Saturday, January 15th, 2011
JULIAN MIGLIERINI, - BBC News (U.K.)
Stephan: The War on Drugs has transparently become a program whose main function is to give several big bureaucracies, and a small number of corporations an endless supply of public money, and to feed into the American Gulag System, which keeps a whole other set of bureaucracies, and another group of corporations, many the same, hooked to the pipeline of public money. The fact that this system has destroyed the lives of millions of people, and caused the death of tens of thousands means nothing, when measured against the profit potential. After all most of those who die in the constant gunfire are just brown people in another country. It is digusting, and it is corroding our vitality as a democratic society.
MEXICO CITY — Nearly 35,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence since late 2006
The launch this week of a comprehensive official database of drug-related killings around Mexico provides a new insight into the complexity of the conflict with criminal groups that traffic drugs into the United States.
Until now, the public relied mostly on tallies elaborated by national media outlets or on sporadic – and sometimes confusing – figures released by different government institutions.
Many in Mexico have therefore welcomed the publication of a unified set of data that for the first time includes not only fallen gang members, but also police, soldiers and innocent civilians killed in the fight against the cartels.
However, that positive development has been overshadowed by the grim scenario that the figures depict – and some complain that they only show one, even if the most tragic, aspect of the conflict.
According to the new database, the total number of people killed in the conflict between December 2006, when President Felipe Calderon came into power, and the end of 2010, stands at 34,612.
Last year was by far the bloodiest since Mr Calderon launched his head-on military confrontation with the cartels, with 15,273 deaths.
‘Transparency’
President Calderon said the database […]
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Saturday, January 15th, 2011
SAHIL KAPUR, - The Raw Story
Stephan: This is a sickness that seems to pervade the teabagger movement. This kind of willful ignorance and denial of the truth, reducing everything to slogans and tweets, is a sign of an inability to cope with the world in its full complexity and nuance. There is a persistent childishness to what these people say and write, and this trivialization concerning who the Founders were, and what they had to overcome to create the Constitution in 1787, reduces everything to crayon portraits that fail to inform children of their real heritage.
Tea partiers push to remove criticisms of Founding Fathers from textbooks. Tea party activists in Tennessee are pushing state legislators to amend curriculum in a way that eliminates criticisms of the Founding Fathers’ treatment of Native Americans and holding of slaves, according to a news item.
Roughly two-dozen tea partyers demanded that their state lawmakers modify textbook standards to ‘compel the teaching of students in Tennessee the truth regarding the history of our nation and the nature of its government,’ the Memphis-based The Commercial Appeal reports.
‘Neglect and outright ill,’ they said in literature disseminated at a news conference, ‘have distorted the teaching of the history and character of the United States.’
The group’s spokesman Hal Rounds, an attorney, lamented there was ‘an awful lot of made-up criticism about, for instance, the founders intruding on the Indians or having slaves or being hypocrites in one way or another.’
‘The thing we need to focus on about the founders is that, given the social structure of their time, they were revolutionaries who brought liberty into a world where it hadn’t existed,’ Rounds said, as quoted by the newspaper.
He and his fellow activists pushed for new state curriculum standards that asserted: ‘No portrayal of minority experience […]
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Friday, January 14th, 2011
LESTER BROWN, - Foriegn Policy
Stephan: This is the latest useful piece I have read on this trend which is coming towards us like that Denzel Washington movie about the speeding train out of control
As the new year begins, the price of wheat is setting an all-time high in the United Kingdom. Food riots are spreading across Algeria. Russia is importing grain to sustain its cattle herds until spring grazing begins. India is wrestling with an 18-percent annual food inflation rate, sparking protests. China is looking abroad for potentially massive quantities of wheat and corn. The Mexican government is buying corn futures to avoid unmanageable tortilla price rises. And on January 5, the U.N. Food and Agricultural organization announced that its food price index for December hit an all-time high.
But whereas in years past, it’s been weather that has caused a spike in commodities prices, now it’s trends on both sides of the food supply/demand equation that are driving up prices. On the demand side, the culprits are population growth, rising affluence, and the use of grain to fuel cars. On the supply side: soil erosion, aquifer depletion, the loss of cropland to nonfarm uses, the diversion of irrigation water to cities, the plateauing of crop yields in agriculturally advanced countries, and — due to climate change — crop-withering heat waves and melting mountain glaciers and ice sheets. These climate-related trends seem destined to […]
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Friday, January 14th, 2011
DAVID EDWARDS and STEPHEN WEBSTER, - The Raw Story
Stephan: We are devouring ourselves with fear, when what we should be doing is creating a social environment such that people like the Tucson murderer are identified and treated, and don't have access to terrorist weapons and are stopped from walking into a public parking lot and killing people with abandon. These catastrophes cannot be stopped by force, or more guns; they must be stopped by caring. Almost every other country in the developed world seems to get this.
Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) has introduced a little-noticed bill that intends to once again renew controversial provisions of the Bush administration’s USA Patriot Act that are due to expire this year.
When the act was first signed into law, Congress put in some ‘sunset’ provisions to quiet the concerns of civil libertarians, but they were ignored by successive extensions. Unfortunately, those concerns proved to be well founded, and a 2008 Justice Department report confirmed that the FBI regularly abused their ability to obtain personal records of Americans without a warrant.
The only real sign of strong opposition to the act was in 2005, when a Democratic threat to filibuster its first renewal was overcome by Senate Republicans.
Since the bill introduced by Rogers on Jan. 5 was virtually identical to the extension passed last year, its passage was seen as likely.
‘Given the very limited number of days Congress has in session before the current deadline, and the fact that the bill’s Republican sponsor is only seeking another year, I think it’s safe to read this as signaling an agreement across the aisle to put the issue off yet again,’ the conservative-leaning Cato Institute’s Julian Sanchez wrote.
‘In the absence of a major scandal, though, […]
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Friday, January 14th, 2011
MICHAEL MCCARTHY, - The Independent (U.K.)
Stephan: You're a bee on the wall. How do you think it went in the boardroom? 'A third of the bees have disappeared. Without them agriculture is not possible. But, hey, we could make say a billion in the short term if we can co-opt Beekeepers Association, and get them to endorse our new pesticides.
'There is a long term down side, sure, but we'll have gotten out with our millions before that, so it's not on our watch. Can we do it? You bet, their Executive Director can't wait to be corrupted.'
Britain’s beekeepers are at war over their association’s endorsement for money of four insecticides, all of them fatal to bees, made by major chemical companies.
The British Beekeepers’ Association has been selling its logo to four European pesticide producers and is believed to have received about £175,000 in return.
The active ingredient chemicals in the four pesticides the beekeepers endorsed are synthetic pyrethroids, which are among the most powerful of modern insect-killers.
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* Search the news archive for more stories
The deal was struck in secret by the beekeepers’ association executive without the knowledge of the overwhelming majority of its members.
After news of the deal emerged, some members expressed outrage and others resigned.
The beekeepers have now said they will end their pesticide endorsements – but have left the door open to future deals with agrochemical companies.
The battling beekeepers will have a showdown this weekend at the National Beekeeping Centre at Stoneleigh in Warwickshire.
An open letter signed by prominent figures in the world of the environment and agriculture condemns the British Beekeepers’ Association for its commercial relationship with […]
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