Truthout
Hawks Box in Obama on Afghan War
Just back from Afghanistan, Marine Commandant, Gen. James Conway held a news conference to add his voice to the Pentagon campaign to disparage the July 2011 date President Barack Obama set for U.S. troops to begin leaving Afghanistan.
On Tuesday, Conway claimed that intelligence intercepts suggest that this deadline has strengthened the conviction of those resisting the U.S.-led occupation that it is just a matter of time before most foreign forces leave. Conway said:
"In some ways … it's probably giving our enemy sustenance. … We think he may be saying to himself … 'Hey, you know, we only have to hold out for so long.'"
Banks' Self-Dealing Super-Charged Financial Crisis
Over the last two years of the housing bubble, Wall Street bankers perpetrated one of the greatest episodes of self-dealing in financial history.
Faced with increasing difficulty in selling the mortgage-backed securities that had been among their most lucrative products, the banks hit on a solution that preserved their quarterly earnings and huge bonuses:
They created fake demand.
Our Weird and Wanton Wars
Many citizens in Britain are puzzled. Why do we always seem to be at war? How can this come about? What does it mean? At the same time, we seem to think of ourselves as a peaceful nation. In seeking answers, let us list a few notable characteristics of our current wars.
Michael N. Nagler | From Churchill to Petraeus
"I have not become her Majesty's first minister to preside over the dissolution of the British Empire." It was hard not to remember this proud declaration of Winston Churchill, as wrong headed as it was confident, when General Petraeus argued last Sunday that he had "not come to Afghanistan to preside over a graceful exit." Can we, unlike many, unfortunately, who will be persuaded by his reasons to delay withdrawing troops from Afghanistan until the "job" is done, draw some lessons from the instructive parallel?
Motive Behind Slaying of 72 Mexican Migrants Still Unclear
Mexico City - President Felipe Calderon on Friday accused the gunmen who killed 72 illegal migrants in northern Mexico this week of "incalculable savagery" as his government attempted to depict the major drug gang implicated in the slaughter as weakened and desperate.
The discovery of the grisly massacre Tuesday night at a ranch near San Fernando, about 45 miles southwest of Brownsville, Texas, put the spotlight on Los Zetas, a crime syndicate based along the Gulf Coast of Mexico that has international tentacles.
Speculation and the New Commodity Price Crisis: Separating the Wheat From the Chaff
Wheat prices had been climbing prior to the August 5 announcement of a Russian wheat export ban. Kansas Board of Trade wheat futures contracts had gone from $4.92 a bushel on June 10 to spike at $7.95 a bushel on August 5, prompting a reporter to ask, "How could a Russian drought in the age of instant information escape the world's notice until the country's wheat crop was devastated?" This excellent question does not yet have a clear answer.
No "Home Sweet Home"
Note from Greg Palast: Matt Pascarella and I encountered Patricia Thomas while she was breaking into a home at the Lafitte Housing Project in New Orleans. It was her own home. Nevertheless, if caught, she’d end up in the slammer. So would we. Matt was my producer for the film, Big Easy to Big Empty, and he encouraged my worst habits. I’d worked for the New Orleans Housing Authority years back and knew they wanted the poor black folk out of these pretty townhouses near the French Quarter. Katrina was an excuse for ethnic cleansing, American style. Matt and I skipped cuffs on this shoot, but were charged later by Homeland Security (see below). While I recorded the story of hidden evils on film, Matt gathered a story which no camera can capture.
Is the US Pulling the Plug on Iraqi Workers?
Early in the morning of July 21, police stormed the offices of the Iraqi Electrical Utility Workers Union in Basra, the poverty-stricken capital of Iraq's oil-rich south. A shamefaced officer told Hashmeya Muhsin, the first woman to head a national union in Iraq, that they'd come to carry out the orders of Electricity Minister Hussain al-Shahristani to shut the union down. As more police arrived, they took the membership records, the files documenting often-atrocious working conditions, the leaflets for demonstrations protesting Basra's agonizing power outages, the computers and the phones.
News in Brief: Bernanke Says Recovery on Track as GDP Falls, and More ...
Bernanke Says Recovery on Track as GDP Falls
Obama Resists Pressure for Red Line on Iran's Nuclear Capability
Washington - President Barack Obama's refusal in a White House briefing earlier this month to announce a "red line" in regard to the Iran nuclear programme represented another in a series of rebuffs of pressure from Defence Secretary Robert Gates for statement that the United States will not accept its existing stocks of low enriched uranium.
The Obama rebuff climaxed a months-long internal debate between Obama and Gates over the "breakout capability" issue which surfaced in the news media last April.
Gates has been arguing that Iran could turn its existing stock of low enriched uranium (LEU) into a capability to build a nuclear weapon secretly by using covert enrichment sites and undeclared sources of uranium.
Fighting Corporate Concentration in Agriculture
Today, the U.S. Departments of Justice and Agriculture convene their fourth public hearing on corporate concentration in U.S. agricultural markets. Farmers and ranchers are expected to crowd Fort Collins, Colorado to air their long-standing grievances about the disproportionate power of multinational meat packers. To contribute to this unprecedented public policy process, research assistant Sarah E. Trist and I surveyed the evidence of buyer power in U.S. hog markets, which have undergone rapid structural transformation in the last 25 years.
Rachel Maddow: Radio Fills Crucial Role in New Orleans at Critical Time (Video)
Rachel Maddow replays some of the calls to WWL (New Orleans) radio, following Hurricane Katrina and talks with Garland Robinette about how the station became a community service source during the national emergency.
In New York Times Matt Bai Attacks Social Security
In August 26th’s New York Times, One Liberal Voice Dares to Say, Cut the Budget, by Matt Bai. Bai's piece frames the federal debt as almost entirely the fault of Social Security, with cutting Social Security the only real way to fix the problem.
Ten Candidates File Suit as "Massive Improprieties, Tampering" Seen in Shelby County, Tennessee, Election
While barreling westward across the Great Plains yesterday, I received an urgent text message from Bev Harris of the non-partisan election integrity watchdog organization BlackBoxVoting.org. She and Susan Pynchon, an election integrity advocate from Florida Fair Elections Coalition, had traveled to Shelby County (Memphis), Tennessee, following reports of massive voter disenfranchisement during the state's August 5th elections.
Broadband Needs Truth in Labeling
The Federal Communications Commission recently released a technical paper confirming what most technology insiders – and many movie fans who have tried to stream a high-definition Netflix trilogy at 8 o’clock at night — have long suspected. Actual download speeds on broadband connections in America lag way behind what most providers advertise.
Study of Coal Ash Sites Finds Extensive Water Contamination
Washington - A study released on Thursday finds that 39 sites in 21 states where coal-fired power plants dump their coal ash are contaminating water with toxic metals such as arsenic and other pollutants, and that the problem is more extensive than previously estimated.
The Mosque and the "American Street"
The circus around the mosque should start to lose audience. New York officials have the authority to decide whether an Islamic center may be built near the tragic site of the attacks on the Twin Towers. They've given it a green light.
Robert Scheer | They Go or Obama Goes
Barack Obama and the Democrats he led to a stunning victory two years ago are going down hard in the face of an economic crisis that he did nothing to create but which he has failed to solve.
That is somewhat unfair because the basic blame belongs to his predecessors, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, who let the bulls of Wall Street run wild in the streets where ordinary folks lived. And there was universal Republican support in Congress for the radical deregulation of the financial industry that produced this debacle.
The Equal Rites Awards - Again
Boston - And so we rise to celebrate Aug. 26, the 90th anniversary of the day American women finally won the right to vote. It took nine decades to get a third woman on the Supreme Court. But in politics, alas, we have gone from radical women chaining themselves to the White House fence to conservative women serving tea. Or at least the tea party.
What would Susan B. Anthony make of Sarah Palin as arguably the most (in)famous female politician in the land with her menagerie of groupies? The former leader of "pit bulls with lipstick" is now a "Mama Grizzly" intent on escorting a "stampede of pink elephants" -- aka ultraconservative female Republicans -- to Washington.