Steven Thomma: Obama Misstates Facts About Debt Plan!

President Barack Obama got some of the major points wrong when he unveiled his plan to curb projected federal budget deficits. Here's what he said Monday, and how it was wrong. "Today, I'm releasing a plan that details how to pay for the jobs bill, while also playing down our debt over time." In truth, the national debt would increase every year under his plan. According to White House figures, the debt held by the public would increase from $10.2 trillion this year to $17.5 trillion in 2021. According to Republican staff of the Senate Budget Committee, gross debt, which includes not just debt held by the public, but also that held by federal agencies, would increase from $14.9 trillion to $24.6 trillion. While Obama claims that his is a plan to reduce debt by more than $4 trillion, the plan does NOT reduce debt! Assuming that the president misspoke and meant to say the plan would cut projected DEFICITS by $4 trillion over 10 years, that would also be wrong! First, his plan totals $3.6 trillion in proposed tax increases, spending cuts, and interest savings. To get a figure of more than $4 trillion in spending cuts, he counts the $1.2 trillion in spending cuts already enacted over the summer. Second, while he counts the $866 billion in added revenue from letting the Bush tax cuts expire for incomes above $200,000 as he proposes, he doesn't count the cost of extending the Bush tax cuts for incomes below $200,000 as he also proposes.

Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya: Libya and the Big Lie. Using Human Rights Organizations to Launch Wars.

We all know that the war against Libya is built on fraud. The United Nations Security Council passed two resolutions against Libya on the basis of unproven claims, specifically that Colonel Muammar Qaddafi was killing his own people in Benghazi and Libya. The claim in its exact form was that Qaddafi had ordered Libyan forces to kill 6,000 people in Benghazi and Libya. These claims were widely disseminated, but always vaguely explained. It was on the basis of this claim that Libya was referred to the UN Security Council at UN Headquarters in New York City and kicked out of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. False claims about African mercenary armies in Libya and about jet attacks on civilians were also used in a broad media campaign against Libya. These two claims have been sidelined and have become more and more murky. The massacre claims, however, were used in legal, diplomatic, and military framework to justify NATO's war on Libya! One of the main sources for the claim that Qaddafi was killing his own people is the Libyan League for Human Rights (LLHR). The LLHR was actually pivotal to getting the UN involved through its specific claims in Geneva. On February 21, 2011 the LLHR got the 70 other non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to send letters to President Obama, EU High Representative Catherine Ashton, and the UN Secretary-General Ban-ki Moon, demanding international action against Libya invoking the "Responsibility to Protect" doctrine. Only 25 members of this coalition actually assert that they are human rights groups.

Ellen Shultz: How Companies Plunder and Profit from the Nest Eggs of American Workers!

In December 2010, General Electric held its Annual Outlook Investor Meeting at Rockefeller Center in New York City. At the meeting, chief executive Jeffrey Immelt stood on the Saturday Night Live stage and gave the gathered analysts and shareholders a rundown on the global conglomerate's health. But in contrast to the iconic comedy show that is filmed at Rock Center each week, Immelt's tone was solemn. Like many other CEO's at large companies, Immelt pointed out that his firm 's pension plan was an ongoing problem: The "pension has been a drag for a decade," he said, and it would cause the company to lose 13 cents per share the next year. Regretfully, to rein in costs, GE was going to close the pension plan to new employees. The audience had every reason to believe him. An escalating chorus of bloggers, pundits, talk show hosts, and media stories bemoan the burgeoning pension-and-retirement crisis in America, and GE was just the latest of hundreds of companies, from IBM to Verizon, that have slashed pensions and medical benefits for millions of American retirees. To justify these cuts, companies complain they're victims of a "perfect storm" of uncontrollable economic forces, an aging workforce, entitled retirees, a stock market debacle, and an outmoded pension system that cripples their chances of competing against pension-less competitors and companies overseas.

Paul Zimmerman: Fukushima and the Battle for Truth!

Fukushima's nuclear disaster is a nightmare. Ghostly releases of radioactivity haunt the Japanese countryside. Lives, once safe, are now beset by an ineffable scourge promising vile illness and death. Large sectors of the population are accumulating significant levels of internal contamination, setting the stage for a public health tragedy. A subtle increase in the number of miscarriages and fetal deaths will be the first manifestation that something is amiss. An elevated incidence of birth defects will begin in the Fall and continue into the indefinite future. Thyroid diseases, cardiac diseases and elevated rates of infant and childhood leukemia will follow. Over the next decade and beyond, cancer rates will soar. Chernobyl was the harbinger of this heartbreaking scenario. It taught mankind the inescapable biological truths that emerge within populations internally contaminated by heightened levels of fission products. And yet, government and industry schemers attack these truths as unfounded scare-mongering. With cold indifference, they deny that Chernobyl was a mass casualty event. They turn a blind eye to a huge body of research and deviously proclaim that no evidence exists that more than a handful of people suffered harm from the Ukrainian disaster. They publish propaganda, draped in the guise of science, that dismisses the hazard of low levels of internal contamination. Believing their subterfuge to have been successful and intoxicated by their hubris, they are already positioning themselves to stage-manage the public's perception of Fukushima. Japan's government, its Nuclear Safety Commission, and the Tokyo Electric Power Company have already demonstrated that they will do everything in their power to keep citizens ignorant of what is taking place. The emerging health crisis is scheduled to be erased!

John Grant: Is the United States a Police State?

Honorable people like to debate whether the United States of America is a "police state," but when it comes to shutting down the expression of ideas on the political left, there is little room for argument. We are inundated in this country with propaganda boilerplate about being the greatest democracy in the world. No, we are not a police state like our friends in Saudi Arabia, or our former friends, and current enemies, in Iran. Our police agencies have figured out how to accomplish police state repression in a "softer," more sophisticated manner. Look at the September 26 report by Lawrence O'Donnell of MSNBC, on what he describes as a "violent burst of chaos" caused by armed "troublemakers" from the New York Police Department. It was a peaceful demonstration against Wall Street greed. At least it started out that way. All evidence suggests it was, then, sent careening into chaos by the police strong-arming of young protesters who had done nothing but express their views in public. In one incident, young women on the sidewalk observing the arrest of a young man in the street are corralled by cops using orange plastic nets. White-shirted Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna then walks up, un-holsters his pepper spray gun and shoots one of the women full in the face. He re-holsters his weapon and walks away.

William Pfaff: Afghanistan Is Obama's Gordian Knot!

Useful advice can be found in the past: Gordius, King of Phrygia, tied an intricate knot, ever since then called the Gordian knot. An oracle told Alexander the Great that whoever could untie it would master Asia. Alexander drew his sword and slashed the knot. He then conquered the lands between Persia and Afghanistan, pushing on as far as the Punjab. There, his exhausted troops rebelled, and his retreat from Asia began. The oracle should have known that the mastery of Asia ultimately belongs to Asians. Barack Obama has promised a withdrawal of many or most American troops from Afghanistan in the months to come. He has not promised the departure of the enormous State Department and mercenary force of "state-builders" and "democracy-creators" and defenders which are already there. This, at least, is the plan, a bad and dangerous one that can be relied upon to fail, because it refuses to face reality. The Gordian knot by which this American project is bound, is the simultaneous conflict and collaboration of the United States and nuclear Pakistan, certain to end in a wounded American withdrawal, if only because Pakistan lives, and has lived since antiquity, in this particular place in Central Asia, and the United States lives in a different world, geographically, psychically and morally, having arrived in Central Asia yesterday, and destined to leave tomorrow.

Paul Craig Roberts:Pakistan's "Haqqani Network"

President Obama's claim that he had Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden "exterminated" deflated the threat from that long-serving "bogyman". A terror organization that left its leader, unarmed and undefended, a sitting duck for assassination, no longer seems formidable. Time for a new, more threatening bogeyman, which will keep the "war on terror" going! Now, America's worst enemy are the Haqqanis. Moreover, unlike Al Qaeda, which was never tied to a country, the Haqqani network, according to Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, is a veritable arm of the Pakistani government's intelligence service. ISI. Washington claims that the ISI ordered its Haggani Network to the US Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, in September 13, along with the US military base in Wadak province. Senator Lindsey Graham, a member of the Armed Services committee and one of the main Republican warmongers, declared that "all options are on the table" and gave the Pentagon his assurance that in Congress there was broad bipartisan support for a US military attack on Pakistan! As Washington has been killing large numbers of Pakistani civilians with drones, and has forced the Pakistani army to hunt for Al Qaeda throughout most of Pakistan, producing tens of thousands or more of dislocated Pakistanis in the process, Senator Graham must have something larger in mind. The Pakistani government thinks so, too. The Pakistani prime minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani, called his foreign minister home from talks in Washington and ordered an emergency meeting of the government to assess the prospect of an American invasion.