from WSWS

US employers will be able to largely avoid penalties under the Obama-backed health care legislation, while offering very limited plans to their workforces. An article in Monday’s Wall Street Journal notes that these bare-bones plans may lack key benefits such as hospital coverage.

In the run-up to full implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), the Journal reports, a crop of benefits advisers and insurance brokers is sprouting up to pitch these low-benefit plans to employers. While these plans would cover minimal requirements such a preventive services, some would provide no coverage for surgery, X-rays or prenatal case. Others might charge fees for additional service, such as $100 a day for a hospital visit.

Details of these “skinny” plans are the latest confirmation that the Obama health-care overhaul is tailored to the profit interests of big business and the private insurance industry. The Obama administration’s claim that the ACA will extend decent-quality, affordable health care to millions of those currently uninsured is increasingly being exposed as a fraud. In fact, despite President Obama’s repeated assurances that “if you like your plan, you can keep it,” companies are looking for ways to hack away at provisions of existing coverage for their employees.

[read the rest, here]

Police fired rubber bullets on tens of thousands of protesting Bangladeshi garment workers in the Ashulia industrial belt near Dhaka yesterday, injuring at least fifty.

Workers were protesting to demand higher wages and safe working conditions. They were also demanding the death penalty for the owner of the Rana Plaza clothing factory that collapsed on April 24, killing 1,127 garment workers, according to official figures.

Police sources said 20,000 workers joined the protest yesterday, blocking the main highway in Ashulia. Ashulia is the hub of Bangladesh’s garment industry, where 300 factories are located, producing thirty percent of the country’s garment exports.

Workers are demanding a $US100 monthly basic wage. They now receive a paltry monthly wage of $37, the world’s lowest pay for garment workers.

[American companies, led by Walmart and Gap, lag on Bangladesh safety plan]

[read the rest, here]

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India’s Ministry of Environment and Forests has decided to forbid the keeping of captive dolphins for public entertainment anywhere in the country.

In a policy statement released Friday, the ministry advised state governments to reject any proposal to establish a dolphinarium “by any person / persons, organizations, government agencies, private or public enterprises that involves import, capture of cetacean species to establish for commercial entertainment, private or public exhibition and interaction purposes whatsoever.”

The statement issued by B.S. Bonal, the member secretary of the Central Zoo Authority of India, acknowledges that cetaceans in general do not survive well in captivity, saying, “Confinement in captivity can seriously compromise the welfare and survival of all types of cetaceans by altering their behaviour and causing extreme distress.”

Noting that India’s national aquatic animal, the Ganges River dolphin, as well as the snubfin dolphin are listed in Schedule-I and all cetacean species are listed in Schedule II part I of the Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972, the ministry said it is important to protect these endangered species from captivity and exploitation.

“Whereas cetaceans in general are highly intelligent and sensitive, and various scientists who have researched dolphin behavior have suggested that the unusually high intelligence; as compared to other animals means that dolphin should be seen as ‘non-human persons’ and as such should have their own specific rights and is morally unacceptable to keep them captive for entertainment purpose,” the ministry said.

[read the rest, here]

UPDATE: Apparently I’m not the only one sick of these political hacks using our misery to push their own agendas:

“What do you get when you take one monster twister, drop it into a staunchly conservative red state and mix it up with the political ideology of a Democratic leader at the helm in the White House? A lot of self-righteous politicizing at a time when people are still trapped under the rubble of collapsed buildings.” RT

Republicans are using the crisis to push for deeper genocidal austerity cuts across the nation on behalf of Wall Street while the dems seem satisfied using it to garner support for creating a carbon credits market that Wall Street will love as well.

UPDATE: Reports that flooded the MSM late yesterday and this morning had the death toll as high as 91 with 20 kids confirmed dead. That number has just been revised downward to a total of 24.

UPDATE: These photos show the path of the tornado from the air and as all these reporters are going around saying it was a mile wide, you can clearly see it wasn’t.

——-

A democratic senator from Rhode Island, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, had this to say  about the tornado that touched down in Oklahoma yesterday, at least partially blaming those who question man-made global warming, people he calls “extremists”, for the tornado and pretty much everything else bad that has (will) happen across the country:

“We are stuck in this together. When cyclones tear up Oklahoma and hurricanes swamp Alabama and wildfires scorch Texas, you come to us, the rest of the country, for billions of dollars to recover. And the damage that your polluters and deniers are doing doesn’t just hit Oklahoma and Alabama and Texas. It hits Rhode Island with floods and storms. It hits Oregon with acidified seas, it hits Montana with dying forests. So, like it or not, we’re in this together…

… I don’t want this future. I don’t want a Republican Party disgraced, that let its extremists run off the cliff, and an America suffering from grave economic and environmental and diplomatic damage because we failed, because we didn’t wake up and do our duty to our people, and because we didn’t lead the world. I do not want that future. But that’s where we’re headed.” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse

It’s not surprising that a politician would leap to the podium as soon as people start weeping for a lost child, trying to make political points off someone else’s horrific tragedy. After all, those who seek power these days are possibly the lowest form of life on the planet and certainly the most destructive. The fact that he is pushing for an agenda (man made global warming) which will create a vast carbon credit market (another bubble for the banks and financial elites to profit from) while enacting strict regulations on the basic building block of all life on the planet (carbon) is also not surprising. The financial institutions are the primary backers of congress and all politicians these days. Service to their interests above all else is the mantra of the modern-day political animal.

It’s also not surprising that Sen. Whitehouse would resort to calling those of us who think for ourselves and don’t just go along to get along, “extremists”. It’s a dangerous word these days. And a dangerous association for Whitehouse to make. But that is the world we live in, isn’t it? If you don’t praise the emperor’s new clothes, if you think for yourself and say what you see clearly before you, you’re an “extremist”.

And we all know what fate awaits the extremists in America, don’t we?

When a tornado hits Oklahoma, it’s not really shocking. Oklahoma gets a lot of tornadoes. That’s not to dismiss the tragedy these people feel nor is it to say we don’t need to do everything we can to help them.

In times like these tragedies of the natural kind are used to promote man-made global warming and in order to do that, they are often made to appear much worse than they are.

I always take hits when I write articles like these. I certainly did when Sandy came ashore as little more than a tropical depression and the press turned it into some sort of biblical tempest. The “global warming” crowd lept all over it, till actual scientists came out saying global warming had nothing to do with it.

The same will probably happen here, but that isn’t stopping the opinion makers from using the deaths of these people to claim the end is nigh if we don’t hand over still more billions to Al Gore and his venture capitalist partners so they can craft a carbon credits market which somehow will defend us all with the credit default swaps and derivatives they make from it.

So before that all happens, let’s put this Oklahoma tragedy into perspective.

Over at Gawker, this is the report:

“A massive, mile-wide tornado touched down in Moore, Oklahoma Monday afternoon, killing at least 51 people, including 20 children. A reporter from local news station KFOR supposedly called it “the biggest, most destructive tornado in the history of the world,” and estimated it was two to three times the magnitude of the massive tornados that hit Oklahoma in 1999.” Gawker

“The biggest, most destructive tornado in the history of the world“? That’s just simply stupid. Or it’s a lie. It’s not even the most destructive in Oklahoma’s history.

Two years ago to the day, an F5 (one classification higher than the F4 that hit yesterday) hit Joplin, Mo., killing 158 people

Back in 1999 a series of tornadoes spawned a true F5 monster, the 1999 Bridge Creek–Moore tornado, which hit the exact same area, Moore Ok. killing 41 people.

Back in 1953 over the course of only two days, the Waco Tornado Outbreak saw 33 twisters touch down, killing a total of 140 people, 114 of whom lost their lives when a true F5 ran straight through the middle of Waco.

On March 18th, 1925, the single deadliest tornado in U.S. history, the Tri-State Tornado, took the lives of 695 people. It was massive to say the least.

That’s just a few of the worst from the history here in the states. There is a list of the ten worst tornadoes in our brief history. Yesterday’s tornado in Oklahoma won’t make that list.

In 1996 in Bangladesh, an F5 touched down killing 700 people and destroying 30,000 homes.

Another one in the same country in 1989 killed 1,300 people and cut a mile-wide swath of destruction 50 miles long. It’s wind speeds were so high, it simply erased everything it touched… even pulling the grass out of the ground.

In April of 2001, more than 1,000 tornadoes touched down in the United States. That was a record then. I don’t know if it still holds up today.

In April of 2011, just two years ago, the most tornadoes ever spawned in one day, 209, occurred on the 27th.

My point is simple: this is not the most destructive and deadly tornado in the history of the world, nor does it qualify to lead those classifications in the U.S. or even in Oklahoma.

When you exaggerate events like this at a time like this, one can only surmise that you are doing it in support of a political agenda, the kind made perfectly clear by Sen. Whitehouse. Your credibility is tossed out the window in exchange for recognition from those who aim to mislead the public to their own ends.

But, just to put it in perspective, this horrible tragedy being felt by so many in Moore Ok. certainly feels like the worst that has ever happened in human history because it has happened to them. And we need to help those people recover and rebuild their lives as best as we can because we are a community in the end, no matter where you live, no matter what side of the artificial divide you claim as your own.

But this is no more the fault of those critical thinkers who look at the “scientific consensus” of man-made global warming and say “bunk” than yesterday’s tornado was the biggest and most destructive in the history of mankind. Like the science of global warming, facts like his just don’t stand up to further review and you marginalize the suffering of those effected by it when you try to use it so disingenuously for your own purposes.

… Under US law, it is not illegal to publish classified information. That fact, along with the First Amendment’s guarantee of press freedoms, is what has prevented the US government from ever prosecuting journalists for reporting on what the US government does in secret. This newfound theory of the Obama DOJ – that a journalist can be guilty of crimes for “soliciting” the disclosure of classified information – is a means for circumventing those safeguards and criminalizing the act of investigative journalism itself. These latest revelations show that this is not just a theory but one put into practice, as the Obama DOJ submitted court documents accusing a journalist of committing crimes by doing this.

That same “solicitation” theory, as the New York Times reported back in 2011, is the one the Obama DOJ has been using to justify its ongoing criminal investigation of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange: that because Assange solicited or encouraged Manning to leak classified information, the US government can “charge [Assange] as a conspirator in the leak, not just as a passive recipient of the documents who then published them.” When that theory was first disclosed, I wrote that it would enable the criminalization of investigative journalism generally:…

[read the rest, here]

So I’m pecking around on the interweb thingys and I come across my Facebook page and start scanning down to see links people have put up and there is one from Stan Goff with this big picture of Bono and his trademark rose colored glasses. It’s a link to an article by someone I once was involved with running a website, Rady Ananda. That came out wrong… I wasn’t “involved” with her. Just the site.

Anyway, the article she wrote that Stan just linked to, Celeb Bono Partners with Monsanto, G8, to Biowreck Africa, first appeared on Food Freedom News and it’s about how President Obama got together with a bunch of corporations and decided they had to infuse the whole of Africa with “liberalized Western capital” and some good old fashioned genetically modified organisms from his friends at Monsanto. It was the launch of what they called the “Grow Africa Partnership”.

“At the G8 Summit held two weeks ago at Camp David, President Obama met with private industry and African heads of state to launch the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, a euphemism for monocultured, genetically modified crops and toxic agrochemicals aimed at making poor farmers debt slaves to corporations, while destroying the ecosphere for profit.

And Bono, of the rock group U2, is out shilling for Monsanto on this one.

It’s phase 2 of the Green Revolution. Tanzania, Ghana, and Ethiopia are the first to fall for the deception, with Mozambique, Cote d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso and other African nations lining up for the “Grow Africa Partnership,” under Obama’s “Global Agricultural Development” plan.” Rady Ananda

Remember, this was first published in July of 2012.

Just last week Monsonto won a ruling over how farmers here can use the seeds they grow in their crops, bringing the exact kind of bio-tyranny to our farmers that killed off so many Indian farmers over the past 15 years.

In fact, the Huffington Post made a name for itself a decade ago featuring stories about how wrong and evil it was for Monsanto to be given such control over the farmers in India and now they just did a TV show (yes, they have a “news” show as well like everyone else on “The Company’s” payroll) saying that the recent ruling in favor of Monsanto was the right thing to do. They said it was all about protecting Monsanto’s business profits and never mentioned once what it does to the small and mid-sized farmers. That never factored into their equation.

Funny how the world turns, ain’t it?

Anyway, back to the story.

So Rady’s article was going on about how the power elites were lying through their teeth saying this was going to be a great thing for the people of Africa… of course it’s always for “the people” don’t you know… when I read these quotes she included from another person’s writing on the same subject:

“But African civil society wants no part of this latest Monsanto aligned ‘public private partnership.’ Whatever will the progressives do now that their flawless hero has teamed up with their most hated nemesis to exploit an entire continent like they did to India not that long ago?

With a commitment of $3 billion, Obama plans to ‘partner up’ with mega-multinationals like Monsanto, Diageo, Dupont, Cargill, Vodafone, Walmart, Pepsico, Prudential, Syngenta International, and Swiss Re because, as one USAID representative says ‘There are things that only companies can do, like building silos for storage and developing seeds and fertilizers.’

Bono says that there has to be a ‘public private partnership’ in order to get this done and that they are going to be using the ideas of the African people and farmers. Really? This is what the African farmers say to that…

‘We request that: – governments, FAO, the G8, the World Bank and the GAFSP reconsider their promotion of Public/Private Partnerships which, as they are now conceived, are not suitable instruments to support the family farms which are the very basis of African food security and sovereignty.’ African Civil Society Organizations

I wonder if that could be any clearer. They don’t WANT the public private partnerships involved in this process…. It’s not enough that huge mega-corporations are bleeding the nations of Africa dry by sucking the valuable mineral resources out of their hills. No. As Bono says about the development in Africa:

‘They’re future consumers for the United States. The president is talking business. This is good. It’s a whole new development paradigm today. The old donor/recipient relationship… it’s over.’ Bono

If that writing style (or lack of style) sounds familiar, it should. I wrote it.

Rady quoted yours truly in her article on how Bono and Obama championing the new model of assisting other nations… through “business”… i.e. “profits”

I wrote the article on May 20th 2012 and I was quite incensed that the progressives were completely ignoring Obama’s latest betrayal. With a few notable exceptions like Rady, it got very little attention.

But it stuck me as I read this, as I was shocked to see something of mine included in a random Facebook click, that I just wrote about that very same meeting in 2012 just the other day when I was writing about what may have been the actual motivation behind the Benghazi Psyop and our 35 nation invasion of Africa on behalf of 45 corporations.

And in fact, that quote I used in my article that showed up in Rady’s writing, makes it perfectly clear: Obama HAD to figure out some way to muscle the various nations in Africa because many of them had already openly rejected their plan.

The article I wrote back in 2012 was called President Obama Pitches CFR Plan: Looks to Bring the India Model of GM Genocide to Africa

“President Obama has announced his big initiative to save the starving people of Africa by “unleashing the powers of the market” all across their continent. It’s called the New Alliance for Food and Nutrition Security. Obama has made this announcement at a G8 summit meeting at Camp David (created back in the 1930′s under the Works Progress Administration part of the New Deal) hosted by none other than the Chicago Council on Foreign Affairs. You may remember them. They changed their name back in 2008 when it was inconvenient for the wife of the next president to be affiliated with the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations.” Scott Creighton May 2012

The one I wrote just the other day: The “Why?” of Benghazi: “a pretext to kill more Muslims, to steal more resources” for 45 Different Corporations

“A $3.5 billion dollar investment is one hell of a “why” now isn’t it? The conference mentioned above actually took place at the The Chicago Council on Global Affairs, “Founded in 1922 as The Chicago Council on Foreign Relations“

In May of 2012, a plan is announced at the Council on Foreign Relations to effectively recolonize the whole of Africa for 45 of our favorite crony corporations.” Scott Creighton

It’s funny how these trivial little treasons they commit end up snowballing into a catastrophe in the end, isn’t it? That’s because when you start something with the wrong intentions in place, you can’t go anywhere but down from there. And when they go bad, as they often do, they just get progressively worse to the point where you have ridiculous lies being spouted by apologists and their treason being ignored as if it never happened.

In my 2012 article, I focused a great deal on how civil society in Africa openly and vocally rejected this new “private/public partnership” plan concocted by the G8 corporate states.

I should have remembered that for my 2013 article.

It’s VERY relevant to my point that the Obama administration KNEW they needed muscle in some of these countries to achieve their desired cooperation and to put that muscle on the ground all across Africa as needed, they needed a FLEXIBLE PSYOP which featured a target enemy that would move from nation to nation on the continent as needed. At the risk of boring you, what the African Civil Society Organizations said in May of 2012 bares repeating:

‘We request that: – governments, FAO, the G8, the World Bank and the GAFSP reconsider their promotion of Public/Private Partnerships which, as they are now conceived, are not suitable instruments to support the family farms which are the very basis of African food security and sovereignty.’ African Civil Society Organizations

by Asad Ismi, from Global Research

Celebrating the sweeping triumph of his socialist economic program which he calls “the citizens’ revolution,” the popular President declared to his supporters:

“In this revolution the citizens are in charge, not capital. This victory belongs to each of you. No one and nothing is stopping this revolution, my friends. We are making history.

Correa promised to radicalize the Citizens’ Revolution with free public education and health care. Up to now, his government has significantly expanded public access to both benefits.  Given his domination of the legislature, Correa vowed to push through reforms that will make his socialist model permanent.

Ecuador is a South American country with a population of 14.6 million people, 37% of whom lived in poverty seven years ago. Since he was first elected in 2007, Correa had cut the poverty rate to 28% by 2011, a 27% reduction. He also more than doubled spending on education, halved unemployment to 4.1%, added 95,000 jobs, and greatly increased government spending on health care and subsidized housing. These impressive welfare achievements have ensured his popularity and given him a public approval rating of 85%.

The key to Correa’s success has been his building of a strong, independent, democratic socialist state which controls the economic system and the financial sector. The state now sets economic policy, not the Ecuadorian economic élite in league with U.S. imperialism, as was the case before. And the main aim of this progressive state is the redistribution of income to the poor Ecuadorian majority, a project that has made Correa highly popular.

[read the rest, here]

(As a side note: I  wrote a comment  earlier this morning to a guy  before reading this article just now. I talked about how I would make some changes to the way this country is run at the present. Turns out many of those suggestions just happen to be mentioned in this article and guess what? They seem to work)

“Correa’s reforms, as the Washington D.C.-based Centre for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) concludes,

“played a major role in bringing about Ecuador’s strong economic growth [5% a year since 2007], increased government revenue [and] a substantial decline in poverty and unemployment,” while minimizing the effect of the global recession which started in 2008.  As Mark Weisbrot, an economist at CEPR, describes it, “The end result of these and other reforms was to move the financial sector toward something that would serve the interests of the public, instead of the other way around (as in the U.S).”

The CEPR report adds:

“What is most remarkable is that many of these reforms were unorthodox or against the prevailing wisdom of what governments are supposed to do in order to promote economic progress. Taking executive control over the central bank, defaulting on one-third of the foreign debt, increasing regulation and taxation of the financial sector, increasing restrictions on international capital flows, greatly expanding the size and role of government – these are measures that are supposed to lead to economic ruin. The conventional wisdom is also that it is most important to please investors, including foreign creditors, which this government clearly did not do. While not all of Ecuador’s reforms went against orthodox policy advice, many of them did – and they succeeded. It should be no surprise that Correa [is so] popular.” by Asad Ismi, from Global Research

UPDATE: You know, these guys and their “professor” come across so badly (one is clearly high at one point in the interview and was described earlier as a drug addict) in this film, it almost makes me think that Hollywood released this recent Google thing in an effort to get more people to watch the film.

Uh, wait a minute.. maybe I spoke too soon. I think I like these guys. “Sweden is not in the United States. Your laws do not apply here“… “Please go sodomize yourself“…. heeheehee. I like these guys.)

from BitTorrent

It is no secret that Hollywood is trying to take down as many pirated movies as they can, but their targeting of a Creative Commons Pirate Bay documentary is something new. Viacom, Paramount, Fox and Lionsgate have all asked Google to take down links pointing to the Pirate Bay documentary TPB-AFK. But is it a secret plot to silence the voices of the Pirate Bay’s founders, or just another screw up of automated DMCA takedowns?

After years of anticipation, The Pirate Bay documentary TPB-AFK was finally released to the public in February.

The film, created by Simon Klose, is available for no cost and has already been watched by millions of people. The public response to this free release model has been overwhelmingly positive, but it’s now meeting resistance from Hollywood, TPB’s arch rival.

Over the past weeks several movie studios have been trying to suppress the availability of TPB-AFK by asking Google to remove links to the documentary from its search engine. The links are carefully hidden in standard DMCA takedown notices for popular movies and TV-shows.

[read the rest, here]

UPDATE 4: I KNOW I PROMISED….  Turns out Astroturf Adam was kinda on stage (it seems to have been a rock of some sort) and he did have the event’s wired microphone briefly while sharing the stage with another guy. A reader left me a lovely comment and a link to Adam holding a corded mic. So there you have it. There’s a cord, so Adam is innocent. yeah.

UPDATE 3: (OK.. but this is the last one, I promise)… according to a woman on the street (next to a guy screaming at a building with a bullhorn) our prefabricated hero Astroturf Adam is being charged with a felony or two (resisting arrest, assaulting an officer) and being detained without bail til at least Thursday. So much for Adam carrying his gun to D.C. on July 4th.

Maybe now Astroturf Adam will listen to his thousands for former supporters and fellow libertarian gun owners of America who have been telling him what a bad idea it is to go to DC with semi-automatic weapons strapped to your backs. Maybe now that he is facing two felonies, he will tell his peeps that they should show up sans bangsticks and protest peacefully to get their message across (and a good message it is, by the way) without committing a slew of felonies and having their guns confiscated and potentially their rights to own firearms permanently removed. Maybe he’ll do that. But I’m not holding my breath.

UPDATE 2: I promise… no more updates… someone at the Daily Paul asks:

Why do you think Adam is a

Submitted by limelemon on Mon, 05/20/2013 – 12:34. Permalink