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Help Save Jennifer's Life
by Jennifer Jones Austin
Hello, my name is Jennifer Jones Austin. I am a 41 year old mother of two young children. On September 23 of this year, I was diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukemia. Just days before I was walking around feeling fine, taking care of my family, going to the gym daily, and working professionally as an advocate for children and families living in poverty. I had no medical history of health problems. Things were good.
Today I live with the very real possibility that I may not see my children grow up. My doctors have informed me that my chances of surviving Acute Myeloid Leukemia are small unless I undergo a bone marrow transplant that would cure me of this cancer. And now my family, friends, colleagues and I are feverishly searching for a bone marrow donor who will help me have a transplant and significantly decrease the odds of the cancer returning. As we search, we also are hoping to help others like me who need transplants too.
Is "More Jobs" Sustainable or Necessary in the Post-Peak Oil World?
by Jan Lundberg
What was required for a growing economy, that was supposed to uplift all of modern humanity, is at root a false notion for the manipulated public: the overwhelming majority must work for others to enrich the few so that all of society benefits through unlimited expansion. This problematic profit-scheme is failing to hold up, what with general economic uncertainty on the rise (apart from “Hope”) and the advanced depletion of easily extracted, cheap oil.
To put even greater pressure on our bankrupt (in so many ways) system, the ecological crisis is knocking at the door ever more threateningly, demanding not mere policy adjustments but a radically different approach to treating the Earth and all its people and species.
Brutalizing Palestinian Children
by Stephen Lendman
As an isolated incident, it would be appalling and criminal. As a regular occurrence, it's state-sponsored terrorism against defenseless children, subjected to barbarism by Israeli soldiers committing crimes against humanity to crush their will for wanting to live free on their own land - what Westerners take for granted; what Palestinians since 1948 haven't had, and since 1967, under military occupation denying their very humanity.
Nora Barrows-Friedman does heroic reporting for Pacifica Radio's KPFA Flashpoints Radio and as an activist/teacher/journalist in Occupied Palestine during regular visits. On March 8 on the Electronic Intifada, she wrote about Amir al-Mohteseb, a 10-year old Hebron child, arrested, detained, and savagely beaten after his 12-year old brother Hasan endured similar treatment a week earlier.
On March 7 at 2AM, "Israeli soldiers (broke) into (his) house, snatch(ed) Amir from his bed, threatened his parents with death by gunfire if they" interfered, took him down the stairwell, and brutally beat him causing internal abdomen bleeding, requiring overnight hospitalization. "In complete shock and distress, Amir would not open his mouth to speak for another day and a half."
The Imperial Origins of Feudal America
by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy
Any politician can cook up a run o' the mill recession, but it requires the GOP to revert an entire people to feudalism. Our status as vassal of China is the evidence and result of our feudal status. GOP policies from which a ruling elite of just one percent benefit are responsible; the results may be seen at the CIA's 'World Fact Book' which lists China at the very top with the World's largest positive Current Account Balance and the U.S. on bottom with the world's largest negative Current Account Balance. Related to this is China's support for the U.S. dollar, a situation that China tolerates so that American consumers can buy Chinese product at Wal-Mart. If China should find this arrangement inconvenient, as many have said it is becoming, then China may 'pull the plug' and the dollar will collapse.
The economic decline of America is behind and the result of U.S. imperialism, a path about which we were well warned by a man that I have called the 'last honest Republican' ---Dwight David Eisenhower.
THE REAL AMERICAN EMERGENCY
by Mary Pitt
"They came in their thousands, queuing through the night to secure one of the coveted wristbands offering entry into a strange parallel universe where medical care is a free and basic right and not an expensive luxury. Some of these Americans had walked miles simply to have their blood pressure checked, some had slept in their cars in the hope of getting an eye-test or a mammogram, others brought their children for immunisations that could end up saving their life." - The brutal truth about America’s healthcare
While our president is involved in dealing with the many emergencies in which our nation is now foundering, he fails to see the most urgent one.
The dead numbered 137,000 per year through the years of 2000 to 2006, according to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Science and, as the depression continues to worsen, the numers will climb even higher on an annual basis. The problem? Simply a lack of health insurance and the inabilty to obtain the needed care on an individual basis!
Does Israel hope to spark a new wave of suicide bombing?
Stuart Littlewood
“The suicide bomber wrote that he began to live the day he came to know he was to die. Where did he get this passion to kill?”
- Mahesh Bhatt
Here in the civilised West we hate suicide bombers with a passion.
We’re taught that the proper way to blow fellow humans to smithereens is to do it from 40,000 feet.
Economic Warfare? Europe versus Wall Street
(March 10) Wall Streets is headed toward international pariah status thanks to two recent actions by the European Union (EU).
On Tuesday, the EU announced that it was banning Wall Street banks from the lucrative government bond business in Europe. They didn't express official concern or fire off a warning shot. They simply banned Wall Street from financing government bond deals like the one Goldman Sachs sold to Greece. The Guardian pointed out that Wall Street bond business from European governments has gone down over the last two years. Now the business is gone period. In effect, the EU has labeled Wall Streets business tactics as too dangerous for their governments to handle.
Then on Wednesday, the President of the European Commission said that the EU was considering a ban on government debt speculation through Credit Default Swaps (CDS) President José Manuel Barroso announced that, "the Commission will examine closely the relevance of banning purely speculative naked sales on Credit Default Swaps of sovereign debt." While not an outright ban, the threat of banning CDS on national debt would be a major loss for the world's financial speculators, particularly those in the United States and Great Britain.
The Business of Water: Privatizing An Essential Resource
by Stephen Lendman
In her 2002 book titled, "Water Wars," noted author, social activist, and ecologist Vandana Shiva called privatizing water:
-- ecological terrorism;
-- a global water crisis;
-- along with overuse, waste and pollution, it can cause "the most pervasive, most severe, and most invisible dimension of the ecological devastation of the earth;"
Russia, Azerbaijan/Armenia: All roads lead to the Caucasus
Eric Walberg
Georgia is eager for another war, but there are other fires there which refuse to die -- Russia’s battles with terrorism and separatists and Azerbaijan’s bleeding wound in ethnic Armenian Nagorno Karabakh, notes Eric Walberg
The Russian Federation republics of Chechnya, Dagestan, North Ossetia and Ingushetia have experienced a sharp increase in assassinations and terrorist bombings in the past few years which have reached into the heart of Russia itself, most spectacularly with the bombing of the Moscow-Leningrad express train in January that killed 26.
The Fugitive Humanity of City Spaces
Jeremy Seabrook
The word slum has come in for much criticism recently, and rightly so. It is a concept borrowed from the streets of 19th century Britain; the word assumes that the same serene improvement to urban landscapes witnessed in this country will eventually extend to the places of savage destitution which are to be found all over the 'developing world'. (This is another foolish term - all societies are developing; we should beware of the determinist implications of the word 'developed').
Poverty, like the sites in which it is to be found, is not static. Constantly mutating, evolving, new privations are created out of the very ways in which old ones are supposed to have been answered. Indeed, it is the dynamic, protean nature of urban poverty that makes it difficult to capture. This leads many observers, when they confront the world's spreading cities, into apocalyptic denunciations of terminal and lawless urban ruin. Mike Davis's splendid polemic, Planet of Slums, is perhaps the best known – and by far the best written – of these prophets of the evils of an incontinent urbanization. This is part of a long tradition, which goes back at least to the sulphurous evocations of Engels. Much of the United Nations' work on urbanization falls into this pattern, although naturally, it is couched in more prudent and diplomatic terms than the denunciations of Engels. The UN has, for at least thirty years, consistently overestimated projections of urban populations; in the 1980s it foresaw cities of 25 million or more inhabitants, while its recent Challenge of Slums report anticipated a doubling of slum populations within a couple of decades.
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