When reaching out to Alberta oil sands companies before a trip to Canada last month, I thought all of them mined oil the same way — they don't.The open mining most people think of when they picture the oil sands is just one way of extracting crude from the ground, but it is without a doubt the most dramatic. And we had to see it.
After being refused a mine tour and any type of access to a mining site or equipment, Business Insider rented a plane that I used to see everything I could of the mines on my own.
Restricted to flying no lower than 1,000 feet above the ground, I spent nearly two hours leaning out the window of a small Cessna 172 with a long lens, snapping pictures and trying to keep warm.
The oil sands hold up to two trillion barrels of oil spread over more than 54,000 square miles, making it the second largest oil deposit in the world after Saudi Arabia.
The amount of energy spent recovering that oil and the pollution created in refining it is immense and the impact on the environment profound.
The national unemployment rate gets lots of attention, and lately more attention has been paid to the workforce participation rate since more Americans have given up looking for a job, but we can also see that an astounding 100 million Americans don’t have jobs.
Specifically, these are people who are part of the civilian over-16 non-institutional population who are either unemployed or not part of the workforce. According to the April jobs report, the number of jobless American stood at 100.9 million.
That’s an all-time record and it’s an increase of 26.2 million over the last 12 years. It’s as if we absorbed the entire adult population of Canada and not a single person had a job.
The numbers are staggering. The jobs-to-population ratio peaked 12 years ago. If we were to have the same ratio today, we would need 15.3 million more jobs, or 23.7 million fewer people.
(Note: The chart above is the Civilian Over-16 Non-Institutional Population minus the seasonally adjusted Civilian Workforce.)
For six weeks in early 2012 I ran for the office of President of the United States of America. I was accepted by the Reform Party (one of six accredited national parties completely shut out of the political process in the US), was listed at Politics1, participated in a WikiNews interview and got my views posted at On the Issues. I created We the People Reform Coalition, and I wrote letters to every single candidate for President including Rocky Anderson and Buddy Roemer, throwing in Dennis Kucinich for grins. This is my report — there are no winners.
Preamble
I was shocked into paying attention by Al Gore's playing dead in 2000 (despite Greg Palast outing the Bush family scheme to disenfranchise 50,000 people of color, doing so three months in advance of election day). I was radicalized by 9/11 — a clear false-flag operation in which elements of our own government were complicit — and infuriated with the ease by which this nation was taken to war on the strength of 935 now-documented lies — lies that no serving officer — including Colin Powell — was willing to confront. Then I lost everything in the 2008 economic crash described so well by Matt Taibbi in GRIFTOPIA — it took two years for my company to go out of business — and along came Occupy. Occupy failed. This is their story and mine. If this story moves you, I believe we have 90 days from today to take seven steps that can bury the two-party tyranny and install an honest coalition government.
Tulane University and the State University of Haiti just released a rather damming evaluation of the humanitarian response to the 2010 earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12th. The comprehensive assessment, which takes a participatory approach and applies a novel resilience framework, finds that despite several billion dollars in “aid”, humanitarian assistance did not make a detectable contribution to the resilience of the Haitian population and in some cases increased certain communities' vulnerability and even caused harm. Welcome to supply-side humanitarian assistance directed by external actors.
“All we need is information. Why can't we get information?”
A quote taken from one of many focus groups conducted by the evaluators. “There was little to no information exchange between the international community tasked with humanitarian response and the Haitian NGOs, civil society or affected persons / communities themselves.” Information is critical for effective humanitarian assistance, which should include two objectives: “preventing excess mortality and human suffering in the immediate, and in the longer term, improving the community’s ability to respond to potential future shocks.”
This longer term objective thus focuses on resilience, which the evaluation team defines as follows:
… Are what again? As the following graphic from IBD demonstrates, for the first time in history, a majority of jobless workers over 25 have attended some college, and now outnumber those without a job who simply have a high school diploma or less. But at least those in the fomer category have tens of thousands of non-dischargeable debt to show for it.
Click on Image to Enlarge
.. Are what again? As the following graphic from IBD demonstrates, for the first time in history, a majority of jobless workers over 25 have attended some college, and now outnumber those without a job who simply have a high school diploma or less. But at least those in the fomer category have tens of thousands of non-dischargeable debt to show for it.
Is the American-Jewish romance with Israel coming to an end?
Are the American Jews known for their liberal views distancing themselves from Israel?
Or is it simply an overstatement?
Do they support the current Israeli policies?
Does the Israeli lobby represent their views?
And do they have a strong connection to the Holy Land?
Cross Talk with Norman Finkelstein, Daniel Pollak and Mouin Rabbani.
Amazon Page Pending
Norman Finkelstein's new book on the American Jewish community has been both widely praised and criticized by influential writers. So is the American-Jewish romance with Israel coming to an end? Are the American Jews known for their liberal views distancing themselves from Israel? Or is it simply an overstatement? Do they support the current Israeli policies? Does the Israeli lobby represent their views? And do they have a strong connection to the Holy Land? CT-ing with Norman Finkelstein, Daniel Pollak and Mouin Rabbani.
Phi Beta Iota: Israel is not the only albatross around the neck of the USA, there are others, but Israel (its government, not its people) is the one that has most often committed atrocities and sabotaged the USA with espionage, corruption, and inducing US Jews to commit treason–we refer especially to all those holding Top Secret / Sensitive Compartmented Information clearances who are either publicly or in some cases silently dual-citizens. What has been done to the Palestinian peoples has been a long-running crime against humanity, right up there with undeclared wars that produce depleted uranium babies and destroy entire societies for no decent moral reason. The Zionization of US foreign policy–and the castration of US financial policy–are two great crimes against humanity that are directly linked to the Zionist state of Israel and its twin agents, Mossad and Goldman Sachs/AIG et al. The Israeli attack on the USS Liberty did it for us–we would have wiped out the originating airfield and expelled the Israeli Embassy, and then removed the building from the planet, sowing salt in the dirt and making it a memorial to the perfidy of “friends.” We favor a two state solution that restores the Palestinian lands back to Biblical times, tears down the walls that Joseph Stalin would have been proud to call his own, and makes Jerusalem an international open city with a multi-religious governing council that excludes all state claims on any part of Jerusalem.
