Benghazi Conspiracies Debunked, Republicans Proven Liars • Climate Change Causes Massive Storms, Including Snow

- Expect More Giant Snowstorms as Climate Warms

The storms that buried the Buffalo, New York, area in more than 7 feet (2.1 meters) of snow this week shattered records and shocked residents — even in a region accustomed to dealing with heavy snow. The storms are certain to provide new fodder for climate-change skeptics who seem to embrace every monster blizzard as evidence that global warming doesn't exist. And yet, the science behind these catastrophic storms suggests that they do not occur despite global warming, but in fact because of it. 

 A study of 20th century snowstorms published in the August 2006 issue of the Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology, before the big storms of recent years, found that most major snowstorms in the United States occurred during warmer-than-normal years. 

 Part of what gave us the record lake-effect snowfall in Buffalo was warm, late-fall lake-surface temperatures that combined with something highly unusual: a 5 sigma event. That is, a very unlikely event on the order of 1-in-a-million — a remarkably persistent, anomalous configuration of the jet stream, which brought frigid Arctic air down into the United States so early in the season."

- House Intel panel demolishes Benghazi conspiracies (with video)

The substance of a story is what matters, but sometimes, when a story breaks is nearly as important. The Republican-run House Intelligence Committee, for example, waited until late on a Friday afternoon, the week before Thanksgiving, to announce the results of a two-year investigation into the deadly attacks on a U.S. outpost in Benghazi, Libya.


For the right, the findings were simply devastating: all of the Benghazi conspiracy theories, the GOP-led committee found, are completely, demonstrably, and unambiguously wrong. From the Associated Press account:

A two-year investigation by the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee has found that the CIA and the military acted properly in responding to the 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, and asserted no wrongdoing by Obama administration appointees. 

Debunking a series of persistent allegations hinting at dark conspiracies, the investigation of the politically charged incident determined that there was no intelligence failure, no delay in sending a CIA rescue team, no missed opportunity for a military rescue, and no evidence the CIA was covertly shipping arms from Libya to Syria.

The report, which is available in its entirety here, is an unflinching summary of the available evidence, which utterly destroys everything right-wing conspiracy theorists have been pushing for more than two years about the deadly attack. For conservatives, there’s no sugarcoating any of this – literally every accusation has been debunked. No exceptions.


And for Republicans, who’ve invested so much in the ugly exploitation of the terrorism for partisan gain, that obviously posed a problem. For House GOP lawmakers, the solution was to release the findings late on a Friday, shortly before a major national holiday, in the hopes the American public wouldn’t hear the facts. For the most part, the tactic worked exactly as intended: much of the national mediaoverlooked the findings, which were also largely forgotten on the Sunday shows.


Which is a shame, because this seems like an important accountability moment.


Republicans – lawmakers, media personalities, campaign committees, et al – decided the deaths of four Americans abroad should be manipulated into a partisan tool. The party and its allies built a political machine of sorts, raising money, attacking the character of officials such as Susan Rice, misleading their own base, and ignoring real work to chase after ridiculous conspiracy theories.


And now we know, with great clarity, that they were wrong.


It would seem an apology is in order.


Indeed, perhaps no one should be angrier than conservatives themselves. The people they trust most misled them, on purpose, telling loyalists for years that the conspiracy theories had merit, that this was a real scandal, that President Obama and his team were guilty of monstrous wrongdoing. Americans on the right, who assumed they could believe their powerful allies, bought it, only to be quietly told on a Friday afternoon that it was all a sham.


For conservative Americans, this betrayal should be no small development. If Republicans lied to them about a terrorist attack, what else is the party lying to its base about?


For Fox News, that has to be especially demoralizing. No entity was more responsible for keeping the conspiracy theories alive than the cable network, which aired, endorsed, and pushed the conspiracy theories with an unhealthy enthusiasm. Over the summer, Fox went so far as to say it would only coverthe parts of White House press conferences that addressed the 2012 attack.


And what, pray tell, did the network tell its viewers on Friday night after the Intelligence Committee’s report was released? Not much. Wouldn’t you know it, Fox News, which found no Benghazi detail too small, somehow managed not to tell its audience about the findings. The network ran one online report, which tried, to a genuinely (albeit unintentionally) funny degree, to overlook every relevant detail of the Intelligence Committee report.


The on-air apology to Fox’s viewers ought to be amazing, right?


Postscript: It’s worth emphasizing that the House Intelligence Committee’s findings, while devastating for the right, were arguably superfluous. The House Intelligence Committee, the Senate Intelligence Committee, the House Armed Services Committee, and the State Department’s independent Accountability Review Board have all published reports on the 2012 attack, and each found the same thing. In addition, the attack has been scrutinized by the Senate Armed Services Committee, the Senate Homeland Security Committee, the House Oversight Committee, and the House Foreign Affairs Committee, each of which has held hearings, and each of which failed to find even a shred of evidence to bolster the conspiracy theorists.


In other words, we knew the right’s Benghazi story was wrong before Friday afternoon, because their claims had already been discredited. This new report, however, should seal the deal.

- House Report Finds No Attempt by Whitehouse to Mislead Public Over Benghazi

The Republican-led House Intelligence Committee quietly issued a report late Friday concluding that there were no intelligence failures in the lead-up to the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi (in contrast to what all Republicans and republican media have been saying since the event took place)— and that there was nothing the military could have done to save Ambassador Chris Stevens and the three other Americans killed in the incident. AND: According to Mediaite, if you get your news from Fox News, which has run thousands of segments promoting various Benghazi conspiracy theories, you may have no idea of the new report’s existence.

Climate Change Worse than Expected (worsened by meat production) • "Humane Meat is Lie" Admits Meat Producer • Doomsday Preppers • Report: USA Tortures People • Guns vs "Terrorism"

- How Resource Scarcity and Climate Change Could Produce a Global Explosion

Brace yourself. You may not be able to tell yet, but according to global experts and the US intelligence community, the earth is already shifting under you. Whether you know it or not, you’re on a new planet, a resource-shock world of a sort humanity has never before experienced. Two nightmare scenarios—a global scarcity of vital resources and the onset of extreme climate change—are already beginning to converge and in the coming decades are likely to produce a tidal wave of unrest, rebellion, competition and conflict. Just what this tsunami of disaster will look like may, as yet, be hard to discern, but experts warn of "water wars" over contested river systems, global food riots sparked by soaring prices for life’s basics, mass migrations of climate refugees (with resulting anti-migrant violence) and the breakdown of social order or the collapse of states. At first, such mayhem is likely to arise largely in Africa, Central Asia and other areas of the underdeveloped South, but in time, all regions of the planet will be affected.

- Why does America lose its head over 'terror' but ignore its daily gun deaths?

The thriving metropolis of Boston was turned into a ghost town on Friday. Nearly a million Bostonians were asked to stay in their homes – and willingly complied. ...If only Americans reacted the same way to the actual threats that exist in their country. There's something quite fitting and ironic about the fact that the Boston freak-out happened in the same week the Senate blocked consideration of a gun control bill that would have strengthened background checks for potential buyers. Even though this reform is supported by more than 90% of Americans, and even though 56 out of 100 senators voted in favour of it, the Republican minority prevented even a vote from being held on the bill because it would have allegedly violated the second amendment rights of "law-abiding Americans".
So for those of you keeping score at home – locking down an American city: a proper reaction to the threat from one terrorist. A background check to prevent criminals or those with mental illness from purchasing guns: a dastardly attack on civil liberties. All of this would be almost darkly comic if not for the fact that more Americans will die needlessly as a result. Already, more than 30,000 Americans die in gun violence every year (compared to the 17 who died last year in terrorist attacks).

- Report: Post-9/11 Torture "Indisputable" and "Unprecedented"

A new report from an independent task force finds that the Bush administration committed torture....The task force, an eleven-person team led by former Congressman Asa Hutchinson, a Republican and an undersecretary at the Department of Homeland Security during the Bush administration, and former Democratic Congressman James R. Jones, sought to piece together "an accurate and authoritative account of how the United States treated people its forces held in custody as the nation mobilized to deal with a global terrorist theat." The New York Times called the report "the most ambitious independent attempt to date to assess the detention and interrogation programs."
In the years since 2001, journalists, lawyers and activists have been unable to get the Central Intelligence Agency, Justice Department and Bush administration to state unequivocally that the interrogation tactics used on detainees constituted torture. The Obama administration chose not to commission an official study of interrogation and detention tactics, saying it was unproductive to "look backwards." But it is "indisputable," the report’s authors conclude, that torture occurred at Guantánamo, the C.I.A.’s so-called black sites and other war-zone detention centers.

- Livestock’s carbon footprint ‘catastrophic,’ say climate experts

A new report from an independent task force finds that the Bush administration committed torture.......livestock farming now accounts for the use of 70 percent of the global freshwater and 38 percent of the world’s land-use conversion. Some 70 percent of the Amazon Rainforest, in fact, has already been cleared for grazing and feed crop production.The "Livestock and Climate Change" published in the latest issue of World Watch magazine reported that livestock and their byproducts actually account for at least 32.6 billion tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per year, or 51 percent of annual worldwide GHG emissions as noted by Inquirer Science/Health on April 20. Forbes online, in its April 28 issue, wrote that the 2006 report estimated that 18 percent of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions attributable to cattle, buffalo, sheep, goats, camels, pigs and poultry (chicken) were in fact updated to 51 percent, citing an analysis performed by Robert Goodland, a former World Bank Group environmental adviser, with cowriter Jeff Anhang, an environmental specialist at the World Bank Group’s International Finance Corp.

- Major Poultry Producer Lies About Animal Treatment

Perdue is facing a lawsuit after attempting to cash in on consumer interest in animal welfare be falsely labeling their poultry as “humane.”New Jersey courts have given The Humane Society of the United States the green light to go forward with a class-action lawsuit against Perdue Farms, Inc. The major poultry producer is getting sued for misleading consumers after it falsely labeled its chickens as humanely raised, when they were actually subject to the same cramped and painful conditions of factory farms. Perdue disputed these charges in the New Jersey federal court, asserting that consumers should not expect the animals to be raised in humane conditions even if the label indicated so.

- Climate Change Worse Than Expected, Argues Lord Stern

Climate change looks far more threatening than it did six years ago as the world marches toward a warming of 4 degrees Celsius higher by the end of the century compared to the preindustrial era, said Lord Nicholas Stern, a professor of economics and chairman of the Grantham Research Institute at the London School of Economics.Stern called for new and better climate models and better economic assessments of climate impacts but maintained that the main obstacle to action is political will.
The former World Bank chief economist was critical of his own 2006 review on the economics of climate change, a document considered seminal to climate change discussions, which estimated that the overall cost of climate change would shave off at least 5 percent of gross domestic product growth annually. Stern said that the review underestimated the "immense risk" from global warming.

- World Bank (Again) Warns of Developmental Setbacks From Climate Change

Climate change doesn't obviously fall under the mandate of the World Bank, which has the official goal of reducing poverty. But speaking in Tokyo last month, new bank president Jim Yong Kim said he felt "a moral responsibility to be very clear in communicating the dangers of climate change." The bank is following through. Yesterday, it released a new report spelling out the consequences of the world's current course. "The lack of action on climate change not only risks putting prosperity out of reach of millions of people in the developing world, it threatens to roll back decades of sustainable development," Kim writes.

- What Could Disappear

Maps show coastal and low-lying areas that would be permanently flooded, without engineered protection, in three levels of higher seas.

- "Just a Theory": 7 Misused Science Words

Hypothesis. Theory. Law. These scientific words get bandied about regularly, yet the general public usually gets their meaning wrong.

- The Doomsday Prepper Caucus

To get a sense of how part of America is going all-in on this bet look no further than National Geographic Channel’s hit reality show Doomsday Preppers... dismissing the popularity of Doomsday Preppers as mere pop-cultural voyeurism would be a mistake.That’s because the show is a microcosm of something else stirring in our country, something more foreboding. The ominous prophecies of government tyranny, financial meltdown and violent anarchy featured on Preppers inform more than just the survivalist movement circa 2013. They’re also being absorbed into contemporary conservatism, which has increasingly bought into these same doomsday storylines hook, line and bunker.

Sean

Do Bees Have Feelings? - Obama Caves to Republicans - Republican Voter Suppression - Peak Oil - Melting Polar Ice Releases Toxins - Racial Wealth gap Grows- Africa Drought Worsens - US Never Planned to Capture Bin Laden - more

- Do Bees Have Feelings?

It’s... an important [question] with implications for how we should treat not just bees, but the great majority of animals. Recently, studies by Geraldine Wright and her colleagues at Newcastle University in the UK have rekindled debate over these issues by showing that honeybees may experience something akin to moods.

- Republican Voter Suppression

More dirty tricks from Wisconsin's Scott Walker, who first passed a voter ID/suppression law requiring photo IDs at the polls [a law which would effect democratic voters] and then started closing DMV offices where residents - oddly, mostly Democrats - could get them, while at the same time expanding hours in Republican areas.

- The Scourge of 'Peak Oil'

When demand for oil consistently surpasses supply, experts warn that our lives will look "very differently".

"Peak oil is the time when the world's production reaches the highest point, then starts back down again," Whipple told Al Jazeera. "Oil is a finite resource, and [it] someday will go down, and that is what the peak oil discussion is all about."

There are signs that peak oil may have already arrived.

- Melting Arctic Ice Releasing Banned Toxins, Warn Scientists

The chemicals seeping out as temperatures rise include the pesticides DDT, lindane and chlordane as well as the industrial chemicals PCBs and the fungicide hexachlorobenzene (HCB). All of these are know as persistent organic pollutants (Pops), and are banned under the 2004 Stockholm convention.

Pops can cause cancers and birth defects and take a long time to degrade. Over past decades, the low temperatures in the Arctic trapped volatile Pops in ice and cold water. But scientists in Canada and Norway have discovered that global warming is freeing the Pops again.

- US Squandered £21 Billion on Private Contractors in Afghanistan and Iraq

Waste, mismanagement and poorly conceived projects mean the United States could have lost more than 15 per cent of the total given out in contracts and grants.

- A surprising war on leaks under Obama

When President Obama took office, federal employees who had exposed wrongdoing or were considering doing so had reason for hope. Eight years of the Bush administration's relentless retaliation against whistle-blowers had ended, and Obama spoke encouragingly of transparency and due process.

Since then, the administration has taken some positive steps for whistle-blowers, most notably in (unsuccessfully) advocating legislation to protect them and in loosening the government's grip on public information. However, its treatment of national-security and intelligence whistle-blowers - arguably the ones we need most - has been brutal. It has pursued multiple prosecutions of such whistle-blowers on espionage charges.

- UN Urges 'Massive' Action on Horn of Africa Drought

An estimated 3.7 million people in Somalia -- around a third of the population -- are on the brink of starvation and millions more in Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda have been struck by the worst drought in the region in 60 years.

Officials said at Monday's meeting the UN has received about $1 billion (696 million euros) since first launching an appeal for the region in November 2010 but needs a billion more by the end of the year to cope with the emergency.

- Obama Administration Delays Smog Rule Amid Pushback From Industry and Republicans

The latest delay comes as major industry groups, many Republicans and some conservative Democrats are pressuring EPA and the White House to scuttle the rules.

- Study Shows Racial Wealth Gap Grows Wider

There's long been a big gap between the wealth of white families and the wealth of African-Americans and Hispanics. But the Great Recession has made it much worse — the divide is almost twice what it used to be.

- Republican Climate Change Deniers and Tea Party Funders the Koch Brothers are Busy Suppressing Votes and Strangling Democracy

Koch Slime Knows No Bounds Dept: It seems the ever-helpful Koch Brothers'  Americans for Prosperity was kind enough to send out absentee ballots to Democratic voters in Wisconsin for upcoming recall elections against six GOP state senators. But in a mysterious "typo," the forms tell voters to return them by Aug. 11. The election is Aug. 9. Wisconsin Democrats have filed a complaint; now, we are too.

- Bin Laden Raid 'Was Strictly to Kill Him'

The raid on Osama bin Laden's hideout in Pakistan was a mission to kill him, and there was ''never any question'' he would be captured alive, one of those directly involved has claimed.

- Special Comment: The Four Great Hypocrisies of the Debt Deal

Retreat, Surrender, Can He at Least Plead?
by Ralph Nader
Published on Tuesday, August 2, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

The headlines came quickly after President Obama concluded the deficit-debt deal with the Republicans Sunday evening. There were few shades of gray. The New York Times editorial was titled "To Escape Chaos, a Terrible Deal: Democrats won almost nothing they wanted except avoiding default."

It was truly, as the Times pointed out, "a political environment laced with lunacy." But don't blame it all on the Republican "mad dogs" on Capitol Hill playing chicken with the economic plight of the American people and its wobbling economy. It was President Obama who surrendered.


In one of the most inept episodes of Presidential-Congressional relations, Mr. Obama managed to give the Republicans more than they expected and leave the Democrats with less than the Republicans offered. The Republicans never expected Mr. Obama to give in entirely on tax increases on the wealthy, on the reviled oil industry giants and other corporate tax escapees. The Republicans even agreed to $800 billion in new revenue over ten years. Obama fumbled the ball day after day, and with the August 2 debt ceiling deadline looming, he fell to the extortionists.

Unlike Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush II, who routinely expected and got debt ceilings raised without conditions.

President Obama's disaster began months ago when he agreed to tie raising the debt ceiling to a grand bargain with the Republicans regarding deficits and revenues instead of demanding a debt ceiling raise while he was caving on extending Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. That immediately gave the "fanatic" Republicans a veto power over the "establishment" Republicans in Congress. And fanatics don't blink. Especially those fanatics who, elected last year, say they don't care about being re-elected.

So Obama accepted about $2.5 trillion in spending cuts over the next decade, got no revenue producing tax increases and therefore made it nearly impossible to create a public works jobs program to uplift a sliding economy.

With economic indicators registering more trouble in recent days for American workers, Mr. Obama has no cards left. Interest rates cannot be driven any lower by the Federal Reserve. He didn't get even a renewal of the extension of unemployment benefits.
Consumer spending - 2/3rds of the economy, is stagnant. Without consumer demand, new investment is sluggish. Unemployment is rising, and without jobs, workers can't increase their consumer spending. State, local and federal government spending cannot increase under the yoke of the just agreed-upon cuts. The weaker dollar may increase exports a little, but the U.S. still has a continuing massive trade deficit, especially with China. Europe's financial problems will curb orders of U.S. goods and services.

So what can Mr. Obama do? He can propose a public works program, paid for by the tax increases on the wealthy and the corporations. Both are getting richer. The large corporations are reporting very good second quarter profits further disconnecting their affluence from that of their workers and labor in general. He could, if he wanted, make a very strong case for repairing America's infrastructure and bring the soldiers back from Iraq and Afghanistan, as a majority of the American people and the most mayors of our cities desire.

First, however, he has to take the offensive by showing that the bulk of the deficits since 2002 were caused by the Bush tax cuts, mostly for the wealthy, and Bush's two wars. Obama also has to hold the Republicans accountable for their hostage-taking of the American economy so they cannot impede public works proposals in an election year.
Amazingly, as a Harvard-trained lawyer, he was quick to compromise from the get-go. Consequently, he painted himself into a corner. So, since he is not a leader, maybe he can become a pleader.

Given that non-financial companies are sitting on two trillion dollars of inert cash and other liquid assets, maybe he can appeal to these companies to disgorge ten percent in immediate special dividends to their long-parched shareholders who are, after all, their owners. Loosening the executive locks on this hoard of money would provide $200 billion for more likely spending in the market place. Companies like Apple, Google, Cisco, Intel and Microsoft alone are sitting on well over $200 billion cash. To these coddled, indentured U.S. companies he can invoke President John F. Kennedy's challenge--"Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country."

Second, he can plead with those very profitable corporations that have benefited from the government bailout, or pay little or no federal income taxes, to voluntarily contribute to a public works fund.

Companies like GE, Verizon, Exxon Mobil, Boeing, IBM, Wells Fargo, DuPont, American Electric Power, FedEx, Honeywell, Yahoo, United Technologies as a group made $171 billion in U.S. profits over three years and paid zero federal income tax with a $2.5 billion negative advantage. And that, says Bob McIntyre, director of Citizens for Tax Justice, is "just the tip of an iceberg of widespread corporate tax avoidance."

Is such pleading just Pollyannaish? Maybe. But it will resonate with the American people's sense of injustice. Those feelings of indignation can reverberate and cause members of Congress to start remembering who sent them to Washington. Last I heard, corporations don't have a single vote.

Sean

No Such Thing as "Conscientious Carnivore" - Obama Betrays Left - How Republicans Warp Laws to Favor Big Business & Hurt People - Fox "News" Ignores Phone Hacking Scandal - Fox Doesn't Pay Taxes - Universal healthcare - US Growing in Unpopularity - more

- A Looming Betrayal

On Thursday, headlines on both the Washington Post and the New York Times announced that President Obama had put both Social Security and Medicare on the chopping block, as part of some "grand bargain" with House Speaker Boehner and the [Republican Party] to cut the deficit and avoid blowing the August 2 debt limit deadline.

My reaction to this news, along with most everyone else aligned with the left side of politics, was predictable. I was aghast, dumbfounded, sickened, and enraged. The Republican Party has been working hammer and tong to eliminate these vital programs since the day they were first conceived. Sometimes their efforts were out in the big wide open, such as George W. Bush's doomed privatization proposal. If it wasn't their hood ornament, it was at least always on the dashboard, right out front, a core element of their philosophy, and always somewhere in their platform. In all those years, however, the GOP had only managed to nibble at the edges of these programs, having never summoned either sufficient muscle or sufficient will to kill them off entirely.

And now here is a Democratic president, after all those years of struggle to defend and protect the social contract created by these policies, offering them up for destruction because he can't seem to stop himself from agreeing with Republicans. Here

- ALEC Bills Expose Corporate Drive to Advance Business Over Public Interest

 Today’s release of more than 800 “model” bills and resolutions drafted and promoted by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) opens a window to the workings of a powerful and secretive corporate front group that has enlisted thousands of state lawmakers to pass legislation on its behalf, often in conflict with the public good, Common Cause said today.

“This is a real eye-opener,” said Bob Edgar, president of the non-partisan government watchdog group. “Dozens of corporations are paying millions of dollars a year to write business-friendly legislation that is becoming law in state houses from coast to coast, with no regard for the public interest. This is proof positive of the depth and scope of corporate influence on our democratic processes...

- ALEC Exposed

The articles that follow are the first products of that examination. They provide an inside view of the priorities of ALEC’s corporate board and billionaire benefactors (including Tea Party funders Charles and David Koch). “Dozens of corporations are investing millions of dollars a year to write business-friendly legislation that is being made into law in statehouses coast to coast, with no regard for the public interest,” says Bob Edgar of Common Cause. “This is proof positive of the depth and scope of the corporate reach into our democratic processes.” The full archive of ALEC documents is available at a new website, alecexposed.org

- Universal Health Care: Can We Afford Anything Less?

Why only a single-payer system can solve America’s health-care mess.

- UN Report: 'Deadliest Six Months' for Civilians in Afghanistan

The first six months of 2011 were the deadliest for civilians in Afghanistan since the war began in 2001, a UN report has found.

- US more unpopular in the Arab world than under Bush

I've written numerous times over the last year about rapidly worsening perceptions of the U.S. in the Muslim world, including a Pew poll from April finding that Egyptians view the U.S. more unfavorably now than they did during the Bush presidency.  A new poll released today of six Arab nations -- Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Morocco -- contains even worse news on this front...What's striking is that none of these is among the growing list of countries we're occupying and bombing. 

While Americans are continuously inculcated with the message that Iran is the greatest threat to that region, the people who actually live there view the U.S. in that light.  And as the above-referenced links to other polls demonstrate, that is a routine finding in surveys of Arab and Muslim opinion in that part of the world.

- CNN Confirms: Fox News Watch Admitted Avoiding Parent Company's Hacking Scandal

As Media Matters first noted, Fox News' media criticism program, Fox News Watch, avoided any mention of the scandal over the British tabloid News of the World and its publisher News Corp., which also owns Fox News. And in a video posted on FoxNews.com, panelists appeared to admit during a commercial break that they were intentionally avoiding the topic.

- How CNN, MSNBC, And Fox Are Covering News Corp. (owner of Fox News) Hacking Scandal

CNN And MSNBC Report On News Corp. Scandal More Than Twice As Often As Fox News. According to a Media Matters analysis*, in the nine days since the News Corp. phone-hacking scandal reignited, CNN reported on the developing story in 109 segments, MSNBC covered the story in 71 segments, and Fox News  covered the story in 30 segments.

- Phone hacking: Murdoch paid lobbyists who oppose US anti-bribery law

Rupert Murdoch donated $1m to a pro-business lobby in the US months before the group launched a high-profile campaign to alter the anti-bribery law – the same law that could potentially be brought to bear against News Corporation over the phone-hacking scandal.

- Phone-hacking scandal: live coverage

Only last month David Cameron, Ed Miliband and others were paying homage to the tycoon at his London summer party. If you had told Cameron and Miliband over the champagne that only a few weeks later that they would be uniting in the Commons to pass a motion opposing Murdoch's bid for BSkyB they would have thought you were barmy. Yet that's exactly what's going to happen today. As the New York Times has argued, Britain is going through its own version of the Arab spring. Truly, a spell has been broken.

- Guess Who Didn't Pay Federal Income Tax And Got Billions In Refunds? News Corp!

Fox News is famous for complaining about taxes. They consistently decry what they see as President Obama's desire to "soak the rich"; they see "class warfare" against the rich almost everywhere; they consistently whine that middle- and low-income families pay no federal income tax; and they relentlessly attacked GE for not paying any federal income tax this past year, going so far as to suggest that this was somehow because GE's CEO is part of Obama's Economic Advisory Panel. But here's a story I wouldn't expect Fox to be highlighting any time soon. As it turns out, News Corp., Fox News' parent company, not only hasn't paid federal income tax in years, it reportedly received billions in tax refunds, mainly from the U.S. government.

How 'Conscientious Carnivores' Ignore Meat's True Origins
Supporting small farms without addressing the pain of the slaughter perpetuates desensitization—just as factory farms do
By James McWilliams

Published Jul 12 2011, at the Atlantic

If there's one phrase I'd like to put to pasture it's the increasingly popular designation of "conscientious carnivore." As with so many other expressions in the food movement's growing lexicon of culinary virtue, this one euphemistically masks a harsh reality with a soothing, but ultimately damaging, rationalization.

The rationalization is that because factory farming is so horrifically brutal to animals, the conscientious carnivore can vote with his or her fork by purchasing meat from farmers who raise their animals in a more "humane" manner—free-range pork, grass-fed beef, cage-free eggs, and all that. The reality, however, is that the so-called conscientious consumers who support these alternative systems are doing very little to challenge the essence of factory farming. In fact, they may be strengthening its very foundation.

I don't mean to discount the benefits that a farm animal experiences when allowed to move about with relative freedom, eat a natural diet, socialize, and care for offspring. And indeed, there's no denying that if our conceptualization of alternative systems stops right here—that is, with a relative comparison to the hellhole of a factory farm—then carnivores who opt for meat produced through alternative methods are certainly acting in a more conscientious manner.

But that's not saying much. Broaden your perspective on the concept of "conscientious carnivorism" and it becomes clear than it's little more than a catchy justification that helps consumers avoid investigating the deeper implications of nurturing an animal to kill it for food we don't need. It's so much easier, after all, just to focus exclusively on the relative happiness farm animals experience while alive rather than to contemplate the entirety of the animal's life cycle. Narrowing our moral vision this way, something every "conscientious consumer" inevitably does, obscures several aspects of "conscientious" meat eating that deserve due consideration. Three stand out.

First, how do conscientious consumers reconcile their rationale for avoiding factory farming with their willingness to tolerate the slaughter of a sentient animal? Logically speaking, it makes no sense. Supporters of alternative meat base their advocacy on the belief that an animal should never be subjected to the pain and suffering endemic to a factory farm. This kernel of compassion is critical. It confirms the fact that conscientious carnivores know full well that an animal has intrinsic value as a living, breathing, and feeling organism. That's precisely why they want it freed from the factory farm in the first place. Nonetheless, despite the evident presence of this compassion, the conscientious carnivore supports killing that animal for a reason as arbitrary as, for example, some fancy restaurant in Manhattan deciding it's time for the animal to die because pork bellies are all the rage. How can this sentiment (concern for animal welfare) and this act (killing the animal) coexist? To this question, there is no compassionate answer.

Second, there's economics. What if we all did "the right thing" and became "conscientious carnivores"? That is, what if enough consumers placed enough demand on humanely raised meat so that producers had to multiply and expand their "humane" operations to meet growing demand? Currently, about 1 percent of all the meat we eat comes from alternative systems. What if the situation was reversed, and only 1 percent of meat was factory farmed?

Presumably, this is exactly what advocates of small-scale animal farming want. But it's hard to imagine how the proliferation of free-range alternative farms, all of which would be competing with each other on some level to meet demand, could possibly avoid cutting corners to achieve efficiencies of production. This ineluctable quest for efficiency would be fine if we were talking about gadgets. But we're not. We're talking about humans owning and exploiting sentient beings—beings with a foremost interest in staying alive—in order to make a profit.

In this respect, alternative systems might look innocuous at 1 percent, but at 10, 20, 30 percent basic business history dictates that expansion in scale and scope will lead the industry to assume aspects of the factory farming system it originally intended to replace. When you have people owning, raising, and killing animals to meet growing demand, does anyone really believe that animals are going to be given primary consideration? Do we truly think that a farmer whose livelihood depends on owning and killing animals is, in the face of economic competition, going to sacrifice market share to a competitor for the sake of his animals (who are going to be turned into meat anyway)? Within the confines of free-market capitalism, selling animals for food will always entail unnecessary suffering. It goes without saying that there would be nothing conscientious about this inevitable downward cycle of economic efficiency, animal exploitation, and market capitalization.

Finally, if conscientious producers and consumers put their money where their mouth is and get closer to where our food comes from, they'll confront the act of killing an animal. And as they do so, as more and more consumers get closer to the slaughter, they'll have no choice but to call into question the justice of commodifying emotionally aware animals. Last year an online article for Food and Wine interviewed chefs who, in an (admirable) effort to shorten the supply chain and connect with the food they served, slaughtered their own animals. Here is what one of them had to say:

I first harvested an animal—an adult goat and two kids—eight years ago . . . It's a whole mix of emotions—fear, hate, joy, awe—all the big ones. It was the hardest thing I have ever done in my life, holding this baby goat in my arms and petting him until he died, trying to make him comfortable. Did I cry? Yes. Do I cry every time I harvest animals? Yes. I cry every time I talk about it.

It's poignant testimony, and I respect the chef for his openness. The fact that this chef has since gone on to kill many animals and start two successful restaurants that serve every part of those animals to "conscientious carnivores" is unfortunate. But the gut-level emotionalism of his first slaughter should not be downplayed, for it highlights not only the overall quest to get closer to the means of meat production, but it pinpoints the precise reason why we ultimately will not be able to create a reformed food system while continuing to kill animals for pleasure and profit. In essence, it reminds us that killing animals for food we don't need is bloodsport.

The emotional pain the chef experienced was real. The fact that he's gone on to rationalize the experience as a hard knock of economic life—something no doubt assuaged by his usage of euphemisms such as "harvest"—does not make him a conscientious carnivore. It makes him a desensitized one. This guy went to the brink of true change, experienced the rawness of his reaction, and instead of taking a leap, backed away.

As more and more "conscientious carnivores" do what their designation dictates and, as did our chef, move closer to confronting the ethics of slaughter, they'll be similarly jarred into recognizing the gravity of killing a live animal. They'll witness firsthand the fact that the animal does not want to die. And in so doing, they will either have to acknowledge the easy way out of the carnivore's dilemma (choosing not to kill animals for food) or they will have to, a la the chef, desensitize themselves to the slaughter, thereby undermining the conscientious part of "conscientious carnivore."

All these problems with conscientious carnivorism—the killing of an animal despite acknowledging its moral worth, the economics of efficient production, and the desensitization required to deal with the slaughter—end up collectively supporting the very foundation of factory farming. As long as we're willing to commodify a living creature that has intrinsic worth, directly link its lifespan to consumer demand, and numb ourselves to the painful essence of the slaughter, we're doing nothing more than reaffirming the core values of factory farming. It might feel good to call ourselves "conscientious carnivores," but at some point we'll have to recognize that the only conscientious carnivore is, alas, an herbivore.

MLK; Schools More Segregated today; Iranian 'Chernobyl' Thanks to US/Israel; Gun Control; WikiLeaks and US Hypocrisy; BP Oil; Republican Hypocrisy

- Stuxnet Virus Attack: Russia Warns of 'Iranian Chernobyl' Russian nuclear officials have warned of another Chernobyl-style nuclear disaster at Iran's controversial Bushehr reactor because of the damage caused by the Stuxnet virus- widely believed to have been the result of a sophisticated joint US-Israeli cyber attack.

- On MLK Day, Some Thoughts on Segregated Schools, Arne Duncan, and President Obama American schools are more segregated by race and class today than they were on the day Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed, 43 years ago. The average white child in America attends a school that is 77 percent white, and where just 32 percent of the student body lives in poverty. The average black child attends a school that is 59 percent poor but only 29 percent white. The typical Latino kid is similarly segregated; his school is 57 percent poor and 27 percent white.

- Talk About Civility is Fine, but Where are the New Calls for Gun Control? Behold the silence of the lambs. Naturally, I'm talking about the Democrats.

One of their own House members has been plugged in the head by a nut job armed with a Glock and a high-capacity magazine, yet even now they can't muster the courage to talk about sensible gun curbs. That issue is off the national agenda because Democrats have been rendered mute by their terror of [the Republican's best friends,] the gun lobby.

- Amid WikiLeaks Storm, US Gov't Promotes Ellsberg Film AMERICAN HYPOCRISY: Even as prosecutors build a case against the Army private suspected of passing hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks, the State Department is promoting a documentary film that celebrates Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg.

- BP Targets One of the World's Last Unspoilt Wildernesses Speaking to The Independent on Sunday  yesterday, Mike Childs, FoE's head of climate change, said: "BP, a number of years ago, were positioning themselves to be the greenest of the oil companies, promising to go 'beyond petroleum'. This latest move positions them quite nicely as environmental villain number one, given the huge impact they had in the Gulf of Mexico as well."
The oil giant "cannot be trusted" to drill oil in difficult waters, and any oil spill would be "completely catastrophic". He added: "The Arctic should be a no-go for fossil fuel extraction as it's one of the few pristine environments we have left. It's very fragile and we should be looking at ways to protect it, not seemingly trying to find ways of wrecking it."

- Martin Luther King's Legacy n the mid-1960s, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. contributed an annual essay to The Nation on the state of civil rights and race relations in the United States.  His last piece, from March 14, 1966, could have been written today: "Jobs are harder to create than voting rolls. Harmonizing of peoples of vastly different cultural levels is complicated and frequently abrasive." Read and share four of King's timeless and timely essays to mark this year's holiday.

- Darrell Issa (Republican) asks business: Tell me what to change Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) wants the oil industry, drug manufacturers and other trade groups and companies to tell him which Obama administration regulations to target this year.

- Don't Look Back Darrell Issa, the corrupt Republican congressman about to launch endless "investigations" into the Obama administration has had some troubles of his own.


Which Side Would Martin Luther King Be On?

President Lyndon B. Johnson and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. meet at the White House, 1966

When it comes to newly maligned public workers, the answer is easy
by Roger Bybee
Published on Monday, January 17, 2011 by In These Times

If Martin Luther King, Jr. were to be resurrected today, just in time for the national holiday commemorating his memory, many of the anti-public sector politicians praising his legacy would be choking on their words.

After all, King was a persistent, unwavering champion of the most despised and disparaged members of society, like the public employees now being systematically demonized for state and local fiscal crises (Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich decimates the myths behind the campaign against government workers here).

Recent portraits of Martin Luther King, like Michael Eric Dyson's I May Not Get There With You and the brand-new All Work Has Dignity by Michael Honey, stress his unwavering commitment to labor unions and economic rights as well as full racial justice.
King's exhausting pace of organizing and mobilizing helped to force the passage of landmark civil rights legislation in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But he never considered resting on his laurels. He remained utterly unconcerned with retaining elite approval, as he had a larger vision of economic and social justice he sought to pursue.
Dr. King maintained a disciplined method of non-violence, but increasingly went "too far" in challenging America's economic inequality and the inequality its corporations established across the globe, backed up by U.S. military might. In a little-known speech at the Highlander Institute for activists in 1957, King proudly proclaimed:

I never intend to adjust myself to the tragic inequalities of an economic system which takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes. I never intend to become adjusted to the madness of militarism and the self-defeating method of physical violence.

King fought not just against "Jim Crow" laws, but against the underlying structure of America's economy which condemned all working people--black, white, and Latino--to a fundamental lack of power, dignity, and economic security. The condition of black people in America was a distinct product of American racism, but it was also intertwined with the economic powerlessness facing all poor and working people, King argued.

The Northern media—which largely applauded his efforts to bring down the irrational system of Southern segregation which kept the entire region backward for a century and impeded economic development—were far less sympathetic to his forceful denunciation of economic injustice and the Vietnam War.
As Norman Solomon and Jeff Cohen noted,

But after passage of civil rights acts in 1964 and 1965, King began challenging the nation's fundamental priorities. He maintained that civil rights laws were empty without "human rights" — including economic rights. For people too poor to eat at a restaurant or afford a decent home, King said, anti-discrimination laws were hollow.

Noting that a majority of Americans below the poverty line were white, King developed a class perspective. He decried the huge income gaps between rich and poor, and called for "radical changes in the structure of our society" to redistribute wealth and power."

Thus, at the time of his death on April 4, 1968, Dr. King was deeply immersed in the struggle of 1,300 black sanitation workers in Memphis who had organized themselves into an AFSCME local.. At the same time, he was also building a coalition for a "Poor People's Campaign" that would assemble in Washington, D.C., to demand "economic rights" for people of all colors. It was aimed at building a mighty coalition that would span autoworkers in Detroit, discarded coalminers in Appalachia, Latino farmworkers, and oppressed blacks in both the South and North.

In his new book All Work Has Dignity, Honey pulls together 11 of King's speeches on labor and explains the lasting significance of King's emphasis on the need for "economic rights" for all.

People forget that Dr. King was every bit as committed to economic justice as he was to ending racial segregation. As we struggle with massive unemployment, a staggering racial wealth gap and near collapse of our financial system, King’s prophetic writings and speeches underscore his relevance for today.

King saw domestic inequality as inextricably linked with the foreign policy of U.S. corporations and the government. He spoke out against the Vietnam War not as a "tragic well-intentioned mistake," as so many liberals described it, but the inevitable result of the U.S. empire of corporate power expanding under a growing military umbrella.
In an audacious statement that would get him branded a dangerous "extremist" today, King declared on April 4, 1967, that the United States was "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." King was an early critic of corporate globalization, which exploited the misery of the world's poorest nations:

capitalists of the West [are] investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries.

GLOBALIZATION: SOUTHERN MODEL EXPANDED ACROSS GLOBE
The current version of globalization would seem familiar to Dr. King, as the the Southern economic model of all-powerful management, docile low-wage labor, and publicly subsidized operations, is now hugely expanded and ported around the globe.
Were he with us today, Dr. King would stand against the opportunistic politicians overlooking the untaxed wealth of billionaires to target public workers. In choosing which side to take in this growing battle, King would have little trouble making a decision, states Honey:

Efforts to shred public employee unions would have deadly effects on the wages, jobs and living standards of the rest of us—especially African Americans, who constitute the most highly unionized group of workers in the country. King fought for the right of all workers to belong to unions, and died supporting that right in Memphis.

Sean

Mankind Is Using Up Global Resources Faster; Fake Ground Zero Mosque Controversy; Oil Spill Worse than Reported; Fox News Donates Millions to Republican Politicians; Pakistan Floods

- How the "ground zero mosque" fear mongering began A viciously anti-Muslim blogger [who is insane, by the way], the right-wing New York Post and the right-wing media machine: How it all went down (with video)

- Many Americans Are Still Clueless on How to Save Energy Many Americans believe they can save energy with small behavior changes that actually achieve very little, and severely underestimate the major effects of switching to efficient, currently available technologies, says a new survey of Americans in 34 states.

- Government Report on Gulf Oil Spill Inaccurate, Scientists Say at Least 79% of Oil Still in the Sea Researchers from the University of Georgia called a recent government report "inaccurate" on Monday for claiming that three-quarters of the oil leaked from BP’s blown-out underwater well had either been collected, evaporated or burned off. Instead, the scientists say nearly 79% of the oil still remains in the Gulf of Mexico in some form.

- Fox "News" Gives $1 Million to Republican Governor's Association News Corp., which owns Fox News and the New York Post, gave [an unprecedented] $1 million to the Republican Governors Association this year, according to the RGA's most recent filing.

- Pakistan Floods: 3.5 Million Children at Risk from Deadly Diseases, says UN The UN said Monday that 3.5 million children in Pakistan are at risk from deadly waterborne diseases, as fresh protests erupted over the slow delivery of aid in the flood-ravaged country.

- Old-Style Coal Plants Expanding Utilities across the country are building dozens of old-style coal plants that will cement the industry's standing as the largest industrial source of climate-changing gases for years to come.

Mankind Is Using Up Global Resources Faster Than Ever
The growing world population and increasing consumption has pushed the world into ‘eco-debt’ a month earlier this year, according to the latest statistics on global resources.
by Louise Gray
Published on Monday, August 16, 2010 by the Telegraph/UK

Think tank the New Economics Foundation (NEF) look at how much food, fuel and other resources are consumed by humans every year. They then compare it to how much the world can provide without threatening the ability of important ecosystems like oceans and rainforests to recover.

This year the moment we start eating into nature's capital or ‘Earth Overshoot Day' will fall on 21st August, a full month earlier than last year, when resources were used up by 23rd September.

Andrew Simms, Policy Director at NEF, blamed increased consumption.

He said people in developing countries like China are consuming more meat and demanding cars and other energy-intensive goods. Even with green developments and energy efficiency, rich countries are also consuming more as individuals demand the latest technology, food fad or car.

He explained that the earlier humans use up Earth's resources, the more strain is put on resources, forcing up fuel prices and driving climate change. Ultimately ecosystems like fisheries and even the Earth's climate system will suffer and future generations will experience food shortages and rising global temperatures.

Mr Simms called for a transition to a more sustainable way of living to prevent poverty and starvation in the future.

"The banking crisis taught us the danger of a system that goads us to live beyond our means financially," he said. "A greater danger comes from a consumer culture and economic policy that pushes us to live beyond our means ecologically."

Sean

Environmental Minefield in Gulf; BP/Republicans Still Lying; Corporations Decide What's Safe in USA; Racism, Alive and Well in USA; more

- The Big Lie: BP, Governments Downplay Public Health Risk From Oil and Dispersants BP is still in the dark ages on oil toxicity. BP officials stress that, by the time oil gets to shore, it is "weathered" and missing the highly volatile compounds like the carcinogenic benzene, among others. BP fails to mention the threat from dispersed oil, ultrafine particles (PAHs), and chemical dispersants, which include industrial solvents and proprietary compounds, many hazardous to humans.

- Republican Mississippi Gov. Barbour Fronts for BP Louie Miller, state director of the Sierra Club in Mississippi, is burning up. And its not the sweltering heat typical of Mississippi summers that's getting to him: It's Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour and his kid-glove treatment of BP over its oil blow-out disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

- Afghan Corruption Doubled Since 2006: Survey Corruption in Afghanistan has doubled in three years since 2006, despite pledges by the government to clean up graft in one of the world's poorest countries, according to a survey released Thursday.

- "We tired of u n-----s movin in are neighborhood!" Nearly 20 black families in a Detroit neighborhood got racist - not to mention seriously badly spelled - letters Tuesday telling them to move out or get killed, the latest in a string of racially ugly events that included a cross burning and Aryan Nation flyers found in Easter eggs. Welcome to Obama's post-racial America.

- Wal-Mart: Life, Liberty, The Pursuit of Freedom to Allow Mobs to Trample Your Employees to Death Wal-Mart employee Jdimytai Damour was trampled to death by a 2,000-strong post-Thanksgiving, bargain-hunting mob in 2008. Wal-Mart says it shouldn't be held accountable for safety standards - like not having workers stampeded to death - that would cut into sales promotions of the latest plastic gimcracks made in sweatshops in China. These guys are truly princes of industry.

- Oh Dear, It Seems Mission WAS Accomplished So what if hundreds of scholars and every vaguely sentient biped on the planet have judged George Bush the worst president, ever. The stalwart founders of Honor Freedom  want to set the historical record straight - that W was "the right leader at the right time." Under headings like Compassion, Liberation and Truth, it seeks to correct nefarious myths like, "The war in Iraq was an invasion, not a liberation by the U.S." Are these people dangerous, or just sad?

- Weighing Safety of Weed Killer in Drinking Water, EPA Relies Heavily on Industry-Backed Studies Companies with a financial interest in a weed-killer sometimes found in drinking water paid for thousands of studies federal regulators are using to assess the herbicide’s health risks, records of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency show. Many of these industry-funded studies, which largely support atrazine’s safety, have never been published or subjected to an independent scientific peer review.


Abandoned Oil Wells Make Gulf of Mexico 'Environmental Minefield'
AP investigation finds BP was responsible for 600 of more than 27,000 abandoned wells in the Gulf of Mexico
by Richard Wray
Published on Wednesday, July 7, 2010 by The Guardian/UK

The Gulf of Mexico is packed with abandoned oil wells from a host of companies including BP, according to an investigation by Associated Press which describes the area as "an environmental minefield that has been ignored for decades".
While the explosion and subsequent sinking of the Deepwater Horizon rig has thrown the spotlight sharply on BP's activities in the Gulf of Mexico, environmental safety in the area has been neglected for decades.

While the explosion and subsequent sinking of the Deepwater Horizon rig has thrown the spotlight sharply on BP's activities in the Gulf of Mexico, environmental safety in the area has been neglected for decades. (Photograph: Gerald Herbert/AP)

There are more than 27,000 abandoned wells in the Gulf of Mexico, according to AP, of which 600 belonged to BP. The oldest of the abandoned wells dates back to the late 1940s and the AP investigation highlights concerns about the way in which some of the wells have been plugged, especially the 3,500 neglected wells which are catalogued by the government as "temporarily abandoned". The rules for shutting off temporarily closed wells is not as strict as for completely abandoned wells.

Regulations for temporarily abandoned wells require oil companies to present plans to reuse or permanently plug such wells within a year, but the AP found that the rule is routinely circumvented, and that more than 1,000 wells have lingered in that unfinished condition for more than a decade. About three-quarters of temporarily abandoned wells have been left in that status for more than a year, and many since the 1950s and 1960s.
AP quoted state officials as estimating that tens of thousands are badly sealed, either because they predate strict regulation or because the operating companies violated rules. Texas alone has plugged more than 21,000 abandoned wells to control pollution, according to the state comptroller's office. In state-controlled waters off the coast of California, many abandoned wells have had to be resealed. But in deeper federal waters, AP points out, there is very little investigation into the state of abandoned wells.

The US Minerals Management Service, now called the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement and charged with keeping an eye on offshore drilling, has little power to deal with abandoned wells. It merely requests paperwork to prove that a well has been capped and unlike regulators in states such as California, it does not typically inspect the job.

The Deepwater Horizon disaster has so far cost BP more than $3bn (£1.98bn) in actual clean-up expenses, but many times more in terms of the company's financial value. Its share price has more than halved since the explosion on 20 April and the clean-up is likely to take months if not years. The AP investigation raises the question of whether there are more such environmental disasters waiting to happen.

White knight wanted

BP boss Tony Hayward, meanwhile, continues to try to deal with the fall out from the Deepwater Horizon disaster. The BP chief executive is understood to have met with the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA) as he continues his world tour in search of a so-called white knight investor to ward off a takeover by a foreign rival.

Having already held talks with current investor, the Kuwait Investment Office, Hayward has switched his interest to other cash-rich oil states as he tries to bolster support for BP, which has become increasingly vulnerable as a result of the share price collapse caused by the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. ADIA is one of the world's largest sovereign wealth funds.

The news comes after it emerged on Tuesday that the US government has demanded that the oil group give it advanced notice of any potential disposals. Earlier this month BP said it would raise $10bn by selling some of its non-core assets in order to help shore up its balance sheet in the face of the mounting cost of dealing with the spill.

On 23 June, the US attorney general Tony West wrote to BP to request that the department of justice be alerted to any sales or even joint ventures entered into by the company. BP has yet to respond.

Speculation has centred on the disposal of some of BP's assets in South America, while 'mature' assets in the North Sea have been seen by other oil watchers as obvious candidates for sale. Hayward was in Azerbaijan on Tuesday to reassure local politicians that it is not about to jettison its assets on the Caspian and met with Azerbaijan president Ilham Aliyev.
BP has ruled out issuing any new shares, instead hoping that it will be able to persuade investors to pick up their stakes in the market. But many in the City believe it will need to raise more cash to bolster its balance sheet, with a bond issue seen as the most likely route.

Sean

The Lies about ACORN; Republicans are Pro-Rape; Racist Republicans; Climate Change; US Supports War Criminals; Single Payer Health Care; more (posted 10/16/09)

- Republicans Side with Rapists! Yes, You Read that Correctly! Thanks to democratic senator Al Franken, US defense firms (like Haliburton, etc) are to be barred from lucrative government contracts if they refuse to allow employees access to the courts, this after a woman working for a Halliburton subsidiary in Iraq was prevented from taking legal action after being gang raped by fellow workers.

- The Gang Rape and the Republicans It's a story from the dark political underbelly that makes you question the entire setup, rethink humanity, and lean out your window and scream: what the hell is wrong with these people? Who are they, really? Why do we give them power?

Here is freshman Minnesota senator Al Franken's first-ever legislative action, a relatively simple, almost laughably surefire bill requiring the Pentagon no longer do business with any contractor -- like former Vice President Dick Cheney's company Halliburton -- that requires its employees to agree that she cannot sue said contractor if she is, oh let's just say, gang raped by its employees.

The most repellant part is the 30 U.S. senators -- Republicans each and every one -- who just stepped forth to vote against the Franken amendment, essentially saying no, women should have no right to sue if they are sexually abused or gang raped, Halliburton and its ilk must be protected at all costs...

- Republican Congress Members Call for Investigation of Muslim Political Activity CAIR is a non-profit organization of American citizens who are Muslim and their "mission is to enhance understanding of Islam, encourage dialogue, protect civil liberties, empower American Muslims, and build coalitions that promote justice and mutual understanding." They stand accused of plotting to influence members of Congress and trying to help interns obtain positions in Congress in order to advance their political agenda. That's consistent with what virtually every political advocacy group in the nation does; it's normally called activism and democracy. But because, in this case, it's a group of Muslims who are doing this, these House Republicans are depicting it as some sort of nefarious espinage plot against the U.S. that demands a criminal investigation.

- Why We Need Single Payer Health Care: Insurer ends health program rather than pay out big Ian Pearl has fought for his life every day of his 37 years. Confined to a wheelchair and hooked to a breathing tube, the muscular dystrophy victim refuses to give up. But his insurance company, Guardian, already has.

Legally barred from discriminating against individuals who submit large claims, the New York-based insurer simply canceled lines of coverage altogether in entire states to avoid paying high-cost claims like Mr. Pearl's.

In an e-mail, one Guardian Life Insurance Co. executive called high-cost patients such as Mr. Pearl "dogs" that the company could "get rid of." A federal court quickly ruled that the company's actions were legal, so on Dec. 1, barring an order by the federal Department of Health and Human Services, Mr. Pearl will lose his benefits.

- US Berated for Shielding Israel on Gaza Killings A U.S. decision to stall Security Council action against Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas for war crimes during the 22-day conflict in Gaza last December has come under heavy fire both from inside and outside the United Nations.

The number of Palestinians killed during the recent conflict is estimated at between 1,387 and 1,417, mostly civilians, compared with four Israeli fatal casualties in southern Israel and nine soldiers killed during fighting, four of whom died as a result of friendly fire.

- She Who Has Borne the Battle Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA) has released a report, "Women Warriors: Supporting She 'Who Has Borne the Battle,'" on the horrific and largely overlooked problems facing women veterans, who make up over 11% of those serving in America's wars. Among the findings: last year's 3,000 reports of sexual assault, widely viewed as a fraction of the true number; divorce rates triple that of male soldiers; inadequate health care; and rising homelessness.

- The Arctic Will Be Ice-Free in Summer within 20 Years, Research Says The Arctic will be ice-free in summer within 20 years, the study found, while the Earth will lose the white cap that can be seen in photographs taken from space.



The ACORN Standard
by Jeremy Scahill
Published on Thursday, October 15, 2009 by The Nation
 
The nonpartisan Project on Government Oversight and Reform recently revealed that the top 100 government contractors made nearly $300 billion from federal contracts in 2007 alone. Since 1995 these same contractors have been involved with 676 cases of "misconduct" and were paid $26 billion in fines to settle cases stemming from fraud, waste or abuse. Fines and other penalties, it seems, are simply the stunningly small price of doing government business.

Take the case of the top three war contractors, Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrop Grumman. These companies have engaged in 108 instances of misconduct since 1995 and have paid fines or settlements totaling nearly $3 billion. In 2007 they won some $77 billion in federal contracts. Or consider pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, which in September paid $2.3 billion to settle a slew of criminal and civil cases, including Medicaid fraud. According to the Justice Department, this was "the largest healthcare fraud settlement" in its history. Yet Pfizer made more than $40 billion in profits last year and won $73 million in federal contracts in 2007; it continues to do robust business with the government. Not bad for a "corporate felon."

Unfortunately, neither Pfizer nor the largest US military contractors are targets of significant Congressional action. Instead it's ACORN, a community organization that trains and advocates for poor and working-class Americans. Over the past fifteen years, ACORN has received just $53 million in federal funds, much of it for low-income housing.

Despite--or perhaps because of--its efforts to empower some 500,000 member families, ACORN was the subject of a sting video produced by a right-wing activist that featured a fake pimp and prostitute seeking tax advice. The group swiftly fired the handful of employees who were entrapped, but that didn't put an end to the storm. Fox News aired the video repeatedly, and right-wing astroturf operative Rick Berman set up a Rotten ACORN website. The campaign was wildly successful. In mid-September all but seventy-five House Democrats and seven senators voted with their Republican colleagues to bar the group from receiving federal funds.

ACORN, like all organizations receiving federal dollars, should be subject to Congressional scrutiny. But ACORN was clearly singled out for political reasons. Those Democrats who voted for the "defund ACORN" bill should be required to explain their reasoning to their constituents, particularly when so few of them have taken substantive actions to apply the ACORN standard to corporate criminals with real rap sheets.

A small but growing number of lawmakers are fighting to confront out-of-control corporations. Here are three legislative initiatives that stand out:

§ HR 3679. Representative Betty McCollum of Minnesota introduced her own ACORN Act--the Against Corporations Organizing to Rip off the Nation Act--which seeks to deny federal funds to "corporations or companies guilty of certain felony convictions." Pfizer is singled out, but the act could be applied to other corporations too. "Why are companies that break the law as a business strategy allowed to receive taxpayer funds?" asks McCollum. "A government contract is a privilege, not a right. If a company commits a felony against the people of the United States, then that privilege must end." Significantly, Wisconsin Representative David Obey, chair of the powerful House Appropriations Committee, has signed on as a co-sponsor. Obey also voted to defund ACORN.

§ In the Senate, Bernie Sanders put forward an amendment to the current defense authorization bill (HR3326 S. AMDT. 2617) that calls on the defense secretary to conduct a wide-ranging study of the money the government pays to contractors that have been indicted, settled charges or been fined by any federal agency, as well as those that have been convicted of fraud. It also calls for recommendations on how to penalize contractors that are "repeatedly" involved with fraud. "Virtually every major defense contractor in this country has, for a period of many years, been engaged in systemic, illegal and fraudulent behavior while receiving hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money," says Sanders. While Sanders is just calling for a "study," the spirit of his amendment could be the basis for legislation that targets corporate criminals receiving federal dollars.

§ Several Congressional offices say they are weighing the possibility of introducing legislation that would apply the ACORN standard to companies like Blackwater, whose operatives will stand trial next year on manslaughter charges stemming from killing Iraqi civilians; or KBR, which is being investigated in connection with the electrocution deaths of US soldiers and contractors in Iraq. Representative Jan Schakowsky says she is considering reintroducing a version of her 2007 Stop Outsourcing Security Act, which sought to ban the use of Blackwater and other mercenary companies from performing armed activities on the federal payroll. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a co-sponsor in the Senate, now oversees the work of Blackwater and other armed State Department contractors, increasingly employed in Afghanistan.

Florida Representative Alan Grayson is spearheading calls for fraudulent military contractors to be defunded under the anti-ACORN legislation. He points to Halliburton's misconduct and its "extreme and gross negligence...putting in showers in Iraq that end up electrocuting soldiers, and feeding them poisoned water." The federal funding ACORN has received over the past twenty years, Grayson says, "is roughly equal to what the taxpayer paid to Halliburton each day during the war in Iraq."

And for more on the republican lies about ACORN, watch these segments from the Rachel Maddow show which explain it all. Very interesting:

The Media Fails ACORN: http://www.commondreams.org/video/2009/09/25-0

Republicans Lie ABout ACORN: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/09/25-1

GOP seeking wedge issue in ACORN: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/#33064799

ACORN on Republican Hit List: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/#33080922

The Man Behind the Lies about ACORN, also claims Global Climate Change is fake: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/#33111033

Sean