by chycho

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During the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries Barack Obama stated that “the world wants to see the United States lead”, and in a recent speech to the US Congress where he received “19 standing ovations”, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown echoed the same sentiment:

“I believe that you, the nation that had the vision to put a man on the moon, are also the nation with the vision to protect and preserve our planet earth.”

These happen to be amazing statements considering that the “American Lifestyle” has been one of the main culprits of our pending global ecological collapse. This lifestyle has been, to this point, dependent on and maintained due to the availability of cheap oil.

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Andrew Glikson Earth & paleo-climate scientist Australian National University

The state of the terrestrial atmosphere over the last ~10,000 years (Holocene), when conditions became amenable for agriculture and civilization, and over the preceding ~5 million years (Pliocene-Pleistocene) when prehistoric humans evolved, was constrained by a CO2 range of 180 to 300 ppm (https://wesfiles.wesleyan.edu/home/droyer/web/
Target_CO2_(Hansen_et_al).pdf), developed some 34 million years ago (end-Eocene) when atmospheric CO2 levels declined below 500 ppm (http://www.nature.com/nature/
journal/v446/n7135/pdf/nature05699.pdf; https://wesfiles.
wesleyan.edu/home/droyer/web/KurschnerCommentary(2008).pdf; http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v451/n7176/full/nature06588.html; http://www.soest.hawaii.edu/GG/FACULTY/POPP/Royer%20et%20al.%202004%20GSA%20Today.pdf). A rise of CO2 to 400 ppm at ~3.0 million years ago resulted in 2 - 3 degrees C temperature rise, melting of large parts of Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets and sea levels of +25+/-12 metres higher than the present (http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2008EOSTr..89..501R).

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Kevin Zeese

More than 1 in 100 adults in the United States are now behind bars. 1 in 31 are in prison, probation or parole. The U.S. with 5% of the world’s population now has 25% of the world’s prisoners. Incarceration of drug offenders has risen 1,200% since 1980 from 41,000 to 500,000. The appetite of the American prison machine is voracious. Each year 7 million Americans are jailed and approximately 700,000 go on to serve prison sentences. When a racial prism is added to these numbers the stark reality of racial unfairness is impossible to deny. And now women and girls are the fastest growing group of prisoners.

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Stephen Lendman

This article addresses Washington's financial coup d'etat in the context of discussing Michael Hudson's important, very lengthy and detailed April 5 Global Research.ca one titled: "The Financial War Against Iceland - Being defeated by debt is as deadly as outright military warfare." It reviews its key information in advance of Hudson's April 14 scheduled appearance on The Global Research News Hour to discuss.

What's true for Iceland holds everywhere, including the developed world, the idea being to enrich finance capitalism through state-sponsored debt bondage and neo-feudal impoverishment. The global economic crisis was no accident. It was long ago hatched, and has been brewing for years, gestating, percolating, then bubbling into the 2000 tech crash, a mere prelude for today's greater one spreading everywhere like a cancer but hitting the developing world and most indebted nations hardest.

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eileen fleming

On Arpil 5th, 2009, President Obama stood on the world stage amongst thousands of flag-waving Czechs and spoke of good humor, home town Chicago, the will of the people over tanks and guns, old conflicts, revolution, moral leadership as the most powerful weapon, iron curtains that fell and the state of 21st century nuclear weapons.

An excerpt:

…We are here today because enough people ignored the voices who told them that the world could not change. We're here today because of the courage of those who stood up and took risks to say that freedom is a right for all people, no matter what side of a wall they live on, and no matter what they look like. We are here today because the simple and principled pursuit of liberty and opportunity shamed those who relied on the power of tanks and arms to put down the will of a people…

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Allen L Roland

Almost 50% of U.S. families spend more than they earn, according to a Federal Reserve study, using credit cards to make up the difference but now they are in over their heads and are caught in the malicious credit card Usury Debt Trap where high interest rates overwhelm principle reduction : Allen L Roland

On June 30th, 2008 I wrote a column HUGE CREDIT CARD CRISIS NEXT FOR AMERICA in which I said that many Americans are living off their credit cards but be forewarned ~ that bubble has already burst as more Americans are using high-interest credit card cash to pay at least part of their mortgages. Overall U.S. credit card debt grew by 435% from $211 billion in 2002 to approximately $915 billion year-end 2007.

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Michael Collins

Murder Trumps Torture Says Bugliosi

(Left)2003 State of the Union, Jan. 29, 2003. WikiCommons

Bush Crimes

"If we prosecute those in America who only commit one murder, under what theory don't we prosecute a president who is criminally responsible for over four thousand murders?" Vincent Bugliosi

(April 7, Wash. DC) The legendary Los Angeles County prosecutor and top selling true crime author, Vincent Bugliosi, continues to make the case that he argued in detail in his New York Times best seller, The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder. His crime, according to the esteemed former prosecutor: deliberately deceiving the United States into an illegal war that resulted in the deaths of 4,200 U.S. soldiers and more than 1,000,000 Iraqi civilians.

He has the help of a citizens group called ABA Publishing headed by Arminda and Bob Alexander with Jude Morford. The all volunteer group recently sent Bugliosi's cover letter and book to 2,200 local prosecutors across the country.

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Stephen Lendman

Of so-called "eco-terrorism" in his case, a term believed coined by Ron Arnold, executive director of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise (CDFE), a radical right wing group established on July 4, 1976 "to continue (the) Revolution of liberty, free enterprise and individual initiative....without hindrance by government."

According to Sourcewatch:

"Arnold blurred the boundaries between nonviolent civil disobedience and more contentious tactics such as vandalism and sabotage," (mostly rejected by environmentalists) by equating property damage to "terrorism as a societal threat."

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Gaither Stewart

(Rome) Protests, broken heads and hundreds of arrests at the G20 in London, bloody demonstrations in Kehl and Baden Baden and Strasbourg at celebrations marking the 60th anniversary of NATO, workers uprisings across the face of France, and on Saturday in Rome’s Circus Maximus a mammoth manifestation organized by the CGIL trade union underline the abyss separating the New Class of capital from labour. The current and spreading revolt of labour against capital seems to mark the second phase of the crisis of capitalism, as a consequence of the financial crisis caused by the New Class of an elite that has illogically chosen to separate itself from labour in the Occidental world.

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by chycho

. We just got the answer to the first, and we anxiously await the answer to the second.

The first question was; would Obama finally fulfill the US administrations promise to end prohibition, a promise that was made by President Jimmy Carter over 30 years ago. It was a legitimate question, since this is exactly what Obama promised when he made the following statement:

“The war on drugs has been an utter failure, and I think we need to rethink and decriminalize our marijuana laws.”

Unfortunately, however, on 26 March 2009, during an Interactive Town Hall Meeting, Obama stated that:

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