Thursday, April 9th, 2015
Amy Goodman and Aaron Maté, -
Stephan: Do you remember the old line, Merchants of Death. I think it is appropriate, and I think that is disgusting.
Credit: celesteheadlee.tumblr.com
As Saudi Arabia continues U.S.-backed strikes in Yemen and Washington lifts its freeze on military to aid to Egypt, new figures show President Obama has overseen a major increase in weapons sales since taking office. The majority of weapons exports under Obama have gone to the Middle East and Persian Gulf. Saudi Arabia tops the list at $46 billion in new agreements. We are joined by William Hartung, who says that even after adjusting for inflation, “the volume of major deals concluded by the Obama administration in its first five years exceeds the amount approved by the Bush administration in its full eight years in office by nearly $30 billion. That also means that the Obama administration has approved more arms sales than any U.S. administration since World War II.” Hartung is the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy, and author of “Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex.” Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its […]
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Thursday, April 9th, 2015
Stephan: I am amazed that people are surprised that ending Marijuana Prohibition would undercut the power and profits of of the drug cartels. We have a historical precedent in the end of alcohol prohibition: bootlegger is not much of a career path anymore. And note the number of people killed in Mexico by the cartels.
Soldiers escort Los Zetas drug cartel leader Omar Trevino Morales in Mexico City on March 4, 2015.
Credit: Time
MEXICO CITY, MEXICO — In the midst of this seething mountain capital, Mexico’s security ministry houses a bizarre museum — a collection of what the army seizes from drug traffickers. The Museo de Enervantes, often referred to as the Narco Museum, has drug samples themselves (including the rare black cocaine), diamond-studded guns, gold-coated cell phones, rocket-propelled grenades and medals that cartels award their most productive smugglers. It also shows off the narcos’ ingenuity for getting their drugs into the United States, including “trap cars” with secret compartments, catapults to hurl packages over the border fence and even false buttocks, to hide drugs in.
Agents on the 2,000 mile-U.S. border have wrestled with these smuggling techniques for decades, seemingly unable to stop the northward flow of drugs and southward flow of dollars and guns. But […]
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Thursday, April 9th, 2015
Dana Milbank, - The Washington Post
Stephan: There is something very sick, I mean a real mental illness, in the way the Theocratic Right seems to delight in punishing the poor. This essay makes this point very well.
Food bank shelves
Credit: www.ppbaptist.org
Rick Brattin, a young Republican state representative in Missouri, has come up with an innovative new way to humiliate the poor in his state. Call it the surf-and-turf law.
Brattin has introduced House Bill 813, making it illegal for food-stamp recipients to use their benefits “to purchase cookies, chips, energy drinks, soft drinks, seafood, or steak.”
“I have seen people purchasing filet mignons and crab legs” with electronic benefit transfer (EBT) cards, the legislator explained, according to The Post’s Roberto A. Ferdman. “When I can’t afford it on my pay, I don’t want people on the taxpayer’s dime to afford those kinds of foods either.”
Never mind that few can afford filet mignon on a less-than-$7/day food-stamp allotment; they’re more likely to be buying chuck steak or canned tuna. This is less about public policy than about demeaning public-benefit recipients.
The surf-and-turf bill is one of a flurry of new legislative proposals at the state and local level to dehumanize and even criminalize the […]
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Thursday, April 9th, 2015
Steven Rosenfeld, National Political Reporter - Alternet (U.S.)
Stephan: Think about this: In a third of the United States your life is more likely to end in gun fire than a car accident. We have more deaths per year in the U.S. by gun fire than many war zones. I find that an extraordinary bit of data. In the 10 years of the Iraq War about 5,300 Americans were killed in combat. During that same time 270,000 men, women, and children died by gun fire in American towns and cities.
In one-third of America, you are more likely to be killed by a gun than in a car crash, a new Violence Policy Center (VPC) analysis has found. (emphasis added)
“Firearm-related fatalities exceeded motor vehicle fatalities in 17 states and the District of Columbia in 2013,” VPC’s report said, citing the most recent federal data. “That year, gun deaths (including gun suicide, homicide, and fatal unintentional shootings) outpaced motor vehicle deaths in Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, District of Columbia, Indiana, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, Nevada, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, Washington, and Wyoming.”
In those 17 states, there were 12,730 gun deaths, compared to 11,256 car-related fatalities. The states with the most gun deaths were Alaska, Louisiana, Wyoming, Tennessee and Missouri, where the death rate was 50 percent higher—or more—than the national average of 10.64 gun deaths per 100,000 people. (emphasis added)
The reason why guns are killing more people than cars in these states is due to two simultaneous trends. The first is gun nuts have undermined sensible government efforts to require life-saving controls, the study said, such as […]
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Wednesday, April 8th, 2015
Doug Gurian-Sherman, - The Food Revolution Network
Stephan: One of the selling points for industrial chemical agriculture is that nothing can equal its productivity. As this report explains, this is not true, and when the pollution and toxicity costs and effects are factored in there really is no contest. We need to completely reassess our agricultural practices, from the subsidies to the actual farming. We are on the wrong track.
Industrial agriculture has huge, unsustainable impacts on our environment. And while organic and other ecologically based farming systems (agroecology) have huge benefits, some have suggested that it will never produce enough food. Production is only one of the challenges for food security. But, according to new research, even by this measure, critics seem to have substantially underestimated the productivity of organic farming.
Impressive research from Iowa State University has already begun to show that agroecological systems that don’t completely eliminate synthetic chemicals can match or exceed yields from U.S. industrial grain production and provide equal or higher profits to farmers. Now, new research by a team of U.C. Berkeley scientists shows that organic systems can also be highly productive.
I want to point out that, despite the fact that we currently produce more than enough crops to feed our global population, around a billion people are hungry around the globe. And, in the meantime, we waste between 30 to 40 percent of the food we produce. In other words, crop productivity is only one piece of the food security puzzle. Food sovereignty […]
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