Thursday, February 28, 2019

GLOBAL WARMING?

GLOBAL WARMING?
REPORTS HAVE BEEN SUGAR COATED

(On Contact)

"The glaciers in Alaska alone are losing an estimated 75 billion tons of ice every year.  The oceans, which absorb over 90 percent of the excess heat trapped by greenhouses gases in the atmosphere, are warming and acidifying, melting the polar ice caps and resulting in rising sea-levels and oxygen-starved ocean dead zones.  We await a 50-gigaton burp, or "pulse," of methane from thawing Arctic permafrost beneath the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, which will release the equivalent of around two-thirds of the total carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere since the beginning of the industrial era. Some 150 to 200 species of plants, insects, birds and mammals are becoming extinct every 24 hours – one thousand times the "natural" or "background" rate. This pace of extinction is greater than anything the world has experienced since the disappearance of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Chris Hedges speaks to journalist and author, Dahr Jamail, about his new book 'The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption,' which looks at the climate emergency."

DANGEROUS COMEDY

DANGEROUS COMEDY

(Redacted Tonight)

"On VIP this week I spoke with Larry Charles, the director of "Borat" and a writer on "Seinfeld." He recently released a Netflix show called "Larry Charles Dangerous World of Comedy." To start off the show I dissected some MSNBC regime change propaganda regarding Venezuela."

SO FUNNY IT HURTS

SO FUNNY IT HURTS

(The Jimmy Dore Show)

MICHAEL HUDSON

MICHAEL HUDSON

Watch a comedian host, from his garage, and an economist guest, from his pantry, report and inform beyond anything available on the billion dollar propaganda platforms.

(The Jimmy Dore Show)

Wednesday, February 27, 2019

BLEEDING VEINS OF VENEZUELA

BLEEDING VEINS OF VENEZUELA

(The Real News.com)

"Trump promises “democracy and freedom” to Venezuela, delivered by Elliott Abrams who brought you illegal wars, coups, and support for dictatorships; and Mike Pompeo and VP Pence, both with deep ties to the Koch brothers who need Venezuelan heavy crude to feed their Texas refinery – Col. Larry Wilkerson joins TRNN’s Paul Jay"

UPDATE:

 VIDEO: Investigating Venezuela’s ‘Humanitarian Crisis’: Max Blumenthal Tours a Supermarket in Caracas
(Gray Zone Project)

VIDEO: The Real Humanitarian Aid: Inside Venezuela’s State-Subsidized Communal Markets
(Gray Zone Project)

BLACK ON TAX

BLACK ON TAX

(Bill Black on The Real News.com)

"Trump’s “middle class tax cut” is a tax hike. Economist Bill Black says Trump could have been a popular President, if he hadn’t lied about middle class tax cuts and building infrastructure"

ATOMIC PUNK

ATOMIC PUNK

(CounterPunch.org)

"On Tuesday, the House Oversight and Reform Committee revealed that, based on the testimony of “multiple” whistleblowers, the Trump Administration has been attempting to rush through a transfer of “highly sensitive U.S. nuclear technology” to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia without Congressional approval in violation of federal law."

KOOL AID

KOOL AID

(Max Blumenthal at Consortiumnews.com)

"Marco Rubio and coup leaders are accusing the Venezuelan National Guard, but Max Blumenthal lines up opposing evidence."

Sunday, February 24, 2019

HUMANITARIAN RAID

HUMANITARIAN RAID

(Consortiumnews.com)

"The reporter as clown — for whom the truth is too difficult to report —may be the final stage of much of mainstream journalism’s degeneration, writes John Pilger for Consortium News."

UPDATE:

(The Real News.com)

"On the eve of another US war for oil, Abby Martin debunks the most repeated myths about Venezuela and uncovers how US sanctions are crimes against humanity with UN Investigator and Human Rights Rapporteur Alfred De Zayas."

Monday, February 18, 2019

MEDICARE FOR ALL MAKES CENTS

MEDICARE FOR ALL MAKES CENTS
(TRILLIONS OF THEM)

(The Real News.com)
"Contrary to Michael Bloomberg and former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, potential 2020 Presidential candidates, a completely public health care program could save taxpayers 1.5 trillion dollars, says Prof. Robert Pollin of PERI at UMass, Amherst and Adam Gaffney, President of Physicians for a National Health Program."

NO NUKES NADER

NO NUKES NADER

The other nuclear elephant in the room is nuclear power. The construction and utilization of nuclear power plants has been bolstered by huge government subsidies. We tax payers not only made that industry possible, we are on the hook to clean up the mess if a plant melts down. And of course the fallout of decades of toxic waste accumulation will be with us for what....thousands of years?

Nuclear power should be phased out, but it's being touted as the solution to the ongoing climate catastrophe. It was a mistake, it doesn't make sense anymore. But don't take my word for it, check out the following interview with Dr. Gregory Jaczko.

(Ralph Nader Radio Hour)

"Ralph spends the entire hour with physicist and former Chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Dr. Gregory Jaczko, talking about his book “Confessions of a Rogue Nuclear Regulator.”

THE BLIND LEADING THE DOOMED

 THE BLIND LEADING THE DOOMED

Tomgram: James Carroll, How Many Minutes to Midnight?

"Consider it a marriage made in hell. Start with the groom, Donald Trump, the man who once wondered why in the world we make nuclear weapons if we can’t use them; who wouldn’t rule out using nukes, even in Europe; who insisted that a president should be “unpredictable” on the subject; who suggested that it might not be “a bad thing for us” if Saudi Arabia, Japan, and South Korea all became nuclear powers; who threatened North Korea with “fire and fury like the world has never seen” before he became a chummy correspondent with its dictator; and who called for a nearly 10-fold increase in the U.S. nuclear arsenal (among many other, often contradictory, comments he’s made on nuclear matters).

Now, think about the bride, National Security Advisor John Bolton, a “statesman” who never saw a nuclear agreement he didn’t want to nuke. Those included President Richard Nixon’s Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, President Bill Clinton’s Agreed Framework with North Korea, President Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear deal (all of which he helped to deep-six), and most recently President Ronald Reagan’s Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces, or INF, Treaty (a pact that had actually resulted in thousands of ready-to-use nuclear weapons being scrapped). With the help of his neocon bro, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Bolton recently succeeded in sticking a knife directly in the back of that treaty. He’s undoubtedly now eying the New START treaty, which put limits on long-range nukes and is up for renewal in 2021. (The president has already called it “one of several bad deals negotiated by the Obama administration.”)

As TomDispatch regular and former Boston Globe columnist James Carroll points out today, the first new member of Trump's and Bolton's nuclear family, a “low-yield” nuke, was only recently born and given the less-than-apocalyptic name, W76-2. It looks as though, in nuclear terms, they are headed for a grim version of connubial bliss. To mix a metaphor or two in the fashion of our president, you might even think of that first progeny of theirs as a minute hand on a ticking clock heading for midnight. Tom" 

(James Carroll at Tom Dispatch.com)

"Last month, the National Nuclear Security Administration (formerly the Atomic Energy Commission) announced that the first of a new generation of strategic nuclear weapons had rolled off the assembly line at its Pantex nuclear weapons plant in the panhandle of Texas. That warhead, the W76-2, is designed to be fitted to a submarine-launched Trident missile, a weapon with a range of more than 7,500 miles. By September, an undisclosed number of warheads will be delivered to the Navy for deployment.

What makes this particular nuke new is the fact that it carries a far smaller destructive payload than the thermonuclear monsters the Trident has been hosting for decades -- not the equivalent of about 100 kilotons of TNT as previously, but of five kilotons. According to Stephen Young of the Union of Concerned Scientists, the W76-2 will yield “only” about one-third of the devastating power of the weapon that the Enola Gay, an American B-29 bomber, dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Yet that very shrinkage of the power to devastate is precisely what makes this nuclear weapon potentially the most dangerous ever manufactured. Fulfilling the Trump administration’s quest for nuclear-war-fighting “flexibility,” it isn’t designed as a deterrent against another country launching its nukes; it’s designed to be used.  This is the weapon that could make the previously “unthinkable” thinkable."

NO PEACE FOR US

NO PEACE FOR US

American plutocrats and their media puppets peddle conflict. The main stream media and our most powerful politicians, are paid well to love war.

(Democracy Now.org)

That our national leaders enthusiastically support an industry whose purpose is slaughter and destruction, makes them evil in my book. The military is not only paid for by our tax dollars, it receives the lion's share, yet its primary purpose is to serve the interest of corporations. Corporate interests are not de facto the interests of American citizens. A rational assessment of the "successes" of the Military Industrial and Surveillance Complex, show that there aren't any, unless you directly cash in on its fiscal excesses or benefit from foreign interventions, because you cash in on the rape of foreign natural resources.

The U.S. is orchestrating a coupe in Venezuela to exploit its resources. It's another illegal foreign intervention intended to prop up a failing world-wide capitalist system, its mission to serve the oligarch's here and abroad.

Regime Change Made in the USA
(Consortiumnews.com)

We who pay for war suffer because our money might have paid for domestic programs and infrastructure, soldiers suffer and die for corporate profit, not public safety, and we are unwittingly responsible for the war crimes and crimes against humanity perpetrated in our names. As a nation we have caused the murder and torment of many millions, wasting lives and resources to serve Mammon.

(US News.com)
***
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone.

It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.

It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.

It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.

We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.

We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.

This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."

-President Dwight Eisenhower
***
 -Major General Smedley D. Butler

Serious journalists, conscientious politicians, and anti-war activists are marginalized, silenced by the drum beat for endless profitable wars. Profitable for a few, as it will likely bankrupt America. Our hegemony will collapse like the British Empire and the Soviet Union.

Exclusive: The Pentagon’s Massive Accounting Fraud Exposed
How US military spending keeps rising even as the Pentagon flunks its audit.
(The Nation.com) 

Sadly, comedians have increasingly become the voice of reason. Even more sadly, comedians, like other media pundits, are often co-opted by the consolidated corporate media machine, so their messages serve only the status quo, adding bits of humor to the propaganda they're pushing. Despite a glibbly voiced desire to be co-opted by a million dollar salary, the comedian Jimmy Dore seems to be fighting the good fight.

&
(Jimmy Dore)
***
The damage that the Military Industrial and Surveillance Complex has done to our country is literally incalculable, all in the name of serving us and democracy around the world. Corporately driven armed conflict is the tragedy that not only defines most of our history, but will likely be the last word as the human race extinguishes itself.
War critics become victims of ridiculous smears, lose their jobs, and suffer the intense scrutiny of the surveillance state. As a nation we're encouraged to believe that war is peace. Military intervention has been transformed into both our preferred method for providing humanitarian aid and a means to secure the safety of American citizens. Overwhelming evidence over many decades has proven that military activity not only causes catastrophic human suffering, it results in blow back that fuels the hostility directed at us.

Veteran NBC/MSNBC Journalist Blasts the Network for Being Captive to the National Security State and Reflexively Pro-War to Stop Trump
(The Intercept.com)

"A veteran national security journalist with NBC News and MSNBC blasted the networks in a Monday email for becoming captive and subservient to the national security state, reflexively pro-war in the name of stopping President Donald Trump, and now the prime propaganda instrument of the War Machine’s promotion of militarism and imperialism. As a result of NBC/MSNBC’s all-consuming militarism, he said, “the national security establishment not only hasn’t missed a beat but indeed has gained dangerous strength” and “is ever more autonomous and practically impervious to criticism.”

Waging peace must become a top priority. All the money in the world won't buy us a new planet, if we destroy this one.