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Recent Israeli Provocations
by Stephen Lendman
Perhaps suggesting a larger-scale planned offensive, recent violent Israeli outbreaks struck Gaza, the West Bank, and Israeli/Lebanon border, the first there since the summer 2006 war.
Like Cast Lead, it was Israeli aggression - violent, lawless and unrelenting, a scorched-earth blitzkrieg, inflicting vast destruction, causing billions in damage, killing over 1,000 Lebanese, injuring thousands more, and displacing around a million others (about one-fourth of the country's four million population), including over 300,000 children fleeing north for their lives. In the end, Hezbollah handed Israel a humiliating defeat. Perhaps revenge is planned.
WHAT A GOVERNMENT CAN DO WITH ITS OWN BANK: THE REMARKABLE MODEL OF THE COMMONWEALTH BANK OF AUSTRALIA
Ellen Brown
Virg Bernero, the mayor of Lansing, Michigan, just won the Democratic nomination for governor of his state, making a state-owned Bank of Michigan a real possibility. Bernero is one of at least a dozen candidates promoting that solution to the states’ economic woes. It is an innovative idea, with little precedent in the United States. North Dakota, currently the only state owning its own bank, also happens to be the only state sporting a budget surplus, and it has the lowest unemployment rate in the country; but skeptics can write these achievements off to coincidence. More data is needed, and fortunately other precedents are available from other countries.
One of the most dramatic is the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, which operated successfully as a government-owned bank for most of the 20th century, until it was privatized in the 1990s. The Commonwealth Bank’s creative founders demonstrated that a government-backed bank can make loans without capital. Denison Miller, the Bank’s first Governor, was fond of saying that the Bank did not need capital because “it is backed by the entire wealth and credit of the whole of Australia.”
Environmental and Health Impacts of the BP Gulf Oil Spill Plus Necessary Resources for the Healthcare Provider
By Tom Termotto, DCAE
THE COMING OF THE BLACK WAVE
Nothing in our shared cultural experience will prepare us better for the oncoming Black Wave throughout the Gulf of Mexico than the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill in Prince William Sound, Alaska. And yet even this environmental catastrophe falls far short of what is coming around the corner in the Gulf. Alaska is not Florida, or Louisiana, or Texas. The Deep South summer here in Tallahassee, FL has been as hot and humid, as any we’ve seen. This weather pattern is what will distinguish the BP Gulf Oil Spill from the Exxon Valdez just as the total volume of the spill and use of dispersants have.
Pakistan Hit By Worst Flood In 80 Years
by Brian McAfee
Reports out of Pakistan now indicate that about 1,500 people have lost their lives and tens of thousands have been left homeless. This year's monsoon, which began July 28, is said to have affected 3.2 million people in northwest Pakistan. The most urgent need is clean drinking water followed by food, shelter, sanitation and medicine. Homes, bridges, roads and agricultural land has been swept away leaving scores of families with no place to live and no livelihood.
The potential for disease is high among flood victims as, for most, there is no fresh water and the threat of water borne illnesses is high. Indeed, the monsoon, which began a week ago, has permanently displaced hundreds of thousands of people, particularly children. Of the three million plus impacted by the floods, UNICEF workers in the region report that one million of them are children.
Targeted Assassinations: Challenging US Policy
by Stephen Lendman
The WikiLeaks "Afghan War Diaries" provided documented evidence of America's out-of-control lawlessness, including Special Forces death squads (Task Force 373) extrajudicially murdering or capturing suspected Taliban and Al-Qaeda figures, many hundreds or perhaps thousands on a so-called Jpel (joint prioritized effects) list, also willfully killing civilian men, women and children, the London Times Kabul-based Jerome Starkey reporting earlier on these crimes, suppressed in US media accounts, presenting an embedded view of the war, omitting the targeting of Americans until then Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair acknowledged it in February, explaining that:
CIA operatives and Special Forces death squads have been authorized to kill US citizens abroad, suspected of terrorist involvement, Blair saying:
The Repressive Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law
by Stephen Lendman
On July 18, the Knesset again extended the "Temporary Order" as it's done annually since 2003, affecting thousands of couples, one member an Israeli citizen, the other a Palestinian resident or refugee in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran or elsewhere, denied their right to reunite legally with spouses in Israel.
A new Physicians for Human Rights - Israel (PHR-IL) position paper titled, "No civil status, no hope: A close look at the 'Humanitarian' Committee of the Citizenship Law (CL)" explains its harm, using several case study examples.
The Liberal Media: Rest in Peace
by Stephen Lendman
The New York Times never qualified, run exclusively as a voice for power and privilege. The same, of course, holds for virtually all mainstream publications, including the Nation magazine, suppressing, sanitizing, and distorting truths, betraying its readers since 1865.
Its founding prospectus said it "will not be the organ of any party, sect, or body. It will, on the contrary, make an earnest effort to bring to the discussion of political and social questions a really critical spirit, and to wage war upon the vices of violence, exaggeration, and misrepresentation by which so much of the political writing of the day is marred."
THE ULTIMATE COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS
Allen L Roland
Paul Hawken at University of Portland / 2009
On May 3rd, 2009 Paul Hawken delivered the ultimate and timeless commencement address in that he stressed the true values of human behavior ~ Truth, Beauty, Justice, Faith and Love and then wrapped them all in the last great humanitarian value of Service.
I have always felt that the last two steps of ego death are celebration and then service. But celebration and service from a place of truth, beauty, justice, faith and love.
Paul Hawken stressed these same values in his historic commencement address at the University of Portland in May, 2009.
" You are graduating to the most amazing, challenging, stupefying challenge ever bequested to any generation. Nature beckons you to be on her side. You couldn’t ask for a better boss. The most unrealistic person in the world is the cynic, not the dreamer. Hopefulness only makes sense when it doesn’t make sense to be hopeful. This is your century. Take it and run as if your life depends on it"
I Have Become Uncomfortably Numb
by Cindy Sheehan
I am numb, I think.
Since the U.S. Corporate Military Industrial Complex forced me into the World of the Aware after my son’s murder in Iraq, I feel that the news freshly assaults me on a daily basis.
I am numb, I think, from being abused by this Empire on a regular basis for years.
I am numb, I think, because it wears on one to care so deeply when so many citizens of my national community (reader excepted) barely even know we are at war, let alone that we live in a murderous Empire.
On Friday, July 23rd when we were awaiting the birth of my new grandson in California, 52 Afghan civilians were slaughtered by US/NATO (same thing) forces.
Why was I born? Why are we here?
By Katherine Smith
John W. Whitehead, head of the Rutherford Institute, "a kind of evangelical Christian civil liberties union" is an attorney and author who has written, debated and practiced widely in the area of constitutional law, social and human rights.
In his essay, Does Life Have Meaning or Are We Merely Bobbleheads in Bubbleland? Whitehead believes we have missed our purpose and the meaning to life because we didn’t listen to Martin Luther King Jr.
In April 1967, King said [W]e as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motive and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
John’s commentary: “We didn't listen then, and we still have not learned: Material things don't fill the spiritual void. People need more than possessions to give meaning to life.”
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