This is a discussion based on a report of a very small anti-war protest in the USA. In a large city the protest was about 30 people holding placards on a street corner.

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John S Veitch wrote:

I'm an outsider, (from New Zealand) and the low level of concern in the USA about the erosion of democracy, the flouting of the law and the criminal actions of the Bush administration really surprises me.

The propaganda machine in the USA is clearly very effective. People seem to have no idea what's really happening, are therefore unconcerned. If this is YOU, please make an effort on the Internet to read the foreign press, and to take part in conversations that involve a worldwide group of participants.

Here's the truth. GW Bush wanted to be a GREAT President. In his view he needed therefore to be a WAR PRESIDENT. So from the beginning his ambition was to get into a good war. Both the Democrats and the Republicans are to blame for deciding that the place for a good war was Iraq. The economic sanctions ...

http://www.celsias.com/blog/2007/03/29/european-bees-taking-a-nosedive/

We’ve had significant interest in our recent posts on Colony Collapse Disorder in the U.S. (here, and here). The latter of the two stories intimated that European bees are also being affected. Spiegel have just released an article giving more info on this mysterious phenomenon – now hitting Germany’s bees hard – and experts are concerned that GM crops may be the root of the problem.

A mysterious decimation of bee populations has German beekeepers worried, while a similar phenomenon in the United States is gradually assuming catastrophic proportions. The consequences for agriculture and the economy could be enormous.

… The problem, says Haefeker, has a number of causes, one being the varroa mite, introduced from Asia, and another is the widespread practice in agriculture of spraying wildflowers with herbicides and practicing monoculture. Another possible cause, according to Haefeker, is the controversial and growing use of genetic ...

Hello Again Everyone.

This is important no matter where you live.
Local democratic action is a the centre of creating quality communities. Here is a way to help.

In almost every city there is inadequate political response to many of issues. E-Democracy is part of a possible future solution. You don't do this alone. You plug into resources that are already in place.

For instance we've just launched the Canterbury Local Issues Online Forum, here in NZ. You can see and read the posts here. You don't need to be a member to do that.
http://forums.e-democracy.org/groups/canterburyissues/index.html

On this page you can join E-Democracy.org yourself.
http://forums.e-democracy.org/index.html

You will see that there are several successful groups in the USA. (Actually 10 years of success for the oldest group.) Some in the UK. and now one in New Zealand. You can help create a group in your town or region. It's taken our committee about four months to get from start to launch.

There is a help group for ...

This is a small part of a very interesting discussion on Ryze. It began with a simple list of issues, the news media, the current presidential race, taxes, terrorism, you know the sort of things people listed.

Then Peter Flentov ignited the list with a comment about the USA returning to the Dark Ages, as evidenced by "Blind faith (and I'm not just thinking about religious faith) seems to increasingly trump logic and reason, even when there is overwhelming empirical and logical evidence to contradict irrational beliefs. Politics has devolved into emotional sound-bites; there is little meaningful debate about values and ideas. How can someone claim to be "pro life" when they are in favor of the death sentence?"

"In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries people fought for basic human liberties and rights. Today a complacent populace abdicates these rights with little protest. The right of the state and the right of the corporation is more important than the right of the individual."

After several interesting ...

SilentPatriot on Thursday, March 8th, 2007

[Excellent graph missing here.]

The time has long past for us to fight back against the administration's baseless propaganda about Iraq and its effect on worldwide terrorism. Mother Jones help us do that with their exclusive study:

Has the war in Iraq increased jihadist terrorism? The Bush administration has offered two responses: First, the moths-to-aflame argument, which says that Iraq draws terrorists who would otherwise “be plotting and killing Americans across the world and within our own borders,” as President Bush put it in 2005. Second, the hard-to-say position: “Are more terrorists being created in the world?” then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld asked at a press conference in September 2006. “We don’t know. The world doesn’t know. There are not good metrics to determine how many people are being trained in a radical madrasa school in some country.”

We have undertaken such a study, drawing on data in the mipt-rand Terrorism database ...

The election of the Bush administration exposed many problems with the voting process in the USA. Ex-president Jimmy Carter has said that the elections in Venezuela which some Americans like to sneer at, were a model of good practice that the USA cannot emulate.

The news media, supports the war and the Republican party and is an ineffective participant in the process of questioning government policy. The news media, the Republicans and the Democrats entered a race for public favour by demonstrating how tough and uncompromising they were against Iraq. We can see where that led.

The Democrats, serve the same paymaster as the Republicans. The are also committed to the war and to making America a great nation. They are effectively junior Republicans in all that they believe and stand for. If they were not, funding for the next election wouldn't flow their way. The USA is a country run by the rich for the rich, and both parties are subservient to the paymaster.

So there is no open public debate about the ...

By Nick Childs
BBC world affairs correspondent

A majority of people believe that Israel and Iran have a mainly negative influence in the world, a poll for the BBC World Service suggests.

It shows that the two countries are closely followed by the United States and North Korea.

The poll asked 28,000 people in 27 countries to rate a dozen countries plus the EU in terms of whether they have a positive or negative influence.

Canada, Japan and the EU are viewed most positively in the survey.

'Traditional divides'

In January, the BBC World Service revealed polling results that suggested most people think the US has a mainly negative influence in the world - and that the numbers had increased significantly in the last couple of years.

This latest GlobeScan survey, mostly of the same people, confirms those findings.

But it also suggests that two countries are viewed even more negatively - first Israel, and then Iran.

North Korea is just behind the US.

Israel, of course, has long provoked ...

Extract from Mother Earth News.
From "Four Arguments For The Elimination of Television"
By Jerry Mander


In a scientific experiment "some chimpanzees had been isolated, one to a room, and were being taught to communicate with a team of scientists by way of symbols. Whenever they had a need or a desire they would push buttons. If they wanted a banana, they located a button marked with a symbol of a banana, pushed it and a banana came down a chute.

Other buttons had other symbols. There was one for water and one for changes in lighting. There was even one that requested physical affection. When the chimp pushed it, a human scientist would enter the room, hug and play with the chimp for a time, and then go back out the door.

The chimpanzees’ world of experience was reduced to what they could ask for with these buttons. What could be requested, of course, was limited to what the scientists had thought to provide. Since cost was a factor in the experiment, the scientists did not attempt to duplicate the ...

It is hard to make the travesty of 12-year-old Deamonte Driver’s death more plain than reporter Mary Otto did in Wednesday’s story about him in The Washington Post:

Twelve-year-old Deamonte Driver died of a toothache Sunday.

A routine, $80 tooth extraction might have saved him.

If his mother had been insured.

If his family had not lost its Medicaid.

If Medicaid dentists weren't so hard to find.

Deamonte Driver had a toothache that led to an infection that spread to his brain. A long, $200,000 hospital stay couldn't save his life.

Deamonte's family lives in Prince George’s County, Maryland, within about a half-hour’s drive from the U.S. Capitol. In the Capitol, the conversation about universal health care coverage is dominated by why it can’t happen — it’s wrong to get the government too involved; we can’t buck the powerful insurance and pharmaceutical companies; we can’t raise taxes to cover the costs, even if those taxes would mean more efficiency and, most importantly, better health.

Those ...

Published on Saturday, February 24, 2007 by the Capital Times (Madison, WI)

by Mike Konopacki/Kathy Wilkes

The war in Iraq gets worse every day. Americans want to end it, but how? Cut and run? Partition the country? Bring in the U.N.?

We've heard the politicians' spin, but it seems that's all they do. And as they spin and bob and weave and cover their political behinds, people continue to suffer and die.

We sent politicians a message in the 2006 election. We have their attention. Now is the time for us - as citizens, as voters - to capitalize on our clout and tell them what they must do: impeach, convict, imprison. It's the only way we can begin to end the war.

Unless the Bush regime is stopped, Iraq will get even worse. We might also end up in a deadly conflict with Iran. Bush & Co. have already deployed the same scare tactics they used to launch their illegal war against Iraq. Yes, illegal. It's not a "mistake" or "blunder." It's a crime, a violation of U.S. and international laws. No one's being ...

McClatchy Newspapers

Posted on Thu, Feb. 22, 2007 By Tony Pugh

Source: U.S. Census Bureau
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/news/nation/16760690.htm
(Below is the first part only of a much longer article. See link above for the full script.)

WASHINGTON – The percentage of poor Americans who are living in severe poverty has reached a 32-year high, millions of working Americans are falling closer to the poverty line and the gulf between the nation’s “haves” and “have-nots” continues to widen.

A McClatchy Newspapers analysis of 2005 census figures, the latest available, found that nearly 16 million Americans are living in deep or severe poverty. A family of four with two children and an annual income of less than $9,903 – half the federal poverty line – was considered severely poor in 2005. So were individuals who made less than $5,080 a year.

The McClatchy analysis found that the number of severely poor Americans grew by 26 percent from 2000 to 2005. That’s 56 percent ...

February 13, 2007 By John Pilger

How many days of mourning have I attended? Vivid in the memory are wreaths thrown on to Sydney Harbour, and men in crumpled hats and women in loose frocks standing on foreshores where their forebears saw the first ships carrying white men. On 14 February, there was a day of mourning for T J Hickey, an Aboriginal boy who was chased by police three years ago and ended up impaled on a spiked iron fence in The Block, a ghetto within sight of Sydney’s banks and corporate towers. Commemorative silences were held for “TJ” and his violent death was likened to Australia’s many Aboriginal deaths in custody, such as that of Mulrunji Doomadgee on Palm Island.

Palm Island is one of the most beautiful on the Great Barrier Reef, yet few outsiders take the short flight from Townsville. Established in 1918 as a detention camp for Aboriginal men, women and children convicted of the crimes of homelessness, rebelliousness and drunkenness, it has changed mostly on ...

Sometimes John Pilger sounds like a voice bleating in the wilderness. I think the beginning of this article is excellent. The present leadership of the USA is way out of line in trying to make a war with Iran. This is worth printing to read.

People across the world need to understand what's happening. Political leaders and civil society leaders across the world need to have the courage to tell the USA, that more new lies on top of old lies will never a truth make. We need to voice our disapproval.

John
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February 03, 2007 By John Pilger

As opposition grows in America to the failed Iraq adventure, the Bush administration is preparing public opinion for an attack on Iran, its latest target, by the spring.

The United States is planning what will be a catastrophic attack on Iran. For the Bush cabal, the attack will be a way of "buying time" for its disaster in Iraq. In announcing what he called a "surge" of American troops in Iraq, George W Bush identified ...

This is a very intretesting article. Sadly it doesn't only describe that pattern for Venezuela, but also for all of Latin America. I understand there is a common understanding that, 'you can have anything you want, even freedom, so long as "uncle" agrees'.

This is from Venezuelanalysis.com a web site that's certainly left of centre, but over the years I've found it to be more reliable than the press statements from Washington. Enjoy.

http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=1917

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Democracy: Washington's Real Enemy in Venezuela
Tuesday, Dec 19, 2006

By: Chris Carlson
Hugo Chavez isn't the only Venezuelan leader to ever challenge and anger the United States. Cipriano Castro, president of Venezuela from 1899 to 1908, was probably as big of an adversary to Washington as Hugo Chavez is today. Throughout Castro's reign, U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt was itching for an excuse to invade Venezuela. He considered the Venezuelan president a "villainous little monkey," and threatened ...

A couple of years ago the Repubicans in the USA were creating a great song and dance about corruption in the United Nations, particualrly in the "Oil for Food Scandle".

Of course it turned out that the corruption was present, but the source was the Security Council members themselves all of who wanted to get around the Oil for Food rules when it suited them, including the USA and Russia and France. There was some minor fault found with the UN, but not the "hundreds of millions" for fraud the American were claiming.

The stories about the blatent fraud currently occurring in Iraq under the present administration are many. They appointed an auditor to investigate. He seemed to do nothing for 18 months, they he started to bring prosecutions (He turned out to be honest.) so they sacked him.

The new guy will also take 18 months to get running and by then GW Bush won't need to worry what he finds.

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Yahoo! News Mon Jan 29, 5:04 PM ET
Contractor in Iraq gets ...