Monday, August 11, 2008

Credit Card Debt - The Next Bubble - Another Global Corruption Bubble Slamming The World

The Next Bubble Is on the Way: Credit Card Debt
Why Are We All Complicit in Our Own Economic Servitude?

by Danny Schechter

Published on Monday, August 11, 2008 by CommonDreams.org
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/08/11/10921/

Let me try a few words out on you: “Charge It,” “Swipe It” and “Priceless.”

You know exactly what I am talking about. We all have credit and debit cards. We all use them, and many of us keep our lives going because of them.

That is, until the bill becomes due.

The sad truth is that we are all complicit in our own economic servitude even if, at bottom, it’s not our fault because we live in a consumption society, and don’t feel we could live without them.

While many eyes are focusing on the housing meltdown and its hugely negative effect on an economy clearly moving into recession, few are paying attention to the next bubble expected to burst: credit cards. You would never know it by watching those slick VISA card ads on the Olympic TV broadcasts.

Combined with the subprime losses, such a credit card nightmare has the potential, experts say, of bringing down the entire financial system and global economy.

You and your credit card have become key players in the highly unstable financial crunch. Mortgage lender cupidity and bank credit card greed wedded to financial institution deregulation supported by both political parties, have been made manifestly worse by Bush administration support-the-rich policies.

It has brought us to a brink not seen since just before the Great Depression.

While campaigning in Edinburg, Texas, in February, Barack Obama met with students at the University of Texas-Pan American. “Just be careful about those credit cards, all right? Don’t eat out as much,” he said. After the foreclosure crisis, he warned, “the credit cards are next in line.”

The coupling of home equity debt and credit card debt has gone hand in glove for years. The homeowners at risk can no longer use their homes as ATM machines, thanks to their prior re-financings and equity loans, often used in the past to pay off their credit cards. Indeed, homeowners cashed out $1.2 trillion from their home equity from 2002 to 2007 to pay down credit card debts and to cover other costs of living, according to the public policy research organization Demos.

To compound the problem, fewer people are paying their credit card bills on time. And, to flip the old paradigm, more are using high-interest credit card cash to pay at least part of their mortgages instead of the other way around.

Younger people are being crushed by this debt burden as college students and new consumers. Emma Johnson of MSN Money reports that “Generation Y” is broke.

“The democratization of credit has really generated a competitive spending culture, and plastic has allowed for material goods not had in the previous generation,” says Bob Manning, author of Credit Card Nation. “Most of us grew up in a home with just one or two bathrooms for the whole family, he points out; today, new homes usually have at least one bathroom per bedroom.”That change has happened so fast,” Manning says.

“This generation feels that somehow or another they’re going to figure out some technological advancement that’s going to get them out of their financial troubles and outsmart the market,” says Manning, who served as adviser to the documentary In Debt We Trust. The documentary paints a picture of national financial crisis stemming from the personal-debt burden. (See InDebtWeTrust.com)

Happily, this issue is finally being addressed by Congress and the Federal Reserve Bank. When asked for comments, the public overloaded the Fed’s website as the New York Times commented:

When the Federal Reserve asked for comments on its proposed rules on abusive credit card practices, an astonishing 56,000 poured in. Most were from outraged consumers. They told of interest rates skyrocketing when they paid an unrelated bill late. They complained of unwarranted late fees and pushed-up due dates. One Pennsylvania customer fumed: “I’m fed up with credit card company tricks that drive us deeper in debt.”

This anguished deluge should send a clear message to leaders in Washington. The Federal Reserve should swiftly adopt its proposed rules against unfair or deceptive credit card practices. But the real burden to curb these abuses falls on Congress.

This discontent is being organized to press Congress to act by groups like the Consumer Federation of America and the Center for Responsible Lending. And Congress is listening:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Legislation aimed at curbing credit card billing practices that surprise borrowers with unexpected interest rate increases and fees was approved on Thursday by a U.S. House of Representatives committee.

The bill approved by Financial Services Committee mirrors Federal Reserve proposals that would effectively end double-cycle billing — in which card companies reach back to prior billing cycles to help calculate the interest charged in the current cycle.

These reforms are a start but much more needs to be done because it’s not just billing practices that is at issue — it’s high interest changes, deceptive marketing, and arbitrary rules.

On top of that, there are other loans that need scrutiny including payday lenders and student loans. And of course our own addiction to shop until we drop.

Also, let us not forget that our credit card companies have been colonizing markets throughout the world. As the New York Times explained in a series on debt, “As the American blessing of credit cards became widespread, so did the American curse of debt.”

Bear in mind the experience of another addicting industry — tobacco. As they came under restraints in the US, they escalated their poison pushing worldwide.

Debt is a global issue and has to be treated as such.

Just as groups like NACA provide help to homeowners in distress, we need a major effort to help the victims of credit cards — with practical assistance and political demands for regulation and relief.

News Dissector Danny Schechter made the film In Debt We Trust (InDebtWeTrust.com). His new book PLUNDER: Investigating Our Economic Calamity is out later this month from Cosimo. (Newsdissector.com/Plunder) Comments to dissector @mediachannel.org.

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Better Nutrition Without Meat - Nutrition Information For Doctors & Health Care Providers

Here are two good nutrition resources-

NutritionCME is intended for physicians, physician assistants, nurses, nurse practitioners, dietitians, nutritionists, and other health care providers interested in how nutrition can be used for health promotion and disease prevention.

http://www.nutritioncme.org/

PCRM
http://www.pcrm.org/about/index.html
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Doctors are encouraged to make use of these useful websites.

They came from an interview of a doctor that grew up in North Dakota on a cattle ranch who now does not recommend meat since there are many significant health issues and also mounting environmental issues due to meat - including salmonella in tomatoes from meat farms contaminating water used on tomatoes.

From PCRM

The new Four Food Groups are:
Whole Grains (5 or more servings a day)
Vegetables (4 or more servings a day)
Fruit (3 or more servings a day)
Beans - Legumes (2 or more servings a day)

The major killers of Americans—heart disease, cancer, and stroke—have a dramatically lower incidence among people consuming primarily plant-based diets.

Weight problems—a contributor to a host of health problems—can also be brought under control by following the New Four Food Group recommendations.

Try the New Four Food Groups and discover a healthier way to live!
---


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	PCRM’S in-depth analysis of current health and nutrition related issues such as high-protein diets, airline food, and fast food salads. go> New Report: 2007 School Lunch Report Card			PCRM's research projects on diabetes, weight-loss, and PMS and premenstrual pain. go> Diabetes: Targeting Diabetes: PCRM Study Shows the Dramatic Impact of a Low-Fat Vegan Diet

	Lifesaving information on reducing cancer risk, and how diet and other factors may help improve survival. go> Where to Start? The Cancer Project web site			Enjoy these low-fat, heart-healthy, vegetarian delights. Here’s to your health! go> Where to start? Recipe of the week

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Here's information on Vegetarian and Vegan Diets
http://www.pcrm.org/health/veginfo/index.html

A good place to begin is the Vegetarian Starter Kit
also available in Spanish-language Guía de Iniciación una Dieta Vegetariana

and our fact sheet Vegetarian Foods: Powerful for Health
also available in Spanish-language La Comida Vegetariana: Poderosa para la Salud

For additional information, check out
FAQs About Vegetarian Diets
Find answers about issues such as protein, milk, eggs, athletic performance, essential fatty acids, lactose intolerance, calcium absorption rates in foods, vitamin B₁₂, vegetarian diets for correctional facilities, and incorporating vegetarian meals on college campuses.

FAQs About General Nutrition Issues

The New Four Food Groups

Information About Diabetes

If you're pregnant, be sure to read
Vegetarian Diets For Pregnancy

To raise vegan children, read our fact sheets:
Vegetarian Diets for Children: Right from the Start
Vegetarian Diets: Advantages for Children
a comprehensive report by PCRM's Nutrition Panel

Healthy Snacks for Kids

Restaurant Vegetarian Starter Kit

NutritionCME is intended for physicians, physician assistants, nurses, nurse practitioners, dietitians, nutritionists, and other health care providers interested in how nutrition can be used for health promotion and disease prevention.

http://www.nutritioncme.org/

PCRM
http://www.pcrm.org/about/index.html

Doctors and laypersons working together for compassionate and effective medical practice, research, and health promotion.

Prevention
PCRM promotes preventive medicine through innovative programs:

PCRM has led the way for reforms of federal nutrition policies.

Our clinical research programs are breaking new ground in diabetes, cancer, and other serious conditions.

PCRM’s Cancer Project has provided vital information to tens of thousands of people.

The New Four Food Groups is PCRM’s innovative proposal for a federal nutrition policy that puts a new priority on health.

Our public service announcement series features medical experts on prevention and health.

Research Advocacy
We encourage higher standards for ethics and effectiveness in research:

We oppose unethical human experiments. While great strides have been made in eliminating such experiments, problems remain. For example, children are still given synthetic growth hormone in experiments to make them taller, and both children and adults are exposed to unnecessary new drugs which have toxic effects.

We promote alternatives to animal research. We have worked to put a stop to gruesome experiments, such as the military’s cat-shooting studies, DEA narcotics experiments, and monkey self-mutilation projects. We also promote non-animal methods in medical education. Currently, more than three-quarters of all U.S. medical schools have dropped their animal labs for medical students.

Organization
Founded in 1985, PCRM is a nonprofit organization supported by physicians and laypersons who receive Good Medicine each quarter. PCRM programs combine the efforts of medical experts and grassroots individuals.

Leadership
PCRM Board of Directors: Neal D. Barnard, M.D., President; Mark Sklar, M.D., Secretary; Russell Bunai, M.D., Director.

PCRM’s advisory board includes 11 health care professionals from a broad range of specialties:

T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D. Cornell University
Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr., M.D. The Cleveland Clinic
Suzanne Havala Hobbs, Dr.PH., M.S., R.D. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Henry J. Heimlich, M.D., Sc.D. The Heimlich Institute
Lawrence Kushi, Sc.D. Division of Research, Kaiser Permanente
Virginia Messina, M.P.H., R.D. Nutrition Matters, Inc.
John McDougall, M.D. McDougall Program, St. Helena Hospital
Milton Mills, M.D. Gilead Medical Group
Myriam Parham, R.D., L.D., C.D.E. East Pasco Medical Center
William Roberts, M.D. Baylor Cardiovascular Institute
Andrew Weil, M.D. University of Arizona

Affiliations are listed for identification only.

Sunday, August 10, 2008

Nagasaki - Eliminate Nuclear Weapons - Global Campaign

Published on Saturday, August 9, 2008 by Agence France Presse

Nagasaki Commemorates Anniversary of Nuclear Attack

TOKYO - Nagasaki on Saturday demanded North Korea fully abandon nuclear weapons, while urging India to sign nuclear treaties, as the Japanese city marked 63 years since it was flattened by an atomic bomb.

Thousands of people offered a minute’s silence at 11:02 am (0202 GMT), the exact moment the city was hit by the world’s second and last nuclear attack on August 9, 1945, killing more than 70,000 people.”As the victim of nuclear bombs, our country has a duty and responsibility for taking the initiative to eliminate nuclear weapons,” Nagasaki Mayor Tomihisa Taue told the ceremony.

“The Japanese government must strongly demand complete abolishment of nuclear weapons in North Korea,” Taue said, standing at the foot of the Peace Statue — a bronze figure of a man pointing to the sky.

“It should seriously consider the creation of a Northeast Asian nuclear weapon-free zone,” he said.

On Wednesday the people of Hiroshima held a remembrance to mark the 63rd anniversary of the first ever nuclear attack, which killed 140,000.

The dropping of the two bombs by the US was followed by Japan’s surrender in World War Two on August 15. However, it ushered in the nuclear age and an era of fear of the use of atomic bombs again.

Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda, who flew from Beijing early Saturday after attending the opening ceremony of the Olympics, renewed his efforts to “spearhead” a global campaign against atomic bombs.

North Korea has agreed to abandon its nuclear programme in exchange for aid, but it is still uncertain if Pyongyang has completely met its promise to permanently dismantle its atomic plants and hand over all nuclear material and weaponry.

Taue also urged India to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) amid growing concerns over its atomic deal with the United States.

“India, whose nuclear cooperation with the United States is a cause of concern, should be strongly urged to join the NPT and CTBT,” Taue said.

India has been under international pressure over a controversial nuclear deal in which the United States will provide the energy-starved nation with civilian nuclear fuel and technology.

Japan has voiced concerns over the deal and urged New Delhi to sign the two treaties as soon as possible. Japan is a key member of the Nuclear Suppliers Group of 45 nations, which controls trade in nuclear fuel, material and technology to make sure they are used only for civilian purposes.

India needs a waiver from the group and ratification by the US Congress before the deal can go through.

Shigeko Mori, 72, who was 4.1 kilometres (2.5 miles) from the epicentre of the blast, recalled the horror, which killed her brother instantly and later took the lives of her parents and sisters who suffered radiation-related diseases.

“The devilish nuclear bomb blasted everything in a second,” Mori told the ceremony. “It was a deadly weapon that has also afflicted survivors for the rest of their lives.”

Friday, August 8, 2008

The Execution Of Margaret Hassan And Iraq

The “execution” - the cold-blooded, appalling murder of Margaret Hassan, the Care worker who was a friend as well as a contact of mine - is among the least terrible of the scenes that lie in the satellite channel’s archives.

11 years of UN-imposed sanctions had somehow changed the mentality of Iraqis. And I do recall, back in 1998 - when Saddam still ruled Baghdad - an NGO official tried to explain to me what was happening to Iraqis.

The Americans and British “want us to rebel against Saddam,” the official said. “They think we will be so broken, so shattered by this suffering that we will do anything - even give our own lives - to get rid of Saddam.

The uprising against the Baath party failed in 1991 so now they are using cruder methods. But they are wrong.

These people have been reduced to penury. They live in shit.

And when you have no money and no food, you don’t worry about democracy or who your leaders are.”

That official was Margaret Hassan.

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The Tragic Last Moments of Margaret Hassan
When a renowned British aid worker was kidnapped in Iraq, the world was horrified. Her body was never recovered, but her execution was captured on video and sent to Al Jazeera, the Arab satellite channel. Robert Fisk watched it and reveals why it has never been broadcast

by Robert Fisk
Published on Friday, August 8, 2008 by The Independent/UK
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/08/08/10883/

She stands in the empty room, a deplorable, terrible, pitiful sight. Is it Margaret Hassan? Her family believe so, even though she is blindfolded. I’m not sure if videos like this should ever be seen - or perhaps the word is endured - but they are part of the dark history of Iraq, and staff of the Arab Al Jazeera satellite channel have grown used to watching some truly atrocious acts on their screens.

Kidnapped by men in police uniforms, it is now November, 2004, and Margaret has already made her last appeal. Viewers saw her begging Tony Blair to help her, to withdraw British troops from southern Iraq. “I beg of you to help me,” she says in a voice of great distress. But there was then another tape which Al Jazeera refused to show, in which Margaret was coerced into claiming that she gave information to American officers at Baghdad airport. A man’s voice prompts her to keep to a text. “I admit that we worked with the occupation forces …” she says. It is untrue, of course. Margaret was against the whole Anglo-American invasion. She would never have spied on Iraqis.

Then comes the last tape. She is standing in that bare room in a white blouse, a blindfold over her face, her head slightly bowed and a man approaches her from behind holding a pistol. He points it at her head and places what appears to be an apple over the muzzle - a primitive form of silencer? And then squeezes the trigger. There is a click, an apparent misfire, and the man retreats to the right of the screen and then reappears. Margaret Hassan doesn’t move although she must have heard the click. The man is wearing a grubby grey and black checked shirt and ill-fitting, baggy trousers, a scarf concealing his face.

This time the gun fires and the woman utters a tiny sound, a kind of cry, almost a squeal of shock, and falls backwards onto the floor. The camera lingers on her. She has fallen onto a plastic sheet. And she just lies there. There is no visible blood, nor wound. It is over. Should such terrible things be seen? Margaret’s immensely brave Iraqi husband told me I had his permission to watch this, but still I feel guilty. I think it was only here, watching her death on a screen next to Al Jazeera’s studios more than three years later, that I realized Margaret Hassan was dead.

It was Margaret who took leukaemia medicines donated by readers of The Independent to the child cancer victims of Iraq back in 1998 after we discovered that hundreds of infants were dying in those areas where Western forces used depleted uranium munitions in the 1991 Gulf War. She was a proverbial tower of strength, and it was she - and she alone - who managed to persuade Saddam Hussein’s bureaucrats to let us bring the medicine into Iraq. The United Nations sanctions authorities had been our first hurdle, Saddam Hussein our second. It is all history. Like Margaret, all the children died.

“We’ve trained ourselves not to go to the maximum in our feelings when we see terrible things like this,” Ayman Gaballah, Al Jazeera’s deputy chief editor, says bleakly. And I can see why. There are other tapes, other outrages too terrible to show. George Bush wanted to bomb the station’s headquarters in Doha but staff have shown great sensitivity with what they show the world from Iraq. There is no proof that any of Al Jazeera’s reporters was ever tipped off about anti-American attacks before they happened - in Iraq, I investigated these claims in 2003 and 2004 - but plenty of proof that some things are too awful to see.

On one tape, a half-naked man is held to the floor while another produces a small butcher’s knife and slowly carves his way through the victim’s throat, the poor man’s shriek of pain dying in froths of blood until his head is eventually torn from his body.

Another tape shows 18 Iraqi policemen held captive against a demand for the release of Iraqi women prisoners. They are aged between 17 and 40 and stare at the camera hopelessly.

Al Jazeera aired the pictures and the written demands but then cut the next scene. It shows the 18 men trussed up and blindfolded in front of a ditch. A hooded man then fires into the back of one of their heads and - along with other men off-camera - goes from one body to the next, firing again and again. Some of the victims are still alive, their legs kicking and the hooded man goes to each one and fires again into their heads. Then, in the background, a bearded youth approaches the camera, holding an Islamic flag. He is singing.

For some in the Al Jazeera studios these archives are intensely personal. “I trained Ali Khatib - he was a great reporter,” I am told. “The war was almost declared at an end in Iraq and he went out with our cameraman to cover some story and, while he’s approaching an American checkpoint, you can hear an American soldier on the tape say ‘Stop - you have to go back’. And then the soldier just shot at them and killed both of them. Ali had got married two weeks earlier.”

For some, the videotapes will always be too much. When I met Margaret’s husband Tahseen in his Baghdad home after her murder, he was a picture of courage and mourning. There were terrible times. “I would come home and sit here and weep,” he told me then. “I would sit here sometimes and go out of my mind crying and sobbing. I don’t think insurgents did this. I don’t think Iraqi people did this … I couldn’t see the video that was released - not because she’s my wife, but because I can’t bear to see anyone assassinated.”

So who did murder Margaret Hassan? On the video of her apparent execution, there are no Islamic banners, no Muslim chants, no claim of responsibility, just the killer and the fatal shot. After her kidnap, Margaret - who once worked as an English-language newsreader on Saddam’s government television station in Baghdad - even found support among the anti-American insurgents; they issued a joint appeal for her release. Even Abu Musab Zarqawi, the al-Qa’ida leader in Iraq who was later killed by the Americans, joined in the appeal. Margaret had worked in Palestinian camps in the 1960s and fought tirelessly for those thousands of Iraqis under her care in Iraq. If her husband’s suspicions were correct, then whose “foreign” hand took her away?

The tape leaves no clue. In Al Jazeera’s archives, it is difficult to escape this repository of death. The Americans fired a cruise missile at Al Jazeera’s Kabul office in 2001 after it had forwarded Osama bin Laden’s tapes to Doha. Then an American aircraft fired a missile at the station’s Baghdad office in 2003. That time, the Americans killed the bureau chief, Tareq Ayoub. His jacket and his last notes are today on the wall of Al Jazeera’s Doha head office. His staff had - for their own protection - earlier given the map coordinates of their Baghdad office to the US State Department. Reporters asked Tony Blair - on a post-prime-ministerial tour of the Doha offices - if Bush had really planned to bomb them. “Blair said something about ‘the need to move on’” one of them told me. “So we knew it was true.”

If Al Jazeera’s staff have paid a terrible price for their reporting and have been the witnesses to some of the ghastlier acts in Iraq, they appear to have the ferocious support of the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, who spends his millions funding the loss-making station.

Stories abound of the day that George Tenet - then America’s CIA chief - turned up in Qatar to give the Emir a dressing down for Al Jazeera’s reporting. There was a stiff row between the two men before the Emir walked out.

In Washington, he was invited to meet Vice-President Dick Cheney, only to find that Mr Cheney had a thick file on his desk when he walked in. It was Mr Cheney’s list of complaints against Al Jazeera. The Emir told him he would not discuss it. “Then that is the end of our meeting,” Mr Cheney announced. “It is,” the Emir apparently replied. And walked out. The “meeting” had lasted 30 seconds.

But those are the high points, the drama of Al Jazeera. The dark moments are on those terrible tapes. I asked some of the reporters how humans could commit such atrocities. None of them knew.

One suggested that 11 years of UN-imposed sanctions had somehow changed the mentality of Iraqis. And I do recall, back in 1998 - when Saddam still ruled Baghdad - an NGO official tried to explain to me what was happening to Iraqis. The Americans and British “want us to rebel against Saddam,” the official said. “They think we will be so broken, so shattered by this suffering that we will do anything - even give our own lives - to get rid of Saddam. The uprising against the Baath party failed in 1991 so now they are using cruder methods. But they are wrong. These people have been reduced to penury. They live in shit. And when you have no money and no food, you don’t worry about democracy or who your leaders are.”

That official was Margaret Hassan.

–Robert Fisk

Thursday, August 7, 2008

Tar Sands Can Be Shut Down By First Nation's Lawsuit

First Nation’s Lawsuit Could Shut Down the Tar Sands

July 28, 2008
http://climateandcapitalism.com/?p=495#more-495

“If the Beaver Lake Cree win clearly in this case, it could mean an end to development on their territory”

By Tom Sandborn

From TheTyee.ca, July 28, 2008

Jack Woodward and the Beaver Lake Cree aim to change Canadian law — and their success likely would throw a huge wrench into Alberta’s tar-sands oil production.

The suit pits the Beaver Lake Cree band against the governments of Canada and Alberta, asking the court to rule invalid the government authorization for thousands of petroleum projects on the band’s core territory.

Woodward, a Victoria-based Aboriginal-law expert, filed the suit on behalf of his clients this May, and says its intent is to lay the groundwork for a new legal regime governing resource extraction on land reserved for or claimed by Canada’s First Nations.

A victory would allow the Beaver Lake Cree to demand much higher levels of accommodation and consultation from government and industry on oil and gas operations on their territory.

Woodward thinks a win could create a precedent that will allow other bands to enforce similar demands across the multi-billion-dollar oil-sands projects in Alberta’s north.

It could also, conceivably, shut down Canada’s only tactical bombing range at Cold Lake.

Landmark win in his pocket

Woodward has a track record to be taken seriously. In November of last year, as lawyer for the Tsilhqot’in First Nations, he helped win a landmark B.C. Supreme Court decision that said the provincial government had overstepped its authority in granting land-use rights to firms without Tislhqot’in approval.

Woodward believes the Tsilhqot’in case, also known as the ‘Xeni decision,’ underscores the point that Aboriginal rights to hunt, trap and fish create an obligation on government to proceed in ways that do not make those rights meaningless by reckless authorization of resource exploitation.

Cynthia Dickens of Justice Canada in Edmonton will act as lead counsel for the federal Crown in defending against the claims of the Beaver Lake Cree. Speaking from her offices in Edmonton, Dickens told The Tyee that neither she nor the representatives of the Alberta government had yet filed statements of defence in the matter.

Mike Hudema, tar-sands campaigner for Greenpeace in Alberta, thinks the case could have immense implications. “If the Beaver Lake Cree win clearly in this case, it could mean an end to development on their territory,” Hudema told The Tyee.

“The precedent could slow tar-sands development across Alberta. The consultation process with First Nations before development began has been absolutely terrible. I’d love to see them win, not only for their own interests, but also for the sake of everyone in Canada,” Hudema said.

‘We will fight as long as it takes’

“All of the animals are starting to deplete,” said Beaver Lake Chief Alphonse Lameman, in whose name the action was launched, on the day his people went to court. “Soon there will be nothing. We will fight as long as it takes to get justice. The governments of Canada and Alberta have made a lot of promises to our people, and we intend to see those promises kept.”

The ancestors of the Beaver Lake Cree people signed a treaty with the federal government in September of 1876, a deal that guaranteed them reserves and some other benefits, including the right to hunt and fish throughout the tract surrendered, “saving and excepting such tracts as may from time to time be required or taken up for settlement, mining, lumbering or other purposes….”

Since then, the governments of Canada and Alberta have authorized over 16,000 projects, mainly oil and gas exploration and extraction, on the core territories of the Beaver Lake Cree.

The governments have also arranged the leasing of land within the territory to the Cold Lake Air Weapons Range, Canada’s only tactical bombing range. The Cree band has gone to court to argue that development has occurred without proper consultation with them, without proper caution about protecting the habitats necessary to make their treaty rights to hunt, fish and trap meaningful, and without proper environmental and species inventories.

Win could spill into oil sands

The core traditional territory of the Beaver Lake Cree lies near Lac LaBiche on the margins of oil sand development, but if the band wins this case at the Supreme Court level, it could create precedents for other First Nations in Canada, including those whose claimed territories are where the tar-sands oil rush is underway in Northern Alberta.

The oil sands, viscous deposits of tar-like bitumen underlying areas of Alberta larger than Florida, are estimated to contain over 175 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, with at least one oil company spokesman estimating the total reserves at up to two trillion barrels, or eight times the size of all Saudi Arabia’s oil supplies.

Husky: ‘We take it seriously’

One of the installations on Beaver Lake Cree land targeted by the May legal action is Husky Energy’s Tucker Oil Sands Project north of Cold Lake. When the company announced the opening of the project, its press release estimated that the Tucker lease contained 1.27 billion barrels of discovered resource, and that the project would recover approximately 352 million barrels of oil over a 35-year project life.

Contacted in his Calgary office last week, Graham White, who speaks for Husky, declined to comment on the court action, but did confirm that Husky’s Tucker Oil Sands Project lies within the area disputed by the Cree.

Nadine Barber, who speaks for Devon Canada Corporation, a firm with many projects within the Beaver Lake Cree territory, says that her firm will not intervene in the court action.

“The filing is with the two governments,” she told The Tyee. “Devon will take no role during the trial. After the decision is rendered, we’ll discuss whether to intervene. We do, however, take Aboriginal matters very seriously. We try to deal with all such matters consistently and respectfully.”

Huge stakes on both sides

Exploitation of the tar sands is now seen in industry circles as economically viable in an era of steeply rising oil costs, while environmentalists worry about the pollution created in cooking the oil out of the tar sands, as well as global warming effects as more oil and gas go into the global pipeline.

Politicians foresee a fortune in tax revenues, but most of Canada’s leading environmental groups are calling for a moratorium on further development until or unless the tar sands projects can be made genuinely sustainable.

“Anything that slows down tar-sands development would absolutely be a good thing,” says David Suzuki Foundation climate-change campaigner Dale Marshall. “Greenhouse gas emissions from the tar sands are three times the volume per barrel extracted at conventional wells. These are huge strip-mining operations with terrible impacts on biodiversity.”

Greenpeace campaigner Hudema agrees. He said tar-sands development represents an environmental and human-rights crisis for Canada, threatening to destroy two river systems, dump double the emissions currently generated by Canada’s car and light trucks into the air by 2020 and cover more than 50 square kilometres of Alberta with toxic tailing ponds by 2015.

Hudema is also worried about the potential health impacts on those who live downstream from tar-sands development, pointing to increased rates of rare cancers in Fort Chipewyan.

Precedents cited by Cree counsel

“Given that we now have federal and provincial governments across Canada willing to back mining and tar-sands exploitation against Aboriginal rights, we can look for no statutory relief,” Beaver Lake Cree counsel Woodward told The Tyee.

“Both levels of government have been passing legislation to make stopping these projects impossible. Only First Nations can stop or force modifications to them now,” Woodward said. “We all depend on First Nations to do the heavy lifting on environmental protection.”

Woodward said he believes that precedents created by a 2005 Supreme Court of Canada ruling in a case brought by the Mikisew Cree nation will support a win for his Beaver Lake clients. The court ruled, he says, that a First Nation can oppose industrial activity on its land if that activity makes the treaty rights to hunt, fish and trap meaningless by destroying the healthy habitats necessary for the rights to be exercised.

Stuart Rush, Q.C., a distinguished senior member of the Aboriginal law bench and one of the leading counsels in the precedent-setting Delgamuukw case, thinks that the Mikisew case is an appropriate precedent for Woodward to cite.

“Mikisew is a powerful authority,” he told The Tyee. “This is a strong precedent. Tsilhqot’in, on the other hand, is obiter dicta, not precedent. That said, this new case represents the cutting edge on Aboriginal law. No court in Canada is going to give a First Nation an absolute veto on resource extraction, but levels of consultation and accommodation could well be strengthened by a win at Beaver Lake.”

‘Impressive’ claim: enviro law expert

David Boyd, an environmental expert based in Victoria with affiliations with the University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University, and the University of Victoria, says that the statement of claim prepared by Woodward for the Beaver Lake Cree is “impressive.”

“The Beaver Lake Cree are the latest David to challenge the tar-sands Goliath, and while the odds are stacked against them, you’ve got to admire their courage,” Boyd said in an e-mail to The Tyee. “Even if they eventually emerge victorious, no single lawsuit is likely to strike a decisive blow against the tar sands. Instead, Aboriginal people, environmentalists, judges and politicians (both in Canada and around the world) will have to join forces to slow down the reckless expansion of Alberta’s dirty oil juggernaut.”

“Governments and industry ignore our concerns,” Beaver Lake Chief Lameman said. “This is our home. This is where we live. We have a responsibility to our children, and to our children’s children, to see that the lands where the Cree live, and will always live, remain inhabitable.”

The case is now in a case-management process overseen by Justice K.D. Yamauchi, and a first meeting of all counsel and Justice Yamauchi will be held August 18 to determine timelines. Dickens of Justice Canada said she expects that both Canada and Alberta will file their statements of defence sometime in the fall. Dickens declined to comment on what might be at stake for the Crown in the matter.

Constitutional Rights for Nature Approved By Ecudorian Assembly

Ecuadorian Assembly Approves Constitutional Rights for Nature

July 10, 2008
http://climateandcapitalism.com/?p=479#more-479

On July 7, the 130-member Ecuador Constitutional Assembly, elected countrywide to rewrite the country’s Constitution, voted to approve articles that recognize rights for nature and ecosystems.

“If adopted in the final constitution by the people, Ecuador would become the first country in the world to codify a new system of environmental protection based on rights,” says Thomas Linzey, Executive Director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund.

The following clauses will be included in the constitution that will be submitted to a countrywide vote, to be held 45 days after Assembly finishes its work later this month.

Chapter: Rights for Nature

Art. 1. Nature or Pachamama, where life is reproduced and exists, has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution.

Every person, people, community or nationality, will be able to demand the recognitions of rights for nature before the public organisms. The application and interpretation of these rights will follow the related principles established in the Constitution.

Art. 2. Nature has the right to an integral restoration. This integral restoration is independent of the obligation on natural and juridical persons or the State to indemnify the people and the collectives that depend on the natural systems.

In the cases of severe or permanent environmental impact, including the ones caused by the exploitation on non renewable natural resources, the State will establish the most efficient mechanisms for the restoration, and will adopt the adequate measures to eliminate or mitigate the harmful environmental consequences.

Art. 3. The State will motivate natural and juridical persons as well as collectives to protect nature; it will promote respect towards all the elements that form an ecosystem.

Art. 4. The State will apply precaution and restriction measures in all the activities that can lead to the extinction of species, the destruction of the ecosystems or the permanent alteration of the natural cycles.

The introduction of organisms and organic and inorganic material that can alter in a definitive way the national genetic patrimony is prohibited.

Art. 5. The persons, people, communities and nationalities will have the right to benefit from the environment and form natural wealth that will allow wellbeing.

The environmental services are cannot be appropriated; its production, provision, use and exploitation, will be regulated by the State.

“Public organisms” in Article 1 means the courts and government agencies, i.e., the people of Ecuador would be able to take action to enforce nature rights if the government did not do so.

Wednesday, August 6, 2008

The Lies of Nuking Hiroshima & Nagasaki Live On - Israel Itching To Nuke Iran

The Lies of Hiroshima Live On, Props in the War Crimes of the 20th Century
The 1945 attack was murder on an epic scale. In its victims’ names, we must not allow a nuclear repeat in the Middle East

by John Pilger

Published on Wednesday, August 6, 2008 by The Guardian/UK
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/08/06/10835/

When I first went to Hiroshima in 1967, the shadow on the steps was still there. It was an almost perfect impression of a human being at ease: legs splayed, back bent, one hand by her side as she sat waiting for a bank to open. At a quarter past eight on the morning of August 6, 1945, she and her silhouette were burned into the granite. I stared at the shadow for an hour or more, then walked down to the river and met a man called Yukio, whose chest was still etched with the pattern of the shirt he was wearing when the atomic bomb was dropped.

He and his family still lived in a shack thrown up in the dust of an atomic desert. He described a huge flash over the city, “a bluish light, something like an electrical short”, after which wind blew like a tornado and black rain fell. “I was thrown on the ground and noticed only the stalks of my flowers were left. Everything was still and quiet, and when I got up, there were people naked, not saying anything. Some of them had no skin or hair. I was certain I was dead.” Nine years later, when I returned to look for him, he was dead from leukaemia.

In the immediate aftermath of the bomb, the allied occupation authorities banned all mention of radiation poisoning and insisted that people had been killed or injured only by the bomb’s blast. It was the first big lie. “No radioactivity in Hiroshima ruin” said the front page of the New York Times, a classic of disinformation and journalistic abdication, which the Australian reporter Wilfred Burchett put right with his scoop of the century. “I write this as a warning to the world,” reported Burchett in the Daily Express, having reached Hiroshima after a perilous journey, the first correspondent to dare. He described hospital wards filled with people with no visible injuries but who were dying from what he called “an atomic plague”. For telling this truth, his press accreditation was withdrawn, he was pilloried and smeared - and vindicated.

The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a criminal act on an epic scale.

It was premeditated mass murder that unleashed a weapon of intrinsic criminality. For this reason its apologists have sought refuge in the mythology of the ultimate “good war”, whose “ethical bath”, as Richard Drayton called it, has allowed the west not only to expiate its bloody imperial past but to promote 60 years of rapacious war, always beneath the shadow of The Bomb.

The most enduring lie is that the atomic bomb was dropped to end the war in the Pacific and save lives. “Even without the atomic bombing attacks,” concluded the United States Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946, “air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion. Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that …

Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”

The National Archives in Washington contain US government documents that chart Japanese peace overtures as early as 1943. None was pursued. A cable sent on May 5, 1945 by the German ambassador in Tokyo and intercepted by the US dispels any doubt that the Japanese were desperate to sue for peace, including “capitulation even if the terms were hard”. Instead, the US secretary of war, Henry Stimson, told President Truman he was “fearful” that the US air force would have Japan so “bombed out” that the new weapon would not be able “to show its strength”. He later admitted that “no effort was made, and none was seriously considered, to achieve surrender merely in order not to have to use the bomb”. His foreign policy colleagues were eager “to browbeat the Russians with the bomb held rather ostentatiously on our hip”. General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project that made the bomb, testified: “There was never any illusion on my part that Russia was our enemy, and that the project was conducted on that basis.” The day after Hiroshima was obliterated, President Truman voiced his satisfaction with the “overwhelming success” of “the experiment”.

Since 1945, the United States is believed to have been on the brink of using nuclear weapons at least three times. In waging their bogus “war on terror”, the present governments in Washington and London have declared they are prepared to make “pre-emptive” nuclear strikes against non-nuclear states. With each stroke toward the midnight of a nuclear Armageddon, the lies of justification grow more outrageous. Iran is the current “threat”. But Iran has no nuclear weapons and the disinformation that it is planning a nuclear arsenal comes largely from a discredited CIA-sponsored Iranian opposition group, the MEK - just as the lies about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction originated with the Iraqi National Congress, set up by Washington.

The role of western journalism in erecting this straw man is critical. That America’s Defence Intelligence Estimate says “with high confidence” that Iran gave up its nuclear weapons programme in 2003 has been consigned to the memory hole. That Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad never threatened to “wipe Israel off the map” is of no interest. But such has been the mantra of this media “fact” that in his recent, obsequious performance before the Israeli parliament, Gordon Brown alluded to it as he threatened Iran, yet again.

This progression of lies has brought us to one of the most dangerous nuclear crises since 1945, because the real threat remains almost unmentionable in western establishment circles and therefore in the media. There is only one rampant nuclear power in the Middle East and that is Israel. The heroic Mordechai Vanunu tried to warn the world in 1986 when he smuggled out evidence that Israel was building as many as 200 nuclear warheads.

In defiance of UN resolutions, Israel is today clearly itching to attack Iran, fearful that a new American administration might, just might, conduct genuine negotiations with a nation the west has defiled since Britain and America overthrew Iranian democracy in 1953.

In the New York Times on July 18, the Israeli historian Benny Morris, once considered a liberal and now a consultant to his country’s political and military establishment, threatened “an Iran turned into a nuclear wasteland”. This would be mass murder. For a Jew, the irony cries out.

The question begs: are the rest of us to be mere bystanders, claiming, as good Germans did, that “we did not know”? Do we hide ever more behind what Richard Falk has called “a self-righteous, one-way, legal/moral screen [with] positive images of western values and innocence portrayed as threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted violence”?

Catching war criminals is fashionable again. Radovan Karadzic stands in the dock, but Sharon and Olmert, Bush and Blair do not. Why not?

The memory of Hiroshima requires an answer.

Monday, August 4, 2008

High dose vitamin C injections slash tumor growth in mice - No Adverse Effects

High dose vitamin C injections slash tumor growth in mice

http://www.lef.org/newsletter/2008/0805_High-Dose-Vitamin-C-Injections-Slash-Tumor-Growth-in-Mice.htm?source=eNewsLetter2008Wk32-1&key=Article&l=0#article

An article published in the August 5, 2008, issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reported that injections of ascorbate (vitamin C) reduce the weight and growth rate of tumors by half in mouse models of ovarian, pancreatic and brain cancer,

while leaving normal cells unharmed.

Researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) tested ascorbate in 43 tumor and 5 normal cell lines to determine a concentration that decreases cell survival in cancerous cells without resulting in toxicity to healthy cells. They subsequently injected a dose of 4 grams ascorbate (neutralized with sodium hydroxide) per kilogram body weight once or twice per day into immune-deficient mice with implanted ovarian, pancreatic and glioblastoma (brain) tumors. "At these high injected doses, we hoped to see drug-like activity that might be useful in cancer,” explained lead author Mark Levine, MD, who is the chief of the Molecular and Clinical Nutrition Section of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases at the NIH.

Dr Levine’s team found that injecting the animals with ascorbate decreased tumor growth and weight by 41 to 53 percent.
While metastases occurred in 30 percent of the mice with brain tumors, none appeared in animals injected with vitamin C.

No adverse effects of vitamin C treatment were noted.

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Solar Power Breakthrough Stores Energy for Later Use

Published on Monday, August 4, 2008 by Environmental News Service (ENS)
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/08/04/10799/

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts - Within 10 years, homeowners could power their homes in daylight with solar photovoltaic cells, while using excess solar energy to produce hydrogen and oxygen from water to power a household fuel cell. If the new process developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology finds acceptance in the marketplace, electricity-by-wire from a central source could be a thing of the past.

“This is the nirvana of what we’ve been talking about for years,” said MIT’s Daniel Nocera, senior author of a paper describing the simple, inexpensive, and efficient process for storing solar energy in the July 31 issue of the journal “Science.”

“Solar power has always been a limited, far-off solution. Now we can seriously think about solar power as unlimited and soon,” Nocera said.

Until now, solar power has been a daytime-only energy source, because storing extra solar energy for later use is expensive and inefficient. But Nocera and his team of researchers have hit upon an elegant solution.

Inspired by the photosynthesis performed by plants, Nocera and Matthew Kanan, a postdoctoral fellow in Nocera’s lab, have developed a new process that will allow the Sun’s energy to be used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen gases.

Later, the oxygen and hydrogen can be recombined inside a fuel cell, creating carbon-free electricity to power buildings, homes or electric cars - day or night.

The key component in the new process is a new catalyst that produces oxygen gas from water - another catalyst produces valuable hydrogen gas.

The new catalyst consists of cobalt metal, phosphate and an electrode, placed in water.

When electricity from a photovoltaic cell, a wind turbine or any other source runs through the electrode, the cobalt and phosphate form a thin film on the electrode, and oxygen gas is produced.

Combined with another catalyst, such as platinum, that can produce hydrogen gas from water, the system can duplicate the water splitting reaction that occurs in plants during photosynthesis.

The new catalyst works at room temperature, in neutral pH water, and is easy to set up, Nocera said. “That’s why I know this is going to work. It’s so easy to implement,” he said.

Sunlight has the greatest potential of any power source to solve the world’s energy problems, said Nocera. In one hour, enough sunlight strikes the Earth to provide the entire planet’s energy needs for one year.

James Barber, a leader in the study of photosynthesis who was not involved in this research, called the discovery by Nocera and Kanan a “giant leap” toward generating clean, carbon-free energy on a massive scale.

“This is a major discovery with enormous implications for the future prosperity of humankind,” said Barber, the Ernst Chain Professor of Biochemistry at Imperial College London. “The importance of their discovery cannot be overstated since it opens up the door for developing new technologies for energy production thus reducing our dependence for fossil fuels and addressing the global climate change problem.”

Currently available electrolyzers, which split water with electricity and are often used industrially, are not suited for artificial photosynthesis because they are very expensive and require an environment that has little to do with the conditions under which photosynthesis operates.

More engineering work needs to be done to integrate the new scientific discovery into existing photovoltaic systems, but Nocera said he is confident that such systems will become a reality.

“This is just the beginning,” said Nocera, principal investigator for the Solar Revolution Project funded by the Chesonis Family Foundation and co-Director of the Eni-MIT Solar Frontiers Center. “The scientific community is really going to run with this.”

The project is part of the MIT Energy Initiative, a program designed to help transform the global energy system to meet the needs of the future and to help build a bridge to that future by improving today’s energy systems.

MITEI Director Ernest Moniz said, “This discovery in the Nocera lab demonstrates that moving up the transformation of our energy supply system to one based on renewables will depend heavily on frontier basic science.”

This project was funded by the National Science Foundation and by the Chesonis Family Foundation, which gave MIT $10 million this spring to launch the Solar Revolution Project, with a goal to make the large scale deployment of solar energy within 10 years.

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Free Learning For The World - Audio and Video From World Universities, Museums, Public Media ...

Free Learning For The World

Audio and Video From World Universities, Museums, Public Media

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