As North Korea is said to be threatening Hawaii with missiles, and the U.S. scrambles to get their “interceptors” ready — you may wonder, when did the Pacific archipelago incite threats from North Korea. It all starts with a little annexation and some illegal occupation of a sovereign nation… Pinky explains.
Dr. Wesley Boyd finally got the green light to publish his explosive findings about exactly what health insurers were investing in, after editors and fact-checkers went through it for weeks. And then came the bomb: The New England Medical Journal ran the findings that prove US, Canadian and British health and life insurance firms hold at least $4.4 billion of investments in companies whose subsidiaries manufacture cigarettes, cigars, chewing tobacco and related products. Health and life insurers are essentially investing in their patients’ illnesses.
The report is the latest of painful examples of how a profit-driven life/health insurance industry works. Boyd told Amy Goodman yesterday: “… The insurance industry is primarily concerned about making money, not about insuring people’s health and well-being.”
Boyd, of the Cambridge Health Alliance and Harvard Medical School, gave Read more »
Nihilism — the malaise of not caring what happens, and the feeling of not being able to change what is projected upon you — has been a major player in the attitudes of citizens of the industrial world. Most people don’t vote, don’t rally, and many aren’t involved in their local communities. Recently a lot of good reporting has outlined the sources of this cultural blah and how to break out for some fresh air. Adbusters’ current Read more »
Rep. Dennis Kucinich spoke yesterday before the U.S. House on the wars the US has brought to Iraq and Afghanistan:
“A new administration and the same old war, and expansion of the war in Afghanistan. We cannot afford these wars spiritually. They are wars of aggression, and they’re based on lies. We cannot afford these wars financially. They add trillions to our national debt and destroy our domestic agenda. We cannot afford the human cost of these wars, the loss of lives of our beloved troops and the deaths of innocent civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.”
As more than 30 wars continue around the world today, many are framed in terms of protecting something holy, or about lives or beliefs more “holy” than the enemy’s. As individualism and misplaced patriotism divides people in the war-soaked dichotomies of terrorist/civilian, statist/rebel, capitalist/communist — is it worth reciting Blake’s idea that everything is holy, as echoed loudly in the reading rooms of San Francisco by Allen Ginsberg, and later spat into a microphone by Patti Smith:
Maybe not the large majority of Americans who do not support the use of torture, but the Central Intelligence Agency and the US government (especially abroad) has used morally and tactically questionable means to abstract confessions and just plain scare its captives long before the so-called War on Terror. A view from Cesar Chelala, published by CommonDreams.org, spells out the history of torture the US conducted in other countries well before its ventures in Iraq. (The use of torture is a thick thread in Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine.)
The latest in the life of US torture: Pres. Obama goes even further than his predecessor in saying he is considering a “preventive detention” system that would indefinitely jail suspects in the US without a fair trial. The “legal” terms of the detention would be similar to those in Abu Ghraib — except in the US, and with even more legal cushioning for unsubstantiated imprisonment.
This spotted on a busy cross street at a bus stop in Boston:
This is not surprising or revelatory — it’s actually old news — but it’s sort of cathartic to see Murdoch admit that he “tried” to “make a difference” in the aftermath of 9/11 by having his papers and television stations cover the lead up to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in a pro-war manner.
Of course, it was veteran interviewer Charlie Rose, who (during the January 2007 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland) asked him the simple question: Has your global media enterprise shaped that agenda in terms of how the war is viewed?
Murdoch said, “Well, we basically supported — Read more »
All is not well. Business as usual is not ‘okay.’ But you can’t very well just get up and say it with your cohorts in the street. No, because that would be illegal.
Naomi Wolf gave a succinct explanation about this during her January 16 talk at Hudson Union Society in New York City. Basically, the legal barriers of permits and pesky laws that ban, for example, megaphones at rallies have effectively made organized protests fell like a parade — and therefore have lost their potency to change things, or force people to listen.
The thinking goes: who knows about a protest if traffic wasn’t stopped, no one got hurt or arrested and they couldn’t hear what that mass of orderly people were so “angry” about because they weren’t aloud to blast their message. Because, in the last 30 years there has been, what Wolf calls, a “neutering of our marches.”
The pillaging of Iraq’s cultural and historical establishments during the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of that country has been well-documented.
Because these facts are so easily accessible, it is astounding that a Time Magazine reporter could miss something so obvious in a story about — you guessed, looting art in Iraq. It’s not some anecdote that the guy got wrong, but the crux of the entire article. The title of the story begins: “Iraq’s infamously looted museum…” which only tells us that at least the headline writer knew this had been in the news before.
Maybe the reporter, Mark Kukis, didn’t want to burden us with the harsh reality of war in his letter home to his American readers about that crazy place called Baghdad. After all, he is writing what is labeled a “Postcard.”
The piece admits that, “for many Iraqis the loss of their cultural treasures was an omen of what lay ahead under U.S. occupation.” But it does not face the fact that the looting of the cultural sites in Iraq was more than an omen — it is a very tangible loss, and a symptom of the Bush Administration’s and Rumsfeld’s impossible desire to create a new ‘country from scratch.’
It must be noted that Timereported in July of 2003 that U.S. soldiers looted about $100,000 million dollars worth of Read more »
Dr. Wesley Boyd finally got the green light to publish his explosive findings about exactly what health insurers were investing in, after editors and fact-checkers went through it for weeks. And then came the bomb: The 
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