April 13, 2013

Just a Few Reasons Why a Democratic Senate Hopeful is Backpedaling on Tar Sands

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/04/11-6



Mr. Lynch has never voted against Emergency Supplementals to keep the wars going.

Just a Few Reasons Why a Democratic Senate Hopeful is Backpedaling on Tar Sands
by Jamie Henn
Published on Thursday, April 11, 2013 by 350.org

A year ago, Rep. Stephen Lynch was an ardent supporter for the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. Now, he just seems confused.

Lynch is running against Rep. Ed Markey in the Democratic primary for John Kerry's old Senate seat in Massachusetts. With no serious Republican candidate in the race, the primary will likely determine the election. But Lynch has run into trouble over his support for the controversial Keystone XL pipeline.

~snip~

In January 2012, Lynch was interviewed by Jim Braude on NECN and offered the following unequivocal support for KXL:

LYNCH: Look, I'm for the Keystone pipeline. I think we have the technology. We've had it since the 10th century BC, to make oil go through a pipe. if the president is serious about needing enough time -- 60 days is a very short time to review a project of this size, this is a 1,700 mile pipeline.

April 13, 2013

Three Key Lessons from the Obama Administration's Drone Lies

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/04/12-2



Barack Obama and his new defence secretary, Chuck Hagel, left, listen to the new CIA director, John Brennan, at the White House on 7 January.

Three Key Lessons from the Obama Administration's Drone Lies
by Glenn Greenwald
Published on Friday, April 12, 2013 by The Guardian/UK

For years, senior Obama officials, including the president himself, have been making public claims about their drone program that have just been proven to be categorically false. The evidence of this falsity is so conclusive that even establishment sources are using unusually harsh language - including "lies" - to describe Obama's statements. McClatchy's national security reporter, Jonathan Landay, obtained top-secret intelligence documents showing that "contrary to assurances it has deployed US drones only against known senior leaders of al-Qaida and allied groups, the Obama administration has targeted and killed hundreds of suspected lower-level Afghan, Pakistani and unidentified 'other' militants in scores of strikes in Pakistan's rugged tribal area." That article quotes drone expert Micah Zenko of the Council on Foreign Relations as saying that "McClatchy's findings indicate that the administration is 'misleading the public about the scope of who can legitimately be targeted.'"

In his own must-read article at Foreign Policy about these disclosures, Zenko writes - under the headline: "Finally, proof that the United States has lied in the drone wars" - that "it turns out that the Obama administration has not been honest about who the CIA has been targeting with drones in Pakistan" and that the McClatchy article "plainly demonstrates that the claim repeatedly made by President Obama and his senior aides - that targeted killings are limited only to officials, members, and affiliates of al-Qaida who pose an imminent threat of attack on the US homeland - is false." Beyond the obvious harms of having the president and his administration continuously lie to the public about such a crucial matter, Zenko explains that these now-disproven claims may very well make the drone strikes illegal since assertions about who is being targeted were "essential to the legal foundations on which the strikes are ultimately based: the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force and the UN Charter's right to self-defense." Marcy Wheeler uses the documents to show how claims about drones from other key officials, including Senate Intelligence Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, are also unquestionably false.

Both Landay's article and Zenko's analysis should be read for the details, but I want to highlight the three key points from this:

(1) The Obama administration often has no idea who they are killing.

April 13, 2013

Mali: Mission Accomplished or Hollande's Bush Moment

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/barry-lando/49019/mali-mission-accomplished-or-hollandes-bush-moment

Mali: Mission Accomplished or Hollande's Bush Moment
by Barry Lando | April 12, 2013 - 8:59am

As Colin Powell famously warned George H.W. Bush on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, “if you break it, you own it.”

France is not responsible for “breaking” Mali. The country was already a West African basket case long before the French intervention.

But France, which enraged many Americans by refusing to participate in the invasion of Iraq, now finds itself stuck with the results of their own intervention. And there’s no crazy glue in sight.

~snip~

The irony today is that not only is there no obvious solution to Mali’s plight, but Hollande himself is having enormous problems running his own deeply troubled country.

April 12, 2013

Wall Street Journal De-Links Story That Jamie Dimon Will Meet the President at the White House Today

http://wallstreetonparade.com/2013/04/wall-street-journal-de-links-headline-that-jamie-dimon-will-meet-the-president-at-the-white-house-today/



Wall Street Journal De-Links Story That Jamie Dimon Will Meet the President at the White House Today
By Pam Martens: April 11, 2013

If President Obama is trying to make it clear that he reports to the 1 percent, not the average Americans who elected him, he’s earning an A+ on his report card.

At 6:46 p.m. last evening, the White House sent out the President’s schedule for today. One item on the agenda reads as follows: “Later in the morning, the President will meet with members of the Financial Services Forum as part of the organization’s daylong Spring Meeting. This meeting in the Roosevelt Room is closed press.” There is no mention in this press announcement that the President will be meeting with the CEOs of the too-big-to-fail banks – certainly a detail worthy of the public’s attention.

Early this morning, the Wall Street Journal’s link on the front page of its web site to its story on the President’s meet-up with members of the Financial Services Forum tells us the following: “PAGE UNAVAILABLE — The document you requested either no longer exists or is not currently available.” Fortunately, Google has cached the article and from it we learn that Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase (whose firm is under an FBI investigation for losing $6.2 billion of depositors’ money in a derivatives trading scheme) is expected to meet with the President at the White House today as part of the Financial Services Forum. Also expected to attend is Brian Moynihan, CEO of Bank of America.

At the same moment the President is meeting with the CEOs of these firms, an investigative hearing will be playing out in the U.S. Senate’s Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Consumer Protection, part of the Senate Banking Committee, on whether these same banks and others corrupted the process of a regulatory mandate to review their foreclosure files for evidence of fraud and abuse by directly paying and interacting with the consultants hired to do the work.

April 12, 2013

New Research Confirms Gun Rampages Are Rising—and Armed Civilians Don't Stop Them

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/04/mass-shootings-rampages-rising-data



Data on 84 attacks echoes MoJo's investigation and further debunks the NRA's "good guys with guns" myth.

New Research Confirms Gun Rampages Are Rising—and Armed Civilians Don't Stop Them
—By Mark Follman
Thu Apr. 11, 2013 3:00 AM PDT

By the time the nation confronted the unthinkable school massacre in Connecticut last December, Mother Jones' groundbreaking investigation of mass shootings, launched the prior summer, had shown that mass gun violence in America was on the rise. The trend appeared to be no coincidence in light of the proliferation of guns and looser gun laws nationwide. One leading criminologist took issue with our criteria, arguing that mass shootings had not become more common. But now, research from an expert on criminal justice at Texas State University further shows that gun rampages in the United States have escalated.

The research, to be published in a book in July, confirms that:
* Public shooting rampages have spiked in particular over the last few years
* Many of the attackers were heavily armed
* None of the shootings was stopped by an ordinary citizen using a gun

The author of the study, Pete Blair, advises law enforcement officials and has conducted extensive research on gun rampages in workplaces, schools, and other public locations. He gathered data on 84 "active shooter events" (ASEs) between 2000 and 2010 in which the killer's primary motive appeared to be mass murder. This chart shows his findings on the frequency of cases:



Pete Blair, Texas State University

Notably, the jump in attacks in 2009 and 2010 was prior to the massacres in Tucson, Aurora, Oak Creek, Newtown, and numerous other locations during the last two years. Although Blair's research does not cover 2011 and 2012, he concludes that "our tracking indicates that the increased number of attacks continued in those years." As our own investigation showed, there were a record number of mass shootings in 2012.

April 12, 2013

Monsanto Claims to Ditch Herbicide While Selling More of It

http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2013/04/roundup-usual-suspect-herbicide-sales-drive-monsanto-profit



Roundup, the usual suspect.

Monsanto Claims to Ditch Herbicide While Selling More of It
—By Tom Philpott
Wed Apr. 10, 2013 3:00 AM PDT

Genetically modified seed giant Monsanto likes to trumpet its "commitment to sustainable agriculture." The story goes like this: by generating novel, high-tech crop varieties, Monsanto will wean farmers off of synthetic chemical poisons. The company even markets its flagship product, seeds genetically engineered to survive its own Roundup weed killer, as a tool they can use to to "decrease the overall use of herbicides."

But as I've shown before, herbicide use has actually dramatically ramped up as the Roundup Ready technology conquers vast swaths of US farmland. That's because weeds quickly developed resistance to it, forcing farmers to apply ever-larger doses and resort to older, more toxic herbicides to combat resistant weeds. And while the company has tried hard to leave behind its past as a purveyor of toxic chemicals and rebrand itself as a technology company, those toxic chemicals remain central to its growth and profitability, as its latest quarterly profit report shows.

The report—press release here—cheered investors, driving Monsanto shares to their highest levels since 2008. Here's the main bit, lifted from the press release (note that by "second quarter," the company means the January to March period):



Monsanto's latest earnings report—all about corn and "ag productivity" (herbicides) Detail from a Monsanto press release.

Note that the company consists of two main segments: what it calls "Seeds and Genomics," which involves sales of seeds, obviously, plus licensing fees on genetically modified traits; and "Agricultural Productivity," which means, essentially, chemicals, mainly Roundup in a variety of forms. Seeds and Genomics is by far the largest of the two in terms of contribution to overall sales, but good old Agricultural Productivity is still really important. Indeed, its sales shot up from $824 million in second-quarter 2012 to $1.12 billion in the same time period of this year—that's an amazing 36 percent jump.

April 12, 2013

Tomgram: Mattea Kramer, A People's Budget for Tax Day

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/tom-engelhardt/49003/tomgram-mattea-kramer-a-peoples-budget-for-tax-day

Tomgram: Mattea Kramer, A People's Budget for Tax Day
Economic Policy
by Tom Engelhardt | April 11, 2013 - 8:49am

Recently, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel gave a major speech at the National Defense University on cutting military -- aka defense -- spending. Hagel is considered a “realist” and so when it comes to such cuts, this is undoubtedly the best we’re likely to get out of Washington for a long time to come. Unfortunately, it turns out that the best is pretty poor stuff.

The speech was filled with the sort of complaints we’ve already grown used to hearing from the Pentagon about the “deep cuts... imposed by sequester.” These, Hagel insisted, will result in “a significant reduction in military capabilities.” (In fact, President Obama's just released 2014 budget calls for only a miniscule 1.6% cut in the Pentagon's bloated budget.) There was also the usual boilerplate stuff about the U.S. global military stance -- “America’s responsibilities are as enormous as they are humbling” -- and about the “vacuum” we’d create on planet Earth if we reduced it in any way. As the Nation’s Robert Dreyfuss wrote, “Nature may abhor a vacuum, but it isn’t the job of the United States to go stumbling into every regional conflict, humanitarian crisis, failed state, and would-be terrorist nest that arises. Whatever those things are, they’re not ‘vacuum’ to be filled.”

Like Leon Panetta before him, Hagel, who took a voluntary sequester pay cut, managed to make it sound as if the U.S. military were teetering at the edge of some financial cliff. He spoke mournfully, for instance, of the Pentagon having “significantly less resources than the department had in the past.” Well... no, as Mark Thompson of Time magazine pointed out, it just ain’t so.

The facts aren’t difficult to sort out, even for those of us who aren’t secretaries of defense. In a world filled with the most modest of enemies, after those “sequestration” and other planned cuts in the military budget are taken into account, the country would still be spending at levels that weren’t reached in the Cold War years when there were two overarmed superpowers on the planet. As the Congressional Budget Office concluded last month, “In real terms, after the reduction in 2013, DoD’s base budget is about what it was in 2007, and is still 7% above the average funding since 1980.”

April 12, 2013

Two Obamas, Two Classes of Children (**graphic pic**)

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/04/11-10



The lifeless bodies of Afghan children lay on the ground before their funeral ceremony, after an airstrike on their extended family household by order of President Barack Obama killed several Afghan adults and at least ten children in Shultan, Shigal district, Kunar, eastern Afghanistan, Sunday, April 7, 2013.

Two Obamas, Two Classes of Children
by Ralph Nader
Published on Thursday, April 11, 2013 by Common Dreams

An Associated Press photograph brought the horror of little children lying dead outside of their home to an American Audience. At least 10 Afghan children and some of their mothers were struck down by an airstrike on their extended family household by order of President Barack Obama. He probably decided on what his aides describe as the routine weekly “Terror Tuesday” at the White House. On that day, Mr. Obama typically receives the advice about which “militants” should live or die thousands of miles away from drones or aircraft. Even if households far from war zones are often destroyed in clear violation of the laws of war, the president is not deterred.

These Obama airstrikes are launched knowing that very often there is “collateral damage,” that is a form of “so sorry terrorism.” How can the president explain the vaporization of a dozen pre-teen Afghan boys collecting firewood for their families on a hillside? The local spotter-informants must have been disoriented by all those $100 bills in rewards. Imagine a direct strike killing and injuring scores of people in a funeral procession following a previous fatal strike that was the occasion of this processional mourning. Remember the December 2009 Obama strike on an alleged al-Qaida training camp in Yemen, using tomahawk missiles and – get this – cluster bombs, that killed 14 women and 21 children. Again and again “so sorry terrorism” ravages family households far from the battlefields.

If this is a war, why hasn’t Congress declared war under Article 1, Sec. 8 of the U.S. Constitution? The 2001 Congressional Authorization to Use Military Force is not an open-ended authorization for the president. It was restricted to targeting only nations, organizations or persons that are determined to have been implicated in the 9/11 massacres, or harbored complicit organizations or persons.

~snip~

Unless the American people come to realize that a president must be subject to the rule of law and our Constitution, our statutes and treaties, every succeeding president will push the deficit-financed lawlessness further until the inevitable blowback day of reckoning. That is the fate of all empires.

April 12, 2013

Gitmo Defense Lawyers Say Somebody Has Been Accessing Their Emails

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/04/11-5

These new concerns are the latest example of irregularities of military commissions overshadowing the actual facts of the cases brought before them.

Gitmo Defense Lawyers Say Somebody Has Been Accessing Their Emails
by Cora Currier
Published on Thursday, April 11, 2013 by ProPublica

The long-troubled military trials at Guantanamo Bay were hit by revelations earlier this year that a secret censor had the ability to cut off courtroom proceedings, and that there were listening devices disguised as smoke detectors in attorney-client meeting rooms.

Now, another potential instance of compromised confidentiality at the military commissions has emerged: Defense attorneys say somebody has accessed their email and servers.

“Defense emails have ended up being provided to the prosecution, material has disappeared off the defense server, and sometimes reappeared, in different formats, or with different names,” said Rick Kammen, a lawyer for Abd Al Rahim Al Nashiri, who is accused of plotting the 2000 attack on the U.S.S. Cole.

The lawyers say they don’t know exactly who is accessing their communications. And it’s not yet clear whether the emails were intentionally grabbed or were scooped up mistakenly due to technical or procedural errors.

April 11, 2013

Boeing plans to invest $1 billion in South Carolina

http://www.thenewstribune.com/2013/04/10/2550806/boeing-plans-to-invest-1-billion.html



Boeing produces 737s at its Renton plant, where a new assembly line will build the 737 Max by 2015

Boeing plans to invest $1 billion in South Carolina
JOHN GILLIE; Staff writer
Published: April 10, 2013 at 2:35 a.m. PDT — Updated: April 10, 2013 at 2:36 a.m. PDT

Boeing has told South Carolina legislators it plans to invest $1 billion and hire at least 2,000 more workers in South Carolina by 2020.

The company made those promises this week as the South Carolinia Legislature began deliberations on a bill to give Boeing $120 million in upfront aid to expand its facilities there.

Boeing already has invested more than $1 billion in its site near the Charleston Airport where it assembles 787 Dreamliners and builds major components for those composite-bodied planes.

The company in 2009 rejected a plan that would have expanded 787 production at its Everett plant and instead announced a plan to build its first new aircraft assembly plant outside of Washington state in North Charleston.