts over repeated U.S. claims that the targeting efforts behind the drones kill terrorists and spare civilians. Last month, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and a staunch drone advocate, claimed that the drones kill only “single digits” worth of civilians annually. Many of the CIA’s strikes, termed “signature strikes,” kill people believed to fit a pattern of extremist behavior, rather than killing specific, known terrorists. Emmerson’s tribal contacts gave reason to doubt that westerners unfamiliar with the area would even be able to tell a terrorist from an average resident. “In discussions with the delegation of tribal Maliks from North Waziristan the Special Rapporteur was informed that drone strikes routinely inflicted civilian casualties, and that groups of adult males carrying out ordinary daily tasks were frequently the victims of such strikes,” Emmerson continued. “They emphasized that to an outsider unfamiliar with Pashtun tribal customs there was a very real risk of misidentification of targets since all Pashtun tribesmen tended to have similar appearance to members of the Pakistan Taliban, including similar (and often indistinguishable) tribal clothing, and since it had long been a tradition among the Pashtun tribes that all adult males would carry a gun at all times. They considered that civilian casualties were a commonplace occurrence and that the threat of such strikes instilled fear in the entire community.” As much as Emmerson will rely on the Obama administration for access concerning the drones during his inquiry, he’s given a major international platform to the victims and the critics of its robotic campaign. Emmerson told Danger Room last month that he endorsed John Brennan to run the CIA out of confidence that Brennan will rein in the drone effort. Now that Brennan’s at Langley, Emmerson will soon have his theory tested, having delivered a major public challenge to Washington. Robert Luis Rabello Adventure for Your
[Biofuel] Federal Judge Finds National Security Letters Unconstitutional, Bans Them
Federal Judge Finds National Security Letters Unconstitutional, Bans Them By Kim Zetter March 15, 2013 Information Clearing House -Wired - Ultra-secret national security letters that come with a gag order on the recipient are an unconstitutional impingement on free speech, a federal judge in California ruled Friday. U.S. District Judge Susan Illston ordered the government to stop issuing so-called NSLs across the board, in a stunning defeat for the Obama administration's surveillance practice. However, she also stayed her order for 90 days to give the government a chance to appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. We are very pleased that the Court recognized the fatal constitutional shortcomings of the NSL statute, said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Matt Zimmerman, whose organization is representing a telecom that received an NSL in 2011. The government's gags have truncated the public debate on these controversial surveillance tools. Our client looks forward to the day when it can publicly discuss its experience. The telecommunications company received the ultra-secret demand letter in 2011 from the FBI seeking information about a customer or customers. The telecom took the extraordinary and rare step of challenging the underlying authority of the National Security Letter, as well as the legitimacy of the gag order that came with it. Both challenges are allowed under a federal law that governs NSLs, a power greatly expanded under the Patriot Act that allows the government to get detailed information on Americans' finances and communications without oversight from a judge. The FBI has issued hundreds of thousands of NSLs and been reprimanded for abusing them --- though almost none of the requests have been challenged by the recipients. After the telecom challenged the NSL, the Justice Department took its own extraordinary measure and sued the company, arguing in court documents that the company was violating the law by challenging its authority. The move stunned the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is representing the anonymous telecom. It's a huge deal to say you are in violation of federal law having to do with a national security investigation, says Zimmerman. That is extraordinarily aggressive from my standpoint. They're saying you are violating the law by challenging our authority here. The case is a significant challenge to the government and its efforts to obtain documents in a manner that the EFF says violates the First Amendment rights of free speech and association. It's only the second time that such a serious and fundamental challenge to NSLs has arisen. The first occurred in 2004 in the case of a small ISP owner named Nicholas Merrill, who challenged an NSL seeking info on an organization that was using his network. He asserted that customer records were constitutionally protected information. But that issue never got a chance to play out in court before the government dropped its demand for documents. With this new case, civil libertarians are getting a second opportunity to fight NSLs head-on in court. NSLs are written demands from the FBI that compel internet service providers, credit companies, financial institutions and others to hand over confidential records about their customers, such as subscriber information, phone numbers and e-mail addresses, websites visited and more. NSLs are a powerful tool because they do not require court approval, and they come with a built-in gag order, preventing recipients from disclosing to anyone that they have even received an NSL. An FBI agent looking into a possible anti-terrorism case can self-issue an NSL to a credit bureau, ISP or phone company with only the sign-off of the Special Agent in Charge of their office. The FBI has to merely assert that the information is relevant to an investigation into international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities. The lack of court oversight raises the possibility for extensive abuse of NSLs under the cover of secrecy, which the gag order only exacerbates. In 2007 a Justice Department Inspector General audit found that the FBI had indeed abused its authority and misused NSLs on many occasions. After 9/11, for example, the FBI paid multimillion-dollar contracts to ATT and Verizon requiring the companies to station employees inside the FBI and to give these employees access to the telecom databases so they could immediately service FBI requests for telephone records. The IG found that the employees let FBI agents illegally look at customer records without paperwork and even wrote NSLs for the FBI. Before Merrill filed his challenge to NSLs in 2004, ISPs and other companies that wanted to challenge NSLs had to file suit in secret in court -- a burden that many were unwilling or unable to assume. But after he challenged the one he received, a court found that the never-ending, hard-to-challenge gag orders
[Biofuel] Paid to Lose, The Progressive Movement is a PR Front for Rich Democrats
Paid to Lose The Progressive Movement is a PR Front for Rich Democrats By John Stauber March 15, 2013 Information Clearing House -Counterpunch - There is good news in the Boston Globe today for the managers, development directors, visionaries, political hacks and propaganda flacks who run the Progressive Movement. More easy-to-earn and easy-to-hide soft money, millions of dollars, will be flowing to them from super rich Democrats and business corporations. It will come clean, pressed and laundered through Organizing for Action, the latest incarnation of the Obama Money Machine which has recently morphed into a nonpartisan non-profit corporation that will ''strengthen the progressive movement and train our next generation of leaders.'' Does this information concern you? If not, you need to get out of the propaganda bubble of your Progressive Movement echo chamber and think. Think hard. Think about fundamental, radical, democratic, social and economic change, who might bring it about and how. Ask yourself if the the rich elite, the 1%, are going to fund that. Leave The Nation and Mother Jones on the shelf; turn off Ed Schultz, Rachel Madow and Chris Hayes; don't open that barrage of email missives from Alternet, Media Matters, MoveOn, and the other think tanks; and get your head out of the liberal blogosphere for a couple days. Clear your mind and consider this: The self-labeled Progressive Movement that has arisen over the past decade is primarily one big propaganda campaign serving the political interests of the the Democratic Party's richest one-percent who created it. The funders and owners of the Progressive Movement get richer and richer off Wall Street and the corporate system. But they happen to be Democrats, cultural and social liberals who can't stomach Republican policies, and so after bruising electoral defeats a decade ago they decided to buy a movement, one just like the Republicans, a copy. The Progressive Movement that exists today is their success story. The Democratic elite created a mirror image of the type of astroturf front groups and think tanks long ago invented, funded and promoted by the Reaganites and the Koch brothers. The liberal elite own the Progressive Movement. Organizing for Action, the non-partisan slush fund to train the new leaders of the Progressive Movement is just the latest big money ploy to consolidate their control and keep the feed flowing into the trough. The professional Progressive Movement that we see reflected in the pages of The Nation magazine, in the online marketing and campaigning of MoveOn and in the speeches of Van Jones, is primarily a political public relations creation of America's richest corporate elite, the so-called 1%, who happen to bleed Blue because they have some degree of social and environmental consciousness, and don't bleed Red. But they are just as committed as the right to the overall corporate status quo, the maintenance of the American Empire, and the monopoly of the rich over the political process that serves their economic interests. RICH DEMOCRATS TO PROGRESSIVES: WE LOVE YOU, MAN! After the 2000 presidential election, the Al Gore Hanging Chad Debacle, rich liberal Democratic elite began discussing, conspiring and networking together to try and make sure that no scruffy, radical political insurgency like the Nader 2000 campaign would again raise its political head. They generally loved Al Gore, the millionaire technocrat, and they put in play actions which led to the creation of a movement of their own that aped the right wing's institutions. They reached out to the well-paid professionals who ran the big environmental groups they already funded and owned, and to other corporate reform and liberal media operations.They followed plans drawn up by Democratic Party insiders who wanted nothing more than to win elections, and who saw the need for the tools and groups and campaigns the Right wielded. They made it clear there would be wonderful financial rewards and career advancements for progressive leaders and their organizations who lined up with them. The Progressive Movement we see today was created by a small group including Democratic political operatives and foundations including TIDES (formed in 1976), the millionaires and billionaires of the Democracy Alliance, (formed in 2005) and eventually the Obama machine. After Al Gore's 2000 debacle, the rich liberal Democrats in the East and the West began to talk and meet. The green elite funders and dot.com millionaires of the Bay Area solidified relationships with the Beltway think tanks, political consultants and and PR flacks. Liberal Democratic Party players like MoveOn's co-founder Wes Boyd and TIDES Drummond Pike drew closer with others including the George Soros, John Podesta and Stanley Greenberg crowd. The Democratic Party defeats in 2002 and 2004 fueled
[Biofuel] Praising the Troops for Defending Our “Rights” and “Freedoms”
Praising the Troops for Defending Our “Rights” and “Freedoms” By Jacob G. Hornberger March 15, 2013 Information Clearing House -fff - Have you ever wondered what people mean when they praise the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan for defending our rights and freedoms here at home? This is one of the most popular and important bromides of our time. Given that we hear it all the time, especially in church and at sporting events, wouldn’t it be good to contemplate what people mean by it? I think everyone by now will agree that the 9/11 attacks were not the first stage of a giant terrorist invasion of the United States. It’s been 12 years since those attacks. That’s plenty of time for tens of thousands of transport ships carrying hundreds of thousands of terrorists to appear on the horizon on the eastern shore of the United States. Not even one transport ship carrying a few terrorists, much less tens of thousands that would be necessary for a successful conquest of the United States, has even departed from the Middle East on its way to the United States. Yet, as a practical matter, the only way for Americans to lose their rights and freedoms would be for an army of terrorists to take control of the U.S. government and the levers of power, thereby being able to subjugate the entire nation to the will of the terrorists. Oh sure, it’s entirely possible that a few terrorists can blow up a building or kill some people, but that, of course, is a far cry from conquering an entire nation and enslaving its citizenry. Thus, the reality, notwithstanding all the hype and fear, is that the rights and freedoms of the American people are not in any danger whatsoever of being lost to the terrorists. That is, there is no army of hundreds of thousands of terrorists crossing the ocean in transport ships seeking to invade and conquer the United States. As a matter of fact, such an endeavor would be so utterly difficult from a military standpoint that one can say with certainty that the chances of success would be virtually nil. After all, don’t forget that Hitler’s massive and powerful army couldn’t even cross the English Channel to invade and conquer England. Don’t forget also that the Allied invasion at Normandy involved around 150,000 troops and, even then, success was not guaranteed. Needless to say, there is no evidence whatsoever that 150,000 terrorists are planning the much more difficult operation of successfully launching a military crossing of the Atlantic Ocean. So, the fact is that American rights and freedoms are not in danger, at least not from the terrorists. Thus, if American troops are not over there defending our rights and freedoms, what are they defending? They’re defending the “right” and “freedom” of the U.S. government to be over there. That’s what the fighting is all about. On the one side, you have people over there saying to the U.S. government: “Get out of our part of the world. Deal with your own problems. Go home. Leave us alone. Take your soldiers and your CIA agents away. Stop funding our dictators. Don’t come back.” On the other side, you have the U.S. government saying: “Not on your life. We have the ‘right’ to be over here, thousands of miles away from American shores. It’s our ‘right’ as Americans. We have the ‘right’ to impose sanctions and embargoes on you, to oust recalcitrant dictators and install pro-U.S. dictators, to support pro-U.S. dictators with foreign aid, to invade and occupy your countries when necessary, to influence your elections with money paid to domestic groups, to kidnap, rendition, torture, and incarcerate people within your countries, and to do whatever else we want to you, your nation, and your government. Our right to do these things is part of our heritage of ‘freedom’ as Americans. You must submit to our will. It is for your own good. Otherwise, we will kill you, bomb you, and destroy your country until you do submit to our will.” Thus, if Americans truly contemplated one of their favorite bromides — praising the troops for defending our rights and freedoms, they would realize that what they’re really referring to is the “right” and “freedom” of the president, the Pentagon, and the CIA to intervene in the affairs of other nations, not the rights and freedoms of the American people. In fact, if Americans were to carefully contemplate that bromide, they would realize that the real danger to their rights and freedoms comes not from the terrorists but rather from the U.S. government itself. Our American ancestors understood this principle, which is precisely why they insisted on the passage of the Bill of Rights soon after the Constitution called the federal government into existence. Contrary to what many Americans think, the Bill of Rights doesn’t grant any rights to Americans. Instead, it protects the people’s preexisting rights from the federal government, which our ancestors viewed
[Biofuel] Environmental Threats Could Push Billions Into Extreme Poverty, Warns UN
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34303.htm Environmental Threats Could Push Billions Into Extreme Poverty, Warns UN UN's 2013 human development report urges action on climate change, deforestation and pollution before it is too late By Claire Provost March 14, 2013 Information Clearing House -The Guardian - The number of people living in extreme poverty could increase by up to 3 billion by 2050 unless urgent action is taken to tackle environmental challenges, a major UN report warned on Thursday. The 2013 Human Development Report hails better than expected progress on health, wealth and education in dozens of developing countries but says inaction on climate change, deforestation, and air and water pollution could end gains in the world's poorest countries and communities. Environmental threats are among the most grave impediments to lifting human development ... The longer action is delayed, the higher the cost will be, warns the report, which builds on the 2011 edition looking at sustainable development. Environmental inaction, especially regarding climate change, has the potential to halt or even reverse human development progress. The number of people in extreme poverty could increase by up to 3 billion by 2050 unless environmental disasters are averted by co-ordinated global action, said the UN. Far more attention needs to be paid to the impact human beings are having on the environment. Climate change is already exacerbating chronic environmental threats, and ecosystem losses are constraining livelihood opportunities, especially for poor people. A clean and safe environment should be seen as a right, not a privilege. The British prime minister, David Cameron, and US president Barack Obama have both made eradicating extreme poverty a key plank in their respective development agendas. The proportion of people living under $1.25 a day is estimated to have fallen from 43% in 1990 to 22% in 2008, driven in part by significant progress in China. As a result, the World Bank last year said the millennium development goal to halve the proportion of people living in extreme poverty by 2015 had been met ahead of schedule. Thursday's report says more than 40 countries have done better than previously expected on the UN's human development index (HDI), which combines measures of health, wealth and education, with gains accelerating over the past decade. Introduced in 1990, the index aims to challenge gross domestic product and other purely economic assessments of national wellbeing. Norway and Australia are highest in this year's HDI, while the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Niger are ranked lowest. Some of the largest countries -- including Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, South Africa and Turkey -- have made the most rapid advances, it says, but there has also been substantial progress in smaller economies, such as Bangladesh, Chile, Ghana, Mauritius, Rwanda and Tunisia. This has prompted significant rethinking on routes to progress, says the report: The south as a whole is driving global economic growth and societal change for the first time in centuries. The report points to cash-transfer programmes in Brazil, India and Mexico as examples of where developing countries have pioneered policies for advancing human development, noting how these efforts have helped narrow income gaps and improve the health and education prospects of poor communities. The presence of proactive developmental states, which seek to take strategic advantage of world trade opportunities but also invest heavily in health, education and other critical services, emerges as a key trend. The rise of China and India, which doubled their per capita economic output in fewer than 20 years, has driven an epochal global rebalancing, argues the report, bringing about greater change and lifting far more people out of poverty than the Industrial Revolution that transformed Europe and North America in the 18th and 19th centuries. The Industrial Revolution was a story of perhaps 100 million people, but this is a story about billions of people, said Khalid Malik, lead author of the report. The report singles out short-sighted austerity measures, inaction in the face of stark social inequalities, and the lack of opportunities for citizen participation as critical threats to progress -- both in developing countries and in European and North American industrial powers. Social policy is at least as important as economic policy, Malik told the Guardian. People think normally you're too poor to afford these things. But our argument is you're too poor not to. He said more representative global institutions are needed to tackle shared global challenges. China, with the world's second largest economy and biggest foreign exchange reserves, has only a 3.3% share in the World Bank, notes the report, less than France's 4.3%. Africa, with a billion
[Biofuel] Don’t Fall For Pentagon Spin
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34300.htm Don’t Fall For Pentagon Spin Never mind what you heard about massive new cuts to the defense industry. Here's how contractors avoided calamity By Ben Freeman March 14, 2013 Information Clearing House -Salon - If you believe the hype, sequestration is going to deal a catastrophic blow to the politically powerful defense industry. It’s a “doomsday mechanism,” former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta declared. The Aerospace Industries Association (AIA) – the leading advocacy group for Pentagon contractors – has also warned of the allegedly dire consequences of sequestration for their industry (which receives nearly $1 billion a day from the Pentagon), expressing “extreme disappointment that sequestration was not averted.” The political implications for the contractor lobby are just as calamitous, we’re told. Roll Call’s Eliza Newlin Carney says the enactment of sequestration “marks a moment of truth for an industry that has lost clout and allies on Capitol Hill, probably for good.” And, of course, sequestration’s plan to reduce Pentagon spending by $492 billion over the next nine years was the reason Democrats mistakenly believed Republicans would seek to avoid it at all costs. Don’t believe the hype The truth? We’re watching a political magic trick. Right now, we’re at the part of the show where it appears Congress and the President sawed through Pentagon contractors. They’re moaning and complaining – giving the audience a good show – but fear not, contracts will be just fine. This is largely because of the rock solid foundation the industry is standing on. Every year for the last five years the Pentagon has doled out at least $360 billion to contractors. In fact, every year since the war in Afghanistan began contractors have received more than half of the Pentagon’s total budget. In other words, contractors have received more taxpayer money than the Department of Defense’s civilian employees and nearly 1.4 million active duty military personnel combined. All that money has really added up. So much so that Pentagon contractors are sitting on a backlog of contracts worth nearly as much as the entirety of Pentagon sequestration. In other words, even if contractors absorbed all of the Pentagon sequestration cuts, they’d still be on track to receive more than $300 billion a year in new contracts, which is more than double what any other country in the world spends on its military. Does any of this sound catastrophic? Behind the Curtain We, the naïve audience of taxpayers (who are, of course, paying for this whole show), are supposed to believe the victim has been eviscerated. Once we pull the curtain back, however, we’ll see the truth behind the trick: contractors may have been a target of sequestration, but they’re still winning the war for the Pentagon’s budget. To be clear, the contractor lobby didn’t take the hit from sequestration on March 1, but on August 2, 2011 when the Budget Control Act of 2011 was enacted and included cuts to Pentagon spending as a punishment for Congressional inaction. Unfortunately for the contractor lobby, inertia is the norm for a Congress that hasn’t passed an actual budget in nearly four years. For many policymakers sequestration became the best, worst option. Most Members of Congress got at least something they wanted by doing what Congress does best – nothing. But, even with the enactment of sequestration, contractors can rest assured of their preeminent role in the Pentagon’s budget. They’re being protected as much as possible from all sides – the Secretary of Defense, Hawks on the Hill, the Department of Defense Comptroller, and the White House. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel said during his confirmation hearing, “The continuing health of the industrial base will be a high priority for me.” And despite sequestration, hawks are far from an endangered species on Capitol Hill. John McCain (R-AZ), for example, remained an especially ardent opponent of Pentagon cuts, arguing that it would “significantly impact our industrial capabilities.” Then there’s Pentagon Comptroller Robert Hale, who said in a sequestration briefing on February 20, “I don’t anticipate that we will cancel many, if any, contracts…And, I would like to say to reassure them [contractors], if you’ve got a contract with us, we’re going to pay you.” But to truly understand the situation, consider that the White House recently issued sequestration guidance which allows agencies to award new contracts for “high-priority initiatives.” Given that, among other boondoggles, the Pentagon recently spent taxpayer money on an app that lets you know when it’s time for a coffee break (how would you possibly know otherwise?) and $1.5 million to develop its own brand of beef jerky (99 cents Slim-Jim’s just weren’t cutting it), the bar for qualifying as a “high priority
[Biofuel] Rand Paul Exposes the Democrats
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34302.htm Rand Paul Exposes the Democrats Rand Paul was denounced as the wrong man with the right message, but most Democrats were too craven to deliver any message at all on the high crimes of their president and his killing assistant. At the end of the day, only two Democrats (Ron Wyden, Jeff Merkley) and independent Bernie Sanders joined Republicans in opposing Brennan's nomination. By Margaret Kimberley The Democratic Party is actually a partner with the Republicans working against the aims of achieving a peaceful and just country and world. March 14, 2013 Information Clearing House -Black Agenda Report - Republican Senator Rand Paul is a Kentucky conservative, and a proud Tea Party member. Paul publicly stated that he opposes the Civil Rights act of 1964, the legislation which at last gave some semblance of legal rights to black Americans. Paul typifies all of the beliefs central to right wing Republican dogma. He is against civil rights and a staunch opponent of abortion, a proud poster child for retrograde politics. Yet when members of the United States Senate had the opportunity to stand against an imperial president claiming a right to murder, it was Paul instead of supposedly liberal Democrats who took to the Senate floor for thirteen hours in an act of protest against what ought to be a high crime. Rand Paul proved that there is almost no one charged with upholding the Constitution who will actually do it. Democrats attacked the Bush administration when it claimed a right to designate anyone an enemy combatant and destroy their rights to due process. But in a twist reminiscent of Alice falling down the rabbit hole, it is now Democrats who stand idly by while both domestic and international law is torn asunder by one of their own. In an example of politics making strange bedfellows, leftists can thank Paul for proving a point they have been making for years. The Democratic Party is not just ineffectual, it is actually a partner with the Republicans working against the aims of achieving a peaceful and just country and world. The Democratic Party still garners support because of an old and undeserved reputation as the champion of civil rights and workers and as the party of peace. Democrats are seen as the last bulwark against the barbarian Republicans at the gates. In point of fact the Democrats have a long history of making war around the world and of doing the right thing at home only when forced by the actions of masses of people. It is now Democrats who stand idly by while both domestic and international law is torn asunder by one of their own. Barack Obama claims that he and a super secret group of terrorism experts and lawyers can determine that he has a right to label anyone a terrorist and then order that person to be executed. Paul used the president's nomination of John Brennan for the position of CIA director as an opportunity to bring attention to what should be an outrage -- as counter terrorism czar Brennan took responsibility for creating the now infamous Obama administration kill list. Actually, it was the president himself who used willing reporters at the New York Times to claim responsibility for deciding who to kill and how to kill them. When a few eyebrows were raised Brennan suddenly said that he was in fact the architect of death. It isn't clear if the administration was lying with the first statement or the second. The right wing southerner exposed the cravenness of the Democratic politicians and the blatant hypocrisy of progressives. Why was the Tea Party conservative alone in asking attorney general Eric Holder if the president claimed the right to kill United States citizens on American soil? That question should have been on the lips of every member of Congress, not just a man who had been dismissed as a racist and a crackpot. Of course, Paul is a racist and he would move the country's political life back to the 1950s, a time when white people didn't have to deal with black people unless they wanted to. It is sad that it is this man who attempted to get even a vaguely worded and troubling denial from Holder who, despite what liberals think, stated clearly that the president has the right to kill Americans in America if he says they are terrorists. 'Does the president have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil?' The answer to that question is no.' In other words, if Obama says someone is engaged in combat on American soil, that person can be killed on his orders. White House press secretary Jay Carney tried to make Holder say something he didn't. The president has not and would not use drone strikes against American citizens on American soil. The right wing southerner exposed the cravenness of the Democratic politicians and the blatant hypocrisy of progressives. The
[Biofuel] Going Against the Grain
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34290.htm Going Against the Grain Al-Jazeera Video Report Journalist Gideon Levy is arguably the most hated man in Israel for his reports on the occupied Palestinian territories. Posted March 13, 2013 Filmmaker: Bilal Yousef Gideon Levy is someone who evokes strong emotions from fellow Israelis. The writer and journalist has made weekly visits, over the past three decades, to the occupied Palestinian territories, describing what he sees - plainly and without propaganda. For some Israelis, he is seen as a brave disseminator of the truth. But many others condemn him as a propagandist for Hamas. And his columns for the Tel Aviv-based Haaretz newspaper have made him, arguably, one of the most hated men in Israel. When I joined Haaretz newspaper, I started to visit the occupied territories, Levy says. I immediately realised this was what I wanted to do; to understand the brutality and inhumanity of the Israeli occupation. I figured out three things. First, this was the biggest drama facing the state of Israel. Second, this story was not being covered by the Israeli media. And third, this was going to be my life mission - to report about the Israeli occupation to Israeli readers who did not want to know what was really happening there. Over the years, Levy's stories have shed light on the realities Palestinians face on a daily basis. One of his earlier reports, 'Death of a baby' in 1996, told of an incident involving the Abu Dahouk family. They were stopped at a checkpoint on their way to a hospital. Israeli soldiers delayed the family including a heavily pregnant Fayzeh Abu Dahouk, who ended up delivering her baby in the backseat of the car. The baby, who she hoped to name Yousef, died a couple of days later. Levy wrote at the time: Who the hell are they? Who are those soldiers who saw Fayzeh Abu Dahouk in pain as she delivered her baby in her brother-in-law's car. Who are those soldiers who didn't let her pass to reach the hospital? Who are those soldiers who made Fayzeh have to wrap her baby in her clothes and walk two kilometres to reach the hospital? Levy's reports have told of young Palestinians gunned down by Israeli soldiers after being accused of throwing stones; the lack of retribution against soldiers who kill Palestinians in cold blood; and the plight of Palestinian farmers, who make their livelihoods from olive trees, but who have had them burned and destroyed by settlers time and time again. Many in Israel have criticised Levy's reporting, saying that he and his colleagues are responsible for reinforcing anti-Semitism around the world. But others see Levy as an individual who is courageously going against the common views of the society in which he lives. History has witnessed worse and more brutal occupiers than the Israelis. But I've never heard about an occupation that believes it is the victim. And the only victim, he says. I sometimes feel ashamed of what is being done on our behalf. I feel really guilty towards the Palestinians. I think we are doing terrible things to them. Going Against the Grain follows Gideon Levy on one of his assignments in Hebron, and meets some of the ordinary Palestinians whose lives he has described in his regular column for Haaretz. -- Robert Luis Rabello Adventure for Your Mind http://www.newadventure.ca Meet the People video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txsCdh1hZ6c Crisis video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZedNEXhTn4 The Long Journey video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy4muxaksgk ___ Sustainablelorgbiofuel mailing list Sustainablelorgbiofuel@lists.sustainablelists.org http://lists.eruditium.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel
[Biofuel] Ex-ISI Chief Sees Civil War in Pakistan After US Afghan Pullout
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34293.htm Ex-ISI Chief Sees Civil War in Pakistan After US Afghan Pullout By KHALID KHURSHID March 14, 2013 Information Clearing House -Arab News - Gen. Hamid Gul, a former chief of the Inter-Services Intelligence of Pakistan and one of the architects of Afghan Jihad possesses a rich knowledge about Pakistan's politics and its relationship with Afghanistan. In a wide-ranging interview with Urdu News, he spoke about the ramifications of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan for the neighboring countries and the Muslim world. The pullout will have a major impact on Pakistan that may even lead to civil war, Gul said adding the withdrawal will create a vacuum where some miscreants will take advantage of the situation. Pakistan being the immediate neighbor will have to bear the brunt. The Arab Spring has sprung many surprises and after sweeping Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Syria it may now be happening in Jordan, Gul said. He said Al-Qaeda has been the main beneficiary of the Arab Spring and has grown stronger. About the role the GCC countries can play in the current situation, Gul said GCC countries and Pakistan should forge closer relationship. He said Americans are working to normalize relations with Iran but at the same time they are trying to drive a wedge between Iran and GCC countries. Muslims should realize that they are not weak, they are strong. They have oil and other resources. The situation now is in favor of Muslims and not the West. After the US pullout from Afghanistan, NATO will disintegrate as an entity. Gul said the Muslim world has suffered a lot due to the war on terror and now it is time for Muslims to take serious decisions. He said Muslim countries should fill the vacuum in Afghanistan after the withdrawal of US troops and work for the development of the country. Gul suggested that Muslim countries should form an institution more effective and powerful than the OIC. This organization should not only pass resolutions but should also have the authority and the means to get these resolutions implemented. Muslims should give the international community a new socio-economic world order. This was done by the Prophet (peace be upon him) 1,400 years ago and following him the Muslim world can unite and do it. Regarding the Abbottabad Commission that is probing Osama Bin Laden's issue, Gul said it is a fact that Osama had not been living in the Abbottabad compound since long, his family members were there. He said the operation was carried out with the cooperation from Pakistan. He refused to say who cooperated. Speaking about the Indian role in Afghanistan, the former ISI chief said India is responsible for the worsening situation in the region. He said Israel is backing India and both enjoy the backing of the US. India wants its hegemony in the region and Americans think that after withdrawal from Afghanistan, China and Russia will get the benefits so it is backing India. About the situation in Balochistan, Gul said it is getting from bad to worse. He also said that drone attacks were aimed at weakening Pakistan to pave the way for a greater plan. GCC countries can play a role in convincing India that better relations with Pakistan is in its interest. About talks with Taleban, Gul said they would be fruitless if held under the American agenda. The Afghans are capable of handling their own issues. Pakistan should not meddle in their affairs. World peace depends on peace in Afghanistan. About the presence of Al-Qaeda, Gul said very few Al-Qaeda members were in Pakistan. Al-Qaeda leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri had moved to Yemen already, he said. Speaking about the pre-election situation in Pakistan, the former ISI chief said there could be law and order issue as the army has refused to guarantee security at all polling stations. He said security in the country worsened during the five years of democracy and only a revolution can change things. Gul felt that the Western democratic system was a failure for Pakistan. During the tenure of the democratic government, economy has been destroyed, Gul said. -- Robert Luis Rabello Adventure for Your Mind http://www.newadventure.ca Meet the People video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txsCdh1hZ6c Crisis video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZedNEXhTn4 The Long Journey video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy4muxaksgk ___ Sustainablelorgbiofuel mailing list Sustainablelorgbiofuel@lists.sustainablelists.org http://lists.eruditium.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel
[Biofuel] Assad Preparing to Use Chemical Arms, says Israel's Military Intel Chief
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34298.htm War Pimp Alert Assad Preparing to Use Chemical Arms, says Israel's Military Intel Chief Maj. Gen. Kochavi tells Herzliya Conference Syria's president has yet to give order to use the weapons, but preparations for use are advanced; on Iran, says Tehran does not think attack on nuclear facilities is likely anytime soon. By Gili Cohen March 14, 2013 Information Clearing House -Haaretz - The head of Israel's military intelligence, Maj. Gen. Aviv Kochavi, said on Thursday that Syrian President Bashar Assad is preparing to make use of his chemical weapons cache, although he has yet to give an order for them to be used. Syria is no longer a whole country, Kochavi, told the 13th Annual Herzliya Conference. Instead Syria should be seen as two countries, one belonging to Assad and the other to the rebels, he said, with the caveat that this was a slight exaggeration of the situation. Much of the country is now under rebel control, including areas on the outskirts of Aleppo, Kochavi added. In fighting the Syrian opposition, the Assad regime has increased its use of advanced weaponry against civilians themselves. Signs of the uptick in violence include the Syrian military's use of Scud and M-600 missiles on populated areas of the country. To date, the number of such rockets fired on civilians stands at 70, Kochavi said. Iran and Hezbollah's efforts to stabilize the country are also on the increase, according to the intelligence chief. Hundreds of fighters from a special Hezbollah unit are on Syrian soil today. Some have lost their lives in battles with the rebels. Those who perished have been buried in secret so that their identities would not become public, Kochavi told the conference. Aside from these operatives, a Syrian people's army has been active in the country for the past six months. The group comprises some 50 thousand people, operates alongside the Syrian military, and is trained by Hezbollah operatives with Iranian funding. Kochavi also addressed Iran's nuclear program. According to Israeli estimates, the regime has still not made a decision to produce a nuclear bomb. Although, Kochavi added, that is where it is heading. Iran does not expect an assault by the international community on its nuclear facilities, not in the foreseeable future, Kochavi said. The main challenge to Tehran's nuclear program is the survival of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's regime. The weight of sanctions against the country will become an increasingly decisive consideration in Iran's decision, he added, although, so far it has not caused them to change their policies. As long as Iran does not see a high likelihood of attack against its nuclear facilities, Iran under pressure will continue to advance its nuclear plans, Kochavi said. © Haaretz Daily Newspaper Ltd. All Rights Reserved -- Robert Luis Rabello Adventure for Your Mind http://www.newadventure.ca Meet the People video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txsCdh1hZ6c Crisis video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZedNEXhTn4 The Long Journey video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy4muxaksgk ___ Sustainablelorgbiofuel mailing list Sustainablelorgbiofuel@lists.sustainablelists.org http://lists.eruditium.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel
[Biofuel] The Crucifixion of Tomas Young
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34257.htm The Crucifixion of Tomas Young By Chris Hedges March 11, 2013 Information Clearing House - TruthDig -- KANSAS CITY, Mo.---I flew to Kansas City last week to see Tomas Young. Young was paralyzed in Iraq in 2004. He is now receiving hospice care at his home. I knew him by reputation and the movie documentary Body of War. He was one of the first veterans to publicly oppose the war in Iraq. He fought as long and as hard as he could against the war that crippled him, until his physical deterioration caught up with him. I had been toying with the idea of suicide for a long time because I had become helpless, he told me in his small house on the Kansas City outskirts where he intends to die. I couldn't dress myself. People have to help me with the most rudimentary of things. I decided I did not want to go through life like that anymore. The pain, the frustration. ... He stopped abruptly and called his wife. Claudia, can I get some water? She opened a bottle of water, took a swig so it would not spill when he sipped and handed it to him. I felt at the end of my rope, the 33-year-old Army veteran went on. I made the decision to go on hospice care, to stop feeding and fade away. This way, instead of committing the conventional suicide and I am out of the picture, people have a way to stop by or call and say their goodbyes. I felt this was a fairer way to treat people than to just go out with a note. After the anoxic brain injury in 2008 [a complication that Young suffered] I lost a lot of dexterity and strength in my upper body. So I wouldn't be able to shoot myself or even open the pill bottle to give myself an overdose. The only way I could think of doing it was to have Claudia open the pill bottle for me, but I didn't want her implicated. After you made that decision how did you feel? I asked. I felt relieved, he answered. I finally saw an end to this four-and-a-half-year fight. If I were in the same condition I was in during the filming of 'Body of War,' in a manual chair, able to feed and dress myself and transfer from my bed to the wheelchair, you and I would not be having this discussion. I can't even watch the movie anymore because it makes me sad to see how I was, compared to how I am. ... Viewing the deterioration, I decided it was best to go out now rather than regress more. Young will die for our sins. He will die for a war that should never have been fought. He will die for the lies of politicians. He will die for war profiteers. He will die for the careers of generals. He will die for a cheerleader press. He will die for a complacent public that made war possible. He bore all this upon his body. He was crucified. And there are hundreds of thousands of other crucified bodies like his in Baghdad and Kandahar and Peshawar and Walter Reed medical center. Mangled bodies and corpses, broken dreams, unending grief, betrayal, corporate profit, these are the true products of war. Tomas Young is the face of war they do not want you to see. On April 4, 2004, Young was crammed into the back of a two-and-a-half-ton Army truck with 20 other soldiers in Sadr City, Iraq. Insurgents opened fire on the truck from above. It was like shooting ducks in a barrel, he said. A bullet from an AK-47 severed his spinal column. A second bullet shattered his knee. At first he did not know he had been shot. He felt woozy. He tried to pick up his M16. He couldn't lift his rifle from the truck bed. That was when he knew something was terribly wrong. I tried to say 'I'm going to be paralyzed, someone shoot me right now,' but there was only a hoarse whisper that came out because my lungs had collapsed, he said. I knew the damage. I wanted to be taken out of my misery. His squad leader, Staff Sgt. Robert Miltenberger, bent over and told him he would be all right. A few years later Young would see a clip of Miltenberger weeping as he recounted the story of how he had lied to Young. I tried to contact him, said Young, whose long red hair and flowing beard make him look like a biblical prophet. I can't find him. I want to tell him it is OK. Young had been in Iraq five days. It was his first deployment. After being wounded he was sent to an Army hospital in Kuwait, and although his legs, now useless, lay straight in front of him he felt as if he was still sitting cross-legged on the floor of the truck. That sensation lasted for about three weeks. It was an odd and painful initiation into his life as a paraplegic. His body, from then on, would play tricks on him. He was transferred from Kuwait to the U.S. military hospital at Landstuhl, Germany, and then to Walter Reed, in Washington, D.C. He asked if he could meet Ralph Nader, and Nader visited him in the hospital with Phil Donahue. Donahue, who had been fired by MSNBC a year earlier for speaking out against the war, would go on, with Ellen Spiro,
[Biofuel] Police Use of Military Technology Tactics
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34266.htm Police Use of Military Technology Tactics By ACLU March 12, 2013 Information Clearing House - NEW YORK -- American Civil Liberties Union affiliates in 23 states today simultaneously filed more than 255 public records requests to determine the extent to which local police departments are using federally subsidized military technology and tactics that are traditionally used overseas. Equipping state and local law enforcement with military weapons and vehicles, military tactical training, and actual military assistance to conduct traditional law enforcement erodes civil liberties and encourages increasingly aggressive policing, particularly in poor neighborhoods and communities of color, said Kara Dansky, senior counsel for the ACLU's Center for Justice. We've seen examples of this in several localities, but we don't know the dimensions of the problem. The affiliates filed public records requests with local law enforcement agencies seeking information on the use of: Special Weapons and Tactics teams, including: Number and purpose of deployments Types of weapons used during deployments Injuries sustained by civilians during deployments Training materials Funding sources. Cutting edge weapons and technologies, including: GPS tracking devices Unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones Augmented detainee restraint, or shock-cuffs Military weaponry, equipment, and vehicles obtained from or funded by federal agencies such as the Departments of Defense and/or Homeland Security. Affiliates filed a second request with state National Guards seeking information regarding: Cooperative agreements between local police departments and the National Guard counter-drug program. Incidents of National Guard contact with civilians. The American people deserve to know how much our local police are using military weapons and tactics for everyday policing, said Allie Bohm, ACLU advocacy and policy strategist. The militarization of local police is a threat to Americans' right to live without fear of military-style intervention in their daily lives, and we need to make sure these resources and tactics are deployed only with rigorous oversight and strong legal protections. The affiliates which filed public records requests are: Arizona, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Washington, West Virginia and Wisconsin. Once the information has been collected and analyzed, if needed, the ACLU will use the results to recommend changes in law and policy governing the use of military tactics and technology in local law enforcement. More information can be found here: www.aclu.org/militarization Robert Luis Rabello Adventure for Your Mind http://www.newadventure.ca Meet the People video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txsCdh1hZ6c Crisis video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZedNEXhTn4 The Long Journey video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy4muxaksgk ___ Sustainablelorgbiofuel mailing list Sustainablelorgbiofuel@lists.sustainablelists.org http://lists.eruditium.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel
[Biofuel] Ashamed To Be An American?
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34279.htm Ashamed To Be An American? By Timothy Gatto March 12, 2013 Information Clearing House - What in the world is going on in the west? I'm talking about Europe and America and all the players in the Middle East and Africa. The entire scenario smells like rotten fish (more like decaying bodies). I'm tired of holding my tongue and reading the drivel and watching the charade on television. The truth is that everything you are hearing is a lie and lies of the greatest magnitude. First of all this War on Terror is completely fabricated to keep the American war machine going. The bluster about this sequester is designed to keep pumping your tax dollars into the American war machine. We spend 711 Billion dollars on the basic defense budget. That's $711,000,000,000.00. Could you imagine what we could do with just half that amount being put back into this nation's infrastructure and manufacturing base, maybe a few billion for building schools and a few billion for cancer research? Forget it. The powers that be don't want that. They want that money to go to the defense industries in their States. That's the whole story. This entire government is totally corrupt and deceitful. This money isn't for Defense. It's being used for military conquest and to get other nations to give us their resources. This is Gun Barrel Diplomacy. Obama isn't a liberal, peace loving man; he's a tool of the system. This is the system that they make us vote for every few years. It's corrupt and completely fraudulent. We destroyed Libya, we are in the process of destroying Syria, and we are waving missiles and air strikes at Iran. Everyone wonders why North Korea started building and testing nukes. Look, if I were the President or leader of a nation on the wrong side of the USA and NATO, I'd be looking at building a few too. America has no respect for the sovereignty of other nations. That's no joke; they have proved over and over again that they do whatever they believe is necessary. Then they tell the American public that it's in response to protecting our national security. The talking heads on TV repeat the government's position verbatim. The very worst is CBS's Scott Pelley. He calls Syria's Bashir al Assad The Dictator every time he's mentioned. Meanwhile reporters on his own station reporting from Syria are telling him that most of the time they don't knows who blew something up or killed a bunch of civilians. Pelley just goes on and on about how The Dictator is killing his own people. What's so bad about that is that millions of Americans that spend most of their day working for a living get their news from the major networks. CBS has a long history of exposing the truth about world events and has embarrassed many Administrations. Not anymore. They are now the mouthpieces for the government, no more, no less. They lie with straight faces when most of them know what they are saying is false. They should be investigated. Who will investigate them? The FCC? They work for this corrupt lying government too. This is quite a quandary, isn't it? We have no independent news anymore. We might as well be Russians in the 70's reading Pravda. Besides all of the lies they tell you in the media, most of the people in this country think we are going broke. We have the largest economy in the entire world and most Americans think we are going broke. It's no wonder half this country is on anti-depressants. The powers that be want it this way; they want a docile, drugged-up population that believes everything they tell them. Forget about the fact that we invaded Iraq and killed hundreds of thousands of their citizens based on a lie. The entire world turned their heads when we committed that act of aggression that was definitely against everything in the Geneva Convention. They should just scrap the Geneva Convention. When NATO obliterated Libya that was unlawful and against all International law. Meanwhile, the tool of the powers that be, President Obama, said he did it on Humanitarian Grounds. There was no consent from our inept Congress; he just did what he wanted to do. The cackling Hillary Clinton laughed when she heard that Gadhafi had a machete shoved up his ass. Meanwhile the American people are catching on. I see it every day. People are starting to finally get it. Most people I talk to are happy that the defense (really the offense) budget was cut. I think it should be cut by 50%. We spend more on defense than all of the countries on Earth combined if you count the appropriations for different combat expeditions like Afghanistan and the Middle-East and Africa, along with the funding for the Defense Intelligence Agencies. The US has between 700 and 800 military bases Worldwide. The main sources of information on these military installations (e.g. C. Johnson, the NATO Watch Committee, the International
[Biofuel] If Corporations Don’t Pay Taxes, Why Should You?
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34269.htm If Corporations Don’t Pay Taxes, Why Should You? By Robert Scheer March 12, 2013 Information Clearing House -TruthDig - Go offshore young man and avoid paying taxes. Plunder at will in those foreign lands, and if you get in trouble, Uncle Sam will come rushing to your assistance, diplomatically, financially and militarily, even if you have managed to avoid paying for those government services. Just pretend you’re a multinational corporation. That’s the honest instruction for business success provided by 60 of the largest U.S. corporations that, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis, “parked a total of $166 billion offshore last year” shielding more than 40 percent of their profits from U.S. taxes. They all do it, including Microsoft, GE and pharmaceutical giant Abbott Laboratories. Many, like GE, are so good at it that they have avoided taxes altogether in some recent years. But they all still expect Uncle Sam to come to their aid with military firepower in case the natives abroad get restless and nationalize their company’s assets. We still have a blockade against Cuba because Fidel Castro more than a half century ago dared seize an American-owned telephone company. During that same period, we have consistently intervened to maintain the lock of U.S. corporations on the world’s resources, continuing to the present task of making Iraq and Libya safe for our oil companies. America’s multinational corporations still need the Navy to protect shipping lanes and the Commerce Department to safeguard U.S. copyrights. They also expect the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department to intervene to provide bailouts and cheap money when the corporate financial swindlers get into trouble, like GE, which almost went aground when its GE Capital financial wing got caught in the great banking meltdown. They want a huge U.S. government to finance scientific breakthroughs, educate the future workforce, sustain the infrastructure and provide for law and order on the home front, but they just don’t feel they should have to pay for a system of governance, even though it primarily serves their corporate interests. The U.S. government exists primarily to make the world safe for multinational corporations, but those firms feel no obligation to pay for that protection in return. Think of that perfectly legal and widespread racket when you go to pay your taxes in the next weeks, and consider that you have to make up the gap left by the big boys’ antics. Also, when you contemplate the painful cuts coming because of the sequester that undoubtedly will further destabilize the economy, remember that, as the Wall Street Journal estimated, the tax savings of just 19 of those companies would more than cover the $85 billion in spending reductions triggered by the congressional budget impasse. The most skilled at this con game are the health care and technology companies, which, as a Senate investigation last year revealed, have become quite expert at shifting marketing rights and patents offshore to low-tax countries. Microsoft boosted its foreign holdings by $16 billion last year, and by the end of the company’s fiscal year on June 30, 2012, had $60.8 billion stashed internationally. Through creative accounting, Microsoft was able to claim that only 7 percent of its pretax profit last year was domestically generated. Oracle increased its foreign holdings by one-third, including new subsidiaries in low-tax Ireland, and thereby was able to add a cool $272 million to the company’s bottom line by avoiding U.S. taxes. Abbott estimates that it saved $1.6 billion in U.S. taxes through its operations in more than a dozen countries. By moving $8.1 billion of its profits overseas, Abbott was able to claim a pretax loss on its U.S. operations. Johnson Johnson, another health industry giant, has almost all of its cash—$14.8 billion out of $14.9 billion—abroad, yet still claims to be a U.S. company. One of the longtime leaders in offshore tax avoidance has been that once-American-as-apple-pie company GE, which in a more innocent time hired Ronald Reagan to advertise its wares. Now GE has nearly two-thirds of its jobs abroad, avoided U.S. taxes in the previous two years and has $108 billion stashed overseas. Two years ago, President Obama appointed GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt to chair his Jobs Council, despite the fact that Immelt had cut his company’s U.S. workforce by a fifth. GE’s expertise is no longer in appliance manufacturing, a division Immelt has tried to shed, but rather in financial manipulation. GE Capital was a leader in the financial scams that still haunt the U.S. economy, and Immelt has been most effective in lobbying Washington politicians to rig the tax laws to benefit his and other multinational corporations. He has created some jobs, but unfortunately, they are abroad, along with his
[Biofuel] Hugo Chavez Depicted as Tyrant for Challenging Western oil Domination
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34265.htm Hugo Chavez Depicted as Tyrant for Challenging Western oil Domination: Venezuelan leader redirected vast sums of national wealth to the swollen ranks of Venezuela's poor. By Linda McQuaig March 12, 2013 Information Clearing House - Toronto Star - Had Hugo Chavez followed the pattern of many Third World leaders and concentrated on siphoning off his nation's wealth for personal gain, he would have attracted little attention or animosity in the West. Instead, he did virtually the opposite --- redirecting vast sums of national wealth to the swollen ranks of Venezuela's poor, along with free health care and education. No wonder he alienated local elites, who are used to being first in line at the national trough. Chavez's relentless championing of the downtrodden set a standard increasingly followed in Latin America. It explains his immense popularity with the masses and the widespread grief over his death last week. Yet in the West, he was portrayed as a tyrant. He was accused of muzzling the press, although anyone who's ever turned on a TV in Caracas knows there's no shortage of Fox News-style media outlets carrying a frothy mix of celebrities, U.S. sitcoms and anti-Chavez tirades. He was also accused of being anti-democratic, even though he won elections which former U.S. president Jimmy Carter and his global election monitoring centre have declared the best in the world. Chavez deservedly came under attack in the West --- including from Noam Chomsky --- for failing to order the release of a judge imprisoned for allowing a corrupt banker to flee Venezuela with millions of dollars. But it's striking to note that the West routinely ignores more serious democratic failings on the part of its allies, including torture and execution in full-fledged dictatorships like Saudi Arabia. What actually appears to have infuriated the western establishment was Chavez's audacity in challenging --- and scoring some victories against --- western dominance of the world economy. One such victory allowed Third World oil-producing nations to gain a bigger share of global oil revenues. Up until the 1970s, the major western oil companies, known as the Seven Sisters, controlled the world oil market through a cartel established at a secret retreat at Achnacarry Castle in Scotland in 1928. The Achnacarry agreement set out in detail how the companies would maintain their lucrative control of oil markets into the future, setting quotas among themselves, never competing with each other and preventing competitors from getting in on the action. In the 1970s, oil-producing nations in the Middle East and Venezuela organized and managed to replace the Seven Sisters with their own cartel, OPEC, striking a better deal for themselves and sending oil prices soaring. Some enraged westerners were left wondering, How did our oil get under their sand? But the oil companies, backed by western governments, soon reclaimed their dominance. By the late 1990s, according to Wall Street oil analyst Fadel Gheit, a badly divided OPEC was on its deathbed. Then miraculously it started to revive. It was Hugo Chavez, says Gheit. He saved OPEC. Chronicling Chavez's role in reuniting OPEC brought me to Caracas in 2004, for a book I was writing on the geopolitics of oil. In an interview that stretched beyond two hours, Chavez recounted his personal shuttle mission to OPEC nations in August 2000, infuriating Washington by defying its ban on foreign leaders visiting Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, and then convening the squabbling nations in Caracas. Although the oil companies have continued to thrive, OPEC's revival has ensured a significant share of the world's oil wealth has gone to Third World producers --- including poor nations like Algeria, Nigeria and Venezuela. U.S. oil analyst Michael Tanzer notes that attempts to organize other Third World producing nations around commodities like coffee and copper have failed, with OPEC serving as the lone inspiring model of how the developing world can unite to challenge Western power. Chavez championed the rising up of the Third World, and did it with flair and verve --- often breaking spontaneously into popular love songs in front of cheering throngs at public gatherings --- leaving the dull grey suits in the West all the more resentful. For those concerned with social justice, Chavez's passing is a sad milestone. It will surely be a while before we'll see such a feisty mix of Robin Hood, Che Guevara and Michael Bublé straddling the world stage. -- Robert Luis Rabello Adventure for Your Mind http://www.newadventure.ca Meet the People video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txsCdh1hZ6c Crisis video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZedNEXhTn4 The Long Journey video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy4muxaksgk ___
[Biofuel] New Chinese President Xi Aims to Paint Africa Red
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34273.htm New Chinese President Xi Aims to Paint Africa Red By Nile Bowie March 12, 2013 Information Clearing House -RT - The fact that China's incoming president, Xi Jinping, is set to visit Africa on his first foreign trip is a strong indication of where Sino-African relations are headed. But as Beijing focuses on building African industry, Washington has other plans. At a recently held meeting of the National People's Congress in Beijing, China's leaders unveiled a dramatic long-term plan to integrate some 400 million countryside dwellers into urban environments, by concentrating growth-promoting development in small- and medium-sized cities. In stark contrast to the neglected emphasis on infrastructure development in the United States and Europe, China spends around $500 billion annually on infrastructural projects, with $6.4 trillion set aside for its 10-year mass urbanization scheme, making it the largest rural-to-urban migration project in human history. China's leaders have mega-development in focus, and realizing such epic undertakings not only requires the utilization of time-efficient high-volume production methods, but also resources -- lots and lots of resources. It should come as no surprise that incoming Chinese president Xi Jinping's first trip as head of state will take him to Africa, to deepen the mutually beneficial trade and energy relationships maintained throughout the continent that have long irked policy makers in Washington. The new guy in charge -- who some analysts have suggested could be a populist reformer that empathizes with the poor -- will visit several African nations with whom China has expressed a desire to expand ties with, the most prominent being South Africa. Since establishing relations in 1998, bilateral trade between the two jumped from $1.5 billion to $16 billion as of 2012. Following a relationship that has consisted predominately of economic exchanges, China and South Africa have now announced plans to enhance military ties in a show of increasing political and security cooperation. During 2012's Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, incumbent President Hu Jintao served up $20 billion in loans to African countries, which were designated for the construction of vital infrastructure such as new roads, railways and ports to enable higher volumes of trade and export. In his address to the forum, South African President Jacob Zuma spoke of the long-term unsustainability of the current model of Sino-African trade, in which raw materials are sent out and manufactured commodities are sent in. Xi's visit highlights the importance China attaches to Sino-African ties, and during his stay, he will attend the fifth meeting of the BRICS, the first summit held on the African continent to accommodate leaders of the world's most prominent emerging economies, namely Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. The BRICS group, which accounts for around 43% of the world's population and 17% of global trade, is set to increase investments in Africa's industrial sector threefold, from $150 billion in 2010 to $530 billion in 2015, under the theme 'BRICS and Africa: Partnership for development, integration, and industrialization.' With focus shifting toward building up the continent's industrial sector, South Africa is no doubt seen as a springboard into Africa and a key development partner on the continent for other BRICS members. Analysts have likened the BRICS group to represent yet another significant step away from a unipolar global economic order, and it comes as no surprise. As eurozone countries languish amidst austerity, record unemployment and major demand contraction, the European Union has declined as a share of South Africa's total trade from 36% in 2005 to 26.5% in 2011, while the BRICS countries' total trade increased from 10% in 2005 to 18.6% in 2011. The value and significance of the BRICS platform is its ability to proliferate South-South political and economic ties, and one should expect the reduction of trade barriers and the gradual adoption of economic exchanges using local currencies. China's ICBC paid $5.5 billion for a 20% stake in Standard Bank of South Africa in 2007, and the move has played out well for Beijing -- Standard has over 500 branches across 17 African countries, which has drastically increased availability of the Chinese currency, offering yuan accounts to expatriate traders. It looks like the love story that has become of China and Africa will gradually begin shifting its emphasis toward building up a viable large-scale industrial base. Surveys out of Beijing cite 1,600 companies tapping into the use of Africa as an industrial base, with manufacturing's share of total Chinese investment (22%) fast gaining on the mining sector's (29%). Gavin du Venage, writing for the Asia Times Online, highlights how Beijing's
[Biofuel] Israel going for one million Jews in the West Bank
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34276.htm Israel going for one million Jews in the West Bank Despite his disappointing results at the ballot box, Netanyahu has successfully leveraged his negotiating position to create a right-wing government that is outwardly aggressive and inwardly nationalistic. By Aluf Benn March 12, 2013 Information Clearing House -Haaretz - - The election campaign season comes to its real conclusion this week with the formation of the government and an unadulterated victory for the right. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recovered from the blow he took at the ballot box and managed to extract the maximum out of the coalition negotiations he conducted with Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid and Habayit Hayehudi head Naftali Bennett. The old fox schooled the political greenhorns. Netanyahu began the negotiations after a month of futile idling that was meant to weaken his partners' negotiating positions: the highly publicized tiff with Bennett, the crocodile tears over separating from his Haredi former coalition partners, the offer of the Finance Ministry to Labor Party leader Shelly Yacimovich and the promise of renewed talks with the Palestinians to Hatnuah leader Tzipi Livni. When all the political spin had settled, the dice came out in Netanyahu's favor: Foreign and defense policy will remain in the hands of Likud-Yisrael Beiteinu, Lapid has been kicked over to the Finance Ministry and Habayit Hayehudi will be a junior coalition partner. The coalition negotiations were characterized by an excessive preoccupation with minor distractions like the hatred for Sara Netanyahu, the number of ministers in the new government or the production of a Lapid victory photo without Haredim. Substantive topics like foreign or defense policies were pushed aside in the discussions, except for Netanyahu's weekly warning about the Iranian nuclear threat and the dangerous situation in Syria. Even economic policy was pushed aside to the margins, if it was discussed at all. Netanyahu cut his rival and partner Lapid down to size. The prime minister presented him as a vacuous politician chasing after respect and ratings, as someone who wanted to be pampered at the Foreign Ministry instead of finding out where the money is going in the Finance Ministry, as he frequently asked ahead of the election. At the end of last week Lapid surrendered to the pressure campaign in the media and assumed the troublesome task he had tried to shirk. He also failed in ridding the government of unnecessary ministerial portfolios like Jerusalem and Diaspora Affairs. Now the game has ended and real life will begin. The third Netanyahu government has one clear goal: enlarging the settlements and achieving the vision of a million Jews living in Judea and Samaria. This magic number will thwart the division of the land and prevent once and for all the establishment of a Palestinian state. The defense, and housing and construction ministries that are relevant to this issue will be given to Likud MK Moshe Ya'alon and Habayit Hayehudi MK Uri Ariel. They won't be assuming these positions in order to freeze settlement construction, but rather to implement the Levy report which determined that Israel was not legally-speaking an occupying power in the West Bank and the Habayit Hayehudi platform; or in other words, to gradually absorb the West Bank into Israel. Netanyahu has used the term the math to explain the political difficulties that prevented him from being more flexible toward the Palestinians. That was in the previous Knesset term, when moderates like Ehud Barak and Dan Meridor were in senior government positions. In the new government, the math acts with abundant force against a compromise in the territories. The radical right wing is strengthened and united, and those who would claim Netanyahu's mantle need the settlers' support and will do everything in order to bribe them and make them happy. Lapid and Livni are supposed to represent the foreign policy moderates, but they will have a tough time competing to be heard over ministers Ya'alon, Bennett, Gideon Sa'ar, Avigdor Lieberman and Yair Shamir. Lapid will be bought with trifles like the Sharing of the Civic Burden Law so that billions of shekels will continue to flow into the settlements, and Livni is too weak to have much influence. Netanyahu's key task will be buying some quiet on the Palestinian issue to permit the expansion of the settlements at the small price of international condemnation. He will continue with the successful ploy from his previous term: threatening an attack on Iran and Syria, which are drawing American attention. Barack Obama is busy with calming the Iranian front and preventing an eruption in and around Syria, and is ignoring Israel's actions in the territories. This is the deal that Netanyahu will strive to achieve with Obama during their meetings next
[Biofuel] Bradley Manning In His Own Words
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34277.htm Note: Please visit the above link to listen to the audio. Bradley Manning In His Own Words: In Leaked Court Recording, Army Whistleblower Tells His Story for First Time Today, Freedom of the Press Foundation is publishing the full, previously unreleased audio recording of Private First Class Bradley Manning's speech to the military court in Ft. Meade about his motivations for leaking over 700,000 government documents to WikiLeaks. In addition, we have published highlights from Manning's statement to the court. While unofficial transcripts of this statement are available, this marks the first time the American public has heard the actual voice of Manning. Posted March 12, 2013 Podcast Powered By Podbean He explains to the military court in his own cadence and words how and why he gave the Apache helicopter video, Afghanistan and Iraq Wars Logs, and the State Department Diplomatic Cables to WikiLeaks. Manning explains his motives, noting how he believed the documents showed deep wrongdoing by the government and how he hoped that the release would spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy in general as it related to Iraq and Afghanistan. In conjunction with the statement, Private First Class Manning also pleaded guilty to 10 of the 22 charges against him. Freedom of the Press Foundation is dedicated to supporting journalism that combats overreaching government secrecy. We have been disturbed that Manning's pre-trial hearings have been hampered by the kind of extreme government secrecy that his releases to WikiLeaks were intended to protest. While reporters are allowed in the courtroom, no audio or visual recordings are permitted by the judge, no transcripts of the proceedings or any motions by the prosecution have been released, and lengthy court orders read on the stand by the judge have not been published for public review. A short film by Laura Poitras A group of journalists, represented by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), has been engaged in a legal battle to force the court to be more open. While the government has belatedly released a small portion of documents related to the case, many of the most important orders have been withheld---such as the orders relating to the speedy trial proceedings or the order related to Manning's prolonged solitary confinement. Michael Ratner, president emeritus of CCR, called the government utterly unresponsive to what is a core First Amendment principle. Ratner noted this is a public trial, the information being presented is not classified, and that contemporaneous access to information about the trial is necessary to understanding the proceedings. Nonetheless, the lawsuit has been tied up in the appeals court for months. Freedom of the Press Foundation's mission is to support and defend cutting-edge transparency journalism by supporting those organizations that publish leaks in the public interest. We often report on news surrounding government secrecy, educating the public about the important relationship between leaking and independent journalism. When we received this recording, we realized we had a unique opportunity to bring some small measure of transparency directly by allowing the world to hear for itself the voice of someone who took a controversial and important stance for government transparency. We hope this recording will shed light on one of the most secret court trials in recent history, in which the government is putting on trial a concerned government employee whose only stated goal was to bring attention to what he viewed as serious governmental misconduct and criminal activity. We hope to prompt additional analysis of these proceedings by other journalistic institutions and the public at large. While we are not equipped (technically or as a matter of human resources) to receive leaked information nor do we plan on receiving them in the future, we are proud to publish and analyze this particular recording because it is so clearly matches our mission of supporting transparency journalism. The information provided by Manning has uncovered stories of wrongdoing by the United States, as well as by leaders and politicians around the world. The cables were reportedly one of the catalysts that led to the Arab Spring and sped up the end of the Iraq War. To this day, more than two years after their release, the information provided by Manning is used every day by journalists and historians in major publications are the world to enlighten and inform the public, both in the United States and around the world. In a time when the extent and reach of U.S. government secrecy is unprecedented, and there are credible reports that the government has abused its secrecy and classification systems to cover up numerous illegal and unconstitutional activities, Manning's actions should
[Biofuel] NATO and Gulf States Conspiring to Drive the Middle East into Full-blown War
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34267.htm NATO and Gulf States Conspiring to Drive the Middle East into Full-blown War By Patrick Henningsen March 12, 2013 Information Clearing House - The evidence is now in, as list of state actors can now be seen openly conspiring to drive the Middle East into full-blown war. It's well known by now that NATO and the Gulf States initial plans to overturn the sovereign state of Syria has been running behind schedule since their operation was launched two years ago. They had hoped for the sort of slam dunk which they enjoyed in overturning the country of Libya in late 2011. This same formula could not be applied again however, so Plan B, a ground war using proxies has meant a longer drawn out conflict. It hasn't been working fast enough in Syria, and western backed terrorist groups still sustaining heavy losses in their fight to topple the Assad government on behalf of the NATO and its Gulf allies. The main obstacle with Plan B is that the very idea of directly arming terrorists in Syria is not one which can be sold openly in either the US or Britain. From the NATO Allied corner, something drastic needed to be done... Whilst politicians in the West, namely those in Washington DC, London and parts of Europe, have been publicly denying that they were helping to organise running arms into Syria and issuing very public pleads for 'humanitarian aid' for those they identify as the Syrian Opposition, activity back stage has been furious. The debate in government and the media has been mere window dressing for the real operation being quietly carried out. NATO Gun-running via Croatia It can now be revealed that NATO allied nations were busy using proxy states to drive their war in Syria -- putting together one of the biggest international black operation transfers of military supplies in recent history. So it's official: large caches of hardware from the West have been transferred to the Syrian jihadist mercenary collective known as the 'Free Syrian Army' , 'Syrian Rebels', or 'Syrian Opposition' -- depending on who you ask, a brash move which may be vehemently opposed by other UN Security Council members -- namely Russia and China. Multiple media sources reveal the details of this massive airlift comprised of 75 airplanes, and an estimated 3,000 tons of military weaponry on board has left Croatia and has already been delivered... to Syria. It is also confirmed from these reports that Saudi Arabia has financed a large portion of this purchase secretly transported to al Qaeda and other FSA fighters -- who are working with the support of the CIA, MI6 and others, along with other financial and material support of Qatar and Saudi, to further destabilise and overthrow the Assad government in Syria. Croatia's daily newspaper Jutarnji List reported: From the start of November last year, till February this year, 75 planes flew out from Zagreb Airport with over 3,000 tons of weapons and ammunition bound for Syrian rebels...The newspaper, quoting diplomatic sources, says that besides Croatian weapons the planes were full with weapons from other European countries including the UK. The weapons were organised by the United States of America. Sources say that the first few flights to leave Croatia bound for Syria with weapons were operated by Turkish Cargo, which is owned by Turkish Airlines. After those flights, Jordanian International Air Cargo took over the flights. The deal to provide arms to the rebels was made between American officials and the Croatian Ambassador to the US. In addition to this huge gun-running operation, Croatia also appears to be guilty of either having advanced knowledge, or possibly coordinating with Syrian terrorists as evidenced by their recently withdraw all of troops from the UN observer mission in Golan Heights, indicating that the recent kidnapping by Free Syrian Army Terrorists of at least 20 UNIFIL peacekeepers in the Golan Heights was known in advance by Croatia. The incident may have been designed to pull Syria's southern neighbor, Israel, even closer to the conflict, a development which would almost surely prompt the UN to declare this as trigger to a regional crisis, followed by an authorised military intervention. If it was known by Croatia, then one can only conclude that this was also known by US and British operatives as well. Both the US and Britain will naturally claim deniability as their legal out in this case, by deniability through the use of proxies makes no innocent parties when the prospect of a multi-regional war beckons as a result of the west's financial, logistical, political, and now material involvement in the overthrow of a sovereign state and internationally recognised government. US officials are on record as admitting to helping arrange the weapons airlift, as cited in this Feb 25, 2012 article in the New York Times:
[Biofuel] Iran Can’t Build Nuke Without Tripping Alarm Bells, US Says
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34272.htm Engineering Consent For Attack On Iran? Iran Can’t Build Nuke Without Tripping Alarm Bells, US Says Intelligence director James Clapper says Tehran still has not decided whether to pursue militarization of nuclear program By Associated Press. March 12, 2013 Information Clearing House -AP - WASHINGTON - Iran cannot enrich uranium to the point of being able to make a bomb without the international community finding out, a top US intelligence official said Tuesday while delivering an otherwise sobering report on worldwide threats. National Intelligence director James Clapper told a Senate panel that Tehran is developing nuclear capabilities to enhance its security and influence and “give it the ability to develop a nuclear weapon.” But the report stopped short of saying a decision has been made. “We do not know if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons,” the report said. Clapper explained that in the last year, Iran has made progress in working toward producing weapons-grade uranium. However, the report said Iran “could not divert safeguarded material and produce a weapon-worth of weapons-grade uranium before this activity is discovered.” The assessment on Iran comes shortly before President Barack Obama’s trip to Israel, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has warned that the world has until this summer — at the latest — to keep Tehran from building a bomb. The Israeli leader repeatedly has indicated Israel is willing to strike militarily to stop Iran, a step that would likely drag in the United States. Clapper, testifying with newly installed CIA Director John Brennan and FBI Director Robert Mueller to the Senate Intelligence Committee, also spoke about threats emanating from Syria and North Korea. He said that both Iran and Syria had acquired ballistic missiles from Pyongyang In Syria, President Bashar Assad’s inability to quash the uprising in his country increases the possibility that he will use chemical weapons against his people, Clapper said. “We assess that an increasingly beleaguered regime, having found its escalation of violence through conventional means inadequate, might be prepared to use chemical weapons against the Syrian people,” he said. “In addition, groups or individuals in Syria could gain access to chemical weapons-related material.” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat and chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence committee, described Syria as a “massive and still growing humanitarian disaster under way with no end in sight.” The United Nations estimates more than 70,000 people have been killed in the civil war, which started two years ago against Assad’s rule. The report said terrorist threats are in transition with an increasingly decentralized global jihadist movement. The Arab Spring, however, has created a spike in threats to US interests in the region “that likely will endure until political upheaval stabilizes and security forces regain their capabilities.” An unpredictable North Korea, with its nuclear weapons and missile programs, was touted as the most serious threat to the United States and East Asia nations. The outlook on North Korea comes as the communist regime announced that it was “completely scrapping” the 1953 armistice that ended the Korean War and has maintained peace on the peninsula for more than half a century. The Obama administration on Monday slapped new sanctions against North Korea’s primary exchange bank and several senior government officials as it expressed concern about the North’s “bellicose rhetoric.” “The Intelligence community has long assessed that, in Pyongyang’s view, its nuclear capabilities are intended for deterrence, international prestige and coercive diplomacy. We do not know Pyongyang’s nuclear doctrine or employment concepts,” Clapper told the Senate Intelligence Committee. “Although we assess with low confidence that the North would only attempt to use nuclear weapons against U.S. forces or allies to preserve the Kim regime, we do not know what would constitute, from the North’s perspective, crossing that threshold.” North Korea, led by its young leader Kim Jong Un, has defied the international community in the last three months, testing an intercontinental ballistic missile and a third nuclear bomb. “These programs demonstrate North Korea’s commitment to develop long-range missile technology that could pose a direct threat to the United States, and its efforts to produce and market ballistic missiles raise broader regional and global security concerns,” the report said. Copyright Associated Press -- Robert Luis Rabello Adventure for Your Mind http://www.newadventure.ca Meet the People video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txsCdh1hZ6c Crisis video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZedNEXhTn4 The Long Journey video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy4muxaksgk
[Biofuel] Western Media Set Up North Korea For War
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34278.htm Western Media Set Up North Korea For War By Finian Cunningham March 12, 2013 Information Clearing House - Western so-called news media coverage of the escalating tensions on the Korean Peninsula is like watching a cross between a bad James Bond movie and a cheap horror flick about flesh-eating zombies. It would be funny if the danger of war was not so serious and imminent. The disturbing direction of the Western media coverage is to set up North Korea - a poor impoverished country - for an all-out military attack by the world's nuclear superpower psychopath - the United States. Paradoxically, this danger is being incited by news corporations that pompously claim to be free-thinking bastions of independent journalism, when in reality they are nothing more than progenitors of the worst kind of pulp fiction. Kim Jong-un, the young leader of North Korea who took over from his late father in 2011, is being cast as an insane villain whose Western media persona resembles that of a putative Doctor Evil. His projected character is fit for a role in an early 007 movie. Days ago, Kim was reported as threatening preemptive nuclear war against South Korea and its patron the United States. How evil! Scarcely mentioned were the facts that Kim was forced into this position of making a staunch defense of his country, under immense pressure of relentless imperialist aggression. The Democratic People's Republic of Korea has been slapped with yet more US-led sanctions aimed at ostracizing the country from any international contact. It's the equivalent of solitary confinement of a prisoner, subjected to sensory deprivation. But this is torture of an entire nation with no reprieve. Yes, North Korea conducted an underground nuclear weapons test in mid-February. This was after the US tightened the thumb-screws with yet more sanctions; and after years of Washington refusing to reciprocate with a negotiated settlement to end more than six decades of crippling trade embargoes in addition to the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation against North Korea following the 1950-53 war with its American-backed Southern neighbor. No other country has been threatened with nuclear Armageddon as often as North Korea - and always by the US - for more than 60 years. Western media have now highlighted the North Korean leader ordering his massed troops to prepare for wiping out a South Korean island by turning a craggy maritime outpost into a sea of flames. Do you see the innuendo here? Wiping out an island? Well, Kim must be an insane megalomaniac, right? The island in question is the disputed territory of Baengnyeong, which is actually located off the North Korean mainland, but which the US forced into South Korea's possession following the 1950-53 war. It has been used since, provocatively, as a staging post for American surveillance and forward planning for attack against North Korea. No doubt the island will be used this week during the US perennial war planning maneuvers that simulate the invasion of North Korea, but which Washington euphemistically calls defensive measures. Befitting the caricature of arch-villain, photographs and footage have abounded in Western media showing Kim Jong-un clad in black long overcoat and black gloves, peering through binoculars apparently towards South Korean and American forces across the Demilitarized Zone of the 38th parallel. Just in case the Western public fail to pick up on the demonic Dr Evil caricature, there is another sub-plot being instilled - the North Korean flesh-eating zombies. In recent weeks, there has been a rash of stories regurgitated by the same Western media of outbreaks of cannibalism among the allegedly starving people of North Korea. These stories of cannibalistic gore and nihilism have not just been printed by the voyeuristic tabloid gutter press. They have also been published prominently by supposed quality outlets, such as Britain's Sunday Times and Independent, as well as one of America's paper of record, The Washington Post. Significantly, these macabre stories began circulating in Western media outlets at the end of January - some two weeks before North Korea conducted its underground nuclear explosion. That suggests that the flesh-eating horror claims in North Korea are the work of a Western intel psychological campaign aimed at adding pejorative technicolor to the present crisis. It makes for difficult reading. Not because of the alleged gruesome details, but because these stories are so obviously concocted and regurgitated in reflex manner by supposed news organizations. The horror claims all come from one source: allegedly an undercover team of journalists from an outfit called the Asia Press, based in Japan, who were allegedly spirited secretly into North Korea and allegedly interviewed various anonymous
Re: [Biofuel] Kill Anything That Moves
On 3/13/2013 1:23 PM, Gustl wrote: Hello List, I have become somewhat weary of hearing just what a terrible, warmongering and violent country the United States is. It does get tiresome, but to be fair, it serves as a counterbalance to the prevailing attitude of, My country does no wrong. Most people who ascribe to that view have never seen combat. You have, and you know what an awful thing it is. My saintly mother-in-law hails from Germany. She remembers American soldiers entering her village at the end of World War II and in her words, . . . pointing their guns at everything. When I remind her that prior to those incidents, her countrymen were actively trying to kill every one of mine that they could, and further, that Germany could hardly claim the moral high ground in the conflict, she falls silent. We put weapons into the hands of young men and order them to do things that would warrant prosecution in any other context. Despite the veneer of professionalism that we like to think separates us from savage irregulars, we are no better than our enemies. War is a brutal business. Some of our most famous and respected commanders warn us against advocating combat as a means of problem solving: /I confess, without shame, that I am sick and tired of fighting --- its glory is all moonshine; even success the most brilliant is over dead and mangled bodies, with the anguish and lamentations of distant families, appealing to me for sons, husbands, and fathers ... it is only those who have never heard a shot, never heard the shriek and groans of the wounded and lacerated ... that cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation. (William Tecumseh Sherman, May 1865)/ snip I have talked former enemies here in the states back in the 90's. None that I spoke with holds any grudge against us and none had anything good to say about war in general. Same same me. I can't speak for everyone, but that has been my experience. Violence is the problem not the solution. I wish more people understood this issue as you do, but sadly, we live in a society that glorifies violence. We spend our treasure building bombs instead of bridges, and that saddens me deeply. Muckraking is as old as the hills and from the description of the contents of this book it appears that is what we have. One dimensional tripe as far as I can see. If one does not understand that what Turse describes is what governments, corporations, banks, industries and the military do to one extent or another, then perhaps they should take some more reading and logic classes. None have clean hands. Good violence? Bad violence? I don't think so. Renounce violence and work for peace. You were there. You know more about this than I do. What you've written here embodies the spirit of the Biofuels list, and I believe that the INTENT of posting articles about war and war mongering is to instill a preference for nonviolent conflict resolution. That's what I'd like to see, for what it's worth! Robert Luis Rabello Adventure for Your Mind http://www.newadventure.ca Meet the People video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txsCdh1hZ6c Crisis video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZedNEXhTn4 The Long Journey video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy4muxaksgk ___ Sustainablelorgbiofuel mailing list Sustainablelorgbiofuel@lists.sustainablelists.org http://lists.eruditium.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel
Re: [Biofuel] Kill Anything That Moves
On 3/13/2013 2:52 PM, Gustl wrote: I understand, but what I hear so much is Your country always wrong. Folks in general often seem to want pictures of themselves or others in an either/or way and most often it just isn't that easy. For me the only thing which is easy is to realize that violence is wrong. Violence against others, self, countries, religions, races, whatever. On this point, we completely agree. Violence breeds more violence, beginning a self-sustaining cycle of retribution. It only stops when someone is willing to take the last blow and not retaliate. (For me, that is the real message of the Christian cross, but that's a different discussion.) Sadly, we live in a world where soldiering and policing, which should serve to deter, limit or even prevent violence, become tools of the state to suppress the democratic process. Witness what happened to the Occupy movement, for example. Most of the our country is always wrong criticism has a root in policy decisions that put our soldiers in ethically complex situations, where youthful misjudgment and the tendency to react with force when facing a potential threat rise to the top of the behavioral hierarchy. I contend that the military is, by necessity, a blunt instrument, and as such, should be used with extreme care. But among my own family members, the people with whom I attend church and most of my friends, fear displaces reason and military solutions take priority over diplomacy. Do you realize that the Vietnamese have been to war almost continuously for nearly 9 centuries, and the better part of that with China? Yes, I know that. They are a tenacious people, for certain! The Vietnamese now call that conflict in which I participated the American war to differentiate it from all the others. Pick your mythology and it is there. Cain slew Abel. OK, it has only gotten worse from there. The finger needs to be pointed at the problem which is violence stemming from greed and self interest. This is very true. My youngest son went to Cambodia last Christmas and he developed a love for the Cambodian people on that trip. I've subsequently learned that our country dropped more tonnage of bombs on noncombatant Cambodia between 1965 - 1972 than all of the allies dropped during WWII. The destruction of rural villages created a refugee problem in Phnom Penh and set the stage for the rise of the Khmer Rogue. Was that bombing necessary? Did it help us achieve our military objectives? It's easy to judge in hindsight. But in the heat of battle, it's far easier to pull the trigger or punch out the bombs than it is to show restraint. Window dressing and sensationalism don't count for much. If you're going to kill off something pernicious it needs to be done at the root. Describing the leaves and branches will not suffice. All countries are guilty of the same thing to one extent or another. None have clean hands. The difference seems to be in degree. The Roman empire used to be the big dog and they did much good and much evil. Now we are in that position and nothing much has changed save the means and the scale. Sooner or later we will diminish and another country will take our place as either the bad guy or the good guy of the world. Seems to be no in-betweens. Folks like extremes brother. A good many don't like self discipline, self restraint and particularly a healthy dose of responsibility. It's not my fault. OK Agreed. I guess I would rather find commonalities and work with folks for the good of all. I was up in the VA hospital in the congestive heart failure ward when a Catholic priest stopped by (I'm not Catholic) to say hello. I immediately knew he was Vietnamese from his features and his speech. Before he left I apologized to him for what we did to his country and he thanked me for fighting to save it. I know an elderly Vietnamese woman named Lan (a name which means orchid and is very appropriate for her) from church. She says the same thing! It seems odd to me, but she survived the war and her perspective surprised me. It was an interesting moment to say the least. How things look depend on where one is standing I suppose. Still, I would rather renounce violence and war rather than try to justify it. That which requires justification is inherently wrong. It would interest me to see someone write a book about all the good things that folks did in a war. We did a lot of good over there as well as a lot of evil. It happens in all wars. Individuals come forward when and where least expected. I have a friend, former Marine who was there but was a clerk typist with no combat experience who befriended the children of the little ville near him. He saved a young girls life when no one, American or Vietnamese, would help her. He is haunted with
[Biofuel] The New Propaganda Is Liberal -- The New Slavery Is Digital
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34289.htm?utm_source=ICH%3A+John+Pilger%3A+The+New+Propaganda+Is+Liberal+-+The+New+Slavery+Is+Digitalutm_campaign=FIRSTutm_medium=email The New Propaganda Is Liberal -- The New Slavery Is Digital By John Pilger March 13, 2013 Information Clearing House - What is modern propaganda? For many, it is the lies of a totalitarian state. In the 1970s, I met Leni Riefenstahl and asked her about her epic films that glorified the Nazis. Using revolutionary camera and lighting techniques, she produced a documentary form that mesmerized Germans; her Triumph of the Will cast Hitler's spell. She told me that the messages of her films were dependent not on orders from above, but on the submissive void of the German public. Did that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie? Everyone, she said. Today, we prefer to believe that there is no submissive void. Choice is ubiquitous. Phones are platforms that launch every half-thought. There is Google from outer space if you need it. Caressed like rosary beads, the precious devices are borne heads-down, relentlessly monitored and prioritized. Their dominant theme is the self. Me. My needs. Riefenstahl's submissive void is today's digital slavery. Edward Said described this wired state in Culture and Imperialism as taking imperialism where navies could never reach. It is the ultimate means of social control because it is voluntary, addictive and shrouded in illusions of personal freedom. Today's message of grotesque inequality, social injustice and war is the propaganda of liberal democracies. By any measure of human behavior, this is extremism. When Hugo Chavez challenged it, he was abused in bad faith; and his successor will be subverted by the same zealots of the American Enterprise Institute, Harvard's Kennedy School and the human rights organizations that have appropriated American liberalism and underpin its propaganda. The historian Norman Pollack calls this liberal fascism. He wrote, All is normality on display. For [Nazi] goose-steppers, substitute the seemingly more innocuous militarization of the total culture. And for the bombastic leader, we have the reformer manque, blithely at work [in the White House], planning and executing assassination, smiling all the while. Whereas a generation ago, dissent and biting satire were allowed in the mainstream, today their counterfeits are acceptable and a fake moral zeitgeist rules. Identity is all, mutating feminism and declaring class obsolete. Just as collateral damage covers for mass murder, austerity has become an acceptable lie. Beneath the veneer of consumerism, a quarter of Greater Manchester is reported to be living in extreme poverty. The militarist violence perpetrated against hundreds of thousands of nameless men, women and children by our governments is never a crime against humanity. Interviewing Tony Blair 10 years on from his criminal invasion of Iraq, the BBC's Kirsty Wark gifted him a moment he could only dream of. She allowed Blair to agonize over his difficult decision rather than call him to account for the monumental lies and bloodbath he launched. One is reminded of Albert Speer. Hollywood has returned to its cold war role, led by liberals. Ben Affleck's Oscar-winning Argo is the first feature film so integrated into the propaganda system that its subliminal warning of Iran's threat is offered as Obama is preparing, yet again, to attack Iran. That Affleck's true story of good-guys-vs- bad-Muslims is as much a fabrication as Obama's justification for his war plans is lost in PR-managed plaudits. As the independent critic Andrew O'Hehir points out, Argo is a propaganda movie in the truest sense, one that claims to be innocent of all ideology. That is, it debases the art of film-making to reflect an image of the power it serves. The true story is that, for 34 years, the US foreign policy elite have seethed with revenge for the loss of the shah of Iran, their beloved tyrant, and his CIA-designed state of torture. When Iranian students occupied the US embassy in Tehran in 1979, they found a trove of incriminating documents, which revealed that an Israeli spy network was operating inside the US, stealing top scientific and military secrets. Today, the duplicitous Zionist ally -- not Iran -- is the one and only nuclear threat in the Middle East. In 1977, Carl Bernstein, famed for his Watergate reporting, disclosed that more than 400 journalists and executives of mostly liberal US media organizations had worked for the CIA in the past 25 years. They included journalists from the New York Times, Time, and the big TV broadcasters. These days, such a formal nefarious workforce is quite unnecessary. In 2010, the New York Times made no secret of its collusion with the White House in censoring the WikiLeaks war logs. The CIA has an entertainment industry liaison office that
[Biofuel] Cheney Admits that He Lied about 9/11, What Else Did He Lie About?
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34219.htm * Cheney Admits that He Lied about 9/11 What Else Did He Lie About?* *By Washington's Blog * March 09, 2013 Information Clearing House http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/*- *WB http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/03/cheney-admits-that-he-lied-about-911.html - The New York Times' Maureen Dowd writes http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/opinion/perspectives/maureen-dowd-repent-dick-cheney-678240/ today (March 08, 2013): In a documentary soon to appear on Showtime, The World According to Dick Cheney, [Cheney said] I got on the telephone with the president, who was in Florida, and told him not to be at one location where we could both be taken out. Mr. Cheney kept W. flying aimlessly in the air on 9/11 while he and Lynn left on a helicopter for a secure undisclosed location, leaving Washington in a bleak, scared silence, with no one reassuring the nation in those first terrifying hours. I gave the instructions that we'd authorize our pilots to take it out, he says, referring to the jet headed to Washington that crashed in a Pennsylvania field. He adds: After I'd given the order, it was pretty quiet. Everybody had heard it, and it was obviously a significant moment. *** When they testified together before the 9/11 Commission, W. and Mr. Cheney *kept up a pretense* that in a previous call, the president had authorized the vice president to give a shoot-down order if needed. But the commission found no documentary evidence for this call. In other words, Cheney pretended that Bush had authorized a shoot-down order, but Cheney now admits that he never did. In fact, Cheney acted as if he was the president on 9/11. * Cheney lied about numerous other facts related to 9/11 as well. For example, Cheney: * Falsely linked Iraq with 9/11 http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/10/5-hours-after-the-911-attacks-donald-rumsfeld-said-my-interest-is-to-hit-saddam-he-also-said-go-massive-sweep-it-all-up-things-related-and-not-and-at-2.html (indeed, the entire torture program was aimed at establishing such a false linkage http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/10/5-hours-after-the-911-attacks-donald-rumsfeld-said-my-interest-is-to-hit-saddam-he-also-said-go-massive-sweep-it-all-up-things-related-and-not-and-at-2.html; and Cheney is the guy who pushed for torture http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Cheney_admits_authorizing_detainees_torture_1215.html, pressured the Justice Department lawyers to write memos saying torture was legal http://pubrecord.org/torture/311/newly-released-e-mails-reveal-cheney-pressured-doj-to-approve-torture/, and made the pitch to Congress justifying torture http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/02/AR2009060203999.html?hpid=topnews. the former director of the CIA said Cheney of overseeing American torture policies http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/cheney-oversaw-torture-former-cia-director/2005/11/18/1132016963907.html) * Falsely claimed that spying on Americans, torture, the Patriot Act, the Afghanistan war, the Iraq war and the war on terror were all necessitated by 9/11 ... when /all of them/ started or were planned /before/ 9/11 http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/08/u-s-government-planned-indefinite-detention-of-citizens-long-before-911.html * Falsely stated that an attack such as 9/11 was unforeseeable http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2008/04/911-was-foreseeable.html, when Al Qaeda flying planes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon was something which American military and intelligence services -- and our allies -- /knew/ could happen http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/06/al-qaeda-flying-planes-into-the-world-trade-center-and-pentagon-was-foreseeable.html * Falsely pretended that he was out of the loop during the 9/11 attacks http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2007/03/minetas-testimony-confirmed.html * Falsely blamed others for 9/11 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/02/cheney-pins-blame-for-911_n_210300.html, when Cheney was in charge of all of America's counter-terrorism exercises, activities and responses on 9/11. See this Department of State announcement http://web.archive.org/web/20010630041038/http://www.usinfo.state.gov/regional/af/security/a1050878.htm and this CNN article http://archives.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/09/11/ar911.king.cheney/ ... * ... And when Cheney was apparently responsible for letting the Pentagon get hit by an airplane http://www.911truthmovement.org/video/hamilton_win.wmv (confirmed here http://www.youtube.com/v/u-5PKQTUz5o and here) * And was instrumental in squashing a real investigation into 9/11 http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2010/03/the-reason-for-this-cover-up-goes-right-to-the-white-house.html /* Indeed, Cheney initiated Continuity of Government plans on
[Biofuel] Child Marriages: 39,000 Every Day
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34229.htm *Child Marriages: 39,000 Every Day * *By UN Women* /Joint press release by UNFPA, UNICEF, WHO, UN Women, the United Nations Foundation, World Vision, Girls Not Brides, Every Woman Every Child, World YWCA and The Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health./ *-- NEW YORK, 7 March 2013 --*Between 2011 and 2020, more than 140 million girls will become child brides, according to United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). If current levels of child marriages hold, 14.2 million girls annually or 39,000 daily will marry too young. Furthermore, of the 140 million girls who will marry before the age of 18, 50 million will be under the age of 15. Despite the physical damage and the persistent discrimination to young girls, little progress has been made toward ending the practice of child marriage. In fact, the problem threatens to increase with the expanding youth population in the developing world. http://www.unwomen.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Yemeni-child-bride.png /Tahani, 8, is seen with her husband Majed, 27, and her former classmate Ghada, 8, and her husband, outside their home in Hajjah, Yemen, 26 July, 2010. Photo Credit: © Stephanie Sinclair/VII/Tooyoungtowed.org/ Child marriage is an appalling violation of human rights and robs girls of their education, health and long-term prospects, says Babatunde Osotimehin, M.D, Executive Director, UNFPA. A girl who is married as a child is one whose potential will not be fulfilled. Since many parents and communities also want the very best for their daughters, we must work together and end child marriage. Girls married young are more vulnerable to intimate partner violence and sexual abuse than those who marry later. Complications of pregnancy and childbirth are the leading cause of death in young women aged 15-19. Young girls who marry later and delay pregnancy beyond their adolescence have more chances to stay healthier, to better their education and build a better life for themselves and their families, says Flavia Bustreo, M.D., Assistant Director-General for Family, Women's and Children's Health at the World Health Organization. We have the means at our disposal to work together to stop child marriage. On 7 March, a special session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) will focus on child marriage. The Governments of Bangladesh, Malawi and Canada will jointly sponsor the session. It is held in support of Every Woman Every Child, a movement spearheaded by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon that aims to save the lives of 16 million women and children by 2015. The session will address the problems created by early marriages and ways to prevent them. Mereso Kiluso, a Tanzanian mother of five now in her 20s, who was married at 14 to an abusive man in his 70s, will describe her experience. If child marriage is not properly addressed, UN Millennium Development Goals 4 5 -- calling for a two-thirds reduction in the under-five mortality rate and a three-fourths reduction in the maternal deaths by 2015 -- will not be met. Child marriage -- defined as marriage before the age of 18 -- applies to both boys and girls, but the practice is far more common among young girls. Child marriage is a global issue but rates vary dramatically, both within and between countries. In both proportions and numbers, most child marriages take place in rural sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. In South Asia, nearly half of young women and in sub-Saharan Africa more than one third of young women are married by their 18th birthday. The 10 countries with the highest rates of child marriage are: Niger, 75 per cent; Chad and Central African Republic, 68 per cent; Bangladesh, 66 per cent; Guinea, 63 per cent; Mozambique, 56 per cent; Mali, 55 per cent; Burkina Faso and South Sudan, 52 per cent; and Malawi, 50 per cent. In terms of absolute numbers, because of the size of its population, India has the most child marriages. What progress has been made to stop the practice has been in urban areas where families see greater work and education opportunities for young girls. *A violation of the rights of girls* No girl should be robbed of her childhood, her education and health, and her aspirations. Yet today millions of girls are denied their rights each year when they are married as child brides, says Michelle Bachelet, M.D., Executive Director of UN Women. Child marriage is increasingly recognized as a violation of the rights of girls for the following reasons: * Effectively ending their education * Blocking any opportunity to gain vocational and life skills * Exposing them to the risks of too-early pregnancy, child bearing, and motherhood before they are physically and psychologically ready * Increasing their risk of intimate partner sexual violence and HIV infection Child marriage is a huge
[Biofuel] Global Temperatures Highest in 4,000 Years
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34238.htm Global Temperatures Highest in 4,000 Years By JUSTIN GILLIS March 10, 2013 Information Clearing House - NYT -- Global temperatures are warmer than at any time in at least 4,000 years, scientists reported Thursday, and over the coming decades are likely to surpass levels not seen on the planet since before the last ice age. Previous research had extended back roughly 1,500 years, and suggested that the rapid temperature spike of the past century, believed to be a consequence of human activity, exceeded any warming episode during those years. The new work confirms that result while suggesting the modern warming is unique over a longer period. Even if the temperature increase from human activity that is projected for later this century comes out on the low end of estimates, scientists said, the planet will be at least as warm as it was during the warmest periods of the modern geological era, known as the Holocene, and probably warmer than that. That epoch began about 12,000 years ago, after changes in incoming sunshine caused vast ice sheets to melt across the Northern Hemisphere. Scientists believe the moderate climate of the Holocene set the stage for the rise of human civilization roughly 8,000 years ago and continues to sustain it by, for example, permitting a high level of food production. In the new research, scheduled for publication on Friday in the journal Science, Shaun Marcott, an earth scientist at Oregon State University, and his colleagues compiled the most meticulous reconstruction yet of global temperatures over the past 11,300 years, virtually the entire Holocene. They used indicators like the distribution of microscopic, temperature-sensitive ocean creatures to determine past climate. Like previous such efforts, the method gives only an approximation. Michael E. Mann, a researcher at Pennsylvania State University who is an expert in the relevant techniques but was not involved in the new research, said the authors had made conservative data choices in their analysis. It's another important achievement and significant result as we continue to refine our knowledge and understanding of climate change, Dr. Mann said. Though the paper is the most complete reconstruction of global temperature, it is roughly consistent with previous work on a regional scale. It suggests that changes in the amount and distribution of incoming sunlight, caused by wobbles in the earth's orbit, contributed to a sharp temperature rise in the early Holocene. The climate then stabilized at relatively warm temperatures about 10,000 years ago, hitting a plateau that lasted for roughly 5,000 years, the paper shows. After that, shifts of incoming sunshine prompted a long, slow cooling trend. The cooling was interrupted, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, by a fairly brief spike during the Middle Ages, known as the Medieval Warm Period. (It was then that the Vikings settled Greenland, dying out there when the climate cooled again.) Scientists say that if natural factors were still governing the climate, the Northern Hemisphere would probably be destined to freeze over again in several thousand years. We were on this downward slope, presumably going back toward another ice age, Dr. Marcott said. Instead, scientists believe the enormous increase in greenhouse gases caused by industrialization will almost certainly prevent that. During the long climatic plateau of the early Holocene, global temperatures were roughly the same as those of today, at least within the uncertainty of the estimates, the new paper shows. This is consistent with a large body of past research focused on the Northern Hemisphere, which showed a distribution of ice and vegetation suggestive of a relatively warm climate. The modern rise that has recreated the temperatures of 5,000 years ago is occurring at an exceedingly rapid clip on a geological time scale, appearing in graphs in the new paper as a sharp vertical spike. If the rise continues apace, early Holocene temperatures are likely to be surpassed within this century, Dr. Marcott said. Dr. Mann pointed out that the early Holocene temperature increase was almost certainly slow, giving plants and creatures time to adjust. But he said the modern spike would probably threaten the survival of many species, in addition to putting severe stresses on human civilization. We and other living things can adapt to slower changes, Dr. Mann said. It's the unprecedented speed with which we're changing the climate that is so worrisome. © 2013 The New York Times Company -- Robert Luis Rabello Adventure for Your Mind http://www.newadventure.ca Meet the People video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txsCdh1hZ6c Crisis video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZedNEXhTn4 The Long Journey video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy4muxaksgk
[Biofuel] How Deregulation Resurrected American Economic Insecurity
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34235.htm How Deregulation Resurrected American Economic Insecurity By Paul Craig Roberts March 10, 2013 Information Clearing House - PCR - The US might not be in a Great Depression, but economic insecurity has nevertheless returned to America. John N. Gray, a distinguished intellect and retired professor of intellectual history at the London School of Economics, disagrees with the view that the end of history has placed humanity on a course of ethical and economic progress. History, Gray believes, is not progressing to a higher stage. Instead, humanity is repeating the same follies and is destined to endure the same disasters. It is the Enclosures, the Repeal of the Corn Laws, and the Poor Law Act of 1834 all over again. The problem is humans themselves. They are not questioning beings. Human beings use the power of scientific knowledge to assert and defend the values and goals they already have. Instead of ethics and politics having advanced with the growth of knowledge, we are experiencing today state terror and murder on unprecedented scale as Washington kills people with drones and invasions in seven countries and threatens others. The US claims to be the democratic light unto the world, the indispensable nation, but it has resurrected in violation of its own law and international law the torture dungeons of the unaccountable governments of medieval Europe. Few people see the disconnect between the propaganda about the goodness of America and the evil that its government practices. Torture was banned. Its practice was made the act of a war criminal government. But the Bush and Obama regimes have resurrected torture as a defense of the state against citizens who reveal its crimes and against those who resist its aggression. The CIA official who revealed that the US government was torturing detainees in violation of US and international law, John Kiriakou, was subjected to wrongful prosecution and sentenced to prison. The elected officials who approved the torture and those who conducted the torture remain free of all charges to torture again. Bradley Manning, the US soldier who did his duty under the military code and revealed US war crimes that were ignored by his superiors had all of his constitutional rights violated and is now being tried on trumped-up and false charges. The US government claims that by telling the truth Manning aided the enemies of the United States. The US government is so corrupt that it doesn't realize the self-damnation of declaring the truth to be against it. Some light unto the world Washington is. The myths to which Americans subscribe are resulting in their social, political, and economic destruction. In False Dawn: The Delusions Of Global Capitalism, John Gray lays out the destructive consequences of the free market ideology. Gray demonstrates that the libertarian belief that free markets are something that the government suppresses and takes away from us is contradicted by the historical fact that free markets are creatures of state power, and persist only so long as the state is able to prevent human needs for security and the control of economic risk from finding political expression. Free unregulated markets have existed only during short periods of history when state power and economic conditions were conducive to the imposition of unregulated markets. Unregulated markets existed for awhile in Victorian England, and Clinton, Bush, Obama, Thatcher and politicians in Australia, and New Zealand have removed regulation from various economic activities from the 1980s through the present. The evidence is in and piles up daily. Instability is on the rise, and with it has come economic insecurity. Homelessness is increasing. In the last decade, New York City has experienced a 73 percent increase in homelessness, while the net worth of the city's mayor has risen to $27 billion. http://www.salon.com/2013/03/05/new_york_homelessness_sees_unprecedented_rise/singleton/ Deregulation of the financial system produced such massive instability that the Federal Reserve had to lend the banks $16 trillion (a sum equal to US national debt). The Federal Reserve is in the fourth year of monetizing $1 trillion annually of US debt, raising the specter of dollar devaluation and inflation. Once great manufacturing cities, such as Detroit, are in steep decline. Real interest rates are negative, depriving retirees of interest income. The high unemployment rate of recent university graduates, despite an alleged economic recovery, proves that education is no longer the answer. Millions of jobs have disappeared. Unemployment is high. Poverty has increased as has the number of Americans on food stamps. The once vibrant American middle class is disappearing. The blue-collar working class is being proletarianized. Labor arbitrage across national borders has destroyed
[Biofuel] A Huge Hunger Strike at Guantánamo
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34237.htm A Huge Hunger Strike at Guantánamo By Andy Worthington March 10, 2013 Information Clearing House - AW -- When is a hunger strike not a hunger strike? Apparently, when the government says it doesn't exist. At Guantánamo, reports first began to emerge on February 23 about a camp-wide hunger strike, of a scale not seen since before Barack Obama became President. On the Free Fayiz and Fawzi page on Facebook, run by lawyers for Fayiz al-Kandari and Fawzi al-Odah, the last two Kuwaitis in the prison, the following message appeared: Information is beginning to come out about a hunger strike, the size of which has not been seen since 2008. Preliminary word is that it's due to unprecedented searches and a new guard force. Fayiz al-Kandari's team of military lawyers arrived at the prison on February 25, and the day after announced, Fayiz has lost more than twenty pounds and lacks the ability to concentrate for more than a few minutes at a time due to a camp wide hunger strike. Apparently there is a dispute over searches and the confiscations. We believe there is a desperation setting amongst the prisoners whereby GTMO is forgotten and its condemned men will never get an opportunity to prove their innocence or be free. On February 27, the team reported, Today, we had a communication with the Kuwait legal team concerning Fayiz and Fawzi's physical condition in GTMO. It is difficult meeting with a man who has not eaten in almost three weeks, but we are scheduled for an all-day session tomorrow which we are sure Fayiz will not be able to complete due his failing physical condition. Additionally, we learned that our other client Abdul Ghani, [an Afghan] who has been cleared for release since 2010, is also on a hunger strike. Eleven years without an opportunity to defend themselves. On February 28, the lawyers confirmed that Fayiz al-Kandari's weight loss over the previous three and a half weeks had reached 26 pounds (12 kg), and on March 5, after meeting their client, they reported that he had said that the hunger strike certainly hurts physically, but he felt very sorry for his parents whose psychological pain is ten times greater than his physical discomfort. While that last comment showed great concern for others, no one aware of the situation at Guantánamo would begrudge the men still held from dwelling on their own position, and concluding that a hunger strike is the only way to try and draw attention to their plight. Lt. Col. Barry Wingard, al-Kandari's military lawyer, told FireDogLake, there is a growing feeling here that death is the road out of GTMO. Death has indeed been the way out for three of the last seven prisoners to leave the prison --- two who died in 2011, and one, Adnan Latif, a Yemeni, who died last September, despite having repeatedly been cleared for release from the prison. Despair is entirely appropriate at Guantánamo for the 166 men still held, because, although 86 of them were cleared for release at least three years ago by the interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force, established by President Obama (and some were cleared for release under President Bush, between 2004 and 2007), they are still held because of Congressional obstruction, and because of President Obama's refusal to make the case that holding men cleared for release is a disgrace. Of the 80 others, 46 were recommended for indefinite detention without charge or trial by the Guantánamo Review Task Force, and the rest were recommended for trials. Two years ago, President Obama issued an executive order formalizing the indefinite detention of those 46 men, on the basis that they were too dangerous to release, even though insufficient evidence existed to put them on trial. This was also disgraceful, as it attempted to create the illusion that a collection of unverifiable statements produced through the use of torture, other forms of coercion, or bribery could be regarded as something approximating evidence, when that is clearly not the case. In an effort to placate critics, the President promised periodic reviews of these men's cases in his executive order, although two years later no reviews have taken place at all, and a review board has not even been established. These men can, therefore, reasonably be expected to regard themselves as having been abandoned by the President at least as thoroughly as the 86 men cleared for release who are still held. In addition, the majority of the rest of the prisoners --- those recommended for trials --- are also effectively being detained forever without any kind of review process, because, in recent months, the deeply conservative court of appeals in Washington D.C. has ruled that two of the key charges in the military commission trial system first established under President Bush to charge Guantánamo prisoners were not regarded as war crimes when the
[Biofuel] The Green Light for Zionism’s Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34243.htm 65 Years Ago The Green Light for Zionism’s Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine By Alan Hart March 10, 2013 Information Clearing House - I find myself wondering how many of our present day leaders, President Obama in particular, are aware of what happened in Palestine on 10 March 65 years ago. On that day in 1948, two months before Israel’s unilateral declaration of independence in defiance of the will of the organized international community as it then was at the UN, Zionism’s in-Palestine political and military leaders met in Tel Aviv to formally adopt PLAN DALET, the blueprint with operational military orders for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. They did not and never would refer to the crime they authorised as ethnic cleansing. Their euphemism for it was “transfer”. As noted in an excellent anniversary briefing paper by IMEU (the American-founded Institute for Middle East Understanding), from the earliest days of modern political Zionism its advocates grappled with the problem of creating a Jewish majority state in a part of the world where Palestinian Arabs were the overwhelming majority of the population. The earliest insider information we have on Zionism’s thinking is from the diary of Theodor Herzl, the founding father of Zionism’s colonial-like enterprise. He wrote: “We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country… expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.” Those words were committed to paper by Herzl in 1895 but they were not published (in other words they were suppressed) until 1962. By August 1937 “transfer” was a discreet but hot topic for discussion at the 20th Zionist Congress in Zurich, Switzerland. All in attendance were aware that the process of dispossessing the Palestinian peasants (the fellahin) mainly by purchasing land from absentee owners had been underway for years. Referring to this David Ben-Gurion, who would become Israel’s first prime minister, said: “You are no doubt aware of the (Jewish National Fund’s) activity in this respect. Now a transfer of a completely different scope will have to be carried out. In many parts of the country new settlement will not be possible without transferring the Arab fellahin…Jewish power (in Palestine), which grows steadily, will also increase our possibilities to carry out this transfer on a large scale.” A year later Ben-Gurion told a meeting of the Jewish Agency that he supported compulsory transfer. He added: “I don’t see anything immoral in it.” In my view that’s a most revealing statement. It tells us – does it not? – that Ben-Gurion, the Zionist state’s founding father, was a man with no sense of what was morally right and wrong. Joseph Weitz was the director of the Jewish National Fund’s Lands Department which was responsible for acquiring the land for Zionism’s enterprise in Palestine. One of his diary entries for December 1940 reads as follows: “There is no way besides transferring the Arabs from here to the neighbouring countries, and to transfer all of them, save perhaps for (the Arabs of) Bethlehem, Nazareth and Old Jerusalem. Not one village must be left, not one (Bedouin) tribe. And only after this transfer will the country be able to absorb millions of our brothers and the Jewish problem will cease to exist. There is no other solution.” Plan Dalet called for: “Mounting operations against enemy population centres located inside or near our defensive system in order to prevent them from being used as bases by an active armed force. These operations can be divided into the following categories: “Destruction of villages – setting fire to, blowing up, and planting mines in the debris – especially those population centres which are difficult to control continuously. “Mounting search and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the village and conducting a search inside it. In the event of resistance, the armed force must be destroyed and the population must be expelled outside the borders of the state.” Before the Zionist state declared itself to be in existence on 14 May 1948, more than 200 Palestinian villages had already been emptied and about 175,000 Palestinians were already refugees. Some had fled in fear; others were expelled by Zionist forces. The prime fear factor was the slaughter by Zionist terrorists of more than 100 Palestinian men, women and children at Deir Yassin near Jerusalem. As Arthur Koestler was to write, the “bloodbath” at Deir Yassin was “the psychologically decisive factor in the spectacular exodus of the Arabs from the Holy Land and the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem.” It was, however, Menachem Begin, Zionism’s terror master and
[Biofuel] The Bolivarian Revolution, History Has Not Ended in Latin America
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34241.htm The Bolivarian Revolution History Has Not Ended in Latin America By Melkulangara BHADRAKUMAR March 10, 2013 Information Clearing House - History, evidently, has not ended in Latin America. Amidst the «sequester» storm battering the Washington political circuit incessantly, United States President Barack Obama could still see a silver lining among the dark heavy clouds and he scrambled to express an interest in a «constructive relationship» with Venezuela. Hardly had President Hugo Chavez breathed his last. But Obama who is never lost for words sounded uncharacteristically curt and seemed unsure how to necessarily phrase his offer of condolences. The US political elites somewhat made up for it -- the elites who are so polarized that they may not even agree that the earth rotates around the sun closed ranks immediately to peer through the binoculars at faraway Caracas and cry 'Land, ho!' Chavez evokes strong feelings in the American mind. The Republicans on the Hill gloated that it is a good thing that Chavez died. Both the Democrats and the Republicans visualize that a chance has turned up to put behind the long period of strained US-Venezuelan ties and open a new page. However, as the day wore on, the US state department stepped in to hold a special briefing, which gave a nuanced American reaction, perhaps in an attempt to finesse the intemperate political outbursts of the Congressmen as well as to convey a complex set of signals to the leadership in charge in Caracas... Devoid of rhetoric, the state department briefing signaled Washington's readiness to deal with post-Chavez Venezuela, but with the important caveat that the presidential election should be held within 30 days as mandated under the constitution; it should provide a «level playing field» for the opposition to participate; and, it should be held in a free and fair manner with foreign observers who would need to be convinced that «democratic principles» have been adhered to. The unnamed senior state department officials lamented that Chavez made a practice of using Uncle Sam as a «foil, using us as sort of a straw man that could be attacked», and they admitted «just how difficult it's been to try and have the positive relationship with Venezuela that we'd like... a productive, more functional relationship». They repeatedly identified specific areas where there could be mutual interest, «where our [American and Venezuelan] interests coincide» -- counter-narcotics, counterterrorism, trade and economic ties, energy. They said the US will «see if there's any space to work these things... if there's space to do so on their [Venezuelan] side, then we'll find out» -- although, «at least initially, I don't see this changing very much.» On the whole, therefore, the US will adopt a «step-by-step process during which we will continue to speak out and to defend the democratic principles... we've set out sort of a roadmap, if you will, of the way we'd like to do this, a sort of step-by-step process.» Reading between the lines, the Obama administration is groping for a way forward, given the high probability that Chavez's right hand man and Vice President, Nicolas Maduro might be the dominant power to emerge in the forthcoming presidential election. Washington will pursue a twin-track approach to him by piling pressure on the pretext of its concern for «democratic principles» while looking for an opening for a «constructive relationship». This is a well-honed approach that US has deployed over time not only in Latin America but elsewhere too. But whether it will work in today's Venezuela remains to be seen. Chavez's departure does not mean the end for the Left in Venezuela. Nor can the US administration overlook the huge political significance of the allegiance openly expressed by the Venezuelan military to Maduro. Playing the long game Clearly, leftism has deeply penetrated the Venezuelan society and in the short term at least, Maduro will inherit the mantle of leadership. The Venezuelan opposition, which broadly represents the interests of the middle class, lacks the clout today to tilt the prevailing balance of power in its favor. Even detractors would admit that Chavez repeatedly secured legitimate mandates to rule through genuinely democratic elections. In short, the US's «roadmap» and «step-by-step process» will aim on the one hand to rattle the Maduro government so as to compel/coax it to «constructively» respond to Washington's overtures while on the other hand play the long game. The two chilling expressions words in the entire state department briefing -- «roadmap» and «step-by-step process» -- would suggest that Uncle Sam has every intention to discredit Chavisomo, the teachings of Chavez, now that the bizarrely compelling populist socialist gadfly of immense charisma has vacated the stage. Evidently,
[Biofuel] US Criminal Propensity Justifies North Korea's Nukes
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34242.htm US Criminal Propensity Justifies North Korea's Nukes By Finian Cunningham March 10, 2013 Information Clearing House - The Democratic People's Republic of Korea stands out. But it is not because the secretive Stalinist regime is a nuclear pariah threatening global security, as the Western corporate media would have us believe. No, North Korea stands out for being a beacon of rationality and, incredible as it may seem, peace. Bear in mind the following features: No other state on earth has endured a trade embargo or a gamut of diplomatic, financial and economic sanctions more than North Korea. For more than 63 years, since the beginning of the Korean War (1950-53), the DPRK has been frozen out of normal relations with other international states because of a trade embargo imposed by Washington. This illegal straightjacket has been tightened several times down through the decades with resolutions and sanctions implemented by the UN Security Council - the latest being instigated last Friday. Iran has endured more than 30 years of US-led sanctions, while Cuba has had to live with five decades of a US-led blockade. North Korea, therefore, has the dubious distinction of being the country that has been most cut off from the international community and all the vital opportunities that come with such normal contact for beneficialdevelopment. The latest round of sanctions at the UN, initiated once again by the US, aims to make all remaining international conduct by North Korea next to impossible. As well as complete blackout of financial transactions, North Korea's shipping and air transport are to be impounded if they do not comply with unilateral inspections at any point. The second distinguishing feature of North Korea is that no other state has been threatened on more occasions with nuclear annihilation. Not even Iran, despite despicable threats from the US and Israel, can out-claim North Korea on this level of criminal aggression towards its people. All threats of nuclear extinction made against North Korea have come from one source - the United States of America. On just one of these nefarious occasions, in 1995, former US Joint Chiefs of Staff General Colin Powell quipped that North Korea would be turned into a charcoal briquette. Yet in the Orwellian world of Western governments and their dutiful news media, reality is turned upside down. Selective amnesia and selective reporting convey the public image that it is North Korea who is the aggressor and insane nuclear threat while the US is the voice of reason, peace and legality. This past week, Western media have quickly highlighted North Korea's threats of pre-emptive nuclear strikes against South Korea and its American patron following the latest round of UN sanctions. The subtle bias inculcates the notion that North Korea is some kind of crazed pariah, while the US and its South Korean ally are as innocent as white doves. Britain's Guardian newspaper headlined: North Korea urged to halt 'provocative actions' in wake of sanctions. While CNN reported: Even by North Korean standards, the threats this week by leader Kim Jong Un have been incredibly provocative, making the situation on the Korean Peninsula more worrisome. The Guardian quoted a White House spokesman saying: North Korea's threats are not helpful. We have consistently called on North Korea to improve relations with its neighbours, including South Korea. One would never guess the true nature of the conflict on the Korean Peninsula and its very real threat to global security from a reading of the Western mainstream media. All history of the Korean conflict has been whitewashed of salient facts. Take just the recent history over the last months. The latest sanctions imposed on North Korea are said to be in response to the DPRK's underground nuclear bomb test on 12 February. But that test was carried out after the country was threatened with sanctions in January following its successful launch of a long-range missile into outer space in December. That missile was not armed, threatened no-one and helped put a civilian satellite into orbit. Quite an achievement that should be lauded not condemned as the action of a criminal miscreant state. What we have here is a long cycle of US-led provocation and North Korean counter-provocation. But the dynamic is only ever presented as an irrational series of provocations by Pyongyang. The nuclear test last month by the DPRK is its third. Previously, there were tests in 2009 and 2006. Both the Obama administrations and its George W Bush predecessors have scuttled disarmament negotiations between North Korea and China on one side and the US, South Korea and Japan on the other. Contrary to the spin put out by Washington and the Western media, North Korea has engaged fully in earlier talks, but every time it is the
[Biofuel] Iraq May Be Broken, But It Is Our Political Class That Is Bankrupted
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34236.htm Iraq May Be Broken, But It Is Our Political Class That Is Bankrupted Virtually nothing has been learned, and now history is repeating itself By George Galloway March 10, 2013 Information Clearing House - The Independent -- The finest of all journalists in the English-speaking world, Claud Cockburn, said: Believe nothing until it has been officially denied. This basic rubric of the trade was all but abandoned a decade ago in the run-up to the war on Iraq, when every official claim was assumed to be true and those who denied it were treated as bad, or even mad. One honourable exception was Cockburn's son, Patrick, in The Independent, an exception continued in his magisterial look back in anger in this newspaper over the past week. If journalism is history's first draft, then Patrick Cockburn's work on Iraq will prove to be close to the finished article. I mention this not just because I remain bitter at the role of the fourth estate in helping to bring about such slaughter and, a decade later, such ongoing misery in Iraq. But because virtually nothing has been learned, and history is repeating itself over and over again -- in Libya, Mali, Syria. Bob Dylan said in Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again that you have to pay to get out of, going through all this twice For the most part, the bill continues to be paid by others, and elsewhere. For now. Even for someone with my experience, such militarised mendacity can still take the breath away. How many times did you read and listen in the past few days to pontificating pundits tell you that Hugo Chavez had wrecked the Venezuelan economy, without a whiff of self-consciousness about the state of our own and that of the United States? That Chavez's Venezuela was a divided society; as if Bush, Obama, Cameron, and Osborne led governments of national unity? To briefly recap; a huge right-wing conspiracy was mounted 10 years ago to manufacture a case to wage aggressive war (pace Nuremberg, the ultimate crime) upon Iraq. It involved government ministers (some still swilling around profitably in the detritus they created); intelligence agencies and the spin doctors controlling them; craven parliamentarians scarcely worthy of the name; and a veritable army of scribblers, autocue readers, laptop bombardiers and think-tankers. Add a sprinkling of useful idiots calling themselves liberals, and the blue touchpaper was lit. A million died, thousands of them British and American. Millions spread as refugees around the world. A country was dismembered, never to be reassembled. Extremism cascaded around the world, blowing itself up even aboard London buses. The whole humanitarian show is best remembered in the pictures from Abu Ghraib. A female American soldier, cigarette dangling from her curling lip, leading a hooded naked Iraqi prisoner like a dog on a chain. Piling naked helpless Iraqi prisoners on top of each other and forcing them to commit indecent acts, videoing it all for the entertainment of the barracks later. Those tempted to imagine this was American exceptionalism should read the proceedings of the London court this week where, inter alia, we learned of the Iraqi corpse who may or may not have walked into British custody alive, but who surely was handed back to his family minus his penis. It doesn't get much uglier than this, especially when it's all dressed up in the livery of liberal intervention. Millions of us knew that it would end this way, even before it became clear that the entire conspiracy was built on the tower -- bigger than Babel -- of lies around weapons of mass destruction. There were none. But the weapons of mass deception deployed by the conspirators remain in fine fettle. And none of them has even been properly inspected yet. No one has been held to account; not a single head has rolled. Except those of a million Iraqis. When the Chilcot Inquiry was announced, I denounced it in Parliament as a parade of establishment duffers, two of whom at least had been among the intellectual authors of the disaster, one of whom had described Bush and Blair as the Roosevelt and Churchill de nos jours. I pointed out that there was not a single legal personality on the Inquiry, or a soldier. And not a Douglas Hurd or a Menzies Campbell among them either. That no one could be summoned, nor their papers either. That no one would be testifying under oath. That must have been three years ago now. Little did I know that the Chilcot report would be as slow in coming as the judgement day. Iraq is broken now, and as Cockburn's recent reports show, Iraqi hearts haven't mended either. It was a disaster, the greatest British policy failure since the First World War. But for as long as its lessons are not learned, the Iraqis will not be the last such victims. The Iraq war bankrupted the British and American
[Biofuel] US-British Al Qaeda Airlift: 3, 000 Tons of Weapons Fuel Syria's Destruction
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34226.htm *US-British Al Qaeda Airlift: 3,000 Tons of Weapons Fuel Syria's Destruction By Tony Cartalucci *March 09, 2013 Information Clearing House http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/*-***(LD http://landdestroyer.blogspot.mx/2013/03/us-british-al-qaeda-airlift-3000-tons.html#more) - The primary reason, we are told, that the West must immediately begin wider operations to support the so-called Syrian rebels, is to head off extremists, namely Al Qaeda, from overrunning Syria. This narrative has been sold for nearly a year now, as it has become evidently clear that all major offensives in Syria against the Syrian people and their government have been led by Al Qaeda terrorist fronts, including most notoriously, Jabhat al-Nusra. It turns out, however, according the London Telegraph, that the US and Britain have already been arming terrorists operating in Syria for some time, including a massive airlift of 3,000 tons of weapons, sent across Syria's borders with Jordan and NATO-member Turkey. In the Telegraph's article titled, US and Europe in 'major airlift of arms to Syrian rebels through Zagreb' http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/9918785/US-and-Europe-in-major-airlift-of-arms-to-Syrian-rebels-through-Zagreb.html, it is reported: It claimed 3,000 tons of weapons dating back to the former Yugoslavia have been sent in 75 planeloads from Zagreb airport to the rebels, largely via Jordan since November The story confirmed the origins of ex-Yugoslav weapons seen in growing numbers in rebel hands in online videos, as described last month by The Daily Telegraph and other newspapers, but suggests far bigger quantities than previously suspected. The shipments were allegedly paid for by Saudi Arabia at the bidding of the United States, with assistance on supplying the weapons organised through Turkey and Jordan, Syria's neighbours. But the report added that as well as from Croatia, weapons came from several other European countries including Britain, without specifying if they were British-supplied or British-procured arms. British military advisers however are known to be operating in countries bordering Syria alongside French and Americans, offering training to rebel leaders and former Syrian army officers. The Americans are also believed to be providing training on securing chemical weapons sites inside Syria. With so much admitted involvement in the violence aimed at overthrowing Syria's government by the West, it is inconceivable that Al Qaeda could be overrunning moderate forces in Syria, unless of course, no such moderate forces exist, and the West had planned from the beginning to use Al Qaeda as a mercenary force. And indeed, that is precisely what is happening. It has been established with documented evidence since at least 2007, and reaffirmed with this latest report. Pulitizer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh, in his 2007 New Yorker report titled, The Redirection: Is the Administration's new policy benefiting our enemies in the war on terrorism? http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/03/05/070305fa_fact_hersh?currentPage=allstated explicitly that: To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia's government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda. Is there any doubt that the US has executed this plot in earnest, arming and funding sectarian extremists sympathetic to Al Qaeda on both Syria's northern and southern border? Where else, if not from the West and its regional allies, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, could extremists be getting their weapons, cash, and logistical support from? And of course, Syria's borders with Jordan and Turkey have been long-ago identified by the US Army's own West Point Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) as hotbeds of sectarian extremist/Al Qaeda activity - hotbeds that the West is purposefully funneling thousands of tons of weaponry through, while disingenuously claiming it is attempting to prevent such weapons from falling into the hands of extremists. The CTC's 2007 report, Al-Qa'ida's Foreign Fighters in Iraq http://www.scribd.com/doc/111001074/West-Point-CTC-s-Al-Qa-ida-s-Foreign-Fighters-in-Iraq, identified Syria's southeastern region near Dayr Al-Zawr on the Iraqi-Syrian border, the northwestern region of Idlib near the Turkish-Syrian
[Biofuel] Exposed, US and Europe in 'Major Airlift of Arms to Syrian Rebels Through Zagreb'
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34222.htm *Exposed US and Europe in 'Major Airlift of Arms to Syrian Rebels Through Zagreb'* The United States has coordinated a massive airlift of arms to Syrian rebels from Croatia with the help of Britain and other European states, despite the continuing European Union arms embargo, it was claimed yesterday. *By Richard Spencer, Middle East Correspondent* March 09, 2013 Information Clearing House http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/*-* The Telegraph http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/9918785/US-and-Europe-in-major-airlift-of-arms-to-Syrian-rebels-through-Zagreb.html -- Decisions by William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, to provide non-lethal assistance and training, announced in the past week, were preceded by much greater though less direct Western involvement in the rebel cause, according to a Croat newspaper. It claimed 3,000 tons of weapons dating back to the former Yugoslavia have been sent in 75 planeloads from Zagreb airport to the rebels, largely via Jordan since November. The story confirmed the origins of ex-Yugoslav weapons seen in growing numbers in rebel hands in online videos, as described last month by The Daily Telegraph and other newspapers, but suggests far bigger quantities than previously suspected. The shipments were allegedly paid for by Saudi Arabia at the bidding of the United States, with assistance on supplying the weapons organised through Turkey and Jordan, Syria's neighbours. But the report added that as well as from Croatia, weapons came from several other European countries including Britain, without specifying if they were British-supplied or British-procured arms. British military advisers however are known to be operating in countries bordering Syria alongside French and Americans, offering training to rebel leaders and former Syrian army officers. The Americans are also believed to be providing training on securing chemical weapons sites inside Syria. President Barack Obama has been lukewarm about arming Syrian rebels though many of his aides have been privately been keener. The story in the Jutarnji List newspaper gave the fullest details yet of the arms shipments which have enabled rebel forces to begin advancing across the north of Syria in recent weeks, after months of stalemate. The weapons, including rocket launchers, recoil-less guns and the M79 anti-tank weapon, have been seen in rebel hands in numerous videos, and were first spotted by an arms expert Eliot Higgins, who blogs under the name Brown Moses. He traced them moving from Dera'a in the south, near the Jordanian border, to Aleppo and Idlib provinces in the north. Western officials told the New York Times that the weapons had been bought from Croatia by Saudi Arabia, and that they had been funnelled to rebel groups seen by the west as more secular and nationalist. The British involvement fits with the government's policy of doing all it can to help the rebels within the EU arms embargo, which was modified but not dropped at the start of this month. Croatia, a close western ally, does not join the EU until July 1 and has yet to implement the relevant EU legislation, though it has denied the newspaper's claims. The claims were denied by the Foreign Office. While the Foreign Secretary has ruled out no options for the future, the UK has not supplied weapons to the Syrian opposition, a spokesman said. This would be a clear breach of the current EU arms embargo. According to the Croat newspaper, the first cargo planes involved with the shipment were from Turkey, but most have been from Jordanian International Air Cargo, whose Russian-made Ilyushin jets have been seen regularly at Zaghreb airport in recent months. The airlift of dated but effective Yugoslav-made weapons meets key concerns of the West, and especially Turkey and the United States, who want the rebels to be better armed to drive out the Assad regime but fear ultra-modern weaponry getting into the hands of jihadists and the PKK Kurdish terror group. Nevertheless, Mr Higgins has recently posted videos showing some of the Croat weapons in the hands of the jihadist group Ahrar al-Sham. Although regarded as hostile to the West, it fights closely with other Free Syrian Army units regarded as acceptable recipients of weapons. -- Robert Luis Rabello Adventure for Your Mind http://www.newadventure.ca Meet the People video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txsCdh1hZ6c Crisis video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZedNEXhTn4 The Long Journey video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy4muxaksgk ___ Sustainablelorgbiofuel mailing list Sustainablelorgbiofuel@lists.sustainablelists.org http://lists.eruditium.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel
