Peace and Justice Post

By Norman Solomon, ZNet,  March 15, 2011

Like every other president since the 1940s, Barack Obama has promoted nuclear power. Now, with reactors melting down in Japan, the official stance is more disconnected from reality than ever.

Political elites are still clinging to the oxymoron of “safe nuclear power.” It’s up to us — people around the world — to peacefully and insistently shut those plants down.

There is no more techno-advanced country in the world than Japan. Nuclear power is not safe there, and it is not safe anywhere.

As the New York Times reported on Monday, “most of the nuclear plants in the United States share some or all of the risk factors that played a role at Fukushima Daiichi: locations on tsunami-prone coastlines or near earthquake faults, aging plants and backup electrical systems that rely on diesel generators and batteries that could fail in extreme circumstances.”

Nuclear power — from uranium mining to fuel fabrication to reactor operations to nuclear waste that will remain deadly for hundreds of thousands of years — is, in fact, a moral crime against future generations.

Continues >>

by David Krieger, CommonDreams.org, March 15, 2011

Our hearts go out to the people of Japan, who are suffering the horrendous effects of a massive earthquake and devastating tsunami.  Watching the news clips of the natural disasters in Japan makes us realize yet again the enormous power of nature and the limits of our capacities to control such power.  Large buildings, roadways and bridges buckled before the shockwaves of the earthquake.  Cars and trucks, even houses, seemed like small toys when they were swept away by the tsunami wave hitting the Japanese coastline.
“Nuclear power plant failures in Japan are a final wake-up call to replace nuclear power with safe, sustainable and renewable forms of energy”

In Japan, electric power has been knocked out for millions of people.  But the dangers are far greater than those associated with the temporary loss of power.  Some of Japan’s 55 nuclear reactors lost primary and backup power, which in turn led to core cooling problems, partial meltdowns and radiation releases within the reactor control rooms and into the atmosphere, with possibly far worse radiation releases still ahead.  Three of Japan’s 55 nuclear power reactors have reportedly experienced explosions.  Over 200,000 people have been evacuated from around the damaged nuclear power plants.

Continues >>

by Paul Craig Roberts, Foreign Policy Journal, March 14, 2011

If we were to be blessed with a 21st century George Orwell, he would coin a new “speak” to apply to “support the troops.”  Would he call this “Deceptive Speak”?  Or would he be more clever?

The words certainly deserve an Orwellian name.  The catch-phrase was rolled out the minute the war started, which makes one wonder about its public relations origin.  Who can oppose supporting the troops, at least before we learned from WikiLeaks and Abu Ghraib of the intentional killing of civilians and torturing of whoever happened to be rounded up in the various sweeps? All for the fun and games of it.

“Support the troops” originated in the public relations department of the military/security complex. What “support the troops” really means is to support the profits of the armaments industry and the neoconservative ideology of US world hegemony.

“Support the troops” is a clever PR slogan that causes Americans to turn a blind eye to the brutal exploitation of our soldiers and military families for profit and for an evil ideology.

Continues >>

There are three reasons why monitoring AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee) is a valuable use of time for anyone following events in the Middle East.

The first is that AIPAC faithfully reflects the positions of the Netanyahu government (actually it often telegraphs them before Netanyahu does).

The second is that AIPAC’s policies provide advance notice of the positions that will, not by coincidence, be taken by the United States Congress.

And third, AIPAC provides a reliable indicator of future policies of the Obama administration, which gets its “guidance” both from AIPAC itself and from Dennis Ross, former head of AIPAC’s think tank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and now the president’s top adviser on Middle East issues.

The next few months, as AIPAC prepares for its annual conference (May 22-24), will be especially fruitful for AIPAC watchers. The conference is a huge event, attended by most members of the House and Senate, the prime minister of Israel, and either by the president or vice president of the United States. It is also attended by thousands of delegates from around the country and by candidates for Congress who raise money for their campaigns at the event. This year, the leading Republican candidates for president will also be in attendance, all vying for support by promising undying loyalty to the AIPAC agenda.

Continues >>

By Patrick Martin, wsws.org, 12 March 2011

An otherwise desultory press conference Friday morning featured the first public questioning of President Obama about the abusive treatment of Bradley Manning, the Army private who faces 34 criminal charges, some bearing the death penalty, for allegedly leaking to WikiLeaks evidence of US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as State Department cables revealing US diplomatic intrigues.

Manning is jailed at the Quantico Marine Corps base near Washington DC, under conditions that have been denounced by Amnesty International and other human rights organizations as tantamount to torture. He has been held in solitary confinement there for more than seven months. In the last week he has been deprived of all clothing during sleeping hours, then compelled to stand naked for inspection every morning.

If another country were meting out similarly sadistic treatment to a captured American POW, the Pentagon and the American media would be howling about war crimes. But Manning’s treatment has been largely blacked out of the corporate-controlled mass media. Friday’s question was the first time the subject has been raised by the White House press corps.

Continues >>

Bahrain has seen weeks of protests as demonstrators pressure the nation’s rulers to offer reforms [Reuters]

Hundreds of Saudi troops have entered Bahrain to help protect government facilities there, according to witnesses.

Bahrain television broadcast images of the troops entering the Gulf State, which lies between Qatar and Saudi Arabia, on Monday.

The images back up earlier claims by Saudi sources that a force had entered Bahrain whose Sunni rulers have faced weeks of protests and growing pressure from a majority Shia population to institute political reforms.

“About 1,000 Saudi soldiers entered Bahrain early on Monday morning through the causeway to Bahrain,” the Reuters news agency reported a Saudi source as saying, referring to the 26km causeway that connects the island kingdom to Saudi Arabia.

“They are part of the Gulf Co-operation Council [GCC] force that would guard the government installations.”

In Saudi Arabia, the SPA state news agency carried a government statement saying: “The council of ministers has confirmed that it has answered a request by Bahrain for support.”

Continues >>

by Chris Hedges, Truthdigcom, .March 14, 2011

The liberal class is discovering what happens when you tolerate the intolerant. Let hate speech pollute the airways. Let corporations buy up your courts and state and federal legislative bodies. Let the Christian religion be manipulated by charlatans to demonize Muslims, gays and intellectuals, discredit science and become a source of personal enrichment. Let unions wither under corporate assault. Let social services and public education be stripped of funding. Let Wall Street loot the national treasury with impunity. Let sleazy con artists use lies and deception to carry out unethical sting operations on tottering liberal institutions, and you roll out the welcome mat for fascism.Damon Terrell speaks to demonstrators at the state Capitol in Madison, Wis., during a series of protests against a then-pending bill to eliminate collective bargaining rights for many state workers. Last Friday Gov. Scott Walker signed the legislation into law. (AP / Andy Manis)

The liberal class has busied itself with the toothless pursuits of inclusiveness, multiculturalism, identity politics and tolerance—a word Martin Luther King never used—and forgotten about justice. It naively sought to placate ideological and corporate forces bent on the destruction of the democratic state. The liberal class, like the misguided democrats in the former Yugoslavia or the hapless aristocrats in the Weimar Republic, invited the wolf into the henhouse. The liberal class forgot that, as Karl Popper wrote in “The Open Society and Its Enemies,” “If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”

Continues >>

An anti-war  Tamil-English  song

By Villivaru

There’s no denying its historic decline, but the left does not lack for issues. It needs only organisation

Richard Wolff, The Guardian, March 13, 2011

An estimated 100,000 people gathered at the state capitol in Madison, Wisconsin on Saturday 26 February 2011 to protest Governor Scott Walker’s budget bill that would remove collective bargaining rights from public employees. Photograph: AP Photo/Wisconsin State Journal, John Hart

The Capitol Square in Madison at 2 p.m. today. Unionists rushed to the Capitol last night and returned today to protest the surprise passage of the governor’s anti-union bill. Photo: antrover.

Police dragged a hundred demonstrators from the Wisconsin statehouse Thursday to break a blockade trying to prevent state representatives from passing the governor’s anti-union bill.

Several thousand bellowed their disapproval outside, joined by more than 1,000 high school and middle school students who walked out of class again to march together to the Capitol.

None of the protesters were arrested, and state representatives spent the afternoon with police blocking Capitol entrances while they debated inside. Republicans have a clear majority in the Assembly and are expected to pass the bill.

Union leaders and a crowd that grew by thousands yesterday evening and throughout the day denounced Wisconsin’s Senate Republicans, who rewrote a month-old bill yesterday to focus just on attacking union rights and collective bargaining.

That allowed them to pass the bill without the participation of Senate Democrats, who reportedly are returning to the state today. Republicans didn’t need them because a quorum of 20 is required only for fiscal measures.

Continues >>