Global

THE WAR TO END ALL WARS

“Peace, as we have seen, is not an order natural to mankind: it is artificial, intricate and highly volatile. All kinds of preconditions are necessary.” — Michael Howard, The Invention of Peace And here comes World War I, wrapped in World War II, wrapped in the Cold War: tremors on one of Planet Earth’s human fault lines. We have enough angry, manipulable people on this planet to carry out the game plan of the political ideologues and war profiteers, who are always on the lookout for the next war, the one that’s too volatile and “inevitable” to stop. As David Swanson, author of War Is a Lie, put it: “The search for a good war is beginning to look as futile as the search for the mythical city of El Dorado. And yet that search remains our top public project.” And the searchlight stops at Ukraine, full of neo-Nazis, corrupt oligarchs, nuclear reactors, an unelected government, a wrecked economy, a simmering civil war. God help us. Old animosities and ideological divisions come back to life. The United States and NATO stand off against Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Thirty-one people — maybe more — die in a burning building in Odessa.

Possibly the Biggest Unknown Known Risks Exposure

 

 

A petition to the President and the Attorney General has just been posted by several organizations, including one I work for, asking that the Department of Justice stop threatening New York Times reporter James Risen with prison if he refuses to reveal a confidential source.

This story, among other stunning features, I think, threatens to expose an unknown known of the highest magnitude -- by which I mean, not something lying outside Donald Rumsfeld's imagination, but something that everyone paying attention has known all about for years but which would explode the brains of most consumers of corporate media if they ever heard about it.

Here's a great summary of the matter at the Progressive.  The focus there and in the petition is on the threat to freedom of the press.  But read this offhand bit of the explanation carefully:

Mental Illness Advocate vs. Mental Illness Advocate

All advocacy involves a lot of debate. We live in a society that has yet to agree on whether the toilet paper goes over or under, so it isn't surprising that something as complex as mental illness advocacy brings out the claws. We only have to look to Facebook to see the anger that some folks show toward political candidates they disagree with. Democrats and Republicans will be in conflict from now until the end of time. And, without muddying the waters with political debate, that makes sense. Those two parties are on different sides, with sometimes wildly different views. But what about the massive disagreements of people that are, in theory, on the same side, who should have similar views? Mental health issues are serious. They are life-threatening. But more than anything, they are personal. The outcomes fill a spectrum from inspirational to devastating. I work in an industry where the typical advocate is either a person living with the illness or a person who has had a loved one, most often a child, die from this illness. Most of us have, on some level, watched someone we love suffer. The most affected of us will carry the emotional scars of someone we love having died.

HEALTH INSURANCE CEO PAY SKY-ROCKETS IN 2013

Philadelphia, PA - May 1, 2014 - Chief executive officers at Fortune 500 health insurance companies, who have opposed new regulations under the Affordable Care Act, emerged this month as one of the ACA's greatest beneficiaries. Recently filed financial reports show that average compensation for these top nine health insurance CEOs rose by more than 19 percent in 2013, while several of the nation’s largest insurers more than doubled CEO pay.   The biggest winner was Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini, who received a staggering $30.7 million compensation package in 2013. This marks the largest payout to any health insurance executive since passage of the ACA and exceeded the compensation of the next two highest paid health insurer CEOs combined. The Bertolini pay package, which included a large “special one-time performance-based retention award,” represented a 131 percent increase over his $13.3 million compensation in 2012. (See table below.)   Molina Healthcare and Centene, both Fortune 500 insurers that specialize in privately managed Medicaid plans, roughly doubled CEO compensation in 2013. J.

Global Warming and the Inevitability Trap

From the wholly updated new edition of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: Perseverance and Hope in Troubled Times, edited by Paul Loeb (Basic Books $18.99 www.theimpossible.org).  Other contributors include Maya Angelou, Diane Ackerman, Marian Wright Edelman, Wael Ghonim, Václav Havel, Seamus Heaney, Jonathan Kozol, Tony Kushner, Audre Lorde, Nelson Mandela, Bill McKibben, Bill Moyers, Pablo Neruda, Mary Pipher, Arundhati Roy, Dan Savage, Desmond Tutu, Alice Walker, Cornel West, Terry Tempest Williams, and Howard Zinn.  Global Warming and the Inevitability Trap By Paul Loeb   Is the biggest hurdle on climate change outright denial? Or is it the sense that of being overwhelmed and too late, that there’s nothing we can do?  As K.C. Golden writes in an excerpt from my newly updated political hope anthology The Impossible Will Take a Little While, defeat is certain only if we accept it as such. What we often call preordained only becomes so through our resignation.

Woman groped by NYPD officer at protest faces seven years for flinching

 

 

On March 17, 2012 Occupy Wall Street veterans gathered in Zuccotti Park to commemorate the six month anniversary of the beginning of the Occupy movement. What followed was a mass of New York police in riot gear with batons marching in to crush the protest. Some protestors left, others sat down or linked arms. The results were extreme even for the New York Police Department (NYPD), which has acquired a reputation for brutality. Reported injuries among the protestors included a broken thumb, a broken jaw and at least one protestor struck repeatedly in the back with a nightstick as he fled the park. Multiple witness accounts claim that officers used their boots to hold protestors’ faces to the ground while handcuffed and awaiting the pre-arranged bus to jail.

In Search of a Good War

Seven percent want military options considered (poll by McClatchy-Marist, April 7-10), up from six percent a bit earlier (Pew, March 20-23), or 12 percent for U.S. ground troops and 17 percent for air strikes (CNN, March 7-9). Polling is similar on U.S. desire for a war with Iran, or for U.S. military involvement in Syria. Many more Americans believe in ghosts and UFOs, according to the polls, than believe that these would be good wars. The U.S. public never got behind the war on Libya, and for years a majority has said that the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan never should have been launched. The search for a good war is beginning to look as futile as the search for the mythical city of El Dorado. And yet that search remains our top public project. The U.S. military swallows 55.2 percent of federal discretionary spending, according to the National Priorities Project. Televised U.S. sporting events thank members of the military for watching from 175 nations. U.S. aircraft carriers patrol the world's seas. U.S.

Old habits die hard: Europe's fascist right returns to the mainstream

 

The European Union's parliament is due to undergo elections later this month, and many poll projections across the troubled continent suggest that extreme right and fascist parties are set to make large gains. The Europe-wide elections will take place across all 28 member states in two weeks, an event which many now fear is going to give power and legitimacy to parties running on platforms of racism, sexism, homophobia and fascism.

While Europe's habitual problem of far right extremism never disappeared completely. For years, the EU had made it seem as if it was at least contained, with overtly racist parties gaining very few seats in the European Parliament or legislative bodies in their own countries. Since the global financial crash in 2008, however, the economic hardships of austerity and unemployment have led to a sharp increase in support for the extreme right across Europe, even in the more economically stable northern countries like France and the UK.

Killing the Putin-Obama ‘Trust’

“Putin will not talk to Obama under pressure,” American journalist Josh Rogin was told late last week by a close associate of Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. If Russia’s President will no longer call or accept calls from President Obama, this strikes me as the most important casualty so far from U.S.-provoked “regime change” in Ukraine. Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin apparently had conversations on Ukraine almost every week in March; their last talk took place on April 14. U.S. “pressure” – including token economic and travel sanctions against some Russian companies and friends of Putin – is likely to continue. But it is not likely to become more extensive if key European countries “man up” and tell Washington what was obvious from the start; namely, that Russia holds very high cards in this area and that the Europeans will not damage their own flagging economies by approving stronger economic sanctions that would inflict real “punishment” on Russia. President Barack Obama talks with Secretary of State John Kerry and National Security Advisor Susan E. Rice in the Oval Office on March 19, 2014.
Subscribe to Global