TIM ARANGO and CLIFFORD KRAUSS, - The New York Times
Stephan: As the previous story pointed out the deaths of thousands of Americans and some far large but never accurately counted number of Iraqis, and the wounding and maiming of hundreds of thousands of Americans and Iraqis produced no benefits for either country and great damage to both. Even on the terms the neocons argued for the war: it would protect Iraq's massive oil supplies for the U.S. (read the neocons' corporate masters) turns out to be wrong, as this story makes clear. Everything the Bush Administration based its policy decisions on was wrong, and China is the main beneficiary.
BAGHDAD – Since the American-led invasion of 2003, Iraq has become one of the world’s top oil producers, and China is now its biggest customer.
China already buys nearly half the oil that Iraq produces, nearly 1.5 million barrels a day, and is angling for an even bigger share, bidding for a stake now owned by Exxon Mobil in one of Iraq’s largest oil fields.
‘The Chinese are the biggest beneficiary of this post-Saddam oil boom in Iraq,
No Comments
DAVID FERGUSON, - The Raw Story
Stephan: The next time you hear or read some pro-GMO commentator telling you how Monsanto and the five other companies in this outrageous planet wide experiment have everything under control, please remember this story.
The company that engineered an herbicide-resistant strain of wheat which was never cleared for commercial use is baffled as to how the genetically modified organism (GMO) came to be growing in an Oregon wheat field. According to New Scientist, Monsanto, which says it abandoned research on the wheat in 2004, claims it has no idea how the wheat got there, but that it is urgently trying to find out.
An Oregon farmer who found the wheat only realized that it was a genetically modified crop when he tried to clear the field where it was growing by using the Monsanto herbicide Roundup. To his amazement, the plants simply refused to die.
A U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) fact sheet about the contamination said:
An Oregon farmer noticed some volunteers, or plants that had germinated and developed in a place where they were not intentionally planted, in his wheat field, were resistant to glyphosate and sent the samples to the OSU scientist. She received the samples on April 30, 2013, and conducted tests on the samples. Based on her preliminary tests, the samples she received tested positive for the glyphosate trait and the farmer […]
No Comments
JULIET EILPERIN and TOM HAMBURGER, - The Washington Post
Stephan: Here is a clear example of the incestuous relationship between NGCSs and government. It has become so transparently corrupt that it is just business as usual.
The decision on whether to approve the Keystone XL oil pipeline is a political headache for President Obama. But to five of his former aides, it represents a business opportunity.
Four of them - Bill Burton, Stephanie Cutter, Jim Papa and Paul Tewes - work as consultants for opponents of the project, which would carry heavy crude oil from Canada to Gulf Coast refineries. Another, former White House communications director Anita Dunn, counts the project’s sponsor, TransCanada, among the clients of her communications firm.
Keystone XL is just one of several upcoming administration decisions providing lucrative work for former Obama advisers on issues ranging from gun control to mining to legalized gambling. Just this week, three of Obama’s top former political advisers - Robert Gibbs, Jim Messina and David Plouffe - were given five-figure checks to deliver remarks at a forum in the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan, which is in the midst of a campaign to burnish its image in Washington.
Obama came into office promising that his administration would hew to higher standards than his predecessors did. He implemented rules barring former aides from directly lobbying the government for two years and frequently decries the influence of ‘special interests
No Comments
JILLIAN BERMAN , - The Huffington Post
Stephan: One of the great things about owning a government, is that you can get it to write and pass into law regulations that are morally reprehensible, and with common sense obviously wrong and unfair. Here is a transparently obvious example.
Apple may be getting all the attention from lawmakers and the news media for its offshore tax practices, but a new report finds that other major companies are using similar tactics to avoid paying taxes on billions of dollars in profits.
At least 18 companies, including Nike, Microsoft and Apple, are stashing profits in offshore tax havens likely in a bid to avoid paying taxes, according to a new report from the Citizens for Tax Justice, a left-leaning research group. If the companies brought that money home, they would pay combined more than $92 billion in U.S. taxes, the report found.
‘It’s misguided to say it’s some unique thing that Apple has created,’ said Matthew Gardner, the executive director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a research partner of CTJ. ‘A lot of big companies are very likely doing it.
No Comments
PATRICK MARKEY, - NBC News
Stephan: You and I, thanks to Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Daniel Pipes, and a number of other lesser neocons, and an almost fatally incurious President, spent over a TRILLION dollars of public money, and squandered the lives of tens of thousands of young Americans who were killed, wounded, or permanently maimed, in order to achieve... nothing... for either America or Iraq, as this report makes clear.
Historians, I think, will say it was the worst foreign policy blunder in U.S. history. It has resulted in the destabilization of an entire region of the world, sucked out the money that should have gone to rebuilding our infrastructure and our schools, and laid the foundation for generations of anti-American hate throughout the Islamic world.
BAGHDAD — More than 1,000 people were killed in violence in Iraq in May, making it the deadliest month since the sectarian slaughter of 2006-07, the United Nations reported on Saturday, raising fears of a return to civil war.
‘That is a sad record,’ Martin Kobler, the U.N. envoy in Baghdad, said in a statement. ‘Iraqi political leaders must act immediately to stop this intolerable bloodshed.’
Nearly 2,000 people have been killed in the last two months as al Qaeda and Sunni Islamist insurgents, invigorated by the Sunni-led revolt in neighboring Syria and by Iraqi Sunni discontent at home, seek to revive the kind of all-out inter-communal conflict that killed tens of thousands in 2006-2007.
Just this week, multiple bombings battered Shiite and Sunni neighborhoods in the Iraqi capital Baghdad, where at least 70 people were killed on Monday and 25 on Thursday.
The renewed bloodletting reflects worsening tensions between Iraq’s Shiite-led government and its Sunni minority, seething with resentment at their treatment since Saddam Hussein was overthrown by the U.S.-led invasion of 2003 and later hanged.
Al Qaeda’s local wing and other Sunni armed groups are now regaining ground lost during the long battle with U.S. troops.
An Iraqi army raid on a Sunni protest […]
No Comments
