Dr. Paul Craig Roberts: The Collapsing US Economy!

In a recent column, Can The World Survive Washington's Hubris, I promised to examine whether the US economy will collapse, before Washington in its pursuit of world hegemony brings us into military confrontation with Russia and China. This is likely to be an ongoing subject on this site, so this column will not be the final word. Washington has been at war since October 2001, when George W Bush concocted another excuse to order the US invasion of Afghanistan. This war took a back seat when Bush concocted another excuse to order the invasion of Iraq in 2003, a war that went on without significant success for 8 years and has left Iraq in chaos, with dozens more killed and wounded every day, a new strong man in place of the illegally executed former strongman, and the likelihood of the ongoing violence becoming civil war. Upon his election, President Obama foolishly sent more troops to Afghanistan and renewed the intensity of that war, now in its eleventh year, to no successful effect. These two wars have been expensive. According to estimates by Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, when all costs are counted, the Iraq invasion cost US taxpayers $3 trillion dollars. Ditto for the Afghan war. In other words, the two gratuitous wars doubled the US public debt. This is the reason there is no money for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, the environment, and the social safety net. Americans got nothing out of the wars, but as the war debt will never be paid off, US citizens and their descendants will have to pay interest on $6,000 billion of war debt in perpetuity. Not content with these wars, the Bush/Obama regime is conducting military operations in violation of international law in Pakistan, Yemen, and Africa.

James F. Tracy: Wireless Technology and the Toxification of America

As a multitude of hazardous technologies are deployed in homes, schools and workplaces, government officials and industry representatives continue to insist on their safety despite growing evidence to the contrary. A major health crisis looms, that is only hastened through the extensive deployment of smart grid technology. In October 2009, at a Florida Power and Lights (FPL) solar energy station President Barack Obama announced that $3.4 billion of the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act would be devoted to the country's smart energy grid transition. Matching funds from the energy industry brought the total national Smart Grid investment to $8 billion. FPL was given $200 million of federal money to install 2.5 million smart meters on homes and businesses throughout the state. By now, many residents in the United States and Canada have the smart meters installed on their dwellings. Each of these meters is equipped with an electronic cellular transmitter that uses powerful bursts of electromagnetic radio-frequency (RF) radiation to communicate with nearby meters that together form an interlocking network transferring detailed information on residents electrical usage back to the utility every few minutes or less. Such information can easily be used to determine individual patterns of behavior, based on power consumption. The smart grid technology is being sold to the public as a way to empower individual energy consumers by allowing them to access information on their energy usage so that they may eventually save money by programming smart (ie, wireless enabled) home appliances that will coordinate their operability with the smart meter to run when electrical rates are lowest. 

David Michael Green: It's Just Parchment, Get Over It!

Last week America engaged in one of its perennial paroxysms of constitutional cogitation, this time over the Obama health care bill, with mostly predictable results. Four of the great legal priests on our High Temple's Council of Scriptural Interpretation said that, yes, the Affordable Care Act was within the boundaries of what a small collection of men riding horseback to a meeting in Philadelphia one summer two and a quarter centuries ago allow us today as a continent wide superpower society of 300 million people in the age of atom bombs, space travel, heart transplants and genetic engineering. George and John and Thomas say it's okay, we can have health care. Whew, That's a relief. But then the other priests insisted, "Oh, no, this is fundamentally not allowed. Not at all." And one apparently went both ways, voting against it before he was for it. Such, in "the greatest country in the world" as regressives, doing their national equivalent of Allahu Akbar, seek to assuage their insecurities and reassure themselves by constantly shouting at the rest of us, is the way we determine whether tens of millions of children will or will not receive pediatric care.

Bill Moyers: The Cowardly Lions of Free Speech!

In all the hullabaloo over the Supreme Court's decision on health care, another of its rulings quickly fell off the public radar. Before deciding the fate of the Affordable Care act, the Court announced it would not reconsider it would not reconsider Citizens United, the odious 5-4 decision two years ago, that opened our elections to unlimited contributions. Within minutes of that announcement, right- wing partisans were crowing about the advantage they now own, an advantage not due to ideas or personalities, but to the sheer force of money. They were remarkably candid and specific. Here's what Fred Barnes wrote in The Weekly Standard about the Senate race in Missouri: For three weeks in May, Republican super-Pac's took turns attacking Democratic senator Claire McCaskill in TV ads. Republicans hadn't held their primary, it's not until August 7, but McCaskill wound up trailing all three of the GOP candidates in polls. Now McCaskill, unnerved, is struggling to recover. That's what super-Pac's can do. When they emerged in 2010 and worked in tandem, they were a critical force in the Republican landslide in the congressional elections. This year they're playing an even bigger role. The size and reach of their efforts dwarf what they did two years ago.     

Tom Engelhardt: Rebecca Solnit, One Big Continent of Pain!

It shouldn't surprise you that Illegal Drugs R'Us. In fact, nearly 9% of this country's population above the age of 12 uses them, more than 22 million people, according to the government's 2010 National Survey on Drug Use and Health. Nor should it surprise you that the business behind such use is booming on one side of the US border and blowing remarkable numbers of heads off to get its product to market on the other. After all, what businessman, assured that his venture would have a guaranteed 9% market in the US, and that, in the future , those numbers would only rise, wouldn't be eager to plunge in? The nightmare of those dead bodies south of the border and the deadheads north of it is a "problem" that is quickly being militarized as the US employs its experiences in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, still the heroin poppy capital of the world, by the way, to go after the drug trade in Central America and Mexico, drones soaring and guns blasting, only adding to the pyramid of bodies along the way. You might think that the same old militarized same old that had been such a dismal failure in the Greater Middle East might give way to a little new thinking when it came to our "war" on drugs. But not in Washington. Not these days. Fortunately, every now and then, Tom- Dispatch regular Rebecca Solnit has the urge has the urge to write a letter to someone, alive or dead, or in this case, the living, the barely living, and the dead, to offer new ways of thinking about our world, including today about the drug horror show that Americans have become. Too bad our government doesn't call a truce in that "war" for 24 hours, just to give a little new thought to how to proceed. If it won't, the rest of us still should.

Russ Baker: Everything They're Telling Us About Syria is False!

Friday, we read in the New York Times and elsewhere about Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's most important supporters and allies having defected. The impression one gets is that Assad's government is in a state of collapse, and this gives credibility to those pushing for Assad to turn over power. But what the media are not mentioning is that Brigadier General Manaf Tiass did not defect directly from the Assad inner circle. He had already fallen into disfavor early in the uprising and lost his command in May 2011, 14 months ago. If you had that additional piece of information, you would interpret the news reports in a totally different way: When a piece of evidence that contradicts the overall impression is absent from the reportage, the reportage itself is almost worthless. As are reports of horrific events without adequate fact checking and follow up. Remember the Houla massacre? Who carried that out? The media told us that more than 100 people, including women and children, were brutally slaughtered at close range in the village of Houla in late May. The bloodshed, reported around the world, was ascribed to a militia, the Shabiha, which is loyal to Assad. Here's an example from the BBC website: Survivors of the massacre in Syria's Houla region have told the BBC of their shock and fear as regime forces entered their homes and killed their families. Most witnesses who spoke to the BBC said they believed that the army and shabiha militiamen were responsible. "We were in the house, they went in, the shabiha and security, they went in with Kalashnikovs and automatic rifles," said survivor Rasha Abdul Razaq. Later, a dribble of accounts cast doubt on this, since the people killed were, by and large, themselves supporters of Assad.  

Chossudovsky: Demonizing Muslims. America's Witch Hunt!

Heading into a "World War III Scenario"? THe US has launched a witch hunt "reminiscent of the Spanish Inquisition" to "demonize" Muslims. "While President Obama may uphold freedom of religion, the US inquisitorial social order has institutionalized patterns of discrimination, prejudice and xenophobia directed against Muslims," writes Professor Michel Chossudovsky of the Center for Research on Globalization, Montreal. "Ethnic profiling applies to travel, the job market, access to education and societal services and more generally to social status and mobility," he writes in his new book,"Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War". "What is now unfolding is a generalized process of demonisation of an entire population group. Muslims are considered a potential threat to national security. The threat is said to be 'much closer to home', 'within your neighborhood'. In other words, what is unfolding is an all out witch hunt reminiscent of the Spanish Inquisition," Chossudovsky writes. "The arrests, trials and sentences of so-called 'homegrown terrorists' from within Americas Muslim community on trumped up charges sustain the legitimacy of the Homeland Security State and its inquisitorial legal and law enforcement apparatus," he asserts. Chossudovsky writes: "The objective is to sustain the illusion that America is under attack and that Muslims across the land are complicit and supportive of 'Islamic terrorism'. The demonization of Muslims sustains a global military agenda. Under the American Inquisition, Washington has a self-proclaimed holy mandate to extirpate Islam and spread democracy throughout the world."