Ten years ago, I subscribed to traditional newspapers. Each morning I worked through the Courier Journal, the New York Times, the Financial Times, and the Wall Street Journal. Today I rely on the information available to me without charge from various online services.
On two recent research projects, I made a surprising discovery. In this Honk article I want to highlight some of the information services I have to use to get a reasonably complete, unfiltered, current view of certain topics. If I want to learn about the Kardashians or the Miley Cyrus twerking video, I can use Ask.com news, Bing news, Google news and Yahoo news. If I want information about Anthony Weiner’s wife or a fellow with three aliases or akas, I have to use multiple systems.
3. Islamic Bloc Wants Permanent Seat on Security Council
The Islamic world should be granted permanent member status on the United Nations Security Council, according to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation's secretary-general.
At a recent speech in Moscow, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu asserted that the 57-member OIC, the largest international organization outside the U.N., deserves “a new position.”
“I think there should be a seat for OIC in the Security Council,” he said. “If you look to the structure of the Council today, you have the [five permanent members] and there are representatives of different civilizations, different cultures, political powers.
“But you won't find a representative of more than 1.6 billion people of the Muslin world.”
Benjamin Franklin understood the truth this report discusses. In his will of 1789, Franklin left money for the building of parks to Boston and Philadelphia, because he believed that creating aesthetic public spaces created greater comity in the community. More than two centuries later we are still learning this lesson.
Last year, a group of Edinburgh architecture researchers asked a dozen students to take a walk. They began on a tree-lined shopping drag, turned along the tranquil northern edge of the Meadows, one of the city’s larger parks, and wound up in a busy commercial district some half-hour later. The pastoral section of an otherwise urban jaunt, the researchers found, induced a significant increase in meditative thinking.
This may not strike you as a novel discovery. Thanks to Henry Thoreau’s trip to Walden Pond, Teddy Roosevelt’s sojourn in the Badlands, and America’s other legends of retreat, the idea that nature has restorative powers is deeply embedded in our culture. Science is in support: A raft of studies credit bucolic settings with reducing aggression, alleviating depression, and improving mental function.
In 2010 in Virginia's Fifth Congressional District, many people who prioritize peace over war probably voted for Democrat Tom Perriello over Republican Robert Hurt. I know many who did just that.
Here's what Congressman Hurt said on Tuesday about Syria:
“I have repeatedly stated … that before the United States should commit any of its precious American lives or military resources to an attack on the Syrian regime, the President must articulate a compelling American national security interest that requires military action. I have attended classified briefings, and I have concluded that, at this time, the President has not demonstrated that a compelling national security interest is at stake. Because of this, I will not be able to support the Authorization for Use of Military Force resolution should it come to a vote under current circumstances.”
Meanwhile, former Congressman Perriello has advocated, with his colleagues at the Center for American Progress for the United States to “increase its assistance to the Syrian opposition with the goal of supporting an alternative opposition government that is better organized than at present.” According to Perriello the U.S. has a “national security interest” in “preparing the groundwork for a political and economic transition to a new regime in Syria in the foreseeable future.”
The American poor are being driven into the ground. Not only is owning a home out of the question, but also the poor can’t even afford to rent. They lack the money for a damage deposit, and they lack the cash for the large deposits that utility companies require in order to have utilities connected.
The declining ability of the poor to rent is adversely affecting those who provide rental shelter to the poor.
For the dispossessed middle class, foreclosure on a home is often just the beginning of trouble. If, for example, a bank forecloses on a home with a $200,000 mortgage and sells the house for $100,000, under some circumstances the IRS treats the $100,000 difference as income to the foreclosed homeowner and requires the bank to issue a 1099 form to the homeowner showing taxable income of $100,000. http://www.irs.gov/uac/Home-Foreclosure-and-Debt-Cancellation
Alternatively, if the sale does not cover the mortgage, the bank can come after other property that the foreclosed homeowner might possess, such as a second home, car, work equipment, checking account balance. For example, a construction subcontractor who loses his home and moves his family into the office or construction trailer on the lot where he keeps the backhoe loader and work truck can find himself dispossessed of these assets in order to apply the proceeds to the difference between his mortgage and the price at which the bank sells his foreclosed home.
Americans who have not been personally affected by foreclosure have little idea how the system is rigged in favor of the banks that caused the problem and against the victims of financial deregulation.
In the article below, Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn show that the assault on the poor began with the Clinton administration.
Obama's climbdown in Syria, the election of a moderate Iranian president Hasan Rouhani, and the resurgence of Russian influence in the Middle East, have increased Israeli fears of a US accommodation with Iran. The Israelis, together with their wholly own neo-con subsidiaries in Congress, the thinktanks, and the mainstream media, are turning up the pressure for an intensification of the economic sanctions on Iran. Sanction are an act of belligerence, but do they work to reduce conflict?
Attached to this email in pdf format is a timely analysis of the ineffectiveness of sanctions. This important report, A Very Perfect Instrument: The ferocity and failures of America's sanction Apparatus (Harpers, Sept 2013, pp. 50-57), was written by my good friend Andrew Cockburn and is in the September issue of Harpers.
Andrew's essay can be thought of as a bookend to his equally searing analysis of the effects of the sanctions we imposed on Iraq between August 1990 and May 2003 (London Review of Books, July 2010).
As Andrew shows, there is an unthinking brutality implicit in the primitive OODA Loops governing a sanctions strategy. Sanctions are grounded on the crude idea of using slow strangulation as a means to impose one's will on an adversary. Sanctions not only affect the minds of the besieged, but as Andrews shows below, the punishment caused by the physical effects on the besieged blows back to debilitate the mental operations and the moral values of the besieger. He also shows that the corruption of the besieger's OODA loops is by no means a new phenomenon in the sordid history of sanctions. In 2010, Andrew summarized the effects of the Iraqi sanctions strategy on the besieger's mind (i.e., the United States) with the following passage:
Human Rights Watch and the New York Times are trying to implicate the Syrian Arab Army in a chemical incident that happened on August 21 in Ghouta near Damascus.
Using the report of an United Nations commission which investigated various sites around Damascus they try to reconstruct from where the rockets suspected to have been used in the attack may have been fired from.
The UN commission identified two finds of largely intact rockets that landed in a way that lets one estimate from which directions these rockets have been fired.
Lining out from the impact sites towards the direction from where the rockets came the crossing of the two lines point, say HRW and the NYT, to the possible launch point of both rockets.
That point, a Syrian army artillery site, is then seen as implicated in the chemical attack.
When taken together, the azimuths drawn from different neighborhoods lead back to and intersect at Mount Qasioun — so far an impregnable seat of Mr. Assad’s power — according to independent and separate calculations by both The New York Times and Human Rights Watch.“Connecting the dots provided by these numbers allows us to see for ourselves where the rockets were likely launched from and who was responsible,” Josh Lyons, a satellite imagery analyst for Human Rights Watch, noted in a statement on Tuesday.
“This isn’t conclusive,” Mr. Lyons added. “But it is highly suggestive.”
But that analysis is faulty. At least one of the two rockets the UN commission assessed contained no chemical agent at all.
