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What I saw at the Pro-Nuclear Proliferation Press Conference in the U.S. Capitol

This sad event, held in a small conference room in the Capitol Visitors Center (Senate side), was sparsely attended by press, and sponsored by an outfit called the "New Deterrent Working Group," evidently an offshoot of the Center for Security Policy, and skipped by Sen Kyl (who evidently "had to go vote...").

But B*sh era relics John Bolton and Rick Santorum said their bits, and a few other notables offered statements. After an hour of paranoia, innuendo and misrepresentation, they did take a few questions and I was able to ask the first. Incredibly, they let me get all three questions in one. For those who are interested, they're below:

"Jay Marx, Proposition One. One correction if I may, as the Senate has held 18 committee hearings on the NEW Start treaty, not 12 as Mr. Gaffney just stated.

Of course war creates jobs

Of course war creates jobs:
People who lie for a living,
and people who die for a living.

Both are in high demand/
Like a marine band/
Or an honor guard/

Next to the 'Nam diggers/
Working hard/
In the graveyard/

Blowing bugles, firing rounds/
Simulating real war sounds/
Somber notes on hallow bounds/
Justified on shallow grounds/

And so the monied market waits/
For these fine jobs that war creates...

_______

christopher bifani is a poet, artist, musician and activist in Wilmington, North Carolina. His website is: Website

comment at Bifani

What's Behind the War on WikiLeaks

WikiLeaks has teased the genie of transparency out of a very opaque bottle, and powerful forces in America, who thrive on secrecy, are trying desperately to stuff the genie back in.

How far down the U.S. has slid can be seen, ironically enough, in a recent commentary in Pravda (that’s right, Russia’s Pravda):

"What WikiLeaks has done is make people understand why so many Americans are politically apathetic… After all, the evils committed by those in power can be suffocating, and the sense of powerlessness that erupts can be paralyzing, especially when … government evildoers almost always get away with their crimes. …

“So shame on Barack Obama, Eric Holder and all those who spew platitudes about integrity, justice and accountability while allowing war criminals and torturers to walk freely upon the earth. … The American people should be outraged that [their] government has transformed a nation with a reputation for freedom, justice, tolerance and respect for human rights into a backwater that revels in its criminality, cover-ups, injustices and hypocrisies."

A $7 billion new nuke attack

The White House and nuclear power industry may be on the brink of grabbing $7 billion in new taxpayer-funded loan guarantees for new reactors. But they can be stopped.

Taxpayer and environmental groups are asking citizens to call their Senators urging deletion of the guarantees.

The guarantees have been stuck into the Continuing Resolution just passed by the House to fund the government. It now goes to the Senate, where calls should be directed to kill this budget-busting radioactive boondoggle.

Nuke lobbyists have spent more than $640 million in the past decade to fund a "nuclear renaissance" from the federal trough. Earlier this year the Obama Administration and the industry's congressional minions were set to add as much as $36 billion to a Department of Energy loan guarantee program to build new reactors. Citizen opposition has been instrumental in slashing that number.

FBI, DEA, & Homeland Security investigate Russian crime in Thailand

BANGKOK, Thailand -- America's Federal Bureau of Investigation, Drug Enforcement Administration, Department of Homeland Security and other agents are investigating "Russian organized crime networks" who are murdering and stealing in Thailand's most popular tourist beach resorts, according to a U.S. Embassy cable released by WikiLeaks.

Thailand is a staunch non-NATO U.S. ally and this modernizing, Buddhist-majority Southeast Asian nation has attracted criminals from all over the world who exploit its friendly ambiance, low cost workers, corrupt officials, and sophisticated forgery and sex industry networks.

The "confidential" cable was headlined: "RUSSIA LOOKS TO REINVIGORATE BILATERAL RELATIONS WITH THAILAND, AGAIN," dated December 4, 2009, and classified by the U.S. Embassy's Deputy Chief of Mission James F. Entwistle, and signed off by Ambassador Eric John who noted "this cable was coordinated with [the U.S.] Embassy [in] Moscow."

Pearl Harbor: A successful war lie

An excerpt from "War Is A Lie" War is a Lie

One type of "defensive" war is one that follows a successful provocation of aggression from the desired enemy. This method was used to begin, and repeatedly to escalate, the Vietnam War, as recorded in the Pentagon Papers. Setting aside the question of whether the United States should have entered World War II, in either Europe or the Pacific or both, the fact is that our country was unlikely to enter unless attacked. In 1928 the U.S. Senate had voted 85 to 1 to ratify the Kellogg-Briand Pact, a treaty that bound — and still binds — our nation and many others never again to engage in war.

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill's fervent hope for years was that Japan would attack the United States. This would permit the United States (not legally, but politically) to fully enter the war in Europe, as its president wanted to do, as opposed to merely providing weaponry, as it had been doing. On April 28, 1941, Churchill wrote a secret directive to his war cabinet:

Fix our broken food system-Stop Big Food

Urge the Department of Justice and Department of Agriculture to break up the agribusiness giants.

America's supermarket bounty is deceiving. Of those hundreds of brands on grocery store shelves, the vast majority are owned by a handful of industrial food companies like Kraft, Conagra and General Mills.

This concentration of power in the hands of a few large corporations is repeated in all sectors of the food system - from Monsanto's stranglehold on seeds, to Dean Foods and Dairy Farmers of America's control over our milk, to Smithfield, JBS and Cargill's near total dominance of meat processing. But there was nothing inevitable about this kind of corporate control of our food. Decades of deregulation and governmental inattention to industrial consolidation brought us our broken food system, one that features non-stop food safety recalls, an obesity epidemic and the hollowing out of rural America as family farmers are forced to sell out to corporate interests.

It's time to stop letting Big Food control what we eat. Urge the Obama administration to fix our broken food system.

A hollow bomber jacket

Last Friday, in a column about economic policy, Paul Krugman focused on “moral collapse” at the White House -- “a complete failure of purpose and loss of direction.” Meanwhile, President Obama flew to Afghanistan, where he put on a leather bomber jacket and told U.S. troops: “You’re achieving your objectives. You will succeed in your mission.”

For the Obama presidency, moral collapse has taken on the appearance of craven clockwork, establishing a concentric pattern -- doing immense damage to economic security at home while ratcheting up warfare overseas.

By the end of the weekend, a deal was just about wrapped up between the president and Republican congressional leaders to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.

On the spin-cycle agenda this month is yet more reframing of the president’s foggy doubletalk about Afghanistan. Strip away the carefully crafted verbiage and the picture is stark -- with plans for a huge U.S. war effort in that country for many years to come.

Seeking Republican patriots: how reining in anonymous attack ads can help save our democracy

Does Olympia Snowe really want to be the target of waves of anonymous attack ads in support of some conservative primary challenger? Wouldn't a retiring George Voinovich prefer to leave some shards of our democracy off-limits to being sold to the highest bidder? Could John McCain remember why McCain-Feingold was once of his proudest legacies and acknowledge how profoundly the Supreme Court's Citizen's United decision damaged everything he was trying to do to safeguard American democracy?

Wikileaks: Russian bribes "Infected" bout's extradition case to U.S.

BANGKOK, Thailand -- The U.S. Ambassador to Thailand warned that bribes, lies and a plot to have two U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents arrested in Bangkok had "infected" the extradition trial of alleged Russian arms smuggler Viktor Bout to New York, and the envoy suggested Thailand arrange testimony to correct the problems, according to two U.S. cables released by Wikileaks.

"There have been disturbing indications that Bout's xxxxxxxxxx and Russian supporters have been using money and influence in an attempt to block extradition," said a cable by U.S. Ambassador Eric John, with "x's" masking the identity of who the ambassador suspected.

"The most egregious example was the false testimony of xxxxxxxxxx that Bout was in Thailand as part of government-to-government submarine deal," his cable said, apparently indicating a different concealed name.

"Bout's associates had been able to influence testimony given by xxxxxxxxxx," said the cable released by Wikileaks on Wednesday (December 1).

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