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Massive Pentagon Waste, Fraud and Grand Theft
by Stephen Lendman
Longstanding Pentagon operations reflect a black hole of unaccountability. Reuters published a two-part report. In July, it discussed the Defense Department's "payroll quagmire."
It's bureaucracy is stifling. It's "unyielding," said Reuters. Active duty and retired military personal are routinely cheated. Pay errors are widespread.
Correcting "or just explaining them can test even the most persistent soldiers." Weeks or months pass without resolution.
Some personnel are cheated on pay. Others are penalized for overpayments. Their earnings are "drastically cut" unfairly. Precise figures are impossible to calculate.
At issue is "the Defense Department's jury-rigged network of mostly incompatible computer systems for payroll and accounting, many of them decades old, long obsolete, and unable to communicate with each other," said Reuters.
"The Defense Finance and Accounting Services (DFAS) still uses a half-century-old computer language that is largely unable to communicate with the equally outmoded personnel management systems employed by each of the military services."
Israeli Unaccountability
by Stephen Lendman
Previous articles provided extensive evidence. Occupation harshness gives no quarter. Israel gets away with murder and then some.
World leaders able to act do nothing. Israeli crimes go unpunished. Palestinian suffering persists. Besieged Gazans feel it most. Official Israeli policy is making Gaza scream. A humanitarian crisis persists.
Gisha's name means "access" and "approach." It's a Palestinian human rights organization.
It uses legal aid and public advocacy on behalf of Palestinian rights. It supports the right of free movement. International law guarantees it. Israel prevents it.
On November 14, Gisha headlined "No cake in Gaza." Lack of power forced bakeries to cut operations. Sewage treatment deteriorated badly. "The price of a ton of cement (rose) from 380 NIS (new Israeli shekel) to 1,300 NIS.
Syria, Egypt Reveal Erdogan’s ‘Hidden Agenda’
By Nicola Nasser*
The eruption of the Syrian conflict early in 2011 heralded the demise of Turkey’s officially pronounced strategy of “Zero Problems with Neighbors,” but more importantly, it revealed a “hidden agenda” in Turkish foreign policy under the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
What Sreeram Chaulia, the Dean of the Jindal School of International Affairs in India’s Sonipat, described as a “creeping hidden agenda” (http://rt.com on Sept. 15, 2013) is covered up ideologically as “Islamist.”
But in a more in-depth insight it is unfolding as neo-Ottomanism that is pragmatically using “Islamization,” both of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s legacy internally and Turkey’s foreign policy regionally, as a tool to revive the Ottoman Empire that once was.
Open Letter to MoveOn: Time To Change Course On Obamacare
Kevin Zeese
Dear MoveOn,
It is with great sadness that I watch you making last-gasp desperate attempts to save Obamacare and Obama’s reputation. You look foolish when you say that “Of course, it’s a good law” at the same time as your constituents see through the Obamacare illusion. The law is becoming less popular because people are beginning to see through the false partisan claims of Democrats. And worse, you are actually playing right into the Republican’s trap, really the trap of Wall Street and big business interests.
It’s time for honesty. Obamacare is policy that has roots in the Nixon administration, was updated by the Heritage Foundation, a Right-wing think tank, and supported by people like Newt Gingrich. It was first put in place by Republican Governor Mitt Romney in Massachusetts (where it has not worked). The ACA further privatizes our health care by pouring hundreds of billions of public dollars into the pockets of private health industries. It is accelerating the privatization of our public health insurances, gutting our safety net and fomenting greater consolidation of our health delivery system into private hands. It sets the stage to completely privatize the pillars of the old Democratic Party: Social Security and Medicare.
How the Wounded Return from America's Wars
By Gary G. Kohls, MD
I often write essays that try to shed light on – and warn about - some of America’s too-big-to-allow-them-to-fail (or even criticize) institutions that are often given undeserved respect. Wall Street, Big Pharma, Big Food, Big Chemistry, Big Agriculture, Big Medicine are some of my targets. An equally important one is the US military, an institution that has been known to harass, prosecute, imprison and even execute its conscientious whistle-blowers and conscientious objectors to criminality who have tried, in the interest of truth and justice - to expose the secret international war crimes and corruption that they – as insiders – had witnessed. (Google and watch the banned 12 minute “Collateral Murder” video for just one particularly egregious example – made available thanks to Bradley Manning and WikiLeaks at http://vimeo.com/63389575.)
15 years ago the advertising budget just for Pentagon recruitment cost taxpayers $8 billion per year (an item that has probably doubled or tripled by now). Those recruitment ads never mention the common, and often permanent - and often incurable - mental and physical health consequences of participating in war that therefore violate the “Truth in Advertising” laws in this country.
Sabotaging Rapprochement with Iran
by Stephen Lendman
Multiple previous rounds of nuclear talks failed. Washington orchestrated failure. Israel exerted enormous behind the scenes pressure. So did AIPAC.
On November 20, negotiators on both sides meet again. Will this time be different? It remains to be seen what happens.
Prospects aren't promising. Iran's been offered little in return for major concessions. More on the resumed talks below.
Israeli Rabbinical Scandals
by Stephen Lendman
Wrongdoing is commonplace. Crimes in high places happen often. Politicians commit them. So do corporate CEOs and top officials.
Wall Street crooks transformed America into an unprecedented money making racket. They make it the old fashioned way. They steal it.
They do it through fraud, grand theft, market manipulation, front-running, scamming investors, pumping and dumping, bribing politicians, writing legislation, securing top administrations posts, and getting bailed out when needed.
Syria - The Unraveling for Turkey's PM Erdogan
Michael Collins
One of the first initiatives of Prime Minister Recep Erdogan was a foreign policy based on "zero problems with neighbors." From his selection as Prime Minister in 2003, Erdogan led efforts to resolve Iran's conflicts with the West over the Iranian nuclear program. The regime also formed a tight bond with Syria, as did Erdogan with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
In 2011, Erdogan abandoned the alliance with Syria by supporting a violent rebellion to oust President Assad and his government. This marked the undoing of the zero problems policy.
Erdogan consistently denies supporting the jihadists among the Syrian rebels, a claim that even the Prime Minister can't believe. From the start of the violence in Syria through at least December 2012, Erdogan's government supported the Al Nusra fighters, openly aligned with Al Qaeda. In July 2012, Haaretz broke this story: Turkey sets up secret base to bring aid to Syria rebels, sources say . This not-so-secret base trained and armed fighters headed for Syria.
DARK SHADOW OF CHERNOBYL TOUCHES FUKUSHIMA / IT'S TIME FOR ACTION
Allen L Roland
To fully understand the current folly and cover-up of Fukushima, you must understand the same folly, cover-up and consequences of Chernobyl in 1987 and recognize that this time we may not outlive the consequences. It's time now for populist direct action and Germany is a stunning blueprint for the success of that process.
I thought Chernobyl was bad, until I saw this: Here's a time lapse map of the 2053 nuclear explosions that have taken place between 1945 to1998. It starts slowly but skip to 1962 and the buildup becomes overwhelming before the world seemingly comes to its senses ~ 7 minute video.
http://memolition.com/2013/10/16/time-lapse-map-of-every-nuclear-explosion-ever-on-earth/
But now let's deal with the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1987 when a simple experiment to see if the steam turbines could power the coolant pumps, if there was a loss of power, led quickly to a nuclear disaster on the night of April 26, 1986 ~ that nearly poisoned the world with a dose of lethal radiation.
TPP: NAFTA on Steroids
by Stephen Lendman
The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a trade deal from hell. It's a stealth corporate coup d'etat.
It's a giveaway to banksters. It's a global neoliberal ripoff. It's a business empowering Trojan horse. It's a freedom and ecosystem destroying nightmare.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) calls it "a secretive, multi-national trade agreement that threatens to extend restrictive intellectual property (IP) laws across the globe and rewrite international rules on its enforcement."
More on TPP below. New York Times editors support it. Two decades ago, they endorsed NAFTA.
On January 1, 1994, its destructive life began. It's anti-labor, anti-environment, anti-consumer and anti-democratic.
Corporate giants love it. Why not? They wrote it. Hundreds of pages of one-size-fits-all rules benefit them.
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