From Agence France-Presse (AFP) via RawStory:

Global foreign policy leaders launch bid to eliminate nuclear arms

One hundred political, military, business and civic leaders from across the globe launched a new initiative in Paris on Tuesday aiming eliminate all nuclear weapons.

The “Global Zero” declaration, endorsed by a “Who’s Who” of the world’s foreign policy aristocracy from the past 30 years, calls for a binding and verifiable agreement to dismantle all nuclear weapons by a specified date.

“The threat of proliferation and nuclear terrorism has led to a growing chorus of government leaders … calling for the elimination of all nuclear weapons, including Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and US President-elect Barack Obama,” said a statement issued after many of the signatories met here.

“This new and unprecedented political support for getting to zero nuclear weapons from key governments around the world has made this goal — while still difficult — possible,” it said.

The declaration was signed by figures such as former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt, former US president Jimmy Carter, Pakistani Nobel peace laureate Muhammad Yunus, South African Nobel laureate Bihsop Desmond Tutu and Arab League Secretary General Amr Moussa.

It included several former generals in the Indian and Pakistani armies.

China was represented by several leading former diplomats and by Peng Guangqian, a former major general in the People’s Liberation Army and a strategist for the country’s Academy of Military Science.

The group said it was developing a plan, combining high-level policy work with global public outreach using media, online communications and grassroots organizing.

It invited people to visit its website at www.globalzero.org and sign the same declaration the Global Zero leaders had inked.

Global Zero also said it planned to convene a world summit of hundreds of political, military, business, and civic leaders in January 2010 to move the campaign forward.

The GlobalZero Launch Press Release is here.

Gold, now at about $775 per ounce, could be worth more than $2000 by the end of 2009.

As the economic crisis continues to deepen, many are wondering if this recession will turn into a depression. Unemployment is up, the dollar is down, and US markets have lost nearly half their share values over the past year. The Real News spoke to economist Peter Schiff.

Peter Schiff, president of Euro Pacific Capital is an American Austrian School economist. Schiff frequently appears as a guest on CNBC, Fox News, and Bloomberg Television and is quoted in major financial publications. He was an economic adviser for the Ron Paul campaign in the 2008 Republican Party primaries. Schiff is the author of Crash Proof and The Little Book of Bull Moves in Bear Markets.

Real News: December 10, 2008

The Next Depression?

With markets in free fall, economist Peter Schiff opposes stimulus and printing money to fund it

I wonder what a loaf of bread will be worth?

I t s u c k s , b i g t i m e

The president sucks. I mean, he really sucks.

The last president sucked too. The next president is almost guaranteed to suck, since all presidents either suck, have sucked or will suck. Some presidents have even been sucked. Sucking is what presidents do.

The Congress sucks. They really suck. They won’t impeach him. It sucks. They won’t arrest him. That sucks too.

Nancy sucks. I don’t know why anyone would let her, but she does…

The attorney general sucks. Did suck. And will suck.

It all sucks. I mean everything sucks. All of it. It all sucks.

The war sucks. The other war sucks. The last war sucked. The next war sucks even more. Sucking is what wars do.

I mean it. It all sucks.

Now the economy sucks, too. The last economy sucked. The next economy will probably suck too. The economy has always sucked. Sucking is what the economy does.

Even girlfriends suck. All my girlfriends have all sucked. And they probably thought I sucked too. But then most boyfriends probably suck, usually.

My job sucks. probably because I don’t have one. But even the last one sucked. They all sucked. Your job probably sucks too. Or did suck. Or will suck. Sucks, huh?

Is there anything that doesn’t suck?

It sucks that everything sucks. I mean it. It really sucks.

I wish I had an answer. It sucks that I don’t have an answer.

What sucks even more is that you don’t have an answer either. Even if you think you do. Sucks, huh?

Gitmo sucks. Torture sucks. Bombing sucks. Depleted uranium sucks. Napalm sucks. White phosporus sucks. Poverty sucks. Disease sucks. Injustice sucks. Bigotry sucks. Racism sucks. Starvation sucks. Hate sucks.

You suck. I suck. The world sucks. There is no gravity. The earth sucks.

What can I say? Life just… sucks.

This essay sucks. It’s probably the worst thing I ever wrote. It really sucks.

Try to have a nice day, ok?

Egyptian blogger and former law student Abdel Karim Suleiman looks out of a police bus in Alexandria. Reporters Without Borders called on Egyptian authorities to release Suleiman for insulting religion and President Hosni Mubarak as he has now served half his four-year sentence. (AFP null)

You’ve always thought that blogging is a nice, pleasant, no risk activity anyone can do from the safety and sanctity of their own home?

Think again.

Abdel Karim Suleiman, 24, Egyptian blogger and former law student, blogged in Egypt under the name Karim Amer.

Reporters Without Borders on Wednesday called on Egyptian authorities to release Suleiman, who has served two years of a four year sentence after being arrested in 2006 for insulting religion and President Hosni Mubarak.

Suleiman was sentenced in February 2007 to three years in prison for “inciting hatred of Islam” and one year for “insulting” the Egyptian president.

“Two years have gone by and nothing has changed,” the press freedom group said in a statement, according to an AFP article in the Middle East Times today:

“His family have never come to visit him. Only his lawyer reports to the outside world, about his morale, which weakens day after day, and his fragile state of health.

“His parents, probably as a result of intimidation, have even publicly disowned their son and called for him to be sentenced to death… Two years, that’s enough. It is time to free him,” said Reporters Without Borders.

Suleiman was convicted of insulting religion and defaming Mubarak after posting an entry on his blog lashing out at Cairo’s Al-Azhar University — the highest seat of learning in Sunni Islam.

“I say to Al-Azhar and its university and its professors and preachers who stand against anyone who thinks differently to them: ‘You are destined for the rubbish bin of history, where you will find no one to cry for you, and your regime will end like others have’,” he wrote.

His conviction was based on a series of vaguely worded articles in the penal code that forbid the spreading of false information, insulting Islam or other revealed religions, and “affronting the President of the Republic.”

The decision was seen by international rights groups as an attempt to intimidate Egypt’s blogging scene.

Who is this guy? What is this guy?

I have long argued and have written much the past few days in particular that Obama’s past statements and actions, especially as indicated by his latest picks for a foreign policy team, show him to be a center-right imperialist/empire-ist who will simply do the bidding of, or at least be heavily constrained by, a combination of oil companies, corporate oligarchy and foreign policy establishment.

That he will be exactly that, at least when it comes to foreign policy, “war on terror” memes, and the likelihood of him continuing the imperialist policies of the past six or more decades that are creating the very terrorism that the “war on terror” started by George Bush so misguidedly and murderously has done.

Have progressives been suckered into supporting a President who will really govern from the ‘center-right’, and who is an imperialist hawk in sheeps clothing? A very good salesman, in other words, who has been very successful at coopting and defanging progressives and the antiwar movement?

I’m far from alone in my thinking about this. But hang in here for a bit. There’s an opposing viewpoint coming, further down.

As far back as July 2007 Ira Chernus, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of Monsters To Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin wrote, in an article published at Tom Engelhardt’s TomDispatch: Democratic Doublespeak on Iraq:

   …what does it mean to “leave Iraq”? Here’s where most of the Democratic candidates come smack up against that hard place. There is a longstanding bipartisan consensus in the foreign-policy establishment that the US must control every strategically valuable region of the world — and none more so than the oil heartlands of the planet. That’s been a hard-and-fast rule of the elite for some six decades now. No matter how hard the task may be, they demand that presidents be rock-hard enough to get the job done.

   So whatever “leave Iraq” might mean, no candidate of either party likely to enter the White House on January 20, 2009 can think it means letting Iraqis determine their own national policies or fate.

   …

   So the Democratic front-runners must promise voters that they will end the war — with not too many ideologically laden ifs, ands, or buts — while they assure the foreign-policy establishment that they will never abandon the drive for hegemony in the Middle East (or anywhere else). In other words, the candidates have to be able to talk out of both sides of their mouths at the same time.

In the spring of 2007, 6 months after taking control of Congress in the November 2006 midterm elections by running on an “end the Iraq occupation” platform throughout 2006, the Democratic controlled congress under the leadership of Speaker Nancy Pelosi turned around 180 degrees, stuck their thumbs in the eye of the public who had given them their majority based on the expectations of ending the occupation, and gave George Bush the first Iraq supplemental funding bill ever passed by a Democratic congress, in their determination that the US would control the oil resources of Iraq and have a central base from which to attempt to expand that hoped for control across the Middle East.

Their dreams of empire have since developed a badly cracked and shattered facade but not died out, and that first supplemental funding bill was to become only the beginning of a two year long series of betrayals of their mandate, as the Democrats put all of their energy into enabling Bush with multiple Iraq supplemental funding bills and selling the same old deathtrap in Iraq with a shiny new Democratic paintjob, and over the past couple of months enabling and participating in the theft of nearly nine trillion dollars from taxpayers as they have fallen all over themselves to hand bags of cash to their criminal friends on Wall Street who have been busy as beavers all this time wrecking the US and global economy.

Magnifico reports today in his Four at Four on the Washington Post story today: Nuclear or Biological Attack Called Likely.

The story tells in a very serious “objectively journalistic” matter of fact manner of a new report produced by the “Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism”.

WAPO’s article notes that:

The odds that terrorists will soon strike a major city with weapons of mass destruction are now better than even, a bipartisan congressionally mandated task force concludes in a draft study that warns of growing threats from rogue states, nuclear smuggling networks and the spread of atomic know-how in the developing world.

The sobering assessment of such threats, due for release as early as today, singled out Pakistan as a grave concern because of its terrorist networks, history of instability and arsenal of several dozen nuclear warheads. The report urged the incoming Obama administration to take “decisive action” to reduce the likelihood of a devastating attack.

…

…the creation of the commission, chaired by former senator Bob Graham (D-Fla.), with former congressman James M. Talent (R-Mo.) serving as vice chairman, was one of the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, which explored the causes of the 2001 terrorist attacks against the United States.

I don’t recall the 9/11 Commission ever doing any “exploring” of the root causes of the 2001 terrorist attacks or of the root causes of the oppresssion and imperialism and the general foreign policies of messing internally with other countries militarily and via CIA fomented insurrections, destabilization campaigns, and false flag operations to fog the minds of Americans over the past six or more decades.

I don’t recall the 9/11 Commission ever doing anything other than their job: creating justifications for the “war on terror” fearmongering and propaganda campaigns that replaced the “cold war” mentality of ‘political rule on behalf of multinational corporate stripping the earth bare like a swarm of locusts the rest of the world’s human beings are our property and resources to be used till exhausted with no regard for their humanity‘ American Exceptionalism that was behind all the lies and deceits of the ten year sanctions war and eventual invasion and occupation of Iraq that was directly responsible for the deaths, maimings and poisonings of over a million Iraqis; men, women, and children.

But “explore the causes”? Deluded misinformation at best, and pure manipulative propaganda at worst.

Boo! The boogeymen are out to get you.

This story is all over the left blogs today, and most of what I read is people lapping it up as easily and thoughtlessly as the 26 percenters lapped up all of Bush’s years of Rovian manipulations, and using it as justification for “pragmatic” hide their heads in the sand denial of Barack Obama’s obvious miltarist tendencies and full intentions to continue the war on terror memes and determination to militarily dominate the earth while blaming the blowback on “terrists” on behalf of the corporatocracy that rules America.

Have we learned nothing in eight years?

Glenn Greenwald: How Beltway reporters mislead the country

by: ek hornbeck

Sun Nov 25, 2007

I think this is the arena that we are most effective in, media criticism.

The press is a gang of cruel faggots.  Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits – a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage.

(I)t (is) a low trade and a habit worse than heroin, a strange seedy world full of misfits and drunkards and failures. The business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs.  There’s also a negative side.

Objective journalism is one of the main reasons American politics has been allowed to be so corrupt for so long. – Stockton

I think this is the arena that we used to be most effective in, media criticism. But no longer, it seems.

What’s LEFT Of Blogs?

Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, Gen. James L. Jones, Robert M. Gates

On Monday President-elect Barack Obama announced the makeup of the core of his incoming administrations foreign affairs team with what Jeremy Scahill, Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at the Nation Institute, yesterday called “Barack Obama’s Kettle of Hawks“:

The absence of a solid anti-war voice on Obama’s national security team means that US foreign policy isn’t going to change.

…

[T]he real rivalry that will play out goes virtually unmentioned. The main battles will not be between Obama’s staff, but rather against those who actually want a change in US foreign policy, not just a staff change in the war room.

When announcing his foreign policy team on Monday, Obama said: “I didn’t go around checking their voter registration.” That is a bit hard to believe, given the 63-question application to work in his White House. But Obama clearly did check their credentials, and the disturbing truth is that he liked what he saw.

The assembly of Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, Susan Rice and Joe Biden is a kettle of hawks with a proven track record of support for the Iraq war, militaristic interventionism, neoliberal economic policies and a worldview consistent with the foreign policy arch that stretches from George HW Bush’s time in office to the present.

Obama has dismissed suggestions that the public records of his appointees bear much relevance to future policy. “Understand where the vision for change comes from, first and foremost,” Obama said. “It comes from me. That’s my job, to provide a vision in terms of where we are going and to make sure, then, that my team is implementing.” It is a line the president-elect’s defenders echo often. The reality, though, is that their records do matter.

Hillary Clinton was confirmed as Obama’s Secretary of State, and three other appointments were confirmed as well: his closest foreign affairs adviser Susan Rice becoming UN ambassador with a seat at the cabinet table, former NATO commander General James L. Jones as national security adviser, and current Secretary of Defense Bush appointee Robert M. Gates to remain in that role.

What is the symbolism and what is the actuality of Obama’s appointments?

On the flip The Real News CEO Paul Jay talks to Lawrence J. Korb and Phyllis Bennis to analyze the overall message about ongoing US foreign policy that is sent out to the world by Obama’s choices.

The US federal government has made strong preparations for “continuity of government” in the event of a national catastrophe.

A full army brigade is now on active duty within domestic borders, and the Bush administration has issued a directive which allows the president to coordinate all three branches of the federal government in such an event.

The Real News spoke to Bruce Fein.

Real News: December 1, 2008

US prepares for “continuity of government”

Bruce Fein: Army to deal with potential domestic “civil unrest and crowd control”

Bruce Fein is the founder of the American Freedom Agenda, that works to restore constitutional checks and balances. He served in the US Justice Department under President Reagan and has been an adjunct scholar with the American Enterprise Institute, a resident scholar at the Heritage Foundation, a lecturer at the Brookings Institute, and an adjunct professor at George Washington University. He is an adviser to Ron Paul.

The executive summary of the final report published on June 30, 2006 by the U.S. Department of Energy of a study headed by Project Director & Principal Investigator Michael M. Bernitsas, PhD, titled Low Head, Vortex Induced Vibrations River Energy Converter (.pdf) states that:

Vortex Induced Vibrations Aquatic Clean Energy (VIVACE) is a novel, demonstrated approach to extracting energy from water currents. This invention is based on a phenomenon called Vortex Induced Vibrations (VIV), which was first observed by Leonardo da Vinci in 1504AD. He called it ‘Aeolian Tones.’

For decades, engineers have attempted to prevent this type of vibration from damaging structures, such as offshore platforms, nuclear fuel rods, cables, buildings, and bridges. The underlying concept of the VIVACE Converter is the following: Strengthen rather than spoil vortex shedding; enhance rather than suppress VIV; harness rather than mitigate VIV energy. By maximizing and utilizing this unique phenomenon, VIVACE takes this “problem” and successfully transforms it into a valuable resource for mankind.

Dr. Bernitsas is also Chief Technology Officer/Interim Chief Executive Officer of Vortex Hydro Energy LLC (VHE), a Michigan based company.

What? The power of music is a valuable resource for mankind?

Who would have thought such a thing, except for musicians, artists, hippies, and other liberal dreamers?

What are Aeolian Tones? And why should Big Oil be afraid of them?

Follow me downstream, here…

Antonia Juhasz is the author of The Bu$h Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time and most recently, The Tyranny of Oil: The World’s Most Powerful Industry, and What We Must Do To Stop It.

Juhasz is a policy-analyst and a Fellow with Oil Change International, “a research and advocacy organization that exists to force progress in the energy industry towards an environmentally and socially sustainable energy future”, and the Institute for Policy Studies, a policy studies non-profit think-tank for progressive or liberal causes based in Washington, D.C. IPS work is organized into over a dozen projects, all working collaboratively and strategically to pursue three overarching policy goals: Peace, Justice and the Environment.

She has taught at the New College of California in the Activism and Social Change Masters Program and as a guest lecturer on U.S. Foreign Policy at the McMaster University Labour Studies Program in a unique educational program with the Canadian Automobile Workers Union, and lives in San Francisco.

Today Antonia talks with Sharmini Peries of the The Real News about whether or not Barack Obama is likely to buck, or back, the most powerful corporations in the world, and whether he’ll continue the same foreign policies that have over the past 60 odd years of “pragmatic” conservative US imperialism nearly brought the empire to it’s knees, drastically lowering the amount of expenditures on liberal social policies.

Real News: November 29 – 7 min 37 sec

Will Obama reign in big oil?

Antonia Juhasz: Clinton-era deregulation helped big oil get bigger

Hat tips to NL for raising the discussion of pragmatism this morning, and to KJ for my title. 🙂

ABC News:

In a personal and wide-ranging interview conducted by his sister about his legacy, his faith and the influence of his father, President George W. Bush said he hopes to be remembered as a liberator of the Iraqi people.

“I’d like to be a president [known] as somebody who liberated 50 million people and helped achieve peace,” Bush told his sister, Dorothy Bush Koch, in a conversation recorded for the oral-history organization StoryCorps for the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.

An excerpt of the interview was aired on National Public Radio Thursday, and the White House released additional excerpts with both the president and first lady Laura Bush today.

“I would like to be a person remembered as a person who, first and foremost, did not sell his soul in order to accommodate the political process,” Bush said, according to White House excerpts.

[snip…]

Bush said his No Child Left Behind policy, which has been widely criticized by educators as too focused on test scores, is one of his significant achievements.

“I think the No Child Left Behind Act is one of the significant achievements of my administration because we said loud and clear to educators, parents and children that we expect the best for every child, that we believe every child can learn, and that in return for Federal money we expect there to be an accountability system in place to determine whether every child is learning to read, write, and add and subtract,” he said.

[snip…]

“I would advise politicians, however, to be careful about faith in the public arena,” he said.

Read it all here, if you can stand to…