African American unemployment very high

The unemployment rate for African Americans is now at Depression-era levels and the government is having to deal with the poor job showing.

One of the issues troubling Washington is unemployment among blacks, with the percentage of jobless at 16.2 percent higher than in the general population.

In isolation, African American males fare even worse.

The most recent figures show African American joblessness at 16.2 percent.

For black males, it's at 17.5 percent.

For black teens, it's nearly 41 percent.

In New York, it has been estimated that 34 percent of the city's young black men age 19 to 24 are not working. Article source here

More war. Whatever happened to peace and prosperity?

Turkey to take in NATO ground forces

Turkey has agreed that NATO can turn its airbase in Turkey into a base for ground operations into Syria.

The country will become the main base in the area for the US-led military alliance’s ground forces.

NATO’s Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen has said the alliance will transfer the bulk of its ground forces from a military base in the city of Heidelberg in southwestern Germany.

Other troops will arrive from Spain to be placed at the Izmir Air Station in western Turkey, which will now become the centre for ground troops.

Turkey has recently toughened its opinion on neighbouring Syria, where unprecedented civilian unrest has led to the deaths of many people.

Ankara has already created its own military bases close to the common border with Syria. Story source here

The plan to destabilize Syria

by Thierry Meyssan

The operations conducted against Libya and Syria involve the same actors and strategies. However, their respective outcomes will differ since the situations in these countries are not comparable. Thierry Meyssan analyzes the semi-failure experienced by the colonial and counter-revolutionary forces, and predicts a pendulum reversal in the Arab world.

The efforts to overthrow the Syrian government have a lot in common with what has been undertaken in Libya. However, the results are substantially different owing to each country’s social and political background. The project to break up these two States simultaneously was initially brought up by John Bolton on 6 May 2002 when he was serving as Undersecretary of State in the Bush administration. It’s implementation by the Obama administration nine years down the line - in the context of the Arab Awakening - is not without problems.

Like in Libya, the original plan intended to bring about a military coup, but it soon proved impossible owing to the lack of willing Syrian military officers. According to our sources, an analogous plan had also been envisaged for Lebanon. In Libya, the plot was leaked and Colonel Gaddafi proceeded to have Colonel Abdallah Gehani arrested [1]. In any case, the initial plan had to be revised in light of the unexpected "Arab Spring" scenario. Full article published here

Primer on interest - from Sweden

Conspiracy Theory

By Paul Craig Roberts

While we were not watching, conspiracy theory has undergone Orwellian redefinition.

A "conspiracy theory" no longer means an event explained by a conspiracy. Instead, it now means any explanation, or even a fact, that is out of step with the government's explanation and that of its media pimps.

For example, online news broadcasts of RT have been equated with conspiracy theories by the New York Times simply because RT reports news and opinions that the New York Times does not report and the US government does not endorse.

In other words, as truth becomes uncomfortable for government and its Ministry of Propaganda, truth is redefined as conspiracy theory, by which is meant an absurd and laughable explanation that we should ignore. Full article here

Happy birthday David

Bilderberg 2011: The Rockefeller World Order and the "High Priests of Globalization"

By Andrew Gavin Marshall

Happy 96th birthday, Mr. David Rockefeller! But I am sorry to say (or perhaps not so sorry) that while the mainstream media have “respected their promises of discretion,” the new media – the alternative media – have not. As you said yourself, “It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years,” it seems that the “lights of publicity” are now descending upon your “plan for the world,” making it all the more difficult to come to pass. Indeed, “the world is more sophisticated,” but not because the world is ‘ready’ for your plan, but because the world is getting ready to reject it. While national sovereignty certainly has problems and is hardly something I would consider ‘ideal’, the “supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers” is about the worst scenario one could imagine. So as a birthday present to you, Mr. Rockefeller, I promise (and I am sure that I am speaking for a great many more than simply myself) that I will continue to expose your “plans for the world,” so that your dream – and our nightmare – will never become a reality. The light will shine, and in due time, the people will be ready to follow its path.
Very informative article posted here

What happened to this battery?

SOLAR CYCLE 24: EXPECTATIONS AND IMPLICATIONS

David Archibald and Professor David Bellamy, City Beach, August 2008

By David C. Archibald

Summa Development Limited, Perth, WA, Australia
E-mail: david.archibald@westnet.com.au

ABSTRACT
Archibald (2006) predicted that climate during the forthcoming Solar Cycles 24 and 25 would be significantly cold. As at late 2008, the progression of the current 23/24 solar minimum indicates that a severe cool period is now inevitable, similar to that of the Dalton Minimum. Adecline in average annual temperature of 2.2°C is here predicted for the mid-latitude regions over Solar Cycle 24. The result will be an equator-ward shift in continental climatic conditions in the mid-latitudes of the order of 300 km, with consequent severe effects on world agricultural productivity.
Editor: This article and others are available on David Archibald's website

NATO Incorporates Libyan Experience For Global War Template

By Rick Rozoff


As the West's war against Libya has entered its fourth month and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has flown more than 11,000 missions, including 4,300 strike sorties, over the small nation, the world's only military bloc is already integrating lessons learned from the conflict into its international model of military intervention based on earlier wars in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq.

What NATO refers to as Operation Unified Protector has provided the Alliance the framework in which to continue recruiting Partnership for Peace adjuncts like Sweden and Malta, Istanbul Cooperation Initiative affiliates Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates and Mediterranean Dialogue partnership members Jordan and Morocco into the bloc's worldwide warfighting network. Sweden, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates also have military personnel assigned to NATO's International Security Assistance Force in the nearly ten-year-long war in Afghanistan. In the first case, troops from the Scandinavian nation has been engaged in their first combat role, killing and being killed, in two centuries in Afghanistan and has provided eight warplanes for the attack on Libya, with marine forces to soon follow.
Full article published here

Another reason we don't have electric cars

AMAZING SPEECH BY WAR VETERAN

The Destabilization of Syria and the Broader Middle East War

AP. Thousands of supporters of Syrian President Bashar Assad carry a 2,300-metre-long Syrian flag in a demonstration in Damascus on Wednesday, June 15.


By Michel Chossudovsky

What is unfolding in Syria is an armed insurrection supported covertly by foreign powers including the US, Turkey and Israel.

Armed insurgents belonging to Islamist organizations have crossed the border from Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. The US State Department has confirmed that it is supporting the insurgency.

The United States is to expand contacts with Syrians who are counting on a regime change in the country.

This was stated by U.S. State Department official Victoria Nuland. "We started to expand contacts with the Syrians, those who are calling for change, both inside and outside the country," she said.

Nuland also repeated that Barack Obama had previously called on Syrian President Bashar Assad to initiate reforms or to step down from power." (Voice of Russia, June 17, 2011)

The destabilization of Syria and Lebanon as sovereign countries has been on the drawing board of the US-NATO-Israel military alliance for at least ten years.
Full article posted here

This is cute

REPORT FROM TRIPOLI: More NATO "Humanitarian Intervention:" The Bombing of Al Fateh University, Campus B

Global Research, June 14, 2011

By Cynthia McKinney

Since coming to Tripoli to see first hand the consequences of the NATO military operations, it has become clear to me that despite the ongoing silence of the international press on the ground here in Libya, there is clear evidence that civilian targets have been hit and Libyan civilians injured and killed.

This Tuesday morning I was taken from my hotel across the city through its bustling traffic to the Al Fateh University.

On 9 June, Dean Ali Mansur was outside in the parking lot. The sky was blue like Carolina blue. The clouds were white--no chemtrails in sight. Puffy and white. Dean Mansur was visibly upset. It seems that some of the young men at Al Fateh University, Campus B were fighting over girls. He explained to me that Libyans are hot blooded. With a gleam in his eye, he whispered to me that girls are important to young men.

Yes, that was clearly evident today as I approached the campus of Al Fateh University, Campus B, formerly known as Nasser University. Under the trees, throughout the lawn as we approached the campus gates, I could see young men and women talking to each other, talking on cell phones, walking to and fro, assembled, probably talking about the latest campus news--whatever that might be. Today, on the Al Fateh campus, life was teeming. Student life seemed vibrant. This feel and ambiance of this university was not unlike the hundreds of other universities that I have visited in the US and around the world.

Libyan boys and girls are like ours. My son would easily fit into the life of this university.

The campus seemed vibrant, too. Cranes everywhere indicated a healthy building program, adding new buildings to enhance the student learning environment. Despite the students' fracas, Dean Mansur had everything to be happy about as he saw his university becoming bigger, better, and stronger. Her told me that they had even signed an agreement with a British university to begin programs in the English language. Not English studies, Dean Mansur emphasized, but an entire curriculum of study taught in the English language! Of course, he entoned, that's all disappointingly ended now.

Al Fateh University, Campus B consists of about 10,000 undergraduates, 800 masters degree candidates, and 18 Ph.D. students; 220 staff, 150 ad hoc professors, 120 employees. It has eight auditoriums, 19 classrooms, 4 extra large classrooms. It also has a rural campus at Al Azizia where 700 students are taught and are a part of the university system. Dean Mansur compares himself to a mayor because he has so many responsibilities presiding over a large community of students engaging in a rich and vibrant academic life.

Dean Mansur told me that life at the university and, for him personally, changed forever on the afternoon of Thursday 9 June, 2011.

He recalled that the university opened as usual around 8:00 am and was to close later that evening at about 8:00 pm.

Thursday, 9 June, he thought, was going to be just like any other day, except for the fracas over the girls that had cleared the campus of many of the students who didn't want to have any part in the fighting. So, outside in the campus parking lot, Dr. Mansur told me he was preoccupied thinking how he would deal with the disciplinary issue before him.

Then, out of nowhere and all of a sudden, he heard something loud up in the sky.

He said it began out of no where, a loud roar. Then a frightful high pitched the hissing sound. He said he looked up into the sky and couldn't hardly believe his eyes: something shiny up in the sky appeared dancing in front of him. He said it moved about like an atari game or something. It danced and zig-zagged all over the sky. He said he was transfixed on the object for what seemed like minutes but in truth must have only been seconds.

Up and down and sideways it raced in the sky and then, without warning, it just came crashing down into the ground nearby. It was a NATO missile.

Tragically it had found its target: Al Fateh University, Campus B.

Dean Mansur said he saw one missile, lots of fire, lots of different colors all around it, and then a huge plume of smoke. He saw one missile, but heard what seemed like many explosions. He said he now can't honestly say how many.

Dr. Mansur said the force and shock of the blast held him frozen in his place. He said his heart stopped for a moment. He wasn't afraid, just frozen. He didn't run away; he didn't cower; he said he just stood stupefied.

The force of the blast cracked thickened concrete wells, shattered hundreds of windows and brought numerous ceilings down in lecture halls.

Whether it was a wayward Tomahawk Cruise Missile or a misdirected laser guided bomb, no one knows.

His immediate thoughts were for the thousands of his students in the university and for his own three children who study there.

After about 30 minutes, the Libyan press came to see what had happened. the University President and other officials of the school all came. But to Dr. Mansur's surprise not the international press.

And what did they see?

The media saw the widespread structural damage to many of the buildings, all of the windows blown out in every one of the eight auditoriums. Doors blown off their hinges. Library in a shambles. Books and debris everywhere. The campus mosque was damaged. Glass heaped up in piles. Some efforts at cleaning up had begun.

Dr Mansur says that they have kept the university, wherever practicable, in much the same condition as it was on the day of the attack. Except that the main classroom area that students work in has been cleaned and will be renamed the Seif Al-Arab auditorium complex in memory of Muammar Qaddafi's son murdered on April 30, 2011 in his home by NATO bombs.

On Thursday, NATO missiles. Friday and Saturday are considered the weekend here. Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, the students are back to school undaunted by the bombing. In many of the classrooms I saw today, students were taking final exams amid the debris. As I walked around the campus, one male voice shouted out and spoke to me in Arabic: "Where's Obama?"

Good question I thought.

I've always wondered if the politicians who regularly send our young men and women away to war and who regularly bomb the poor peoples of the world have ever, themselves, been on the receiving end of a Cruise Missile attack or placed themselves and their family at the mercy of a laser guided depleted uranium bomb. Maybe, just maybe I thought, that if they had experienced first hand the horror of a NATO attack on a civilian target they might just stop and question for a minute the need to dispatch our armed forces to attack the people of Libya.

I didn't want to disturb the students taking exams so I found some students standing outside not taking exams to talk to. I asked them if they had anything to say to President Obama. One professor, a woman, spoke up readily and said, "We are working under fire: physical and psychological." One student spoke up and said that President Obama should "Free Palestine and leave Libya alone." He continued, "We are one family."

More on that later, but briefly, every Libyan is a member of a tribe and every tribe governs itself and selects its leaders; those leaders from all of the tribes then select their leaders, and so on until there is only one leader of all of the tribes of Libya. I met that one tribal leader yesterday in another part of Tripoli and I am told he is the real leader of this country. He presides over the Tribal Council which constitutes Libya's real policymakers. So when the young man said "We are one family," that is actually the truth.

Dr. Mansur, trained in the United States and spoke fondly of his time in the US and the many friends he made there. He is proud of his students and the richness of his university's community life. He was just like any University Dean in the United States.

In my view God intervened on Thursday 9 June, 2011.

On the day that the missile struck, not one student was killed. It could so easily have been different. It could have been a catastrophe taking the lives of hundreds of teenagers.

I am told that in the surrounding area immediately outside the university others were not so fortunate.

Reports are that there were deaths in the nearby houses.

It's a funny thing about war. Those who cause war become oblivious and removed from its consequences; they seem happy to inflict harm on others and become numb to its ill effects while war's victims find a way to normalize the abnormal and live with the constant threat of death and destruction.

After visiting Tripoli, I remain as opposed to war as ever before.

The students at Al Fateh University continue their studies despite the siege that their country is under.

And oh, that second group of students that I randomly spoke to? I asked them how much they pay for tuition. They looked at me with puzzled faces even after the translation. I asked them how much they pay for their books. Again, the same puzzled face. Tuition at Al Fateh University is 16 dinars per year--about $9. And due to the NATO embargo on gasoline imports, the school now has started 10 free bus lines to its surrounding areas in order to make sure that the students can get to school, free of charge.

I told them that I was about to enter a Ph.D. program in the US myself and that I needed tuition and book money costing tens of thousands of dollars. I continued that my cousin is in debt $100,000 because she went to the schools of her choice and received a Master's degree.

They said to me, "We thank Muammar Qaddafi. Because of Muammar Qaddafi we have free education. Allah, Muammar, Libya obes!"

Well as for NATO, they still cling to the chimera that their strikes are against military targets only and that theirs is a "humanitarian intervention."

I'm still waiting to find evidence somewhere in the world that bombing poor civilian populations of the Third World from the air is good for their voting rights, democracy, medical care, education, welfare, national debt, and enhancing personal income and wealth distribution. It seems clear to me that complex life issues require more complex intervention than a Cruise Missile could ever deliver.
Article source here

Greece revisited

US Naval and Troop Movements Toward North Africa, Middle East Reported As Syrian Destabilization Escalates

Webster G. Tarpley, Ph.D.

June 15, 2011

Washington DC – US Special Forces units based at Fort Hood, Texas, have been told to prepare for deployment to Libya no later than July, according to a US military source. The Special Forces would then be followed in September or October by heavy armored units of the First Cavalry Division, currently located in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with other components of the US III Corps. This report was broadcast today on the Alex Jones radio program, and comes against the backdrop of escalating US destabilization operations against Syria and sharpening US condemnation of Damascus and its ally, Tehran.

Observers point out that US Special Forces have been in Libya since February. They also note that, while the Libyan destination is highly plausible, some of these units may also find themselves on the way to Yemen, Syria, or beyond.

Another anonymous military source speaking on the Alex Jones broadcast reported that US stocks of depleted uranium (DU) munitions are currently very low. This may be the reality behind outgoing Defense Secretary Gates’ complaint last week that NATO is “running out of bombs” in Libya, and similar remarks by French NATO General Stephane Abrial in Belgrade.

A source at US Central Command (CENTCOM) confirmed that US forces are being lined up for new foreign missions, and added that his unit had recently processed two deceased US Army soldiers and three deceased US civilians, possibly mercenaries. The source attributed these cases to Libya, although US operations in Libya are widely thought to be controlled by the new US African Command (AFRICOM).

These reports should be taken together with the energetic protests from the Russian Foreign Ministry over the presence of the US Aegis cruiser Monterrey (a vessel with anti-ballistic missile capabilities) in the Black Sea, along with the arrival of the amphibious assault ship USS Bataan off the coast of Syria.

According to the Israeli site DebkaFile, which often reflects the views of the Mossad, “Western sources additonally report a build-up of ship-borne anti-missile missile strength in the Mediterranean basin. This huge concentration of naval missile interceptor units looks like preparations by Washington for the contingency of Iran, Syria and Hizballah letting loose with surface missiles against US and Israeli targets in the event of US military intervention to stop the anti-opposition slaughter underway in Syria. Moscow, Tehran and Damascus, in particular, are taking this exceptional spate of American military movements in and around the Mediterranean as realistically portending American intervention in Syria.” Debka also says that Hezbollah is in the process of moving some of its formidable missile assets from northern Lebanon to the central regions of that country, closer to Israel.”

The Obama administration is thus on a collision course with the Congress over the War Powers Act, which requires legislative approval of the Libyan war by June 20. If Obama continues to bomb Libya beyond next Monday, or compounds his air assault with a ground invasion, he will be impeachment bait. Article source here

Firestorm of Star Birth in the Active Galaxy Centaurus A

Resembling looming rain clouds on a stormy day, dark lanes of dust crisscross the giant elliptical galaxy Centaurus A.

Hubble's panchromatic vision, stretching from ultraviolet through near-infrared wavelengths, reveals the vibrant glow of young, blue star clusters and a glimpse into regions normally obscured by the dust.

The warped shape of Centaurus A's disk of gas and dust is evidence for a past collision and merger with another galaxy. The resulting shockwaves cause hydrogen gas clouds to compress, triggering a firestorm of new star formation. These are visible in the red patches in this Hubble close-up.

At a distance of just over 11 million light-years, Centaurus A contains the closest active galactic nucleus to Earth. The center is home for a supermassive black hole that ejects jets of high-speed gas into space, but neither the supermassive black hole or the jets are visible in this image.

This image was taken in July 2010 with Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3.
Image source here

Solar forecast hints at a big chill

The sun unleashes a powerful solar flare from the right side of its disk on June 7, as seen in this image from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. Scientists say the sun is heading toward a peak in its activity cycle in 2013 or so, but may enter a period of hibernation afterward.


By Alan Boyle


The latest long-range space forecast predicts a prolonged drop in solar activity after the next peak — and scientists say that might cool down temperatures here on Earth, or at least slow down the warming trend a bit.

Scientists have studied sunspots and the sun's 11-year activity cycle for 400 years, and they're getting increasingly savvy about spotting the harbingers of "space weather" years in advance, just as meteorologists can figure out what's coming after the next storm.

Storms from the sun are expected to build to a peak in 2013 or so, but after that, the long-range indicators are pointing to an extended period of low activity — or even hibernation.

"This is important because the solar cycle causes space weather ... and may contribute to climate change," Frank Hill, associate director of the National Solar Observatory's Solar Synoptic Network, told journalists today.

In the past, such periods have coincided with lower-than-expected temperatures on Earth. The most famous example is the Maunder Minimum, a 70-year period with virtually no sunspots from 1645 to 1715. Average temperatures in Europe sank so low during that period that it came to be known as "the Little Ice Age." Full article here

Rape in Libya: America’s Recent Wars have all been Accompanied by Memorable Falsehoods

When the war-going get tough, the professional P.R.Campaigns get Going

by Prof Peter Dale Scott

June 13, 2011


It is a troubled Time for NATO’s campaign against Libya. President Obama has seen a near-revolt in Congress against the costly war, while Defense Secretary Gates in Brussels has warned his European allies that their tepid response “is putting the Libya mission and the alliance's very future at risk.”1 Back home, according to the London Daily Mail, “Mr Gates has requested extra funds for Libya operations, but has been rebuffed by the White House.”2

The past history of American wars tells us that, when the war-going begins to get tough, the professional p.r. campaigns get going, often with wholly invented stories. For example, when in 1990 Defense Secretary Colin Powell was expressing doubts that the United States should attack Kuwait, stories appeared that, as revealed by classified satellite photos, Saddam had amassed 265,000 troops and 1500 tanks at the edge of the Saudi Arabian border. Powell then changed his mind, and the attack proceeded. But after the invasion a reporter from the St. Petersburg Times viewed satellite photos from a commercial satellite, and “she saw no sign of a quarter of a million troops or their tanks.”3

Hawks in Congress, notably Tom Lantos and Stephen Solarz, secured support for the attack on Iraq with a story from a 15-year-old girl, that she had seen Kuwaiti infants snatched from their incubators by Iraqi soldiers. The story was discredited when it was learned that the girl, the daughter of the Saudi ambassador in Washington, might not have visited the hospital at all. She had been prepped on her story by the p.r. firm Hill & Knowlton, which had a contract for $11.5 million from the Kuwaiti government.4
Full article here

Editor: Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Drugs Oil and War, The Road to 9/11, and The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War. His most recent book is American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection and the Road to Afghanistan. Peter Dale Scott is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

Canada has now been co-opted into another military mess on the other side of the world.
Our recently elected parliament has already proven its profound ineptitude in failing to examine the facts before wasting more Canadian lives and taxpayers' money in yet another exercise in colonialism.

American manufacturing slowly rotting away: How industries die

June 14, 2011

By Ian Fletcher

I wrote in a previous article about why America’s manufacturing sector, despite record output, is actually in very deep trouble: record output doesn’t prove the sector healthy when we are running a huge trade deficit in manufactured goods, i.e. consuming more goods than we produce and plugging the gap with asset sales and debt.

But this analysis of the problem only touches the quantitative surface of our ongoing industrial decline. Real industries are not abstract aggregates; they are complex ecosystems of suppliers and supply chains, skills and customer relationships, long-term investments and returns. Deindustrialization is thus a more complex process than is usually realized. It is not just layoffs and crumbling buildings; industries sicken and die in complicated ways.

To take just one example, when American producers are pushed out of foreign markets by protectionism abroad and out of domestic markets by the export subsidies of foreign nations, it is not just immediate profits that are lost. Declining sales undermine their scale economies, driving up their costs and making them even less competitive. Less profit means less money to plow into future technology development. Less access to sophisticated foreign markets means less exposure to sophisticated foreign technology and diverse foreign buyer needs.

When an industry shrinks, it ceases to support the complex web of skills, many of them outside the industry itself, upon which it depends. These skills often take years to master, so they only survive if the industry (and its supporting industries, several tiers deep into the supply chain) remain in continuous operation. The same goes for specialized suppliers. Thus, for example, in the words of the Financial Times‘s James Kynge:

"The more Boeing outsourced, the quicker the machine-tool companies that supplied it went bust, providing opportunities for Chinese competitors to buy the technology they needed, better to supply companies like Boeing." Full article here

Heading for the heavens

Last Shuttle "ENDEAVOR" flight from KSC, 5-16-2011. A seriously nifty photo of the LAST shuttle launch, from the best seat in the house...

an F-15E Strike Eagle at 26 thousand feet over the east coast flying protective combat air patrol for the launch.

The Libyan war is likely going to bog down and drag on, like the rest. Webster Tarpley comments on the situation

Land rights in Alberta

Keith Wilson and Joe Anglin will host public meetings in the Sundre Community Centre (June 16, 7pm) and the Rocky Community Centre (June 15,7pm) to explain the implications of Bills 19, 36 and 50 for landowners. For more information, phone 780 458-6332 or email- info@landownersagainstbills.com
Website: landownersagainstbills.com

Online Censorship 101

Is Greece the "canary in the coalmine"?

Hundreds of thousands of Greek ‘Indignés’ (‘Outraged’) walk out to wage war against their neoliberal persecutors



Two weeks after it started the Greek movement of ‘outraged’ people has the main squares in all cities overflowing with crowds that shout their anger, and makes the Papandreou government and its local and international supporters tremble. It is now more than just a protest movement or even a massive mobilization against austerity measures. It has turned into a genuine popular uprising that is sweeping over the country. An uprising that makes it know at large its refusal to pay for ‘their crisis’ or ‘their debt’ while vomiting the two big neoliberal parties, if not the whole political world in complete disarray. Full article here

The billion dollar war? Libyan campaign breaks Pentagon estimates costing U.S. taxpayers $2 million a day

Costs: U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates speaks during a media conference today. He is under pressure to stump up for the cost of operations in Libya

Last updated at 10:20 PM on 9th June 2011


The cost of the U.S. campaign in Libya is set to exceed the $750 million Pentagon estimate set out in March, according to a leaked Department of Defence Memo.

The 'eyes-only' DoD dossier said the U.S. had already spent $664 million in Libya by mid-May - a running cost of $60 million a month since the bombing began in March.

At the current rate of spending, the U.S. will have to shell out at least an extra $274 million till the end of the current 90 day no fly zone extension period - brining total expenditure to a minimum of $938 million. Full article posted here

This article has been deleted from all mainstream news sites

Editor: Jack H. Jacobs is a prominent American Jew decorated for heroism in Vietnam
He is an outspoken supporter of US supremacy and is voicing a sense of frustration in the article below. Evidently, the Oligarchy is not very happy about this article as it was promptly pulled off mainstream news sites today.

Last Rites

Behind The Wall 11 Jun 2011, 6:34 pm CEST

By Col. Jack Jacobs

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has finally said publicly what everybody has assumed for a long time: NATO is dead. It's not dead in the sense that it doesn't exist anymore, but it is definitely moribund, and even if there continues to be an organization called "NATO," it will have no purpose other than the perpetuation of the disused bureaucracy that has been the sole reason for its existence in the last few decades.

Originally designed to bind the United States and Western Europe into a credible deterrent against a hostile Soviet Union, NATO's last useful gasp was in Bosnia, but that was almost two decades ago, and the Balkans had little to do with the Cold War anyway. With the demise of the Communist bloc, NATO lost much of its purpose. Under normal circumstances, there are only two things that make sense for such an organization: either find another use for it or dissolve it. We did neither.

Some have said that the existence of NATO after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact made an already paranoid and politically unsophisticated Russia almost as wary as the USSR had been, and we certainly drove the Russians crazy by planning to emplace missiles in their former satellite countries. In any event, NATO became a useless vestigal organ, costing us money and other resources but accomplishing nothing to the benefit of our allies or us. And because we are the chumps we are, we are paying most of the freight.

NATO's irrelevance goes beyond the lack of a central mission. Secretary Gates' complaint is that Europeans don't want to support it, and they don't. Like unsupervised adolescents, they have been busy experimenting with other things, such as coalescing into an ill-conceived economic union that had no chance of success as long as there was no sovereignty to control it. As a result, Europe got into its own economic mess all by itself, with Germany---full of grandiose, half-baked ideas as usual---now hoisted with its own petard and feeling the financial pain of having to support others in the EU. Germany is not alone among our allies who are happy to have NATO around---as long as the U.S. pays for it.

The organization has been the vehicle for getting involved in the Libyan civil war, but that mission was poorly and hastily conceived, it lacks military objectives, and it is being executed in the most muddled and discontinuous fashion. Meanwhile, the United States keeps begging for more NATO help in Afghanistan, but nevertheless our allies have been bailing out of Southwest Asia for some time. Not NATO's finest hour.

The alliance's disutility is also caused by other, more sweeping, changes, and they signal more than just the demise of some useless extra-governmental construct. NATO's leader, the United States, has been losing influence nearly everywhere, and our international reach, once very long indeed, is now dangerously short. With a rapidly growing economy and independent-minded leadership, our own NATO ally, Turkey, is wielding its strength in the region, and the majority party's religious bent may be emblematic of the gulf between us.

The United States is in a difficult position: we look weak whether NATO continues to wander aimlessly or we dissolve it. That should demonstrate as much as anything that, no matter how useless the organization is, it's not NATO's fault that things don't go our way, and we should heed Cassius's observation that the fault is not in our stars but in ourselves.

Interview with NATO's political spokesman

Email sent to Canadian MP Blake Richards today, and copied to all of Canada's senators

Hi Blake,
In regards to the upcoming vote on a continued engagement by Canadian Armed Forces personnel in air strikes on Libya, I would urge you to study all sides of the question before voting.
I have followed this conflict closely, using information from both sides and have concluded that this is a civil war driven by outside interest groups involved in a geopolitical struggle for the control of African resources.
Our bombing of targets on the ground in Libya has nothing to do with saving civilian lives, rather the opposite. It has everything to do with trying to oust from power the existing government of Libya.
I strenuously oppose this intervention in the affairs of a sovereign nation by Canadian forces.

Regards,
Helge Nome
P.O.Box 354
Caroline, Alberta
T0M 0M0