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OBAMAS HIDDEN PAST

 The basic issue is the same there and here. Capitalism generates another of its regular, periodic crises, only this one is really bad. It begins, as often happens, in the financial sector where credit invites the competition-driven speculation, the excess risk-taking, and the corruption that explodes first. But precisely because the non-financial rest of the economy is already on shaky feet -- resulting from the growing economic divides between the mass of workers and the corporate profiteers -- the financial breakdown is spread by the market to the entire economy.

President Barack Obama Monday revealed his new U.S. healthcare reform proposal -- a blend of House and Senate plans along with his own recommendations.

Since June 16, 2002, the Israeli Government has been constructing a West Bank Barrier in Jerusalem. The concrete wall is 750 kilometers in length and eight meters high. Thick concrete walls are equipped with trenches, barbed wire, electrified wire, watch towers, electronic sensors, video cameras, unmanned aircraft, sniper towers, and roads for patrol vehicles. The point is: there is no possibility to penetrate the wall. The barrier wall was built in a zig zag shape through ten of 11 districts; across all cities in the West Bank. Construction of the first phase started from the west to north of Jerusalem along 145 kilometers and was completed in July, 2003. The second phase is underway, ranging from eastern West Bank to southern Jerusalem. This wall needed a lot of funding, but the total cost of construction was never made public. For the barrier wall maintenance alone, Israel has to spend U.S $4.7 million/mile. So the total funds needed for the maintenance of the West Bank Barrier along the 750 kilometers is U.S. $ 3.4 billion.

in the article: US President Barack Obama announced the nomination of current White House chief of staff Jacob Lew as treasury secretary Thursday, underscoring the administration's commitment to slashing entitlements and its domination by Wall Street. Lew, a longtime Washington operative and former Wall Street executive, helped negotiate cuts to Social Security with the Reagan administration in 1983, worked to slash social spending in the Clinton administration's Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and served as the Obama administration's point-man in budget-cutting negotiations with congressional Republicans. Prior to joining the Obama administration in 2009, he earned millions of dollars as the chief operating officer of Citigroup's Alternative Investments unit, which made bets against the housing market as it collapsed. Holy shit. That's maybe all one needs to read of this article. That's pretty ridiculous.

Chokri Belaïd, a secular, anti-Islamist member of the National Constituent Assembly, was assassinated last week. The backlash of the assassination is causing strife in Tunisian politics. His widow has accused Ennahda of playing a role in the assassination, "which sparked mass demonstrations, attacks on Ennahda headquarters and clashes with security forces throughout the country." The Prime Minister, a high-ranking official in Ennahda, has declared his wish to form a non-partisan government of technocrats to manage the socio-political crisis. He has also declared that he will resign from his position if he's not allowed to do so. So things really are deteriorating. qt: Four opposition groupings-Belaïd's own Popular Front bloc, the Call for Tunisia party (Nidaa Tounes), the Al Massar party, and the Republican Party-announced that they were pulling out of the National Constituent Assembly and called for a one-day general strike last Friday, the day of Belaïd's funeral. The principal Tunisian trade union federation, the UGTT (Tunisian General Union of Labour) backed the call, resulting in the first general strike in Tunisia in 35 years. Reportedly, over one million people took part in Belaïd's funeral procession in Tunis on Friday, many calling for the fall of the Ennahda government and a second revolution. ... Much of the bourgeoisie, both secular and Islamist, has swung behind Jebali's proposal. The business journal l' Economiste asserts that "the prime minister's initiative and his proposal to form a non-political government of technocrats is a minimum response, but salutary. The rejection of this reasonable solution by his own party is evidence of the internal divisions that are eating away at Ennahda..." ... The revolutionary uprising of 2011 was channeled into parliamentary manoeuvring and constitutional wrangling by the Tunisian bourgeoisie, with the aid of the petty-bourgeois "left" parties and the UGTT. Underlying the present

The media's latest attempt to undercut the message of Occupy movements all across the globe is by touting the "cost" of these protests. Many sources are reporting that Occupy movements are costing cities hundreds of thousands of dollars in police overtime because apparently it takes an entire precinct to make sure that 50 people don't sleep through the night. When an internal city memorandum stated that Occupy Vancouver had cost its city nearly a million dollars in taxpayer money, the organizers did something brilliant: they broke down the cost of what they were doing for the city of Vancouver.

Under the guise of religious consciousness and First Amendment rights, Conservatives are mounting yet another assault on women's health and freedom that would deny millions of women access to affordable contraception. While the challenge scheduled to be heard by the Supreme Court was not brought by Catholics, it's all the same to me. Besides, they were the loudest and most aggressive in their objections. So, I decided to repost this information I presented during the 2010 debate because the objections represents the epitome of hypocrisy and false morality to me.

"Scientists reveal the growing atmospheric concentrations of man-made greenhouse gases are driving irreversible and dramatic changes to the way the ocean functions, with potentially dire impacts for hundreds of millions of people across the planet. "

At a time of great hardship for many Americans, it is unconscionable that a few mega-corporations can simply misplace a few decimal points and quickly rack up millions of dollars in unjust profits.

Jeffrey Goldberg responded yesterday to my post detailing his long list of journalistic malfeasance by telling me that he and the Prime Minister of Iraqi Kuridstan would like me to travel there to hear how much the Kurds appreciate the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Leaving aside the complete non sequitur that is his response -- how does that remotely pertain to Goldberg's granting of anonymity to his friends to smear people they don't like or the serial fear-mongering fabrications he spread about the Saddam threat prior to the invasion? -- I don't need to travel to Kurdistan to know that many Kurds, probably most, are happy that the U.S. attacked Iraq. For that minority in Northern Iraq, what's not to like? They had foreign countries (the U.S. and its "partners") expend their citizens' lives and treasure to rid the Kurds of their hated enemy; they received semi-autonomy, substantial oil revenues, a thriving relationship with Israel, and real political power; the overwhelming majority of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis whose lives were snuffed out and the millions of people displaced by the war were not Kurds, and most of the destruction took place in Central and Southern Iraq away from their towns and homes, while they remain largely free of the emergent police state tactics of the current Iraqi government. As Ali Gharib put it to Goldberg: "there are at least 600,000 Iraqis who, I imagine, are not too thrilled about the way it all turned out and with whom Greenwald will never get a meeting."

We're falling into a double-dip recession. The Labor Department reports this morning that the private sector added a measly 41,000 net new jobs in May. (The vast bulk of new jobs in May were temporary government Census workers.) But at least 100,000 new jobs are needed every month just to keep up with population growth. In other words, the labor market continues to deteriorate. The average length of unemployment continues to rise - now up to 34.4 weeks (up from 33 weeks in April). That's another record. More Americans are too discouraged to look for a job than last year at this time (1.1 million in May, an increase of 291,000 from a year earlier.)

Without online technologies, Barack Obama would never have gotten past the primaries. Had Facebook, YouTube, texting, a 13-million name email list and a website developed by Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes been absent from his campaign, he would never have raised enough money, been seen and heard by enough people, or enlisted enough volunteers. Yet progressive hopes are faltering, not only because of Obama's compromises and mistakes and Republican intransigence, but also because far too many of his supporters have come to believe they can act exclusively through these online technologies, to the exclusion of face-to-face politics.