What America Will Look Like In 2050

Does anyone in the United States understand or comprehend what America will look like in 2050 “IF” we continue endless immigration into our country? Does any leader possess an inkling of the ramifications of adding the projected 100 million immigrants, their kids and chain-migrated relatives?

That’s correct, at the current rate of immigration legalized by the 1986 Reagan amnesty, we continue on course to add 100 million immigrants from all over the world. They arrive legally at 1.0 million annually. They birth 900,000 babies among their numbers annually. (Source: Dr. Steven Camorata, www.cis.org) With chain migration, that means each “new” American may invite 10 of his or her relatives to join them with “family-reunification.” If the current S744 amnesty bill passes, your US Congress jumped that 1.0 million to 2.0 million legal immigrants annually.

Do the math! Any way you cut it, that means America will experience an avalanche, a human tsunami, or simply the biggest wave of humanity ever to hit our country or any country, ever. We will grow from our current 316 million to well over 438 million people within 37 years. The extra 38 million will come from our own “population momentum.” These figures stem from our country reaching 300 million in October of 2007. We grow by 3.1 million annually.

What’s it going to look like? Answer: it will become ugly on multiple levels—environmentally, sociologically, linguistically, culturally, quality of life and downgraded standard of living—for starters. Parts 1 through 5 will cover what we face.

First of all, 100 million immigrants will equal our adding 20 of our most populated cities. Think of it: we will add another New York City, Detroit, Atlanta, Miami, Chicago, Denver, Houston, Dallas, Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and eight other American cities.

We face watering 100 million more people, housing them, transporting them, warming them, feeding them and finding jobs for them.

Today in 2013, seven states face shortages: Georgia, Florida, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and California. But Georgia will grow from 8.2 million to 16.4 million. Florida expects to grow from 18 million to 36 million. For the whopper fact of all, California expects to jump from 38 million to 58 million.

Our cities face resembling present-day Mumbai, India; or Tokyo, Japan; or Paris, France; or Shanghai, China—bursting at the seams with 50 to100 mile traffic jams, people smooched into 200 square foot apartments rising out of the ground like mindless stalactites.

Our rivers will run with endless chemicals from industrial, farm, human and acid rain pollution. Our National Parks will become so crowded that you will be forced to draw a lottery number in order to visit them.

Every last bit of arable land and wildreness will be destroyed by what scientists call “ecological footprint.” In Ethiopia, it takes .4 (4/10ths) of an acre of land to feed, water and house a person. In the USA, it takes 25.4 acres of land to support one person. (Source:www.allspecis.org)

With those 100 million immigrants, we must destroy 2.54 BILLION acres of land. That, in turn, guarantees accelerating our current 250 species suffering extinction annually in the lower 48 to double that number which will mean 5,000 species a year suffering extinction at the hands of our encroachment on the natural world.

As those enormous human numbers impact the carbon footprint and impact the “water footprint”, we face water predicament that will become unsolvable and irreversible. We face water wars, water confrontations, water irrigation problems heretofore never imagined.

Our giant aquifers like the Ogallala will dry up leaving us with no irrigation of our corn, wheat and hay fields.

We incorporate a Faustian Bargain in 2013 to reap a Hobson’s Choice in 2050—a scant 37 years from now.

Our quality of life cannot help but degrade into severe limitations as to hunting, fishing, wildlife extermination, energy exhaustion and resource depletion.

Let’s talk about energy: we hit Peak Oil in 2011. We face the last 50 percent of all oil remaining on the planet. It takes more energy units to pump it and less energy units out of the ground. Finally, at some point, we will be left with little oil at staggering prices—but a 438 million population to feed. Of sobering note, the world will have added 3.1 billion humans to feed, to this nightmare extends beyond our borders.

How about the environment? Anybody want to guess how much damage our carbon footprint will wreak havoc on our oceans with acidification and warming of the waters? My guess: we face annual Hurricane Sandy’s and Katrina’s. More tornadoes will mow humans down at an outstanding rate.

Additionally: I’ve only covered the tip of the iceberg of what we bequeath to our children.

As I sit here with the scientific facts, my own world travels having seen the 12 largest cities on the planet and my own scientific experiences in Antarctica—I am appalled that the American people and our leaders gallop into this added 100 million more immigrants without so much as a shout, whimper or cry.

Our kids will curse our stupidity, arrogance and outright disregard for their futures. My own two U.S. Senators understand what we face because I spent 45 minutes explaining the facts to their staffs, but they voted to add 2.0 million legal immigrants annually to make our fate arrive even faster than 37 years.

My guess: our leaders resemble intellectual lunatics. Our people resemble the dumbest sheep on the planet.

Finally, why am I one of the few Americans who “sees” this so clearly? Why aren’t there tens of millions of Americans who “see” and take it to “60 Minutes” ; “Charlie Rose” ; “Today Show” ; “DateLine” ; “Good Morning America” ; Scott Pelley, Diane Sawyer, Brian Williams, Wolf Blitzer, Kelly Mygen, Shepard Smith and every other media leader? Why don’t we demand a national discussion?

If we refuse to act, remain too apathetic to act, or don’t act—the S744 Amnesty Bill will pass and add that 100 million immigrants to this country in a blink of time. God help our children when they inherit our legacy of 100 million immigrants.

Cranking Up The Washington Lie Machine

Just for the sake of argument, let’s suspend our disbelief for a moment and pretend (I know it’s a stretch) that the Obama administration and the apologists for the nation’s spy apparatus in Congress, Democratic and Republican, are telling us the gods’ honest truth.

They have, as the Wall Street Journal puts it, “amped up” their defense of the NSA’s massive spying program, claiming that not two, but 50 terrorist plots have been foiled thanks to their metadata mining and their intrusive monitoring of our phone and email conversations and website browsing activity.

Think what that means: for years now, the Jihadists have known that the US spy apparatus is ubiquitous, and that it is able to track all their communications. Of course they knew this, because they would have seen all these plots being foiled (the real ones, not the many ones that were created by FBI or CIA provocateurs and plants), and, not being stupid, they would have put it together and realized that the plots that depended upon a lot of phone calls and internet communications were getting busted up, while ones that were handled either solo, or that were developed by careful word-of-mouth communication and courier were managing to succeed.

But we poor schmucks, the American people, have been left in ignorance, imagining that our carefully crafted and painstakingly memorized six or eight-digit passwords, including at least one letter and one number (or if we’re really good, some symbol or other), were doing the job of keeping our online lives private and that our unlisted numbers, or our decision not to list an address with the phone company, were keeping our telephonic communications secure.

Ho ho! Were we fooled!

But really (stepping back into the real world again now), are we going to believe this nonsense about 50 NSA-foiled plots?

The reason the NSA’s success rate at defeating terror plots leapt overnight from an initial unimpressive two to an impressive 50 is that it turns out that the American people were really not very happy or grateful about learning that they had surrendered all privacy to Big Brother in return for the alleged disrupting of one wacko who had a dream, though poorly conceived, of bombing the New York subway, and the belated capture of another guy who had already allegedly done all the target-scouting work for the successful massacre in the hotel and train station of Mumbai, in India. That’s clearly not a great record to stand on, so now we’re being told by the NSA that actually it wasn’t just two plots that were foiled by their Orwellian spying, it was two score and 10. Much better, right?

Except… we don’t get to learn what those alleged busted plots were. If they were as hairbrained as the underwear bomber’s plan, which succeeded only in scorching his own privates, or as poorly conceived as the Times Square bomber’s plot, which succeeded only in burning some of the upholstery in his SUV, we don’t really have much to show for the freedom we’ve had stolen from us.

And we’re not going to learn what most of these alleged foiled plots were because…they’re secret.

We do know that Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Sen. Mark Udall (D-CO), who as members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, were briefed on at least some of the plots, including the first two that were offered up to us as demonstrations of the NSA’s prowess, have concluded that the NSA was exaggerating. They report that those first two plots were actually foiled by tips from British police, who had broken up plots in that country through good police work and then passed along evidence about plotters they were linked to here in the US. There is really no reason to believe that’s not the case with the other alleged NSA “triumphs.” It’s highly likely that they were all busted by solid police work and that the NSA was an also-ran in the process, playing a cameo role, and at best providing post-facto evidence to use in any prosecution, if that (as was the case in it’s “success” after the Mumbai massacre).

In reality, the biggest threat to America today is not terrorism, which is really a much less serious problem in terms of death and mayhem than drunk driving (and one which would subside if the US stopped trying to be a global empire). Rather, the biggest threat is a federal government that has become increasingly unhinged, secretive, unmoored from the people and the Constitution, and thoroughly unprincipled — ready to lie without hesitation and acting in the interests of the rich and the powerful, instead of in the broad interests of the majority of the population.

We have reached a point where trust in the government is so low that the default assumption of most ciizens is that the government is lying — and they are correct. Our government lies about the extent to which it spies on us, it lies about the integrity of the IRS, it lies about wanting to rein in the banks, it lies about “winning” the war in Afghanistan, it lies about the Social Security program going bankrupt, it lies about the US not torturing captives, it lies about chemical weapons use in Syria, it lies about a nuclear weapons program in Iran, it lies about not deliberately killing innocent civilians, including women and children, with its drones in Pakistan, Yemen and Afghanistan,it lies about nuclear power being safe (and about there being no radioactive fallout in the US from the Fukushima disaster), and it even lies about the safety of our food. That’s just a partial list. You can add your own to it, I’m sure, with little difficulty.

As President Obama said in one of his rare moments of accidental candor: “If people can’t trust, not only the executive branch, but also don’t trust Congress, and don’t trust federal judges to make sure we’re abiding by the Constitution, due process and the rule of law, then we’re gonna have some problems here.”

Exactly. And that’s one reason we do have problems. Based upon a towering stack of evidence, the people of the United States, left, right and center, now profoundly do not trust the government.

But the real reason we have a problem is that the government — the executive branch, the Congress and the federal courts, especially the Supreme Court — don’t trust the people. Hence the spying, the amped up police departments with all their swat gear, tanks, and soon drones, and the laws making virtually any expression of protest a crime. Look at the way the federal government orchestrated the brutal crushing of the Occupy Movement. Police in paramilitary and SWAT garb, armed with flash-bang stun grenades, rubber bullets, truncheons, saps, gallons of mace and even sonic weapons, using night-time assaults, mass arrests, and keeping the media at bay, cleared out Occupy actions across the country, city by city, under the direct guidance and encouragement of the Department of Homeland Security. What was that but fear of the people? Look at the way the full force of the US government’s spying, diplomatic and legal apparatus has been brought down on whistleblowers like Julian Assange, Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden for simply telling the truth. What is that but fear of the people knowing the truth?

Today I drove past a couple of people in the neighboring village of Flourtown, PA, who had set up some signs on a sidewalk along the main street calling for the impeachment of “Big Brother Obama.” People driving past in their cars in this town, which had voted for Obama both in 2008 and 2012, were waving and honking their horns. I thought, “Hey, this is great. Obama’s starting to be seen the way G.W. Bush was seen, as a Constitutional criminal.” Then I noticed that the protesters were from the Lyndon LaRouche cult, the National Caucus of Labor Committees.

Amazing! To think that the US has sunk so far into fascist-style police statism, that the LaRouchies, who used to just seem like paranoid kooks, are now looking sane and prescient.

Source URL: http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/1815

Breivik Uniting Zionism And Nazism

I happened to be present at the Oslo courthouse on Tuesday, April 17th, watching and listening to 22/7 terrorist Anders Behring Breivik’s 75 minute main prepared defense speech. A speech that the press and media were banned from broadcasting to the general public. These are my thoughts after following the story for almost nine months.

The first thing that has to be said, is that watching Breivik defend himself for 5 hours this Tuesday removed each and every doubt that he is indeed «legally sane», in the sense that he is absolutely fit to be punished by the Norwegian judicial system for his criminal terrorist acts. All «experts» who say otherwise are flat out lying. This is a sane, rational, logically stringent man of great wit, who happens to also have some pretty effed up ideological views that have made him become a mass murderer and a terrorist.

It should also be said right from the start of this article that there is little doubt that he carried out both the bombing in Oslo and the shooting at Utøya. What remains to be seen is whether he had accomplices and what parts of the misdeeds these people took part in. There were also some pretty amazing instances of police SNAFU – 27 according to one commentator, but a lot more if you look more closely. There’s a string of maybe 40 or 50 or 60 grave mistakes on behalf of the police, guards and government, making them unable to stop Breivik before the bombing of Oslo, stop him getting out of Oslo and to nearby Utøya, and to stop the shooting ASAP when Breivik amazingly managed to get himself transported over the sound to Utøya island, using the Labour Party’s own ferry.

So many instances of SNAFU, in fact, that the mathematical probability of them all occuring on the same day or relating to the same person, should tell you all you need to know. And of course, in the weeks and months after the terror, documents, tapes and other evidence started disappearing. As by invisible hands.

OK. So, returning to the terrorist’s defense speech on Tuesday, April 17th. Breivik started telling us how there’d been no real post-WW2 democracy in Norway, because «nationalists» like himself were not allowed free speech and democratic rights. This should tell us that he wanted there to be more democracy, and that Norwegian democracy should also include «ultra nationalists», a fair point that even I could agree on.

However, he messes it up by contradicting himself completely. He loves America, and especially a certain McCarthy, the postwar communist witchhunt general, and he regrets that McCarthyism didn’t go far enough and never succeeded in sending alleged «commie» American citizens to Soviet Russia. So, really, when it comes to a more real and including democracy with less political censorship, our terrorist is only in favour of it when it applies to his chums, and to his «nationalist» parties.

Apart from this ideologically induced blindness or logical breakdown, he argues convincingly that censoring a movement like his own for too long, eventually will make members of that movement resort to other means, even violence.

His speech more generally was aimed at reaching out to a slightly broader audience than his Manifesto and his earlier writing on Norwegian websites, or to «unite national conservatism, which I support, with national socialism and militant christendom», as he put it himself. So the strategy obviously is to appeal to a broader spectrum of racists, and to play down the Zionist issue, which divides Breivik, JDL, EDL, NDL and Knights Templar, on the one side, from other nationalists and nazis, on the other.

Breivik talks rather openly about the strategy of supporting and expanding «street extremism», like the JDL, EDL and NDL (Jewish, English and Norwegian Defense League, respectively), while at the same time building a network of single cell terror operatives, borrowing tactics from – yup – al-Qaida.

The reason for using terror cells consisting of only one man, says Breivik, is to avoid the eyes of anti-terror agencies. This way he only needed to meet with his comrades once or twice during a decade, if we choose to believe him, and I guess blogs, forums, RSS feeds, social media etc took care of the rest.

Breivik also tries to use the term «counter jihad» as much as possible, rather than «zionism», which is what he really supports, and he has succeeded in selling this bogus «counter jihad» term to the Norwegian mainstream media. To quote from the terrorist’s Manifesto:

«So let us fight together with Israel, with our Zionist brothers against all anti-Zionists, against all cultural Marxists/multiculturalists.»

So, then, this is what it came to in Norway: Where we could have had the press digging into and revealing the horrific lies of the 9/11 terror attacks ten years after the events, instead we got a snob from the West who bombed his own city using «al-Qaida tactics», and who shot fellow Norwegian kids taking part in a summer youth camp for young politicians and future administrators, because he believed the lies and racist conspiracy theories fed to him for ten years by every newspaper, radio and TV station in this nation and throughout the West. Malicious, racist lies about muslims behind every terrorist act from New York and Bali, through Madrid and London, to Mumbai and Stockholm.

The mythical snake – Midgardsormen – seems to be biting its own tail: False-flag terrorism over a long, sad decade goes unnoticed by the press, the journalists and the editors, and the inevitable end-product of these ten years of lies and cowardice and cover-up is our very own Nordic mass murderer and terrorist; Anders Behring Breivik.

Whether he had handlers or not we don’t know, and the press and the police for some reason don’t seem very eager to find out, he is now the shining example, or knight in shining armour, intended to inspire many, many followers in Scandinavia, Europe and America.

He will even be allowed internet access in jail, and thus to build, expand and strengthen his zionist terrorist networks, both on the streets and in the single-man sleeper cells.

Bølløcks.

Source: Torstein Viddal | 911TruthNorway

The Saga of Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, and Wikileaks

“Defense lawyers say Manning was clearly a troubled young soldier whom the Army should never have deployed to Iraq or given access to classified material while he was stationed there … They say he was in emotional turmoil, partly because he was a gay soldier at a time when homosexuals were barred from serving openly in the U.S. armed forces.” (Associated Press, February 3)

It’s unfortunate and disturbing that Bradley Manning’s attorneys have chosen to consistently base his legal defense upon the premise that personal problems and shortcomings are what motivated the young man to turn over hundreds of thousands of classified government files to Wikileaks. They should not be presenting him that way any more than Bradley should be tried as a criminal or traitor. He should be hailed as a national hero. Yes, even when the lawyers are talking to the military mind. May as well try to penetrate that mind and find the freest and best person living there. Bradley also wears a military uniform.

Here are Manning’s own words from an online chat: “If you had free reign over classified networks … and you saw incredible things, awful things … things that belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington DC … what would you do? … God knows what happens now. Hopefully worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms. … I want people to see the truth … because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.”

Is the world to believe that these are the words of a disturbed and irrational person? Do not the Nuremberg Tribunal and the Geneva Conventions speak of a higher duty than blind loyalty to one’s government, a duty to report the war crimes of that government?

Below is a listing of some of the things revealed in the State Department cables and Defense Department files and videos. For exposing such embarrassing and less-than-honorable behavior, Bradley Manning of the United States Army and Julian Assange of Wikileaks may spend most of their remaining days in a modern dungeon, much of it while undergoing that particular form of torture known as “solitary confinement”. Indeed, it has been suggested that the mistreatment of Manning has been for the purpose of making him testify against and implicating Assange. Dozens of members of the American media and public officials have called for Julian Assange’s execution or assassination. Under the new National Defense Authorization Act, Assange could well be kidnaped or assassinated. What century are we living in? What world?

It was after seeing American war crimes such as those depicted in the video “Collateral Murder” and documented in the “Iraq War Logs,” made public by Manning and Wikileaks, that the Iraqis refused to exempt US forces from prosecution for future crimes. The video depicts an American helicopter indiscriminately murdering several non-combatants in addition to two Reuters journalists, and the wounding of two little children, while the helicopter pilots cheer the attacks in a Baghdad suburb like it was the Army-Navy game in Philadelphia.

The insistence of the Iraqi government on legal jurisdiction over American soldiers for violations of Iraqi law — something the United States rarely, if ever, accepts in any of the many countries where its military is stationed — forced the Obama administration to pull the remaining American troops from the country.

If Manning had committed war crimes in Iraq instead of exposing them, he would be a free man today, as are the many hundreds/thousands of American soldiers guilty of truly loathsome crimes in cities like Haditha, Fallujah, and other places whose names will live in infamy in the land of ancient Mesopotamia.

Besides playing a role in writing finis to the awful Iraq war, the Wikileaks disclosures helped to spark the Arab Spring, beginning in Tunisia.

When people in Tunisia read or heard of US Embassy cables revealing the extensive corruption and decadence of the extended ruling family there — one long and detailed cable being titled: “CORRUPTION IN TUNISIA: WHAT’S YOURS IS MINE” — how Washington’s support of Tunisian President Ben Ali was not really strong, and that the US would not support the regime in the event of a popular uprising, they took to the streets.

Here is a sample of some of the other Wikileaks revelations that make the people of the world wiser:

• In 2009 Japanese diplomat Yukiya Amano became the new head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which plays the leading role in the investigation of whether Iran is developing nuclear weapons or is working only on peaceful civilian nuclear energy projects. A US embassy cable of October 2009 said Amano “took pains to emphasize his support for U.S. strategic objectives for the Agency. Amano reminded the [American] ambassador on several occasions that … he was solidly in the U.S. court on every key strategic decision, from high-level personnel appointments to the handling of Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program.”
• Russia refuted US claims that Iran has missiles that could target Europe.
• The British government’s official inquiry into how it got involved in the Iraq War was deeply compromised by the government’s pledge to protect the Bush administration in the course of the inquiry.
• A discussion between Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh and American Gen. David H. Petraeus in which Saleh indicated he would cover up the US role in missile strikes against al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen. “We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours,” Saleh told Petraeus.
• The US embassy in Madrid has had serious points of friction with the Spanish government and civil society: a) trying to get the criminal case dropped against three US soldiers accused of killing a Spanish television cameraman in Baghdad during a 2003 unprovoked US tank shelling of the hotel where he and other journalists were staying; b )torture cases brought by a Spanish NGO against six senior Bush administration officials, including former attorney general Alberto Gonzales; c) a Spanish government investigation into the torture of Spanish subjects held at Guantánamo; d) a probe by a Spanish court into the use of Spanish bases and airfields for American extraordinary rendition (= torture) flights; e )continual criticism of the Iraq war by Spanish Prime Minister Zapatero, who eventually withdrew Spanish troops.
• State Department officials at the United Nations, as well as US diplomats in various embassies, were assigned to gather as much of the following information as possible about UN officials, including Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon, permanent security council representatives, senior UN staff, and foreign diplomats: e-mail and website addresses, internet user names and passwords, personal encryption keys, credit card numbers, frequent flyer account numbers, work schedules, and biometric data. US diplomats at the embassy in Asunción, Paraguay were asked to obtain dates, times and telephone numbers of calls received and placed by foreign diplomats from China, Iran and the Latin American leftist states of Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia. US diplomats in Romania, Hungary and Slovenia were instructed to provide biometric information on “current and emerging leaders and advisers” as well as information about “corruption” and information about leaders’ health and “vulnerability”. The UN directive also specifically asked for “biometric information on ranking North Korean diplomats”. A similar cable to embassies in the Great Lakes region of Africa said biometric data included DNA, as well as iris scans and fingerprints.
• A special “Iran observer” in the Azerbaijan capital of Baku reported on a dispute that played out during a meeting of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council. An enraged Revolutionary Guard Chief of Staff, Mohammed Ali Jafari, allegedly got into a heated argument with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and slapped him in the face because the generally conservative president had, surprisingly, advocated freedom of the press.
• The State Department, virtually alone in the Western Hemisphere, did not unequivocally condemn a June 28, 2009 military coup in Honduras, even though an embassy cable declared: “there is no doubt that the military, Supreme Court and National Congress conspired on June 28 in what constituted an illegal and unconstitutional coup against the Executive Branch”. US support of the coup government has been unwavering ever since.
• The leadership of the Swedish Social Democratic Party — neutral, pacifist, and liberal Sweden, so the long-standing myth goes — visited the US embassy in Stockholm and asked for advice on how best to sell the war in Afghanistan to a skeptical Swedish public, asking if the US could arrange for a member of the Afghan government to come visit Sweden and talk up NATO’s humanitarian efforts on behalf of Afghan children, and so forth. [For some years now Sweden has been, in all but name, a member of NATO and the persecutor of Julian Assange, the latter to please a certain Western power.]
• The US pushed to influence Swedish wiretapping laws so communication passing through the Scandinavian country could be intercepted. The American interest was clear: Eighty per cent of all the internet traffic from Russia travels through Sweden.
• President of the European Council Herman Van Rompuy told US embassy officials in Brussels in January 2010 that no one in Europe believed in Afghanistan anymore. He said Europe was going along in deference to the United States and that there must be results in 2010, or “Afghanistan is over for Europe.”
• Iraqi officials saw Saudi Arabia, not Iran, as the biggest threat to the integrity and cohesion of their fledgling democratic state. The Iraqi leaders were keen to assure their American patrons that they could easily “manage” the Iranians, who wanted stability; but that the Saudis wanted a “weak and fractured” Iraq, and were even “fomenting terrorism that would destabilize the government”. The Saudi King, moreover, wanted a US military strike on Iran.
• Saudi Arabia in 2007 threatened to pull out of a Texas oil refinery investment unless the US government intervened to stop Saudi Aramco from being sued in US courts for alleged oil price fixing. The deputy Saudi oil minister said that he wanted the US to grant Saudi Arabia sovereign immunity from lawsuits
• Saudi donors were the chief financiers of Sunni militant groups like Al Qaeda, the Afghan Taliban, and Lashkar-e-Taiba, which carried out the 2008 Mumbai attacks.
• Pfizer, the world’s largest pharmaceutical company, hired investigators to unearth evidence of corruption against the Nigerian attorney general in order to persuade him to drop legal action over a controversial 1996 drug trial involving children with meningitis.
• Oil giant Shell claimed to have “inserted staff” and fully infiltrated Nigeria’s government.
• The Obama administration renewed military ties with Indonesia in spite of serious concerns expressed by American diplomats about the Indonesian military’s activities in the province of West Papua, expressing fears that the Indonesian government’s neglect, rampant corruption and human rights abuses were stoking unrest in the region.
• US officials collaborated with Lebanon’s defense minister to spy on, and allow Israel to potentially attack, Hezbollah in the weeks that preceded a violent May 2008 military confrontation in Beirut.
• Gabon president Omar Bongo allegedly pocketed millions in embezzled funds from central African states, channeling some of it to French political parties in support of Nicolas Sarkozy.
• Cables from the US embassy in Caracas in 2006 asked the US Secretary of State to warn President Hugo Chávez against a Venezuelan military intervention to defend the Cuban revolution in the eventuality of an American invasion after Castro’s death.
• The United States was concerned that the leftist Latin American television network, Telesur, headquartered in Venezuela, would collaborate with al Jazeera of Qatar, whose coverage of the Iraq War had gotten under the skin of the Bush administration.
• The Vatican told the United States it wanted to undermine the influence of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez in Latin America because of concerns about the deterioration of Catholic power there. It feared that Chávez was seriously damaging relations between the Catholic church and the state by identifying the church hierarchy in Venezuela as part of the privileged class.
• The Holy See welcomed President Obama’s new outreach to Cuba and hoped for further steps soon, perhaps to include prison visits for the wives of the Cuban Five. Better US-Cuba ties would deprive Hugo Chávez of one of his favorite screeds and could help restrain him in the region.
• The wonderful world of diplomats: In 2010, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown raised with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton the question of visas for two wives of members of the “Cuban Five”. “Brown requested that the wives (who have previously been refused visas to visit the U.S.) be granted visas so that they could visit their husbands in prison. … Our subsequent queries to Number 10 indicate that Brown made this request as a result of a commitment that he had made to UK trade unionists, who form part of the Labour Party’s core constituency. Now that the request has been made, Brown does not intend to pursue this matter further. There is no USG action required.”
• UK Officials concealed from Parliament how the US was allowed to bring cluster bombs onto British soil in defiance of a treaty banning the housing of such weapons.
• A cable was sent by an official at the US Interests Section in Havana in July 2006, during the runup to the Non-Aligned Movement conference. He noted that he was actively looking for “human interest stories and other news that shatters the myth of Cuban medical prowess”. [Presumably to be used to weaken support for Cuba amongst the member nations at the conference.]
• Most of the men sent to Guantánamo prison were innocent people or low-level operatives; many of the innocent individuals were sold to the US for bounty.
• DynCorp, a powerful American defense contracting firm that claims almost $2 billion per year in revenue from US tax dollars, threw a “boy-play” party for Afghan police recruits. (Yes, it’s what you think.)
• Even though the Bush and Obama Administrations repeatedly maintained publicly that there was no official count of civilian casualties, the Iraq and Afghanistan War Logs showed that this claim was untrue.
• Known Egyptian torturers received training at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia.
• The United States put great pressure on the Haitian government to not go ahead with various projects, with no regard for the welfare of the Haitian people. A 2005 cable stressed continued US insistence that all efforts must be made to keep former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, whom the United States had overthrown the previous year, from returning to Haiti or influencing the political process. In 2006, Washington’s target was President René Préval for his agreeing to a deal with Venezuela to join Caracas’s Caribbean oil alliance, PetroCaribe, under which Haiti would buy oil from Venezuela, paying only 60 percent up front with the remainder payable over twenty-five years at 1 percent interest. And in 2009, the State Department backed American corporate opposition to an increase in the minimum wage for Haitian workers, the poorest paid in the Western Hemisphere.
• The United States used threats, spying, and more to try to get its way at the crucial 2009 climate conference in Copenhagen.
• Mahmoud Abbas, president of The Palestinian National Authority, and head of the Fatah movement, turned to Israel for help in attacking Hamas in Gaza in 2007.
• The British government trained a Bangladeshi paramilitary force condemned by human rights organisations as a “government death squad”.
• A US military order directed American forces not to investigate cases of torture of detainees by Iraqis.
• The US was involved in the Australian government’s 2006 campaign to oust Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare.
• A 2009 US cable said that police brutality in Egypt against common criminals was routine and pervasive, the police using force to extract confessions from criminals on a daily basis.
• US diplomats pressured the German government to stifle the prosecution of CIA operatives who abducted and tortured Khalid El-Masri, a German citizen. [El-Masri was kidnaped by the CIA while on vacation in Macedonia on December 31, 2003. He was flown to a torture center in Afghanistan, where he was beaten, starved, and sodomized. The US government released him on a hilltop in Albania five months later without money or the means to go home.]
• 2005 cable re “widespread severe torture” by India, the widely-renowned “world’s largest democracy”: The International Committee of the Red Cross reported: “The continued ill-treatment of detainees, despite longstanding ICRC-GOI [Government of India] dialogue, have led the ICRC to conclude that New Delhi condones torture.” Washington was briefed on this matter by the ICRC years ago. What did the United States, one of the world’s leading practitioners and teachers of torture in the past century, do about it? American leaders, including the present ones, continued to speak warmly of “the world’s largest democracy”; as if torture and one of the worst rates of poverty and child malnutrition in the world do not contradict the very idea of democracy.
• The United States overturned a ban on training the Indonesian Kopassus army special forces — despite the Kopassus’s long history of arbitrary detention, torture and murder — after the Indonesian President threatened to derail President Obama’s trip to the country in November 2010.
• Since at least 2006 the United States has been funding political opposition groups in Syria, including a satellite TV channel that beams anti-government programming into the country.

Cops Kill 3 As Farmers Protest Water Project, Land Seizure Near Mumbai

On August 9, police shot nine farmers, killing three, who were part of a mass protest against a water pipeline project in Baur Village, 50 miles east of Mumbai, India.  Police also smashed cars, fired tear gas and threw rocks at farmers as they fled the violence.  This was all :

Kantabai Thakar (age 40), Moreshwar Sathe (40) and Shyam Tupe (29) were fatally shot by police.  Over 100 others were injured, and nine vehicles damaged in the lethal attack on protesters, report several news outlets in India.

The next day, the Pune police “registered a case of attempt to murder and rioting against 1,200 to 1,400 protesters,” although no one has yet been arrested.  None of the officers involved in murder and excessive use of force have been charged or suspended.

Farmers from over 60 villages in Pune District in the state of Maharashtra have protested the pipeline project since its announcement in 2008, objecting to land takings and the potential for pollution of their water source.  Around 4,500 hectares (over 11,000 acres) of farmland are threatened by the project.

The pipeline would draw 140 million gallons of water a day (525 million liters) from the Pavana Dam to be used for industry and a growing urban center.

Overseeing the project are three government agencies: Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation (MIDC), Talegaon Municipal Council and Dehu Road Cantonment.

The MIDC has long promoted industrialization of this primarily agricultural state.  Its main objective is to “rapidly develop … the underdeveloped parts of the state,” by redistributing land and providing infrastructure like roads, lighting, water treatment and supply, communication, and police and fire services.

Lands seized are then leased or sold to industry.

Though the MIDC promises to compensate those displaced by the pipeline project, it has been 40 years since the Pavana Dam was built and 75% of those displaced still have not been compensated, reports Times of India.  For those lucky 300 who were given other lands, their name is not on the titled deed.  Nor have promised jobs materialized for displaced villagers.

Providing water to industry is “a unique specialty of the MIDC,” which also manages the toxic liquid waste from industry.

But locals don’t trust the government, and for good reason.

Lack of effective oversight of industrial pollutants has led to soaring cancer rates and other health problems in Bathinda, located in the northern state of Punjab.  Forty percent of that population requires medicinal inhalers in order to breathe.  Many of the waters are so toxic that no life survives.

State-sanctioned violence directed at farmers and tribes is common for India, including murder, torture and destruction of villages.

India’s state governments “have signed hundreds of [Memoranda of Understanding] with corporate houses, worth several billion dollars, all of them secret, for steel plants, sponge-iron factories, power plants, aluminium refineries, dams and mines,” explains activist Arundhati Roy.   “In order for the MoUs to translate into real money, tribal people must be moved.”

Maharashtra is the second largest state in India both in population (115 million) and land (308 lakh sq. km, or about 120,000 sq. mi.).  Forty-two percent of the population is urbanized. The ‘scheduled castes’ and ‘scheduled tribes’ – officially recognized populations seen as “historically disadvantaged” – make up another quarter in the state.

Maharashtra farmers cultivate cereals, pulses, sugarcane, soy, cotton, oilseeds and onions, as well as mangoes, grapes, bananas, pomegranates and oranges.

The Pune District is one of several major industrial sectors planned by the MIDC, which has so far developed 233 industrial parks on 160,000 acres, with another 80,000 acres planned.

Deregulated sectors now open to foreign investment include the biotech seed industry, mining, pharmaceuticals, chemicals & fertilizers, construction, and oil & gas.

Driving the destruction of tribal and agricultural lands is trade liberalization that began in earnest since 2000.  As a result, foreign direct investment (FDI) in India ranks third in the world, with Maharashtra bagging a quarter of all of India’s FDIs.

Officially, the Republic of Mauritius is the largest foreign investor in India, but a closer look reveals that through an indirect investment scheme, the U.S. is actually the top foreign investor.  Advisors explain that because the India-Mauritius tax treaty removed capital gains tax, it’s more lucrative for foreign firms to invest in India indirectly through Mauritius.

As part of the G20, the World Trade Organization, and a signatory to international trade agreements including GATT and TRIPS, India ranks 51 in overall “competitiveness” in a field of 139 nations, according to the World Economic Forum.

State-sanctioned violence increases as resistance to globalization grows.  People are left landless, jobless and sickened by industrial destruction of the biosphere. Episodes like these confirm Derrick Jensen’s “20 premises” from his book, Endgame.

Industrial civilization “destroys landbases. That’s what it does,” writes Jensen in his new book, Deep Green Resistance. “And it won’t stop because we ask it nicely.”

2011 Mumbai Blasts – Who Benefits?

Mumbai Blasts Kill At Least 21 in Financial Capital (Jul 13, 2011)

 

Three bomb blasts hit Mumbai, killing at least 21 people, in the biggest attack on India’s financial capital since a November 2008 terrorist rampage.

The blasts injured 141 people, the Home Ministry said in a statement. The explosions occurred around 7 p.m. yesterday in the Dadar, Zaveri Bazar and Opera House neighborhoods, Home Minister P. Chidambaram said in a briefing in New Delhi.

India’s two largest stock exchanges that are based in Mumbai will function as normal today. The city of more than 18 million people is also home to Reliance Industries Ltd. (RIL), which runs the world’s largest refinery complex, and Tata Sons Ltd. which controls the nation’s biggest business group by value. Yesterday’s attack is the first in the city since Pakistani gunmen killed about 160 people in 2008.

“Attacks of this magnitude do not deter foreign investors or have any lasting economic impact,” said Seema Desai, analyst with the New York-based risk consultant Eurasia Group. “Most investors know that terror attacks can and do happen but these do not impact the functioning of the economy.”

The National Stock Exchange of India Ltd. and the BSE Ltd. will trade as normal from 9:15 a.m. local time, according to BSE Deputy Chief Executive Office Ashishkumar Chauhan and NSE spokeswoman Diyva Malik Lahiri.

Bomb in Car
A bomb exploded around 6:50 p.m., Jayesh Labdhi, a resident in the Opera House area, said. The blast damaged cars and motorcycles parked along the street. The bomb that exploded in Dadar in central Mumbai was planted in a grey colored Maruti Suzuki car, Times Now television said, citing eyewitnesses.

India’s home ministry confirmed that the blasts were terror attacks, according to U.K. Bansal, secretary for internal security. No one has yet claimed responsibility for the explosions.

“The nature of the attack points to a group that has the competence and confidence to carry out such an attack because these were timed explosives and took place within minutes of each other,” said C. Uday Bhaskar, director of New Delhi-based National Maritime Foundation, a research group. “This should narrow it down to a handful of organizations.”

Source: Bloomberg.com