The Economist: Beijing, Under Water and Under Fire

For a capital city unusual, and perhaps unique, in being situated neither on a costline nor along the banks of a big river, Beijing has been under water a lot of late. Violent summer rainstorms flooded the city in June of last year, overwhelming the antiquated drainage system, flooding roads and paralysing the normally bustling city. On July 21st Beijing was struck again by an even more devastating rainstorm. According to official monitors, it was the largest the city has suffered since records began to be kept in 1951. Thirty seven deaths have been blamed on the storm. This has raised questions about whether money spent on such prominent "vanity" projects as skyscrapers and Olympic parks, might have been better spent on basic infrastructure and on improving disaster preparedness. A more common problem is a shortage of water. Beijing is perched precariously on the edge of the Gobi desert, and for centuries planners have been preoccupied with how to bring water into it, not divert it elsewhere. Guo Shoujing, a 13th century scientist and hydrologist, is still revered for designing a network of lakes, weirs and artificial waterways. These not only watered the palaces of Kublai Khan and his descendants, but also allowed barges from the southern parts of the empire to bring "tribute" to their imperial masters and grain to the people of the capital. Drainage was left to open sewers, sluices and canals, none of which were particularly effective when rains came. Over the past 1,000 years, the city has suffered 140 serious floods. Inundations in 1626 and 1890 were especially calamitous. Both of those floods came towards the end of dynasties, when corruption, neglect and mismanagement sapped the government's ability to maintain public works. The current drainage system dates from the 1950s and is based on a Soviet design, which relies on pipes rather than sewers to direct excess water. 

F William Engdahl: Putin's Geopolitical Chess Game with Washington

Since reassuming his post as Russias President, Vladimir Putin has lost no minute in addressing the most urgent geopolitical threats to Russia internationally. Not surprisingly, at the center of his agenda is the explosive situation in the Middle East, above all Syria. Here Putin is engaging every imaginable situation in the Middle East, above all Syria. Here Putin is engaging every imaginable means of preventing a further deterioration of the situation into what easily could become another world war by miscalculation. His activities in recent weeks involve active personal diplomacy with Syria's government as well as the so-called opposition Syrian National Council. It involves intense diplomacy with Erdogan's Turkey regime. It involves closed door diplomacy with Obama. It involves direct diplomacy with Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu. Syria itself, contrary to what most western media portray, is a long standing multi ethnic and religiously tolerant secular state with an Alawite Muslim President Bashar Al-Assad, married to a Sunni wife. The Alawite sect is an offshoot of Shia Islam, which doesn't force their women to wear head scarves, and are liberal by Sunni standards, especially in the fundamentalist places like Saudi Arabia, where women are forbidden to even hold a drivers license. The overall Syrian population is a diverse mix of Alawites, Druze and Kurds, Sunnis, and Armenian Orthodox Christians. Were the minority regime of Al-Assad to fall, experts estimate that, like in Egypt, the murky Sunni, as in Saudi Arabia, Muslim Brotherhood organization would emerge as the dominant organized political force, something certainly not welcome in Tel Aviv and certainly not in either Russia or China.  

Chris Hedges: The Careerists!!!

The greatest crimes of human history are made possible by the most colorless human beings. They are the careerists. The bureaucrats. The cynics. They do the little chores that make vast, complicated systems of exploitation and death a reality. They collect and read the personal data gathered on tens of millions of us by the security and surveillance state. They keep the accounts of Exxon Mobile, BP and Goldman Sachs. They build or pilot aerial drones. They work in corporate advertising and public relations. They issue the forms. They process the papers. They enforce the laws and the regulations. And they do not ask questions. Good. Evil. These words do not mean anything to them. They are beyond morality. They are there to make corporate systems function. If insurance companies abandon tens of millions of sick to suffer and die, so be it. If banks and sheriff departments toss families out of their homes, so be it. If financial firms rob citizens of their savings, so be it. It the government shuts down schools and libraries, so be it. If the military murders children in Pakistan or Afghanistan, so be it. If commodity speculators drive the cost of rice and corn and wheat so that they are unaffordable for hundreds of millions of poor across the planet, so be it. If Congress and the courts strip citizens of basic civil liberties, so be it. If the fossil fuel industry turns the earth into a broiler of greenhouse gases that doom us, so be it. They serve the system. The god of profit and exploitation. The most dangerous force in the industrialized world does not come from those who wield radical creeds, whether Islamic radicalism or Christian fundamentalism, but from legions of faceless bureaucrats who claw their way up layered corporate and governmental machines. They serve any system that meets their pathetic quota of needs.

David Vine: Washington's Newest Tool for Global Domination

The first thing I saw last month when I walked into the belly of the dark grey C-17 Air Force cargo plain was a void, something missing. A missing left arm, to be exact, severed at the shoulder, temporarily patched and held together. Thick, pale flesh, flecked with bright red at the edges. It looked like meat sliced open. The face and what remained of the rest of the man were obscured by blankets, an American flag quilt, and a jumble of tubes and tape, wires, drip bags, and medical monitors. That man, and two other critically wounded soldiers, one with two stumps where legs had been, the other missing a leg below the thigh, were intubated, unconscious, and lying on stretchers hooked to the walls of the plane that had just landed at Ramstein Air Base in Germany. A tattoo on the soldier's remaining arm read, "DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR." I asked a member of the Air Force medical team about the casualties they see like these. Many, as with this flight, were coming from Afghanistan, he told me. "A lot from the Horn of Africa," he added. "You don't really hear about that in the media." "Where in Africa?" I asked. He said he didn't know exactly, but generally from the Horn, often with critical injuries. "A lot out of Djibouti," he added, referring to Camp Lemonnier, the main US military base in Africa, but from "elsewhere" in the region, too. Since the "Black Hawk Down" deaths in Somalia almost 20 years ago, we've heard little, if anything, about American military casualties in Africa, other than a strange report last week about three special operations commandos killed, along with three women identified by US military sources as "Moroccan prostitutes," in a mysterious car accident in Mali. The growing number of patients arriving at Ramstein from Africa pulls back a curtain on a significant transformation in twenty first century US military strategy. 

Tony Cartalucci: US Prepares For Direct Intervention

US prepares for direct intervention in Syria. As FSA proxies fail and psychological operations falter, US prepares more direct approach for long sought regime change. As it becomes increasingly clear that last week's "surge" by NATO backed so called "Free Syrian Army" terrorists was a failed psychological operation, coordinated with meticulously timed assassinations the day of the UN Security Council vote designed to stampede the Syrian government out of power, the FSA's foreign sponsors are preparing the public for a more direct intervention, while desperately attempting to maintain the illusion of chaos and the imminent collapse of Syria's government. Contracting NATO's narrative was Thierry Meyssan in Damascus, Syria who reported that Syria's continuity of government seamlessly moved forward after the assassinations last week, and that state institutions are still standing and very much functional. He describes Syria's latest unrest as the result of a coordinated NATO backed terrorist operation aimed at creating confusion and panic, coupled with Western propaganda, and warns that more operations are likely on the way. The Telegraph's, "Bashar al Assad's Syria is now in a death spiral," and the Guardian's "Syria endgame , who and what will emerge from the ruins?" both desperately attempt to write off the Syrian government as already finished, an unsubstantiated reoccurring narrative being repeated daily by the West. Both articles however, categorically fail in qualifying their premises with subsequent facts. Instead they depend on rehashing the initial violence that accompanied last week's assassinations, violence that has already been adequately dealt with by Syrian security forces.

Robert Parry: America: A Nation of Wildebeest?

Whenever some deranged gunman, armed with an assault rifle or some other combat weapon, slaughters young Americans, at a college or a high school or a mall or, now, a movie theater, I think of those documentaries showing Wildebeest on their on their migrations through crocodile infested rivers. In their frightened eyes, you can see that the herd knows that each crocodile will pick off an individual Wildebeest, flip it in the air, break its back, and then drag it away to be devoured. But the herd still crashes through the river, presumably with the understanding that most of them will survive. The Wildebeest may even be emotionally numbed to the fate of the unlucky ones. In a wy, that is what Americans have become. As we send our children off to school or off to a party or off to the movies, we know instinctively that some of them may die at the hands of some troubled person who has obtained a powerful weapon and has decided to avenge some slight by murdering strangers. Sometimes, the dead are in large numbers, like at Aurora, Colorado, multiplex theater, but usually it's just one or two at a time. We just hope it's not our kids. We weep over the tragedy of strangers, but our secret thought is: Thank goodness it wasn't my son or daughter. We are like the Wildebeest continuing the migration hoping that at the next river it won't be our turn. At such moments, it's also typical for news media pundits to wave their fingers at politicians for not having the "courage" to stop this mayhem by standing up to the ruthless National Rifle Association and its gun obsessed fringe, but the harder truth is that the problem is not with America's politicians, it's with American voters.    

At one time, calling the large multinational banks, a cartel branded you as a conspiracy theorist. Today the banking giants are being called that and worse, not just in the major media but in court documents intended to prove the allegations as facts. Charges include racketeering (organized crime under the US Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act or RICO), antitrust violations, wire fraud, bid rigging, and price fixing. Damning charges have already been proven, and major damages and penalties assessed. Conspiracy theory has become established fact. In an article in the July 3rd, Guardian titled Private Banks Have Failed - We Need a Public Solution, Seumas Milne writes of the LIBOR rate rigging scandal admitted to by Barclay's Bank: Its already clear that the rate rigging, which depends on collusion, goes far beyond Barclay's, and indeed the City of London. This is one of the multiple scams that have become endemic in a disastrously deregulated system with inbuilt incentives for cartels to manipulate the core price of finance. It could of course have happened only in a private dominated financial sector, and makes a nonsense of the bankrupt free market ideology that still holds sway in public life. A crucial part of the explanation is the unmuzzled political and economic power of the City. Finance has usurped democracy: Bid Rigging and Rate- rigging: Bid rigging was the subject of US v Carollo, Goldberg and Grimm, a ten year suit in which the US Department of Justice obtained a judgment on May 11, against three GE Capital employees. Billions of dollars were skimmed from cities all across America, by colluding to rig the public bids on municipal bonds, a business worth $3.7 trillion. Other banks involved in the bidding scheme included Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo and UBS.