PRESS DEMOCRAT– Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Petaluma, delivered her 400th speech against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on the House floor Tuesday.
Woolsey, a former Petaluma city councilwoman who was elected to Congress in 1992, began by noting that her series of anti-war speeches — delivered every day Congress was in session — began in April 2004, a year after the invasion of Iraq.
“And so since that day, I’ve stood here in this spot to say over and over again that these wars are eroding our spiritual core; bankrupting us morally and fiscally; teaching our children that warfare is ‘the new normal,’” she said.
Woolsey noted that the Iraq war and former President Bush were “quite popular” in 2004, but that “gradually, the tide of public opinion turned.”
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL– Last year, I
was at a billionaire’s home in California and I asked him to describe his
biggest worry. He pointed to a 19th century painting on the
wall, which depicted a female beggar receiving alms from a wealthy gentleman
and giving her patron a flower in return.
“That’s what I worry about,” he said. “But instead of flowers,
she’s got guns. Violence in the streets, aimed at the wealthy. That’s what I
worry about.”
It turns out he wasn’t alone. A new survey from Insite Security
and IBOPE Zogby International of those with liquid assets of $1 million or more
found that 94% of respondents are concerned about the global unrest around the
world today.
Fully 90% of respondents have a negative view of the current
global economic climate and 41% say they have little or no faith that the U.S.
will be able to right itself in this fiscal climate.
More than a third said security concerns have negatively affected
business or investment plans.
UNITE HERE– As University of California Regents prepare to vote for another tuition hike next week, students and workers gathered July 8, to protest drastic higher education cuts, while corporations like Disney win generous tax breaks.
Students and workers targeted their protest at media CEO Monica Lozano, who is the publisher of La Opinion newspaper and a University of California Regent. As a UC Regent, Lozano has approved seven recent tuition hikes, while simultaneously serving on the Disney corporate board, which last year won millions in potential tax breaks.
One such tax break, an Enterprise Zone distinction in Anaheim, could bring Disney more than $1 million in tax savings just by hiring 100 employees throughout the year, including student summer hires.
Students called on Lozano to reject the latest UC tuition hike. UC tuition and fees will top $11,000 per year this fall.
“As a UC Regent Monica Lozano is assisting in the devastation of California higher education, while getting paid by Disney, which is getting huge tax breaks,” said Joe Silva, a UCLA student. “Disney made $4.4 billion in net profit last year — does it really need a tax break?”
Disney paid Lozano $246,911 in 2010 to serve on its board.
Gov. Jerry Brown had proposed the repeal of the Enterprise Zone program, which costs the state roughly $465 million a year in tax revenue, but doesn’t create jobs, according to a study by the nonpartisan California Budget Project. However, in the final budget deal passed on June 28, the Enterprise Zone tax breaks were left in tact, while $650 million was cut from the UC system, $650 million cut from CSU system and $400 million cut from community colleges.
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC– It’s no illusion: Science has found a way to make not just objects but entire events disappear, experts say.
According
to new research by British physicists, it’s theoretically possible to
create a material that can hide an entire bank heist from human eyes and
surveillance cameras.
“The concepts are basically quite simple,” said Paul Kinsler, a physicist at Imperial College London, who created the idea with colleagues Martin McCall and Alberto Favaro.
Instead
this cloak would use special materials filled with metallic arrays
designed to adjust the speed of light passing through.
In theory,
the cloak would slow down light coming into the robbery scene while the
safecracker is at work. When the robbery is complete, the process would
be reversed, with the slowed light now racing to catch back up.
If
the “before” and “after” visions are seamlessly stitched together,
there should be no visible trace that anything untoward has happened.
One second there’s a closed safe, and the next second the safe has been
emptied.
KPFA– Abby Martin co-hosts this edition of Project Censored radio with Peter Phillips for KPFA’s nationally syndicated show. This episode covers updates in the peace community, the Bohemian Grove’s exclusion of women, and whistleblowers who have put everything on the line.
Listen to Media Roots’s in depth update on US wars and empire at 8:00 or read the transcription below:
***
This is Abby Martin from Media Roots, reporting war and empire news & analysis for Project Censored.
A recent report from Global Research revealed that prisoners are making 23 cents an hour to manufacture weapons components for high tech missile systems for the US defense industry. The use of prison slave labor to increase profits for huge corporations, such as BP did in their clean-up efforts, is unfair to workers and is an egregious expansion of the corporate state.
In an article called The Military Industrial Complex: The Enemy from Within, John Whitehead writes:
“Having been co-opted by greedy defense contractors and corrupt politicians, America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $15 billion a month (or $20 million an hour)—and that’s just what the government spends on foreign wars. That does not include the cost of maintaining and staffing the 1000-plus U.S. military bases spread around the globe…In fact, the Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety.”
In his June 22nd speech, Obama cited the official cost of the Afghanistan & Iraq wars at 1 trillion dollars, but according to economist and Nobel Prize Laureate Joseph Stiglitz, the US has spent well over $3 trillion dollars on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq– and that assessment is three years old.
The Iraq war is still going strong, even though we don’t hear about it much through the corporate press. June marked the deadliest month for the US military in the region since 2009. And still, the corporate media touts the official death toll for Iraqi civilians at approximately 100,000, despite a comprehensive 2008 survey from Opinion Research Business that placed the number of dead Iraqis well over one million. Again, this toll is from 2008 and does not account for the last three years of combat.
In an article written for TheNation, Jeremy Scahill reports:
“Under the terms of the Status of Forces agreement, all US forces are supposed to be out of Iraq by the end of 2011. Using private forces is a backdoor way of continuing a substantial US presence under the cover of “diplomatic security.” The kind of paramilitary force that Obama and Clinton are trying to build in Iraq is, in large part, a byproduct of the monstrous colonial fortress the United States calls its embassy in Baghdad and other facilities the US will maintain throughout Iraq after the “withdrawal.”
For Rebel Reports, Jeremy Scahill writes:
“According to recent Pentagon statistics, w/ Barack Obama as commander in chief, there has been a 23% increase in the number of “Private Security Contractors” working for the Department of Defense in Iraq in the second quarter of 2009 and a 29% increase in Afghanistan. Overall, contractors (armed and unarmed) now make up approximately 50% of the total military force, meaning there are a whopping 242,657 contractors left in Afghanistan and Iraq.”
About 46,000 US troops remain in Iraq, and there are negotiations to keep at least 10,000 troops there past the December 31st deadline. In protest to this inevitable expansion of the US occupation, 100 Iraqi lawmakers recently signed a document calling on the Iraqi government to demand departure of U.S. troops from the country as scheduled by the end of 2011 according to the Aswat al-Iraq news agency.
Earlier this year, the cost of the Afghanistan war started to outpace that of Iraq by ten billion dollars a month- 6.7 billion compared to Iraq’s 5.5 billion. Even though the rhetoric coming from the White House suggests that the Afghanistan war is getting scaled down- with reductions being carried out as planned- the amount of troops remaining in the country will actually still be more than there were before Obama’s 2009 military surge in the country and more than any time during Bush’s presidency.
On another front, the America’s secret war in Pakistan has drastically escalated under the Obama administration. Every month more innocent civilians are killed by drones, and there are US troops stationed in Pakistan performing covert CIA operations against alleged militants. On May 22, Seven thousand people in Karachi Pakistan protested America’s use of unmanned drones and demanded an immediate end to the missile strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas. Activists from the Tehreek-e-Insaf (Movement for Justice) participated in a two-day sit-in pleading the government to end its cooperation with America’s “war on terror.”
We are now coming up on the fourth month anniversary of the US-NATO’s bombing campaign in Libya, which costs US taxpayers approximately $40 million every month. Every missile being dropped costs one million dollars alone! The US is paying more than 75% of the defense budget for the 28 members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Libya and by September the official cost of the Libyan invasion will total a whopping $844 million.
There are still covert wars and unmanned drone attacks happening in Yemen and Somalia too, which the empire rationalizes as mere police actions instead of aggressive acts of war. With all the talk about the federal deficit and the need to cut back on social programs and spending in this country, there is little discussed about cutting the Pentagon’s ever expanding annual military budget, which has more than doubled in the last decade. In 1995, when defense spending was a fraction of what it is now, a poll done by the Program on International Policy Attitudes found that a majority of Americans were “convinced that defense spending has weakened the US economy.”
Before any more bombs are dropped in our name, we must voice our opposition to end these unconstitutional wars. The American taxpayers’ hard earned money needs to be applied here at home and not to the expansion of the military industrial complex– it’s the only way this country can be saved.
This is Abby Martin from Media Roots reporting for Project Censored News & Analysis
PRESS DEMOCRAT– Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Petaluma, delivered her 400th speech against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on the House floor Tuesday.
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC